Some time ago I surmised we need a new way to live.
I don’t have one. I don’t know. What I do know is that part of it would be the idea of taking individual responsibility far, far more than we do currently.
It is time for human beings to stop slavishly following ‘leaders’ and fashions and trends.
They all lead into mobs and witch hunts and stupid agressive arguments.
All over the world people fighting and killing each other or horrifically maiming men, women, children indiscriminately and where are most of the casualties? With the combatants?
No. Never, I’d say. Just about never. The casualties are always with the non-combatants. Who then, if they survive, have a greater likelihood of being combatants.
Stands to reason. With the best will in the world if you come and kill or injure my people it is going to be very hard for me not to want to come and kill and injure you and yours.
Unless one gets so effected by the stupidity and horror of it all that one sheers off from all violence and hatred. That’s not infrequent, I think. A fairly well known reaction.
But more commonly, turn into a hatred-filled fighter yourself.
But why did this begin? Why were the civilians attacked, if it was deliberate?
Because of their ‘leaders’. Nominally their leaders. i.e. the organisation they ostensibly belong to. Most particularly religious organisations but not exclusively so at all, of course.
So Sunni attack Shia and vice versa.
And Muslim attacks Christian.
And what I’m saying is we need personal responsibility in at least two ways right there:
1. Don’t attack anyone simply because your group says that’s what we’re going to do. Especially don’t simply attack another group. That’s non-specific to an illegitimate extent.
2. Don’t belong to a group without a good reason – and religious groups don’t have a good reason for the most part. Our job is to make our relationship with our own God good. To have things straight between yourself and your God.
There’s no need whatever to belong to some association or group of motley people with motley beliefs and actions and all loosely directed by some self-styled leader who dictates what you believe before you even know it yourself and what you should therefore do, who you should hate, who you should attack.
Yes, it may well be that some religions say precisely the opposite to that.
Well those are clearly religions not to ‘belong’ to.
But it is time to stop ‘belonging’ because the price is too high.
‘Belong’ to those who think independently. That’s who you should belong to.
And shun wholesale condemnation and indiscriminate attack and callous indifferent murder.
That’s pretty obvious, surely?