For thousands of years, various thinkers, philosophers, religious or non religious, all questioned the nature of reality, human related reality, questions of how should people lead their lives and what ethics should reign among different groups of people. All religions were an attempt at telling people to obey certain laws or face consequences, they were called "godly inspired and spread laws" Simply for more weight, but most humans kept asking, what constituted the best way to live !!!
Some of our later worldly religions, such as Judaism and to a fair extend its offshoots, Christianity and more so Islam, take a different look and approach to these laws, ways and applications. A legalistic and pseudo moralistic God ordered approach, and less of a philosophical one, accompanied always with a firm threatening tone generally from God himself, and always implying that disobeying or infringing on his laws would bring about and entail the harshest of punishments, often imaginative involving various forms of cruel tortures with fires and skewers et all, and in both lives, the here in this world and in the next one !! God for some reason , never proved himself very philosophically empowered .
From the oldest commandments handed to Moses, to proliferate among his people , to all other prophets of the old Bible, to modern Greek influenced Bibles, to Mohammad and his follower's versions of an Aramaic/Judaeo/Arabian Islam , they all stressed on not committing basic sins, faithfully and blindly obeying god's laws and rituals, and a total feverish devotion and loyalty to him. the religious institutions and hierarchies there after, inherited these divination, obedience, and devotions and turned them into a full school.
Even early Hinduism was very similar in those aspects and approaches, whereby performing the right religious rituals , showing piety during one's life, and he's assured an incarnation of a better and higher quality, and eventually after death one would dwell with the Gods. Later Buddhist concepts mixed with Chinese and Japanese religions, turned more philosophical and addressed human well- being and nature more directly , and less godly and threatening .
Lately , many people all over the world are more than ever shifting emphasis , asking and rationing in the lines of ; " How should a virtuous person act, and under what rules of civility should we conduct ourselves toward others, rather than " how to serve God and live happily ever after" . The positioning of human affairs and persona, rather than God as a central goal in life, is becoming the norm in many civilized societies .
It is accepted nowadays that any authority, including god's and his religious hierarchies, is only legitimate, where it has the consent of the governed . Humans historically surrendered some of their rights to some absolute authorities and to religions and religious institutions only and mostly when life was very poor, nasty, brutal and short. in modern times all theocracies are a perfect example .
When the Rwandan genocide took place in the 90s, the majority extremists Hutus began originally to refer to the Tutsis as cockroaches, the characterization of intended victims as low insects or animals are common phenomena in or before any genocide, the Nazis frequently depicted Jews as rats, and all their victims as Untermenschen, (Sub-humans), Americans labeled native red Indians as savages, and black slaves were always less than humans.
Israeli Zionists, are often referring to Palestinians as animals or even less than animals, many still use the old demeaning adage against Palestinians of "a cancer" , obviously it says and implies that most people can be persuaded to participate in , and condone and justify large scale killings, annihilation, theft and apartheid, only after they begin to think of their victims as completely alien and lowly , that they are indeed sub-human .
" Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit atrocities." said Voltaire back in 1765.
My thanks as always ...
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