Ω{I don't know much about Moonism, the Moonies, that whole Washington Times thing. The little I do know is enough.
The problem with large organized groups of fanatical believers of course is that most of them, the successful cults and religions, quickly develop and implement security protocols, scripture and dogma and squads, whose function is to, like phagocytes, identify and consume threats to the greater body. The immune systems of self-designated spiritual groups are highly virulent themselves.
So it's not a light-hearted thing to speak to the issue of religious conflict, whatever its form, wherever its field of battle. Moonies, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, a long list of zealots and moderates, dialogue professionals and uneducated demagogues. There is a still greater majority whose beliefs if any are subordinate to their sense of human commonality, or their self-interest, but who have no unifying banner or book.
Believers insist they be called by what they're not, a-theist or a-gnostic or in-fidel, because these categories have already been shaped and firmly attached to the machine of faith.
There was a time when I was young when it seemed to me any human progress had to come out of the soil of religious belief. For practical reasons, because there was so much of it, and because the rest was immobilized under the thick scum of hedonism and violent self-interest.
Then there was a time later on, but while I was still in my 20's when the question of God and belief became paramount and pretty much drove me mad. That I was constantly being confronted by believers and zealots didn't help much.
Still later the accumulating maps and diagrams of logical process began to show, in clearer and clearer form, the logical absurdity of all but the most vague religious teaching, but at the same time the implacable biological logic behind the existence of those groups and systems of belief.
So much of the Bible and the other so-called Great Books that seems illogical and nonsensical becomes sensible and practical when seen as part of a grand scheme for the survival of the institutions involved.
But it was equally obvious that those systems and groups had long since developed perfectly fitted categories for dissent and what they termed heresy and blasphemy.
There is no middle ground, or if there is it's us, and we are vastly outnumbered. And nameless, because there isn't really a 'we' in that sense. It's as though the conflict is between large organized and proselytizing groups of clenched, immovable believers, and unorganized, un-unified, non-believers with nothing in common but their humanity.}
Your nagging attention/A short blasphemous comparison
against my will/between the earthly mission
and in defiance of my heart/ of Jesus of Nazareth
as I warned you it would/and the last political act of a Palestinian
has destroyed my love for you/suicide bomber.
A potentially large number of innocent people's lives are destroyed.
In the name of a higher cause the life of the individual is sacrificed knowingly, willingly, with no measure of risk, only the certainty of death.
The bleak finality of the act is tempered, if not transformed utterly, by the conviction of the individual and his or her fellow believers of the existence of an after-life where the act will be rewarded for its redemptive outcome, the liberation of many more lives than are damaged by the act, and the more justly distributed benefits of its larger effects.
It is a desperate act, calmly accepted as necessary, requiring the fullest commitment.
Undertaken out of love, its results have been at least as much a polarization of both love and hate on the part of survivors, and an intensifying of debate on the part of more distant observers.
Unbelievers are often greatly inconvenienced, and consequently highly resentful.
