God seems to be have given many names by men throughout the ages, for example, Our Father, The Creator, Allah, etc, and in times of crisis one of those names always automatically springs to our lips. A question that maybe would spring to mind to someone visiting Earth from another planet is that do the names apply to different gods or do the various names all apply to the same God? The answer to that question isn't as obvious as it might seem, so let us look at why. Followers of Christianity share their devotions between God the Father, and Jesus his Son, who we are told encouraged 'Love thy neighbour', 'turn the other cheek', 'do unto others as you would have done to yourself', and so on. For all of that, Christianity has a long dark history of forcing its belief system upon unwilling recipients; this especially by the Spanish Inquisition during the medieval dark ages. The Christian belief system, as are most belief systems, is and was based upon the assertion that long ago God spoke to a man.
What followed in terms of religious Christian or Islamic texts and sage interpretations written by revered and learned men throughout the ages were all based on the improvable assumption that what was asserted actually took place and was clearly understood by the recipient of so long ago. Today if a person made a similar assertion--that he or she had been spoken to by God--general ridicule and demands for proof would no doubt follow on the heels of such an assertion, and yet both, followers of Christianity and followers of Islam, base their readiness to believe, as is their right and choice, on the supposed truth of similar ancient assertions. Living as I do in England my only experience of worshippers of Allah is via well-established immigrant families who arrived in the UK maybe a generation or two ago. They and their born-in-the-UK children are mostly hard-working, warm, friendly folks who continue to worship Allah but have no wish or intention of forcing their beliefs upon the rest of UK citizens, and in that way they are a valuable and welcome addition to the UK population.
Via the media we receive from abroad very different images of some but of course not all worshippers of Allah in Middle Eastern countries. These very different images would lead our cosmic visitor to believe that a very different and angry God with very different aims is being worshipped by these militant people in the East.
This Westerner's bafflement enters the scene when faced with these Allah-worshipping men's version of logic that, as far as they are concerned, gives them the authority to send explosive-packed, mind-conditioned young people into market places crowded with mostly Allah-worshipping folks, to then wreak death and explosive slaughter upon them. With our own record of thoughtless, insensitive bungling and interference into their eastern affairs, it isn't difficult to understand the resentment and hatred felt by eastern folks towards us in the West, but how this ties in with reducing eastern marketplaces to scenes of bloody carnage defeats me. Probably the production line of young deluded suicide bombers will continue to function. I suspect that the cynical producers of suicide bombers apparently never feel the indignant urge themselves to actually become explosive martyrs. Instead get others to gladly do, what they choose to believe, is the murderous work of Allah. According to these very same men, so revered by their followers, the Islamic belief system must be imposed throughout the entire planet including reducing half of mankind (women's half) to uneducated ignorance. This has been achieved so far by viciously blowing up schools containing female students. Just the same as with militant followers of Christianity I suspect that these militant followers of Allah are extremely selective about which of their prophet's instructions they choose to ignore or to obey. What becomes apparent is that God-given individual freewill choice doesn't appear to enter the scene for the folks targeted to be converted to Islam by these extremists. All human beings individually are born with freewill to choose 'yes' or 'no' and always without any accurate idea of the future outcomes of those choices although the chooser and others have to live with those future outcomes. Personally I'm unwilling to be compelled by anyone to be converted to any religion or belief system that involves, according to them, being judged by an omnipotent Creator about the unforeseeable outcomes of my choices.
It would seem that many people in the Eastern countries share my unwillingness to succumb to compulsion at the hands of arrogant men. These are men who cynically use the Islamic belief system to authorise and conceal their lust to control, and gain power over others.
When will we all wake up?
I do struggle to understand the negative attitudes currently swilling around the planet. Recently in London UK two followers of Islam tried in their own way to impose Sharia Law upon residents of, and visitors to, their London neighbourhood, but surely anyone truly wishing for this harsh legal system should move to a country where Sharia Law is in force, and is no doubt either 'enjoyed' or 'endured' by one and all?
The ongoing generation of hate seems to have flooded this world of plenty and abundance causing countless millions of ordinary non-extremist, non-political minded, non-extremist-religious family folks to become homeless, nation-less refugees just surviving in squalor in grudgingly, and barely supplied with international aid, overcrowded camps. As just one example; meanwhile in the country of the refugees' birth President Assad, desperately clinging to power, has used his subservient military might to reduce Syrian civilization to widespread corpse-strewn rubble; and apparently no one on this planet is prepared to stop him.
Earlier I referred to those youngsters deluded by their religious teachers into becoming young martyrs destined for entry into paradise: I think that in the cynical world of today it is no surprise that the self-professed religious men who talk/brainwash young people into the martyrdom of being suicide bombers that kill crowds in Muslim marketplaces, and in the West, those same 'religious'? men 'unselfishly' never feel the urge to seek explosive martyrdom for their selves; nor, I suspect, do they explain to prospective young martyrs that whatever awaits physically exploded martyrs in non-physical Paradise it certainly could not take the form of much-heralded physical pleasure. I suspect that logically all present in Paradise including new arrivals would be limited to telepathic conversations.
Whilst we decry the actions of extremist militant religions we must not ignore the vicious actions of the clearly non-religious with their introduction of the use of drones. These are computer (real) war games played by trance-state killers simply obeying orders. For years our TV screens have been and are being flooded with adverts for more and more blood-thirsty computer war games where the players use a selection of modern weapons to slaughter an array of realistically portrayed human opponents. The computer games playing that commenced during childhood has graduated to the now adult, totally-removed-from-reality-by-distance conscience-less players safely killing very real people in distant lands.
I suspect it is long past time for us all to awaken and to get real because all of this is being done in our name without consulting us!