It's fine to believe that Islam is for peace. It's fine to believe Christianity is for peace. But both religious beliefs and that of Israel were born from conflicts and all have led to many wars since their deceptive inception. All these religious beliefs are more or less derived from the Abrahamic legends and have been based on sorrow, wrath and pain of being "man". Here one has to say Jesus was not a warrior and that Buddha was not a warrior. In contrast, Mohamed was a warrior. Peace has been the exception between all these religious mantras.

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Year 12 student, Jessica Robinson, argues that Islam and Buddhism are more alike than you think.

SINCE THE dawn of mankind, humans have attempted to answer the most complex and perplexing questions of the universe through religious beliefs. Questions such as why are we here? How did we come to be?

Religions worldwide set out a set of moral and ethical guidelines on how one should live and interact with the world. This leads to a vast number of teachings on peace and conflict, how to behave when at war and how to avoid it all together.

In today’s world, Islam is seen as one of the most violent and war-like religions. However, this is not the case. Many of their ancient scriptures and teachings from the Quran and from their prophet Muhammad talk of avoiding violence at all costs...

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Bullshit.

The Bible is not a history of peace. The Quran is not a manual for peace. Despite containing words of peace, both contain the "justifiable" seeds of war. Each contain the "an eye for an eye" mantra and similar forms of revenge which are erroneously equated to justice. Most of the First (Old) Testament is about the tribulations of a "chosen" people, Israel, in its warring relationship with its neighbours and its dealing with a violence-inspiring god. The First testament is mostly a story of war. It is a bad story of wars, slavery and of godly-led vengeance — and of conquests under various righteously adapted motives — from "chasing/killing infidels/non-believers" to acquiring/stealing the "promised land" as instructed by this war-inspiring god. Many wars since then were thus fought in the name of such religious beliefs. 

Peace as preached by Christ, like turning the other cheek, never really took hold in the mind of his "manufactured" proponents beyond the fourth century AD. 

Even today, Christian leaders will wage war under flimsy pretences. They will lie to suit and we will accept the lie. To a great extend, the "teachings" and example of Christ in peace — but not so much that of Mohamed — have little to do with the Old Testament, except for the loosely interpreted prophecy adopted by the Christians "that a savior would come". This belief was rejected outright by the Jews because they don't believe that Jesus was this person — and was rejected by the Muslims who did not believe in such prophetised salvation, though they recognised that Jesus might have been a prophet. 

In this regard, it is Buddha and Christ, as ordinary humans, who have more in common with peace, than with Abraham the warrior. Many "Christians" have long lost the Jesus full-on peaceful connection and the other religious loonies have also been far from peaceful in their behaviour. Most still wish to connect with the legend of Noah and his crummy boat, as they believe god wanted to punish sinners, by killing humanity — his own creation — except from a very chosen few, to wipe the slate clean, including getting rid of the dinosaurs. Rubbish. Of course, after Noah, the sinning and the fighting that had never stopped came back stronger than ever, hence the next salvation "need" in the religious dogma, for a god to send his son to erase the slate again — in a process called redemption. Were all those who lived prior to this later salvation saved? Redemption is a stupid belief that makes no sense at all, like the silly story of Adam and Eve... The original sin is a grand furphy promoted by grandstanding idiots.

Here, one has to understand that 99.9 per cent of these religious legends were created, told and laced with harsh temporal punishment in order to control the reproductive purpose of humankind, to give men the control over women, in parallel with justifying the conquests of lands to provide food for the thus-religiously regulated tribes. Many dictums and stories in the Old Testament are horribly sinister, sadistic and violent, despite the glorious dedication to god. Some of these harsh punishments are still used in some religiously ruled countries — including the hacking of the hands of thieves and the stoning to death (of women) for adultery.

The main ingredient to control people into "believing" such untrue crap has been the fear of natural death, which in religious dogma is codified into the fear of hell and the promise of glorious eternal heaven. All bullshit. Intelligent people do not submit to such nonsense and know (or should know) the proper cycles of nature of which we are part of. Death is in our animalistic genes... 

Here is the legend-line till Noah, according to the bible: 
Genesis 1  Before 4000 BC   The Garden of Eden (including the creation)
Genesis 2  Before 4000 BC   The Fall of Man (blame the woman)
Genesis 3  Before 3000 BC   Cain kills Abel (the first murder)
Genesis 4  Before 3000 BC   From Adam to Noah ("man" forgets god)
 Genesis 5  Before 2500 BC   Wickedness Provokes God's wrath
Genesis 6  Before 2500 BC   The Great Flood (god destroys most his creation)

Science and intelligent people cannot accept this fabricated short-sighted simplistic bullshit. 

After the purposely concocted story of Jesus, being idealistically massaged with resurrection, social codes became regulated by sociopaths, namely "bishops and emperors" who got together to rule over the mobs to create their own super-wealth. The sense of moral and ethics are not exclusive to hypocritical religious beliefs and to some extend could be more efficient at protecting peace in non-abrahamic societies.

In the 4th century AD, emperor Constantine enacted reforms to strengthen the Roman empire. The government was restructured — civil and military authority separated. A gold coin (the solidus) was introduced to arrest inflation and became the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. These days, it is the US dollar, already more than 200 years old, but only an imposed "standard" for the last 70 years.

 

"Converted" to Christianity, Constantine promoted the Edict of Milan in 313, which decreed acceptance for Christianity in the empire. Monotheism was an easier pill to make people swallow than the complex interactions of the many iffy Roman gods... Constantine instigated the First Council of Nicaea in 325, at which the "Nicene Creed" (formulating the weird "trinity" concept — which Isaac Newton, later on, rejected) was ratified by this conclave of Bishops. Here, the various ancient conflicting stories of the Bible were reconfigured, streamlined and consolidated with new smoother lying narratives. Entire passages of the bible were dismissed. The story had to be told with a Goebbels-like one-track "Catholic" propaganda. Even at this early stage, the Christians became divided and split across various interpretations of the scripts.

 

Constantine's army was reorganised and Constantine declared war against other people — such as the Franks, the Alamanni, the Goths, and the Sarmatians — and recaptured "some lost territories".

 

Constantine built a new imperial residence in Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople after himself. It later became the capital of the Empire for over one thousand years, the later Eastern component of the Empire becoming the Byzantine Empire. Constantine other legacy was the replacement of the four empire rulers (tetrarchy) with a dynastic succession. 

 

The church regarded Constantine as a man of virtue, while many ruthless rulers have invoked him as the examplar for their own godly-decreed legitimacy. During the Renaissance, contemporary critical assessments of Constantine reign were discovered and he was subsequently portrayed by some as a tyrant. 

 

Despite this, Constantine still hold a significant place in Christianity which he helped crystallise into a force of wealth, power and conquest. Constantine is still venerated as a saint in most Christian divisions, despite having been a ruthless empire builder — an empire expanded upon the blood of people who did not submit, while using religion to send "his" people to war. Nothing new.

 

In the Middle Ages, a papal claim to temporal power was based on the "Donation of Constantine" — a FAKE imperial document by which emperor Constantine had transferred authority over Rome and the western Roman Empire to the Pope. 

Mohamed was a warrior. "Muhammad" (born 570) gained followers as he founded Islam, but met hostility from a few Meccan tribes. To escape persecution, Muhammad and some followers migrated to Medina in the year 622. This date marks the beginning of the Islamic Hijri calendar. In Medina, "Muhammad" united the tribes under the Constitution of Medina. In December 629, after eight years of conflicts with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslims and marched on the city of Mecca. The attack went mostly uncontested. Muhammad seized the city with little bloodshed. Three years later, Muhammad died, but the Muslim conquests of the world had barely begun. Northern Africa was first. Then Europe.

The "Battle of Poitiers" was fought on October 10, 732 between forces under the Frankish leader Charles Martel and a massive invading Islamic army led by Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi Abd al Rahman, near the city of Tours, France. Charles Martel won the day and the remnant of the Muslims invaders retreated to the other side of the Pyrennees. 

Thrown out of the Frank kingdom, the Muslims settled most of the Iberian Peninsula from the eight century onwards. 

 

The first of the "Crusades" began in 1095, when armies of Christians from Western Europe responded to Pope Urban II's plea to go to war against Muslim forces in the Holy Land.

 

Meanwhile Jews, who had lived in the Iberian regions since Roman times, were considered "People of the Book" by the Muslims and had special status. The Jews thrived. The tolerance of the Muslim Moorish rulers of al-Andalus attracted Jewish immigration, and Jewish enclaves in Muslim Iberian cities flourished as places of learning and commerce. 

 

The gradual reconquest of Muslim Iberia by the Christian kingdoms, was driven by a powerful religious motivation: to reclaim Iberia for Christendom. By the 14th century, most of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal) had been conquered by the Christian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, León, Galicia, Navarre, and Portugal.

 

Overt hostility against Jews became pronounced, finding expression in brutal episodes of violence and oppression. Thousands of Jews escaped these attacks by converting to Christianity. They were called conversos — new Christians. These conversions were an effective solution to the cultural conflict as many converso families carried on with social and commercial activities. But eventually their success made these new Catholics unpopular with the clergy of the Church and with the royal hierarchies.

 

Suspicions on the part of Christians were heightened as some of the conversions were insincere. Some conversos had chosen to salvage their social and commercial prestige by the only option open to them – baptism and embrace of Christianity – while privately adhering to their Jewish practice and faith.

 

The existence of these crypto-Jews was annoying to secular (though Christians) nobility and ecclesiastical leaders who had been hostile toward Spain's Jewry in general. This turned into a strong anti-semitism in the 15th century. Muslims and Jews were thus kicked out of Spain then.

The European Wars of Religion that followed were a series of religious wars waged in Europe for about 120 year, following the onset of the Protestant Reformation in Central, Western and Northern Europe. Although sometimes unconnected, all of these wars were strongly influenced by the religious rivalry for bums on seats in creed and for soldiering godly souls in kingdoms that new biblical interpretations produced. The combatants were not always categorised by religion alone, but religion was the main motive of war.

 

Conflicts included:

 

Conflicts immediately connected with the Reformation of the 1520s to 1540s:
The German Peasants' War (1524–1525)
The battle of Kappel in Switzerland (1531)
The Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) in the Holy Roman Empire
The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) in the Low Countries
The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598)
The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), affecting the Holy Roman Empire including Habsburg Austria and Bohemia, France, Denmark and Sweden
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), affecting England, Scotland and Ireland
Scottish Reformation and Civil Wars
English Reformation and Civil War
Irish Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

Although later wars, including the Nine Years' War, had religious components, they were somewhat undertaken for political reasons, with coalitions forming across religious divisions. 

 

All this energy sapping warring eventually led to some uneasy peace and an "enlightenment" — a time of new philosophical understanding in which "god" who had led to these deadly bum-fights since time immemorial from the bible, was understood to have been a false human interpretation of reality. God had only been "an idea". A bad idea... a real bad one. Science through observations, analysis and experiments challenged this idea and became the new criteria for understanding the universe. Unfortunately, science is complex, relative and too controversial for simpletons to understand, albeit very accurate. 

 

Since the beginning of the "(re-)writing" of the bible and the formalisation of religious dictums under Constantine, religion and social structures had been designed to breed illiterate simpletons — people who would not ask questions about the real make-up of the world, but feared the wrath of god. Flat earth theory and other planetary misconceptions were only really tackled in the 16th century with Christopher Columbus' explorations and in the 17th century with Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), from concepts expressed by Copernicus, possibly developed from proper observation of reality meshed with some previously discarded Roman/Greek scientific ideas.

 

Contrary to the bible timeline, science exactitude tells us the history of the universe is about 13.8 billion years. The bible humour us with a 4,000 BC fictitious date for a "poof" instant-soup creation, while we know that Aboriginal people populated Australia at least 50,000 years ago and that modern humans have evolved from ancient ape-like creatures going back 3 million years. Evolution is the reality of whom we are. It is a difficult reality to accept when one deludes oneself in terms of glorious godly creation, I give you this...

 

Presently we have two imbeciles vying for the biggest job on the planet — ruling the empire... Both are calling upon the religious votes by licking evangelical butts, in their own inimitable crazy manner. But the Christian empire of today is using the same old tricks as it did 1,400 years ago: divide, demonise and ally with some unsavoury characters who will do some dirty work for cash and favours. These days, we pit Muslims (Sunni) whom we align with against Muslims (Shia). We use a massive biased media organisation to defraud our access to the truth. By our action we force "the other side to take counter-measures" which we then use against them as being against us. And we hate the social secularisation of government because it prevents our thieving crusades and our raping of the Sabines through trade and "just" war.

 

We present to the world an image of a young injured dazed kid sitting quietly in a chair as if the harming conflict was the other side which did it. We are fully responsible for this senseless result, by the support we give to dubious rebels aligned with religious Muslim extremists. And lets not forget, that the extremists ARE religious, despite being despicably nasty, and that our own bombing nastiness is validated by ridiculous excuses... Yes, the religious nuts use the horrors, the sorrow, the wrath and the pain contained in the "eye for an eye" pseudo-justice of their "good book". We mitigate the same. They do not have to dig far as we look away in disgust while we think that our own war actions are justified — and secretly think that our own god would approve.

 

Could it be time to replace this incestuous Democrat/Republican semi-dynastic charade with a renewed tetrarchy? Say a US government led by a group of intelligent people, not by a single maniac, would work for the people, while helping all to become more intelligent in a natural enlightenment? 

 

This ruling would not include the thieves nor the warriors who run capitalism and religious sociopathy — but only those who know sciences and the human condition leading to peace, knowledge and happiness. This should eliminate these old tired religious legends that — though they unfortunately still have currency amongst the stupid pigeons — do not have the future of the planet at heart as most religious idiots dream of the end of the world, daily.

 

Here we need to minimise war, eliminate conflicts and protect the earthly character of this place, including protecting its thin atmosphere from our carelessly spewed garbage. 

 

Do we need to eliminate religious dogmas?  We certainly do in our governing ideals... 

 

We need to be more intelligent and we can be.

 

PEACE.

 

Gus Leonisky

Your local atheist