Innocence and War by Ian Strathcarron

Author:Ian Strathcarron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Adventure, Mark Twain, the Holy Land, Beirut, Baalbec, Damascus, Jerusalem, Jericho, Israel, signal
ISBN: 9781908493002
Publisher: Signal Books
Published: 2011-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

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The writer has the same trouble squaring the Abrahamic circle today. Granted, up to a point, Mark Twain’ view: “The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy.” Fine, but if so, how can the “body-snatchers”, the religious vanguard who have kept the candle, real and metaphorical, burning all these centuries actually believe that three thousand illiterate and superstitious years ago Moses was given a covenant from a god who became not one god for all humanity - a strange enough concept in itself - but a divisive god, a racist god, a sadistic god, a vengeful god, a sexist god, a god that if alive today would be arrested on the spot?

It is not really even possible to suggest that those unlettered tribesmen believed all this three millennia ago, as they understood life through what the Greeks called mythos and not what the same Greeks called logos. Like all ancients they used logos to sharpen their weapons, to observe the movements in the night sky and ultimately to survive. But logos could never explain the inexplicable, what we still call the mysteries of life, either personal emotions or natural phenomena. For that they used mythos. Myths were never intended to be factually correct as they were, by definition, dealing with layers of under- standing beyond the factual, the explicable. It would never have occurred to the authors of the Old Testament that the texts would be taken literally.

But now that we know that Exodus is largely mythos, that the best archaeologists in the world have sifted all through the Sinai and Canaan and no evidence exists that there was ever any flight from Egypt, and no conquest of the Promised Land. So why the ultraorthodox denial of science and reason? Why the flat-earth insistence on the literal meaning of ancient words never meant to be taken literally? Could it be that the incessant questioning has led to the abandonment of the mythos source and the application entirely of logos, after all the very language of dialectic - and questioning? Has logic tied itself in a Gordian knot and the more it picks at it the tighter the knot becomes?

Modern secular Israelis, in other words the vast majority of Israelis, are embarrassed when you ask them about the ultraorthodox. In the car Bruno adds on at least thirty mph before he finishes his rant against them. The former are irked that they have to pay for the latter “studying” away their adult lives and not working; that they don’t have to join the military (although always vote for war)26; that they have a virulent birth rate; that they behave with an arrogance that they are not only the chosen ones but verily chosen among the very chosen. Politically, although they only make up a tenth of the population, in a proportional representation system they have a disproportionate - and generally intransigent - role to play. Ironically, in

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