Tortured Truths (Phillip McGuire Mysteries #1) by Randy Attwood

Author:Randy Attwood [Attwood, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781620073902
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Published: 2013-10-20T23:00:00+00:00

efore I enlisted Bud, I thought it only fair I level with him about the Iranian living in his house. If the guy was Hezbollah, then Bud should know that helping me spy on him could be dangerous.

He came in for his usual beer at the end of the day. We had one end of the bar to ourselves. Bud was one of those guys who was born forty years old. Dead serious, but with an amazing amount of detachment for someone who was only twenty-five. He was finishing up writing his dissertation for his PhD in history, and I envied the undergraduates who had him as their teacher. The University catches too much flak for using graduate teaching assistants instead of full professors to teach many of its classes. I always thought the gripe was a lot of hooey. Some of my best teachers had been graduate students fresh into their studies and excited about them. Some of my worst teachers were full professors whose condescension towards you was as obvious as their boredom.

When I told Bud about Robert Tilson and his neighbor named Habib, his sleuthing skills were tempted.

“Yeah. I know him. Has a lot of meetings with other Iranians or Middle Eastern guys. I can hear their voices through the radiator, but, of course, I can’t understand what they’re saying. How about I tape them? Maybe someone can translate for us. I ever tell you how fascinating Iranian history is? The Iran-Iraq war can be seen as this century’s continuation of the war between the Arab Moslem and Persian Moslem worlds that started 1300 years ago with that whole Sunni-Shiite split. And Iraqi intellectuals say Khomeini is just using the split to promote his own form of Persian nationalism.”

“The power game. Does everything have to relate to it?”

“I used to think Lord Acton’s statement about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely was overstated, but, you know, I’ve followed the politics of Lawrence and what amazes me is how little power it takes for people to start becoming arrogant and bossy.

“And the critical time for new religions, it seems, because of the power question, is in the first decades just after the founder’s death. Who will retain the power in the name of the leader? Mohammed died and didn’t leave a son. So Ali, one of his sons-in-law claimed right of succession. He was murdered, and the Shiites took up his cause. As the minority group, they have become the Moslem purists. The other group, the aristocrats of Mecca, the Sunnis, have been the more intellectual in their approach to what Mohammed wrote.

“You see the same sorts of splits in Christianity. But Buddhism seems to avoid the bloody power arguments probably because Buddha never claimed to be the conduit for the voice of God, but rather illuminated a way to the enlightenment of the god in each of us. I guess the thing that disturbs me the most is when religion condones, even encourages or commands the death of others.

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