Therefore, the text clearly compels us to confess that the Messiah or Christ has long since come and was revealed and that HE brought a spiritual and eternal blessing with HIM into the world. But when unbelieving Jews rejected this and would not have it, it was brought to the heathen. But the wretched Jews were deprived of both material and spiritual blessing, as experience demonstrates. They have now been living for almost 1500 years under great hardships, and in an uninterrupted captivity, and they have nothing of the promises of which the Lord is speaking here. If God is truthful in HIS promises, then they must be liars; and through their unbelief they have forfeited these promises and no longer the seed of Abraham to which these promises were given.
Martin Luther. Lectures on Genesis 12.
(Remember when) your Lord revealed (the Message) to the angels: “Verily, I am with you: Give strength to the believers: I will bring about terror into the hearts of the disbelievers: So you strike above their necks and hit hard over all of their fingers-tips and toes.”
Surah: 8.12
And when those inviolable months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in and wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give Zakāh, let them go on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.
Surah 9:5
Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, and the soul of our soulless condition.
Karl Marx
These quotes clearly state the tenets of One God – which is My God world – and the world of No God – where Gods of all faiths are dumped into one waste basket. Strangely, what we have been witnessing lately is that these two worlds seem to be working in tandem, with barely any conflict between them. Logically, one would think that the No God world would reject One God/My God world, and that obviously is not the case. Perhaps the One God and No God are two sides of the same coin.
Consider the Lutheran line of reasoning: the Jews do not recognize ‘My God’ as the Messiah, and their resistance to enter the world of his God, in his view, gives him the license to harass them and call them “wretched” and inflict pain on them in a variety of ways and then claim that they brought misery on to themselves. The Surahs of the Quran clearly sanctions terrorizing and even hunting down the disbeliever of their faith. The world of No God where the so called ‘secularists, liberals and progressives’ stand under this banner, claim that religion is the source of all evil and yet their ire is reserved only for few faiths.
Believers Clash with Seekers: To understand the clash, we need to investigate the fundamentals of faiths that insist on belief, and the other that recommends search for Higher Being and Truth. In a nutshell, the hermeneutic tradition in Judaism emphasizes reading of their sacred texts to look for signs of the coming Messiah. Since it looks for indicators of the coming Messiah, the process is an open-ended search in multiple directions, and this anticipatory mode makes them seekers. Furthermore, ethical conduct in life is necessary to be able to recognize the signs. Thus, Judaism is an open system and a methodology for the seekers. Christianity that followed Judaism recognized Christ as the Messiah and hence the hermeneutic is faith, that is, to abide by the Covenant Theology. Christianity sees itself as the fulfillment of Judaic search, and hence the binding agreement carries exclusive validity that is sealed in blood. Therefore, there is a closedness and finality to this contract. Christianity does not see itself as an extension of Judaism, but as a replacement of Judaism, making supersessionism as its fundamental motto. The faith demands that they spread the word of Christ and bring everyone into their fold. The Islamic hermeneutic is supersessionism of both Christianity and Judaism. While all three Abrahamic religions are monotheistic, Judaism concentrates on its perennial search and the anticipatory mode is kept alive for the seekers, whereas Christianity and Islam concentrate on enforcement of their beliefs and break away from their parent religion. Hence what we see in Judaism – the first of the Abrahamic faiths – is that it retains its unrestricted openness and is not inclined to bring others into their fold. On the other hand, the very central tenet of Christianity and Islam is to loudly proclaim, ‘My God’ is the only God and others are simply doomed and both have resorted to tremendous violence to forcibly convert those who resist. Although, it must be stated that while conversion into Christianity still happens in many parts of the world, especially in India, their methods are relatively milder, although quite insidious.
There are numerous reasons for the expansion of ‘No God’ world. As God Consciousness and search for Higher Being fades, individuals – particularly the educated class – are drawn to the world of non-believers or non-practitioners in the name of secularism and liberalism and prefer to be seen as progressives. Many find the codified structure of religion to be suffocating and preachy and hence seek freedom from religion. Besides, in academic institutions, it is not uncommon to be jeered at, when signs of religiosity are visible. It must be noted that dogmas come in many forms and the No God world is no exception. Evidently, the No God world also demands allegiance and seeks homogenization of views about human condition, culture, ethics, and history. For that matter, the No God world is just another religion that in many ways is even more rigid and unyielding than the established ones.
Political Islam and Leftist Ideology – A Global Force: The Leftist Ideology came into being when Karl Marx located the genesis of greed and other social evils in Capitalism and saw individuals’ position in the economic class as a single determinant of their consciousness. Having established class as a divisive factor in society, Marx along with Engels authored – The Communist Manifesto – calling to build a classless society. Thus, from 1917 – the year of Bolshevik Revolution – an unprecedented social experiment to build a classless society began as prescribed by Marx and Engels. Although this experiment started collapsing from 1989 in much of eastern Europe, it started gaining grounds in other parts of the world, especially in universities, mass media and other institutions. What started as an attempt to build a classless society, today has morphed into Cultural Marxism, asserting gender fluidity or genderless society, calling for environmental justice, transgender rights and so on and brought in various other perceived and real aggrieved groups under their banner. Thus, educational institutions started grooming social justice warriors, almost starting with kindergarten children in schools who are incapable of understanding these issues, and university students who have become self-styled and self-certified champions of the underdogs in the society without any clarity of purpose, or knowledge of context and history and the philosophical depth to bring about real and effective change.
While the Global Islamic forces – the ISIS and HAMAS types – indiscriminately use brute force in a very barbaric manner, the so called Left lends support with massive protests and loud and dangerous slogans. Furthermore, the Left sees the world as hierarchically organized with various types of oppressors dominating the oppressed, and in their world view, Israel is the oppressor and the occupier of the Palestinian land and people. People marching in the streets and college campuses, neither know the history of the region, the nature of the conflict, and with their phantom ideals they draw false equivalencies and offer lip service condemning the actions of Hamas followed by a forceful and unthinking ‘but then’ and hold Israel responsible for the horror they are facing. This toxic mix of Global Islam and the Left was in full display in much of the western world, after the October 7, 2023, attack on unsuspecting Israelis by Hamas in a manner so inhuman and inexplicable. The Islamic world and the Left believe that the attack is simply a cry for freedom by the people of Palestine. Whereas the slogan – From the River to the Sea – is not a demand for freedom, but a declaration to wipe out Jews. Even for the sake of argument, if we consider that their demands are for freedom, the question is, will they be content managing their land and people and co-exist with their neighbors? All indications tell us otherwise; one is more interested in destroying others rather than building their society. History gives us the proof: In the process of gaining Independence for India, a large chunk of Muslims felt they could not and would not live in a Hindu majority state, and hence Pakistan as an Islamic nation came into being. Were they contented with the partition, and did they concentrate on building their country? Clearly, more energy was spent on causing disturbances and violence in India with ample support from other Islamic nations, rather than building their world. Thus, there are really no achievable goals for organizations like Hamas and ISIS, other than tearing down other civilizations and faiths.
The world of One God/My God is most certainly large in numbers across the globe. It is a world of One Book and One voice and those who resist joining that one voice are threatened or killed. In addition, the religious identity overrides all other national, ethnic, and linguistic identities and this is what gives unbridled brute power to this world.
The world of No God is no different. It is equally single-voiced and demands allegiance through cancel culture. It is a club that governs universities, media and sadly even many government institutions. The key slogans and phrases in this world are ‘Revolution, Revolt, Diversity, Equity…’ and so on and their main goal is to tear down established norms without offering an alternate. Their cry for diversity is purely superficial – people from different backgrounds speaking in the same voice – and not diversity of ideas. Like the Global Political Islam, this world in practice homogenizes the world. The so-called Left – be it in USA, UK, Canada, Europe, or India speak the same language of virtue signaling and claiming to resist hegemony, even while creating their own forms of dominance and control. In the recent testimonies given by the Presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPENN at the Congressional hearings in Washington, they parroted the same prepared texts to shield themselves from legal challenges but displayed no conviction or moral clarity. This is how they are giving support to the One God/My God world. Their refusal to condemn and reprimand those harassing and even hurting Jewish students in their campuses was shameful and disgusting.
For the world to gain relief and freedom from tyranny and intolerance, the world of One God/My God must put an end to their diabolical acts and learn to co-exist with different others. And the world of No God that operates as Woke and Cancel culture or as self-appointed saviors of the world that has been dominating educational institutions, must return to their primal Motto of Veritas, where divergent and competing ideas thrive and flourish. The world of One God/My God and the world of No God must part ways and they must stop negating others to affirm their beliefs. Their union has been toxic to the world.
