It reminded me of the movie The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington. In it, Gary Oldman's character, Carnegie, is a warlord type leader in a post-apocalyptic town. In this future, religious books had all been destroyed long ago because of the dissension they created. Carnegie believes that if he can get his hands on Eli's bible, he can control people on a level greater than he had been able to previously. He says:
"IT'S NOT A @#$%^ ' BOOK! IT'S A WEAPON. A weapon aimed right at the hearts and minds of the weak and the desperate. It will give us control of them. If we want to rule more than one small, @#$%^' town, we have to have it. People will come from all over, they'll do exactly what I tell 'em if the words are from the book. It's happened before and it'll happen again. All we need is that book."
This meme is a play on the old NRA line "Guns don't kill people, people do." With this phrase, the NRA attempts to move responsibility off the gun and on to the people using them. Many people argue that the gun gives destructive power to the people and therefore can't be dismissed.
So what responsibility do you think gods have for the destruction wrought in their name?
3 comments:
I don't think the gods are real. Therefore they can have no responsibility. I think the point of the meme, if I may bring it back to an earlier quote, is that in the protection of religion we are willing expend humanity. Some how it is righteous when we do it for our god.
Men create gods. Gods give commandments. Men follow commandments.
Men make feeble attempts to create and fully describe something that is indescribable, ineffible. For me, there is something higher which I often refer to as the "ground of all being" for lack of a better term. It is very inadequate as a description. I continue to search for a better one. The "gods" are not responsible for what man, himself, has done.
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