Just thought I'd share this with the board. I found it pertinent for a couple of reasons. First, it addresses the issue of abuses and obscenities commited in the name of 'God.' Secondly, it addresses the importance or lact thereof of the name of 'God." It also is about the tragedies of September 11th.
The original article is in Spanish, and can be found here:
. http://www.elpais.es/temas/crisis_eeuu/menub/b2/saramago.html
This is my humble attempt to translate.
Tuesday, September, 18 2001
The 'God Factor'
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Somewhere in India a line of artillery is in position. Tied to the mouth of each cannon is a man. In the foreground of the photograph, a British officer raises his sword, and is going to give the order to fire. There are no photographs available to us of the effects of the blasts, but even the most obtuse imagination is able ‘to see’ heads and bodies dispersed through the area of the blasts, bloody remains, entrails, amputated limbs. The men were rebels.
Somewhere in Angola, two Portuguese soldiers raise a black man, who may not be dead, by the arms; another soldier holds a machete and prepares to separate the head from the body. This is the first photograph. In the second – this time there is a second – the head has been cut off, impaled on a stick, and the soldiers laugh. The black man was a guerilla. Somewhere in Israel, while some Israeli soldiers immobilize a Palestinian, another breaks the bones of his right hand with a hammer. The Palestinian had been throwing rocks. In The United States of America, in the city of New York, two commercial North American airplanes, hijacked by terrorists concerned with maintaining the integrity of Islam, launch themselves at the towers of the World Trade Center and bring them down. For the same reason, a third plane causes enormous damage to the Pentagon, the seat of military power of the United States. The dead, buried beneath ruins reduced to rubble, or vaporized, are counted in the thousands.
The photographs of India, Angola and Israel throw in our faces the horror victims show the exact moment they are tortured, the expected agony, the abject death. In New York, all seems unreal at first; an episode repeated and without the novelty of another cinematographic catastrophe, truly rapturous for the size of the illusion obtained with special effects, but empty of the wheezing breath, the streams of blood, the squashed flesh, the ground bones, the shit.
The horror, hidden like a filthy animal, waited for us to come out of our stupefaction in order to jump down our throats. The horror said for the first time ‘here I am’ when those people threw themselves into the emptiness as if they had just chosen a death that was theirs. Now the horror will appear each moment a rock, a piece of a wall or a twisted sheet of aluminum is removed, and will be an unrecognizable head, an arm, a leg, a disemboweled stomach or a squashed body. But even this is repeated and monotonous, in a manner already known by the images of a million dead in Rwanda, of Vietnam cooked by napalm, of executions in stadiums full of people, of lynchings and beatings, of Iraqi soldiers buried alive under tons of sand, of atomic bombs that razed and burned Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Nazi crematoriums vomiting ashes and of trucks to remove cadavers as if they were trash. We all have to die of something, but we’ve already lost count of dead human beings, killed in the worst manner that humans have been capable of inventing. One of these, the most criminal, the most absurd, that which is the most offensive to simple reason, is that, which from the beginning of time and civilization, orders killing in the name of God.
It’s already been said that religions, all of them without exception, have never benefited man or brought mankind closer together. On the contrary, they have been and continue to be the cause of unspeakable suffering, killing, and monstrous physical and spiritual violence that constitute one of the most tenebrous chapters of miserable human history. At the very least, by showing respect for life, we should have the courage to proclaim in all circumstances this evident and demonstrable truth, but the majority of believers of whatever religion not only pretend to ignore it, but swell with angry and intolerant pride against those for whom God is nothing more than a name, a name that, out of fear of death, we gave him one day, and that will make our true humanization difficult. In exchange we’ve been promised paradises and threatened with infernos, one as false as the other, shameless insults to the intelligence and common sense that we’ve worked so hard to obtain. Nietzsche says that all would be allowed if God didn’t exist, and I respond the precisely because of God and in his name has all has been allowed and justified, principally the worst, the most horrible and cruel. For centuries, the Inquisition was also, like the Taliban is today, a terrorist organization dedicated to perversely interpreting sacred texts that should merit the respect of someone who says they believe in them, a monstrous pact of marriage between religion and the State against one’s conscience and against the most human of rights: the right to say no, the right to heresy, the right to choose something else, which is only what the word heresy means.
And, with all, God is innocent. Innocent like something that doesn’t exist, that hasn’t existed nor will ever exist, innocent of having created an entire universe in which to place beings capable of committing the worst crimes, only to later justify them saying that they are celebrations of His power and glory, while the dead accumulate, those of the twin towers in New York, and all the others that, in the name of a God converted into a murderer through the will and action of men, have covered and insist in covering the pages of History with terror and blood. The gods, I think, only exist in the human mind, prosper or decay inside the same universe that made them, but the ‘God factor,’ that is present in life as if it was effectively lord and owner of it. It isn’t a god, but rather the ‘God factor,’ the one shown on dollar bills and that appears on the posters that ask for divine blessing for America (The United States of, not the other…). And it was the ‘God factor’ into which the Islamic God transformed, throwing against the World Trade Center the planes of revolt against contempt, and of vengeance for humiliations. It might be said that a god dedicated himself to reap winds and that another god responds now with tempests. It’s possible, and maybe certain. But it wasn’t them, poor guiltless gods, it had been the ‘God factor,’ that which is terribly equal in all human beings wherever they may be and whichever religion they profess, that which has intoxicated thought and opened the doors of the most sordid intolerances, that which doesn’t respect even that in which one is supposed to believe, that which supposedly had made man from a beast, has just made a beast from man.
To the believing reader (of whatever belief…) that had managed to tolerate the repugnance these words probably inspire, I don’t ask you embrace the atheism expressed. I simply beg you to understand, with feeling, if not with reason, that, if there is a God, only one God, and that, in your relationship with him, that which matters least is the name they’ve taught you to give him. And that you doubt the ‘God factor.’ The human spirit doesn’t lack enemies, but this is one of the most pertinent and corrosive, as has been demonstrated and, unfortunately, will continue to be demonstrated.
José Saramago is a Portuguese author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
CPiolo