It’s said that one person’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths merely a statistic. Apparently a million is not enough when the sky fairy promised you some real estate three thousand years ago.
An August BBC report from the occupied West Bank settlement of Havat Gilad featured a Jewish/Zionist lawyer who was quite open about his genocidal tendencies. Speaking of the retribution he would like to see visited upon Palestinians following an Israeli death, he named four Palestinian villages which have been the subject of various attacks by the Israeli settlers and said that ‘we need to kill all the people’ in them. The reporter asked him a question about the equivalence he was putting on Jewish lives and Palestinian lives and he responded that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives.
Whilst the compilers of the Hebrew bible went the whole hog; a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21), even they didn’t go that far.
Questioned further about Palestinian residents in the West Bank, ‘Shimon laid out three options: live quietly under Israeli rule and ownership of the land; voluntarily emigrate to other Arab or Muslim nations; or “if you don’t want to make peace with us, and you don’t want to get out, I don’t have a choice: I must kill you, and I kill you all,” he said’. So, submit, leave or die.
There was not an opportunity in the report fully to assess the mental state of the interviewee. We think it is fair to state that religion causes strange reactions in people. This person would seem unaware of the caution, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
From one extreme to another
In August at The Big Church Festival, a person was killed and others were injured when a large wooden sign collapsed. This incident prompted a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury who said, ‘she was “sad and shocked” to hear about the fatal incident’. She was also going to do lots of praying for various people involved. “May the God of comfort and healing be with them all” she said.
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John Donne’s poem, No Man Is An Island, relates a belief that we are all interconnected and the death of one person, let alone a million or ten million, ‘diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.’ The first reaction many would have had would have been to laugh at the irony of a committed Christian being struck down in that circumstance. You were taking the Michael there god weren’t you? We would have felt sorry and diminished afterwards no doubt.
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Lastly, reported by the BBC in September, was that ‘St Paul’s Cathedral has signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside the building’. Finally, some rational use of the building.
DC
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