Rabbi Hillel was a Doctor of the Law at Jerusalem in the time of King Herod. When a heathen asked Rabbi Hillel for a summary of the Jewish religion, Hillel said: “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary”
When asked what was the greatest Commandment, Jesus is said to have replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Imran in Islam is regarded as the father of Mary. The chapter in the Kuran named after the family Imran includes; Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus. A line in this chapter states, “…those who restrain (their) anger and pardon men; and Allah loves the doers of good (to others).”
What are we to learn from this? That we should treat others with respect, even to the extent that we treat others as if they were loved members of our own family.
In our society we often hear comments like, ‘Why doesn’t God stop bad things happening?’ Or, ‘If the Jews are God’s chosen people, why did the Holocaust happen?’ Yes, the Holocaust did happen. My step-father was with the British Army when it liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen on 12th April, 1945. This is the camp where Anna Frank died just one month previously, on March 12th.
So why doesn’t God stop these things from happening? The early Christian Church did not have this belief of an omnipotent God. This is a development in the later church.
And yet there is evil in our world: terrorism, genocide such as the massacre of the peasants at Vendee, France, in 1794; the Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust against the Jews, Uganda, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans; and this sorry list goes on and on. Why do these things happen, if God is all-powerful? Here is an argument that tries to explain this.
1. We say that God is all-powerful.
2. We say that God is good.
3. A good God will always eliminate evil as far as He can.
4. An all-powerful God has no limits to His power, and so can eliminate all evil.
5. The fact that there is still evil in the world means that God is not all-powerful.
But is that the real reason? Remember what I said in the beginning – the teachings of Hillel, Jesus, and Mohammed?
Their original message is the same – look after each other. Treat others as you would have them treat you. Harm none – treat all as family. Give alms to the poor and needy.
So how is it that these genocides occur? Simple. Those that perpetrate these horrors believe their leaders because they want to. The most obvious way is for the leaders to tell their followers that all their troubles stem from one section of their community. Hitler did it in 1934 – he said the Jews were the ones who were responsible for Germany’s loss of WW One – the “November Criminals” he called them. He also said that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s economic collapse in the 1930’s.
Pol Pot’s version of Communism was to blame City Dwellers on the country’s woes and move them to the countryside to work in collective farms and slave labour camps. Anyone who wore glasses was deemed an “intellectual” and either sent to the labour camps or summarily executed, and the effects of all this slave labour, executions and almost non-existence of medical care led to the deaths of approximately one fifth of Cambodia’s population.
Idi Amin’s version was to blame everything on Uganda’s English and Asian communities, much as Robert Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe.
But what happened to those early teachings – Love one another; treat others as you would be treated; look after the poor and destitute? Those original teachings have, for the most part, been overwhelmed by the writings of those who followed the original Teachers.
Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path; Jesus’ admonition to love one another; Mohammed’s teaching to “do good to others” – these have all but disappeared under the weight of centuries of philosophers musing out loud on what they thought the original Teachers meant. This, of course, is followed by another philosopher saying that the first philosopher was mistaken and that the Teachers really meant this and not that; and the result?
Five hundred years after Mohammed, the Sufi Poet, Omar Khayyam, was lamenting that Islam had split into seventy-two “jarring sects”; and Christianity has devolved into literally hundreds of different sects and Churches, nearly all of them saying that only they had the real truth and the others were deluding themselves.
We only need to remember one thing – be kind to each other. It doesn’t matter where that person comes from, what colour skin they have, or what their beliefs are. What church he or she attends, what God he or she may believe in or worship, even if they do not believe in God at all – they are your fellow human beings, and as such are a separate voice of God, as you are a separate voice of God whoever or whatever you perceive him to be.
As someone once said, “God does not tell part of himself how to behave,” and everyone you meet is a part of God, therefore no-one should despise another, for we are all part of God, and ultimately, it is to Him that we shall return.
