Religion - the font of madness.

There were some surprises in the The Times last Thursday (21/12/06). Starting with an article about Rabbi Ahron Cohen, a member of a Jewish anti-Zionist group called "Neturei Karta" who attended a bizarre conference in Iran.

Though I have the greatest respect for Rabbi Cohen's stance on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, I think he made a very ill-considered decision to attend the conference. Also present at the conference was a former "Imperial Wizard" of the Klu Klutz Klan (David Duke, typo deliberate), and holocaust denialists such as Robert Faurisson and Fredrick Töben.

In an earlier article in The Times, Cohen is quoted as saying:

"There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another. We have to look within to improve and try to better ourselves and remove those characteristics or actions that may have been the cause of the success of the Holocaust."

If we take his statement at face value, this would mean that the Palestinians deserve whatever they get, because God/Allah would have protected them if they were deserving. The same applies to any form of suffering on the planet. Is it only Christianity that (hypocritically) preaches forgiveness and tolerance?

Other aspects of the doctrine of Neturei Karta is that the very concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law, and that they are the only "true" practitioners of Judaism.

What a crazy, mixed up world we live in - not only do we have Sunni, Druze and Shia Moslems tearing each other apart, Catholic, Protestant and plain whacky Christians, but the Jewish faith is also clearly splintered. On balance, the nature of any organised religion of any faith is chaos and killing. Remove religion, and the world would be a happier and safer place for all of us - or would we just find other ways to damage ourselves? Perhaps eye/hair colouring, or preference for certain foods would become new mass-movements to provide reasons for killing each other in addition to political beliefs, racial origin, sexuality, etc?

Joe McGonagle