The Damned And The Merely Deluded

The Sunday Age

Sunday July 23, 2006

Terry Lane

SO, THE Man of Steel is going to spend $8 million on establishing an institute of Islamic studies at an unnamed Australian university. The idea is that nice Muslims will be invited to teach, countering the effects of the nasty Muslims. And who, we are entitled to ask, will be separating these particular sheep from these particular goats? Will we have a new Ministry of Religious Wackiness charged with issuing teaching certificates to the approved deluded?

But why stop there? Why not an institute of Jewish studies? An institute of Christian studies? After all, the madness and mayhem perpetrated by Muslims is mere delinquency compared with what Christians and Jews get away with. The problem, of course, is obvious. Would we staff the Jewish studies institute with the members of Peace Now or would we prefer to take them from the Ariel Sharon school of Smiting Hip and Thigh? Would we staff the Christian institute with Quakers or with adherents of George the Smaller's dreamers of the Second Coming and Armageddon?

Seeing that our new Ministry of Religious Wackiness is prepared to come down on one side or the other in Muslim intra-faith debates, they should have no trouble in deciding who are the good guys and who are the bad in the ranks of the other two Chosen Peoples.

From time to time, the three institutes might come together to discuss the meaning of 1 Samuel chapter 15 where Saul falls out of favour with God for being unduly merciful.

Samuel, who was privy to the Lord's thinking, said to Saul: "The Lord sent you with strict instructions to destroy that wicked nation, the Amalekites; you were to fight against them until you had wiped them out. Why then did you not obey the Lord?"

You see, the Lord's orders were clear and unambiguous. "Spare no one. Put them all to death, men, women and children and babes in arms."

And what was the crime of the Amalekites? The bastards resisted the invading Hebrews coming out of the desert with designs on their lands.

Saul had a reasonable defence. He had slaughtered every man, woman and child but he had kept the sheep and oxen. He said that it was his intention to offer them up as a sacrifice to the Lord, but then he would say that, wouldn't he?

OK. Here's the topic for the three institute seminar. If God says kill everything that breathes, is it all right to keep the booty?

For both Jews and Christians, this event is recorded in the book of Samuel, which is part of the canon of both faiths so it must be both true and instructive. God may be merciful, but once He gets his dander up, He can wax extremely wrathful.

Perhaps the institute of three faiths could put their wisest scholars on to answering the question: Will there ever be peace in the Middle East? The answers might be: "Yes, when every last Palestinian is dead" or "Yes, when Israel is destroyed" or "Yes, when our Lord returns and the battle of Armageddon is over and the survivors have either become Christian or been sent to hell".

Or, as a wise Christian, who had lived in Lebanon and knew Israel well, once said to me, it only needs two things to bring peace - that the Palestinians accept defeat and displacement with grace and that the Israelis show magnanimity in victory.

In other words, the answer is no.

© 2006 The Sunday Age

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