Fanaticisms

In the stew of my thoughts have been allot of fanaticism

fusing into insights on something that sits upon us all-fanaticism.

When I was in Brazil I read an interesting book about the reintroduction of Aristotle into Medieval Europe- it told of a story of a Spanish king who after Toledo fell to the Christians in the 11th Century gathered together the best scholars, Muslim, Christian and Jewish and translated the works of Aristotle into Latin. Aristotle's work washed over Europe; challenging Neo-Platonic Augustinian faithlife and beginning the work in which we live. Think about what the 11th and 12th century was like, the world where the Medieval World began to decline and the more open world began.

But fanaticism was everywhere then as now and so a man like St Thomas Aquinas was a heretic!?

Fanaticism and Reaction to progress is always with us, as an adherent to an Abrahamic faith the two sides of our history are this great gentleness/great harshness great art/great iconoclasm.
It is all ours, the murders caused by Joshua in the book of Kings, by Bar Kochba, the murders by Christians of Pagans and Jews, the Crusades, the Jihads by Muslims against Christians and Zoroastrians, the river of blood is long and full of questions.

In my own Catholic tradition we have had the greatest innovators the most humanly divine people, St Francis, St Cecilia, the Desert Fathers, Giotto, Dante, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Caravaggio, Mozart and the most horrible, evil villains, Tomas De Torquemada, Francisco Pizarro, Savanarola, Francesco Borgia, and yes Hitler and Peron and Franco.

I watched a movie recently- the Hamburg Cell, where they showed the development of the men who engaged in September 11th 2001. The thing I came away with is how similar these highjackers were to fanatics of all kinds. Fanatics who get a pass in history and those who dont.
If you call yourself a Marxist or a Christian or Jew or a Muslim or a human being then fanaticism is your inheritance.

This is the problem.

There is no moral difference between Marxist fanatics in Russia or China or Latin America, who by the way have killed millions, or Fascist fanatics, or Fundamentialist Christian fanatics, Catholic Fanatics, Hindu Fanatics or Islamic fanatics. What they all have in common are the Boxcars, and the camps I wish only the worst for people who think they know everything.

the sureness of thinking that they know all and others are 'unclean'.

I scream for an end to equivocation.

The problem is that the world we live in is setting forth facts that challenge and instead of accepting facts, women are equal to me, Evolution is true, Freedom is Better, Secular Separation of Church and State avoids death, people would rather retreat to their ghetto and then from that Ghetto go out and try to force others to believe in a constricted God a constricted world and world that ignores the facts and perverts the truth.

The number one selling book in the USA is the Left Behind Series, which talks about the end of the world, and has more in common with Osama Bin Laden then it does with Jesus or Lincoln

Don't people see the parallels?

Don't people understand that it is not 1200?

I wish that we could resurrect Maimonides, St Francis and Rumi and put them on TV and that people could here them and understand- that YHWH and Allah and Jesus are all the same and that in the end when one group is oppressed eventually all will be oppressed.

I refuse to let the fanatics have our culture

I refuse to hate people for their religion or the fact that they call God something different

I refuse to think that Art and Poetry are sinful

I refuse to let death triumph over Life

I refuse to let the fanatics win no matter if they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu