Signs of Our Times-2

“ We hold ideas and whoever holds opinions different from ours is a potential threat, an enemy.”


No idea can ever be separated from its abstract nature. If it is made flesh as we read in the Scriptures ‘Word was made flesh etc.,’ it is still an idea at its core. With it the bearer of idea delineates in so many examples what idea means to him or her. Happily I can say I bear my humanness as an idea.
What have we done with our ideas? Our forefathers made ideals out of the very capacity of our species to deal with abstractions. It is true for us also.
God is of the same weight as Satan as an idea.
Having made such distinctions and without having fully searched to its limits, or foreseen its downsides we have happily gone on with other aspects of our nature.
As a species distinct from Homo erectus we developed our social structure: owing to present and clear danger of predators out there it was necessity that drove us to seek security of numbers. Our progress to evolve a concept of ‘us and them’ was put up before we have had acquired the full capacity or the strength of mind. The former could have given us a breadth of vision to think of all life forms of the same stock. For want of that breadth circumstances made us cling to ‘a concept of us and them.’ Having found security of allegience and brute strength as prerequisite for survival we made clans into a Cause, sovereign and above the sacredness of an individual. It led to the idea of tribes and later of nations. If only had we shown maturity to the second, the strength of mind, we would have enquired more into the natural phenomena of our world and not be swept off our balance by our fancies that do not speak well for us.
What did convulse us? In thunder we heard God's anger and we made our little rites to appease him. We ought to have made forests our allies than treat them as something evil; we ought to have made the soil our bedfellows than as some hallowed grounds for pouring precious blood of our sacrificial victims.
Religion is an idea that consumed our primordial ancestors to their hurt and the same holds true for national identity, an idea that has become wellworn for use.
benny