The Promised Land

     Anyone familiar with the Bible would know the story of the Promised Land. There was this certain tribe who, fortunately for them, were not just any ordinary tribe but rather were ‘Gold's specially chosen people.' ‘It is you people that God has chosen to be God's very own people out of all these other peoples of the world.' So they recorded in their book of ‘sacred writings.'

     Now being the Chosen People destined to live in the Promised Land, it was only to be expected that a god would make careful plans in order to see it that they got everything that was coming to such a special specially chosen tribe of people. Now there was just one problem with the whole deal and that was that some heathen nations were already living in the Promised Land, and while this might seem like a serious impediment to a mere mortal, never fear, for, after all, a god was on the job making those sorts of plans that only a god could possibly devise, thus proving through the sheer brilliance of the glorious plan in all its intricate and marvelous detail that truly these must have the plans and thoughts of a god. No one could deny it. It was just that obvious given the perfect, infallible and inerrant quality of the words of that god.

     I ask you to consider the following scenario. Let's say that a god decided for arbitrary reasons we need know anything about ourselves, that the Mongolians were suddenly to become god's specially chosen people. Yes, it was the Mongolians that a god had chosen to be god's very own people out of all these all other people's of the world. Now being a god's chosen race wouldn't be worth much if there wasn't some Promised Land or something like that to go along with it, so let us suggest then that this god picked out the country of Poland to be the new specially Promised Land for the Chosen People of Mongolia. Now we know that the unchosen Poles were living in Poland at the time, but never mind. You see the Poles were an ungodly and hateful bunch of heathens and they wouldn't be in Poland for very long. A god said so. And a god had plans for those Poles. A god raised up the Khan, Genghis Joshua Khan, and his job was to lead the Mongolians into Poland where their instructions from the god were that they were to slaughter every last Pole. In the Holy Book they wrote about the promises of that god it was written, ‘And Genghis Joshua Khan slaughtered all the Poles. He did not leave a single Pole alive.'

     Now let us assume that the Mongolians, rather than being religious fanatics, were actually thoughtful philosophers with critical minds. Now taking that Promised Land under the leadership of Genghis Joshua Khan was going to be a horrifying ordeal and real messy, with lots of people getting killed. They used swords and clubs and spears and arrows in those days, so dying in a war would be up close and real personal, both for the murderers and the murdered. ‘Kill all the women and all the little boys but keep the virgin girls for yourselves,' the god told Attila Moses the Hun, and in actual practice this meant chop, hack, whack, stab, slice, disembowel and that means lots of screaming, ‘Noooo! Oh please don't! NOOOOO! NOOOOO! ARRRRRGH! SCREEEEEEEEECH!' Real messy, torturously painful stuff is that dying in the butchery of a war, after all. But the Poles were demonic sub-humans and they deserved, so never mind. It was a holy war, and thus it was all just sacred, as holy things are. The holy book said so.

     Of course a lot of Mongolians would be sliced, chopped and diced in that war on their war into the Promised Land of god's specially chosen people, people as a general war getting hacked up and killed in wars. They would die for the war god, though, so that makes it okay since they would go right straight to paradise for being obedient saints and helping out in that war like they did.

     But let's assume that the Mongolians were philosophers and not simply dogmatic religious fanatics. Let's pretend they were thoughtful people, and when some prophet showed up yacking about some god, they were willing to critically examine everything that prophet said, to see if it made sense, so as to discern the spirit of that prophet, you know, whether or not it came from a god or not.

     Now first of all, let us assume that a god wanted to get rid of the Poles, because they were an evil nation, some kind of sub=human race, and that none of them, not their women, their infants, their grandmothers deserved to live, with the one exception of their young virgin girls. Now no reason is given why Attila the Moses, the great man of a god, decided to spare the virgin girls and ordered the soldiers to ‘divide them up evenly'. No reason is given why the army killed every except the virgin girls of Jabesh-Gilead a few centuries later. But then, really, do we need someone to spell it all out for us. The Poles were a devilish people, and their virgins must have been devilish as well, but, hey, they were virgins, and so it turns out that you can always make a few compromises with a devilish sub-human race under the right circumstances.

     Yet if the Mongolians were philosophers they might find themselves asking some critical questions about these so called holy men of god and these so called prophets and their so called orders from some so called god. For example, if a god wanted to get rid of the Poles so that the Mongolians could move into the Promised Land of Poland, well then surely it must have occurred to a god that a god could get rid of those Poles in a nano-second. Instantly. No more Poles. And then those Mongolians could have just walked into the Promised Land without having to do all those long years of slaughtering and genocide to get rid of the evil Poles themselves, so they could live in the Promised Land, instead of the Poles. They could have avoided all the psychological devastation that they were bound to suffer warring away, up close and personal, listening to screams of those being hacked and sliced to death with swords or burned up in fires or disemboweled or spear to death. If those Mongolians were sensible people with critical minds they could have considered this matter and they could have sent a message back to that god that if it wanted a bunch of people killed so that the Mongolians could move into their land, well that god could just do it itself. Until such a time as that god decided to get rid of those Poles itself, the Mongolians would just stay in Mongolia.

     Of course if they were philosophers like that, instead of fanatically religious those Mongolians would still be in Mongolia to this very day, and the Poles would still be living in the Promised Land a god promised to the Mongolians, since I think we all know just how unlikely it is that a god would ever appear to commit genocide against the poles. No, Attila the Moses might commit genocide and then divvy up the virgins and Genghis Joshua Khan might ‘kill everybody' and he might not ‘leave a single soul alive,' this sort of thing being believable, but gods are really useless when it comes to leading people into the Promised Land. Even though they are gods, and they have big plans, they never act like gods, and therefore when we read of gods and their promises in sacred books we just read about Attila the Moses or Joshua the Hun, who committed genocide and took the Promised Land, and as for gods, well gods it turns out just make cameo appearances to general armies or to pass along messages to the holy men, and other than that prove to worthless as gods at the end of the day. The Poles would have more to fear from those Mongolians than they would from their god, since their god is useless. If it was the turn of those Mongolians to get slaughtered in a great genocide, well those Mongolians would find out in turn just how useless a thing a god can be. It would not be a god committing acts of genocide against those Mongolians but rather Genghis Khan or Hitler the Hun, gods not being the sorts to do such things, and even in the most sacred of holy holy books gods don't do much but talk talk talk, while never walking the walk, and are depicted as for the most part, completely useless.

     Given that this is true, if we were to hear of the Mongolians taking ‘the Promised Land' in the name of some god, if we were critical thinkers, and not simply religious dogmatics, we could assume that there really was no Promised Land and neither did any god general the army that took that Promised Land. If a god wants to take a promised land then let a god be a god and take the land, but rather what we saw were a bunch of Mongolian soldiers under the leadership of the man of destiny, the great Khan, and they took the Promised Land by the edge of their swords. Later on, we can safely assume, they wrote up some Sacred Scrolls where they made up a bunch of stories about a ‘Promised Land' and some god and some promises of some god who as one would expect from such nationalistic war propaganda, would make cameo appearances in those documents to talk a lot about the divine origins of the customs and habits of the Mongolians as well as sending out papers like some general with the armies marching orders for the day. It would be testament to the blind dogmatism of religion, which is no philosophy after all, and to the blindness of the Mongolians, that for thousands of years afterward, those politically motivated war scribblings would studied in universities and preached billions of times over as the divine words of some god. What it reveals at the end of it all is a human race that is atrociously dim witted and slow of mind and easily led astray and brainwashed by nothing more than the specious claims of the war lords of the Mongolians. It is truly an astonishing display of stupidity and ignorance, and those who ponder the ruins of the earth and the perpetual sufferings and destruction on this planet would do well to consider the matter, and what so called Holy Books and their sorry excuse for a philosophy say about human religion and what human religion in turn says about humanity. A human being is not a creature that thinks much, as their history of religion so clearly demonstrates, and any book will do, provided that has been approved by the priestly authorities. A foolish book like the Bible is proof enough of that...