I originally posted this on the Bondi Massacre but was advised I should put it to a wider audience.
Its a terrible shame that the children of the current generations fighting these pointless battle's cannot shake their parents and grandparent's out of this constant cycle of destruction. I accept they may have been brainwashed but the generation of the post millenium has enough information to put a stop to this rubbish.
Early yesterday morning, I was fishing at Nudgee Beach just off the edge of Moreton Bay adjacent to the Brisbane River and Airport. It's a grubby little area and is just 20 minutes from Brisbane City, so it is very accessible. It's my release. A way to get away from all the humdrum and be one with nature.
It might have been a fishing village 50 years ago and the decor would be similar (unfortunately not much fish left just the same).
There were just the two of us there myself and another "old bloke".
We got to talking about the recent events from Bondi. no blame or answer's just the horror. He was heavily accented so I asked him what country he was from originally.
He didn't say at first but did say straight away he was a nationalised Australian.
He then told me after some analysis (I suspect he was sizing me up for what he was about to tell me) that he was a Palestinian. The fact that he went through a process to tell me his country of origin probably explains the sensitivities he experiences in a society that does not understand much about middle east politics.
He explained further that he as a Palestinian was essentially a blood brother of all the Arabs and really the equal our own the indigenous people in Australia but for him of the Middle East, he also said he was a converted Christian, because his wife was a Christian but he believed just the same. My feeling was he was both proud and embarrassed about his heritage.
He was sympathetic to the Islamic cause and explained to me some of the subtletes of the various factions, from the Lebs, Syrians, Qatar, Egypt, Iran and of course the Jews.
He had no time for the terrorists or the terrorism of the region but explained how deeply ingrained they were in their thinking. We quickly agreed that the Cathlolic Church was probably one of the most corrupt institutions on the Christian front (my whole family wife, me and all our kids are Catholic, so dont get lost on that). He did also say he believed Jesus teaching's were the most justified of all the religions.
We spoke for about 3 hours on that Jetty and covered so much territory, he was 83 and his wife was in her 80's and he hinted with dementia. He was a retired Fitter and Turner and a very intelligent man.
We caught one fish between us but shared our bait and ideas, commonsense was a constant in the whole discussion.......if two old bastards from entirely different cultures can get on a jetty for a few hours and agree on most things, it goes to show there must be some hope for this world....... One thing that came out of our discussion was not the importance and the damage religion can do but the need for many to have faith in something when it appears there is nothing else to place your hopes on.
My personal view is that the people that come into these discussions on forums like ours, have little understanding of the need for faith from some of these people who we seem to treat as statistics and not understand their lack of alternatives in a life that has passed them by.
Just to finish on a different note, the one fish I caught was by me, it was about 3 inches long, a little bream, I "live baited" it and left it on a sleeper rod trying to catch something bigger. It was on for 40 minutes or so and was not taken. My view when I wound it in after inspecting it a number of times was he had done a pretty good job and I took the hook out and he swam away, seemingly unaffected by his ordeal.
Tell your children but explain to them they have a responsibity to get it right because the current generations and their predessers for the past 3000 years or so have really fcuked it up, big time and its time to let it go!
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Message received..... subtle as always
Great write up, it's disappointing to see racist views on a footy site it doesn't help anyone.
Gordon, "racism" or heavily biased views are almost always due to fear and limited perspectives (or worse such as natural sociopathic leanings) and it gets dressed up in all sorts of wrappings, justifications and ego-mechanisms. Some can grow out of it, many can't.
Pops, Love this story. Two old men on a Jetty. What immediately struck me as a powerful theme, besides moments of shared humanity, was your friend's fear of judgment in relation to his Palestinian ancestary.
Fear, Trepidation or a want not to cause conflict..... all part of the message Hoe...... you get it! I wonder who else will, it was an eye opener and maybe not a coincidence I found myself there yesterday?
The other message is the brainwashing and cohesion of the terrorist mentality.....their young people now have an information package that can circumvent this madness!
The "brainwashing part" is a far more complex discussion Pops, which is why I didnt immediately go there.
If you're living in bombed-out rubble. Sand. Dust. And not much else. No organized police or army to protect you. No helicopters. No M16s. No food or hot water. And you've seen your family turn to bits of bloodied fragments on dusty, bloodied soil. Or kids with head shots, courtesy of highly-trained skilled snipers that almost none will remember except for some outraged doctors doing their autopsies or some outraged journos that will be called fake news. Oh and you remember stories your long gone relatives used to tell you about the lands they used to live 70 years ago. Where even Jews, Christians and Musliens co-existed. Before your people were booted out. Then what? What do you do about how you feel? What's left for you?
Meanwhile, a brotherhood reach out. The only ones there with you on aground Zero. Some speaking of peace and a better way, others for justice and revenge. To top it all off many in the West will assume you're a "troublemaker" and a Islamo-jihadist terrorist.
And how can you trust the people who represent or "symbolize" the types who provided the missiles, the arms? The US. The West. The people who also say your brotherhood, your faith, is evil and the cause of all the trouble in the world. The ones that live in a very different world. A paradise in comparison.
The irony of all this is the Jews know exactly how this feels and are also a brotherhood. They went through the Holocaust and persecution. With no land to call home until 70 years ago. In land some of the Palestinian generations used to call home. Before the were herded out. Decided by politicians. Seven decades later it isn't getting better. But worse...
I'm sure your friend was on top of all that far more than I am.
Mmmmm. Very difficult and complex topics...
I rarely get into religions, but I absolutely agree that we must get it right. The problem as i see it, If I peel back the thousands of years of layers of people, and conclude that it has never changed in that time, what has been the constant. That constant is that religions right from the start have never been honest. Honest in the fact that the sky fairies are not and have not been real. Love the old gods and the new yada yada yada. Pick a god any god yada yada yada. There are so many holes in the teachings of gods, bibles, Korans Egyptian Mythology, Roman, Greek, Nordic, Aboriginal, African, whatever, the list is endless with 100's if not thousands of gods. Strange that the all mighty being m sky fairy couldn't just get that one teaching correct.
If people were just honest about sky fairies right from the start then perhaps we could all have an equal and truthful base to start again from then perhaps we could put real faith in real humans.
I understand what you are saying Bluey, Hoey is probably more where I am at in recognising a need for faith and the circumstances that make that need.
The events of the 2 Old men on the jetty was not about solving the problem as much as understanding them and the already reconciliation of those two (speaking as a third party) was never an issue. Nothing needed to be reconciled, we were in agreement.
With respect the idealogy of religion and the Sky Fairies was never the question in itself and ultimately can never be resolved from this source of even superstition which most will come back to.
That is why I have identified the children of the current generation, they have access now to information they have previously never been afforded. Those Smart Phones give more information than any encyclopaedias (spell?).
In the future IGNORANCE can never be the solution, answer or cause.....we need to have faith in them and forget the Sky Fairies, they had their chance and fcuked up as much as any of the human beings involved.
Bluey, Like you, I'm not religious at all, even if I went to very religious GPS anglican school: St Andrews Cathedral in Sydney CDB that regularly had religious classes and prayers in the beautiful cathedral there. The cathedral there in the middle of the CBD was only thing I liked about all the religious ceremonies I went to for many years. I used to be anti-religion because I couldn't make heads or tails out it. One question I had as a 14 year old, was 'why would a father sacrifice his son to prove something'? Something they kept saying again and again. Proof that God loved the world so much. It seemed a pretty ridiculous thing to do, for me. For what purpose? Optics? Of course, I kept it to myself. They used to use the cane back then...
As I grew older, it became clear to me people's faith is very important to them, even many in my own family. But most weren't out there killing or doing horrid things. There are billions of religious people. It's only a small percentage that do sociopathic things. I've actually never met a religious person in my own circle that has done anything harmful. I think it's a case of most are good eggs, but you will get the bad eggs too. So, I learned to respect what is important to others. So, I now support people's right to practice their faith, whatever that may be, and would never want to take it away from them.
We can weaponize anything. If not religion, a gun, a knife, a pencil, or any ideology. I mean the Russian and Chinese communists also wanted to kill religion off. Religion is not the problem. It's people that are the problem, specifically people with fanatic and extremist ideologies that do sociopathic things.
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