Imagine

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.

Today is Easter Monday. Last Wednesday marked the beginning of Passover. A week ago today was the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Juvénal Habyarimana, which was swiftly followed with the Rwandan Genocide. Ninety-two years ago yesterday, Canadian efforts culminated in victory at Vimy Ridge. Forty-one years and nine days ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In the midst off this, I thought I’d share my reflections on the world.

As the world learned too late, over 100 days in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were butchered at the hands of Hutus in Rwanda. However, the difference between the Tutsis and Hutus is difficult to pin down, and may be as simple as artificial divisions remaining from European colonial times dependant on the size of your nose, or possible your heard of cattle. And yet both ethnic groups have taken turns mercilessly slaughtering each other. In 2001, terrified school girls were subject to taunts and projectiles hurled at them by angry Loyalists in Belfast, because the Loyalists believed that the Bible is the only infallible authority on Christianity, while the children believed that the episcopacy is also a valid power. Sunni and Shiite Muslims have been mean to each other ever since their religion was twenty-two years old when a disagreement broke out about who the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muhammad was. These and all arbitrary differences are creating an ‘other’ to blame for our own deficiencies, and dividing humanity.

In many cases religious or ethnic differences are simply used as a smokescreen to hide other cultural challenges, but the fact is that divisions created sometimes thousands of years ago to suit the needs of a horny king or a discarded heir or a colonial power are continuing to drive a giant wedge between humans today. What we need now is a complete separation of church and state, and a greater global harmony going forward. While visiting in Turkey, Barack Obama recently boldly reinforced that the United States was not a Christian nation. Canada has, to a large degree, exemplified that notion quite well, and continues to be a beacon of multiculturalism and acceptance.

‘Cause tonight; we can be as one tonight.

I was listening to CBC radio a while back, and they were interviewing a Muslim scholar. I can’t remember who it was, or the context of the discussion, but what they were talking about was their notion that what their organization was striving for and envisioned was a world in which everybody was Muslim. This made me stop and think for a moment, because the concept of the entire world following the same religion, and the idea of organizations striving for this, was a concept that had never really occurred to me. Sure it makes sense that people would generally desire others to agree with them on such topics, but for an organization to actually foresee this as an eventuality, let alone a possibility, really struck me. Perhaps because the only way I can see that ever happening is as a secular world, rather than any one religion over all the others.

That’s because it seems somewhat presumptuous to me to assume that your religion, or race, or ethnicity, or group is solely correct and only your people will be chosen or saved (I'm afraid it was 'the Mormons.' Yes, 'the Mormons' was the correct answer). Since most religions are for the most part mutually exclusive, it follows that only one can be totally correct, or, quite possibly, that none are correct. Some may accuse me of taking too literal an approach to this matter, but I believe a literal approach is a valid way to consider such an issue, especially when one group involved can raise almost $40 million in California to see to it that homosexuals cannot be married, because over two-thousand years ago, Leviticus said: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Something that always gets me, and gives me hope, is the Christmas truce of 1914, in which enemy soldiers dug into trenches in the Great War joined each other in No Man’s Land to sing, exchange gifts, bury their dead, and play soccer. The war would last almost five more years, but on that day everybody was a human being.

Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too. Imagine all the people; living life in peace.

Russ