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Series:
Gathic Illustration
Historical Events
Personal-Perspective
Theology
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Author:
Smith,Timothy
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“Unto
you, O Creator, the Soul of Mother Earth complained thus: Wherefore did you
create me? Who gave life to me? Anger, rapine, outrage, plunder,
aggression and violence are present everywhere. There is no protector for
me, except Thee. Therefore, reveal to me a saviour who could show me a way
out of this difficulty.”
Nearly four thousand years
later, does not the Soul of Mother Earth still utter the same cry? Since
the tragedies of September 11th, 2001, and in the fury of anger and fear
that have followed,
how far do we honestly believe we have advanced in the last four thousand
years? Where the world is not churning in confusion and superstition, it
seems to be turning in desperation to false hopes and lies. We need to
think again. We need to think clearly. We need to think, period.
Let’s begin our journey with
a story from long ago. About the time the last of the great ice ages began
to descend upon the earth, the spirits of two children left their young
bodies. They were buried together in their favourite place to play, a
promontory where two crystalline streams came together in a forest. Their
band would come to this place year after year. On a crisp, clear day, the
immense ice cap could be seen in the distance, creeping closer from the
northlands with every cycle of the sun. Now, this community so loved these
two children that they buried them in the warmest clothing lavishly adorned
with some six thousand ivory beads and jewels. The youngest of the two, a
girl of only about nine or ten years of age, was perhaps a little more
favoured than the older boy. But, just like the boy, she had in her
possession slender ivory lances and ivory spears to accompany her to the
next hunting ground.
Compared with our present
day, the ice age could hardly be considered a time of great prosperity.
Indeed, it was a time of much hardship and suffering, but it was a time when
human life was still a great rarity on the face of Mother Earth. Survival
of human life was precious. It was a time when the lives of children were
as important as those of adults. It was a time when both women and men were
respected and treated as equals. It was a time when an entire community
could mourn the death of a young girl and boy as a major loss, even though
neither was yet of an age to make any notable achievement amongst their
people, or rise to a high social status on their own. It was a time when
every soul counted for something.
Even in the most “advanced”
of nations today, this level of perception is virtually nonexistent, wiped
out by a swiftly increasing and demanding population that leaves little room
for such considerations. We have come to a place in time where the life of
a particular child, dear as it may be to its parents and immediate family,
may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and the life of a
child who also happens to be a girl is readily disposable in far too many
quarters. Perhaps we can console ourselves a little by saying that advanced
societies have an array of programs for children, while those which remain
backward do not. Unfortunately, that’s just not saying a whole lot.
The family members of these
children of the ice age who managed to survive may have been – literally –
the ancestors of many of us alive today. It was a very long time ago, and
thousands upon thousands of generations of human beings produce millions
upon staggering millions of offspring. In the interim, we ask what we have
accomplished, and how we honour those who have come before us.
Jesus of Nazareth, whose
conduct of life was a lucid message of love to humankind, nevertheless
instructed his followers to “say ‘Yes’ when you mean ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ when you
mean ‘No.’ Anything beyond that is from the evil one.”
In other words, difficult as situations may be, we are advised that, when we
speak, we should do so clearly and truthfully.
Based on the aforementioned
ideas, I wish to share a few of my thoughts in more detail. Those
responsible for sparking the tragedies of September 11th clearly had come up
with a plan to produce gain for themselves while causing others to suffer.
In choosing to disregard the most fundamental principles of social justice,
their actions can readily be discerned to be evil in thought, word, and
deed. Some people, still bathing in false religiosity and ignorance, have
gone so far as to say that God
ordained the deaths of all those who died on that fateful day. That
outrageous blasphemy is renounced on the grounds that, though we may gain a
few glimpses from time to time from revelations of prophets throughout the
ages, not one of us can presume to know the will of God. We are on one of
many planets that orbits around a star in elliptical fashion, and every day
our planet spins about once on its axis, and we believe we understand enough
of the laws of physics to know quite a bit about how it happens. However,
not one of us knows why it happens, why it was created this
way – we haven’t a clue as to why the laws of physics work as they
do. We don’t yet know the answer to a question as simple as why we happen
to be where the Creator put us. We would do better to think before talking
about things we know nothing about.
Many claim this war is not a
religious war, but I beg to differ. As far as those who perpetrated it in
the first place are concerned, it most certainly is a religious war. Among
other hints about it, they came right out and said so. The religion they
follow is not to be confused with Islam at all, regardless of what they
might say, but it is a religion nonetheless. The rest of us may not want to
be involved in a religious war, but let’s not water down the situation,
either. If a religion stands for that which is good, and that religion is
compelled to fight the actions of some zealots who are actively promoting
evil, then this is definitely a religious war. How we choose to conduct the
fight is another matter, yet another subject of concern that challenges our
senses of civility and our interpretation of what is good, and particularly
what is good for the Soul of Mother Earth.
Terrorism is not alone in
its quest for gain at the expense of others. Many other interests have
plans to add more for their members at great expense to others and, in this
connection, we are not limited only to branded terrorists. Left unbridled,
entire governments, nations, and communities are prone to do the same in a
nightmare of contradictions. Not to be hypocritical, many religions yield
quite a dirty history on this point, too. In the end, Zarathushtra’s
visionary message is correctly directed first to each and every person:
each individual must make proper choices, because an individual who chooses
very badly can wreak havoc on the face of the earth.
What does one make of the
Afghanistan of a few months ago?
Tragically, this was a country in chaos from decades of wars and poverty,
earthquakes and landmines. Sad as it is, this fails to provide the
slightest excuse that what meager bounty Afghanistan produced was reserved
for the pleasures of a handful of men, certainly not its women or children,
virtually all of whom were condemned to crude lives of atrocious disrespect,
encouraged through flawed government pronouncements with quasi-religious
overtones.
This was not the ice age.
After twenty-five thousand years of progressive civilization, we somehow
managed to create a few places far worse, and Afghanistan is not alone.
Some countries in central
Africa
and southern Asia
are so badly ravaged by disease, hunger, war, corruption, malevolence, and
lack of education that governments have no idea where to start. Poverty
flourishes even in the most prosperous of nations.
Indeed, the entire world has
a lot of building and rebuilding to do. Developed regions can look forward
to more than a few years of emergency shipments of food, clothing and
medicines to the less fortunate. In time, buildings and airports and roads
and entire cities can be put back together again. Eventually, women will
regain their status in society, and children will no longer serve as
military conscripts or be sold into slavery. Order will someday be
restored, justice will prevail, and we will be happy again.
The souls lost on the tragic
day of September 11th and since were not lost in vain. Rather, new
beginnings have been catalyzed for a fresh, new world. This time around,
let us take time to think before acting. Let us help one another to resist
evil before it has a chance to grow into war. Let us instruct each other to
choose the path of good. Let us pause to honor those who have gone before
us, those souls from just a few months ago, to the ancient ones from the ice
ages and beyond. Let us make every living soul count for something and,
this time, let us listen to the Soul of Mother Earth. For, in spite of our
dreadful failings of the past, we have every reason to be cheerful and
optimistic about the future to come.
Ys. 29:1, Gathas: the Holy Songs of Zarathushtra, trans.
Mobed Firouz Azargoshasb (Publication of the Council of Iranian Mobeds of
North America, 1980).
On September 11th, 2001, four commercial jetliners in the air
over the United States were seized by terrorists. A highly coordinated
attack aimed two of the four jets into the World Trade Center in New York,
creating an inferno that killed thousands; another jet crashed into the
Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, destroying part of the building and killing
nearly two hundred, while the fourth jet plunged to the ground in Somerset
County in Pennsylvania, killing all on board. Less than two hours had
passed, but before the day was over, the massive twin towers of the World
Trade Center collapsed, and many firefighters and police died in rescue
operations. A federal investigation identified members of the al-Qaeda
network as the people responsible for these calamities. Their leaders,
Osama bin Laden in particular, were thought to be in Afghanistan under the
protection of the Afghan government, the Taliban. While nations from all
over the world immediately expressed their condolences to the families of
victims of the tragedy, the United States strained heavily under massive
transportation and security problems. For a number of countries, however,
sympathy began to fade soon after the United States vowed a “war on
terrorism” not only against terrorists as individuals, but also against
those governments harbouring terrorists. The United States nevertheless
managed to pull together sufficient strategic alliances to launch intense
air strikes and ground operations in Afghanistan in an attempt to rout out
the al-Qaeda terrorists and dislodge the oppressive Taliban
government. The Taliban is out of power for the time being, but the masters
of terrorism remain unaccounted for as of this writing. Virtually unknown
to many Americans as they remain largely self-absorbed and insulated from
what goes on in the greater international community, the September 11th
tragedies and the events that have since followed have led to a deep and
dangerous polarization among nations. Perhaps weary and tired, many
Americans take some comfort in rationalizing the attacks on the United
States as largely symbolic, and stop short at that point. Many continue to
overlook the clear intent on the part of the terrorists to destabilize the
world’s oldest, most prosperous, most generous, free and secular republic to
a state of bedlam and anarchy from which it would be unable to recover.
History will eventually show neither the muddled, chaotic pseudoreligious
zeal of this plague of terrorists, nor the incomparable retaliatory military
and economic might of the United States, necessary as it may be at this
time, will dare to gaze upon the face of Truth.
This is
a personal narrative about the Paleolithic archaeological site of Sungir
found near Vladimir, Russia, in 1955, and the technical details are in
accord with the scientific facts of the site. The burial site is currently
dated to 25,500 years before the present. For more information on this
site, see Soffer, O., “Sungir: A Stone Age Burial Site,” in
Burenhult, G., The First Humans, vol. 1: Human Origins and History to
10,000 B.C. (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1993), pp. 138-139.
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