The Human Condition V

In a recent TV-feature about Al Quaeda’s bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, one of the victims, a woman who lost her eye-sight in the Nairobi blast, said: God, if you have to, please take only one eye.

The statement stunned me.

What kind of god would take up that offer?
If he had decided to take both eyes, he would surely take them, as it was unclear what the woman had to offer in return.
And if she had something to offer, what kind of miserable, stingy, vengeful god would consider such a trade-in?
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to ask Osama Bin Laden for compensation for this incredibly cowardly act? The chance of a positive response would have been endlessly higher – albeit minimal.

Let me demonstrate through their own account how sick these terrorists are:

The one allocated to the Nairobi plot was supposed to have shot the guard at the embassy entrance, paving the way for the other to drive the explosives through the gate.
However, he forgot his gun at the back seat of his car.
As he couldn’t shoot the guard immediately, after which he’d probably have been killed himself, he figured that he had messed things up – and ran away.

The logic is that in order to obtain a one way ticket to paradise, he had to be killed in the act – and not afterwards, as this would be considered suicide.
And suicide is not allowed.
Chew on that one for a while.

I don’t know who of the two people, the blind lady or the terrorist, I pity the most. Both are lost in an illusion that only religion could bring about.

My conclusion is, that our time on earth is short and final. Therefore it is better to concentrate on friends and family and make the most out of life here and now than to believe in deluded promises of a paradise – or to believe that God (which of them?) has monopoly on being good.

The problem, of course, is that friends and family may not see it that way, but the solution is simple: convert them to at least understand the "here and now" principle - or dump them.
Time is much too short to live with waste and futile hopes.

What a relief this insight has become for me!