Harun Al-Rashid Receiving A Delegation Of Charlemagne In Baghdad

Harun al-Rashid (Arabic: هارون الرشيد‎}; Hārūn ar-Rashīd) (17 March 763 or February 766 — 24 March 809) was the fifth Abbasid Caliph.

His surnametranslates to “the Just”, “the Upright”, or “the Rightly-Guided”. Al-Rashid ruled from 786 to 809, during the peak of the Islamic Golden Age.

His time was marked by scientific, cultural, and religious prosperity. Islamic art and musicalso flourished significantly during his reign. He established the legendary library Bayt al-Hikma (“House of Wisdom”) in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, and during his rule Baghdad began to flourish as a center of knowledge, culture and trade.

Charlemagne (/ˈʃɑrlɨmeɪn/; 2 April 742/747/748 – 28 January 814),also known as Charles the Great (German: Karl der Große; Latin: Carolus or Karolus Magnus) or Charles I, was the King of the Franks from 768, the King of Italy from 774, and from 800 the first emperor in western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state he founded is called the Carolingian Empire.

The oldest son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, Charlemagne became king in 768 following the death of his father. He was initially co-ruler with his brother Carloman I. Carloman’s sudden death in 771 under unexplained circumstances left Charlemagne as the undisputed ruler of the Frankish Kingdom. Charlemagne continued his father’s policy towards the papacy and became its protector, removing the Lombards from power in northern Italy, and leading an incursion into Muslim Spain.

He also campaigned against the peoples to his east, Christianizing them upon penalty of death, at times leading to events such as the Massacre of Verden.

Charlemagne reached the height of his power in 800 when he was crowned “emperor” by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day at Old St. Peter’s Basilica.

Called the “Father of Europe” (pater Europae), Charlemagne united most of Western Europe for the first time since the Roman Empire. His rule spurred the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of cultural and intellectual activity within the Catholic Church. Both the French and German monarchies considered their kingdoms to be descendants of Charlemagne’s empire.

Charlemagne died in 814, having ruled as emperor for just over thirteen years. He was laid to rest in his imperial capital of Aachen in what is today Germany. His son Louis the Pious succeeded him.

Artist: Julius Köckert
Date: 1864
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Location: Maximilianeum Foundation, Munich, Germany
Info via: Wikipedia
Info provided by: CZ

The Vatican: A Holy Roman Empire?

Empire travels to Rome, the spiritual home of the world’s oldest Christian denomination to reveal, on deeper examination, a more complex picture of a faith in flux and a church at a crossroads.

Whilst its following may be growing in new territories, the traditional Catholic heartlands of Europe and the Americas have seen significant reductions in numbers of church-goers.

The rise of secularism, the resurgence of Protestant and Evangelical churches and the self-inflicted scourge of sex-abuse scandals and charges of mismanagement, have damaged Catholicism’s credibility and diminished its membership.

As the Catholic Church faces new and old challenges - both internal and external - Empire asks: What can Pope Francis, the first from the global South, do to stem the bleed of devotees in the West? And will he seek to reform and modernise or will he maintain ‘business as usual’?

In the coming and going between the faithful and the faithless, we examine how the battle for hearts, minds and souls, is more than just a numbers game.

Joining us in Vatican City to discuss the present issues and future direction for the Roman Catholic Church are: Marco Tosatti, writer for La Stampa, and author of several books on religion, including John Paul II: Portrait of a Pontiff; Father Norman Tanner, a Jesuit Priest, and author of New Short History of the Catholic Church; and Marco Politi, a journalist and author of Joseph Ratzinger - Crisis of a Papacy.

Vatican Inc.

Pope Benedict's resignation shocked the Catholic Church and left the Vatican in disarray. His successor will face many challenges, from recurrent sexual scandals to concerns about financial impropriety at the Vatican's own bank.

In 2011, we investigated allegations that bank had been involved in money laundering and examined Pope Benedict's plans for cleaning up the secretive system. But with many of the reforms having fallen short and the Vatican's finances still under a cloud, the next pope will have to introduce new rules to clean up the financial system.

At the heart of the Vatican, the sovereign papal state at the heart of Rome, is the Vatican's own bank, the Institute of Religious Works (IOR).

Until now the IOR has operated with few of the regulations that govern the activities of banks in the wider world, with sometimes disturbing results.

In the 1980s it became involved in an infamous fraud scandal the Banco Ambrosiano affair which made global headlines when its chief, Roberrto Calvi, was found hanging from a bridge in London, a murder that has never been solved.

More recently Italian state prosecutors have been investigating allegations of money laundering at the IOR, freezing some accounts, seizing funds and putting its president under formal scrutiny.

Filmmakers Alessandro Righi and Emanuele Piano have been examining this latest chapter in the history of a 

notoriously secretive organisation.

Ethnic Cleansing Is Next To Godliness

The Bible and The Other

By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

The way people quote the Bible, you would think it was “The Word of God.” Never mind that it has often provided the justification for horrible atrocities committed against those whom its words and interpretations have demonized as The Other.

One of America’s original sins is the horrific enslavement of– and then its continued discrimination against– people of color, in a white-controlled hierarchy of access to economic, political, legal and religious power. The moral rationale for dehumanizing them as the inferior Other is found in the New Testament: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” (Ephesians 6: 5, 6) Here, enslavement was spiritually sanitized: just think of it as obedience to “Christ.”

Another original sin was the “Founding Fathers’” biblically-inspired belief that America was like “a city built on a hill,” the divinely-guided “light of the world” (Matthew 5: 14-16), a nation crowned with a canopy of “beautiful . . . spacious skies,” and with “God shed[ding] his grace on thee, And crown[ing] thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea.” (From “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” words by Katharine Lee Bates; music by Samuel A. Ward) “Brotherhood?” Except for the indigenous peoples, turned into inferior “savages,” i.e., The Other, who were not included in the “manifest destiny” of “God’s light-shedding grace,” and cast into outer darkness. The divinely envisioned Promised Land led pioneers to kill, drive out and corral indigenous peoples, which was “how the West was won” and settled.

There is more. Belief in the Holy Bible as the infallible “Word of God” provides the religious authority for certain Christian denominations– and many states– to continue demonizing and discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons as The Other. The spiritual violence against LGBT persons is legitimized by biblical passages, like Leviticus 20:13 in the Old Testament: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” And, in the New Testament, there is Romans 1: 26-32: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men. . . . They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die– yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.”

Certain Christian denominations will attempt to dissociate themselves from the biblically-inspired climate of rejection they help to foster, a climate that turns LGBT persons into The Other and leads to their being discriminated against, and even subjected to physical violence. Christian professions of “love” for these scripturely-defined Other, and the simultaneous condemning of their behavior as “sinful,” “unnatural” and “incompatible with Christian teaching,” are merely self-serving, face-saving theological denials—hatred masked as “love”– and said with a straight face. To try to separate who one is from what one does reveals a schizophrenic theology, rooted in fear and ignorance, that sins against another’s authentic identity and integrity. Here there is not “the gospel truth,” but the dumbing down of one’s deity.

The Bible engages in another sleight of hand in putting women down while placing them on a pedestal. Mary may be revered as “The Mother of God,” but her sisters are not lofty enough to be priests and ministers in certain of her “Son’s” Christian churches. So says Paul the Apostle, who is credited with writing almost half of the New Testament, and was the primary leader of the earliest Christian communities. “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission,” he instructed. “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” Why is that? Because “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing . . .” (1Timothy 2: 11-15)

Paul’s women-diminishing patriarchal belief goes back to The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve, whom “the Lord God” created and put “in the garden of Eden . . . to freely eat of every tree of the garden”– except “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” The serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit that would make her “wise” and “be like God, knowing good from evil.” Eve ate from the tree, and induced Adam to eat from it. “The Lord God” found out, and let Eve, especially, have it: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing . . . yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3) Thus Paul the Apostle not only declared that women could not be ordained as priests and ministers; they also were to be submissive to their husbands. “Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior.” And for emphasis: “Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.” (Ephesians 5: 22-24)

Christianity seeks to cushion—and camouflage– the biblically legitimized relegation of women to The “adored” Other. We are reminded that Jesus was very affirming of women, and that they were worshipful toward him. Never mind that all of his twelve disciples were men, which is used as a key scriptural argument for why certain Christian denominations ordain men only as priests and ministers. To counteract this reality, the religious work of women is repeatedly verbalized as invaluable– and it is! Never mind, though, that real equality involves the sharing of power, which is represented in certain Christian churches by a clerical collar or suit, and not a blouse or skirt. Thus certain male-controlled Christian denominations continue to have difficulty cutting the “umbiblical” chord of patriarchy. Contrary to biblical literalism that believes Adam and Eve’s disobedience represents the sinful “fall of man,” the opening of their eyes to “the knowledge of good and evil” represents instead the moral rise of humanity.

Christianity’s ingrained imperialism is prophesized in the first chapter of John’s gospel. Jesus is equated with “God.” His birth is announced: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus was “the true light” for “all people,” and “to all who received him” and “believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

This imperialistic Christian belief is also pronounced in the final chapter of Matthew’s gospel. A resurrected Jesus is recorded as appearing to his disciples and commanding them with, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore,” he continued, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (28: 16-20) Never mind that the doctrine of the Trinity (belief that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate and equal substances of the Christian god) was formulated some three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. The early Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the fourth century; it then became the religion of the state, and Christians, with their imperialistic mission and state acquired power, began evangelizing the Roman world and persecuting the Jews.

It is no surprise then that a majority of evangelical Christians in particular acquiesced, accommodated, or actively supported a prayerful, “hand of Providence”-guided President George W. Bush in his prosecution of the criminal, falsely-based, pre-emptive war against Iraq—certain Christian leaders even seeing it not as a horrible war crime against humanity, but as an opportunity to convert The Other, i.e. [Muslims) to their Christ. (See “Young White Evangelicals: Less Republican, Still Conservative,” by Dan Cox, Research Associate, www.pewforum.org, Sept. 28, 2007; and “Rev. Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse,” by Shelia Musaji, theamericanmuslim.org, May 27, 2012) American exceptionalism and Christocentric belief are two sides of the same imperialistic coin.

People who believe they possess the one true religion, or see themselves in other biblical ways as “God’s chosen people,” are unable to affirm the inherent worth and rights of those who are different. Such biblically-blessed exceptionalism, rooted in a personal or political need to gain power over people or remain submissive, turns persons deemed less than acceptable into The Other, who become objects of paternalistic and predatory behavior. Here, ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. A final example is the State of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.

In seminary, I was taught that “God” liberated the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage and led them to The Promised Land. As the Bible says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt . . . and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land . . . to . . . a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.” (Exodus 3:7,8) We seminarians were not encouraged to theo-moralize about the fate of the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples, demonized as The Other. Actually, preoccupation with theologizing itself often encouraged obliviousness to pursuing such moral implications.

The moral of the biblical story was that “the Lord God” created a covenant to reward oppressed faithful Jews with a homeland of their own. The morality of the story? We did not get into that. We paid no mind that “the Lord God” also said,

I will hand over to you the inhabitants of the land, and you shall drive them out before you. . . . And when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. . . . The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the people on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Exodus 23: 31; Deuteronomy 7: 1-6)

In my United Methodist Conference, certain ministers were granted stipends for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was about visiting sacred Christian sites where a liberating and crucified Jesus walked, not connecting with the sights of the oppressed Palestinians of today. It was actually about lifting the spiritual life of the visiting minister, not about liberating the physical lives of the biblically-victimized Palestinian Other.

Greatly needed here is the model provided by Fr. Michael Prior, C.M., Ph.D., biblical scholar, author, lecturer and liberation theologian, who wrote extensively about “the biblical mandate to commit genocide.” He focused on “A Land Flowing with Milk, Honey, and People.” (See “Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” in Burning Issues: Understanding and Misunderstanding The Middle East: A 40-Year Chronicle, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, 2007; see also Dr. Prior’s book, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, England, 1997, 1999) Teaching biblical studies at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, Fr. Prior responded to a Palestinian plea for “pilgrimages from the West to meet the Christian communities” in Palestine, to meet “’the Living Stones’ of the land, and not be satisfied with the ‘dead stones’ of archeological sites.” Thus were established “links between Christians in Britain with the Holy Land.” (Ibid)

Upon Fr. Prior’s accidental death at age 62, in 2004, one eulogy in particular cited his commitment to the “Living Stones” of the Palestinian people. “One of his constant themes,” the eulogy stated, “was to question the motivation of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land who view all the religious sights, but fail to notice or act on the sufferings of the people who live there.” Prior is then quoted:

How, I constantly ask myself, are such people so unconcerned about others being kicked out of their homes, children being shot, people struggling for survival against very oppressive forces of occupation? Instead of trying to give food to the hungry and sight to the blind, as Jesus exhorted, these people support institutions that make seeing people blind, put free people in prison and make the poor poorer. (“In Memorium: Fr. Michael Prior, C.M.,www.domusviridis.org.uk)

Fr. Prior confronted the biblically inspired belief that ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. He wrote, “The view that the Bible provides the title-deed for the establishment of the State of Israel and for its policies since1948 is so pervasive even within mainstream Christian theology and university biblical studies, that the very attempt to raise the issue is sure to elicit opposition.” (“Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” Ibid) He should know. In 2002, Fr. Prior’s invitation to present a lecture on “The Christian Churches, Zionism and the State of Israel” at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts was withdrawn. The reported reason: to “save Holy Cross some further unnecessary division,” as,”most of the Jewish faculty in the college were among the strongest supporters of the college and its Jesuit mission. They were worried about outside media attention.” Still, Fr. Prior’s tour across America included lectures at 15 academic and religious institutions, including Harvard. (“Fr. Michael Prior, C.M.: In Memoriam, Ibid)

Fr. Prior was not insensitive to the horrific oppression of the Jewish people during Hitler’s reign of terror. But, he stated, “Nor can the Shoah (Holocaust) be appealed to credibly to justify the destruction of an innocent third party. It is a dubious moral principle,” he added, “to regard the barbaric treatment of Jews by the Third Reich as constituting a right to establish a Jewish state at the expense of an innocent third party.” He added, “Until Israelis acknowledge their having displaced another people and make some reparation and accommodation, there will be no future for the state.” (“Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” Ibid)

Fr. Prior believed in a bigger god than the one for whom ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. “Namely,” he stated, “that God is fundamentally moral; and, for those espousing the Christian vision, that he loves all His people, irrespective of race, etc.” (Ibid) He had “no doubt that a future generation of diaspora and Israeli Jews will repudiate its presumptions and repent for the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinians by their fathers and grandfathers.” (Ibid)

This liberation theologian contributes greatly to the humanizing of The Other. He said,” It is high time that biblical scholars, church people, and Western intellectuals read the biblical narratives of the promise of land ‘with the eyes of the Canaanites.’” (Ibid)

“The eyes of the Canaanites.” Recently, some three dozen Palestinian villagers, joined by activists, set up a tent village on West Bank land that Israel intends to seize for settlement-building. Last Saturday, Israeli soldiers removed their tents, attacked them, and sprayed them with foul-smelling water. But the reported “villagers and activists refused to leave.” “Said one activist, Mazen Qumsiyeh, ‘It is our natural right to develop, reclaim, improve, use, and live on all our lands, free and without threats from the occupiers.’” They named their tent village “Canaan.” (“Israeli forces remove new Palestinian tent village in West Bank,” By DPA, HAARETZ.com, Feb. 9, 2013)

“The eyes of the Canaanites” are the windows to The Golden Rule and thus to every human being’s inalienable worth and rights.

Does The Bible Make Americans More Violent?

By Valerie Tarico
Courtesy of "AlterNet"

My friend Li is an Evangelical Christian and, in keeping with her family values she keeps an eye on what her children view and read. In the summer, she took her 12-year-old daughter to the Hunger Games. “It’s the perfect movie for her,” Li commented. “No swearing and no sex.” No swearing; no sex. Just people stalking and killing each other.

The Motion Picture Association of America agrees with Li’s priorities. So did the writers of the Bible.  Our love-hate-love affair with violence goes way back.

It goes way back, and it also appears to be changing. In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Stephen Pinker lined up information from a wide variety of sources to show that human societies are less violent now than ever in recorded history. Violence dropped precipitously with the agricultural revolution, and then again with the Enlightenment and more recently, with the emergence of universal human rights. In the U.S., recent decades have seen a decline in murder rates and gun ownership. This finding is counterintuitive for several reasons. We have become more sensitized to kinds of violence that once were accepted as normal, like child and wife abuse; modern weapons of war have made killings more dramatic; we forget how brutish our ancestors really were; and thanks to media, modern incidents of violence produce shockwaves of trauma that once were impossible. All of this obscures a long and vast trend line toward—it sounds weird to say it—a kinder, gentler world. A medieval British man was fifty times more likely to die at the hands of another man than is his modern descendant.

We might be even farther along this path were it not for a love affair with fantasy violence that, if anything, appears to be growing.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been rating sex, violence and profanity in movies since 1968, with the goal of limiting how much of each children absorb—or at least giving parents a tool that lets them make the judgment call. In 2006, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed the top grossing movies since the rating system began.  In fact, they reviewed movies all the way back to 1950. They found that explicit sex and violence had both increased over time, but that “ratings creep” affected only violence. Explicit sex is still reserved for “R” rated films; explicit violence is not.

Many parents naively trust that media targeted at young children are developmentally harmless even though brain science suggests otherwise. They similarly tend to assume that a G-Rating means a movie is low on violence. In reality, it may mean simply that the violence is less realistic or designed to trigger laughter rather than fear. A Harvard study published in 2000 reviewed every animated feature film produced between 1933 and 1999, 74 in total. At the time, the findings made headlines because they were startling:

-- Every single film had at least one violent act. The amount of footage devoted to violence ranged from 6 seconds to 24 minutes.

-- Most of the films showed physical fighting as a means of resolving conflict.

-- Characters used weapons including swords and guns and every-day objects.

-- In half of the movies at least one character gave violence a thumbs-up at some point by cheering or laughing.

A follow up  in 2004 showed that G-rated movies, like all others, gradually are becoming more violent. A 2007 study sampled 77 PG-13 films and tallied 2251 violent actions, with nearly half causing one or more death.  Researchers classified most of the incidents as “happy violence” meaning it was “cool, swift, and painless.” Today, by the age of 11, the typical American kid has seen almost 8000 murders on TV. Why? Because we like it that way. Movies that are rated R for violence make more money than those that are rated R for other reasons. We are attracted to violence and we are inured to violence.  Most Americans—not just my friend Li--find murder to be more acceptable fare for children than sex or swear words.

Our peculiar hierarchy of priorities may be due in part to the influence of Abrahamic religion on Western Civilization and the unique standing accorded to the Bible in American Christianity specifically. The Bible amalgamates the mythology and legal codes of a specific kind of culture: a clan-based tribal society in which herdsmen struggling for survival in an arid and increasingly denuded environment. Males competed to control females and territory while maintaining the purity of bloodlines and inheritance; gods that were modeled on warlords competed for fealty. Consequently, while codes governing sexuality and blasphemy were strict, codes governing violence were complicated.

Yahweh himself originated as a war god. Non-Hebrews were regarded with hostility and indeed, much of the founding story of the Israelite people comprises tales of triumphal genocide. The violence in in the Bible is so extreme that it defines vast portions of the book:

[Edmund Leach] looked at the Bible through the eyes of a communications engineer and asked: what message are these authors trying to get through to the reader? The answer, Leach thought, was that they were trying to obscure the fact that mankind began through incest (Adam and Eve) and so the strategy was to compile a list of atrocities so heinous that, in the end, the original incest would come to look like a harmless act.

Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.

Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans see ourselves as peacemakers. During the midwinter holiday season, Peace on Earth is sung from choir lofts and hung in shopping malls. We complain about our role as “policeman to the world.”  And yet, if we could see ourselves as others see us, we would see a people who, like the ancient Israelites have created unparalleled archetypes of violence: the Rambo, the mushroom cloud, the Tommy Gun, the Cowboy. Hollywood ensures that, even independent of the world’s best funded military, violence is one of our top exports.

I once rode a bus to a then small town in Mexico called San Cristobal de las Casas. The ride was my introduction to a new phenomenon that would become a bane during subsequent budget travel: video on buses and trains. It was also my first awakening to the level of violence we Americans export to the world as storytellers. Real dialogue can be hard to translate; psychological or social nuance almost impossible. But sex and violence are universals, which means they are even more ubiquitous in the movies that cross cultural and economic lines than those that don’t.

On this particular bus ride, the gratis entertainment was about a serial killer who was making snuff films. As we swayed around mountain switchbacks, the sound blared. Men, traditionally clad women, and small children pressed against each other, with no option but to face the screen depicting death scene after death scene. My savage hope was that the other passengers were motion sick like me and that the pairing of the film and switchbacks was conditioning a permanent visceral aversion to sexual violence.  Later that year, on an all-night bus, I would find myself assaulted by my first movie about people hunting people. The male lead was a hunky white supremacist, a farmer by day who secretly liked to hunt Blacks.

In movies, of course, it is the bad guys who do the unprovoked killing. Any violence perpetrated by the protagonist, meaning by us at a fantasy level, is vengeance or justice. Most people are deeply ambivalent about violence. We are both attracted and repelled by it. We enjoy and fear it. It turns us on and it horrifies us. Consequently, to get the satisfaction of a good blockbuster we need those bad guys to instigate things. The violence we like best is righteous violence, and—in movies and stories--most violence is just that. It protects innocence and restores justice. It safeguards women and children and the homeland.

Ironically, those who most relish the fantasy power of righteous violence are those who in real life are most likely to perpetrate unrighteous violence. Masculinity, the substance of action films, is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary thus: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men: a need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. Hypermasculine men hit women more, and a woman being pregnant is no deterrent. In the real world, tough guys are good guys until suddenly, sometimes, they are not. In the real world, most murders are triggered by the same motives we find so satisfying on the screen: righteous anger, a sense of violated fairness or honor, the outrage of feeling wronged, the conviction that the one murdered was the bad guy.

Most of us will never kill. These days, most of us don’t even hit. Even so, if we hope to continue the trend toward less violence, the challenge is not whether we can call up the heroism to face down villains and demons like those in our stories but whether we can continue to face away from our own dark fascinations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed the painful conundrum: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Who of us is willing even, to miss the next blockbuster? In The Hunger Games, the bad people are the citizens of the Capitol who demand that outlying districts provide sacrificial contestants for their high tech version of the Roman Coliseum. Movie viewers and readers root for the kids and scorn those who give them no choice but to kill or be killed, those who watch the blood sport for entertainment. But the books and movie work only because we, as readers and viewers, ignore the disturbing obvious: we arethe Capitol. The Hunger Games were staged for us; we are and always were the only intended audience.  Suzanne Collins offered us a chance to watch kids hunting and killing each other, and we ate it up. Did she laugh we flocked to the book stores and theater, as we downloaded DVD’s and shared dog-eared copies and checked sequel release dates? Did she cry? Did she care? Do we? 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Let's Remember, Jesus Was A Palestinian

By Gideon Polya
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

On Christmas Day this year the World will again celebrate the birth of Jesus but needs to loudly and publicly proclaim the truth that Jesus was a Palestinian. Goodhearted and honest Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Jews, Animists, Agnostics and Atheists would all agree that Jesus was a wonderful humanitarian,  and an outstanding moral philosopher. All of us, from Atheists to Zoroastrians, recognize Jesus as the most renowned Indigenous  Palestinian. Today under US-, UK-, Canada- and Australia-backed and racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel the land of Palestine has been 90% ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinians, 75% of Christian Palestinians have fled the Occupied West Bank, and Palestine, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, is peculiar in being denied de facto statehood and remains violently occupied by a nuclear terrorist, rogue state run by genocidally racist European colonizers.

Palestine is the land west of the Jordan River and derives its name from the Philistine sea people who settled the coastal region in circa 1200 BC and are referred to from that time onwards by the Egyptians and thence by the Assyrians in circa 740BC. Canaanite, the name given to Palestinians in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, refers to people trading in the purple cloth of the great Semitic Phoenician civilization. The great 5th century Greek historian  Herodotus (c irca 484 – 425 BC)   referred to ”These Phoenicians… now inhabit  the sea coast of Syria; that part of Syria and as much of it as reaches Egypt, is all called Palestine”. The Jewish Roman historian connected with the Hasmonean Jewish aristocracy, Josephus (37-circa 100 CE),  was involved in the First Jewish Roman War (67-33 CE) but thence rejected  rebellion against Rome as inspired by fanatics. Josephus referred to Jews as among the inhabitants of Palestine (see “The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia”, volume 3).

The forebears of the Indigenous Palestinians were the Semitic inhabitants of Palestine and participants in the agrarian revolution in the Fertile Crescent that was one major nucleus of human agrarian civilization. The Holy Bible (Genesis 15.18-21 ) refers to the complexity of the population of the region: “In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram [Abraham] , saying, unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” There is no Egyptian record of the Exodus of the Israelites (see Shlomo Sand, “The Invention of the Jewish People” ) but the Holy Bible refers to the inhabitants of Palestine to be ethnically cleansed by the Israelites, namely (South to North), the Midianites, Edomites, Amalekites, Moabites, Jebusites, Philistines, Canaanites, Ammonites, Amorites, Gileadites, Bashanites and Phoenicians (see Martin Gilbert, “Jewish History Atlas”).

According to the Biblical accounts, acting on the orders of their Lord, the Israelites  ethnically cleansed Jericho (Joshua 6.12: “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword”), Ai (Joshua 8.26: “For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai” ), Makke'-dah, La'-chish, Lib'-nah, Eg'-lon, Hebron, De'-bir (Joshua 10.39: “And he took it, and the king thereof, and all the cites thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein; he left none remaining as he had done to Hebron, so he did to De'-bir, and to the king thereof; as he had done also to Lib'-nah, and to her king”) and thence  the Galillee of Gileadites and Bashanites (Deuteronomy 3.6: “And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon, King of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women , and children of every city”.  

“The Lord of hosts” instructed Saul “Now go and smite Am'-a-lek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. Saul failed to carry out his orders to destroy everything and everybody and was accordingly cursed. David succeeded Saul and finally captured the Jebusite city of Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5.8: “And David said on that day, whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jeb'-u-sites, and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David's soul, he shall be chief and captain. Wherefore they said, the blind and the lame shall not come into the house.”  Fortunately  for the Canaanites, the Israelites were not as successful as set out in The Bible. According to Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People”, the “kingdom of David and Solomon” (1,000-925 BC) did not stretch from the River Euphrates to the River of Egypt as asserted by Martin Gilbert (Atlas of Jewish History”) but was a much smaller affair confined to Jerusalem and neighboring towns and villages.

Jesus came from Galilee and spoke Aramaic, like the surviving Samaritans in Palestine today and the largely Christian Assyrians in Syria and Iraq . His wonderful message of peace and “love thy neighbor as thyself” has inspired decent humanity for over 2,000 years. It is an appalling irony that hundreds of thousands of Christian Assyrians fled Iraq after the illegal invasion by the ”Christian” US Alliance and that 75% of Bethlehem Christians have fled the Anglo-American -backed Palestinian Genocide now live abroad (see “Palestinian Christians”, Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Christians ). The ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians by Israelites under genocidal mass murderers Joshua, Saul and David in circa 1000BC is now being repeated in Palestine by the US Alliance-backed racist Zionists as summarized below.

In 1880 there were about 0.5 million Indigenous Palestinians. Of the 25,000 Jews in Palestine half were immigrants (see:  http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story559.html andhttp://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm ).  Palestinian casualties of war violence total about 80,000 since 1948 and about 100,000 since 1936 (see “Palestinian casualties of war”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_casualties_of_war ). However one must also consider avoidable Palestinian deaths from war-, expulsion- and occupation-imposed deprivation that now total about 1.9 million since 1948. Thus Palestinian deaths from violence or from violently-imposed deprivation since 1936 total about 2.0 million. In contrast, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry: “From 1920 through 1999, a total of 2,500 residents of Mandatory Palestine and, since 1948, the State of Israel fell victims to hostile enemy action; in most cases, terrorist attacks” and “1,218 people have been killed by Palestinian violence and terrorism since September 2000” i.e. 3,700 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians since 1920 as compared to 2.0 million Palestinians killed by racist Zionist colonizers since 1936.

Yet as pointed out by Professor Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University (a university that sits on the site of an Arab village ethnically cleansed within living memory), the cultural and ethnic descendants of the Palestinians of the time of Jesus are indeed today's Indigenous  Palestinians. In contrast, most of the Jewish Israelis are descendants of Yemeni, Berber and Khazar converts to a commendably universalist Judaism of the first millennium CE.

Palestinian refugees total about 7 million, of whom about 5 million are registered with the UN.  Of 12 million Palestinians, about 6 million are forbidden to even step foot in their own country, one of the world's oldest civilizations dating to the very dawn of agrarian civilization. This has been a Palestinian Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". The race-based, racist Zionist-run Apartheid State of Israel is a democracy-by-genocide. Of about 12 million Palestinians, only the adults of 1.6 million Palestinian Israelis (21% of the Israeli population) can vote for the government ruling all of a 90% ethnically cleansed Palestine plus part of Lebanon and a near-completely ethnically cleansed part of Syria , albeit as third class citizens. 1.6 million Occupied Palestinians are abusively confined to the Gaza Concentration Camp and 2.5 million Occupied Palestinians live under highly abusive military rule in West Bank Bantustans. There are 5.9 million Jewish Israelis and 0.3 million non-Jewish and non-Arab Israelis (see “Palestinian Genocide”:https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ ).

Outstanding  Jewish American scholar Professor Jared Diamond in his best-selling book "Collapse” (Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) enunciated the "moral principle, namely that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people", an injunction grossly violated by racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel and by its racist, genocide-committing and genocide-ignoring US Alliance backers in the post-1990 War on Muslims that has been associated, so far, with 12 million Muslim deaths from violence or from violently-imposed deprivation (see “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”:https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ).  

The largely Christian Americans have an acronym WWJD that stands for “What would Jesus Do?” There is no doubt in the mind of decent people that the wonderfully humane Jesus would be dead opposed to the following genocidal atrocities by the racist Zionists or by the Zionist-backed US Alliance (deaths from violence or from violently-imposed deprivation in parentheses): the Palestinian Genocide (2.0 million since 1936), the Iraqi Genocide (4.6 million since 1990), the Somali Genocide (2.2 million since 1992) and the Afghan Genocide (5.6 million since 2001). Jesus no doubt would share the humane position of anti-racist Jews and ant-racist non-Jews opposed to such atrocities (for the opinions of such outstanding humanitarians about the ongoing Palestinian Genocide see “Jews Against Racist Zionism: :https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/ and “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”:https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/ ).

At Christmas time we remember the Biblical story of the Holy Family fleeing as refugees from the genocidal infanticide of King Herod. We should spare a thought for the 7 million Palestinian refugees and over 20 million Muslim refugees in the world today largely due to Anglo-American-backed Zionist violence or Zionist-backed Anglo-American violence, the breakdown being 7 million Palestinians, 5-6 million Iraqis, 2.0 million Somalis, 3-4 million Afghans, 1 million Libyans, 0.5 million Syrians, 1 million Myanmar Rohingyas and 2 million Pashtun refugees generated in NW Pakistan by US and US-backed violence.  

At Christmas  time we remember the Biblical story of  mass murder of infants by Herod. We should spare a thought for the present era, and the 3,000 Palestinian infants dying  deprivation-linked deaths under Israeli Occupation and the 0.2 million who have done so since 1967; the over 7 million under-5 infants dying avoidably each year on Spaceship Earth with Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters in charge of the flight deck; and the nearly 6 million under-5 year old infants who have died avoidably in the Zionist-backed US War on Muslims since 1990, the breakdown being 1.8 million (Iraq), 2.6 million (Afghanistan) and 1.2 million (Somalia), this being a Muslim Holocaust commensurate with the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from imposed deprivation).

Yet these horrendous realities are steadfastly ignored by One Percenter-run Mainstream media in the Western Lobbyocracies , Murdochracies and Corporatocracies  in which Big Money buys people, politicians, parties, policies, public perception of reality and votes. For decent human beings it goes without saying that “thou shalt not kill children”.  If Indigenous Palestinian Jesus had been born in our era He might well have become one of the 1 million Palestinian children killed through violence or deprivation since 1936; one of 2 million Occupied Palestinian children denied human rights by the Israelis; or one of 0.8 million Palestinian children abusively confined to  what the Catholic Church has described as the Gaza Concentration Camp, and of whom 80,000 are physically stunted due to Israeli sanctions.

WWJD (“What would Jesus Do?”) Jesus would speak out as he did 2,000 years ago when he declared (Matthew 18.6): “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” We must all live Jesus' message of “love they neighbor as thyself” but love is not enough – we must speak out on behalf of the innocents suffering at the hands of the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We must follow the example of the  Aramaic-speaking Good Samaritan in Aramaic-speaking Jesus' famous parable: we cannot walk by on the other side.

Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003).

3 Faiths, 1 God: Judaism, Christianity, Islam

Teaser:

This is an excerpt from the ground-breaking documentary, Three Faiths, One God: Judaism, Christianity, Islam which compares similarities and differences in religious beliefs and practices that Islam has with Christianity and Judaism. It also examines how people of goodwill in the Abrahamic faith communities are coming to terms with historical conflicts that impact their lives today, the crisis of the fundamentalist approach to religious pluralism and tearing down barriers to understanding & respect. 

www.threefaithsonegod.com

15 Ways The Bible Is Used To Control and Malign Women

Photo Credit: Dr John2005

Fundamentalist Religion Of All Stripes Has Degradation Of Women At Its Core, and Fundamentalist Christianity Is No Exception. 

By Valerie Tarico 
March 8, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

Why can’t GOP politicians trumpet their religious credentials without assaulting women?  

Because fundamentalist religion of all stripes has degradation of women at its core, and fundamentalist Christianity is no exception. Progressive Christians believe the Bible is a human document, a record of humanity’s multi-millennial struggle to understand what is good and what is God and how to live in moral community with each other. But fundamentalists believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of the Almighty, essentially dictated by God to the writers. To believe that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God is to believe that women are tainted seductresses who must be controlled by men. 

Listen to early church father Tertullian: “You [woman] are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.”

Or take it from reformer John Calvin: “Woman is more guilty than man, because she was seduced by Satan, and so diverted her husband from obedience to God that she was an instrument of death leading to all perdition. It is necessary that woman recognize this, and that she learn to what she is subjected; and not only against her husband. This is reason enough why today she is placed below and that she bears within her ignominy and shame.”

Both Tertullian, a respected Catholic theologian, and Calvin, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, took their cues on this matter straight from the book of Genesis: 

To the woman [God] said, I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. -Genesis 3:16

No matter how outrageous Santorum and Gingrich may seem to secularists and moderate people of faith, they are right on target for an intended audience of Bible believing fundamentalists. If you have any doubt, check out these 15 Bible passages.*

1. A wife is a man’s property: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:17

2. Daughters can be bought and sold: If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. Exodus 21:7

3. A raped daughter can be sold to her rapist: If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. Deuteronomy 22:28-29

4. Collecting wives and sex slaves is a sign of status: He [Solomon] had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. 1 Kings 11:3

5. Used brides deserve death: If, however the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. Deuteronomy 22:20-21.

6. Women, but only virgins, are to be taken as spoils of war: Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Numbers 31:17-18

7. Menstruating women are spiritually unclean: When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches her bed will be unclean; they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean; they must wash their clothes and bathe with water....

...The priest is to sacrifice one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. In this way he will make atonement for her before the Lord for the uncleanness of her discharge. You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them. Leviticus 15: 19-31

8. A woman is twice as unclean after giving birth to a girl as to a boy: A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over.

If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding.

When the days of her purification for a son or daughter are over, she is to bring to the priest at the entrance to the tent of meeting a year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. Leviticus 12: 1-8

9. A woman’s promise is binding only if her father or husband agrees: When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said. When a young woman still living in her father’s household makes a vow to the Lord or obligates herself by a pledge and her father hears about her vow or pledge but says nothing to her, then all her vows and every pledge by which she obligated herself will stand.

But if her father forbids her when he hears about it, none of her vows or the pledges by which she obligated herself will stand; the Lord will release her because her father has forbidden her....

...A woman’s vow is meaningless unless approved by her husband or father. But if her husband nullifies them when he hears about them, then none of the vows or pledges that came from her lips will stand. Her husband has nullified them, and the Lord will release her. Her husband may confirm or nullify any vow she makes or any sworn pledge to deny herself. Numbers 30:1-16

10. Women should be seen and not heard: Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 1 Corinthians 14:34

11. Wives should submit to their husband’s instructions and desires: Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Colossians 3:18

12. In case you missed that submission thing...: Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Ephesians 5:22-24.

13. More submission – and childbearing as a form of atonement: A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. 1 Timothy 2: 11-15

14. Women were created for men: For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.1 Corinthians 11:2-10

15. Sleeping with women is dirty: No one could learn the song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they remained virgins. They follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were purchased from among mankind and offered as first-fruits to God and the Lamb. Revelation 14:3-4

This list is just a sampling of the Bible verses that either instruct or illustrate proper relationships between men and women. In context, they often are mixed among passages that teach proper relationships with children, slaves and foreigners. The Bible doesn’t forbid either contraception or abortion, but it is easy to see why Bible-believing fundamentalists might have negative feelings about both. 

As futurist Sara Robinson has pointed out, traditional rules that govern male-female relationships are grounded more in property rights than civil rights. Men essentially have ownership of women, whose lives are scripted to serve an end—bearing offspring. It was very important to men that they know whose progeny they were raising, so sexual morality focused primarily on controlling women’s sex activity and maintaining their “purity” and value as assets. Traditional gender roles and rules evolved on the presumption that women don’t have control over their fertility. In other words, modern contraception radically changed a social compact that had existed for literally thousands of years. 

Some people don’t welcome change. Since the beginnings of the 20th century, fundamentalist Christians have been engaged in what they see as spiritual warfare against secularists and modernist Christians. Both of their foes have embraced discoveries in fields as diverse as linguistics, archeology, psychology, biology and physics -- all of which call into question the heart of conservative religion and culture. Biblical scholars now challenge such “fundamentals” as a historical Adam, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the special status that Abraham’s God gave to straight males. 

Fundamentalists are fighting desperately to hang on to certainties and privileges they once saw as an Abrahamic birthright. If they can’t keep women in line, it’s all over. The future ends up in the hands of cultural creatives, scientists, artists, inquiring minds, and girls. It’s horrifying. 

*All verses are quoted from the New International Version of the Bible, a favorite of evangelicals. 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

The Second Coming Of Jesus

Christian and Islamic Views On His Return

By Shahul Hameed
Monday, 04 January 2010 10:11
Courtesy Of "On Islam"

Muslims believe that Jesus will return at the end of time and will clear all the confusion prevailing in the world regarding his life and mission.

No historical figure has been the subject of as much controversy as Jesus of Nazareth. He is worshipped as the only-begotten Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior, and as God Himself by the Christians of the world.

The Jews believe that he falsely claimed to be the expected Messiah of the Jews.

The rationalists claim that Jesus Christ never existed. According to them, Jesus was a myth, a "fabricated hero".

Of the dozens of Christian denominations who believe in the second coming of Jesus, the position of the Christian Fundamentalist Churches (or the Evangelicals) is unique.

Their belief system owes a great deal to the Scofield Reference Bible, which was the work of Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921), a pastor of the Dallas First Congregational Church. By inserting his own interpretations of particular verses into his Bible, he was able to provide a new narrative to an old story:

Scofield told his audience that the world would end in a final world conflagration called the Armageddon. But, he said, born-again Christians should welcome such a catastrophe because once the final battle began, Christ will lift them up into the clouds.

Thus to the Evangelicals, the most attractive part of the story is that "all true Christians" (meaning the same band of fundamentalist Christians) will be bodily lifted up to heaven during a miraculous event called "the Rapture", so that they will be spared of the "tribulations" and the trauma to which the non-Christians (who include all other Christians like the Roman Catholics and most Protestant groups) are exposed. 

The "dispensationalists" (one group among the Evangelicals) believe in the doctrine of imminent "Rapture". This, according to them, means that Jesus will come secretly in the clouds and raise dead-and-buried born-again Christians from the dead.

In contrast to the above beliefs, the Muslims hold the following beliefs about the second coming of Jesus:

• - Jesus was a real person and a blessed prophet of God who lived some two thousand years ago, preaching to his people, the Israelites.
• -Jesus was the Messiah (Masih) prophesied by the earlier Israelite prophets.
• - The return of Jesus is a sign of the end times.
• - Jesus will clear all the confusion prevailing in the world regarding his life and mission. 
• - Jesus will follow the law of God as perfected by the final prophet, Prophet Muhammad ( peace be upon him).

About the so-called "crucifixion" of Jesus,  God in the Quran says what means:

[And (as for) their saying, "We killed the Messiah, Isa son of Maryam, Messenger of Allah", …They did not kill him and they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them. Those who argue about him are in doubt about it. They have no real knowledge of it, just conjecture. But they certainly did not kill him. Allah raised him up to Himself. Allah is Almighty, All-Wise.] (An-Nisaa' 4:157-158)

A close look at the above verses point to the following:

The Romans and the Jews did not kill Jesus; they did not crucify him; but it appeared so. The question is: what happened to Jesus then?

And the answer, according to Islam, is: "God raised him up to Himself."

Considering the context of the event described, it does not seem reasonable to believe that "raising him up" meant, (as some would argue) elevating his spiritual status before God. We should understand that God saved Jesus from an accursed death on the cross (as the Gospels later alleged).

Moreover, the belief in Jesus' crucifixion stems from the Islamically unacceptable concept of the inherited sin of mankind. And the concept of blood sacrifice by an innocent Son of God to save sinful man is abhorrent to reason, justice, and the very idea of an All-Merciful God.

And for this reason, the "atoning crucifixion" of Jesus could never have happened. In other words, the truth is what the Quran says that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified. 

The Quran and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad support the belief that Jesus will certainly return: 

Prophet Muhammad said,                                                              

By the One in Whose hand is my soul! The son of Mary is about to come back as a just ruler who will break the cross, kill the swine, and cancel the tribute, and money will be so great in amount that no one will be in need of it, and one act of prostration will be more lovable to a person than the whole world and everything in it. (Al-Bukhari)

The foregoing clearly shows that Jesus will return to the earth. But as Islam has been made perfect by God through Prophet Muhammad, Jesus will not make any addition or subtraction to the teachings of Islam. Rather, he will follow the Shariah (Islamic law) of Muhammad. 

One of Jesus' chief functions on his second coming will be to correct the false beliefs that are spread about him and his religion. And then his true followers will be the followers of Prophet Muhammad. The followers of Jesus will merge with the followers of Muhammad.

Muslims do not know when Jesus will come, but they surely believe he will come.

Professor Shahul Hameed is a consultant to the Reading Islam Website. He also held the position of the President of the Kerala Islamic Mission, Calicut, India. He is the author of three books on Islam published in the Malayalam language. His books are on comparative religion, the status of women, and science and human values.