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The middle east conflict. What its really about

07/31/06

The middle east conflict. What its really about

What person has the right to "own" land, and by what authority, in any case?

In our world the land is owned, the sky is owned, the seas are owned, fresh water is owned. There are patents on species of life. String together a few words from the English language, and this very likely is owned too [go on, "Just Do It"(TM)(c)]*. For pete's sake, even the design of the wheel is patented and owned! What next, will the right to breath air or have children be claimed by someone?

Point is that these things are not ours to own. The lands of the middle east are just as much mine as they are Hezbollah's or the Jews' or anyone else's for that matter. The sea and the air and the sky belongs to me as well as you.

I'm saying that the middle east will continue with their wars until one thing happens: humanity progresses beyond private ownership of public commons.

Part of letting go of our obsession with "owning" everything is letting go the idea that certain people or certain groups of people "own" G0d**, because that's essentially what organised religion is- it's the idea that a single group of people have the monopoly on G0d; that they alone hold the right to tell others what G0d wants; and that they alone have access to all the wonders that G0d has to offer in life and after life. Organised religion is about the privatisation of G0d.

In the middle east both sides claim a right to the land by virtue of their group's sole, exclusive access to G0d, who has apparantly given them the authority to occupy such land. To say that one side is "right" and the other is "wrong" is, on a universal level, to bow to and accept the idea that G0d and G0d's will can be privatised and "owned" by a certain group of people.

If you accept my argument that organised religion is about the privatisation of G0d, then sometime it should occur to you that it's ridiculous to even think that the lowly human species could "own" G0d. And in the same way that we can never really own G0d, we can never really own land.

It is useless to argue about who is right or wrong in this specific conflict in the middle east, because ultimately it becomes an argument about who "owns" things that cannot be owned. Both sides claim that they "own" the land because they claim to "own" sole access to G0d, and their ownership of the land is 'what g0d wants'. The real fault here lies with humanity's way of thinking that such things can be solely "owned" by one group to the exclusion of other groups.

To fix the problem we don't need a political solution, we need a paradigm shift. This is happening, no doubt about that, though the real question to ask is will this paradigm shift happen in time to save us from ourselves?

**G0d/All That Is/The Thing That's 'Bigger Than Us' - call it what you want
* "Just Do It" is a copyrighted, registered trade mark belonging to Nike, i.e. you may not use these words without paying Nike money.

Thanks to Debs for this

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