The Hamas charter does not mince its words: ‘The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’
A return to the ancient pagan gods would surely be an improvement, but the modern world adopts the Hamas line. Consider the current deities of the bigots whose opponents, hiding behind a clearly sacrilegious belief in rational argument, must be condemned to eternal cancellation. The Greek and Roman gods of myth were far more accommodating.
Take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the first works of what we call western literature (c.700 bc). When the heroes talk about the gods, they refer to their power and unpredictability – but in the gods’ presence they react as if to powerful humans who might be friends or enemies.
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