The Evil Within.

The Peshawar Massacre - 16 Dec 2014

Wars mean killing each other for among other things - principles and values. Each country and people no matter how fair they may be in their own eyes has dunnit. Who is to say that it is fair to kill enemy adults, soldiers and not children. To say so is also conditional to your value system but values and ideologies are certainly not a universal constant, are they?

Taliban too is fighting a war. It has been said that all is fair in war and love. They are fighting hard and bitterly for freedom – to be rid of people with conflicting ideologies. At a certain level, they are no different than countless others.

We may be repulsed by some dramatic event such as the massacre of the children at Peshawar. However, we are really missing the wood for the trees. There is a much deeper problem – the evil within, the disease…

This disease is normally passed by inheritance to the immediate progeny. Empirical evidence suggests that not even .1% are free of the particular variant of the infection that afflicted their parents. Once infected, it causes suspension of rational thinking, unquestioning acceptance of dogma and an attitude of aversion to competing ideologies.

This disease is called religion. If one has inherited and afflicted with a variant, the mind is “taken”. Rational thinking is no longer quite possible to challenge any dogma.

Not every strain is equally virulent or malignant, nor every individual is affected by this “virus” in an identical way. But while extent may be different, suspension of rational thinking is a defining feature.

Humanity is not going to be rid of this disease anytime soon – if ever! Because the people who say that “there is no good Taliban or bad Taliban” can’t accept that “there is no good religion and bad religion”! They too are “taken”.

This virus, just like its biological avatar has evolved to exploit the subject to propagate. Now while it spreads, sometimes it is convenient to let the subject live along and sometimes not. The virus spreads, the subject is the means but not the end.

Take the rabies virus, it affects the mind of the subject animal that it is more likely to bite, so the virus can spread.

Those who are taken cannot be rational enough to see and understand this. That is part of the scheme! So are you bewildered by the Taliban mind not seeing the evil in the wanton violence and destruction? Don’t be, they are “taken”.

There are countess variants of biological viruses causing common cold to ebola. Not all can be expected to have identical effect. The subjects are the “medium” that is essential for their spread. The effect of some variants of the viruses (Common Cold?) are not so fatal. But make no mistake, that is not out of a deliberate benign intention, that is just incidental.

I am sorry, you may “hate” me for this, but statistically speaking overwhelming chances are that YOU are taken too.

Are you religious? Are you “taken” too?