Two hundred and fifty Yazidis murdered. Another blow for racial purity. Who could blame the murderers once you understood the obviously incorrect theology of Yazidism? Infidels. That's the name we right-thinking folks refer to those in mortal error. They are Muslims or Christians or Jews or the infinite varieties within. A pox on all our houses. We are all in the grips of systemic delusion. Stories to explain the unexplainable. Rejection - annihilation - of the Other whose existence threatens the reliability of our tale. Miracles, mysteries, magic - remarkable fabrications of the mind that reinforce the unreinforceable. One could be black ands become president, woman, hispanic - maybe even Jewsish, someday possibly even gay or lesbian. But the one thing you cannot be is an atheist. Because every one of those delusional cults stands ready to strike you down as a lost soul, a dangerous infidel. From a systemic point of view, there are no infidels, only Others. Differentiation run amok. Groupthink in its most murderous disguise: If we can't convince you, re-educate you, love you into agreement, convert you, then all that is left is to murder you. What else could you expect from us right-thinking people?
In the presence of uncertainty - and there is no greater uncertainty than what this whole matter of existence is about - we create certainty. Certainty is what our brains do best. I'm walking down the street. In front of me is a man striding purposely ahead. Just behind him is a woman and child. The boy's face is strikingly similar to his father's.There obviously has been some family tension. They are tourists and there has been some disagreement as to what to do, where to go, a familiar tourism dispute. And then, the man suddenly turns into a store while the mother and son continue on their way. Only now is it clear: there was no family, no tourists dispute, no family tension. what we did have - once again - was my brain creating order - wrongly once again - out of uncertainty.
The Yazidis were deluded fools; those who murdered them are deluded fools; all of us who insist on certainty (myself included) are deluded fools. The truth is: We are swimming blindly in a sea of uncertainty making up our self-serving dramas to ease the passage.
The other possibility is to end the Terrible Dance of Power. Never again.
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