“The opinions that are held with
passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is
the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.” – Bertrand
Russel
In March, 2013 I started
this blog and the very first post was created today three years ago. This blog
is three! This makes me feel proud. There’s something about this blog that
makes me feel like I can achieve whatever I want. I did not imagine that I would
still constantly update the blog three years later at the time I started it, but
I have. At that time, I felt I needed something to hold on to; something that
would have my name on it and that was it. But it is different now. I fell in
love with it. It has become a part of me.
I was thinking about
burning. I was thinking about burning because yesterday I saw gruesome
photographs of human beings burnt to death. One had his hands up and I imagined
that he was pleading with his antagonist to have mercy. I hate to see those
kinds of pictures: Pictures of dead people, of a drowned child whose body was
washed ashore because the world failed him. Or pictures of burned human beings,
their hands stuck mid-air like they are asking God for respite or asking Him to
let them into heaven or begging whoever was doing the burning to be human and
just… be human for Christ’s sake.
It was a sad sight.
I heard it happened on
the 3rd of February and I remember that on the weekend before 3rd
February, a house close to where I live got burnt and it was so sad that the
house burnt down and left its former occupants shelter-less, now imagine a human
being burnt. How heartless do you have to be to pour gas over a living person
and burn him to death? How heartless do you have to be and where the hell do you
even get the conscience to sleep at night for the rest of your life?
I have heard people say
things like ‘some people do not have a conscience,’ but I disagree. We all have
a conscience. It is not something that can leave one, I think of it as an organ
in one’s body. But the thing about conscience is that even though it makes you
feel remorse when you think you have done something wrong, it also makes you
feel justified when you feel you have done something right. It is our compass
and when a compass has been rigged, it could say North is South and East is West. It is the minds of these evil people that have been taken, not
their consciences. I have tried to imagine extremism as a kind of different
shade of belief, like, believing in something so much, you are willing to do
whatever it takes to sail its idea, but even that seems rational, it is not
completely absurd. But what level of extremism drives a person to burn another
person to death? Salman Rushdie, in his controversial novel, The Satanic
Verses, that almost got him killed, he wrote, from the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. Maybe
the real problem is not the passion but the holder of the passion. Maybe there
are certain ideas that are too acidic for some people to just comprehend
smoothly without thinking of it as a means of hurting people. Maybe some types of
people are just better off godless after all.
*Thank you guys so much for the past three years, there is no blog without its readers!
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