Theology for the coexistence of all beliefs - BEING GOD, Chapter 1

מָה-טוֹב; וּמָה-יְהוָה דּוֹרֵשׁ מִמְּךָ, כִּי-אִם-עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט וְאַהֲב ַת חֶסֶד, וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת, עִם-אֱלֹהֶיךָ.

Judaism - From the Torah - Micah 6:8 अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्रः करुणा एव च। निर्ममो निरहङ्कारः समदुःखसुखः क्षमी। Hinduism - From Bhagavad Gita - 12.13-14 Appamādaṁ pamādo ca, appamādo ca pāṇḍito, appamāde pamādena, sampādeti mokkhamīti. Buddhism - From the Dhammapada - Verse 5

ἀλλὰ ἐπιστεῖλαι αὐτοῖς τοῦ [a]ἀπέχεσθαι τῶν ἀλισγημάτων τῶν εἰδ ώλων καὶ τῆς πορνείας καὶ [b]τοῦ πνικτοῦ καὶ τοῦ αἵματος·

Acts, 15, 20.

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَٱلَّذِينَ هَادُوا۟ وَٱلصَّـٰبِـُٔو نَ وَٱلنَّصَـٰرَىٰ مَنْ ءَامَنَ ٱلْـَٔاخِر ِ وَلَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُو نَ

Islam - Sura 5, 69[i]

Three universal laws for the harmony of Religions The world of the 21st century is actually a spiral that sustains all religious manifestations, all stages of understanding of God, from idolatry and dogma to compassion and coexistence, passing through forced conversion and holy war. And yet, we live in an era of previously unattainable knowledge, with access to the great works of theologians, philosophers, poets and novelists, with the entire legacy of theater and cinema at our disposal. Ignorantia non excusat, the Romans said to citizens who, having committed a crime, claimed that they did not know the law. But the law is no longer only available to jurists, nor medicine to doctors, nor sacred religious texts to academics. It is our duty, as human beings who accept the importance of peace, coexistence and respect for the lives not only of others, but of the creatures that share the earth with us, to strive to reach a common consensus. Will it be possible to achieve a universal agreement between religions, establishing practical laws for the coexistence of believers and non-believers? It would be essential to resort to laws that also respect the universal charter of human rights adopted by the United Nations. It was the wise Isaac Asimov who, after long hours of reflection on artificial intelligence, bequeathed us, in the domains of a future utopia, three laws for robotics. If we undress the prejudices that previous times have imposed on us from their contexts of rejection, persecution, intolerance and even mystical ecstasy (revelations of visionaries and prophets), we can adapt it to religious belief. These adapted ethical laws could serve as fundamental principles to guide the conduct of believers in a world characterized by intolerance, encouraging empathy, obedience to religious teachings, and promoting peace and unity. First Religious Law: A believer will not harm a human being or allow another human being to suffer harm, and will do everything in his power to alleviate the suffering of others according to the precepts of love and compassion inherent to his faith. Second Religious Law: A believer will not cause harm to nature, nor to the living beings that inhabit it from the animal and plant kingdom, unless doing so results in an action contrary to the First Religious Law. Third Religious Law: A believer will obey the teachings and commandments of his sacred books, and the precepts imparted by the leaders of his faith, unless following them results in an action contrary to the First and Second Religious Law.

Being God - Theology

First Universal Religious Law The first law invokes all the precepts of love and compassion towards others typical of each creed; The laws of punishment of both the Pentateuch and the New Testament and the Quran are abrogated by the pre-eminence of kindness, respect and gentleness.

First Religious Law: A believer will not harm a human being or allow another human being to suffer harm, and will do everything in his power to alleviate the suffering of others according to the precepts of love and compassion inherent to his faith.

One of the fundamental principles that make Tai Chi a non-violent martial art is the idea that violence and aggression can be tamed by gentleness and harmony. This principle is based on Taoist philosophy and the idea of balance and fluidity. It was Mahatma Gandhi, a spiritual leader and advocate of nonviolence, who personified this philosophy in India's struggle for independence. Gandhi promoted peaceful resistance as a means to achieve freedom and justice. Some notable examples from his life that reflect his commitment to nonviolence are: The Salt March: Gandhi led a protest march against the British colonial monopoly on salt in India. This act of peaceful resistance mobilized thousands of Indians and exemplified his focus on nonviolent civil disobedience. Jejuno for Peace: On several occasions, Gandhi carried out hunger strikes as a form of non-violent protest and pressure. His willingness to suffer personally rather than resort to violence demonstrated his commitment to nonaggression. Fighting Racial Discrimination in South Africa: Before his leadership in the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi lived in South Africa and fought against racial discrimination there. His focus on peaceful resistance and equal rights influenced his later struggle in India. Gandhi personified the idea that gentleness, compassion, and peaceful resistance could overcome violence and oppression. His legacy continues to inspire peace movements and human rights defenders around the world. Socialism, a pseudo-religion that endorses religious violence Unfortunately, socialism is, as we will see in Metaphysics of Politics, a pseudo-religion that, lacking texts that preach universal compassion, is based on the thesis of class struggle to justify the violent seizure of power. Suffice it to quote some of the passages from the “Communist Manifesto” "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei" by Marx and Engels:

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite! (...) The first stage of the workers' revolution is the rise of the proletariat to political power, the conquest of democracy (…) The weapons with which the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself[ii]."

Marx and Engels, like all generations of the 19th century, had been deeply impacted by the French Revolution, and had worked, together with socialists and anarchists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ferdinand Lassalle and Mijaíl Bakunin, from the philosophy of history, in unravel the triggers of revolutions, in order to establish themselves as new rulers, this time using the proletariat as aegis and authority. Despite their application of Hegelian dialectics, the theses of Marx and Engels failed in practice; Lenin's Bolshevik revolution was made possible by the abyss between the aristocracy and its industrial petty bourgeoisie, and the bulk of the working-class and rural population, which until 1861 was made of mujiks, quasi-slaves subject to a form of hereditary servitude. In 2023 we still see bold manifestations of Marxists' zeal to demonstrate that the theses of their theologian, philosopher and economist are correct. More insightful, undoubtedly due to the absence of personal ambition, is “Politics” by Aristotle, a text that addresses the causes of revolutions in its fifth book. Aristotle first establishes leadership as the origin of all revolutions, identifying two main factions, that of the nobility and that of the people, and emphasizes the often-capricious origin of civil wars, which is often, however, restrained by the existence of a middle class:

Revolutions also occur when sectors of the state that are generally considered antagonistic (e.g., the rich and the common people) are equally balanced, with little or no middle class to tip the balance; because when either side has a clear preponderance, the other will not be willing to risk a fight with the side that is obviously stronger. This is the reason why men of preeminent merit do not, as a rule, attempt to provoke sedition: it is only a few against the many.

Twenty-one centuries later, Robespierre, a representative leader of the people, would also understand that the greatest obstacle to the revolution in France was the middle class. “Le Terreur” was his most notable legacy, eventually emulated by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. As leader of the Jacobin Club, Robespierre defeated his more moderate opponent, Mirabeau, who despite his prestige was the victim of a conspiracy that led to his death. Robespierre's radicalism earned him animosity and distrust that turned into visceral hatred, to the point of being practically lynched by the National Assembly. In the end, the great victor of the French Revolution was Napoleon, as Edmund Burke had already announced in “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a 1790 book in which­–confirming Aristotle's thesis, already exemplified by the rise of the emperor Augustus in Rome, predicted that the revolution would lead to the emergence of a charismatic and authoritarian leader with imperial ambitions. Napoleon's emulators have emerged since then under the label of socialism and its variations: Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Chaves, with the advantage of having a universal pseudo-church that endorses them, their most recent denominations being the liberation theology, the left and progressivism. His sympathizers have come to propose that the terrorists be exonerated of guilt, alleging that their perpetrators do not commit crimes against humanity, but rather "political crimes" by virtue of the powerlessness they experience as an oppressed minority. Such was the case of Pepe Mujica, who, according to several of his journalist compatriots, murdered a police officer from behind, paid a sentence and, upon being released, became President of Uruguay. Mujica has never acknowledged such a crime, needless to write. However, beyond the historical justifications for it, although there are, as Gandhi prescribed, many reasons why one can die, we do not find a single reason why a human being has to murder another. The exceptions to the rule, such as war, self-defence, the death penalty or tyrannicide, remain controversial. Socialism seeks to identify with radical Islam

Theology - Religious laws for a better world

It is not surprising that, in their eagerness to justify terrorist attacks as legitimate means of accessing power, socialists identify with any social group that endorses terrorism as a form of protest. The admiration that Hitler felt for the Islamic soldiers of the Jihad has infected other socialists of our generation, the group that today we find both academics and socialist leaders who partly endorse the terrorist actions of Muslims against the civilian population of London, Paris, Madrid or Israel. Such is the case of António Guterres, who serves as Secretary General of the United Nations. Before his election, Guterres was a member of the Portuguese Socialist Party and served as Prime Minister of Portugal between 1995 and 2002. On October 7, the Islamic terrorists of Hamas murdered 1,400 Jewish children, young people and the elderly in cold blood. several of them attendees of the Reim Electronic Music Festival. Hamas's strategy was to retreat into the tunnels they have built in hospitals and apartment buildings in the Gaza Strip, to use Palestinian civilians as human shields. Israel, justified by the sadism of the video images of the massacre, gave Palestinian civilians a period of 24 hours to move to safer places. Hamas blocked their exit, while the Arab leaders of Jordan and Egypt closed their borders, thus preventing Israel from acting freely. Israel retaliated by bombing Hamas hideouts and hundreds of civilians have died as human shields. In such a scenario, Guterres announced to the world at the UN that the Hamas attack “did not occur in a vacuum” and that “The people of Palestine have been subject to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Is it not possible for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in a democratic nation? Such has been the purpose of Israel and the rest of the world that not only a radical group like Hamas has avoided, but also all other Arab countries, humiliated by their defeat in the 6-day War. Guterres, as an Israeli representative announced, “is unaware of the situation in the region,” and with his sympathy for Hamas, he supports the work of terrorist groups to gain power. He would do a better job traveling to Jordan and Egypt to advocate for temporary shelter while the war between Israel and Hamas continues. From the Real Politik viewpoint, Israel is fighting for its survival, since its condescension with the UN and the socialist lobby that sympathizes with Hamas was what allowed Hamas to strengthen itself, build its network of tunnels and arm itself to the teeth with surface-to-air missiles that are being fired incessantly since October 7. Socialism and its family of isms have become an ideology that not only protects crime, but commutes and rewards it. For example, the Netflix series Clark, based on the life of Clark Olofsson, a criminal who inspired psychologists to create the “Stockholm syndrome”, there Clark, who usually seduces women that he then abandons, seduces a communist, who praises his criminal work and tells him that his rebellion is a social by-product for which he should not blame himself. The series turns comical, as Olofsson takes advantage of such a naive belief and exploits it for his own benefit, culminating in the writing of an autobiography that turns him into a thriving celebrity. Only those of us who have lived in Colombia in this generation know what it is like to see criminals who have raped children, planted bombs in public places and kidnapped and murdered innocent people, being exonerated by virtue of their Marxist credentials to become senators of the Republic, obtaining without popular votes or support, high salaries and government honours. Such nonsense was the consequence of a peace process imposed after being rejected at the polls, sacralised with a Nobel Prize, subsidized by the European Union, with billions of dollars from drug trafficking involved, and mediated and sacralised by the Cuban tyranny that subsidized its terrorism with Soviet funds for decades. Those who justify violence allege social inequality do not realize that both poverty and illness are obstacles that are only absolute in naturalistic narrative, as Gilles Deleuze prescribes in his analysis of the film Susana (1951) by Luis Buñuel. A case of socialist impunity: The peace process in Colombia Juan Manuel Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, surprising most Colombian citizens. For them, Santos had made constitutional concessions to a guerrilla that controls most of the cocaine production in the world, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), an organization financed by the USSR during the Cold War and later by Cuba and Venezuela. It was later learned that one of the members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee was part of an oil company to which the winner granted exploitation licenses. The award was announced days after the Santos peace agreement was rejected by the majority of Colombia's population in a referendum. Defiant because of his prestigious Nobel Prize, Santos ignored the will of Colombian citizens, whom he called “ignorant,” and granted perks and bureaucracy to members of Congress, who, accustomed to giving their vote for a price, They approved the repealed and never fulfilled peace treaty; As a British journalist told Santos in an interview, the FARC never did their part, giving a report on drug trafficking routes, releasing their kidnapped people or handing over their ill-gotten billions of dollars; Instead they joked cynically like teenagers, handing over a list of kitchen utensils as the total asset of their fortune. Despite Santos' speeches swearing that the war in Colombia was over, coca crops grew 400% during his presidency. The extortion and kidnapping continued, this time under the banner of another guerrilla group that suddenly grew stronger, the ELN. The FARC, for its part, never became extinct, but was renamed "FARC Dissidents", and in 2023 they are the guerrilla that exports the most drugs to the USA via Mexico and to Europe via Venezuela. The majority of Colombians, that is, honest Colombians who renounce violence and drug trafficking, criticize Santos for his despotic decisions. On New Year's Eve 2019, Santos was seen in a car through the streets of Cartagena. People booed him and hit his limousine. He had to be pulled away by his bodyguard. The open secret is that Santos is, since his youth, a secret member of Cuban communism, with the alias of Comandante Santiago, an infidelity that would explain his irrational handover of power to a drug trafficking organization varnished with Marxism. One of his darkest legacies was the creation of the JEP (Special Justice for Peace), a Soviet-style court composed of 18 judges appointed by 5 prominent figures of the international left. The main task of the JEP has been to protect the members of the FARC. Their decisions have been biased: Santrich, one of the FARC leaders, was captured in 2019 by the DEA while finalizing a deal to export 10 tons of cocaine to the United States. According to the Santos agreement, all crimes committed after the signing of the peace agreement were to be tried by ordinary courts. The JEP disagreed and decided that they were the only ones who could decide whether Mr. Santrich would be extradited to the United States or not. A month later, the country learned that several JEP judges were favouring FARC leaders by signing permits for them to leave the country for extended periods. They were also providing confidential information to their lawyers. Santrich escaped from prison under suspicious circumstances and was later killed in battles between drug gangs in Venezuela. Adding insult to injury, President Gustavo Petro asked international authorities to investigate his predecessor, Iván Duque, for allegedly having Santrich murdered. Guterres' UN responded positively to such a crazy request. The JEP's cynicism toward former FARC drug traffickers is not as sinister as the trials they are carrying out against military personnel who fought against them in recent decades. They promise freedom to all soldiers accused of having committed crimes against the civilian population, as long as they confess that they did so. In other words, if a military officer is in prison, unjustly accused of killing civilians, he can walk free by confessing to a crime he did not commit. Between 2002 and 2003 I worked in Kyrgyzstan. After nine months of teaching, I reported an influential student, a television representative, who tried to pass a course he had missed due to his repeated absences, in exchange for a "private and intensive course" that he would pay for out of his own pocket. My incorruptibility exasperated the locals, especially since I was Colombian, to the point that they took me for interrogation at the American University of Central Asia. When I entered the room and discovered 18 "judges," I realized that I was facing another of the false courts that Lenin and Stalin established since the revolutionary era to destroy their opponents. Despite showing them an email, they unanimously ruled that the test was invalid, as the email was written in English, which was neither my nor the student's native language (!). The social pressure was such that on some occasions I even doubted my sanity. If everyone in a country tells you that white is not white but black, you end up claiming that you made a mistake and accept that white is black. A couple of threatening phone calls and a sudden fire in my apartment, which I discovered at 2 a.m. and put out before it spread, convinced me to give up further complaints. These events are recorded, from fiction, in my novel “A Kyrgyz Spring”. When I read about the creation of the JEP, I remembered that farce of a trial, and even more so when I read Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's column in the national newspaper El Tiempo, "Special Justice for the FARC." The JEP model is similar to that of the fearsome committees created against the enemies of the Socialist State. In the USSR, judges were chosen by important bureaucrats of the tyrant in power. Common sense was sacrificed for the sake of gratitude to the contracting party and the privileges granted. The judgments were communicated in advance to the judges by their benefactors; They only had to act out a credible farce. The defendant's arguments were refuted with fallacies, ignored or dismissed. In the end, the victim knelt before his judge-executioner and his special "justice", pleading guilty in exchange for a reduction in his sentence: if he memorized the text given to him, his relatives would not be persecuted. Then the cameras recorded a repentant man who had betrayed the "people" and had allowed himself to be influenced by the selfish capitalist ideology; He confessed to having spied, lied and stolen, took credit for murders or conspiracies that he never committed and implored his judges not to impose a lesser sentence than hanging or execution. The next day, the unfortunate scapegoat was executed to the applause of his enraged spectators. What is questionable about the JEP is its homogeneity. The five bureaucrats who elected their magistrates were all of socialist or left-wing affiliation, and among the elected magistrates there is not a single representative of the, so-called by the left, Colombian “right.” To date the JEP has not persecuted free-thinking citizens who denounce the corruption of the toga cartel and socialist senators, but the action is contemplated in its statutes. If we had to live with Show Trials or farcical trials, Colombia would simply cease to be the country of freedoms and laws that we have known since General Santander. Some readers will respond with that cynicism so typical of our universities, that Colombia has never been a country of inclusion and respect. It would be enough in your scepticism to search online for the Disney video "The Trial of Pluto" to understand what loss of freedom to which I allude: this animated nightmare that Cubans and Venezuelans live today was described by the philosopher Žižek as the best representation in the cinema of what was, is and will be a trial under the special justice of socialist institutions. When I taught in Kyrgyzstan, they told me that the USSR had invested millions in socialist revolutions in Latin America and that they were going to restore Russia's power in the world at any cost. The corruption of thousands of judges in Western democracies are the current means to this end. The Cold War is not over; We have only experienced a pause. The message of universal coexistence in the Quran has been altered by its footnotes. I chose as the epigraph of this chapter sacred texts from five religions that emphasize the just and charitable person over the one of rituals and missionary zeal. This hierarchy follows a postulate of human nature: no animal or human loves by force, and no one believes in something or someone by imposition. A community of believers enjoys harmony when each member believes in what they do and say in their rituals, and loses its charm when any of its members objects, even if only in thought. This is why Kierkegaard believed that a true Christian is not the one who receives the beliefs of their upbringing but the one who, having questioned them, is reborn in them. In his prologue to Gustave Flaubert's "Temptations of Saint Anthony," Borges writes that in its early centuries, Christianity was a passion. This historical dialogue representation by Flaubert recreates the variety of beliefs and communities from the third and fourth centuries after Christ, from the Adamites who lived naked and swapped spouses to the Docetists who believed that Jesus did not have a real human body and that his physical appearance on Earth was an illusion. The variety of Christian churches flourished in relative harmony because there was no central authority to condemn them. It was the central power of the Roman authorities, who preached freedom of worship, that, under the rule of Nero, persecuted them, accusing them of superstition, if not licentiousness, with effects that, rather than deadening it, spread the Christian faith, as Tacitus recorded in his Annals:

"The Christians, a class of men given to a new and maleficent superstition, were punished. The superstition was momentary suppressed, but it broke out again, not only in Judea, the source of this evil, but even in Rome, where all the horrors and abominations of the world converge and find acceptance[iii]."

Religious tolerance among Christian sects ceased when Constantine officialised the religion with the Nicene Creed, and it became dogmatic with the condemnation of Arianism. The precepts of religious inclusion in the New Testament, such as that of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verse 40, were sacrificed on the missionary zeal to impose a single belief among all Christians:

"John said to Him, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name, and we tried to prevent him because he was not following us.' But Jesus said, 'Do not hinder him, for there is no one who will perform a miracle in My name, and be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me. For he who is not against us is for us.'"

Edward Gibbon traces the origins of such intolerance in "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," in the Jewish religion and their belief in being God's chosen people. This exclusivity was later transferred from Christianity to Islam and has been preserved in the secular era through Jihad, still sanctified by several imams in Arabia and Palestine, intellectual culprits of the immolations of young people in various cities worldwide, from New York to Jerusalem. But, just as with the New Testament, Muhammad left divine passages of universal tolerance in his writings. In Sura 5 of the Quran, we read:

"Indeed, those who have believed [in Prophet Muhammad] and those [before Him] who were Jews or Sabeans or Christians - those [among them] who believed in Allah and the Last Day and did righteousness - no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve." The Quran - Sura 5, 6

These verses bestow the blessing of Islam upon any honest man or woman who has certainty in a universal God, regardless of whether their religion is Jewish, Christian, or the worshipping of the planets (Sabeans). The epigraph from the Quran also aligns with the one from the New Testament, where Saint Peter and Saint Paul decide that to be a Christian, one does not need to adhere to rituals but simply abstain from worshiping deities that preach evil and from enslaving other human beings through prostitution:

"But we should write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from what has been strangled, and from blood." Acts of the Apostles, 15, 20.

The Quran, a book dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to Muhammad, has, as its initial verses indicate, all the truth about religions. Subsequent theological discussions among imams, therefore, would address questions such as: What is doing good? Or, what is good? However, it has not been the Quran as a sacred text that has imposed its authority on all the peoples who follow Islam, but the footnotes that later generations added based on writings that friends or acquaintances of Muhammad presumably composed in years after his death. Thus, in versions of the Quran available for free in various languages, we read in the footnotes of these verses are abrogated by Sura 3 (the family of Imran), verse 85, which preaches that, from the death of Muhammad onwards, the unique religion of God is Islam, without further specification. This is how the message of universal coexistence in the Quran has been altered by its footnotes. Without discussing the difference between the validity of a religion and the alignment of the precepts of that religion with the practices of certain unbelievers or infidels, we immediately notice how our First Universal Religious Law, that of respecting every human being, comes into conflict with such derogation. The values of bellicose generations that considered the conversion of infidels to Islam the highest law above all others is still endorsed by imams and Islamic scholars who glorify ritual suicide as a shortcut to paradise. This overemphasis, first on the footnotes of the sacred text of the Quran, and second on violence over compassion, is the cause of all the harms of religions throughout the history of humanity. Jesus would have said in the face of such interpretation, just as he said to his Jewish brethren who tempted him by asking why Moses had endorsed laws like divorce at the will of man: "Because of the hardness of your heart" (St. Matthew 18, 8). And now that we have reached this point, it is time to inquire, as Jean-Luc Marion does, about the origin of the notion of an exclusive God, separate from the idol worshippers of Sumer and Egypt[iv]. Did a single God first come to mind to the Jews, and then to the Sumerians and Egyptians? Or did one of these peoples come up with this notion first and the others then learned of it through the faith, conquest, or migration of the people who initially believed in it? Biblical narratives, such as the Tower of Babel, seem to suggest that Judaism was the first to hold this idea. But there is also the possibility that it was a universal belief that preceded the advent of organized religions. It is worth noting that the five religions in the epigraph agree on something essential: being a good person is more important than the rituals that may separate them, that no one believes by force, that they must live together in harmony. If religious communities follow this belief, it will be impossible to spread evil in the name of God. But the logic of rituals and dogmas seeks to dominate everyone, even those who deny the existence of God, which is why an essential proposition of the Quran would be to have complete trust in God, without dogmas or rituals that divide the faithful among themselves, nor Islam from other religions. This can be appreciated when we compare the different confessions of faith among religions: Judaism: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Christianity: I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. Islam: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. Hinduism: There are various versions of the Hindu confession of faith, but they all emphasize the supreme oneness of the divine. Buddhism: Buddhism doesn't have a formal confession of faith, but the emphasis is on the path to enlightenment and the realization of truth. These confessions highlight the oneness of God or a supreme reality, which is a common theme among major world religions. While there are differences in religious practices, rituals, and theological interpretations, the core message of monotheism and recognizing the divine unity is a shared belief among many religious traditions. The The focus should ideally be on moral and ethical values, fostering goodwill, compassion, and coexistence rather than imposing beliefs through force or intolerance. The ancestral philosophies of all nations find their common ground in preaching peace, non-violence, and respect for others, as we can see in this compilation of proverbs that celebrate peace over war and persuasion over the edge of the sword:

Nation

Original Text

Translation

America

Make love, not war

Theology of peace according to several cultures

Second Universal Religious Law The second religious law pertains to harmony with Mother Nature, the ancient Greeks' goddess Gaia, and the pre-Columbian American tribes' Pacha Mama.

Second Religious Law: A believer shall not cause harm to nature or the living beings within it, both from the animal and plant kingdoms, unless doing so results in an action contrary to the First Religious Law.

This law promotes respect and consideration for nature and all living beings coexisting within it, from animals to plants, with a focus on forest preservation and the avoidance of open-pit mining exploitation. The global ecological movement has made significant strides in recent decades, but there is still a long struggle ahead as long as there are entrepreneurs who mistreat animals in collective farms, destroy the environment to obtain precious minerals, and cut down forests while exterminating animal species to claim land. The protection of living beings is a philosophy deeply rooted in religious traditions and cultures worldwide. Ancient beliefs regarded the Earth as a living being that eliminated entire species as needed for preservation, leading modern writers to question whether Earth, tired of human abuse, might be the entity triggering natural disasters to rid itself of humans, much as it once did with dinosaurs. It was Isaac Asimov who, in one of his books, postulated that, over the millions of years of the world's existence, it is entirely logical and plausible that some ancient mega-reptile species achieved an advanced intelligence comparable to modern humans. Their extinction would have occurred because they possessed a technology as destructive as nuclear weapons and used it in war, which lead to their self-destruction. This thesis would be corroborated by Plato's dialogue on Atlantis and passages from the Mahābhārata about the "Brahmastra," a weapon attributed to the supreme deity Brahma, capable of destroying everything in its path, including cities, entire armies, and even life on Earth. As human beings, we have the privilege to exploit Earth's resources, including its animals, but we also have the responsibility to treat them with consideration and compassion. Many religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, promote non-violence towards living beings, including animals. In these traditions, it is believed that all beings possess a spark of divinity and deserve respect and kindness. Respect for nature also involves the conservation of biodiversity. Species loss and environmental degradation are serious issues in many parts of the world. This religious law urges the protection and preservation of life's diversity on Earth, recognizing that each form of life plays a crucial role in ecosystem balance. Preserving forests is essential for maintaining ecological balance and protecting biodiversity. Indiscriminate deforestation of trees and mangroves can have devastating effects on the environment and the communities that depend on them. This religious law promotes sustainable management of forest resources and forest conservation as an integral part of harmony with nature. Open-pit mining is an activity that often has a significant environmental impact, including soil degradation, water pollution, and habitat destruction. This religious law advocates responsible and sustainable mining practices that respect the land's integrity and minimize environmental damage. Third Religious Law The Third Religious Law, which pertains to the obedience of the teachings and commandments found in sacred texts and religious leaders, plays a fundamental role in the lives of believers worldwide. Only respect for others' beliefs can bring harmony among all peoples and communities. Obedience to our own beliefs and principles shines as a path to virtue and spiritual fulfilment.

Third Religious Law: A believer shall obey the teachings and commandments of their sacred texts and the precepts imparted by the leaders of their faith, unless following them results in an action contrary to the First and Second Religious Laws.

Communities of religious and secular believers The third religious law is intrinsically linked to the two previous religious laws: the First Religious Law (not to harm another human being) and the Second Religious Law (not to harm nature and its living beings), within the context of ethics, universal harmony, and coexistence. The Third Religious Law encourages believers to venerate and obey the teachings and commandments of their respective communities or faiths, regardless of whether they involve deities or religious hierarchies. This includes belief systems like agnosticism and atheism, if they promote values that align with the principles of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The law emphasizes the importance of respecting the ethical and moral guidance provided by these belief systems or communities for their followers. However, it also notes that the law does not support belief systems or communities that explicitly rebel against social laws or advocate actions contrary to the principles of universal harmony, such as promoting violence, discrimination or harm to others. The emphasis is on adhering to ethical principles and values that contribute to a just and equitable society, promoting coexistence and respecting human rights. Even without religious dogma, both agnostics and atheists develop their own principles for coexistence, such as respect for others, equality, justice, compassion, and ethical responsibility, principles that, like those in the ancient proverbs mentioned above, coincide with those of humanist philosophy, secular thought, and various philosophical traditions that advocate universal peace and common coexistence among all human beings, as Schiller sang in a poem and Beethoven expressed sublimely in his Ninth Symphony. The Third Law shelters theistic or non-theistic anticlerical philosophical and religious creeds that prioritize reason and ethics over faith in particular deities. Some of these perspectives include: Secular Humanism: Secular humanism promotes an ethics based on reason, empathy, and human dignity, independent of religious beliefs. Humanists focus on ethical values and human well-being. Secular Spirituality: Some people consider themselves spiritual without adhering to organized religion or belief in a supreme being. Secular spirituality emphasizes the search for meaning, transcendence, and connection with the world and other human beings, without the need for the supernatural. Secular Ethics: Secular ethics relies on rational and secular ethical principles rather than religious morality. It focuses on ethical responsibility and human well-being, independent of religious beliefs. Confucianism: Although Confucianism is more of a philosophical and ethical tradition than a religion, it emphasizes the importance of virtue, social harmony, and proper human relationships. Secular Buddhism: Some secularized Buddhist approaches focus on wisdom, compassion, and mindfulness practice without involving beliefs in divine beings. What these perspectives have in common is their concern for ethics, morality, and the search for meaning beyond traditional religious beliefs. The Third Religious Law advocates respecting and obeying the teachings of all these perspectives as long as they align with the principles of the previous Religious Laws. Religious leaders, sages, philosophers, and saints In addition to sacred scriptures, the Third Religious Law also references the authority of religious leaders in interpreting and applying faith. Religious leaders, such as priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, and gurus, play a crucial role in providing spiritual and moral guidance to their followers. However, so do the wise, philosophers, theologians, or scientists appointed as guides and teachers by each community or nation. Adherence to the leaders' precepts is essential to maintaining cohesion and spiritual direction for each believer, with ethical principles like service, love, compassion, justice, honesty, and charity. Their teachings, in line with the first two laws, form the foundation for building a just and equitable society, not through blind obedience but through persuasion and mutual collaboration. Invalidity of community leaders endorsing violence Religious teachings and leaders' precepts should be followed unless they contradict the first two religious’ laws. This provision recognizes that religious teachings can occasionally be misinterpreted or misused to justify harmful actions toward other human beings or nature. Among the leaders who stand out today in our generation, there are few imams but too many left-wing bureaucrats and academics who, even if only lightly, endorse terrorist suicide attacks in the name of alleged injustices. They assert that the young Palestinian who travelled to Tel Aviv to blow up a nightclub was a product of poverty and oppression and that the US and UK's war in Iraq was the main justification for the terrible atrocities to come. Even when the world heard that two British citizens had sacrificed themselves for the Palestinian cause, most journalists failed to comprehend the pseudo-religious nature of their sacrifice. Only now, with the dramatic rise in suicide terrorists born in Britain, are European journalists beginning to question the true nature of the Islam that preaches violence over peace and coexistence among faiths and nations. Islamic fundamentalists harbour resentment against Christianity as the dominant discourse in our political world. Despite low church attendance statistics, media hedonism, and injustices perpetrated by the medieval Church and modern nations, Western leaders strive to follow the principles established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that embodies the Christian principle of defending the weakest. While Islamic martyrs are often sacrificed in war after killing many enemies or, as in our tumultuous times, innocent women and children, Acording tot heir theology, AChristian martyrs used to embrace martyrdom for the sake of their executioners. Peaceful demonstrations in London and Paris are not much different from those of the early Christians in Rome. Citizens of all nations, faiths, and races strengthened each other in peaceful silence last week, rejecting irrational feelings of resentment and revenge. The teachings of Jesus, a prophet in which the world's three major monotheistic religions converge, shine in his Sermon on the Mount, an absolute rejection of violence and a hymn to trust in the justice of fortune, God, nature, or chance: - Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. - Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. - Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. - Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. - Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. - Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. - Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. - Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This teaching has come to life from the healing of a non-Jewish woman by Jesus to the Church reform by St. Francis, from the conversion of Paul the Christian persecutor to St. Paul the martyr, from the defense of indigenous people in the New World by Bartolomé de las Casas to the works of Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta, from the defense of black slaves in Cartagena by St. Peter Claver to the forgiveness of his murderer by St. John Paul II. Christianity shines through its philosophy of forgiving its enemies as a religion beyond the limits of religion. Christian leaders who, defying Jesus's teachings, tried to impose their creeds by force have invariably failed, especially in the Crusades and the Inquisition. Christianity, as defined in the already-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, is inclusive, extending to all people of peace and goodwill, as the angels sang to the three wise men from the East: Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. The invitation of the three wise men to Jesus' birth expresses Christianity's universal destiny since each is native to the three corners of the Earth, each practices occult sciences, and each belongs to extinct creeds or religions. Their presence at every Christmas confirms William Blake's visions of the New Jerusalem, a metropolis of men of harmony, compassion, and peace. William Blake was an English poet, painter, and engraver known for his unique and often mystical vision of the world. In his work "Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion," Blake presents a personal and spiritual vision of Jerusalem, not referring to the physical city in the Middle East, but representing a mystical and spiritual state of redemption and freedom. Blake's "Jerusalem" is an allegory of the redemption and spiritual transformation of humanity. Blake believed in the importance of imagination and spirituality in the pursuit of freedom and justice. His work addresses themes such as oppression, slavery, and the struggle for spiritual and social liberation. In his vision, Jerusalem becomes a symbol of a world transformed by imagination and spirituality, where justice and freedom prevail. Blake advocates in his poems for freeing the mind and spirit from the prejudices inherent in morality, aligning him with Nietzsche's vision of the Superman, to achieve a supreme view of reality capable of spiritual and social transformation. Swedenborg also writes that the true Church, already present in paradise, is composed exclusively of the righteous, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or religion. According to Swedenborg, religions were nothing more than theatrical acts, staged to cater to each community's moral whims. Regarding Muslims, he wrote that it is indeed a religion approved by God, created in accordance with the lustful and bellicose temperament of its believers. The only divine imposition about Christianity on Islam was that they accept Jesus Christ, God incarnate in His own Son, as a prophet and acknowledge His birth from a virgin. Islamic fundamentalists delight in the bloodiest history of Islam. They admired Muhammad not so much for his teachings of tolerance and forgiveness as for his military campaigns. It is no surprise that most Islamic fundamentalists show deep admiration for obsolete figures like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or Hitler. Yet, Islamic fundamentalism is an obsolete and misinterpreted branch of the sacred scriptures of the Quran. Islam, once freed from its yoke, as Christianity was from the Inquisition, will become the fastest-growing religion in a world where its scriptures inspire devotion among its believers. Universal Harmony The Third Religious Law is framed within the pursuit of universal harmony. By obeying religious and ethical teachings, believers contribute to creating a world where peace, respect, and compassion are central. Harmony is not limited to human relationships but extends to the relationship with nature and all living beings. The universal implementation of the three religious laws, not only by each religion but also by the UN, seeks to establish a solid foundation for peaceful coexistence and universal harmony, a vision of a humanity in which spirituality, ethics and coexistence are intertwined for world peace.

[i] - Judaism (From the Torah - Micah 6:8): "And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" - Hinduism (From Bhagavad Gita - 12.13-14): "He who is not hateful to any creature, who is friendly and compassionate, who has no idea of 'mine' and the idea of ego, who is the same in pain and pleasure, and forgiving." - Buddhism (From the Dhammapada - Verse 5): "Hate is never conquered by hate; hate is conquered by love. This is an eternal law." - Christianity (Acts, 15, 20): "But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood." - Islam (Sura 5, 69): "Those who believe, those who follow the Jewish scriptures, and the Sabians and the Christians - any who believe in God and the Last Day and perform good deeds - will have nothing to fear or regret." [ii] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). "Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als eure Ketten. Ihr habt eine Welt zu gewinnen… Die erste Phase der kommunistischen Gesellschaft ist daher die Bourgeoisie auf die politische Gewalt, die Eroberung der Demokratie… Die Waffen, womit die Bourgeoisie dem Feudaladel den Boden abgerungen hat, werden jetzt gegen die Bourgeoisie selbst gewandt." Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. [iii] "Afflicti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae. Repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursus erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque." Tacitus. Annales, Liber X, Caput 44. [iv] Marion, Jean-Luc (1982), Dieu sans l’être, Librairie Arthème Fayard.