Ashura thing

"Enlightenment" fills people with rage: for the slave wants something absolute; he understands only the tyrannical, even in morality; he loves as he hates, without subtlety, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness."

Friedrich Nietzsche - Jenseits Gut und Böse

What Nietzsche calls the slave, I simply call the Human and as humans, as social apes, the urge to submit to the Alpha ape whether real or imaginary seems to me to be our ineluctable heritage. We have our religions and dogmas and cults of personality and no matter what the nature of the founding god or literature may be, mankind has always made and always will make his slavish devotion into an excuse for his ego, his aggression and his love of violence. I'm not setting one religion above another and nearly any religion I can think of has at some time or another indulged in torture, witch hunts, heretic burning, territorial aggression, persecution, domination and worse, but reading about and watching footage of the self-mutilating frenzy of those commemorating their perceived loss in a battle nearly 1400 years past, I lose hope for all of us.

One of the worst characteristics of such mythologized events is that devotion to a God who is supposed after all to be kind,loving and merciful, is the need to promote ourselves to be the right hand, the defender and the avenger of God, as though his arms were too short to reach our world. The slave of God becomes the scourge of God and the mercy and justice of God becomes the property of madmen. It has been a long time since 680 of the common era, but The journey from Karbala to car bomb takes but a moment.

If the victory that was the death of the grandson of the Prophet did not settle anything but rather brought on a war that never ends, what can we say of George W. Bush's phantom victory in Iraq?