Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Monotheism …

1. 00:02 ifi is an English journalist of Arab extract, Egyptian in at the source. I, as you all know, I’m an Israeli. And here here we are discussing the conflict in Gaza. And we managed to make it to the end without slitting each other’s throats, which proves that a civil
2. 00:28 discourse is always possible. When people feel helpless in reality, sometimes they resort to self-d delusion. They delude themselves that they are superior in some kind of fantasy or they believe in a utopia. Very few of them know that utopia means
3. 00:58 no such place. And today we are not going to discuss a utopia. We are going to discuss a dystopia of incredible proportions. What is happening in what is left of the Gaza Strip. I’ve tried throughout this talk not to be judgmental. I try to stick to the facts and
4. 01:23 give insight to some points of view which are less popular or less discussed or even denied to some extent. I trace many of the global conflicts and definitely the conflict in the Middle East to the clash not of civilizations but the clash of religions.
5. 01:46 Personally, I believe that the the transition from polytheism to monotheism has been one of the worst in human history. Monotheism is a scourge. Monotheism to start with is intolerant by definition. It’s my god or no god and your god is the wrong god. And if you insist that
6. 02:11 it’s not, I’m going to decapitate you or kill you or exile you or do something to you. That’s monotheism. That’s the main message of monotheism. Every type of monotheism, no exception. Monotheism by definition is exclusionary. It is also highly personalized. In all
7. 02:32 monotheistic religions, the believer and God have some kind of rapport, some kind of interactions. The interaction can be mediated, the interaction can be direct, but there’s always a personalized connection which elevates the individual, aggrandizes the individual,
8. 02:52 renders the individual entitled and legitimizes negative effects, negative emotions such as hatred of the other, envy and rage, anger, it all stems from monies. M and monotheism is distributed. It’s not localized. Many pagan religions were localized. Monotheism is not. Monotheism
9. 03:20 spreads, metastasizes across borders, across nations. Monotheism creates virtual nations, virtual collectives. And as such, monotheism legitimizes simultaneously the individual as an organizing principle and the collective as an organizing principle, creating instantaneously
10. 03:45 irreconcilable tension between them. And all this translates into politics. The confluence between monotheistic religions or non-monotheistic religions and politics is undeniable. Throughout most of human history, politics has just been another name for religion. And
11. 04:11 monotheistic religions especially, but religion in general, they give rise to leaders who are unscrupulous and populist. leaders who raify, personify, legitimize, leverage, express, exercise aggression and negative effects. If you look at the
12. 04:34 conflict in Gaza or the Middle East more largely, what do we see? We see leaders who leverage religion and the in the traits inherent in religion, the fundamental aspects and dimensions of religion, its intolerance, its exclusive nature, its personal impact on the individual.
13. 04:57 They leverage all this in order to annihilate or control or subjugate the other. Who is the other? in majority of cases the members of another religion or the members of another church. So othering becomes inextricably linked to religion especially monotheistic religions.
14. 05:28 That’s in a nutshell how I see the conflict in in the Middle East. It’s a religious conflict, not a clash of civilization because civilizations there by and large is pretty pretty much the same as all over the world. We’ve been all westernized for better or worse. So,
15. 05:44 it’s not a clash of civilization. It’s a clash of value systems of course and so on, but all of them are grounded in religion. It’s a religious war. No wonder um it is often called jihad. It’s a religious war. And this religious war takes place within the individual and in
16. 06:03 the collective. The individual is supposed to somehow become a part of the collective by mysteriously becoming more of an individual. The principle of submission is inherent in all monotheistic religions. And of course it was inevitable that monotheistic
17. 06:31 deities and monotheistic divine religions give rise to secular religions such as Nazism, such as communism, such as nationalism and such as to large extent liberal democracy or liberalism. These are all secular religions but they are constructed on the template and the
18. 06:50 edifice of monotheistic religions. So they are equally exclusionary, equally aggressive, equally non-territorial, equally personalized and so on. We saw it in the renaissance where there was a deification and adoration and worship of the individual as an organizing and
19. 07:11 explanatory principle on the one hand and of the charismatic leader on the other. The Gna therefore was the preparation for Protestantism led the way to Protestant. Protestant Protestantism was simply more honest in the sense that it codified the relationship between the
20. 07:35 individual and God. A two-way street. God’s blessings manifested in an individual’s life. An individual can communicate with God directly and negotiate with God. But this is not limited to Protestantism. Abraham negotiated with God. Moses negotiated with God. God in
21. 07:55 monotheistic religions is a presence in the individual and yet at the same time the defining framework of the collective. And so when people commit atrocities, when people misbehave, when people deny themselves, betray others, they they evoke and invoke the collective.
22. 08:21 They individuate and individualize by immersing themselves in the collective. The collective becomes their core identity. This is exactly what’s happening in Gaza and in the wars in the Middle East. And so now I hand you over to Ifik and myself in this talk
23. 08:46 and try to keep an open mind. Don’t have knee-jerk stupid reactions. Don’t express your brainwashing and propaganda. Just keep an open mind. Listen to what both of us have to say. I often disagree with if and if invariably disagrees with me. But look at the way
24. 09:06 we talk. Look at the dialogue. On the one hand, the civility on the other hand, we do listen to each other. We are reactive to each other. what is happening between me and Eve is possible on a larger scale. It’s just that people don’t want this to happen. They regard
25. 09:23 dialogue, having a dialogue is very threatening, is an existential threat. And this I attribute this directly to monotheism and the personality cults and the cult of the individual that arose from monotheism and especially much later Protestantism. Have fun.