Religious violence between Israeli Jews and Gentile Palestinians has been going on since the creation of the modern Jewish state of Israel in 1948. With Israel's Six Day War in 1967, and its subsequent occupation of Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank, religious violence has been constant. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is, in and of itself, a form of religious violence and terrorism against the Palestinians.
Last month Joe Biden made a statement critical of the Jewish state's larger than usual expansion of its illegal and cruel occupation of Palestinian land in the Palestinian West Bank. In his statement, Biden said Israel shares blame for recent violence due to cabinet ministers who push settlement expansion while rejecting Palestinian rights.
Biden's statement angered two of those cabinet ministers, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Smotrich responded it is the Jewish state's right and duty "to continue to act to fulfill the mission of the citizens of Israel, to defend ourselves and build our homeland."
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir responded regarding Biden's statement with "the USA is our wonderful friend, and we love it, but I say to President Biden: The Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel."
Like Elwood and "Joliet" Jake Blues from the 1980 comedy film The Blues Brothers, religious Jews like Smotrich and Ben Gvir believe they're on a mission from gawd! In fact, they believe all of the Jews in Israel are on a mission from gawd. That mission is found in the Torah and is to create a Greater Israel of biblical proportions. To do this, they must ethnically cleanse what they see as their land of the Gentile Palestinians. They accomplish this through Israeli Jewish squatters/"settlers" who violently steal land from the Palestinians and who are protected by Israeli Occupation Forces. (Israeli Defense Forces is an obvious misnomer, as stealing land is not an act of defense.)
Ben Gvir's statement that "the Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel" means Israel is for Jews, not Gentiles such as the Palestinians. According to the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/the Christian Old Testament, the land the ancient Jewish clergymen who wrote the Bible claim God gave to the Jews for a Jewish state includes all of the Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem. In addition to that, it also includes all the land from the Euphrates River to the river of Egypt (Genesis 15:18). For Israel to occupy all of that land will require much more religious violence on the part of Israel, since the people living on the land the Hebrew Bible claims is part of a Greater Israel will not simply turn their land and homes over to the Jewish state and become homeless refugees without a fight. (When Palestinians fight back against the Israeli occupation, they are called terrorists. The same will hold true with Israel's future victims of Israeli Hebrew Bible-based occupation/religious terrorism.)
In another example of Hebrew Bible-based Jewish superiority, Ben Gvir this week said, "My right, and my wife's and my children's right, to get around on the roads in Judea and Samaria is more important than the right to movement for Arabs."
This statement shows Ben Gvir's false sense of superiority over Palestinian Gentiles that is grounded in the Hebrew Bible/the Christian Old Testament, at Deuteronomy 7:6. In this verse the ancient Jewish clergymen who wrote it claimed God said he has chosen the Jews "to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth." Ben Gvir's statement also makes clear the minds of religious Jews are stuck in the muck of the ancient Hebrew Bible in that when they refer to the Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem, they use the ancient biblical names for these geographic areas of Judea and Samaria.
One of the most important qualities of Deism is its ability to reach people who are currently under the influence of a "revealed" religion. This is because Deism is rational belief in The Supreme Intelligence/God. This gives Deists common ground with sincere "revealed" religionists who do have a belief in God, but whose belief in God is twisted by accompanying belief in irrational man-made dogmas and doctrines.
Deism has the very real potential to defuse the religious violence the "revealed" religions are spreading by supplanting the dangerous and harmful ideas of the "revealed" religions with rational and natural Deism. Albert Einstein believed the survival of humanity depended on it. Einstein wrote:
"The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them . . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive."
