Henry David Thoreau pointed out an exceptionally important fact when he wrote, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." If we truly want to stop evil we must recognize and attack it at its root.
Looking at the ongoing slaughter/genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by the Jewish state of Israel, which has of this writing killed at least 30,035 Palestinians, 11,500 of which are children, at first glance it seems the root cause is the deadly attack Hamas launched against Israel on October 7, 2023. That attack killed approximately 1,200 Israeli Jews and Hamas took 240 people prisoner/hostage. Based on this assumption it appears the Palestinians through Hamas struck first, and Israel is retaliating, though, even if that was the case, Israel is going way beyond any reasonable retaliation.
As philosophy instructs us, we must objectively look beyond how things appear on the surface in order to see things as they really are. When we do this regarding the current unbearable and horrendous situation in Gaza, we see its roots are in the creation of the modern Jewish state of Israel in 1948. In order to make room for the Jews of the new Jewish state, over 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and became refugees. Ever since 1948 Israel has been stealing more and more land from Palestinians through its illegal, cruel and Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament-based expanding occupation. (For a solid understanding of Israel's founding, read the important and well-documented book Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the US Was Used to Create Israel.)
It is a very clear fact that Israeli leaders believe they have a biblical right to the land the Palestinians lived on and on which they currently live. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir made this clear when he said, "The Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel." This myth-based belief was also expressed by Israel's Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon who said,
We do have biblical rights to the land. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or Jew - you read the Bible, you read the stories of the Bible - it's all there. This is our deed to the land. That's biblical.
Deists and all freethinkers know, the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament did not originate from God, it originated from the minds of ancient Jewish clergymen. That is why it is full of Jewish superiority. For example, it claims God chose the Jews "above all people that are upon the face of the earth" (Deuteronomy 7:6), it teaches that Jews should not own their fellow Jews as slaves but should take all of their slaves from the Gentile people and their children whom they can own "for ever" and pass ownership on to their Jewish children (Leviticus 25:44-46), etc., etc. Thomas Paine did a wonderful job of honestly addressing the false claim that the Jews are God's chosen people when he wrote in The Age of Reason:
If we will not stubbornly shut our eyes and steel our hearts, it is impossible not to see, in spite of all that long-established superstition imposes upon the mind, that the flattering appellation of His chosen people is no other than a lie which the priests and leaders of the Jews had invented to cover the baseness of their own characters, and which Christian priests, sometimes as corrupt and often as cruel, have professed to believe.
It's dumbfounding and concerning that in the 21st century a nuclear-armed religious state can exist and claim not only its right to exist, but its right to steal land from other people and to brutalize those people, is based on discredited ancient religious texts.
When people are forced from their homes and end up living with their families in the squalor of refugee camps, they become angry. Add to this the brutal reality of Israel's occupation that humiliates Palestinians, and which imprisons thousands of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem, coupled with the brutal conditions Israel inflicts on the people living in Gaza through its blockade and control of everything from food, water and electricity, and it's not surprising that Palestinians meet violence with violence.
Humanity needs to break free of the violence promoting nonsense of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism. Deism offers us the very best way out of the unending cycle of religious violence. This is because Deism is based on our innate God-given reason and serves as a bridge to the minds of people who are currently under the influence of a "revealed" religion letting them know God gave them their innate reason and not religion. Our innate God-given reason, if we use it, will not let us accept the irrational claims and teachings of the "revealed" religions. This, in and of itself, will, once a large enough number of people are reached with Deism, put an end to religious violence. We need to take the advice Thomas Paine offered us in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition. Paine wrote,
Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man.
This applies not only to the Bible, but to the Quran and Book of Mormon as well as to all "sacred" scriptures.
The new way of thinking that Deism is offering us is necessary for humanity to not only eliminate religious violence, but to continue to exist in the nuclear age we are now in. Albert Einstein pointed out that we need a new way of thinking if we want to survive in the nuclear age when he 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.
Reason-based Deism can be that new manner of thinking that will help to ensure the survival of humanity as well as the natural progress humanity can make once humanity is unencumbered by "revealed" religions/superstitions.
