#freejerusalem

Capital of Palestine | Drawing by me🖤✍🏻

Jerusalem is an accursed place. Since the death of Moses and Aaron, the seat of Judaism has been nothing but marinated in the blood of the innocent, from civil war, conquests, and religious fanaticism. While there is no harm in defending one self from persecution or invasion, it is another matter entirely in instigating religious persecution and oppression. The Heavenly City has been a hell for generation upon generation. If any people are to worship freely and in peace in any land they call home, the only secure means of protecting such a sacred freedom and to keep it peaceful is if the state was entirely and completely secular, ideally with only reason to guide the creation, enforcement, and interpretation of its laws.

However, the current cliques vying for control of and over the former City of God are the Muslims and the Jews, the Palestinians and the Israelis. They are all fighting for religious domination, for their faith to control everything and anything, everything and anyone, within its walls and in its streets, while using faith, narratives of persecution current and ancient and fear of the other based on myths, paranoia and outright blood-libel as an excuse to commit horrific crimes beyond imagination against one another. Such villains naturally embrace divine government, for somehow a government that favours no religion is supremely unjust. Indeed, the British screwed with both Arabs and Jews by making conflicting and contradictory promises in order to govern the region better, by intentionally pitting people against each other that has, since Israel’s independence, lived on to this day. No cause, said Camus, merits the killing of innocents, regardless of whether one’s side is just or not.

If God is to exist, and he is just, he would only favour individuals who were righteous, regardless of their faith, over those who were evil yet feigned piety. To favour someone over their religion, regardless of their actions, words, and intent, is supremely unjust, and to make one religion an official religion of the state, or to cater to only the faithful of all religions or of a certain kind of religion, codifies injustice. This is why secularism is the only solution, for faith mixed with power isn’t just unjust, but renders faith meaningless as a moral compass. It would be if Gandalf was given the Ring of Power, he would become more frightful and terrible than that of the Dark Lord Sauron, for Gandalf, bearing the One Ring, would see his actions as doing good, regardless of consequences. Time and time again, religion established as an official state doctrine or faith has permitted horrors and wars never needed.

Secularism isn’t new, and the reasons for cutting power out of the hand of faith has been said again and again by men greater and older than this or any other generation to come. The point is: in order to save the City of God, we must save the city from God. No official doctrine should dominate other than that of reason and necessity. God has no place in the halls of power. But neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are willing to hold Jerusalem without establishing their faith as the official religion. So Jerusalem must be free from both if it is to be saved. It should not remain as an international city, either, for the world cannot control a single spot in the world, and would rob this “Holy” City of its freedom and for any chance of peace. Every nation has its own agenda, and Jerusalem should not be some neutral ground for nations to settle scores, and it is already controlled by one group or the other anyway. It must therefor go down the same path as the Holy See, the Vatican in Rome, and become a sovereign, free, independent secular republic of its own.

Houses of worship can be not destroyed but either dismantled carefully and be rebuilt elsewhere for the sake of preserving culture and history, or secularized. The Holy Mount must never belong to either the Muslims or the Jews. Any area of land claimed by both parties deserve to be owned by neither. Government should neither condone or condemn any religion or its freedom of worship, hand-in-hand with freedom of speech, and on a related tangent, to ensure peace reign, no one should be allowed to carry, own, sell or transport any weapons except those in government. It should never spare any faith of any taxation nor sanction or impose any tithe. Nothing related to religion. Nothing for religion. Nothing by religion or against religion.