These are a couple of short extracts from the book – Farther from the Sun’ that I wrote twenty years ago and am presently editing:
Just leave footprints. The world is in our care. We are just passing through.
15.9.01
Muslims do not allow living things to be represented in their art. They have a thing about idolatry. No face can be depicted. Their art is largely abstract design. I have no problem with that. Their art is beautiful but their certainty and intolerance is the ugliest side of humanity. Their blind interpretations and adherence to every word of a text written more than a thousand five hundred years ago are abhorrent.
Religion is a personal view. I have no problem with what a person believes.
There are no facts. Certainty is ignorance.
I do have a problem with what they do in the name of belief.
When they ousted the Hindus in India and took over their temples they knocked the heads of all the statues and gouged the tiles.
One has to ask why? They were not theirs. They were merely passing through. They defaced the seventh-century Jain sandstone carving outside of Agra. The Afghanistan Taliban demolished the even older and more beautiful Jain statues carved in sandstone on their steppes – the Buddhas of Bamyan.
These are crimes against the whole history and culture of the world carried out by brainwashed fanatics. Such intolerance and disregard is at best ignorant. It displays egotistic arrogance.
I tell you – certainty is our biggest enemy.
15.9.01