FEET IN THE MIND

Feet in the mind

 

The lightness in the feet
Comes from the mind
With intent, without weight
Thought is movement
Before and after the movement
Harmony is the sign of the link
In syntony fatigue and doubt fade
And the impossible begins
Softly in the next step…

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

Lightness I, photography by São Ludovino.

ONLY ONCE

ONLY ONCE

  

One can choose to pass and not notice
What almost always goes unnoticed.
One can choose to search for the unnoticed
Everytime in everything and just discover
The human impossibility of it.
And one can choose to search for the unnoticed
In the exact same thing that was noticed
Time after time
And even so discover
A new light, a new angle, a new colour
That will go unnoticed afterwards
Just because it wasn’t noticed
In the only moment it could have been noticed…

São Ludovino, 5/3/2025

Summer Wings, photography by São Ludovino.

BALLERINAS

BALLERINAS

 

When the trees cover with ballerina-leaves
Then Spring begins and announces
Warmer days and higher expectations
Some dress in shades of green
Some dress in shades of red
Some wear the whole palette
The observer sees them all
The painter adds some more
The photographer allows to take them home
Without stealing them from the trees
Tomorrow they’ll wear a different dress
Tomorrow will be another Spring day

São Ludovino, 5/3/2025

Dance of the birds I, photography by São Ludovino.

FINDING

FINDING I

Looking for the roots in the sky
You found the aerial tree
That you planted in the ground
When you still believed in aerial trees.

São Ludovino, 1/3/2025

FINDING II

Collecting the withered leaves of today
You found again the original purpose
Of planting cherry trees
Even in the last garden of the journey.

São Ludovino, 1/3/2025

 

FINDING III

 

In the pockets of your soul
There are more treasures
And more achievements
Then in the superficial biography
Of the duties of your days.

 

São Ludovino, 1/3/2025

Windows in the Trees, photography by São Ludovino.

Don't tolerate the intolerable! - IV

HOLY BOOKS

     Below is another chapter of a sequence of articles that I wrote about a decade ago.

     All “holy books” are interesting books of symbolical stories conceived and written by human hands; some also have some fragments of factual History, like the Torah and the Bible attested by thousands of archeological findings in old and new Israel. But they are not History and Science books. Islam takes the Quran as the only book that contains all knowledge. What happens when someone mixes everything and takes a parable, a fantasy, a “human revelation”, a subjective interpretation or an opinion for an historical truth? The World, Life, the Universe become a succession of illusions, knowledge becomes an untouchable mirage and dogmas take the place of all natural inner faith. But those who submit and believe in all this and in nothing else believe this is the only truth and become eternal prisoners of their beliefs.

     Some of those who uttered and / or wrote those texts were real and even exceptional human beings, because they were truly good in their souls and in their lives. The way they lived, their principles, ideas and ideals demonstrated that (the Jewish prophets, Jesus (also a Jew from Israel), Buddha, Lao Tse, and many others). But what may we say about those who were dishonest, cruel, autocratic, slavers, killers and demanded their followers to be and do the same? Should anyone take their words as representative of god’s being and will and follow their teachings and commands? That would be absurd and evil. And yet that’s precisely what happened and still happens in Islam.

     Some “holy books” also prescribe ways of thinking and living using imaginary stories or episodes of the life of a particular person (a prophet, a saint, a wiseman or wisewoman…). Many of those stories are really instructive, make us reflect upon our own choices and actions; sometimes, even when the characters act wrongly, the purpose is sublime or just point the best way to act in some practical situations. But the entire subjacent moral in these stories is of a religious and ethical kind. The values and actions defended are considered good because someone assumed that was god’s will and decision. And many of those values and actions are actually good by universal ethical standards of any culture and time. But what can we say when those examples and teachings impose to people barbaric values, actions and the total disrespect for humankind?

     By any dignifying human standards of the present, or even of the past of many civilizations, Muhammad would be considered a very despicable individual. I don’t need to enunciate here in detail his destructive actions and teachings; anyone can read several biographies by very different authors. And the Quran, with its 114 Surah, and the Hadith (teachings and sayings of the prophet), are available in many languages, printed and online. You just have to read them (choose the most accurate and impartial not the apologetic) to draw your own conclusions. Only Islamic authors will show a positive image of Muhammad, his actions and his teachings, justifying his crimes as legitimate and as being the manifestation of god’s will. How can anyone perfectly reasonable defend such a character and follow his teachings was always a mystery to me. I began to read a lot about religions when I was around 12-year-old and already then it was evident to me how “un-divine” and destructive Islam was in its essence. And my attitude wasn’t unilateral because I also had and have many objections to other religions. Later, I read the Quran and several biographies of Muhammad, by several authors and in different languages. I was still trying to understand how it was possible that any reasonable human being would follow such a “religion”.

     It took me some time to understand that after all Islam wasn’t even a religion, was a political ideology that uses god and religion to achieve its purposes: control, manipulate, conquer and dominate the world with its perverse autocratic religious form of governing peoples and nations. In the present I see the addicted followers of Islam as some kind of brainwashed prisoners that accept totally their condition of mental prisoners (a kind of “self mental autocracy”) and want to impose that same way of living to the rest of the world. That’s their model of perfection and happiness!

     It is disturbing to verify that Islamic values really correspond to what its holy book prescribes (in all the 30 existing versions written along 100 years starting at least 150 years after the death of the “prophet”) and that no reform was made to make it fairer and human. Or at least the religious leaders should declare that a holy book can’t be taken literally. But why should Islam be reformed if it is so convenient for rulers just like it is? While there’s thirst of autocratic power and there’s still some oil in the Islamic countries most probably no reform will be done. Other reason to this petrified state of Islam teachings and morality has to do with the ignorance of Quran itself. The direct knowledge of Quran, through reading, is even worse than the knowledge of the Bible in the Middle Ages in Europe. The great majority of Islamic followers are illiterate; they can’t even read the Quran, at least in Arabic, they just know Islam by hearsay and clerics preachments. They believe and follow what they hear, no matter how absurd and barbaric it is. So, the holy book of Islam is like a mirage: it exists but it isn’t really known.

     Would you blindly follow any fiction book whose author tells you that its content is a direct revelation of the “words of god” even without reading it?

     The radical leaders and their uncritical and loyal servants and followers use everything to achieve their purpose, mainly terror and killing as prescribed in their holy book. And to complete this circle of manipulation, civil laws reproduce the religious dogmas and stay unchangeable, the sharia law. Religious cruel laws shape and control by force the lives of believers and unbelievers under an Islamic regime. And this mad model is presented to the world as the only perfect society. As if terror did ever lead to anything good, to any real and lasting “victory” or a sane and peaceful society. But nothing of that is surprising because that was precisely the way Islam was born: jihad, the holy war against the infidel, was the first main imposition of the prophet. He practiced it himself killing those who wouldn’t submit, what makes the prophet just a warlord and his ideology a cult of war and death.

     Some analysts and historians call this strategy the “political Islam”. Well, anyone who really knows a little bit of Islam History knows that Islam was a political ideology from the beginning, very similar to any other dictatorial ideology, with or without the personal cult of a leader (Nazism / Hitler, Bolshevism / Leninism / Stalinism, Maoism / Mao Tse Tung, Fascism / Mussolini, “North Koreanism” / Kim Jong Un, “Chavism” / Hugo Chávez, “Madurism” / Nicolás Maduro, Castrism” / Fidel Castro, Putinism / Vladimir Putin…). It is not irrelevant that Hitler admired Islam so much and considered Christianity the religion of the “weak”, because Islam knew how to make war and kill, and Christianism preferred peace and coexistence, at least in his essence and origin… the Inquisition and the systematic pogroms against Jews proved the opposite. Islam and the Russian totalitarianism are also in the root of “Palestinianism”, a pernicious farce formally and publicly created in 1964 by the Russians and Yasser Arafat (PLO), a virus-idea that keeps killing until the present. Before Arafat, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, became a friend and ally of Hitler and asked him to help to install some kind of extermination camps of Jews in Israel, the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and all over the Middle East. Considering the chronology, one may even assume that Amin al-Husayni, the first founder of “Palestinianism” point the way to Hitler in what concerns the Final Solution. Those camps weren’t built probably because Hitler was too busy exterminating the Jews who were living in Europe.

Monsters by Herbert Pagani, 1964.

MEMRI TV Compilation Of Imams In The West Espousing Anti-Christian Hate & Islamic-Inspired Supremacy

Australian Imams And Islamic Scholars Glorify Jihad Against Jews, Infidels, 'Enemies Of Allah'

DROPLETS

 

The measure of blue

Pushed by the wind

The clouds bend
And open a vast road above
Since the blue beyond is immeasurable
The road is infinite.
No matter how small and weak
The wings of the birds may be
Each flight is a step in the infinite road…

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

The chant of the clouds

From where I’m standing
The storm is surrendering
The rage becomes a chant
And the hard rain
Delays its fury
Suspended above…

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

Resting in the harbour

I carry a lighthouse in my soul
And a ship in my mind
As an old sailor
I know the only one
Who can take me down
Is the large ocean
And the oblivion of return…

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

The author within

I found a seed inside a flower
And a flower inside a hand
And a hand inside a mind
And a mind inside a book
Then, the endless sowing
And cropping began
The more pages I turn
The more seeds I find
And the hidden author within
Is yet to be found…

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

Continuum

The last rays here
Are the first somewhere else.
Light is a continuum
The link between all points
In time and space.

São Ludovino, 1/12/2024

Sunset, photography by São Ludovino.

Expanding Time & Space, photography by São Ludovino.

Don't tolerate the intolerable! - III

 CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

     One of the reasons why Islam tries to paint a reasonable portrait of itself is the fact that in their holy books (Quran and Hadith) we can really find opposite principles: some pointing to relative tolerance and others pointing to the most violent and outrageous intolerance. And again, these contradictions show clearly how this religion had a practical purpose from the beginning. The dogmas and rules were prescribed considering the conquering and governing needs of each moment. Then, since those contradictions were so useful, they remained there to use again and again when they were needed and denied by opposite statements when that was the most suitable.

     About the whitewashing that Islam tries to make with his own warlord prophet and violent holly book, Harry Foundalis points some examples that entirely contradict the fake idea of “religion of peace”. That’s how the large majority of Muslims define their religion (though a great part didn’t even read the Quran or the Hadith) and even many people in the free West. The most part of these didn’t read the Quran or the Hadith too and would never choose to live under an Islamic regime… These contradictions within the Islamic scriptures are especially convenient when Muslims try to demonstrate that Islamic terror and the Islamic State (ISIS) have nothing to do with Islam! They cut a specific verse from the context and hide the rest that would deny it. In Islam, is very easy to find contradictions not only between theory and practice but within the same holy Islamic scriptures.

     «(…) What Muslims do not ever reveal to non-muslims are all those other verses of the Qur’an that make it abundantly clear that the Muslim should fight (do jihad, in Arabic) until all other religions disappear and “religion is all for Allah”; such as this one:

Qur’an 8:39: “So, fight them [the disbelievers] until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.”

Qur’an 9:5: “And when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the pagans wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

     In other words, slay the pagans until they change their religion. If they do, then stop slaughtering them because then, and only then, Allah remembers how merciful he is!

What about this one?

Qur’an 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

     Translation: Fight against every non-muslim, even Christians and Jews (“the People of the Book”), until they surrender, become your slaves, and pay the special “subdued non-muslim tax” (“jizyah”) to you — those who are not dead already. Unless, of course, they change their religion and become Muslims. (Otherwise, “no compulsion in religion”!)

     What about this excerpt from Sahi al-Bukhari?

Sahi al-Bukhari, V4B53N386:

     “Our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, has ordered us to fight you till you worship Allah alone or pay us the Jizyah (tribute tax); and our Prophet has informed us that our Lord says: ‘Whoever amongst us is killed as a martyr shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen, and whoever survives shall become your master.’ ”

     In other words, warring so that Islam prevails over other religions is the highest priority for Muslims, since whether they die fighting, or survive, Muhammad promised them “a deal they can’t refuse”.

     Of course, there are more:

al-Tabari 9:69

     “Arabs were the first to respond to the call of the Prophet. We are Allah’s helpers and the viziers of His Messenger. We fight people until they believe in Allah. He who believes in Allah and His Messenger has protected his life and possessions from us. As for one who disbelieves, we will fight him forever in the Cause of Allah. Killing him is a small matter to us.”

     And there are many, many more! But let’s not tire the reader with this avalanche of evidence that the Qur’an contradicts its own “no compulsion in religion” multiple times, and that Muhammad himself ordered Muslims to fight non-muslims until they worship Allah or pay the jizyah (tax). And, if you neither become Muslim, nor pay the tax, you are “dead meat”. At least, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and possibly elsewhere, that’s what you are; you are killed, executed. In more “progressive” places, such as the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the 20th C., you would be sent to exile. That’s exactly what happened to my grandfather, who was a Greek born in Talash, Turkey (then Mutalashkee, Ottoman Empire), was living in Kayseri, and married my grandmother in Konya, both large cities of today’s Turkey.»

     About the ISIS conquering plan, the author demonstrates that the aim was exactly the same of the founders of Islam, a large campaign of conquest in the East, West and Africa.

     «(…) Try to understand the idea in the frame above, please, because it has important consequences in our times. You see, Muhammad’s wars and conquests were admired and attempted to be copycatted in our times by the barbarian and murderous hordes of the Islamic State. In 2014, the Islamic State published the following map, depicting the lands that they were dreaming of conquering and subjugating under their horrendously barbaric and inhuman regime, within five years.

Fig. The dream of the Islamic State

     As you can see, the Islamic-State dream was not too different from the actual extension of the 8th-century Umayyad Caliphate (see Fig. above), only somewhat more ambitious. It is a different issue that, by 2018, the Islamic State disappeared from the face of the Earth, and its fighters were largely exterminated. Through the map of Fig. above they managed to depict their futile dreams.»

     The Islamic condemnation of suicide as an immoral crime is in flagrant contradiction with the defense of suicide bombings, even when the bombers are just children. Suicide is considered morally wrong but suicide bombings to kill innocent people, that they call “infidels”, is considered right for a large number of Muslims.

     There’s also a shocking contradiction between the supposed protection of children and the use of children as human shields and as suicidal bombers. It seems that children are only important to be indoctrinated and become future soldiers of Allah!

     The opinion of a majority of Muslim about “suicide bombings” is very elucidating about what they consider justifiable doing to achieve their purposes (Islamize the world and punish the infidels for not being as barbaric as they are).

Suicide Bombing

     «When Muslims are asked whether suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilian targets can be justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies, few in the countries surveyed say that this form of violence is often or sometimes justified, and support has generally diminished in the last decade. Still, significant minorities of Muslims in a few countries do hold the view that it can be justified.

     In the Middle East, support for suicide bombing is highest in the Palestinian territories, where 46% of Muslims say that it is often or sometimes justified in order to defend Islam. Support is particularly high among Muslims in Gaza (62%) versus those in the West Bank (36%).

     In Lebanon, 29% of Muslims say targeting civilians is justified. This includes 37% of Shia Muslims but only 21% among Sunni Muslims. Meanwhile, a quarter or less of Muslims in Egypt (24%), Turkey (18%), Israel (16%) and Jordan (15%) say suicide bombing is often or sometimes justified. Among Tunisian Muslims, only 5% say this.

     Nearly half of Bangladeshi Muslims (47%) believe suicide bombing can be justified. This is much higher than the 18% of Muslims in Malaysia who say the same. In Indonesia and Pakistan, countries which have been rocked by suicide bombings in the past decade, one-in-ten Muslims or less say that targeting civilians is often or sometimes justified (9% and 3%, respectively).

     More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and after hundreds of high profile attacks on civilians, the percentage of Muslims who say suicide bombing is often or sometimes justified has fallen in many of the countries surveyed. For instance, in 2002, 74% of Lebanese Muslims said suicide bombing was often or sometimes justified. But in the wake of well-publicized attacks, such as the 2005 assassination of Prime Minister Hariri, support has fallen to just 29% today.»

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/07/01/concerns-about-islamic-extremism-on-the-rise-in-middle-east/

- https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2005/07/14/islamic-extremism-common-concern-for-muslim-and-western-publics/

     These data don’t include ISIS actions and the Islamic attacks in Europe in 2015 and after (France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Austria, etc.)