hi, an interesting piece published in today's economic times is attached. regards.
CO S M I C U P LI N K Knowledge is always a safe bet MUKUL SHARMA RECENT research conducted in the US by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that Americans are often woefully ignorant not only of other religions, but about their own faith, too. (Turns out that the Florida pastor Terry Jones who had threatened to burn copies of the Koran in September had neither read the book nor knew what was in it.) Yet, somehow, the finding doesn’t strike one as something very startling, does it? No, because the same thing’s true anywhere. What seems surprising, however, is the research also discovered that atheists and agnostics are actually better informed about the religious world than even the über-faithful Mormons and orthodox Jews. So is that startling news now? Not really. One way to look at it is to believe that only by knowing about something can one combat it or reject it as the case may be, whereas ignorance is at best a static force. The New Testament informs us that Satan knew his Bible backwards and in fact was quoting from Scripture when he told Jesus to throw himself down because (according to Psalm 91:11) “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.” More than 2,500 years ago, a Chinese military treatise written by Sun Tsu, which is known today as The Art of War, said the same thing. “Know the enemy,” wrote Tsu, “as only then is it possible to fight a hundred battles.” Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the Africa Theatre of action during the Second World War where the German general Erwin Rommel came within an inch of hammering the Allied British forces before he was vastly outnumbered and his supply chain broke down. One of the main reasons he could make such stupendous headway was because he had studied the enemy well — a fact the British were acutely aware of since they constantly referred to the man as the “Desert Fox”. Does this mean non-believers are evil? No. What it means is, evil has to be very knowledgeable in order to exist whereas good is not necessarily so. So far, good has prevailed in the world only because of the tremendous strength of might behind it and with the weight of force. Obviously, this needs to change if the war has to be reinvented. What did Jesus say when Satan quoted Scripture? He said: “Again it is written, you shall not test the Lord your God.” He quoted Scripture against Satan’s use of it, demonstrating that he knew the Bible much better than him.
