Three Deities

I feel it is no coincidence—after all my intentions not to be here—that I should be speaking on this particular day about a particular event that happened some years ago. I refer to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Arundhati Roy is asked these days, as the unthinkable is being thought and the talk of nuclear war swirls around her, "Why don't you leave Delhi?" She answers,

If I go away, and everything and everyone—every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved—is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love? My friends and I discuss Prophecy, the documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fireball. The dead bodies choking the river. The living stripped of skin and hair. The singed, bald children, still alive, their clothes burned into their bodies. The thick, black, toxic water. The scorched, burning air. The cancers implanted genetically, a malignant letter to the unborn. We remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of a building. We imagine ourselves like that. As stains on staircases. I imagine future generations of hushed schoolchildren pointing at my stain ... that was a writer. Not She or He. That.

She adds, "The very notion that war is an acceptable solution to terrorism has ensured that terrorists in the subcontinent now have the power to trigger a nuclear war."

World War I, dubbed the "war to end all wars," gave way to another world war. And today we are faced with the numbing thought that the last "bomb to end all bombs" at Nagasaki may yet give way to the bomb to end all life. Roy says that whether nuclear bombs are used or not, "they violate everything that is humane. They alter the meaning of life itself. Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate these men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?"

I was in Nagasaki in June this year and thought of the pilot who flew overhead that day in 1945. In an interview, Captain Sweeney used the word pretty to describe Nagasaki. One novelist, calling it the "Naples of the Orient," wrote, "Nagasaki overwhelms one with its beauty and serenity. It is a town of stone roads, mud walls, old temples, cemeteries and giant trees." Captain Sweeney said it was the greatest thrill of his life when he dropped the bomb.

There is a thrill in murder. There is a thrill in war. It is not just the certifiably insane who feel this. The lust for blood continues unabated in the human condition. But like parents of murdered children being faced after years with the release of their murderers, we must face again the appetite for war, the fears that feed it, the hunger for vengeance. It is fresh blood the dogs of war demand. At what point do we come to know that the blood we taste and drink is our own and that of those we love?

Hans Kung states that in our striving for peace, we should begin with religion. "Peace among the religions" he says, "is the prerequisite for peace among the nations." In our religious mythologies, we find sources of both violence and peace.

The three deities of this talk are, first, the god who demands all; second, the goddess who grants mercy; and, third, the deity who promises abundance.

The religion in which I grew up was Christianity. The god of my childhood was the god of Abraham, the god of the patriarchs, a god who demanded all. Like us, Abraham found himself in a world of death and suffering. In such a world, his god promised him abundance—as many descendants as there are stars in the sky. This was to be through Abraham's two main sons—Ishmael, his eldest, born of the servant Hagar, and Isaac, the child of his wife, Sarah. Although Ishmael and Isaac lived as rivals, when Abraham died they buried their father together, as brothers.

Today, three great faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—claim...