Ego - or rather a lack of it - may be our main problem as well

The following analysis totally resonated... despite the differences between the author and myself with regards to nationality and religion. Read on:

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Anyway. You’re born and bred and raised to not see who you are for what you are, but rather for where you live, what family you come from, [what sect you're from, in the case of Lebanon], who your friends are, what school you went to…you get the picture. We consistently try to find comfort for our own failures either in God’s will (baree2 menkom ya kafara), the country, the government, Israel, the States, the devil, the neighbours, the ‘others’, the rich, the poor, the martians [... the Jumblatts, the Hariris, the Aouns, the Nasrallahs ...] age, grey hair, bad teeth or any combination of the above. It’s a natural by product of a culture that promotes a total and unabated and unashamed obliteration of the ego, or, in simpler terms, any sense of self. Arabs have no ego. They have a hyper-ego. An ego linked through a common language, culture, colour, region and religion.

And here is where we start having serious issues. Mainstream Islam is a convenient platform to promote and reinforce this hyper-ego. You get goodie points for telling others to obey God. God will love you more if you pray with them. Although Islam has an abundancy of guidelines and deliberations on the relationship between the person and his or her God, the cultural, climatic and historical aspects of Arabia pushed all of that into the shadows, simply because an inflated ego would be not only prove detrimental to the survival of the tribe, but also borderline suicide to that particular individual.

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