Offensive religion and signs of hope. Not a story; just a scandal.

A friend recently attended a women's meeting at a nearby church and was told something I hadn't heard of. They had been addressed by a representative of the Red Cross. She informed me that the Red Shield of David had been replaced by a Red Crystal. This was something I had never come across before and thought it would be worth following up. 

Click on 'Read more for the rest of the article and images. For some reason Google /Blogger won't display them with all the other posts.

It turned out to be old news, but old news that had not surfaced in the mainstream media and, unless one was paying close attention, not much anywhere else. Furthermore, what she had been told wasn't strictly accurate - or was it?

If you Google 'Magen David Adom' and look at the images, and, in some cases, click on the associated links,you will get one version of the story. If you Google 'International Red Cross' and click on the images, it all looks a bit different.

  I found this on Magen David Adom.

On the images for ICRC, I found a variety of images shown below:

 

The rather stunned looking Lion and Sun is Iranian and apparently hardly used. Have you ever seen the Cross and Crescent inside the 'Crystal'? It's a crystal because diamond offends the South Africans due to Apartheid.

It would seem that the red ribbon, cross and crescent are signs of hope. Which leaves one asking whether the other symbols are not signs of hope?

In theory, we should be seeing stuff like this: ->

In practice, I don't recall seeing much of this sort of thing.

These days we see this one in combination with assorted other symbols.

This one is part pagan in origin if you see the centre symbol as the staff of Aesculapius. Or you could see it as the  bronze serpent lifted up in the Wilderness. And also here.

Perhaps we should keep quiet about those connections, after all one thing is clear from all this:

All religions can be offensive, but one religion is more offensive than all the others. 

As I state in the headline, this is not news. But it is a scandal. A scandal because it never should have had to happen in the first place and because it has slipped past most of us without our noticing. This is, of course, not an accident. Now we have reached the point where a Red Cross UK representative can, possibly in all innocence, inform a church group that the Red Crystal has replaced the Red Shield of David.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and we have a lot of catching up to do.