God is Greater

I wrote this in 2002 as a rebuke to religious fundamentalism of any kind.

We’re fighting against the nons, but why all the violent brutality?
If you’d read the entire Book, it would change your gang mentality.
We’re battling against the uns, we’re even warring with each other,
If you trace it all the way back, you’d see that I’m your brother.

We’re all in a long race, working hard to cross the finish,
If we could just work together, we’d be sure to make the distance.
Instead we’re knocking each other down, fulfilling Satan’s whisper,
If you’d open up your heart, you’d see that she’s your sister.

If I’m a weak Muslim and you’re a righteous Jew,
Of course I’m going to heaven but most definitely not you.
God is Greater, God is Greater.
All except the Christians, are pre-destined for hell,
Might as well throw in the Mormons, and the Catholics in as well.
God is Wiser, God is the Loving.
Even if we accept Abraham’s Three, we must reject the rest,
They haven’t made the grade, name one man who passed the test.
God is the All Embracing, God is the Gatherer.
He is the Best Creator and he made us all one family,
So we could know one another, and finish our story in harmony.
God is Everlasting Mercy, God is Infinite Compassion.

I thought our job was to help our brother and to be his witness,
Not to fight against him, just because we see some difference.
That wise son of Mary took a simple lesson off the shelf,
He said love God with all you have, and your brother as yourself.

Was he the only one to teach this Truth, to pass it down to us?
When you do your homework, you’ll find many others to discuss.
His brothers and sisters have been saying this all through the ages,
You’d know this if you’d listened to the Great One, and his saints and sages.

It would definitely be much better, if you other folks weren’t around,
We would have a pure group, and we could wear the crown.
God is the King of kings, God is the Lord of lords.
You think that you’re better, and that you’ve got the Whole Truth,
Don’t poke out my eye, when I only struck your tooth.
God is the Best Judge, God is the Most Fair.
When we love each other and treat God as the Most High,
Then we can’t fail to see the plank in our own eye.
God is the Forgiver, God is the Patient.
Then we can take it out, but not beat our neighbor with the wood,
We can use it to build a plowshare, and both sow something good.
God is the Source of Peace, God is the Bestower.

We’ve got to all come together and understand that we are connected,
Don’t you remember when we were brought out of Adam all perfected?
We’re all waiting on the Messiah, to gather us together at Mount Zion,
But if we can’t learn to love each other, why would the lamb lay down with the lion?

There are many ways to worship God, but only one God to worship,
We may be on different paths, but we’re all taking the same trip.
Your God, my God, his God, the truth is they’re all the same One,
When we come to know one God of all mankind, the race we will have won.

God could have made us all one group, could have made us all one nation,
But if we were all the same, we could never fall in to temptation.
God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest.
Believe in God and the Last Day, and compete in doing good deeds,
The judgment belongs to God, you can’t see what the scoreboard reads.
God is the Guide, God is the Light.
the final return for all is to God, at the end He’ll tell us how we did ,
Success wasn’t getting rid of our brother, our own evil we must have rid.
God is all Aware, God is the Witness.
I’m taking a stand that we can’t keep fighting and killing each other,
and since I’ve learned that God is Love, I love you as my brother.
God is Greater, God is Greater. There is no god but God.

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About Ian Benouis

Ian is a West Point graduate, former US Army officer, Blackhawk helicopter pilot and combat veteran. He is Patient Number One for the Mission Within which treats special operators with PTSD, TBI and addiction using iboga and toad in Mexico. Ian has been helping wounded veterans for over 7 years. Ian has moderated numerous veteran’s panels including the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in 2018 in Austin and the Bufo Congress in 2019 in Mexico City. He has founded an ONAC church chapter which was later returned to the parent church. He is a founder of a Santo Daime church which is the US chapter of a Brazilian government approved church and has founded a number of other medicine churches in the US with his law partner Greg Lake. Ian participated in Operation Just Cause in the Republic of Panama. This operation was the largest combat operation in US history focused directly on the War on Drugs and was the largest special operations deployment ever conducted. He was a pilot-in-command and his aviation brigade flew more night vision goggle hours than any unit in the military except for the Task Force 160 Special Operations which his unit was ultimately rolled up into when the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California military base was shut down. Ian grew up in Hawaii in the 1970’s where cannabis was decriminalized and fully integrated in to the culture. He has been healing himself for over 30 years with sacred plants, a spiritual practice, and being a student and practitioner of ethnobotany. Ian was a pharmaceutical representative for Pfizer after he got out of the Army witnessing firsthand the meteoric rise of the SSRI’s and synthetic opioids in the early 1990’s. He is a casualty of the drug war having been arrested for cannabis while in law school. Ian is an intellectual property attorney who has been working in the corporate world for over 20 years in the primary roles of VP of Sales and Marketing and General Counsel. He is a political activist in the cannabis and natural plant medicine space nationally and locally in Texas. Ian was previously the Chairman of the Board for a public policy foundation in Texas for over seven years. Ian was featured in the Spike Jonze produced episode Stoned Vets on Weediquette the cannabis focused series on Viceland on HBO with a number of other veterans protesting the VA’s policy on medical cannabis and trying to end the veteran suicide epidemic. In 2016 Ian organized a trip for six veterans with PTSD to Peru in May for a 10-day plant diet including ayahuasca and other plant medicines with three Shipibo trained shaman brothers that are third generation plant medicine healers. Ian also took some of the same veterans to Mexico for treatment with iboga and 5-Meo-DMT. This experience was captured on video and was released as a documentary in March 2017 entitled Soldiers of the Vine. He is member of the team supporting the movie From Shock to Awe a feature-length documentary that chronicles the journeys of military veterans as they seek relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of ayahuasca, MDMA and cannabis. This movie premiered at the Illuminate Film Festival in Sedona, AZ on June 2, 2018 where it captured the inaugural Mangurama Award for Conscious Documentary Storytelling. Ian Benouis’ Drug War Story as part of Psymposia’s Drug War Stories – Catharsis on the Mall: A Vigil for Healing the Drug War. This was part of the Drug Policy Reform Conference November 20, 2016 in Washington, DC.