Would God ever damn America? Is there anything we have done or could do as a nation that might court such severe judgment from an almighty, or is there a peculiar American exemption from God’s wrath? The prediction of God’s damnation for bad behavior is made in both black and white churches.
One authority on such matters, the Rev. Pat Robertson, didn’t think the latter when he blamed the ravaging effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Lord’s retribution against those who “shed innocent blood.” Robertson’s reference to legalized abortion cited a passage from Leviticus that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright also might have been thinking of when he sermonized: “The government … wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” a reference to African-Americans sacrificed on ghetto streets.
While the “innocents” about whom they spoke are different, the scriptural reference seems to be the same. As Robertson put it, in a statement preserved in a video clip posted on the Internet by Media Matters: “I was reading yesterday … about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood … ‘the land will vomit you out,’ ” which he related to attacks “either by terrorists or now by natural disaster.”
Robertson, a firm ally of Republican administrations, has not always been warm to the presumed GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, although the two recently mended their strained relationship. However, in this season of pastor-baiting, McCain has his own problem, having expressed his thrill in receiving “the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee.”
Hagee, citing a planned “homosexual parade,” had previously told National Public Radio that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment of the people of New Orleans for “a level of sin that was offensive to God.” Obviously, the almighty with whom Hagee is on intimate terms is in need of MapQuest, given that New Orleans’ gay neighborhoods were among the ones least impacted by the hurricane.
Hagee long has been denounced by Catholics for labeling the Vatican “The Great Whore” and blaming Hitler’s genocidal policies on his having “attended a Catholic school as a child.” An Hagee issue that has some current relevance to the Iraq disaster is his blasting of the Roman Catholic Church for sponsoring the Crusades, which “plunged the world into the Dark Ages.”
In a warning that imperial adventures lose some of their luster with the passage of time, Hagee wrote in his book “Jerusalem Countdown”: “The brutal truth is that the Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ killers on the road to and from Jerusalem.” What will future theologians say about George W. Bush’s crusade to liberate Iraq, shedding the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents?
I know what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would say were he alive today, for it would be consistent with his denunciation of the Vietnam War in a sermon at New York’s Riverside Church a year before his assassination. Recounting his difficulty in spreading the message of nonviolence and personal responsibility to the very ghetto youths that the Rev. Wright has worked with for four decades, King stated, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
King delivered that speech the year Wright ended his six years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy, for which he received three commendations from President Lyndon Johnson, whom King was confronting. No doubt Wright was influenced by King’s oratory decrying “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens … in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” And neither could Wright.
I respect Barack Obama’s right to repudiate his pastor’s comments, as he did, but I respect even more his refusal to throw the man overboard in a practice we witnessed all too often with the Clintons when they came under right-wing attacks. Hillary did it again Tuesday, telling the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board that Wright “would not have been my pastor.” So she says, but the record shows she was there in the White House on Sept. 11, 1998, when her husband posed for a photo with the Rev. Wright and was grateful for his support in the midst of that wrath-of-Leviticus blue dress flap. Ingrate.
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
© 2008 TruthDig.com
Some how the universe is to huge for a God to care about paltry little humans…on the other hand, Jermiah told the truth when he listed what White Rich Americans have done… And America needs to grow up and look at its faults…this is from a white almost elderly woman…
All of the above is only a very small slice of the sum reason why thinking women and men steer clear of organized religions altogether. Every pulpit on earth straddles an open sewer.
Substantially amusing and relevant to PRINCIPLES involved, in both occasions.
¿ Can we all please just laugh HARD at these foolish people, until they just go away ?
I am not free to speak the truth as I know it on this issue.
Obviously Stilba hasn’t attended any of the many progressive houses of worship located in every city in this country! Martin Luther King straddling an open sewer? Bill Moyers? James A. Forbes, Jr.?, William Sloane Coffin? I could continue with a long list of just those with whom I am familiar, who speak or have spoken from the pulpits of America. I am no great lover of the fundamentalist movement in all religions, but it is categorically unfair to “thinking women and men” to paint all who speak from pulpits with the same brush!
It’s that old notion, as old as our country’s history, that America (properly, the United States of America) is God’s “most favored nation.” To say that one doesn’t believe this always causes kneejerk rage and denunciation of the “How dare he” variety. My fellow Americans get madder about this (and collateral issues like not wearing flag lapel pins and not saluting the national anthem fervently enough) than almost anything else. It is not debatable to them. To question the notion that God loves American way better than anyone else is, to them, the ultimate affront.
But I think if God exists and is truly fair, he (she or it) ought to maybe cut back on blessing America and spread a little around to the rest of humanity.
oakport, a thousand good deeds or words does not atone for one murder. Why did MLK and a lot of other very smart folks retain any connection to the vile, absurd, anti-progressive church (or any of its near-infinite facets)? Maybe because that’s where the audience is. Progressive house of worship? - that’s an oxymoron. All organized religion is fundamentalist when you get down to it. By necessity, their nature is totalitarian, tribal, and tradional. I agree, that kind of thinking sounds great when it’s on your side.
Please explain to us how this is not the case. I’m completely open to to it, but the more I look, the dirtier religion gets. Just like the Dems and the Repubs, the sky-god religions should be abandoned for better ideas.
lightning struck a caveman in the ass
he saw a way to turn his burn to cash
he told the others they would get it too
unless they did just what he told them to
yeah god’s on my side don’t you fuck with me
he’s in my basement doing carpentry
I may be a fanatic with a complex
but god’s on hand to cosign all my paychecks
and in the cloistered closets of New Rome
the pointy hatted priests gnaw on their bones
the dusky fella’s gods are buried deep
there’ll be no more stealing of the sheep
God has already damned America with two terms of Bush/Cheney treachery.
If everyone would quit listening to preachers, I am confident the body count would drop. If God exists, s/he has a lot of explaining to do, starting with “Why do you have such crackpot idiots working for you?”
I guess white voters just don’t like to know what many black folks think of them? For the past decade or two we have constantly heard that race no longer truly exists in America. We, the white folks, gave MLK a nice Monday holiday in January to commemorate his birth which should have closed the books. And all that affirmative action stuff - so we’re told - is just ripping off the deserving many to benefit the undeserving few.
Oh yes, white rage is so noble and uplifting. Blacks should get on line with all the rest of us, so they tell us. There is no color in America.
Is there an element of race fear in all this? Are some white brothers and sisters terrified by the likes of the Reverend Wright with his fiery oratory? “God damn America?” Doesn’t it matter that he has felt and lived white racism in his bones, throughout much of his life? That the job is unfinished? Doesn’t he have a right to anger too?
Can’t our white brothers and sisters understand? Can’t they see? And now Hillary apes the right with her “He would not have been my pastor You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend” comment.
This, from the wife of the first “black president?” Taking her lines from the rightwing’s playbook? Whose side is Hillary on anyway? (Besides her own? And Bill’s possibly?) That expanse between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh must indeed be “Alabama.” The woman is so shameless that she doesn’t even attempt to express the least understanding of where the Reverend Wright comes from. Which, were she not more interested in seeking an advantage, would go far in improving the national understanding of race relations. Help starting, perhaps, a dialogue.
There is greatness in Obama. As Toni Morrison said, we ignore him at our peril.
In all fairness it should be pointed out that although Bill Moyers defined religion as “the search for God” on his PBS TV show, belief in God is not a tenet of Buddhism. The Buddha’s answer to the God question is that if there were a god, he/she would share the same delusions as any self-aware consciousness. Religious pronouncements should be considered in light of their morality of reciprocity, i.e. the Golden Rule. In the East the Golden Rule is understood as: All things are permitted, except those things that one would not wish done to himself. (Do not do what you would not have others do unto you.) The Christian version of the Golden Rule stipulates that you should do good to others and that which you consider good for yourself is an adequate yardstick. (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.) Christianism invites the delusion of self-righteousness into the equation for the discernment of evil. It is no wonder we circle such issues indecisively forever – until we are drawn down the drain.
Any religion (as commonly referred to) that does not repudiate out of hand the killing and maiming of millions - MILLIONS - of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis is not a religion.
In all of the “bibles,” God does not damn or bless countries, he damns or blesses people who happen to be living in certain places at certain times, no matter what said people have decided to call said places.
All religions play by the “rules,” just like, say, the NFL. Out of bounds IS ALWAYS out of bounds. Offsides IS ALWAYS offsides. Killing millions of innocents IS ALWAYS killing of innocents. Period. God’s “rules” do not allow for “collateral damage, and they are not relative to whether one agrees with the killer of innocents’ stance on abortion and tax cuts.
IOW, all of your Gods have one thing in common - the original Zero Tolerance Law: no killing innocents ever. If your particular religion does not agree with and adhere to God’s Zero Tolerance Law, then you need to find a new one.
“Why did MLK and a lot of other very smart folks retain any connection to the vile, absurd, anti-progressive church (or any of its near-infinite facets)?”
I’d guess they did so because, for them, there were non-vile, non-absurd, progressive elements in their respective faith traditions, and not just because it afforded them a large audience.
“All organized religion is fundamentalist when you get down to it. By necessity, their nature is totalitarian, tribal, and tradional.”
Wow. That’s a big claim. Care to back it up with evidence? Most claims beginning with “ALL…” require a LOT of evidence. Religions have been responsible for a good deal of nasty shit over the last few millennia, but they’re also responsible for a variety of positive developments too (in the arts, architecture, literature, philosophy, etc.)
I understand your hostility toward religion per se, I really do, particularly since I grew up in a REAL fundamentalist Christian home (and not merely the pseudo-fundamentalism you equate with religion per se). But it does no one any good when progressive folks of a non-religious stripe alienate progressive folks of a religious stripe, or vice-versa.
JBPM - “All organized religion is fundamentalist when you get down to it”.
Answer this: Does Christianity include the rule that if you do not believe in the god as defined in the Bible you will go to hell? If it does include that rule, and you call yourself a Christian, and believe the bible is THE book of Christianity, whether you’re a fundie or liberal, then you believe there is a class of people who deserve to die and go to hell. You can spin it any way you want…that’s not progressive.
In fact, if you hold that belief (that non-believers go to hell), but also hold that we should be inclusive regardless of race, religion, etc. then you’re more hypocritical than a fundie. At least they don’t hide their hate behind liberal-sounding talk.
Down here in New Orleans we still had the parade anyway.
Even after the storm.
And my house was fine.
OK something started the stars burning and the planets spinning.. even science knows ya can’t get something from nothing.
However when a group claims to have the inside track to the , ah.. lets call it the ” prime mover”.. i get mighty suspicious.
Most religions i have had a look at claim ”god is on our side” ok who is lying?
When there is NO religion, good people do good things and bad people do bad things… but when good people do bad things guess what ..there is a religion
Dave Dubya wrote: “God has already damned America with two terms of Bush/Cheney treachery.”
Exactly.
To damn a person or a country you have to believe there is a just God.
We are conditioned to believe that good triumphs over evil. In practice the good lose over half the time.
goddam the busher man.
Re: THE PARTY OF TURD BLOSSOM / FOLLOWED BY A MOONHAGEE
…Oh, I’m bein followed by a MoonHagee, MoonHagee, MoonHagee,
leapin and hoppin on a MoonHagee, MoonHagee MoonHagee…
“NO!” ‘EM –BY THEIR FRUITS:
THE GOP’S FAUX PROPHET WAR PHARISEES
PULPIT NONFICTION …FOR A CHANGE
RE:PUBLICAN—ON GOD & COUNTRY: AGGREGATED GESTALT
FOREIGN & DOMESTIC ASSAULT
AND DINGBATTERY (INCLUDED)
…THERE’$ THE RUB —NEW WRAPTURIAN$…
THE CHEESY MONKEY$ OF HOUSE BUSHELZEBUB
From http://buzzflash.com :
The Right’s billionaire anti-American pastor calls us the “Kingdom of Satan”
http://www.gorenfeld.net/john/?p=17
And what Hellbent Vision Thing,
its Truthless Power come round at last,
$louches towards Liberty to be Borne?
THE DEVIL WEARS COULTER –BIGtime
I AM THE FATHER OF LIES. I AM THE GREAT DECEIVER.
MY BULLY PULPIT IS “INSTALLED”–I SCREW THEM IN LIKE LIGHTBULBS
“Believer” by “Believer…”
Dobson. Falwell, Robertson, Haggard…
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3354/81/
posted–comment 7
I don’t know if I’d use the word “conditioned” ezeflyer. Maybe we’re compelled, through the fact of our cognizant existance to seek security. Not nurture, but nature.
Senator Clinton declares that Rev. Wright “would not have been [her] pastor,” characterizing his clearly critical and passionate comments on America as “hate speech.” Clinton asserts that while one can’t choose one’s family, one can choose which church to attend and that walking out is always an option.
One wonders whether Clinton would also have walked out when Frederick Douglass asked, “what to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” and concluded that “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Would Clinton have also walked away at that Fourth of July speech in 1854 when the great abolitionist minister from Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison, set fire to a copy of the U.S. Constitution, calling it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell?”
Had she been on the scene, Senator Clinton would no doubt have denounced both Douglass’s and Garrison’s impassioned rhetoric as “hate speech” too.
But that was the past. America clearly has no need for ministers who speak in the prophetic voice anymore.
— Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Barbara Ehrenreich puts it just right in showing Hilary Rodham Klanton’s backing of a “pastorate” which was tight with Nazis, Nazi oriented types, and other far right/loony right gangsters.
Were I in the British House of Commons, where I might be were I on the island of Britain, home of my ancestors, as it hasn’t near the bias against working class people, and were I to debate Klanton, I might ask, “Would my ‘right honorable friend,’ (this is always a tip as to where things are headed) agree that she is a slimy excuse of a human being who has so strongly supported a religious clique that backs Nazis, pro Nazi criminals and other assorted scum and is actually lower than the excrement of Enoch Powell, that well known British racist, whose own party, thanks to Harold MacMillan, then leader of that party and prime minister disowned for Powell’s low life racism which he had poured into the British body politic so poisonously’?
The hate-America fringe of the internet can’t stop applauding Jeremiah Wright and his disciple Barack Obama.”
Comparing MLK to Jeremiah Wright is a new low even for desperate Obama supporters like Robert Scheer.
Barack Obama preaching racial harmony AFTER he was outted by ABC is about as dignified as Eliot Spitzer preaching marital fidelity AFTER he was caught with a hooker.
When did God ever bless America? I know many Americans claim that blessing, but I can’t remember God ever mentioning it.
Look at it this way. Back in the Old Testiment, God declared the Israelites as his ‘chosen people’. But, then along came Jesus with a new message. And that new message was that God’s blessing was now available to everyone. Jesus didn’t teach about a new chosen people. He said love every man as your brother because they all are in the eyes of God.
So, when exactly did God bless America? I can’t recall him ever saying anything about that. In fact he seems to have said very clearly that he was out of that business 2000 years ago.
One thing about this whole debate bothers me. Its the assumption that just because someone sits in a church pew and listens to a preacher, that they are automatically in agreement with everything that the preacher says.
Back in the Joe McCarthy era, this was called ‘guilt by association’. And, as that bit of madness receded, this idea was, for awhile, rejected by the American people.
Seeing the Hillary and her supporters resurrect the ideas and tactics of Joe McCarthy bothers me a great deal more than anything the Rev. Wright might have said. I think the phrase is ‘by their deeds you shall know them.’
Personally, I don’t believe in religion as an institution. And the notion of “god damning” one country and sparing another is one glaring reason for why I feel the way I do. IMHO, the exclusivity of religion is just a ticking time bomb that humanity simply doesn’t need. That said, I get that many people need religion to get them through their day, and I don’t begrudge anyone that at all. In fact, I respect it in those who actually live it and walk the walk, rather than wear it like a lapel pin when it serves a purpose and then spew hateful venom at the woman using coupons and holding up the line at the grocery store. But ultimately my point is this: Obama is actually being the good Christian man he professes to be when he chooses not to banish Rev. Wright from his life. Sure, it would have been a seemingly safer political move to ditch him. But he’s walking the walk. I think it’s that “love the sinner, hate the sin” part of the bible that deals with unconditional love and not judging people? Pretty sure it is what Jesus would do, and I suppose that is one of the many good things Rev. Wright preached. Lots of so-called Christians I know seem to forget that part quite conveniently. But I’ll forgive them.
I think it is ridiculous for anyone to presume to know what people, country, or group “God” has “blessed” or “damned”.
I don’t believe in God, but if he does exist, if he is a “good” god and if he does care for mankind, I doubt he’d be pleased with America. That’s why I find Rev Wright’s statements far less offensive than what comes out of the mouths of Hagee or Robertson. At least Wright gets all worked up over some REAL crimes, unlike the Hagees and Robertsons of the world who get indignant over imaginary “crimes” like homosexuality, not supporting Israel, negotiating with the Arabs, not overthrowing Hugo Chavez, etc. Let’s not forget that they are all too often pro-war(pro-death), but that shouldn’t make getting an endorsement from one of them controversal; only the preachers who don’t want to start more wars should be closely examined and attacked.
It seems to me one of the biggest problems with the Christian right isn’t that they are too “Christian”, but that they are too American. Far beyond a healthy amount of patriotism, they are very often extreme nationalists and even imperialists. Those “humble” right-wing Christians with the huge egos I’ve met would just assume that “God” is on their side.
Why is it that these people don’t realize they are being manipulated?
DAVE DUBYA: You raise an interesting point (LOL).
EZEFLYER: Depends on how much TIME in question, for the wheel of karma turns slowly, often balancing justice over LIFETIMES.
FRANK: I agree. When religion leads the charge to war/killing it departs 180 degrees from what ANY bona fide religion ought do.
Religion, patriotism, nationalism, every “ism” imaginable are human generated abstractions, empty fantasies we use to trick ourselves with meaning. So much nonsense, so much suffering.
How do you get a nun pregnant?
Dress her up as an altar boy.
Friends,
While hitch-hiking around the world — and, four years before I was in India and became a monk — I visited with a tribe in Northern Cameroon who basically wore no clothes and had no ‘religion’. As I have seen in certain other villages on our planet, you would not believe how emotionally and spiritually healthy these people were. About them a French Catholic priest from a nearby town told me: “These so-called ‘pagans’ who everyone looks down upon are more ‘Christian’ than any Christian I have ever known in Europe.” I knew exactly what he meant.
I am going to give you a few quotes from someone in India who, believe-it-or-not, knows what I am thinking and writing at this very moment (no doubt, because of experience):
(1) “There is one religion, the religion of love;
there is one race, the race of humanity;
there is one language, the language of the heart;
there is one God and that God is everwhere for everyone.”
(2) “There is one school — the world;
there is one teacher — God;
there is one book — life.”
(and, we can know our own books as well or as little as we want — in the moment)
(3) “Everyone has their own lock and their own key.”
(4) “You can call yourself an ‘athiest’ — but, when your heart is full of love — you are close to God.”
Bless
When your heart is full of love, let it be. As soon as the mind interprets, God, then it is gone.
Well Hanuman, although I never like contradicting a monkey, I’d say it’s more like when your heart is full of love, you are close to atheism.
It would be cool if commentors tried a bit to stay OT.
My understanding of Scheer’s main points was that, although not politcally expedient, Wright’s words were based on reality, as were King’s — and therefore, understandably, Obama needed to distance himself from Wright on this.
Furthermore, the pronouncements of false prophets such as Robertson, Hagee [and Moon] although off the scale of sanity, are rarely alluded to, let alone mentioned in the MSM.
Finally, some commentators here denounce religion — but is this is not like denouncing politics because of the likes of Bush and Cheney?
Chuck Cliff is right to call us back to the topic at hand, Rev. Wright’s words and the reaction to them sparked by Senator Clinton’s statement that Wright would not have been her pastor.
So here’s a question for all those (like Jacob Freeze) who agree with Senator Clinton’s evaluation of Rev. Wright:
Was William Lloyd Garrison guilty of “hate speech” when he publicly burned copies of the U.S. Constitution, denouncing it as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell?”
Was he guilty of the sin of being “anti-American” when he harangued America for its hypocrisy in proclaiming “all men” to be “created equal” in one of its most important founding documents while institutionalizing and entrenching the enslavement of one part of its population in another?
This was a consistent part of Garrison’s preaching from his Massachusetts pulpit. What makes his behavior and his preaching different from Wright’s jeremiads on America’s sins?
We Americans suffer from an appalling lack of self-reflection and a woeful ignorance of our own history. Prophetic denunciation and righteous indignation over America’s many injustices (at home and abroad) has always been a part of America’s history, and many of this country’s finest orators have been its sharpest and most unsparing critics.
White Americans (like myself) often show little discernment when it comes to such speech, all too readily regarding it as “hateful” and “un-American” because they cannot bear to hear such criticism.
This is what Senator Clinton has done. No doubt had she been alive in the 1850s, she’d have done the same in reaction to Garrison’s sermons or Douglass’s speeches. No doubt too she’d have scratched her head in puzzlement over King’s claim that the “white moderate” rather than the “Ku Klux Klanner” presented the greater “stumbling block in [African Americans’] stride toward freedom.”
- Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Too bad we let this all get off track on an unrelated topic. The same bloggers seem to be responsible for off-track diversions of certain topics.
Siouxrose, what if there is no karma or just God? Isn’t this just a belief? Or maybe a deceit?
Kane Jeeves,
There is not a single entity called “Christianity.” While many schools of Christianity insist that the only way to heaven is through belief in the god as defined in their particular interpretation of their particular translation of the Bible, this is not necessarily true of ALL Christians or forms of Christianity. Some Christians are universalists, seeing the Christian gospel of redemption as one that includes EVERY PERSON, whether they believe something or not. In other words, not all Christians believe in hell, and not all believe that you or I are going there.
Now there are definitely some Christians (who usually presume to speak for ALL Christians) who see Christianity in such monolithic terms, and they love it when non-Christians accept these monolithic terms, but these monolithic categorizations don’t actually match the diversity of Christianity as it is actually lived and practiced.
The same goes for Judaism, Islam, etc. Just because a given scripture says something that can be interpreted a certain way doesn’t mean that every religious person accepts the validity of that scripture and that interpretation.
I agree that it is hard to consider yourself a progressive and to believe in something as regressive as eternal punishment for those who disagree. Luckily, not every Christian believes this. Most of those I’ve met who work on progressive causes DON’T believe in damnation and hellfire, though they certainly accept the reality of the hell created and perpetuated through human injustice.
Anyhow, I’m just trying to point out that painting a BIG group of diverse individuals with such broad brush strokes, while certainly tempting (and believe me, I’m tempted—just read about an 11-year old whose parents let her die from diabetes because their prayers didn’t work), isn’t helpful in building alliances with people who agree with you where it really matters — taking care of others, providing community, working for justice and compassion and forgiveness, etc.
Hanuman and 4the future,
How about this one—when your heart is filled with love, go out and share it with others. Don’t worry about what to call the experience.
Cheers,
J
JBPM,
Agreed.
Two more quotes from same source:
“Make yourself into a flute through which God can play His music.”
and, “The highest spiritual practise is transorming love into service.”
One of my favorite spiritual passages is from the Christian mystic Khalil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’. In the chapter on ‘Giving’ he writes of the different reasons why people give — and then he wrote: “And there are those as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes it’s fragrance into space. Through the hands of such as these God speaks — and, from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.”
When I read that many years ago, I thought to myself something like: “at last, somebody who knows what someone like Jesus would be like.”
Bless
HANUMAN: Inspired post
EZEFLYER: We all arrive at belief systems in part through the filters of our personal experiences, added to our education (formal and on our own), AND based on (in my view) the particularities of our innate “cosmic chemistry.” With that being said, the concept of GOD is innate to me; but I do NOT agree with the patriarchal definitions given by major religions. The concept of karma is one that is generally univeral, and only varies by degree from spiritual system to spiritual system. It makes sense to me. Bottom line is, we all have to believe in something, and I prefer a concept of Universal justice to the concepts of chaos and nihilism. As Richard Bach put it, “If you argue FOR your limitations, you get to keep them.” Human justice, the time limit of its execution is in my view a very real limitation; whereas Divine justice, as per the agency of the lords of karma, well, that manifests over MANY MANY lifetimes.
Cheney and Bush probably are challenging the lords of karma to determine the suitability of many future lifetimes, as it would take at least that to make up for the destruction and willful carnage done on their watch, with “war at their pleasure” quite literally. I was thinking about this, that many Jews have a martyr complex (given the history of that people, it’s not a far stretch); and Christians worship Jesus AS the martyr, and there is the sect in Islam that seems to favor the suicide bomber as martyr. So the synchronicity of these three groups with claims to the “Holy Land” makes that arena the peak zone of martyrs. Some would say on the SOUL level all those in the Middle East maelstrom have on some level elected this play-out, possibly to BURN many lifetimes of karma through this supreme sacrifice that all sane persons HOPE will put an end to war. This is only a theory, but I try to make sense of pain and depravity; perhaps I deploy too much poetic license. Apologies to any this theory might offend.
Editorial correction– put the word “America’ between the words “saved” and “from.”
well i’m in kansas and i know republicans that hate bush more than they hated clinton… that think we need amnesty for illegals… that we need our Bill of Rights… that the War was insane from the beginning… that hate NAFTA… that we’ve been conned… that would vote for obama over mccain in a heartbeat given the opportunity
as usual he’s the lesser of evils… and i don’t know what he will do… but i know some of the things he COULD do… and with net neutrality under bombardment… we never have another chance to do an end run around that symbiosis, between the PACs and our elected officials.
i say give the guy a break if they ever let him on the ticket… might be the biggest landslide in us history…. would look good for a while, eh?
and i’ve said what this author has said ever since the speech… god bless that guy obama, for not tossin his pastor “under the bus.” doncha just hate that phrase?