I am increasingly perturbed by politicalized religion. This past weekend, on a site I frequent, someone linked to a video where the orator advanced the proposition that “The GOP protects God-given rights… Dems protect government”. I’m sure this was accepted and applauded by many conditioned to unquestioningly believe our statutory rights are God-given. But upon reflection it may be as justified to say that our rights, if by “rights” we mean the notions in The Bill of Rights, are more a product of the Enlightenment and a philosophical consideration of Man by men, than the Bible.
When in The Declaration of Independence it said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, they made the determination a priori that men are endowed with these rights, because nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments are any such assertions made. Conversely, the God of the Old Testament is as dictatorial as any Earthly potentate in demanding obedience and prescribing allowable behavior. There was absolutely no suggestion of unalienable rights that could be contemplated by man, and no implication in word or action that all men are created equal. There was no right to freedom of speech, right of assembly, right to bear arms, and of course no separation of church and state. And in the eighteen hundred years of Christianity before Jefferson set pen to paper there can’t be found any theological instruction or civil manifestation indicating acquaintance with any Biblical proviso positing unalienable rights (personal or political), or right of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, or political equality. These concepts were distilled from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and others, and signify a rather rebellious secular divergence from the existing church/state theology. So quintessentially, God is being endowed with these thoughts and intentions by Man, rather than man acquiescing to any expressed aspiration or mandate of God.
So when this video says “the GOP is protecting God-given rights”, the most charitable assessment is that it is just inappropriate rhetoric founded in the voluntary ignorance that many feel they must undertake when the words God or religion are broached. Or less charitably, it may be a sordid political calculation based on the well established phenomena that people seldom challenge long-standing orthodoxy or reflect on the things they have been led to believe by rote.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Afghanistan and Anal Fixation
Why are we in Afghanistan? We must begin, not on 9/11, but in 1992 with the “Defense Planning Guidance” which proposed that the new political and military mission of the United States, (with the demise of the Soviet Union) was to assure that no rival or group of rivals could emerge to challenge our primacy as the hegemonic world super power. This was the first time American intent to dominate the entire world was explicitly stated. This required the establishment of military bases across the globe, now numbering 1100, creating in geo-political jargon “strategic depth” in every region of the world.
Though formulated at the end of the first Bush administration, the plan observed that Taliban control of Afghanistan would serve to hand its neighbor, Pakistan, additional muscle vis- à- vis India, thereby upsetting the balance of our “strategic depth” scenario in the region. When George W. Bush became President in 2000, the brain trust that produced the Defense Planning Guidance, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl et al, took leading roles in the new administration and proceeded to implement the strategy - patriotically renamed The Project for the New American Century. Although the Taliban was strictly nationalist and had exhibited no prosecutable designs outside Afghanistan, strange good fortune presented a new enemy, Al Qaeda, which conveniently headquartered itself in that benighted country.
Although we know, if the 9/11 Commission Report is to be believed, that the alleged nineteen perpetrators of the attack of Sept. 11th lived and trained in this country for years, and received communications and funding ($500,000) telephonically and electronically, from a command structure dispersed in different locations around the world, and that the total number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan never numbered more than a few score at most; our considered response to the attack was to send 120,000 troops and spend a trillion dollars to invade the third poorest country on earth, to deny Al Qaeda a locale to plan operations that could have as easily been planned in a rented conference room of any Marriot Hotel.
So, if you have ever wondered why we are in still in Afghanistan long after the few Al Qaeda have departed, and how we smoothly transitioned from Al Qaeda to the Taliban as the targeted enemy, read the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. The Guidance, combined with the mutable rationalizations for our subsequent invasion of Iraq, may clarify the pretext for the murky “War on Terror”, a phrase so tactically vague it is synonymous with a “War on Possibly Dangerous People with Ten Fingers”, and expose the opportune license it has granted our world-wide military expansion that all too perfectly dovetails with the prerequisites of the fundamental stratagem. It may not be a false polemic to speculate our children are not dying and killing to advance freedom or to secure the homeland, but rather to advance the empire project of megalomaniacs.
Some may disagree with my harsh assessment of our government’s actions and motives. Others may prefer to believe in the innate goodness imbued in our ethical soil that wouldn’t allow or condone such sordid maneuvers. But even if cast in the best possible light, and the prospect of world hegemony might bring some consonance to worldly affairs, we must still deal with the stubborn fact that after ten years the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine in the world is unable to defeat the ragtag Taliban. That crystallizing reality would seem to undermine the whole arrogant thesis of The New American Century, and might challenge the decent sensibilities of the most patriotic muggle. It may also alert the wise to abandon such foolishness, with the first step in the return to sanity being withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan.
Though formulated at the end of the first Bush administration, the plan observed that Taliban control of Afghanistan would serve to hand its neighbor, Pakistan, additional muscle vis- à- vis India, thereby upsetting the balance of our “strategic depth” scenario in the region. When George W. Bush became President in 2000, the brain trust that produced the Defense Planning Guidance, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl et al, took leading roles in the new administration and proceeded to implement the strategy - patriotically renamed The Project for the New American Century. Although the Taliban was strictly nationalist and had exhibited no prosecutable designs outside Afghanistan, strange good fortune presented a new enemy, Al Qaeda, which conveniently headquartered itself in that benighted country.
Although we know, if the 9/11 Commission Report is to be believed, that the alleged nineteen perpetrators of the attack of Sept. 11th lived and trained in this country for years, and received communications and funding ($500,000) telephonically and electronically, from a command structure dispersed in different locations around the world, and that the total number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan never numbered more than a few score at most; our considered response to the attack was to send 120,000 troops and spend a trillion dollars to invade the third poorest country on earth, to deny Al Qaeda a locale to plan operations that could have as easily been planned in a rented conference room of any Marriot Hotel.
So, if you have ever wondered why we are in still in Afghanistan long after the few Al Qaeda have departed, and how we smoothly transitioned from Al Qaeda to the Taliban as the targeted enemy, read the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. The Guidance, combined with the mutable rationalizations for our subsequent invasion of Iraq, may clarify the pretext for the murky “War on Terror”, a phrase so tactically vague it is synonymous with a “War on Possibly Dangerous People with Ten Fingers”, and expose the opportune license it has granted our world-wide military expansion that all too perfectly dovetails with the prerequisites of the fundamental stratagem. It may not be a false polemic to speculate our children are not dying and killing to advance freedom or to secure the homeland, but rather to advance the empire project of megalomaniacs.
Some may disagree with my harsh assessment of our government’s actions and motives. Others may prefer to believe in the innate goodness imbued in our ethical soil that wouldn’t allow or condone such sordid maneuvers. But even if cast in the best possible light, and the prospect of world hegemony might bring some consonance to worldly affairs, we must still deal with the stubborn fact that after ten years the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine in the world is unable to defeat the ragtag Taliban. That crystallizing reality would seem to undermine the whole arrogant thesis of The New American Century, and might challenge the decent sensibilities of the most patriotic muggle. It may also alert the wise to abandon such foolishness, with the first step in the return to sanity being withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Politics and Morality
This year’s political campaign has re-ignited the church/state issue, and has as usual established a synchronistic orbit around sex and the highest and best use of genitalia. It is strange that in our political corpus the larger field of morality is pristine grass and only the hectare of sexuality is trampled and muddy.
There are many bloggers I am familiar with who have indicated they have attended law school. They will tell you our jurisprudence is not centered on what is “moral” but rather what is “legal”. Nowhere in our body of secular laws does it say it is immoral to commit homicide, but it instead lays out when it is and is not legal to do so. Nowhere in the Bible does it say it is immoral to drive above the speed limit, but it is nonetheless illegal to do so. So, as a practical matter, since Sept. 17, 1787 there has been an effective separation of church and state – and it is as the Founders intended it to be. If you want to conflate church and state, and religious and legal morality then you simply can’t limit the process to the realm of sexuality. The Biblical prohibitions against usury would force the closing of banks. But of course capitalism overrules mere religion - and I’m not just being facetious. It is a legitimate example of the acceptance of the separation of church and civil society which has never been seriously questioned by our most Bible-thumping political panderers. And there are other examples that demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political clowns who imitate Jesus on the campaign trail but govern as Caesar once elected.
If you ask an ordinary American what would be their duty as a juror on a murder trial, they would say they would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict and take the freedom or life of the accused. Most would think this is a culturally mandated and legitimate commingling of religious and legal doctrine. They would be wrong. It can be easily demonstrated that the State has absolutely no interest in religious morality being the directing influence in various duties of citizenship. If the standard of reasonable doubt is not just a legal standard but a moral standard that must be met before the State kills, many actions of our nation would be immoral, and citizens preached-up to justify the rejection of contraceptives being funded via insurance policies purchased by religiously affiliated institutions would be equally justified, nee, required to refuse to participate in many actions initiated by the State.
In the case of Iraq for instance, given that there were no weapons of mass destruction or affiliation of the leadership of that nation with Al Qaeda or its alleged action on 9/11, and since there are ample publically available records documenting not only reasonable doubt of either of these allegations, but convincingly showing that the rationale presented to our nation and the world to justify our attack and occupation of Iraq was a blatant lie, then the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would under civil legal and theoretically coterminous religious standards constitute both illegal and immoral murder. But the secular empire of the United States indubitably exempts itself from religious standards of morality, and like every empire preceding it unabashedly subordinates all legality or basic fairness to the greater imperative of geo-political advantage. If this is not separation of church and state, I don’t know what is. And self-identified “religious” (and volunteer) soldiers who kill in the service of a known lie are patriotically acknowledging their belief in the separation of Heaven and Earth, and are further choosing to lobotomize themselves from the awareness that the justifications for war and taking up arms peddled to them weren’t convincing enough to cause the children of the born-again Commander-in-Chief to do the same. Did they hear a different truth or a different lie? I suspect it is morally proper we don’t ask and don’t tell. After all, that has nothing to do with sex.
There are many bloggers I am familiar with who have indicated they have attended law school. They will tell you our jurisprudence is not centered on what is “moral” but rather what is “legal”. Nowhere in our body of secular laws does it say it is immoral to commit homicide, but it instead lays out when it is and is not legal to do so. Nowhere in the Bible does it say it is immoral to drive above the speed limit, but it is nonetheless illegal to do so. So, as a practical matter, since Sept. 17, 1787 there has been an effective separation of church and state – and it is as the Founders intended it to be. If you want to conflate church and state, and religious and legal morality then you simply can’t limit the process to the realm of sexuality. The Biblical prohibitions against usury would force the closing of banks. But of course capitalism overrules mere religion - and I’m not just being facetious. It is a legitimate example of the acceptance of the separation of church and civil society which has never been seriously questioned by our most Bible-thumping political panderers. And there are other examples that demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political clowns who imitate Jesus on the campaign trail but govern as Caesar once elected.
If you ask an ordinary American what would be their duty as a juror on a murder trial, they would say they would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict and take the freedom or life of the accused. Most would think this is a culturally mandated and legitimate commingling of religious and legal doctrine. They would be wrong. It can be easily demonstrated that the State has absolutely no interest in religious morality being the directing influence in various duties of citizenship. If the standard of reasonable doubt is not just a legal standard but a moral standard that must be met before the State kills, many actions of our nation would be immoral, and citizens preached-up to justify the rejection of contraceptives being funded via insurance policies purchased by religiously affiliated institutions would be equally justified, nee, required to refuse to participate in many actions initiated by the State.
In the case of Iraq for instance, given that there were no weapons of mass destruction or affiliation of the leadership of that nation with Al Qaeda or its alleged action on 9/11, and since there are ample publically available records documenting not only reasonable doubt of either of these allegations, but convincingly showing that the rationale presented to our nation and the world to justify our attack and occupation of Iraq was a blatant lie, then the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would under civil legal and theoretically coterminous religious standards constitute both illegal and immoral murder. But the secular empire of the United States indubitably exempts itself from religious standards of morality, and like every empire preceding it unabashedly subordinates all legality or basic fairness to the greater imperative of geo-political advantage. If this is not separation of church and state, I don’t know what is. And self-identified “religious” (and volunteer) soldiers who kill in the service of a known lie are patriotically acknowledging their belief in the separation of Heaven and Earth, and are further choosing to lobotomize themselves from the awareness that the justifications for war and taking up arms peddled to them weren’t convincing enough to cause the children of the born-again Commander-in-Chief to do the same. Did they hear a different truth or a different lie? I suspect it is morally proper we don’t ask and don’t tell. After all, that has nothing to do with sex.
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