Archive for politics

Betraying Democracy For Theocracy

Posted in belief, culture, faith, Government, politics, religion with tags , , , , , on November 29, 2012 by chouck017894

Theocracy is an ugly form of government which is touted by some faith system merchants as being presided over by God, while in real time all temporal management is to be dominated by a priestly order which claims rule by “divine sanction.”  In other words, it is sham authority.  In this twenty-first century the prime example of this type of governing is Iran.

Theocracies are alway ruthless and quick to condemn and dispose of any perceived threat to whoever happens to oppose the self-proclaimed mouthpiece for the ultimate being. All allegiance to such a set up is compulsory and the multitude is to accept it on blind faith even though there is never any real supportive evidence for the claims of godly choice of leader or the practices that are demanded.  It is this horror of social interaction that the forefathers of the United States sought to avoid, and they thus established the wise declaration that church and state must be kept separate.

That protective provision for maintaining true democracy as featured in the US Constitution has been the glue which bound diverse people from many lands in respectful acceptance of spiritual equality, which consequently made the US one of the mightiest nations in history.  Unfortunately, that strength and influential power which resulted from tolerance of diversity is a lure that cannot be resisted by ego driven conspirators.  If such persons can imagine that they speak for God, it is also easy for them to imagine that they should command the world.

Since the last half of the twentieth century and into this twenty-first there have been a glut of false prophets and self-proclaimed mouthpieces of God seeking to chip at that tap-root of the Constitution and replace it with their interpretation of “biblical values.”  All these ego driven pretenders of sanctity have attracted whole regiments of followers who are encouraged to mistake their ego for their spirit or their soul, and contribute multimillions to the “ministries” that would systematically destroy liberty and freedom for all.  Here, listed alphabetically, is a record of ten major “faith” pretenders that seek destruction of the constitutional mandate of separation of church and state.

  • “Alliance Defending Freedom” = (FDF) “Freedom” in this designation is deliberately misleading; the only freedom sought is to promote the prejudices of an Arizona based organization of TV and radio far right preachers as a tax-free religious group.  It is money and prejudice, not spirit, that guides them.  Gullible believers have shelled out nearly thirty-six million dollars to this group that seeks to overturn the federal law which bars tax-exempt churches (or other non-profit organizations) from intervening in partisan elections.
  • “American Family Association” = (AFA) “American Family” makes it all sound so reputable and patriotic, but this Mississippi based “association,” founded by Reverend Donald Wildmon, functions largely by abhorrent artificiality.  For instance, the AFA staffer Bryan Fischer alleges that Adolf Hitler invented church/state separation.  Apparently Fischer thinks that Hitler was present in the 1700s when the US Constitution was written.  Of course the AFA likes to portray abortion as sin, that gay persons do not deserve equal rights, that the AFA should be free to promote their faith system interpretations in public schools, etc., etc.  These bigoted hate mongers boast that they operate nearly 200 radio stations nationwide, and by stimulating their extremism the AFA has raked in nearly eighteen million dollars in 2012 in the name of God.
  • “Concerned Women for America” – (CWA) The “concern” is allegedly to “bring biblical principles into all levels of public policy.”  (Related blog: A Short Example of Biblical Values, Oct. 2012.)  The CWA was organized in 1979 by Tim and Beverly LaHaye (yeah, that Tim LaHaye, author of religious horror books), and it was started at that time as an opposition group to the Equal Rights Amendment.  Tolerance and trying to understand each other apparently is not a sacred obligation for them, and the CWA therefore opposes equal right for gays, promotes the teaching of creationism in science classes, and similar absurdities.  This is claimed to be “the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization,” and it garnered over ten million dollars in 2012.
  • “Council for National Policy” =(CNP) This “council” is small potatoes, drawing in not quite two million dollars in 2012, but it typifies the shadowy operations of the radical right.  The CNP is another Tim LaHaye scheme, and its purpose is coordinating meetings of “invitation only” religious right front men to develop strategy for political control (GOP).
  • “Faith and Freedom Coalition” (FFC) Founded by Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition.  Again the “freedom” striven for by this group is not to benefit all of god’s diverse people, but to entice conservative religious voters to certain (GOP) candidates which the FFC desired.  With revenues of nearly five and a half million dollars in 2012, the FFC hosted a forum of GOP presidential contenders in four states.
  • “Family Research Council” = (FRC) Here again a word in their title is deceiving; the word “research.”  This “council,” headed by Tony Perkins, is the principal religious right organization in Washington DC.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has actually designated this outfit as a hate group.  This “council” sponsors a program annually, the “Values Voter Summit,” to promote far-right politicians who favor bans on reproductive freedom and on gay equality, and who favor amending the Constitutional church/state safeguard, and who favor injecting creationism into public school science classes, and similar attacks on God-approved diversity.  But hate is profitable: nearly fifteen million dollars was collected by the FRC in 2012.
  • “Focus on the Family” (earlier known as Alliance Defense Fund) = (FOF) This outfit was founded by James Dobson.   The “family” that this outfit is concerned about is the right-wing political family, not the every-man family which embraces all diversities of human nature.  This Colorado based organization is really focused on pressuring state and national law makers in such things as abortion rights, denying equal rights for gays, and the rest of the typical hate obsessions.  Fanning such obsessions is lucrative, and the FOF revenue for 2012 was around one hundred and five million dollars.
  • Jerry Falwell Ministries/Liberty University/Liberty Counsel = Here is a multimillion dollar empire built on stilts of bigotry and hypocrisy.  With revenues of over five hundred twenty-two million dollars (principally from Liberty University), there is churned out a constant irritation of partisan politics.  Liberty Counsel, based at Liberty University, serves as a religious-right legal unity that specializes in lawsuits aimed at undermining church/state separation.
  • The Pat Robertson religious business empire = One of God’s most long-winded busybodies, Pat Robertson built a worldly empire for himself by selling ego-titillation as spiritual magnification.  The anchor for this fixation was the purchase of a broadcasting license that became the Christian Broadcasting Network, which allowed him to preach to stay-at-home seekers his bias take on what God allegedly wanted.  Mining the airways proved extremely lucrative, and in pursuit of shaping even more minds he established the Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA.  Featured in the private University are two legal groups; the Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, and the American Center for Law and Justice.  Ungrateful for his democratic springboard, Robertson has unendingly expounded in far-right and political invective, even stating that the church/state separation clause in the Constitution was a “myth.”  His ego-motivating “700 Club” is nothing more than a forum for promoting extreme right-wing ideology; it is imagined godly favoritism that brought in revenue for 2012 of over four hundred million dollars.
  • And lastly, we have the “United States Conference of Catholic Bishops” = Considering how the Catholic Church governed over most of Europe through the centuries which history records as the “Dark Ages,” we have every right to question the spiritual motivation for the bishops fueling the “cultural war” in the United States.  Catholicism has not exactly proven itself to be an infallible faith system through its two millennia of spiritual posturing.  When bishops indulge themselves in lobbying Congress in Washington DC, it is not for the benefit of all the diverse people that make up the citizenry of the nation; it is an attempt to force principles of the Catholic faith system upon everyone—just as they did in the Dark Ages.  The creative power that is personified as God has decreed that life is to be expressed in broadly diverse modes, and it is not up to any faith system to sit in judgment of that diversity.  The bishops’ formation of the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty is pure hypocrisy when its purpose is an ultra-conservative stand on such things as reproductive rights, on who is allowed to love who, marriage equality rights, birth control, school vouchers, and seeking federal funding for their highly prejudicial church-affiliated social services.  With revenue in 2012 of over twenty-six million dollars, we can pretty much judge just where their true spirituality rests.

This short list of religious right groups certainly is not complete, but it does exemplify the most threatening pressure groups plotting against true democratic governing.  There is nothing of any genuine spiritual worth in attempting to force others into some man-formulated performance of honoring the creative Source: that is greed and pretense at its worst.  Under almost any other form of government such attempts at sabotaging the government’s founding principles would rightfully be construed as traitorous.

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Claims of Godly Favoritism

Posted in Atheist, belief, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , , on July 11, 2012 by chouck017894

It was not until around 300 BCE, in the Hellenistic period, that foreign observers began to write extensively about the laws, traditions and customs of the Jewish people.  The Greek skeptic, historian and philosopher Hecataeus of Abdra (4th century BCE) recorded observations of Jewish life in his work Peri Hyperboreon.  Hecataeus pondered with some wonderment the Jewish traditions which then lavished their priests with highest prestige, and he pondered on the many peculiar Laws of Deuteronomy which prevailed over Jewish social legislation.  Indeed, since those laws and claims of godly favoritism had been “discovered” in the Temple walls in the timeframe of King Josiah (640-608 BCE), the kingship had become a relic.  By this 300 BCE timeframe the governing of the people had been absorbed by priests.

Jews, Hecataeus noted, were more fanatically devoted to their singular God than was practiced in most Pagan cultures which Hecataeus had encountered.  That difference was due principally to the Pagans feeling closer personal affiliation to nature in which they recognized the interlocking creative energies at work within nature.  The Pagans respected those universal energy aspects as being godlike in their own right.  Consequently Pagan cultures were more accepting and respectful of other peoples’ personal beliefs.  The Jews, on the other hand, long dominated by priest-formulated “laws” attributed to Moses, had been conditioned from the time of King Josiah, and so shared the belief in a concocted history of exclusiveness that starred Moses as their savior and Abraham as their God-blessed progenitor.

The priest-written scriptural “history” asserted that from the time of Moses a whole string of Israelite ancestors could be claimed, all of whom had allegedly spoken directly with God.  The “history” presented in Exodus, for example, and the asserted entitlement of the Promised Land provided the elements for a shared identity among the people in a psychological manner that the mythologies of other cultures could not.  Thus conditioned for generations, the Jews shared the alleged law codes of Moses—a whole battery of laws (613), which, strangely, had not been found until the time of King Josiah, some 700 years after the time of Moses.  (See related post A Priest’s Convenient Discovery, December 2011.)  The unity of the Judean people was anchored upon the priests’ imaginative holy accounts and the allusion of their faith systems’ historic past.

The priests of Yahweh were accomplished story tellers, and borrowed their plotlines from astronomy-cosmology lessons that were ancient even then, using  them as the inspiration for constructing their Israelite history.  Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics, for example, had also used the same ancient cosmic knowledge to account for their gods, but those accounts had never been presented in a manner that seemed to be linked to a certain people s’ national history.  Neither did those epics of the Mesopotamian/Persian cultures particularly inspire principles of ethical responsibility.  The Greek myths of deities and their epics of heroes, for instance, were presented in metaphorical style, and were meant only to inspire by example, not as decrees from some holy authority.

After the conquest of the Near East region c. 332 BCE by Alexander the Great, which gave rise to the Hellenistic period, there was a gradual and steady increase of awareness and recognition of the Jewish cult among the Mediterranean cultures.  By the time of the second century BCE there had evolved a questioning spirit among the Judean people themselves, which resulted from their association with Syrian and Greek cultures afer Antiochus the Great (242 to 187 BCE) of Syria acquired possession of all Palestine and Coele-Syria in 198 BCE.  (In the second century BCE this name was applied to lands extending south and southwest to Egypt and Arabia Deserta.)

By 168 BCE there was mounting dissatisfaction among the Jews over the excesses indulged in by Antiochus IV, son of Antiochus the Great, and it eventually led to outright Jewish revolt led by the Maccabees under Mattathias, a priest.  His third son, Judas, fanning religious fervor, led the revolt and in rapid succession defeated four Syrian generals, and in 165 BCE Judas “purified” the Temple which had been taken over by the Syrians.  Judas then re-consecrated the Temple, and this is still celebrated by Jews in the festival of Hanukkah, meaning “dedication” (to light).

The priest-composed Talmudic myth flavors the rededication of the Temple with the “miracle” where only one cruse of oil, blessed by the high priest of course, supposedly caused the small available quantity to burn for the entire eight days of the festivities.  In all the world it was/is asserted that only this structure and the Jewish people were allegedly held in highest esteem by the Creator.  The date of the Temple rededication began on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the third month of the Jewish calendar,  which happens to roughly correspond to the month of December in the Gregorian calendar.  Ignored in the priestly assertion of a special miracle is any connection to the gradual seasonal increase of light that each year begins after the Winter Solstice, December 21.  It is simply coincidence, of course, that the ancient Pagans had always honored the seasonal increase of light at this same time of year, celebrating it with their Vigil of Light.

Yahweh was a most psychotically jealous god, according to the alleged sermon of Moses, which the high priest Hilkiah had supposedly “discovered” in the  Temple wall being reconstructed in the 7th century BCE.  That little sermon-jewel is now incorporated in Deuteronomy 7: 5-6, saying, “For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your Elohim; it is you that Yahweh our Elohim has chosen to be his very own people out of all the people of the earth.”

Sure.

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Reasoning, Politics and Teabags

Posted in Atheist, culture, Government, logic, politics, random, thoughts with tags , , , , on February 2, 2010 by chouck017894

On the teeter-totter that is politics, the exercise of coöperation for mutual benefit often gets forgotten in the fever of inflamed egos, with either end of the oscillating act imagining it is in complete control of what is up or down.  Weight, of course, can be a cause, but muscle and energy has its dynamics too.  When one end holds the landed position it can flatter itself by declaring, “I am the superior one because I hold command with the power of earthy magnetism,”  i.e. materialism.  The up-end can flatter itself and declare, “I am superior because I am catapulted skyward and therefore discern things further than you,” i.e. liberalism.

Of course neither extreme is what supports their capability of movement.  The necessary but commonly overlooked part in the attempt to out-seesaw each other is the fulcrum—the pivoting point.  In this illustration it is the point upon which political attention may seesaw between passion and skepticism.  That pivot-point, that area upon which balance is meant to be sought regardless of the violent oscillations imposed by either end, is often but erroneously presented by each side as reason.  For each end of the teeter-totter it is their assessment of what the reason represents which serves as the center of their self-assurance.  Regrettably, reason is not always reasonableness.

Reason serves as something like the central point of a magic circle that we all place around ourselves—a self-made center in which we may feel secure, and where the turmoil at either end of the seesaw is rendered invisible by the magic of modifying conclusions to suit our vanity (or greed).  This begs the question: Is reason always reasonable?

It is reasonableness that must serve as the true fulcrum, the means of balance in communal exchange, not simply some reason which can always be molded by one’s ego.  It is reason to which each person flees when meeting some opposing passion which obstructs desired control of some situation.  It is reason, not reasonableness, that allows the freedom to reject any relationship, which then bars the  seemingly  incompatible virtues from being tested by consideration of what is best for the majority of the people.  We can see that lack of reasonableness being played out today in the USA by the Republican odds and ends who are spoken of as “tea-baggers.” 

Their withdrawal into their shallow and brittle reason-center has been shown to be a sad and misdirected move by the fact that their stubborn and raucous refusal to consider any position other than their own is not the true fulcrum of the mechanism upon which everyone can share incentive.  Refusal to negotiate or coöperate on any principles and just say “no” to everything is not reasonableness, but is simply infantile self-absorption.  That obstinate refusal to give their enthusiasm and dedication to reasonableness and truth, but choose instead to indulge in “party-line” selfishness is hardly the quality that is looked for in social responsibility.

 

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God’s Political Addiction

Posted in Atheist, Christianity, culture, enlightenment, history, nontheism, politics, random, religion, Uncategorized with tags , , , on May 9, 2009 by chouck017894

After World War II the faith market in the United States quickly recognized the then-new technological wonder of television as a godsend for spreading their pious propaganda. By the 1950s enterprising soul-savers still clutching their newly minted bible-mill diplomas, and sniffing the gold to be made through the far-reaching media, latched on to electronic ministry with holy lust. In those early days of TV the divinely driven were complaining bitterly and loudly that the media ignored them—which was not exactly true (surprise!)– for if it had not been for the media few persons across the nation would have known that such a wide array of moral champions existed at all. To garner attention, one scheming servant of the sacred launched the so-called “Coalition for Better Television,” the real purpose of which was to impose upon the gullible public the religious right’s particular version of “moral code.” Thus religious extremists embarked upon a political power grab in the name of religious devotion.

In 1961 an attention-grabbing faith-based, politically inspired group was parading under the banner of “Moral Majority,” which sponsored its first seminar on “Understanding Politics.” The training session had absolutely nothing to do with making oneself spiritually worthy of god’s blessing: rather the ideas being eagerly shared were on how to shove their particular version of religion into the workings of national government.

As is common among the faith-driven, other divinely inspired keepers of god’s word were receiving slightly different instructions from heaven. Oddly, the governments of the world–especially the government of the US–seemed to trouble god much more than did the conduct of his strange array of messengers. And stranger still was the emphasis placed on their attainment of materiality for the sake of spirit’s advancement! So to advance this seemingly contradictory means of attaining spiritual worthiness, various rightwing movements showered the faithful with an endless assortment of manuals and pamphlets. Titles of these propaganda texts always implied that only they held the keys of salvation. The advice, however, ususally pivoted on taking over national management.

The movers and shakers of the religous right groups–although not exactly chummy–sought to establish a modus operandi to achieve political power. Topping the list for achieving a power base was the necessity to recognize the givers and takers–meaning, in other words, go after those who will donate the most cash. To implement this drive they had to have a plan which would include:
    1) have a focal-point candidate or invent some supposedly urgent issue;
    2) be organized and keep it organized;
    3) establish a means of keeping money flowing, which meant finding easy-to-sway persons who would get personally involved in collecting money for their movement.

To effectively siphon money into their temporal cause, the advice was:
    1) project the income necessary for the operation and expansion of their rightwing bloc;
    2) define the levels of donations to be aimed for;
    3)devise programs for attracting donations;
    4) implement the plan.
The advice on how to pursue collection of donations stressed the necessity of never emphasizing with a contributor: learn all you possibly can about potential donors, but never, never emphasize with them. The reason for this was the fear that to emphasize with a contact might inspire the donation seeker to pass judgment on whether or not a contact would donate.

Always the mantra was think big, and that necessitated keeping the path open for people who might be inclined to give thousands of dollars. How should they pursue this? The most effective way and the least costly way to reach the most people and raise money was determined by the holy schemers to go direct response–which meant use the Postal Service. They then drew upon persons with writing talent to compose fund raising spiel letters, and the principle thing the obsessed authors had to remember was the basic psychological quirk that inspires people to release their grip on money. That ignoble idiosyncrasy is that people tend always to be most willing to lend support against something than they are to show willingness to support something!

And that may be why neither organized religion nor hard-right politics seem capable of any genine integrity.
(See also related entry, God’s Henchmen.)

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