Spoken like a true Puritan's son. In fact, Mary Parker, who was hanged for witchcraft by a Salem, Massachusetts church court in 1692 happens to be George W. Bush's eighth great-grandmother. [25] And a Mr. Richard Bush (1696-1732) of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, is the first known male Bush in America. [26] So perhaps Bush's War on Terror had less to do with his predilection for dungeons and torture and more to do with a pious reiteration of his family's hand-me-down Directorium Inquisitorium. After all, their god requires the spectacle of terror as an instrument of its justice and authority. It helps me to understand, but not condone, the more than trillion American dollars spent into debt for the horrors of war, [27] the thousands of troops wounded and killed, [28] the millions of innocent civilians butchered and bombed, [29] the millions of orphans and destitute widows, [30] the catastrophic environmental devastation abroad and at home--all this and more in the name of their god. But it nearly pales in the shame of lost hope to think what millions of saved lives and trillions of saved taxpayer dollars might have done for America had our troops gone to college rather than war, had green energy supplanted oil, had jobs been made in America instead of off-shored, had the rich paid their fair share in tax, had truth in media exposed the brainwash, hogwash, cover ups, and lies.
Reagan was elected president in 1981 by a majority of voters who attached their beliefs in god and religion to the republican party and became known as the Moral Majority. Since then, America has sunk to the bottom of every quality of life index conducted among all the world's industrialized nations. [31] We have the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world. [32] We have the highest rate of childhood poverty, [33] [34] and the greatest disparity of wealth between rich and poor. [35] So earlier, when I wondered to what patriotism these godly refer, I return to The Independent's 2005 BBC transcript:
"Another telling sign of Mr. Bush's religion was his answer to Mr. Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.
"The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to." [36]
By itself, Bush's appeal to a higher father might seem endearing, but when coupled with a report later that year by Doug Thompson of the conservative Capitol Hill Blue [37] news site, the lineage of diabolical madness comes full circle. The article interviews three GOP operatives who were in a White House meeting with George Bush in an attempt to keep him from renewing the suspension of human and civil rights that were ordered by his USA Patriot Act:
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper." [38]
The president of the United States is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But according to Bush, our 43rd president, "It's nothing but a goddamn piece of paper." I will not speculate what the outcry would have been from the pro-patriot, pro-Christian political opposition had George W. Bush been a Muslim, Jew, woman, democrat, liberal, atheist or member of any other ethnic or cultural group than rich, white, male, and Christian, but my guess is that impeachment and trials for treason would have been on the table. Instead, I ask the question, Whose country is this, really? Is it the land of Pilgrims and Puritans armed with their long history of brute conquest, torture, terror, theft and Depravity? Is it the property of the top twenty percent of Americans who now own eighty-five percent of our country's wealth and resources [39] [40] --an inequality that is twice that of other industrialized nations? [41] Does it belong to the fifty percent of Americans who cynically renounce their right to vote, the very foundation of citizenship, in favor of their own systemic apathy and submission? A partial answer can be found in an auxiliary memo to the Total Depravity of Christianity called--Antinomianism. The term was coined by John Calvin's compatriot, Martin Luther (1483-1546) and is defined by the Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as, "The doctrine or belief that the Gospel frees Christians from required obedience to any law, whether scriptural, civil, or moral, and that salvation is attained solely through faith and the gift of divine grace." [42]
This explains to me, at least, how and why all these self-appointed messengers of divine will, do what they do. Antinomianism bestows the faithful with the a priori dispensation needed to take what they want, including the inalienable rights of the American people in order to sell them back as Christian charity or as evidence of their god's grace. Not so? What could possibly explain the landmark 2010 Supreme Court's, Citizens United v. FCC [43] 5-4 decision that revokes and nullifies the voice of individual free speech and fair elections with the unlimited wealth of multi-national corporations? Yes of course, money talks. But now, by judicial fiat, they can out-talk and out-scream as loud and long as they want. It is a Frankenstein construction that invites foreign and special interests to outspend, saturate, flood and monopolize all available media with their political voice and thereby quash, smear and extinguish all opposition to their corporate and religious empire. The plaintiff, Citizens United [44] is an ultra-right wing Christian organization intent on legislating America into a tightly controlled Christian state. The five justices who ruled in their favor are all god-fearing conservative Catholic republicans [45] who were nominated to the bench by two god-fearing Christian republican presidents, Reagan and George W. Bush. This decision has elevated disembodied multi-national corporations to the status of natural born citizens and has endowed them with all the human and civil rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States, yet they remain unborn, undying, without heart, brain, guts or feeling--eerily like the god they worship. At best, this decision diminishes we, the people into a neutered spectator species within our own nation. At worst, it turns citizens into mute, disenfranchised drones on par with slaves in chain--bound, gagged, without voice or the means of self-determination.
War is terrorism. To have a Global War on Terror is as ludicrous as chewing sand to end thirst. Fraud, lies, pollution, poverty, slavery, imprisonment, torture, war, genocide, god and religion are all elements in the Christian arsenal of Total Depravity. They are the fiery stake and gallows of church-state collusion where goodness and generosity, love and peace, art and science, justice and equality all go to die. It is where democracy fails and the patriarchal disease of exclusion, domination, and violence succeed. I question how peace and freedom can exist beneath or under anybody's superstition, god or religion. Myths are fine for poetry, bedtime stories and fireside chats, but who in their right mind could possibly care if their Christian god rose from the dead when it is the Christian-led military-industrial cabal together with their clergy and judges who do nothing but kill the living, rape the treasury, and turn all Americans into inmates of a crude, disastrous torture state--and for nothing but their own profit and power. If these godly minions are so determined to put their religious beliefs above country and are so convinced that the Constitution is nothing but ".["] a goddamn piece of paper," then to me, their god and religion are nothing but goddamn figments of their goddamn minds. And here is the rub: Christians and their co-religionists are welcome to live and thrive in an open and liberal society, but liberals, liberty and truth cannot live in theirs. It is why the founding fathers made it abundantly clear that the only trinity Americans are obliged to observe are those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-- and we, the people expect the same from others, too often to our own chagrin.
As an aside, the Pew Forum released a study in September of 2010 called the US Religious Knowledge Survey. [46] The results showed that atheists and agnostics know more about religions and the Bible than any other group tested, particularly Catholics and Protestants. It showed that even though America leads the developed world in religious conviction, ".["] large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions -- including their own." [47] However, this is just the tip of the ironic iceberg. You see, there has been a long standing schism within the Christian religion that goes back to its beginning. It has to do with what Jesus, the teacher said, and what the church Patriarchs said he said. In a wry and simple way, one could say that the entire moral history of western civilization is less about good v. evil, and more about Goodness v. God.
Here is why. It was 1789. At war with Briton, Napoleon routed the British from Egypt and marched his army down the Nile to capture the capitol city of Cairo. For the first time, the pyramids and tombs of Egypt were seen by legions of modern western eyes. As tombs were unearthed and treasures revealed, the research and study of Egypt and its antiquities grew. In 1896, a German research scholar purchased a cache of ancient papyrus scrolls that were dated to the 3rd century A.D. [48] They were found hidden and buried in caves along the Nile and tell of a teacher they called Savior. Over the years many more of these hidden scrolls were found, then translated, published, and finally brought to the public in the mid-1950s [49] --just as the under-God fires, and Congressional Witch-hunts were ablaze in The States.
All together, these scrolls are called the Gnostic Gospels [50] and tell a very different story of their Savior, community and salvation than what the Patriarchs of the early church wanted known. In these gospels, their Savior says that women are the ones most inclined to goodness and therefore the ones most qualified to serve as priests and that men would do well to listen. In these gospels, sin is explained as psychological conflict and salvation as the joy of uncovering one's own innate goodness. They teach peace, not war. They teach justice and equality, not deference to the frauds of church and state. In these gospels, the teacher explains the resurrection as the liberation of mind from the grip of all gods so that one's true self is free to unite with life's universal goodness. This was his testament--his new testament.
The Patriarchs had other ideas. They taught a trickle-down theology that scorns women and dooms men to sin. To them, salvation requires submission to their church and god. So when the Roman general, Constantine (272-337 A.D.), became the first Christian Emperor of Rome it became his duty to unify the empire, including Egypt, under one rule, one state, one god, and one religion. The Emperors and Patriarchs not only excluded the gnostic gospels from today's Bible, [51] but declared them all heretical--and cleansed from existence. Communities were leveled, its members tortured and killed, all temples and statues defaced and destroyed. They burned down the Ancient Library of Alexandria [52] and torched all other centers of learning so that centuries of accumulated pre-Christian history, scholarship, science, arts and wisdom were crushed, buried, burned to ash and forgotten. They also controlled print and paper, the media of the day, and took great pains to overwrite all trace of the gnostic teacher's Goodness with their God.
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