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The Power of Love

2011-07-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Jay Michaelson: The Trouble With Harry (Potter)

2011-07-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

The Trouble With Harry (Potter): Religious Conservatives Do Have Something to Fear

By Jay Michaelson article link

July 14, 2011 | Religion Dispatches

Most progressives clucked their tongues when some Christian conservatives condemned (and tried to censor) the phenomenally successful Harry Potter franchise, which comes to its provisional conclusion this week with the release of the eighth film in the series. There they go again, we thought. Yet while many specific critiques of the series are simply phobic reactions to the presence of witches, wizards, and magic, I think many anti-Potterites may be onto something interesting—even if they’re not aware of it themselves. (Warning: this article contains spoilers galore.)

The final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is, like most of its predecessors, quite faithful to the books. This last film, among the best in the series, is more action-packed and thus less reflective than some of the other installments, but the basic arc of the story remains consistent. Harry Potter, boy wizard, is actually the Chosen One who will, prophesies say, defeat Lord Voldemort, or die trying, or both. As readers of the books have known for some time now, “both” turns out to be the answer. Harry is killed by Voldemort, but, Christ-like, returns from the dead to ultimately vanquish his foe.

Except Harry isn’t Christ. He returns from death not because of divinity or grace, but because he possesses the “Resurrection Stone,” one of the three ‘deathly hallows.’ The hallows are all magical objects: the invisibility cloak, the elder wand (which ultimately undoes Lord Voldemort), and the resurrection stone. Once again, they are not blessed, divine, or even holy. They are magical technology: things that have powers.

Weirdly, the last few Potter books are chock-a-block with these totemic magical items. Lord Voldemort is able to be semi-immortal himself because he has bound up his soul in seven physical objects, called horcruxes. The discovery of this magical technology was the main revelation of HP6, and the slow elimination of the horcruxes (including Harry himself) is the main task of the heroes of HP7. Here again, Potter is rigorously materialistic in nature. Magic may be mysterious, but the strongest forms of it are bound to physical objects which have or are imbued with magical power.

The closest the series ever comes to something like providential grace is in the case of Gryffindor’s Sword, which twice appears out of thin air to aid heroes in distress. Yet, we are told, this too is the result, not of any superhuman force, but of Gryffindor’s own power. Indeed, author J.K. Rowling does a remarkable job of humanizing and deflating the one godlike figure in the series of books, headmaster Albus Dumbledore. Early on, Dumbledore appears infallible, wise, and invulnerable. But particularly in the last volume, he is revealed to be human and full of faults. Thus even the stand-in for a beneficent father-deity is relentlessly demystified, brought down to Earth. Every time grace seems to creep in, it’s revealed to be all-too-human.

Harry Potter’s world is one of materialist magic, and while its ethical teachings are basically “Judeo-Christian” (love is important, trust in your friends, be brave no matter what people say, etc.), these teachings are played out against an ontological/theological background that is thoroughly devoid of a monotheistic deity. Oddly enough, Harry Potter’s world would be more familiar to a scientist than to a mystic. Yes, the world includes goblins, charms, and curses; but these are all basically explicable according to their own internal logic. What’s missing is anything like the numinous, or any supernatural power—by which I anything that transcends human knowledge.

I should be clear that, for me, none of this is problematic. As a non-dualist with pantheistic leanings, I’m only too happy for the sacred/Sacred to be represented as a concatenation of this-worldly forces, many of which are capable of inspiring wonder. Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s escape from Gringott’s Bank on the back of a dragon is an exhilarating spiritual moment (even if it closely resembles Harry’s hippogriff ride from HP3), and I don’t really care if their wonder is the result of a this-worldly or other-worldly miracle.

But that’s me. For a conventional theist, surely it is problematic that Harry’s drama of good versus evil plays out in an entirely this-worldly context. God (by which I mean here the unreconstructed monotheistic God) has no role whatsoever. The best man wins the duel—or rather, the man with the best wand.

Now, one could, of course, make the same claims about comic-book sagas like Superman or Batman. Why should Harry Potter have to take any more refuge in the numinous than Kal-El or Bruce Wayne?

Well, because there is something intrinsically religious about the Potter series; and I don’t just mean the rabid devotion of its fans. Potter raises Ultimate Questions, much to Rowling’s credit. It is a meditation on the nature of good and evil, what it means to become an adult, and of course it takes place in a world filled with magic and wonder. Harry Potter is less a comic-book hero than a fantasy hero, and fantasy worlds exist according to their own internal theological grammars. The Lord of the Rings has its creation myth (told in The Silmarillion) with a full array of angels, demons, and something resembling gods. Star Wars, more properly understood as fantasy than as science fiction, has its Force. Narnia, of course, has its Aslan. Whereas comic-book heroes are merely highly gifted individuals (superhuman in the DC universe, ingenious-human in Marvel) operating in the more-or-less familiar world, fantasy heroes exist in entirely different ones. And Harry Potter’s is unique in its secularism.

Rowling’s great genius was to so thoroughly imbricate the magical world and our own that she invited children of all ages to imagine that magic was not so otherworldly after all, but was right here, albeit beneath our notice. Yet Potter’s world is still a total re-visioning of the world we know, and as such comprises a complete, self-contained mythic universe. And the forces that govern that universe are entirely this-worldly, non-theistic, and basically material.

From the medieval period through the modern and postmodern eras, European “secret societies” codified their beliefs in a similar way. What for religious traditions are sacred sites and sacred objects became understood as secret sources of power: the Temple in Jerusalem, the Shroud of Turin. Detached from their contextual religious significance, such objects became regarded as magical sources of power. Like Harry Potter’s world, their true power was concealed from the uninitiated, but was available esoterically to a select few. Such societies were often branded as heretical, other times co-opted by church authorities.

The very notion that the world is not one of ordinary objects supervised by a supernatural deity, but rather a world of ordinary and extraordinary objects that doesn’t seem to be supervised by anything, has more in common with Enlightenment rationalism than with traditional religion. We may get distracted by the superstitions and doctrines, but really, such philosophies are resolutely secular—all the more so for being esoteric and magical.

I loved the eighth Potter movie, and nearly shed a tear when it ended. But I think part of why I loved it, and the series as a whole, is the same reason that religious conservatives mistrusted it: because Rowling’s world is a magical, pagan universe in which chthonic beings duke it out without any hint of a Supervisor in Chief. Its Christ figure is a human boy who lives, dies, and is reborn, thanks to a magical stone. Its Satan is a human wizard gone awry, drunk with his own power. It’s a magical, wonderful world—and, in conventional terms, a godless one.

Jay Michaelson, a Religion Dispatches associate editor and founder of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality, writes regularly for the Forward and Tikkun. He is completing his Ph.D. in Jewish Thought at Hebrew University and his most recent book is Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Shambhala, 2009).

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Robert Engelman: What a Population of 7 Billion People Means for the Planet

2011-07-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

With global population expected to surpass 7 billion people this year, the staggering impact on the environment is hard to ignore.

What a Population of 7 Billion People Means for the Planet

by Robert Engelman article link article link

July 20, 2011 | CommonDreams | Yale Environment 360

Demographers aren't known for their sense of humor, but the ones who work for the United Nations recently announced that the world's human population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year. Since censuses and other surveys can scarcely justify such a precise calculation, it's tempting to imagine that the UN Population Division, the data shop that pinpointed the Day of 7 Billion, is hinting that we should all be afraid, be very afraid.

We have reason to be. The 21st century is not yet a dozen years old, and there are already 1 billion more people than in October 1999 — with the outlook for future energy and food supplies looking bleaker than it has for decades. It took humanity until the early 19th century to gain its first billion people; then another 1.5 billion followed over the next century and a half. In just the last 60 years the world's population has gained yet another 4.5 billion. Never before have so many animals of one species anything like our size inhabited the planet.

And this species interacts with its surroundings far more intensely than any other ever has. Planet Earth has become Planet Humanity, as we co-opt its carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles so completely that no other force can compare. For the first time in life's 3-billion-plus-year history, one form of life — ours — condemns to extinction significant proportions of the plants and animals that are our only known companions in the universe.

Did someone just remark that these impacts don't stem from our population, but from our consumption? Probably, as this assertion emerges often from journals, books, and the blogosphere. It's as though a geometry text were to propound the axiom that it is not length that determines the area of a rectangle, but width. Would we worry about our individual consumption of energy and natural resources if humanity still had the stable population of roughly 300 million people — less than today's U.S. number — that the species maintained throughout the first millennium of the current era?

It is precisely because our population is so large and growing so fast that we must care, ever more with each generation, how much we as individuals are out of sync with environmental sustainability. Our diets, our modes of moving, and our urge to keep interior temperatures close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit no matter what is happening outside — none of these make us awful people. It's just that collectively, these behaviors are moving basic planetary systems into danger zones.

Yet another argument often advanced to wave off population is the assertion that all of us could fit into Los Angeles with room to wiggle our shoulders. The image may comfort some. But space, of course, has never been the issue. The impacts of our needs, greeds, and wants are. We should bemoan — and aggressively address — the gross inequity that characterizes individual consumption around the world. But we should also acknowledge that over the decades-long span of most human lifetimes, most of us are likely to consume a fair amount, regardless of where and how we live; no human being, no matter how poor, can escape interacting with the environment, which is one reason population matters so much. And given the global economic system and the development optimistically anticipated in all regions of the world, we each have a tendency to consume more as that lifetime proceeds. A parent of seven poor children may be the grandparent of 10 to 15 much more affluent ones climbing up the ladder of middle-class consumption.

This, in fact, is the story of China, often seen not as an example of population's impact on the environment but that of rapid industrialization alone. Yet this one country, having grown demographically for millennia, is home to 1.34 billion people. One reason the growth even of low-consuming populations is hazardous is that bursts of per-capita consumption have typically followed decades of rapid demographic growth that occurred while per-capita consumption rates were low. Examples include the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, China at the turn of the 21st, and India possibly in the coming decade. More immediately worrisome from an environmental perspective, of course, is that the United States and the industrialized world as a whole still have growing populations, despite recent slowdowns in the growth rate, while already living high up on the per-capita consumption ladder.

Many of the impacts of this ubiquitous multiplication of per-capita resource consumption by the number of individuals are by now well documented. Humanity started to overwhelm the atmosphere with greenhouse gases not long after the Industrial Revolution began, a process that accelerated along with population and consumption growth in the 20th century. Fresh water is now shared so thinly that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) projects that in just 14 years two thirds of the world's population will be living in countries facing water scarcity or stress. Half of the world's original forests have been cleared for human land use, and UNEP warns that the world's fisheries will be effectively depleted by mid-century. The world's area of cultivated land has expanded by about 13 percent since its measurement began in 1961, but the doubling of world population since then means that each of us can count on just half as much land as in 1961 to produce the food we eat.

For the rest of life on Earth, the implications of all this are obvious. Where we go, nature retreats. We are entering an epoch scientists have begun calling the Anthropocene, a break with the geologic past marked by humanity's long-term alteration of the natural world and its biota. We are inadvertently bringing on the sixth mass extinction not just because our appetites are vast and our technologies powerful, but because we occupy or manipulate most of the land in every continent except Antarctica. We appropriate anywhere from 24 percent to nearly 40 percent of the photosynthetic output of the planet for our food and other purposes, and more than half of its accessible renewable freshwater runoff.

Given these facts, it's hardly surprising that wildlife conservation faces an uphill battle globally and in every nation, while ambitious concepts like the creation of wildlife corridors to help species escape the ravages of development and climate change proliferate despite their impracticality in a world of growing human impacts.

So should we be afraid on the day we gain a 7 billionth living human being, especially considering UN demographers are now projecting anywhere between 6.2 billion and 15.8 billion people at the end of the century? Fear is not a particularly productive response — courage and a determination to act in the face of risk are the answer. And in this case, there is so much to be done to heal and make sustainable a world of 7 billion breathing human beings that cowering would be not just fatalistic but stupid.

Action means doing a lot of different things right now. We can't stop the growth of our numbers in any acceptable way immediately. But we can put in place conditions that will support an early end to growth, possibly making this year's the last billion-population day we ever mark. We can elevate the autonomy of women to make life-changing decisions for themselves. We can lower birth rates by assuring that women become pregnant only when they themselves decide to bear a child.

Simultaneously, we need a swift transformation of energy, water, and materials consumption through conservation, efficiency, and green technologies. We shouldn't think of these as a sequence of efforts — dealing with consumption first, because population dynamics take time to turn around — but as simultaneous work on multiple fronts. It would be naïve to believe we will arrive at sustainability by wrestling shifting technologies and lifestyles while human population grows indefinitely and most people strive to live as comfortably as Americans do. Nor should we take comfort in the illusion that population growth is already on a path to end soon. Demographers can no more tell us when that will happen (or through what combination of lower birth rates or higher death rates) than economists can predict when robust global economic growth will resume. Both expert groups are mocked by the many surprises the future holds in store.

Rather than forecast the future, we should work to secure it. More than two in five pregnancies worldwide are unintended by the women who experience them, and half or more of these pregnancies result in births that spur continued population growth. Clearly there is vast potential to slow that growth through something women want and need: the capacity to decide for themselves when to become pregnant. If all women had this capacity, survey data affirm, average global childbearing would immediately fall below the "replacement fertility" value of slightly more than two children per woman. Population would immediately move onto a path leading to a peak followed by a gradual decline, possibly well before 2050.

Despite the obvious barriers to women's rights in today's world, such a vision rests on a set of straightforward and achievable conditions: Women must be able to make their own decisions free from fear of coercion or pressure from partners, family, and society. They must not depend on prolific motherhood for social approval and self-esteem. And they must have easy access to a range of safe, effective, and affordable contraceptive methods and the information and counseling needed to use them.

For those who care about the environment, the future of human civilization, or both, the Day of 7 Billion should prod us to face and address the risks of continued population growth. By the sheer scale of our presence and activity we are putting ourselves and all life at risk. No human being has the right to consume forever more than any other. Yet if we could somehow close the global consumption gap, the importance of our numbers would be even more obvious as the limits of natural systems were crossed. It scarcely lessens the importance of reducing both consumption and inequity to celebrate the fact that population growth can end without policies that restrict births, without coercion of any kind, without judgments on those who choose large families. We are not far from a world in which the number of births roughly balances the number of deaths, based on pregnancies universally welcomed by women and their partners.

The transition to this world may not be entirely painless. Nations will have to adjust to rising average ages as birth rates descend further. In China and India, smaller families may contribute to artificially high ratios of baby boys, with possible risks to future social stability. But these problems are the kind that societies and institutions are generally good at handling. Stopping climate change, reducing water scarcity, or keeping ecosystems intact, by contrast, don't yet seem to be in our skill set. Working now to bring population growth to an end through intentional childbearing won't solve such problems by itself, but it will help — a lot. And such an effort, based on human rights and the dignity and freedom of the world's childbearers, is in the interest of all who care about a truly sustainable environment and human future.

Robert Engelman is executive director of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. The Population Institute awarded his book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, the Global Media Award for Individual Reporting in 2008. A former newspaper reporter who covered science and politics, Engelman served on the faculty of Yale University as a visiting lecturer in the early 2000s and was founding secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

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Hal Crowther: The Alarming Revival of Ayn Rand

2011-07-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Christianity and the wolverine capitalism of a John Galt are totally incompatible systems, two mutually exclusive human possibilities. They cancel each other out. Any political party that pretends to integrate them is a party of liars, and doomed.

The Alarming Revival of Ayn Rand: The Right's Weirdest Idol of Them All

by Hal Crowther article link article link

July 18, 2011 | AlterNet | The Progressive Populist

A passion for the prose and philosophy of Ayn Rand tells us a great deal about an individual, none of it good.

The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be heartwarming and sidesplitting, but for the tragic knowledge that one of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far above their abilities. Blood pressures rose among party elders when Donald Trump, marginally Republican and one of the greatest fools in the solar system, momentarily tossed his hairpiece into the ring and became the instant favorite.

The GOP dilemma — a golden opportunity to rule but nothing to say and no one to say it — is so desperate that my instinct is to help them sort it out. Could we make a start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama’s birth certificate or raised the specter of Sharia law in America, followed briskly off the stage by lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?

That would leave plenty of unbalanced extremists still in the running, yet reduce the stench of sheer evil and madness. The “birther” and Sharia cults reek of cheesy talk-radio racism; climate-change denial is a stranger faith yet, a political assault on basic science that insults a ground squirrel’s intelligence and casually threatens the survival of life on earth.

The party that produces birthers and global-warming deniers no doubt harbors End-of-the-Worlders, too, Christians who packed their bags for heaven with the senile prophet Harold Camping on May 21. Though none of them, I suppose, would commit to the time and expense of a presidential campaign just to preside over a nation of sinners expiring in fire and pestilence. Leo Rangell, the prominent Freudian analyst whose obituary is in this morning’s Times, once lamented that the American public is “gullible or easily seduced, and susceptible to leaders of questionable character.”

Dr. Rangell wrote that in 1980, long before gullibility became such an epidemic that we began to doubt the value of our schools, before media demagogues made a billion-dollar industry of manipulating our most credulous citizens, before the Republican Party dedicated itself to gathering most of them into its fold. Before Rush Limbaugh, before Fox News, before the Tea Party.

“Finally, people’s stupidity will break your heart,” observed my father, a small-town politician and a loyal Republican of the moderate traditional strain that has been systematically exterminated by the radical Right.

My father lived long enough to vote for George McGovern and against Ronald Reagan, but the rhetoric GOP candidates churn out to charm this Tea Party would sound extraterrestrial to most Republicans of his generation.

The odious hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who considered himself a serious presidential candidate until his entire staff abandoned him in disgust, rests his appeal on his intellectual superiority to Sarah Palin and Rick Perry — a distinction much like being a faster runner than Dom DeLuise. In his obligatory pre-campaign book Gingrich claims that Barack Obama, a cautious centrist if there ever was one, drives a “secular-socialist machine” that “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Father Coughlin, move over. Newt is just full of Shariah, among other things, and accuses Obama of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” a blatant pitch for the racist vote the Tea Party has re-energized. A colossal irony — demonstrating how hopelessly divided America has become — is that the radical philosopher Cornel West, a black Princeton professor, calls Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” This is not helpful of Dr. West, nor even responsible. He and Newt Gingrich are equally useless if a calmer, more logical and coherent political culture is what we’re after. But if I had to say which of these two hostile portraits of our president is less preposterous, I’m sure I’d choose West’s. Virtually all the valid criticism of Barack Obama has come from the left.

When Tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole — when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns — there’s a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when “conservatives” fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo’s holster? I’ve reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I’ve never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner. The election of a non-white president has brought out the worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or that their worst was so awful?

The late Albert Einstein, of my father’s persuasion if not of his party, once wrote despairingly, “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.” But the coalition that poisons this struggling republic is an unnatural one, made up of rich cynics who supply the money and poor ignoramuses who supply the votes. They have nothing in common, except that the cynics will say anything and the morons will believe it. There must be something, optimists insist, that could drive a wedge between the exploiters and the exploited — some irresistible revelation, some fraud or contradiction so flagrant that the most obtuse voter could see how callously and criminally he’s being used.

How about Ayn Rand? The latest Republican poster boy, congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, stole the media spotlight with a slash-to-the-bone budget proposal that Fox News heralded as the Magna Carta of fiscal responsibility in America. I lack the expertise to take on Rep. Ryan’s budget digit-for-digit, but I place considerable confidence in the opinion of the Times’ Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008. “The proposal wasn’t serious at all,” Krugman wrote. “In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.”

That sounds about par for the current Republican course, with fresh infusions of Tea Party belligerence and unreality. But what frightened me most about Rep. Ryan was the report that he is an avowed disciple of the writer/philosopher Ayn Rand, and has declared in public that Rand is “the reason I got involved in public service.” Good grief, she’s back. She died in 1982, but someone neglected to drive a stake through her heart.

A passion for the prose and philosophy of Ayn Rand tells us a great deal about an individual, none of it good. There are few surer signs of a poor reader, a poor thinker and an unpleasant person than a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

In 2005, Rand’s acolytes gathered in Washington for a symposium to celebrate her 100th birthday — the occasion for Rep. Ryan’s disturbing confession — and I admit I’d give anything to see the seating chart. If there was some way to ban everyone in that room from holding public office, we could probably turn the United States of America back toward the generous light of reason.

She was to literature what Rod McKuen was to poetry, what Fabian was to rock n’ roll, what Guru Maharaj Ji was to religion. Look them up. Like them, she once enjoyed a huge audience of admirers. Unlike them, she was never harmless and she’s enjoying an alarming revival.

Since Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, it has sold seven million copies. It’s possibly the most polarizing book ever written. For every Paul Ryan who finds it life-shaping, a dozen readers are mystified and a dozen more appalled. Few actually finish the 1,200-page novel, which ends with the mysterious Galt drawing a dollar sign in the air with his finger. If you wade into this stuff up to your ankles — the hokey melodrama, the backlit macro-characters posed like Easter Island monoliths, the cruel and obvious message stamped on every page—-you begin to fear that you can never wash it off.

At times her critics oversimplify Rand’s beliefs, which embody any number of contradictions and opacities. But essentially she glorifies the will and celebrates Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, the superman whose blazing passage through the world need never be impeded by the interests or opinions of mediocrities like you and me. It’s the same string of arrogant assumptions that spawned the Master Race theories of Herr Hitler: ego-deification, social Darwinism, arbitrary stratification of human types. Adapted for capitalism, it becomes the divine right to plunder — a license for those who own nearly everything to take the rest, because they wish to, because they can. Because the weak don’t matter. Let the big dogs feed. This repulsive theology was the work of a fairly repulsive person.

For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.

Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.

What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.

This division of the human race into the elect few who are destiny’s darlings and the “second-rate” multitudes above whom they soar—-this Ubermensch nonsense—-is perilously thin ice on which to rest a philosophy (Nietzsche, you recall, went hopelessly mad.)

Since there’s no agency that rates human beings the way we rate bonds, the elect are always self-elected supermen and superwomen. Super, says who?

If it’s supposed to be intellect as much as will that sets them above us, I sense a critical problem. Whenever a person of superior intelligence begins to comprehend the human condition, the first fruits of his knowledge are humility and irony—-those two things Rand and her heroes most spectacularly lack.

Personally, I never feel more superior than when I see someone carrying a copy of Atlas Shrugged. What actually sets the self-styled super race apart is an unrepressed infantile id, a raging “I want” that defies socialization. These are damaged children, people of arrested development drawn to an ugly philosophy that legitimizes narcissism and socially unacceptable behavior. Donald Trump would be a perfect example. For an apostle of self-willed happiness, the goddess of greed led a troubled life, marked by depressions, amphetamine addiction, messy love affairs and betrayals. But you could say that she had a capacious mind, if not a healthy or an orderly one.

She was well educated, she had actually read Aristotle and Nietzsche before she hobbled them and hitched them to her wagon. Her unlikely 21st-century resurrection is the work of much smaller, often almost invisible minds that cherry-pick the vast creaking structure of her oeuvre for their own ends, just as they cherry-pick the Bible or The Wealth of Nations.

If corporate feudalism is your dream for America, she’s the prophet for you. Her naïve faith in capitalism and contempt for “the welfare state” are just what the right-wing doctor ordered.

Much of the rest, alas, will never fly in Alabama. Pundits have been delighted to note that the heroine of the new Republicans was a pacifist who opposed the Vietnam War, a feminist who supported abortion, an adulteress who preached free love, a bohemian who mocked family life and child-bearing, an elitist who sneered at the common man, and, after all her “nanny state” rhetoric, a recipient of Social Security and Medicare and a late, sick convert to the benefits of socialized medicine.

Worst of all, for tea-stained Christian Republicans, she was a militant atheist. In Rand’s ideology religious faith was the most abject form of weakness, a sniveling retreat from the hardheaded, self-centered “objectivism” her heroes impose on the world. She not only would have rejected Jesus and his gospels, she actually did—-repeatedly. Christ’s message that the poor are blessed and the meek will inherit the earth is antithetical to Rand’s belief that the poor and meek are no more than mulch where the dreams of the mighty take root.

So adamantly did she denounce the altruism and self-sacrifice at the center of the Christian message, it’s no exaggeration to call her the intellectual Antichrist.

It’s no great exaggeration to say that praising her is like spitting in Christ’s face.

How do Paul Ryan, Ron and Rand Paul and company manage to pass off this radical atheist, this subversive Russian Jew (born Elisa Rosenbaum) as an iconic role model for Christian conservatives?

Apparently they don’t think they need to get into the details, not with their particular constituency. Assuming that they know the details themselves. The careless condescension of their leaders is not yet a scandal to the tea-baggers of America’s unlettered hard Right. But Ayn Rand seems like the biggest joke of all, one that might yet blow up in the party’s face.

The plutocrats she worshiped are so few, the plebeians she scorned are so many. The GOP’s little people can’t all be totally illiterate, and Limbaugh and Glenn Beck actually urge them to read this woman’s books. It’s in-your-face deception that reminds me of the old stage villain, the silent-movie heavy with the waxed mustache, cackling behind his cloak and inviting the audience to share the cruelty he’s about to inflict on his innocent victims. It’s as if Wall Street is surreptitiously giving the finger to Main Street Republicans, laughing at the gullible recruits as they march to the polls to lower corporate taxes and deregulate markets. Ayn Rand, indeed. She would have applauded the big dogs’ ruthlessness but rolled her eyes at the Christian-family rhetoric they’re obliged to use for bait.

She wasn’t one of them, of course; she certainly wasn’t one of us. She was one of a kind, thank god. In her defense, you might argue that her love affair with capitalism was rooted in a Russian Jew’s horror of the totalitarian systems that devastated Europe in the 20th century.

That offers her a gravitas she doesn’t share with ultra-light Midwestern reactionaries like Paul Ryan or Michele Bachmann. But the more Americans read her books, the better for liberals and the worse, I think, for Republicans.

Her work illustrates conclusively what a few brave clergymen and a few ink-stained relics like me have been saying for years to anyone who would listen, and to Republicans who refuse to listen — that Christianity and the wolverine capitalism of a John Galt are totally incompatible systems, two mutually exclusive human possibilities. They cancel each other out. Any political party that pretends to integrate them is a party of liars, and doomed.

Hal Crowther’s most recent book is Gather at the River. Write him at 219 N. Churton St., Hillsborough, NC 27278.

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Christian Parenti: Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble

2011-07-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble

Reading the World In a Loaf of Bread

by Christian Parenti article link article link article link article link

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | TomDispatch | OpEdNews | Truthout

What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?

The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be “read” as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country’s interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field

Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf -- and so does trouble.

To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf -- call it a “factor of production” -- is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans.

And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.

Next, without financial capital -- money -- our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.

The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market.

Marketing Disaster

When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: the upheavals in Egypt lay at the heart of the Arab Spring. Egypt is also the world’s single largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria and Morocco. Keep in mind as well that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor triggered deadly riots and finally the flight of the country’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His last act was a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk, and bread -- and it was too little too late.

With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian government ordered increased wheat imports to stave off growing unrest over food prices. As global wheat prices surged by 70% between June and December 2010, bread consumption in Egypt started to decline under what economists termed “price rationing.” And that price kept rising all through the spring of 2011. By June, wheat cost 83% more than it had a year before. During the same time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91%. Egypt is the world’s fourth largest corn importer. When not used to make bread, corn is often employed as a food additive and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, Syria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn importers. As those wheat and corn prices surged, it was not just the standard of living of the Egyptian poor that was threatened, but their very lives as climate-change driven food prices triggered political violence.

In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all, one in five Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the government provides subsidized bread to 14.2 million people in a population of 83 million. Last year, overall food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than 20%. This had an instant and devastating impact on Egyptian families, who spend on average 40% of their often exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply feeding themselves.

Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the global food system was "one shock away from a full-fledged crisis." And if you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and devastating weather being experienced across this planet.

When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010, Russia, one of the world’s leading wheat exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 years. Known as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and damaged the country’s breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices to surge upward.

At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20% of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators.

And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country’s reigning autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis that led to an incipient civil war and then western intervention in neighboring Libya, which meant most of that country’s production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of crude oil to surge, at its height hitting $125 a barrel, which set off yet more speculation in food markets, further driving up grain prices.

And recent months haven't brought much relief. Once again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe has hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is visibly straining, if not snapping, under the intense pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, growing water shortages, and most of all the onset of climate chaos.

And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90% over the next 20 years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and religious violence, banditry, civil war, and (if past history is any judge) possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers.

And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global poor -- that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You already know the sad answer to that question.

Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the Middle East, Glencore made windfall profits on the surge in grain prices. And the more expensive our loaf of bread becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible form of “adaptation” to the climate crisis.

So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored.

To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Parenti discusses the origins of his latest book and how climate change contributes to global violence, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Christian Parenti, a Nation contributing editor, fellow at The Nation Institute and visiting scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book is Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. Previous books include The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press) and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.

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East Africa's Drought: 11 Million Lives At Risk

by Tristan McConnell article link article link article link

July 18, 2011 | CommonDreams | Countercurrents | GlobalPost

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Post Apocalyptic America -- NOW!

by Rob Kall article link

July 18, 2011 | OpEdNews

Jim Robbins: As Alberta’s Tar Sands Boom, Activists Target Project’s Lifelines

2011-07-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

As Alberta’s Tar Sands Boom, Activists Target Project’s Lifelines

by Jim Robbins article link article link

July 15, 2011 | CommonDreams | Yale Environment 360

The Sand Hills of Nebraska are a unique Great Plains prairie ecosystem. The rolling dunes, rising to 300 feet, cover about a quarter of the state, and because the grasses and wildflowers there are adapted to wet, sandy soil, many grow nowhere else. Thousands of ponds and lakes dot the Sand Hills, nourishing the Ogallala Aquifer.

This region is an unlikely ground zero for a growing rebellion against a different kind of sand — the Athabascan oil sands of Alberta, 1,400 miles to the north. But that is precisely what is happening as energy companies seek to construct a pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands — the second-largest petroleum deposit in the world, after Saudi Arabia — across the length of the U.S. to refineries in Texas, passing through the Sand Hills on its way.

And the so-called Keystone XL pipeline is not the only tentacle of the tar sands poised to spread across North America: Energy companies are seeking to build a second pipeline to carry tar sands oil across the wild heart of British Columbia, while other firms are proposing to truck gargantuan equipment for the tar sands project along narrow roads in one of most remote parts of the northern Rocky Mountains.

Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, elected officials, native people, and a host of others have risen up in opposition to the potential environmental threats posed by the expanding reach of Alberta’s tar sands. Some opponents are concerned that pipelines or oversized equipment running through their communities pose an unacceptable environmental risk. But for others, the battle is about something far larger. They believe that wreaking so much environmental destruction to continue expanding supplies of planet-warming fossil fuels is fundamentally wrong, noting that the tar sands project has razed hundreds of square miles of boreal forest, led to the creation of dozens of toxic tailings ponds, and released vast quantities of CO2. And they are convinced that choking off the tar sands pipelines is a way of stopping, or at least hampering, the development of the Alberta tar sands themselves.

Indeed, the fight over the tar sands pipelines has become a proxy battle between two diametrically opposed worldviews: Those who see the planet as heading toward irreversible environmental harm, driven largely by human CO2 emission from fossil fuels, and those who say that the U.S. needs oil at almost any environmental cost to keep its economy growing.

“The pipeline has become a symbol of where America is going,” says Jane Kleeb, director of BOLD Nebraska, a group working to protect the unique ecology of the Sand Hills. “We’re concerned about climate change, absolutely. America is smart enough to figure out how to do clean energy.”

Among the growing protests over Alberta’s tar sands and the proposed pipelines are a series of acts of civil disobedience planned in Washington, D.C., for the last two weeks of August. The campaign, Tar Sands Action, will feature protests at the White House and will include author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and Canadian scientist and broadcaster, David Suzuki.

Roughly 173 billion barrels of Alberta tar sands reserves, worth more than $15 trillion, underlay an area the size of Florida, making it by far the largest petroleum deposit in North America. The strange solid or semi-solid oil, called bitumen, is essentially mined, and doing so means digging up large tracts of boreal forest and releasing a lot of CO2, which is why critics call the product of the tar sands “dirty oil.”

But supporters of the tar sands and the pipelines say that the “dirty oil” rap is unfair. Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, says tar sands crude creates just 1 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions generated annually by U.S. coal-fired power plants. It’s really “ethical oil,” he says, because the profits won’t go to corrupt dictators or civil wars.

Oil companies have limited refining capacity for the dense crude in Alberta, and that’s where the biggest pipeline project, Keystone XL, figures in. Each day the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — to be built by Calgary-based TransCanada Corporation — would move 910,000 barrels of a slurry of bitumen, natural gas, and undisclosed chemicals through a 36-inch-diameter, high-pressure pipe, buried four feet underground. The nearly 1,700-mile route would run from Hardisty, Alberta, through Saskatchewan, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska (including 92 miles of the Sand Hills), and Oklahoma. After connecting with an existing pipeline in Nebraska, the new Keystone XL would begin again in Cushing, Oklahoma and continue on to Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. There, company officials say, they would have the special refining capacity they need.

The $7 billion pipeline, which must be approved by the U.S. State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has drawn both opposition and support across its route. But it has run into the fiercest resistance in the conservative farming state of Nebraska, largely because the pipeline would cross the Sand Hills. Should the toxic brew leak, it could pollute not only the water there, but could seep into portions of the Ogallala Aquifer, the 174,000-square-mile underground reservoir, fed in part by water from the Sand Hills.

Spills are not a far-fetched scenario. In a year of operation, a similar pipeline in the U.S. — the existing Keystone, also owned by TransCanada Corporation — had 11 spills. Most of them were tiny, but the largest, in southeastern North Dakota, was 21,000 gallons, and federal officials temporarily suspended the company’s operating permit. And last year a 30-inch oil pipeline owned by Enbridge, another Canadian pipeline company, suffered a 4-foot-long rupture and spilled nearly 20,000 barrels — 840,000 gallons — of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, killing much of the aquatic life for miles. It was the worst spill ever in the Midwest.

John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, whose members oppose the pipeline, said a big problem is the involvement of the U.S. State Department, which he says isn’t equipped to assess the environmental risks of Keystone XL. “They are out of their element,” he said. Nor has the state of Nebraska exercised oversight, said Hansen. “In this void, TransCanada took the short cut through some of the most environmentally sensitive land you could build a pipeline through,” he said. “It’s very fragile. The water is close to the surface and in the spring, water would cover some of the pipeline. To anybody who knows anything about the Sand Hills, the thought of running a toxic pipeline through your water supply makes no sense.”

Petroleum pipelines that carry diluted bitumen, or “dilbit,” pose special risks. Dilbit pipelines use higher pressure and higher temperatures and need chemicals to keep the thick, tarry substance flowing. Some data suggests they suffer more ruptures because of these temperature and pressure extremes.

But the real problem, says Carl Weimer, the director of the Pipeline Safety Trust — set up after three young boys were killed by a gasoline pipeline rupture, explosion, and fire in Bellingham, Washington in 1999 — is that so little is known about dilbit pipelines. “We’ve asked those types of questions to the Department of Transportation and haven’t gotten an answer,” says Weimer. “Unfortunately no one has looked into these things.” The director of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Cynthia Quarterman, testified recently to Congress that existing safety and environmental regulations fail to take this new kind of pipeline into account. Environmentalists have criticized Quarterman for her ties to the oil and gas industry, including providing legal counsel to the Enbridge pipeline company before joining the Obama administration.

Company officials say they are aware of the fragile nature of the Sand Hills. “We take safety and environment very seriously,” said Terry Cunha, a spokesman for TransCanada Corp. “This pipeline would not be the first to cross the Sand Hills. There’s already 3,000 miles of pipe crossing the [Ogalalla] aquifer.” Other conventional pipelines, not dilbits, do cross the Sand Hills.

It seemed at first that the approval process for the continent-crossing pipeline would be perfunctory. Because of the international aspect of the project, the environmental studies are being conducted by the U.S. State Department, which approved a previous Keystone pipeline, which runs from Canada to Oklahoma, with little notice. The chief lobbyist for the pipeline company, Paul Elliot, was a deputy campaign manager for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, and last year Clinton said she was “inclined” to approve the pipeline, long before the environmental studies were completed. As an outcry arose, Clinton backpedaled, and said she hadn’t made up her mind.

The final environmental impact statement on Keystone XL is due in August, after which hearings will be held in states affected by the pipeline and in Washington, D.C. A decision could come by the end of the year. “If we get the permit we’ll begin construction in early 2012,” said Cunha. The EPA has twice given very poor grades to the State Department’s environmental review, most recently in early June.

Another major front in the battle over the tar sands’ tentacles involves a proposed pipeline and a new tanker port in Canada. Enbridge Inc., whose pipeline spilled crude oil into the Kalamazoo River last year, is proposing a $5.5 billion double-pipeline called the Northern Gateway that would move oil west from Alberta, across 730 miles of British Columbia, to two giant oil tanker loading docks it proposes to construct at the eastern end of a fjord at Kitimat, British Columbia. (The second parallel line would move liquid natural gas to Alberta.) That part of the proposal is controversial, too, for many on the coast of British Columbia have been opposed to oil tanker traffic since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Earlier this year though, several First Nations tribes, who own a quarter of the land the pipeline would traverse, rejected an agreement with Enbridge, in spite of a revenue sharing offer that would mean more than a billion dollars to the tribes. Geraldine Thomas Flurer, a spokesman for the Yinka Dene Alliance near Vanderhoof, British Columbia, said no amount of money could replace the hunting and fishing that sustains the remote towns, should a pipeline rupture. “Moose hunting, salmon fishing, sturgeon, this is something that we do every day, this is who we are,” she said. “The pipeline would cross nearly a thousand rivers, lakes and streams, and one leak could destroy what we have, who we are.” Those rivers include the Fraser and the Skeena, both highly productive salmon fisheries.

Michael A. Levi, an energy and climate change analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, said that both the energy security issue cited by proponents of the tar sands oil and environmental problems raised by those against the pipelines, are overblown. “All energy development comes with environmental issues,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of choosing the option of zero environmental problems.” As far as the Keystone XL pipeline, “I don’t like betting, but if I did, I bet it would get built.” The Northern Gateway was less certain, he said, not because of the pipeline, but because of the concern over tanker traffic after the Exxon Valdez disaster.

On a third front involving the tar sands, Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, is seeking permission to move 207 giant modules — three stories high, more than 200 feet long, and 24 feet wide — for oil production at Kearl Oil Sands, a new mine in the tar sands. The oversized equipment would travel along a winding, two-lane highway that crosses some of the wildest country in the Lower 48 state; the route was chosen because, unlike interstate highways, there are no overpasses. Environmentalists and locals have organized against the modules, objecting to an industrial corridor that would carry gargantuan equipment through such wild country.

Barry and Bobby Bartlette are co-owners of the Lolo Square Dance Center and Campground, located along the proposed equipment route. They worry that campers with trailers will avoid Highway 12, and that road-widening could harm the water quality of Lolo Creek.

And like many other opponents, they object to the large-scale destruction associated with the tar sands project. “Taking out forests to get oil is devastating and the impacts downstream are devastating,” Barry Bartlette said. “There’s more oil they can drill for and not have those impacts.”

Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His fifth book, The Forgotten Forest, about the poorly understood role of trees in the environment, will be published next year by Random House. In an earlier article for Yale Environment 360, he explored how a great forest die-off occurring across western North America is linked to climate change.

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Ethan Indi: Jesus, My Favorite Conspiracy Theorist

2011-07-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Jesus, My Favorite Conspiracy Theorist

by Ethan Indi article link

July 11, 2011 | OpEdNews

Language is like a map. And stories take people to new places. Yet if we don't possess the language to put the story in context its value might be overlooked. Elimination of language takes away and new language expands. Conspiracy theorists often offer new language so people can follow them, while people who would like to eliminate conspiracies like to eliminate language and stories and storytellers even.

President Eisenhower arguably knew more about the military and war than any other US president and was perhaps the greatest conspiracy theorist of the last century with his coining of the phrase "military industrial complex' and his warning concerning it. The powers that be normally discount and disbelieve any notion of conspiracy, and any new language concerning it, but when the President defines it, it is hard to deny. The military industrial complex describes a militaristic corporate entity among entities.

There is endless variety of conspiracy, clandestine crimes and power grabs, but they all pertain to one goal; oligarchical collectivism. George Orwell, another great conspiracy theorist right up there with Eisenhower, originally penned this phrase. He arguably authored the most profound political fiction on conspiracy theory. Oligarchical collectivism is at root of every institutional conspiracy over individuals for thousands of years. Oligarchical collectivism means the coming together of the few in control of the many, the linking of pyramid systems. The military industrial complex is just one example of oligarchical collectivism.

Oligarchical collectivism is the phrase, the unification of institutions of the few in control of the many is the story. The military industrial complex and oligarchical collectivism are keys to understanding the map, the story. Jesus Christ's story is one of an individual standing up to oligarchical collectivism. He is a peaceful warrior who sees wrongdoing interlinked over individuals and speaks up about it. Jesus reacted to the epitome of oligarchical collectivism and tossed over tables and ruffled the feathers of institutions. He stood up the interlinked institutions of the Jewish temple supported by the Roman State and the traders/bankers inside the temple. The oligarchical collectivism for Jesus was the same we have today, interlinking of institutions of religion, state and corporation. The wrongdoing set forth by linking of church, state and corporate institutions is enough to make even Jesus angry.

Exploitive institutions are set up in the same pyramidal shape now as they were then. The few are at the top controlling the many through interlocked institutions. And people should be angry. People should be angry and inspired to take action, like a peaceful warrior, like Jesus, when oligarchcical collectivism takes place.

And yet people are so subdued, so absolutely and wholly apathetic that we will let the military industrial complex run over strangers and their oligarchical operations rain nuclear poison over entirety. We will let corporate agriculture genetically modify plants and animals without concern. Jesus' story is the story the Prince of Peace fearlessly standing up to and calling out the oligarchical collectivism of his day. Jesus stood up to the oligarchical collectivism he was surrounded by not because he was the son of God, but because he was also a mortal and standing up for liberty is at the core of our mortal human condition. Jesus wanted them to stop doing business and exchanging money in the temple which made revenue for the few among the many, those in control of the church, state and corporate.

It is human nature to stand up and repel oligarchical collectivism and yet people today are so passive and tolerant we will let oligarchical collectivists hold reign through one overt conspiracy after another. This itself is conspiracy and as a accused conspiracy theorist I have the phrase for the map to the story. There is an ongoing conspiracy committed by all institutions to instill tolerance on people. Being tolerant toward individuals is okay. Compassion towards individuals is better. Tolerance of individuals is a start, but even Jesus Christ the lord didn't tolerate institutional wrongdoing. Jesus knew very well the difference between individuals and institutions.

People are tolerant of wrongdoing, tolerant of oligarchical institutions, tolerant of militaristic corporatist exploitation of others, people are tolerant of government involvement in drug smuggling and gun running. Many people are tolerant little bitches who take more offense to harsh language than they do to exploitation of their neighbors and themselves. And at the same time those with institutionally induced tolerance of institutional wrongdoing are less likely to tolerate an individual's alternate race, origin or perspective.

This misunderstanding, this misunderstanding of tolerance and confusion of individuals and institutions is a conspiracy gluing all other conspiracies together. It is the conspiracy of Institutionally Induced Tolerance and should be a psychiatric disorder simply called IT. You have to be fearful of being human, you have to lose all sense of humanity to stand down to institutions and oligarchical collectivism. You have to be barren of feeling or ignorant of the most basic precepts of reality to not be angry when confronted by oligarchical collectivism. Perhaps the conspiracy of IT is so wide that tolerance is induced biologically as well as politically.

I myself am certain that the conspiracy theory of IT is not theory, but certainty. I feel this way through compiled information and something institutions do not have and would like to eliminate the validity of, intuition. Institutions despise human intuition, mainly because intuition can detect oligarchical collectivism instantly. To me IT is not as much theory as it is actuality, however I understand it as a theory and in using the word theory I like all other theorists of all other subjects, merely pose the notion for consideration. Eighty five percent of Americans suffer from Institution Induced Tolerance, do your part to fight this disease and stand up to oligarchical collectivism, like Jesus.

Ethan Indi: I write. I love the USA; locals, land and liberty. I hate institutions placed above locals, land and liberty. I have roots in Maine, NYC and Northern California. My freshman work is titled The Complete Patriot's Guide to Oligarchical Collectivism: Its Theory and Practice. It is pro individual and anti institution and may become contraband for thought provoking. In the book I investigate political mentality and political power for individuals among institutions. Progressive Press is the publisher. Within the book are new concepts and new terms based on observations of history, philosophy and reality. I coin the term petrolithic era which began when Diesel died and continues on today. You can see cover and buy it before it's banned on amazon or many other websites and perhaps your local independent bookstore.

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The Prophetic Redoubt and Prescience of Theodore Roszak

by Christopher Diamant article link

July 11, 2011 | OpEdNews

Frank Schaeffer: Why Rupert Murdoch Love$ God

2011-07-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books.

Why Rupert Murdoch Love$ God: World's Biggest Sleaze Mogul Also Getting Rich from Christian Moralizers

by Frank Schaeffer article link

July 10, 2011 | AlterNet

Here's what you might not know about Rupert Murdoch: he’s one of the leading religion publishers in the world.

Maybe one day soon Murdoch will go to jail as might his son, as will several of their UK editors if many alleged and disgusting and illegal acts of pirate “journalism” are proved true, ranging from bribing the police to hacking the phones of bereaved family members of killed service men and women and child murder victims. Make no mistake: when it comes to the Murdoch media “empire” we're talking about the lowest form of “journalism” as detailed by the Guardian newspaper.

So are religious moralizers and others writing about religious and/or “moral” themes prepared to enrich the Murdoch “ media juggernaut” forever while Rupert Murdoch further corrupts UK, American and Australian politics while his companies trade in human misery for profit by hacking murder victim's phones, paying off the police, elevating smut to a national sport and even hacking the phones of killed soldiers’ families?

You bet!

Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of "progressive" Rob Bell’s Love Wins.

Rick Warren, Rob Bell and company helped Murdoch fund his tabloid-topless-women-on-page-3 empire, phone hacking of murdered teens and Fox News' spreading "birther" and "death panel" lies about the president. They helped Murdoch by enriching him. And these weren’t unknown authors just lucky to get published anywhere, they could have picked anybody to sell their books.

Do the religious authors making their fortunes off Murdoch wear gloves when they cash their royalty checks? Do they ever dare look in the mirror?

The authors publishing with Murdoch serve a religious market so fine-tuned to grandstanding hypocrisy and moralizing, that, for instance, my novels about growing up religious (Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma) will never be sold in the thousands of CBA member (Christian Bookseller’s Association) bookstores because – horrors! – my books have profanity and sex in them!

But those same CBA stores gladly sell tens of millions of books -- annually -- published by Murdoch, a man with the moral rectitude of the herpes virus, a man who runs the companies that gave Glenn Beck a megaphone, that hacked a dead girl's phone, that lied about Iraq's involvement in 9/11, and thus contributed to the war-of-choice needless killing of almost 5000 American soldiers by George W Bush.

You see, Murdoch has bought into and now owns a huge chunk of American religion and is suckling from the profitable God-teat along with the likes of Rick Warren and Rob Bell et al.

Murdoch bought the venerable evangelical Zondervan publishing house. I knew the founding Zondervan family, a clan of strict Bible-believing Calvinists who’d have bathed for a week in the Jordan River to purify themselves if they’d ever even brushed up against Murdoch and his minions! Later generations sold out.

Murdoch also bought the all purpose all-religion-is-great-if-it-sells-something “religion” site “Beliefnet” and "Inspirio" - religious “gift production,” specialists making tawdry religion-junk of the one-more-pair-of-praying-hands made of pressed muck kind.

And Murdoch publishes Rob Bell and other so-called progressives evangelical “stars” as well as run of the mill evangelical right winger’s books though Harper One, the "religious" division of Harper Collins, another Murdoch company.

Murdoch knows something I found out way back in the 1970s and 80s, when I was still my founder-of-the-religious-right Dad’s sidekick and a right wing evangelical leader/shill myself: There’s gold in them-thar God hills! James Dobson alone once gave away 150,000 copies of one of my evangelical screeds that sold more than a million copies. (I describe why I got out of the evangelical netherworld – fled -- in my book Sex, mom and God.)

So here’s my question to Rob Bell of the God-loves-everybody school of touchy-feely theology and/or to the right wing "family values" crowd who worry about gay marriage between responsible loving adults while they perform financial fellatio on the mightiest and most depraved/pagan media baron to ever walk the earth:

What serious, let alone decent religiously conscious person – left or right, conservative or liberal -- would knowingly work to enrich this dreadful man who will go down in history as the epitome of everything that all religion says its against: lies, greed, criminality, and sheer disgusting exploitation of the defenseless that would shame a sewer rat?

Secular “un-saved” and "godless" and "liberal" authors like Jeff Jarvis have pulled books from Harper Collins because it’s owned by Murdoch as he writes: “[my] next book, Public Parts, was to be published, like my last one, by News Corp.'s HarperCollins. But I pulled the book because in it, I am very critical of the parent company for being so closed. It's now being published by Simon and Schuster.”

Where are the big time religion writers like the "I-give-all-my-royalties-to-the-poor" Rick Warren to be found refusing to publish with Zondervan, Harper One or write another word for Beliefnet? What’s mildly lefty Rob Bell’s defense for enriching Murdoch and helping to finance Fox “News” via publishing with Harper One when he could publish with anyone?

For that matter where are the evangelical/Roman Catholic/Muslim—or just minimally decent -- people, religious or irreligious guests and commentators now refusing to be interviewed by Fox News even if it will help sell their books?

Knowing what we know about the union-busting, slime-spreading Murdoch empire and it's disgusting and criminal actions can a moral person work for or use the products of this all-encompassing web of profit, far right politics and corruption?

I don't think so.

But of course the religion writers have plenty of company.

What about journalists working for Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal?

What about Deepak Chopra?

He publishes with Harper One. Thus Chopra is helping finance Fox News. And so is Desmond Tutu. He’s also a Harper One author.

And what about all the “progressive” stars, producers and writers doing deals with the Fox movie empire? Such Hollywood moralists used to boycott working in the old apartheid South Africa, but will work for/with Murdoch today as he empowers the far religious racist right through Fox News! Desmond Tutu used to call for boycotts of far right religious nuts in South Africa oppressing blacks in the name of God, and now he’s a Murdoch contributor!

Go figure!

Why should the people – religious leaders, writers, actors, agents, producers et al -- who help Murdoch wreck America and the UK -- remain respectable in our countries?

Okay, they deserve a second chance.

Mea Culpa!

I published two books with Harper Collins some years ago after Murdoch had taken over. I had a deal with the Smithsonian that was tied into Harper Collins for distribution, then the Smithsonian backed out but my books stayed at Harpers. After they were published I thought about – and regretted -- helping Murdoch. I've never published with them again.

I only have one excuse, I didn’t know much about Murdoch then. But who would willingly publish anything with any Murdoch paper, magazine or book publisher now, knowing what we all know?

Post UK meltdown, will Tutu, Bell, Chopra et al – big time authors with a choice of publishers -- still publish yet more books with Harper One, and/or with Zondervan?

Will liberals in Hollywood still underwrite Murdoch with their lives and continue to work for Fox TV and Fox Films?

It’s time to hold all Murdoch's collaborator’s feet to the fire, especially the big and famous sell outs who can go anywhere with their books or scripts. And why would any decent paper or blog review any book, film or TV show that enriches Murdoch? He should be blacked out before he takes us all down with him.

No more excuses. We all know about Murdoch now.

From here on out it’s time to out those who choose to stay in bed with the sleazy man from down under who elbowed his way into America and the UK, damaged our political systems, perhaps fatally, all the while insulting our intelligence and aiding and abetting our war machine.

We can’t boycott every dubious corporation on earth. But with Murdoch’s sleaze-infested ambition to control the politics of so much of the world a reality a line’s been crossed. It is time to pull an “Arab Spring” on the whole Murdoch empire and overthrow it. And we of the outraged “street” can do it at last because so many political and media leaders, who have sucked up to Murdoch for decades, are running for cover.

I know it’s not considered polite to be judgmental but I’ll say it: to work for any part of News Corp, Murdoch, Fox and/or any or all of his companies, let alone to publish books with him makes you an accomplice to a very bad person.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer his new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

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The Oppressing Mind of Mammon

2011-07-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

Mammon Is "Claim of Self" In All Things

2011-07-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

Thou Shalt Not Mammon

2011-07-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

Frank Schaeffer: Fundamentalist Religion Will Destroy The World

2011-07-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

Fundamentalist Religion Will Destroy The World

by Frank Schaeffer article link article link

July 3, 2011 | OpEdNews | AlterNet

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles.

The earth bursts with life. Far right exclusionary religion bursts with death. If there is a creator of life He/She/It must hate fundamentalist religion.

The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world's greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.

If the rest of the human race could find a time machine to roll back the clock and make a world where these countries/city states had never existed we'd live in a better world.

Just take one example of religion's baleful influence: President Woodrow Wilson's messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War One. "My life would not be worth living" Wilson wrote, "if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple." (Letter to Nancy Toy, 1915.)

Wilson's religious views were the driving force in his political career, informing his quest for world peace. And like all fanatics he decided to achieve this "peace" through war. The devout Woodrow Wilson upset fellow Presbyterians as he moved the nation toward entering World War One, including William Jennings Bryan, who quit as secretary of state in protest.

What did Wilson's religious idealism actually achieve? Germany's loss of World War One led to the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War. Wilson picked sides between two equally tarnished nationalistically-inspired colonial contenders and weighed in. So Wilson set the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War Two. With no World War Two there would be no Israel because there would have been no holocaust. Zionism would have simply become a forgotten quirk. And there would have been no Cold War either, maybe not even a Soviet Union.

The twentieth century began with wars rooted in religion and nationalism and ended as the century of wars rooted in ideological atheism led by the likes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Now the twenty first century seems to be shaping up to be the age of renewed wars of religion led by fundamentalist fanatics on all sides who believe in the divine destinies of their nations and/or religions.

These fanatics - they are all of the far right - have ranged from the Ayatollah Khomeinito George W Bush, from the far right leaders of the state of Israel to far right American fundamentalist like Michelle Bachmann who - if she and her fellow travelers have their way - would replace the Constitution and Bill of Rights with the Bible and turn America into a (Reconstructionist) theocracy.

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in "Truth" revealed through one special prophet to one special peoples and/or tribe, be they Jews, Muslims or American Evangelical Christians, or conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.

Eliminate willful self-serving tribal religious delusion from the globe and there might be hope for the survival of the human race. Combine tribalism and religious conviction with nukes and the "right" to exploit the earth and disaster looms.

It's no accident that the most dangerous cultures today are also the most religiously observant societies. The ultra-religiously observant USA embraces perpetual war as a way of life. With our notion of "exceptionalism," we fear the "other" who might challenge our notion of having been chosen by God for some special task.

Like the USA the state of Israel has become an intransigent provocation to the world as it slides inexorably toward becoming the next apartheid state taking up oppression based on race and tribe where South Africa left off. Israel is the place where a demographic minority of the "chosen" already represses (and/or has expelled) the majority of the "un-chosen."

As for the ultra religious state of Pakistan it was actually founded on self-aware religious difference! Pakistan is now the leading exporter of terror worldwide alongside Iran. Both Iran and Pakistan's intelligence agencies are the purveyors of terror. And both countries (when not busy condemning people to death for the crime of heresy etc.,) see themselves as having special prophetic religious destinies.

The Saudis - "keepers of the Holy Places" -- don't need nukes because they have oil. They threaten destruction to the rest of us every bit as catastrophic as war by funding terror, not to mention exporting the most intolerant forms of Islam worldwide into tens of thousands of madrassas.

If Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and the USA just went away, or had never existed, and/or changed their essential neuroses and accepted a role of "ordinary" nations filled with just folks or saw their religions as a way, not the way, the world would take a giant step toward peace.

But to admit this, let alone to say it publicly, is to court the condemnation of being anti-Semitic, and/or anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic and/or anti-Christian, even anti-American" ... which is a little ironic because the sort of right wing religious Americans who fancy themselves as "pro-American" and "pro-Israel" regularly get our men and women in uniform killed and maimed by starting wars of choice. So who is the patriot here?

Let's get one thing straight: Iran, the USA, Israel, Pakistan, the Vatican and Saudi Arabia aren't special, except in the religion-addled brains of the members of their religious right wings and ruling elites. They're just geographical areas like any others filled with ordinary people like any others, no better and no worse.

Someday these "special" and "chosen" countries will cease to exist as will all nation states. Someday they will not even be remembered because all things pass from time into oblivion, nor will their "holy" books and "holy" places exist forever, simple geology will take care of that. What makes them dangerous today is their shared religious delusion that they are somehow essential and eternal.

The delusion is this: "We're chosen, special and enlightened, and only we have The Truth."

Birds of a feather.

So it is no coincidence that the USA has a "special" relationship with Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and special "respect" for the Vatican and a soft spot for religion in general, for instance giving religion tax deductions. And thus it is no coincidence we are at war without end.

Certainty is a killer. And tolerance of certainty is, by nature, intolerant when it comes to results.

For instance; we tolerate Zionism and Christian Zionism and so messed with the Middle East, because we picked sides in a religious war and decided to back one "chosen people" (Jews) over another "chosen people" (Muslims). This picking of sides between two equally ridiculous pre-science claims to divine selection is the real -- and only -- reason for 9/11 and all that's followed.

America needlessly meddled in a tribal religious Middle Eastern war of religion and has paid and is paying the consequences.

Meanwhile the world's most pressing problems, from global warming to endless wars relate to the self-"chosen" nations and tribes and countries. Of course China and India et al are involved in global warming too, mostly because they imitated the West. Of course others start wars too. But I'm talking about first causes of war and threatened global destruction.

If and when we're plunged into capitalist/consumer global ecological destruction chances are future generations - if any - will have right wing fundamentalist religion of all kinds to thank for "justifying" the rape of the earth.

And if and when we're plunged into an age of nuclear terror, lose Washington DC or New York or London chances are that the fateful moment will be rooted in Middle Eastern/American tribal-religious war. We'll have the states of Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and/or the USA to blame for putting humanity on a collision course with reality.

The Jews gave us a book that commands the "dominion" of the earth. The Muslims picked up this theme in their book and predicted the dominion of their one and only "true" religion over the earth, a global "caliphate" that -- for instance -- the Pakistani extremists and Iranian "holy men" in charge of their nukes (or soon to be in charge of their nukes) are working to implement with the same religious ferocity as that displayed by the Israeli "settlers" as they "justify" stealing another Semitic tribe's land.

Meanwhile along with American Evangelicals, the Vatican still holds out a misogynistic / homophobic vision of "progress" and still claims that it and it alone is God's special envoy on earth. The very existence of such exclusivist claims - we'll go to heaven, it's hell for the rest of you! -- is a threat to human survival.

And the United States, the inventor of the bomb, the only country to ever use it, is the granddaddy of the exploitation of the earth in the name of economic growth, as something "given" by God to us as "natural" and "right." And now we Americans run a worldwide war making machine par excellence, sure that we are the "good guys."

The Wilsonian ideological perspective --advocacy of "the spread of democracy," the spread of Capitalism,in favor of intervention to help create "peace" and the "spread freedom," is rooted in an older religious tradition: we're special a "city set on a hill." This insanity goes back to the very religious foundation of the American colonies that were peopled by Calvinist cranks from England and Holland who thought that they were too good, too theologically pure and too "chosen" to co-exist the likes of ordinary folks. So they left those bad folks behind and soon were burning Pequot Indians to death in the name of their Old Testament "God."

That same intolerant Puritan inheritance drives us today and divides America into "Real Americans" as Sarah Palin calls herself and her followers, and everyone else. This is the "saved" and "lost" model of theology directly applied to politics. Result? We "Real Americans" believe we're so special that we can and should police the world!

The "holy books" all the religious cultures mentioned here follow are compendiums of Bronze Age tribal self-serving myths, adopted and updated by ignorant tribes in order to try to make sense of their places in the universe pre-science. Today they are the source of war and the rape of the earth.

It's time to stop being polite about the religions that are motivating the self-deluding right wing Israelis, the self-deluding right wing Saudis and the self-deluding right wing Iranians, Americans and popes. They may all hate each other, but below the surface they all share one dreadful and silly conviction: the unfounded belief that they and they alone (and their tribes) are morally right and that the rest of us are the "other" to be suppressed, converted or sometimes killed. And they all say God is on their side.

If there is a God - I happen to believe there is, but I could be wrong -- a creator, a force responsible for the magnificent diversity of nature and human aspiration, then that actual God, by definition, must despise exclusive-type religion and tribalism and the black and white world of "in" or "out" and "saved" and "lost."

Guessing what God might actually be like by what we see around us, He, She or It is big, generous, non-ideological, wonderful and all encompassing. Just open your eyes to the earth below and heavens above and try to reconcile what you see, hear and feel with petty popes, Ayatollahs and preachers or the books they call "holy"!

If there is no creator (and who can say there is or isn't?) then nature's diversity and adaptability is a silent and powerful rebuke to exclusivity. Put it this way; the Rockies don't know they're part of an "exceptional" country and the Negev desert doesn't know it was "given" to anyone! Nor do the sands of Medina know that they're "holy" much less does the dust of Iran's "holy city" of Qom know it's "sacred," or the plaster under the paint in the Sistine Chapel know it's "owned" by the Vatican and the "one true church!"

The religions and tribalism of those who threaten the world the most - Iran, the state of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Vatican and the USA -- is small, inward looking and backward. It's time to tell the truth and say that maybe it is possible to love God - if there is such an entity -- but it's not possible to love God and love the sort of tribal exclusionary religions that are taking us all down.

Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times best selling author. He is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as "pretty terrible." Frank's nonfiction includes "Keeping Faith-A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps" and AWOL-The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country." Frank's latest book is, "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back."

OpEdNews articles by Frank Schaeffer

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RJ Eskow: The New War of Independence - Against Corporate Politics

2011-07-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

This July 4th, politics is too important to be left to the politicians. The stakes are too high and the system is too broken. Citizen action is everyone's job now.

The New War of Independence - Against Corporate Politics

by RJ Eskow article link

July 3, 2011 | AlterNet

This is the age of corporatized politics. That means we may admire our leaders, but we can't depend on them. We're paying the price for Thomas Jefferson's unfulfilled desire to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

This July 4th, politics is too important to be left to the politicians. The stakes are too high and the system is too broken. Citizen action is everyone's job now, and it will be as long as our political debate focuses on misplaced austerity and ignores the majority's yearning for jobs, growth, and those things that government does best.

But the problem isn't just with politicians, or even the system. The problem is dependence itself.

We call it "Independence Day." But the British didn't leave on July 4, 1776. The war lasted until September 3, 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed. July 4th is the day we declared ourselves independent. Victory came with the recognition that freedom is our natural condition. Our country wasn't born with violence, but with the realization that freedom is discovered and claimed, not granted by others. That's why we celebrate July 4, not September 3, as our Day of Independence.

That will disappoint the history-challenged right-wingers whose patriotic posturing is limited to speaking in their odd pseudo-military lingo, that echolalic Esperanto for fantasy revolutionaries. They don't realize that war is a tactic, not a system of values. And "independence"? Today's "Tea Party" wasn't named for the tea-dumping patriots of Boston, but for some self-entitled commodities traders shrieking "losers!" on cable television. They were sneering at struggling homeowners, mocking middle-class people like the Tea Partiers themselves. And they were enraged at the idea that ordinary families might be rescued the same way their own financier class had been rescued.

They won. Nobody's rescued the middle class yet. Unlike them, the Founders believed in common purpose. They shared George Washington's goal of "protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions." They understood what conservatives don't: There's a difference between declaring independence and telling people they're on their own.

When Sarah Palin tells her followers to "RELOAD!" she has no idea where to aim. When Michele Bachmann says she wants people to be "armed and dangerous," she doesn't understand who or what would be endangered. When John Stossel "jokes" about hanging Barney Frank in effigy, he's putting reason (and the tattered shreds of his own reputation) in the noose generals once used for hanging enemies - and patriots like Nathan Hale.

At least their mangling of Revolutionary War history gave us a great chuckle, when Keith Olbermann said Sarah Palin thought Paul Revere was "warning the British Invasion that kicks keep getting harder to find." Conservatives adopt the Revolution's pose and forget its principles. They're dress-up generals in a make-believe war, corporate servants who use the rhetoric of yesterday's revolution to serve today's Redcoats.

We fought for the principles of self-representation and economic freedom. Those principles are under attack again today. But there's no place for rhetorical violence (or any other kind) in today's debate. When corporations intimidate us with economic pressure and distorted information, the best responses are communication and mobilization.

We resisted Britain's state-sanctioned monopolies in 1776. Today's government-sanctioned corporations hang out on Wall Street, not by the chartered Thames. The spirit of the East India Company lives in the five banks which now control nearly 96% of the derivatives market in this country. Our financial oligarchs receive Treasury Department money, Federal Reserve giveaways, and get-out-of-jail-free cards for a corporate crime wave that would make Al Capone blush.

Some of our ancestors came to this country as slaves or indentured servants. The slaves were freed in body but their descendants' economic freedom is not yet fully won. Unemployment's much worse for African Americans. Infant mortality rates are 2.5 times higher than they are for whites and life expectancy is years shorter. Indentured servitude's making a comeback, too. In colonial days people signed away years of freedom for the "loan" of ship's passage to America, where they were sold to bidders for a period of bondage. If only Wall Street had existed then! Imagine the money Goldman Sachs could have made on selling "IBS's" - "indenture-backed securities."

And then shorting them, of course.

Today's borrowers aren't exactly indentured servants, but their contract terms can be unilaterally changed and their debts sold and resold without notice. Their homes may be foreclosed by unknown lenders for violating terms they didn't know existed. If they resist paying unfair penalties the full weight of the law will be brought down on them (but not the banks.) Bad credit may leave them unable to borrow money, rent a home, or even find a job.

These economic injustices and others will continue as long as wealthy contributors corrupt our political process. Many of us feel the President can and should do much more to rein in Wall Street, create jobs, and defend Medicare and Social Security. But any likely opponent would probably be far worse. Politicians in this post-Citizens United world are either limited by corporate power or prostituted to it.

So we must work around, as well as within, the electoral system. That means getting the truth out, speaking for the majority's viewpoint, and outlining the real choices we face. That's especially hard when almost everyone in Washington is pushing austerity over jobs and growth (no matter how many Nobel Prize-winning economists tell them they're wrong), and when media empires mislead us about our situation and its causes. So we must wage a war for the mind - a war against corporate think tanks and TV talking heads who tell us our problems arise from self-indulgence and those in need, not corporate malfeasance and runaway greed.

Politicians can help this war against media monopolies and for publicly-financed elections. But they can't lead it. This week some conservatives claimed John Lennon was a secret Ronald Reagan fan. Jon Weiner, the writer and historian who's authored two books on Lennon, effectively refuted them. Weiner points out that Lennon's last political statement was in support of union workers. But to truly dismiss their claim, all you need (besides love, of course) is this Lennon quote:

"You make your own dream ... If you want to save Peru, go save Peru ... Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself."

Lennon was right, and if he were still around I suspect he'd add another Presidential name or two to that list.

We can vote for the best (or least objectionable) choices in the next election, but we can't surrender our fate to them. We'll need to keep pressuring them with calls, petitions, and other initiatives. In this corporatized system, we can't expect many leaders to heed Revolutionary pamphleteer (and ur-blogger) Thomas Paine, who said "Attempting to debate with a person who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to the dead." Paine also made this timely observation: "Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."

Some of us have surrendered to despair. Chris Hedges, one of our most brilliant political writers, wrote recently: " When did our democracy die? When did it irrevocably transform itself into a lifeless farce ...?" But he's wrong. Democracy hasn't died here, not yet. Despite a half-century of corporate manipulation and misinformation the country elected a President with an unlikely name and biography, one who promised real change.

What we've learned since then is that the system itself must change. That begins with the vision of something better. "Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order," said the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, "but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one." We have to imagine what our leaders can't or won't imagine, then work to bring it into being.

Hard? Sure. But democracy? Dead? Tell it to the Egyptians. They won't be completely free or democratic until we're completely free and democratic. But they've accomplished what seemed impossible, and so can we. It will take action - independent action, action that doesn't depend on a leader or a spokesperson or party, action that rejects even the most informed pessimism or the deepest despair. That kind of action needs an independence that comes from within.

Happy Independence Day.

Alternet articles by RJ Eskow

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Jim Rigby: Nero’s Fire

2011-07-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

Nero’s Fire

by Jim Rigby article link

July 2, 2011 | CommonDreams

At a gathering on World Refugee Day, we remembered the 1,900 people deported or detained last year from Austin. Friends and family gathered to weep for their missing loved ones. We spoke about the private prisons springing like toadstools to profit from the misery. What follows is reconstruction of the speech I gave.

A United States senator claimed recently that the wildfires in Arizona were possibly started by immigrants. When asked to produce his evidence, he backed off a bit, but the damage was done. Another layer of mythological sediment had settled over the unexamined lives of the American people. Some had come to believe the fires destroying much of Arizona are not the result of climate change, nor poor water management, but, instead, are a curse brought about by strangers in our midst.

The technique has a classic lineage. A leader redirects the attention of the people away from the powerful guilty and upon the weakest and most vulnerable innocents in the population. For Nero it was the Christians, but it could have been any marginal group of outsiders. Immigrants have always made perfect scapegoats. The problem is that blaming our problems on scapegoats also means not confronting the actual roots of our suffering.

To be sure, some fires are probably started by immigrants trying to make do in dried out areas, but there is a larger fire smoldering that threatens to take down our entire nation. Our nation’s infrastructure shimmers and crackles with heat. The rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. The poor did not start that fire, but, like Nero, our rich elite assure us that America’s problems come from the weakest among us.

A moment of thought would be sufficient to realize that whoever robbed America, would still have the booty. The poor are innocent by definition. The rich are suspects by definition. The real fire was not and could not be set by the powerless. It could only be set by the mindlessly rich and the heartlessly powerful.

America’s immigration problem does not begin when someone crosses U.S. borders in search of a better life. America’s immigration problem begins when our corporations cross over into other parts of the hemisphere and destabilize the economies of other nations. Our immigration problem begins when our military is used to destabilize entire nations in the name of “American” interests. America’s immigration problem begins when we in the United States forget that the word “America” refers to an entire hemisphere and not to ourselves alone.

Centuries of exploitation have produced masses of rootless sojourners who wander our hemisphere without a real home. The walls we are building to keep them out are becoming our own prison. Privately run prisons intended to exploit immigrants will easily and unavoidably come to house dissident citizens as well. As the saying goes, “None of us is free while one of us is in chains.”

We U.S. citizens who are not rich have two options as I see it. We can wait until we also become pawns in some rich person’s game, or we can declare our solidarity with humanity now while we still have the power to do something. Perhaps if we stopped selling out the weak, we could find critical mass to stand up to the strong. Liberation movements have a chant, “the people united cannot be defeated”. Alone we are helpless, together we can take back our world. It comes down to a choice of whether we will speak up for the universal human rights of all people, or will go on following Nero until Rome completely burns.

Jim Rigby is pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He can be reached at jrigby0000@aol.com, and videos of his sermons are available online at http://www.staopen.com/sermons/.

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The Cost Of Mammon Is Too Great For Us To Bear

2011-07-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

Alex Henderson: Fighting the Culture Wars With Hate, Violence and Even Bullets

2011-06-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

From the Army of God to the Hutaree Militia to Gary North and his Christian reconstructionists, radical Christianity is alive and well in the United States.

Fighting the Culture Wars With Hate, Violence and Even Bullets:

Meet the Most Extreme of the Radical Christians

by Alex Henderson article link

June 27, 2011 | AlterNet

If there is one name some residents of Amarillo, Texas wish they could forget, it’s Repent Amarillo. Based in that North Texas city, Repent Amarillo is a militant Christian fundamentalist group whose antics have ranged from staging a mock execution of Santa Claus by firing squad to posting a “spiritual warfare” map on its Web site that cited a Buddhist temple, an Islamic center, gay bars, strip clubs and sex shops as places of demonic activity.

Repent Amarillo is also infamous for mercilessly harassing a local swingers club called Route 66. Throughout 2009, members of Repent Amarillo made a point of showing up at Route 66’s events, where they would typically wear military fatigues, shout at Route 66 members through bullhorns and write down the license plate numbers of people attending the events. After finding out who the swingers were, Repent Amarillo’s members would find out where they worked and try to get them fired from their jobs (according to Route 66 coordinator Mac Mead, at least two members of the club lost their jobs because of Repent Amarillo).

None of that has kept Repent Amarillo founder David H. Grisham from dabbling in local politics; earlier this year, he ran for mayor of Amarillo and lost to former city commissioner Paul Harpole.

But Repent Amarillo is hardly alone when it comes to promoting a decidedly radical and militant brand of Christianity. From the Army of God to the Hutaree Militia to Gary North and his Christian reconstructionists, radical Christianity is alive and well in the United States—and Christianists aren’t shy about turning up the heat when it comes to fighting the "culture war." Some radical Christianists have employed bully tactics and hate-mongering rhetoric without resorting to actual violence (Repent Amarillo, the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church), while others have committed acts of terrorism and said the culture war will have to be won with bombs and bullets.

When religion is discussed, it is important to make a distinction between radical and non-radical practitioners. Radical Christianity is not representative of Christianity any more than al-Qaeda is representative of Islam. The average Lutheran or Episcopalian minister is no more a threat to public safety than the average member of Islam’s Sufi sect, who are arguably the Hare Krishnas of Islam. Not all Christians are Christianists; not all Muslims are Islamists. But an abundance of disturbing events bear out the fact that radical Christianity, like radical Islam, is quite capable of violence—and contrary to what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would have us believe, the examples are numerous.

Active since the early 1980s, the Army of God is a loose network of radical anti-abortionists with a long history of promoting terrorism and premeditated murder in the name of Christianity. The Army of God has published an anti-abortion training manual that offers instructions on bomb-making, arson and other ways to attack clinics.

The group’s Web site praises a long list of Christian terrorists who have been convicted of violent crimes, including Paul Jennings Hill (who was executed by lethal injection in 2003 for the murders of abortion provider John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett), Scott Roeder (who was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2009 shooting of George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions), Michael Frederick Griffin (who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, an ob/gyn based in Pensacola, Florida), James Charles Kopp (who shot and killed Barnett Slepian, a physician who performed abortions, in 1998), Matthew Lee Derosia (who, in 2009, rammed his SUV into the front entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul and told police that Jesus ordered him to carry out that attack) and John C. Salvi (who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994, shooting and killing receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols and wounding several others).

The Web site describes Tiller’s murder as “justifiable homicide” and describes Lowney and Nichols not as victims of domestic terrorism, but as women who got exactly what they deserved; Salvi, who died in prison in 1996 and may have committed suicide, is hailed as a hero for killing them. The Army of God exalts Hill, Rudolph, Roeder, Griffin, Derosia and Salvi as martyrs for Christianity in much the same way al-Qaeda consider Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers martyrs for Islam.

The Army of God has also been a vocal supporter of Eric Rudolph, who is serving life without parole for a long list of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Christianity. Rudolph’s crimes include bombing an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, in 1997; bombing the Otherwise Lounge (a lesbian bar in Atlanta) in 1997; and bombing an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998. The Birmingham bombing caused the death of Robert Sanderson, a Birmingham police officer and part-time security guard, and resulted in serious injuries for nurse Emily Lyons, who lost an eye. Rudolph is best known, however, for carrying out the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; that blast killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others.

Another Christian terrorist who has been associated with the Army of God is Shelley Shannon, who shot Tiller in 1993 but didn’t kill him; in addition to being convicted of attempted murder for her attack on Tiller, Shannon was involved in a series of arson attacks on abortion clinics in different states. One person who considered Shannon a good friend was fellow Army of God terrorist Scott Roeder, who visited her frequently in prison and finished what she started when he murdered Tiller in 2009. The Army of God Web site calls Shannon “a warrior soldier in the Army of God.”

In 2010, a North Carolina-based Christianist named Justin Carl Moose was arrested by the FBI for plotting to help blow up an abortion clinic; Moose, the FBI said, considers himself an Army of God member and an organizer of a terrorist cell for that group. According to the FBI, Moose described himself as a Christian equivalent of Osama bin Laden on his Facebook page but openly advocated violence against Muslims; he also praised Timothy McVeigh (mastermind of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people and injured 450 others).

The FBI said that Moose wrote on his Facebook page: “If a mosque is built on Ground Zero, it will be removed Oklahoma City style. Tim’s not the only man out there that knows how to do it....I have learned a lot from the Muslim terrorists and have no problem using their tactics.” Moose, according to the FBI, met with an FBI informant and offered advice on how to make TATP, the explosive used in the London subway bombings of 2005. Earlier this year, Moose was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The Army of God’s Web site has, in the past, been managed by the Rev. Donald Spitz, who is so extreme that even the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue disowned him for promoting violence. The Virginia-based Spitz has publicly argued that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide, and Spitz has published the writings of Paul Jennings Hill, Eric Rudolph, Shelley Shannon and other Christian terrorists on the Army of God’s Web site. Spitz, who considered himself Hill’s “spiritual adviser” during the final months of Hill’s life, heads his own Christianist group, Pro-Life Virginia, and has said that Muslims “should not be allowed to live in the United States.”

In the U.S., the far-right militia movement has often been secular in nature; Timothy McVeigh, for example, was raised Catholic but described himself as an agnostic. But occasionally, the militia movement and radical Christianity have overlapped. A perfect example is the Hutaree Militia, a Michigan-based group with extreme Christianist views. In 2010, nine members of Hutaree were arrested for an alleged plot to assassinate police officers using firearms and explosives; allegedly, Hutaree saw that plot as part of a battle with forces of the "Antichrist."

Christian reconstructionism is one of the most disturbing schools of radical Christianist ideology. Founded by the late Calvinist theologian Rousas John Rushdoony (who died in 2001), the Christian reconstructionist movement believes in abolishing any separation of church and state and establishing a government that adheres to a rigid approach to Mosaic Old Testament law; adultery, homosexuality and blasphemy would be punishable by death under a Christian reconstructionist government.

Even on the Christian Right, Rushdoony (who was a defender of slavery and considered democracy incompatible with Christianity) is controversial. The type of government Christian reconstructionists long for would, in many respects, mirror the Taliban of radical Islam. Rushdoony’s teachings have a following that includes his son, the Rev. Mark Rushdoony (who now heads the Chalcedon Foundation, the organization his father founded) and Gary North (who was R.J. Rushdoony’s son-in-law and now heads his own Christian reconstructionist organization, the Institute for Christian Economics). According to David Holthouse (formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center and now with Media Matters), Mark Rushdoony “now leads a small army of true believers whose fundamentalism is so hardcore they make garden-variety right-wing evangelicals seem like Unitarians at a Peter, Paul and Mary sing-along.”

North has written that under a Christian reconstructionist government, stoning should be the method of execution for gay men, adulterers and women who have had abortions. North has said that stoning (which is still practiced by radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other countries) is preferable to other methods of execution because it is more economical; he has also said that a stoning can be a community event for Christian families.

Of course, not everyone on the Christian Right is guilty of committing or promoting violence. But even without actual violence, Christianists often resort to bully tactics and violent rhetoric. After the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona that killed six people and left Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seriously wounded, Fred Phelps praised the shooter and said that he was doing God’s work. Phelps, who ran for political office several times as a Democrat in the 1990s, said, “Congresswoman Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby killing, was shot for that mischief…Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters...and more dead.”

Journalist Chris Hedges has often said that actual violence is preceded by the "language of violence,” and the language of violence is quite common among Christianists. In 2007, when Hindu minister Rajan Zed was asked to deliver an opening prayer for the Senate, Christianist groups like the American Family Association, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America and Faith2Action angrily protested and made it clear that they had no use for Hinduism. And Repent Amarillo isn't shy about trying to bully its victims into accepting the group's extremist view of Christianity. Certainly, the language and rhetoric of violence is a part of “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” a video game that deals with holy war in the name of Christianity and is part of the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ apocalypse-obsessed Left Behind series. Author Frank Schaeffer, who used to be part of the Christian Right but has since renounced it, has said that the Left Behind novels and games “represents everything that is most deranged about religion.”

But despite all the extremist views, hate-mongering and terrorist violence associated with Christianists, radical Christianity typically gets a pass from Republican politicians and the Republican talk radio hosts who support them. When, in 2009, Janet Napolitano warned of the threat of violence coming from the far right (including anti-abortion extremists), she was called anti-Christian by many people on the Christian Right. But when Rep. Peter King of New York called for Congressional hearings on radical Islamic activity in the U.S., he was applauded by neocons and many of his fellow Republicans.

Far-right talk show hosts have spent a considerable amount of time talking about radical Islam, but they seldom, if ever, have anything to say about radical Christianity. They have no problem with a group like Repent Amarillo, which hasn't actually resorted to physical violence even though it has employed an abundance of violent, militaristic imagery. It’s safe to say that if an Islamist group held a mock execution of Santa Claus and harassed people at work, it wouldn’t be taken lightly in GOP circles. And if an Islamist group released a video game as twisted as “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” it wouldn’t get a pass from Republican talk radio.

One person who has been outspoken about the Republican/far-right double standard when it comes to radical Christianity vs. radical Islam is Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and author of three books on the Christian Right. “From where I’m sitting, the main organizations that are trying to impose religion on other people in this country are fundamentalist Christian in nature,” Boston said:

“I can’t remember the last time, for example, that a Muslim group tried to get Islamic doctrine posted in a courthouse or attempted to ban same-sex marriage by pointing to passages in the Koran, or tried to force Islamic prayers in the public schools. But fundamentalist Christian groups do these things all the time. So if anybody is trying to impose religion on Americans, it’s not Muslims; it’s extreme fundamentalist Christian groups.”

Boston added that just as it is wrong for atheists to make broad generalizations about people of faith, it is equally wrong to automatically associate terrorism and extremism with Islam:

“Christian groups will complain if they are painted with too broad a brush—and rightly so. Christianity in America is diverse. There are Christian groups that are theologically very moderate, and there are Christian groups that are very, very conservative. Not everyone who is a Christian in America is a fundamentalist or an evangelical. We always have to remember that there is a lot of diversity out there. Yet, the same conservative Christian groups that complain about being caricatured will do the same thing to Islam; they portray the one billion Muslims in the world as if they are exactly the same. But anybody who has spent any time talking to Muslims quickly learns that there is just as much diversity in that community as there is in the Christian community about how holy books are to be interpreted and how society is to be ordered.”

Boston continued:

“I just find the whole thing ironic because if you look at the agenda of the Islamic extremists, their agenda is anti-women’s rights and anti-gay rights, and it’s about religion controlling the government. Well, what other movement do you know of that believes in those things? The Christian Right. Culturally, those movements are very similar. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not religion that’s the problem; it’s fundamentalism that’s the problem. I always remind people of that when I’m giving speeches. Sometimes, I run across people who think that religion in general is bad and that religion is why we have all these problems. And I tell them, well, religion can persuade people to do a lot of good things in the world. It’s not religion that’s the problem—it’s fundamentalism."

Some people have described Timothy McVeigh as the ultimate Christian terrorist. This is inaccurate, because while McVeigh was raised Catholic, he appeared to be motivated by extreme anti-government/militia beliefs rather than religious motives. But there is no doubt that McVeigh was responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11.

American Muslim activist Haroon Moghul, who serves as executive director of the Maydan Institute and frequently lectures on Islam, said he sees a major disparity between the way radical Christianity and radical Islam are covered by the right-wing media. “I think the biggest difference in the way Islam and Christianity are covered by the right is that when it comes to Islam, the assumption has been that Islam is inherently violent or inherently political and that Islam has to prove otherwise,” the New York City-based Moghul said.

“When it comes to radical forms of Christianity or more extreme forms of Christianity, it’s always seen as an aberration by the right. But any sort of Muslim behavior that is violent or extreme or intolerant is assumed to be inherent to Islam. So the burden of proof is on a Muslim community or a Muslim individual to prove otherwise. If Osama bin Laden said something, it was assumed that it was inherent to Islam. If it’s Hutaree or something like that, it’s assumed that it is just a lone wolf or a fringe group—and it’s disconnected from the rest of what’s happening in America. Hutaree isn’t assumed to be the product of something bigger than themselves.”

Moghul views the Christianity good/Islam bad narrative of the far right as symptomatic of the soundbite culture that exists in America. “There really isn’t room for a lot of different opinions in our political discourse in the United States,” Moghul said. “Whether the two-party system makes that better or worse, I don’t really know. But you generally see that nuance disappears in our political discourse.”

Another voice of sanity on the subject of Islam and Christianity is journalist Leonard Pitts, Jr., author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood and a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald. In his columns, Pitts has had a lot to say about the way some people on the far right will try to paint Islam in general as a violent religion (as opposed to making a distinction between radical and non-radical Islam). And they get away with that double standard, according to Pitts, because it is easier to attack what is a minority religion in the U.S.

“Christianity is a known element in the United States, whereas Islam is a foreign faith,” Pitts explained. He continued:

“Most people of faith in the United States are Christian. Most Americans know a lot of Christians but don’t know any Muslims. So it’s easy to look at the craziest, most dangerous Muslims and assume that they are representative of Islam as a whole. Christians in the United States will look at the Army of God and say, ‘That has no relation to any Christianity I have ever known. That has absolutely nothing to do with any Christianity I have ever known,’ but moderate Muslims will say the same thing about Muslims who commit acts of violence.”

In one of his columns, Pitts pointed to four scriptural quotes that could be construed as violent—one from the Qu’ran, three from the Bible. His point was that cherry-picking parts of the Qu’ran in order to prove that Islam is an inherently violent or dangerous religion is as intellectually dishonest as cherry-picking parts of the Bible in order to depict Christianity as inherently violent.

The far right, according to Pitts, often neglects to mention the fact that Muslims themselves have been the victims of Muslim extremists, including the Muslims killed on 9/11. “People forget that a lot of Muslims died that day,” Pitts said. “You’re not going to attack Lower Manhattan that way and not kill Muslim people.” He added: “I don't fear Muslims, I don’t fear Christians. But I fear Muslim and Christian extremists. I fear extremists period.”

If stoning proponent Gary North is mentioned at all in the Republican media, he is painted as a harmless eccentric and not part of a radical Christianist movement. But if someone in a mosque in Detroit or Oakland promoted stoning, talk-radio Republicans would be screaming about it for days.

The bottom line is that extremism in the name of religion is cause for concern regardless of whether the extremists identify themselves as Christian or Muslim. Those who claim that Christian extremism is any less dangerous than Islamic extremism are being disingenuous.

“When people embrace any kind of extreme ideology, whether it’s religious or secular, and can tolerate no dissent,” Boston said, “we’re in for trouble."

Alex Henderson's work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, and other publications.

AlterNet articles by Alex Henderson

AlterNet home page

Knowledge of the Holy is to Depart from Evil

2011-06-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Wallowing In Our Filth

2011-06-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

2011-06-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

by Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, Maude Barlow, Bill McKibben and Others article link

June 23, 2011 | CommonDreams

Dear Friends,

This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age—it’s serious stuff.

The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.

The full version goes like this:

As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.

And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.

These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.

To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.

How much carbon lies in the recoverable tar sands of Alberta? A recent calculation from some of our foremost scientists puts the figure at about 200 parts per million. Even with the new pipeline they won’t be able to burn that much overnight—but each development like this makes it easier to get more oil out. As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we're going to be stuck," said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.

Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the president has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal-mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as 300 power plants operating at full bore.

And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. TransCanada Pipeline, the company behind Keystone, has hired as its chief lobbyist for the project a man named Paul Elliott, who served as deputy national director of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce—a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNC and DNC combined—has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline,” which is not so surprising—they’ve also told the U.S. EPA that if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.

So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Dene indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.

And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces.

We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day through Labor Day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business. And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young Senator who told us that with his election the ‘rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.’ We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure the government for change. We’ll do what we can.

And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest. Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.

This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, to the date in September when by law the administration can either grant or deny the permit for the pipeline. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.

Winning this battle won’t save the climate. But losing it will mean the chances of runaway climate change go way up—that we’ll endure an endless future of the floods and droughts we’ve seen this year. And we’re fighting for the political future too—for the premise that we should make decisions based on science and reason, not political connection. You have to start somewhere, and this is where we choose to begin.

If you think you might want to be a part of this action, we need you to sign up here. As plans solidify in the next few weeks we’ll be in touch with you to arrange nonviolence training; our colleagues at a variety of environmental and democracy campaigns will be coordinating the actual arrangements.

We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.

Maude Barlow

Wendell Berry

Tom Goldtooth

Danny Glover

James Hansen

Wes Jackson

Naomi Klein

Bill McKibben

George Poitras

David Suzuki

Gus Speth

p.s.—Please pass this letter on to anyone else you think might be interested. We realize that what we’re asking isn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you’re willing even to consider it.

CommonDreams home page

James Carroll: A Solstice Approaches, Unnoticed

2011-06-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

As our sense of the complexities of life quickened and deepened, our destructiveness of life also quickened and deepened. Through ambitions of unlimited growth, consumption, competitive manufacture, and self-expanding technology, we humans have become a mechanism of extinction. When we stopped noticing Earth, we began to destroy it.

A Solstice Approaches, Unnoticed

by James Carroll article link article link

June 20, 2011 | CommonDreams | Boston Globe

ONCE, HUMANS were intimate with the cycles of nature, and never more than on the summer solstice. Vestiges of such awareness survive in White Nights and Midnight Sun festivals in far northern climes, and in neo-pagan adaptations of Midsummer celebrations, but contemporary people take little notice of the sun reaching its far point on the horizon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, the official start of the summer season, the fullest of light — yet we are apt to miss this phenomenon of Earth’s axial tilt, as we miss so much of what the natural world does in our surrounds.

In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before — earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur — as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”

To our ancestors in the deep past, that attention to nature was, well, natural. They made the evolutionary leap into human consciousness through close observation, among other things, of what heavenly bodies do in the sky. In a cosmos over which they had no control, paying attention to patterns of heat and cold, light and dark, rain and drought was a matter of survival. The invention of agriculture depended on awareness of seasons, so that times of planting and harvesting, herding and grazing, could be depended upon. Movements of the sun and moon were seen to have both influences on, and counterparts in, individual human experience — from mood swings to menstruation to aging. Astrology opened into astronomy, calculation into mathematics, scrutiny into science. Definitions of the calendar were essential to culture. The solstice was a marker of all this.

But this habit of regard for nature was essential also to the transition into modernity. Contemplation of the sun was nothing less than the incubator of our age. Copernicus and Galileo, after all, ushered humans into the breakthrough of testable knowledge by means of their study — one theorizing, the other experimenting — of Earth’s place in the solar system. The solstice, previously perceived as the sun’s standing still for a moment before reversing course on the horizon, would never be understood that way again. Heliocentrism initiated the maturing of science, which eventually would demonstrate that seasonal rhythms not only produce global dynamics of climate but also hormonal changes — daily, weekly, monthly — within the individual human body, each person biologically synchronized to the cosmic clock. Because of science, we were able to grasp the age of the earth — to know that there have been more than 4 billion summer solstices. Humans awakened to the full complexity of the universe.

Ironically, the accompanying social revolution of industrialization led to illusions of human mastery over nature, and ultimately to detached indifference toward it. Contemporary technological civilization became blinded to key phenomena of the living world, much as the night sky is blotted out by the artificial light of cities. Most recently, the cycles of time have given way to the eternal present of the computer screen — detachment squared. As humans came to know so much, we lost our grip on the knowledge with which we became human: our familiarity with the physical universe we live in. Imagining that we no longer needed nature, we ourselves became the great threat to nature. As our sense of the complexities of life quickened and deepened, our destructiveness of life also quickened and deepened. Through ambitions of unlimited growth, consumption, competitive manufacture, and self-expanding technology, we humans have become a mechanism of extinction. When we stopped noticing Earth, we began to destroy it.

Intimate awareness of nature and its cycles, as we saw, was an ancient mode of survival. But survival is at issue again. Noticing the length of light now, reveling in the sun’s achievement, rejoicing in Earth’s perfect balance, honoring the summer solstice — loving it: This is how we became human, and it is how we stay human.

James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.

CommonDreams home page

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Conscientious Objectors: A Reclamation of Our Common Rights

2011-06-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

Spiritual Famine

2011-06-16T10:45:00.001-07:00

Benjamin/Davis: Needed: An Antiwar Movement That Puts Peace Over Politicians

2011-06-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Needed: An Antiwar Movement That Puts Peace Over Politicians

by Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis article link article link

June 15, 2011 | CommonDreams | AlterNet

After campaigning as the candidate of change, the man awarded a Nobel Prize for peace has given the world nothing but more war. Yet despite Barack Obama's continuation – nay, escalation – of the worst aspects of George W. Bush's foreign policy, including his very own illegal war in Libya, you’d be hard-pressed to find the large-scale protests and outrage from the liberal establishment that characterized his predecessor's reign (and only seems to pop up when a Republican's the one dropping the bombs).

That's not for a lack of things to protest. Since taking office, Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan and now looks set to break his pledge to begin a significant withdrawal in July. He has unilaterally committed the nation to an unapologetically illegal war in Libya and in two years has authorized more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor authorized in two terms, with one in three of their victims reportedly civilians. In Yemen, he has targeted a U.S. citizen for assassination and approved a cluster bomb strike that, according to Amnesty International, killed 35 innocent women and children.

But these war crimes, which ought to shock the consciences of the president's liberal supporters, haven't spurred the sort of popular protest we witnessed under Bush the Lesser. At a recent congressional hearing on the bloated war budget, a handful of CODEPINK activists were the sole dissenters. Thousands poured into the streets to cheer Osama bin Laden's death, but no Americans were in the streets decrying the drone attack that killed dozens of Pakistani civilians weeks earlier.

While die-hard grassroots peace activists continue to bravely protest U.S. militarism, with 52 people arrested last month protesting outside a nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City – if they'd been Tea Partiers protesting Obamacare, you may have heard of them – there's no denying that the peace movement has taken a beating.

The question is, why? Part of the reason is the financial crisis. It's hard to protest war when the bank's foreclosing on your house. And it's hard to find money for a trip to Washington, DC, when, like 14 million Americans, you're unemployed.

War has also become normal – routine, boring – to many Americans, with U.S. troops stationed for nearly ten years in Afghanistan and eight in Iraq. And after the first volley of smart bombs, wars are barely covered by the media, eclipsed by the latest scandal involving a politician's privates. Beyond apathy, many who once took to the street may now no longer see the value of protest in the face of the enormous power of the military-industrial complex.

But a recent study suggests that a major reason why the antiwar movement has withered even as the warfare state has grown is simply that the party in charge has changed.

After surveying 5,398 demonstrators between 2007 to 2009, the University of Michigan's Michael T. Heaney and Indiana University's Fabio Rojas found that prior to Obama's election, up to 54 percent of antiwar protesters were self-described Democrats. After his inauguration, that number fell to less than a quarter.

“Democratic activists left the antiwar movement as the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success,” the researchers write. That is, Democrats successfully “exploit[ed] the antiwar movement for their own electoral success,” and many of their supporters took that as a victory in and of itself.

Instead of continuing the hard work of organizing and protesting unjust wars, too many people took the election of politicians with “D”s after their name as their own Mission Accomplished. Instead of continuing direct action, too many were content voting for “their” team and calling it a day, never mind the policies those they voted into office continued once in power.

It's worth recounting just how Democrats have rewarded their antiwar supporters. In 2006, riding public anger over the war in Iraq to take back control of the House for the first time in a dozen years, Democrats had a mandate for change – and then turned around and consistently funded the war they claimed to oppose. The most congressional Democrats have done is offer a resolution requesting a “plan” for ending the war in Afghanistan, all the while dutifully approving the funds to fight it.

We know how Obama has governed after likewise cynically riding antiwar sentiment into the White House.

Once casting themselves as brave opponents of the warfare state, many Democrats have rejected their rhetorical support for peace just as thoroughly as their once-upon-a-time opposition to the Patriot Act. When Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich offered a measure condemning Obama's illegal, undeclared war in Libya and demanding a withdrawal of all U.S. forces within two weeks, he was joined by more Republicans than he was his fellow Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, channeling every right-winger during the Bush years, even claimed lawmakers who opposed the president's unilateral war policy would send the “wrong message” to the U.S.'s NATO allies. The former speaker of the House is seemingly more concerned about hurt feelings than dead civilians, taxpayer money or the Constitution.

Even the recent House vote to block the president from spending funds “in contravention of the War Powers Act” – meaning Libya – received more votes from Republicans than Democrats. Who says elections don't change anything?

Democratic voters who genuinely believe in peace should know that ending the U.S.'s addiction to war requires more than spending a few minutes in the ballot box. The only change voting has brought in recent years is the party approving the money for war and the name of the president requesting it.

If voting isn't changing things – and it's not – it's time we considered changing our tactics.

Obama, after all, whose campaign cast him as the most peaceful of the major party candidates, has committed acts of war in no less than half-a-dozen countries (that we know about): Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Under Obama, the U.S. aids and abets Israeli war crimes to the tune of more than $3 billion a year in military aid, all while vigorously fighting international attempts to hold accountable those responsible for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. And Guantanamo Bay? Still open.

But Obama has done more than disappoint the antiwar movement: he's actively attacked it, using the power of the state to harass and intimidate peace activists, 23 of whom have had their homes and offices raided by the FBI. The pretense? That a group of pacifists may have provided “material support” to terrorists, a charge so slippery and ill-defined that the ACLU warns it can include a conversation on the need to embrace non-violence.

More war and the threat of prosecution to intimidate those who oppose these wars – or expose them, in the case of alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning: that's what Obama's election has wrought. Was his rise to power really such a progressive victory?

Occasional rhetorical flourishes aside, Democrats and Republicans reliably back the killing of poor people on the other side of the globe in the name of “regional stability” and perceived U.S. national (read: corporate) interests. As they've made painstakingly clear over the years, neither is a friend of peace, especially when one of their own is making war.

If change is to come to U.S. foreign policy, it won't be thanks to any politician, but to direct action and organizing of the sort that won African Americans and other minorities their civil rights. We already have public opinion on our side -- 2/3 of Americans consistently say they want to get out of the wars. We now have to make the voice of the silent majority heard.

Rather than devoting time, money and energy into electing politicians who will betray the values of peace, we should organize and energize a new peace movement that values direct action over access to power; real and lasting peace over disingenuous politicians. Instead of waiting – and waiting – for politicians to buck party and power, we should make alliances with labor activists, environmentalists and advocates for the poor who have some pretty good ideas on protest and civil disobedience – and on what to do with the $2 billion the U.S. government wastes every week on the Afghan war alone. If we build a strong enough movement, politicians will figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org). She is author of Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.

Charles Davis has covered Congress for NPR and Pacifica stations across the country, and freelanced for the international news wire Inter Press Service, primarily covering U.S. policy toward Latin America and the war on drugs in particular. He has also worked as a researcher for Michael Moore on his movie Capitalism: A Love Story.

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Sowing the Seeds: Can Wisconsin Uprising Grow Nationwide Movement?

by Pat Schneider article link article link

June 15, 2011 | CommonDreams | The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

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The Revolution Will Not Be Deactualized

by Ted Rall article link

June 14, 2011 | OpEdNews

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Economic and Social Crisis in Canada: The Assault on Public Services

Will Unions Lament the Attacks or Lead a Fightback?

by Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin article link

June 14, 2011 | Global Research

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Spain’s ‘Indignant Ones’

by Pablo Ouziel article link

June 15, 2011 | CommonDreams

Greeks Strike, Clash with Police over Austerity

by Renee Maltezou and Ingrid Melander article link article link

June 15, 2011 | CommonDreams | Reuters

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SWAT Team Mania: The War Against the American Citizen

by John W. Whitehead article link article link article link

June 14, 2011 | ICH | LewRockwell | Rutherford

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Collapse: It's Coming! Are You Ready?

by Gerald Celente article link article link article link

June 15, 2011 | LewRockwell | SHTF Plan | Silver Bear Cafe

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What Are the Social Implications of Economic Collapse?

by Simon Black article link

June 14, 2011 | Sovereign Man

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God is the Author of Our Salvation

2011-06-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

God's Consciousness Awakening In Our Minds

2011-06-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

Pentecost: Spiritual Freedom

2011-06-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Holy Days: Family and Community

The Seven Annual Sabbaths

Our inherent value = love and truth; the communitarian way, the environment instituted in the pages of the OT and exemplified in the NT has a built-in reminder to maintain "the continual", the daily worship (the practise of the way): the annual Holy Days, the festivals; the shared symbolic behavior so important to fellowship and cognition.

The seven annual Sabbaths instituted forever not only the Holy Days [God's Plan of Salvation for humanity] but the way of life within, explicit in the harvest feasts: the communitarian way, the *path* [personal achievement of true humanity] - the first day of the sacred year (the annual beginning); the Passover (the sacrifice, the reconciliation, the acceptance; the SAGE attempt to silence); ULB (the putting away of sin, the commitment); Pentecost (the gift of God; a society of the gift); the fall harvest season, Trumpets, Atonement, FOT, LGD: the return Christ, of His message; the putting away of the adversary (Mammon; the alienated, privileged attitudes); the harvest feast (feast of booths, the millennium, the communal reconstruction); the judgement (the Book of Life opened; all of humanity to share in the way).

The Passover observance at even (sunset), in the NT the Last Supper; the wine and unleavened bread taken by the Baptised in acknowledgement of the sacrifice of Christ Jesus for the remission of sins and in rededication as the very flesh and blood of the "body of Christ"; the Night To Be Much Remembered, observed the next sunset, was instituted to remember the Exodus of Israel from Egypt (typifies sin), the 7 Days of Unleavened Bread [ULB] begin; they picture the removal of sin from our lives; no leavened bread or products of any kind (the puffed-up lives, attitudes); the first and last days are annual Sabbaths; next is Pentecost, which pictures God's Gift of the Holy Spirit to the Christian Community, the 3rd annual Sabbath.

The Feast of Trumpets pictures the return of Christ; the Second Coming when Christ directly intervenes in world affairs and establishes the government or Kingdom of God over mankind; the beginning of the Millennium; the next event is pictured by the Day of Atonement; the binding and separation of Satan, the author of all sin (the transgression of God's Ten Commandments) away from mankind until after the Millennium; next is the Feast of Tabernacles [FOT] or Booths, a feast of ingathering, a seven day festival where we leave our homes and gather together if possible; it pictures the Millennium when Jesus Christ is Lord and King over all the earth, when the Holy Spirit is granted to all mankind alive and born during the Millennium and the earth is prepared for the next great event to take place; that event is pictured by the Last Great Day [LGD], the resurrection of every man, woman and child who has ever lived/been conceived (including the stillborn and aborted, placed into their parents arms); the dead stand before God; this is the Great White Throne Judgement, not a condemnation to a hell as traditional Christianity believes, but a time when the "Book of Life" is opened to all of humanity and they are given their first opportunity to receive God's instruction, to learn his way of love based on the 10 Commandments and ultimately to be born into the very Family of God.

The spring (3 Sabbaths) and fall Holy Days (4 Sabbaths) picture the plan of redemption for mankind and are explained thoughout the Bible; by keeping them as commanded by God every year, the Church (the community) is kept in constant remembrance of God's plan for mankind and man's destiny to be born into the Family of God and ultimately to share in the rule and continuing creation of the universe.

MM Book 2 Chapter 10-17

When we come in contact with, or come up against, “character” that *lacks* God [in others or in ourselves], it is an opportunity to express God: INIQUITY PURGED BY MERCY AND TRUTH [mercy/forgiveness] – all of us have been casualties of the prevailing systemic character, the fear “bullet” [arrow] that is shot deep into us; God will heal the “inflicted wound”, and heal us !! — we must pull-back “for” engagement [from the evil; we are in conflict of interest]; WE MUST *OCCUPY* COMMUNITY, WE MUST *PLACE* GOD’S PRESENCE INTO WHEREVER WE ARE [location or situation]; GOD’S CHARACTER AND ABILITIES ARE OURS TO PLACE !! – WE *ARE* GOD FAMILY, WE EMBODY [our being] AND CREATE [our doing] COMMUNITY, THIS *IS* OUR RESPONSE-ABILITY !! — OUR MINISTRY [ministration] IS ** OUR RELATIONSHIP(S) **, OUR COMMUNITY !! – AGAPE LOVE IS THE GIFT, AND THE GIVING !!

“… The three main festivals in the Bible are Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles – in the physical application Passover is the festival of political freedom, Tabernacles of economic freedom, and Pentecost, the central and most important, is a festival of spiritual freedom [see Harris L. Selig, "Links to Eternity", p. 370; Richard C. Nickels, Giving and Sharing, "Pentecost Paper"]:

PASSOVER = POLITICAL FREEDOM – EXODUS (out of bondage), Christ Systemic;

PENTECOST = SPIRITUAL FREEDOM – 10C, Covenant People, Holy Spirit, COG;

TABERNACLES = ECO-NOMIC FREEDOM – Ingathering, Harvest, KINGDOM OF GOD.

Previously posted MMmeta September 24, 2010 and April 19, 2011

MM Book 2 Chapter 6-14

The 10 Commandments [10C] are a mental environment, each an attitude of mind [an expression of God's very own mind, His character]; “thou shalt not” implies the opposite “thou shalt *do*” [ie., in God's community there is no need, or desire for stealing, all shall freely share], our involvement and responsibility, our family consciousness [of God and man, our relationship], our personality; Philippians 2:5, “let this *mind be in you* that was also in Christ Jesus” – the 10C represent *together* the ultimate, genuine *survival* mentation matrix and paradigm [intelligent design, application (obedience); psychologically, the deep things of God; the ** COMMANDMENTS OF LIFE **]; 2 Cor 10:5, “… bringing into captivity *every thought* to the obedience of Christ” – the 10C are active, real, *living* laws, physically and spiritually [with real penalties when broken; witness the world], they *are* the God Family, they are the Family’s ** Law of Agape Love **, yet the 10C and God are not real to most people !! – it is the transgression of these laws [1 John 3:4, sin is the transgression of the law] that has separated God and man, that has made the reality of our evil systemic [and the resultant suffering engendered] paramount in our lives – these laws are the only way to a *sustainable existence* for man on this planet; they are God’s systemic, His guiding principles, they are what we were designed for !! — the reality of this world must be God’s reality, we must make God our own, a systemic based on “give” NOT a systemic based on “take”, a true systemic of resultant blessings NOT a false, evil systemic of curses [an absence of the blessings !!] – these “living laws” engender [to beget; to bring into being; cause; produce; originate] a *true life*, a living, symbiotic environment; they are part-and-parcel of God’s Holy Spirit, and as such THEY IMPART GOD’S LIFE AND WITHOUT THEM WE WILL CEASE TO EXIST !!

MM Book 2 Chapter 6-16

The Works (spiritually/physically) of the Devil are opposed to the Law of God, to the Family:

1 you shall have other gods before God, you shall serve me;

2 you shall make images of the Beast, the hierarchical systemic;

3 you shall take/carry God’s name in vain, you shall worship me;

4 you shall NOT obey God’s Sabbath;

5 you shall NOT honor your mother and father;

6 you shall murder;

7 you shall commit adultery;

8 you shall steal;

9 you shall bear false witness;

10 you shall covet.

this is a description of a world systemic *of the devil*, of every evil way !! [John 8:44 Ye are of [your] father the devil, and the *lusts of your father ye will do*. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.] — BY DESTROYING THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL (the Works of the Flesh) WE FULFIL THE LAW OF GOD, WE FULFIL *OUR* PURPOSE !! — there is much brilliance in the world but the current, the force of flow lighting and applying that intelligence, is a fallen Angel, NOT THE FORCE AND LIGHT OF GOD’S WORD !! — man took to himself Satan’s knowledge of *good and evil* and that is the systemic in the world today; both good and evil are existent, and the evil separates God from man [our sins; our choice of the evil way].

Mammon or Messiah Book 2 web page (widescreen)

Mammon or Messiah Book 2 blog home

Pentecost: The Giving of God's Law and Holy Spirit

2011-06-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

PENTECOST

Section Four of Biblical Holy Days

Written by: Richard C. Nickels article link

Introduction

Section Four of Biblical Holy Days covers Pentecost, the festival with many names. As with the other sections, our purpose is not to convince others to observe the Sabbaths of the Almighty. It is to provide resource material and in-depth instruction for those who already observe these sacred times. Even though I personally observe a Monday Pentecost, our material on Pentecost is not intended to be a comprehensive proof that a Monday Pentecost is correct. Our study material gathers resource material from a wide variety of sources as a research source for serious students.

Here is a summary collection of Pentecost data:

Feast of Weeks (Chag Shavuot)

Feast of Harvest (Chag Qatsiyr)

Day of Firstfruits (Yom Bikkurim)

Festival of the Covenant

Closing Sabbath (Shavuot Atzeret)

Season of the Giving of God's Law

Holy Spirit Day

Birthday of the Church

An Ordinance Forever (Chuqqah Olam)

Count a full fifty days, then keep Pentecost. Begin counting on the day after the weekly Sabbath which falls during the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Incorrect Pentecost dates are any fixed calendar date (Sivan 6, 7, etc.), and Whitsunday, which was brought into the Catholic Church from paganism.

Proper keeping of Pentecost involves the following:

Being in Holy Convocation on the correct date,

at one accord with God's people,

in the attitude of prayer and supplication,

with obedience to the Laws of the Covenant,

exhibiting the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Of all the Biblical Holy Days, Pentecost is the one most recognized by the professing Christian world. The Pentecost of Acts 2 marked the birth of the New Testament Church. However, as soon as 60-70 years after that epochal Pentecost, the Church was undergoing a radical doctrinal change from its original roots. Since then, much of the Biblical understanding of Pentecost has been lost. Pentecost indeed has a forgotten message for Christians today. Although many Catholics and Protestants take note of Pentecost (Whitsunday), the Biblical basis for the Feast is largely absent.

Yet paradoxically, the "Pentecostals" think they truly understand the meaning of Pentecost. Our study of "Tarry for Pentecost" indicates a deeper meaning that they have missed.

In the Church of God, much effort has been expended to prove which day is the correct Pentecost. Our articles address these issues, and show that there is a gold mine of understanding of the meaning of Pentecost that results from this discussion.

Pentecost: Its Message for Christians Today

Pentecost has a great deal of meaning for Christians today. The first part of this study deals with the Biblical words relating to this important Feast Day. The second part contains reference material relating to Pentecost. All word numbers refer to those given in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance.

PENTECOST

From the Greek #4005 pentekoste, pronounced "pen-tay-kos-tay'," feminine of #4004 pentekonta, (fifty), fiftieth from Passover, the festival of Pentecost.

Church Founded at Pentecost

Acts 2:1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

Paul Wanted to be at Jerusalem for Pentecost

Acts 20:16 For Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus, because he would not spend the time in Asia, for he hasted, if it were possible for him, to be at Jerusalem the day of Pentecost.

Paul Wanted to Stay at Ephesus Until Pentecost

I Corinthians 16:8 But I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost.

His reason for staying at Ephesus until Pentecost? Verse 9 For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries.

FIRSTFRUITS -- Bikkuwr

Hebrew #1061 bikkuwr, "bikkoor'," from #1069 bakar (to burst the womb, bear or make early fruit, firstborn, firstling), the firstfruits of the crop, hasty fruit.

Pentecost One of Two Harvest Feasts

Exodus 23:16 And the feast of harvest [Pentecost], the firstfruits of thy labors, which thou hast sown in the field: and the feast of ingathering [Tabernacles], which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labors out of the field.

Exodus 34:22 And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks [Pentecost], of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end [margin: revolution of the year].

God's Family is a Gift

2011-06-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

All Over Again

2011-06-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

History Is Knocking: Stop the Machine! Create a New World!

2011-06-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

History Is Knocking: Stop the Machine! Create a New World!

by Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, Tarak Kauff, Elaine Brower article link

June 7, 2011 | CommonDreams

There comes a time when efforts to avoid the truth begin to fail, when one can no longer go about daily life and pretend that all is okay. If you are like most of us, you are experiencing this.

There comes a time when one can no longer shut out the atrocities of U.S. foreign and military policy: trade agreements that destroy farming; mass unemployment; especially among communities of color; illegal detention and torture; increasing drone attacks resulting in mass civilian deaths; and once again a President who lies the United States into another war for oil and bankers.

A time comes when one can no longer close one’s eyes to the atrocities of a U.S. domestic policy that steals from the people to add to the already hideously bursting pockets of the wealthy, that kicks people out of their homes, denies needed medical treatment and drives families into bankruptcy so that CEOs can dine on gold-lined plates in their personal jets as they travel from gated mansions to leather seats in penthouse offices.

A time comes when one cannot help but realize that the path is unsustainable and one must make a choice. History is knocking, and each of us must choose how we will answer. What do you want to say you did when history was at your door?

History is not a fairy tale you read to your children at night. It is not something someone else did in another place. History is right here and right now, in front of you. It happens before you realize what is going on. There are events that give hints, but nobody knows when the dam will burst and the flood that gushes forth will wipe clean what has gone before and create a new reality.

When the tipping point is reached, it seems at once both unexpected and completely obvious. We are nearing that tipping point in the United States. We have witnessed the Arab Spring and the blossoming of the European Summer. We ask ourselves if now we will experience the American Autumn.

People in America see that corporate power controls the political process and the media. The Forces of Greed steal our treasure and squander it on militarism and needless wars for empire. Forces of Greed render our White House, Congress and Supreme Court dysfunctional so that the denizens of these bodies regurgitate what their corporate paymasters feed them.

Our country faces crises on every front: the economy, education, jobs, the environment, health care, housing, the wealth divide, an empire stretched too thin and ready to shred. None of these crises has to exist. Just and sustainable solutions are available and known. What stands in the way of all these solutions is concentrated corporate power.

Corporatism is behind the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan in which thousands, including our own soldiers, but mostly innocent civilians—men, women and children—are maimed and killed.

Corporatism ignores majority support for improved Medicare for all and instead hands billions to the medical-industrial complex while tens of thousands suffer and die from preventable causes each year.

Corporatism prevents effective regulation of the finance industry, stands in the way of a more sustainable energy economy, resists real job creation and is at the root of the foreclosure crisis, while more families find themselves on the street with nothing.

Corporatism blocks effective action to decrease the known causes of climate chaos while the Arctic Cap melts and tornadoes rampage; some face record droughts while others face high-level flooding.

Corporatism exploits human beings and the planet for profit.

Somehow we need to realize that the situation has gone beyond critical and there is no alternative but to act and resist with resolve. Every day the runaway corporate machine moves closer to the precipice; every day, thousands more children needlessly starve or die from wars or disease. Every day, the earth itself is being raped, and all this death and destruction, for what? Bloody offerings at the altar of the god of profit! It has to stop and people of conscience and courage are the ones with the collective power to stop it.

None of us can do this alone. Even the organizations that advocate just and sustainable solutions cannot do it alone. Corporate power is tremendous. It misinforms, frightens and divides us. Our strength is in unity, in the connection that we share: our desire for a world in which humans can trust each other, can work together to create real solutions instead of hating and killing each other.

We are seeing the beauty of this unity in other parts of the world and at home. Across the country there is evidence of citizen revolt. Most only see the big demonstrations—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, the immigrant marches—but in fact, people inAmerica are consistently in protest against austerity budgets, big business tax avoidance, rising tuition, cuts to education, foreclosures, insurance-based health care and the ongoing wars. On issue after issue there is evidence of peoplein revolt.

Now is the time to join together and unite our struggles in sustained acts of nonviolent resistance. Democracy literally means people power. Concentrated corporate capital and influence has changed the United States into a faux democracy where Americans only get to choose from two corporate-approved candidates, funded by millions in corporate donations.

The normal tools of democracy no longer work.

October 6 is the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion, and the beginning of the new federal budget year—an austerity budget for everything except for war and the corporate security state. On this day, we are calling for sustained and nonviolent mass resistance in Washington, D.C. The action, Stop the Machine! Create a New World!, portends an American Tahrir Square at Freedom Plaza between the White House and Congress, a block away from the National Press Club and a few blocks from the Chamber of Commerce and K Street, the stomping ground of corporate lobbyists.

An impressive array of people have already signed on. Among them: Ann Wright, Baldemar Velasquez, Ben Manski, Brian Becker, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Chris Hedges, Cornel West, David Swanson, Debra Sweet, Diane Wilson, Glen Ford, Jane Hamsher, Jodie Evans, Leah Bolger, Medea Benjamin, Mike Ferner, Larry Pinkney, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Rosa Clemente, Steffie Woolhandler, Ted Rall, The YES Men. (Google them, if you don't know them, each is an impressive leader.)

We know however, that it is not leaders who make change, but people united who insist on change that will succeed!

We are at a turning point. History is knocking. It is time for each of us to decide whether we can remain silent and thus allow the destruction of our planet or join in solidarity to create the future we envision of peace, justice and equality.

Here are three steps you can take right now to create the momentum that leads to a historical breakthrough:

1. Sign the pledge at www.October2011.org and say why you’re coming.

2. Spread the word by forwarding this newsletter to everyone you know, postingwww.October2011.org on your Facebook page and sending it out on Twitter.

3. Reach out to organizations that should be involved and tell them to join the campaign.

It is time to turn the Arab Spring into the American Autumn and begin a movement to remove corporate power and militarism from control of our government.

Ending corporatism and militarism is the transformative issue of our era.

You can be part of a great moment in history—don’t miss the opportunity, answer the call.

Questions? Info@October2011.org.

Kevin Zeese is co-founder of Voters for Peace and directs Come Home America.

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a congressional fellow with Physicians for a National Health Programand a pediatrician based in Baltimore. She is also a board member of Healthcare-Now. She can reached by email at: margaret@pnhp.org

Tarak Kauff leads the Veterans For Peace direct action program.

Elaine Brower is a military mom and a leader of World Can't Wait.

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John Kozy: Humanity at the Crossroads: Business and Jobs

2011-06-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Humanity at the Crossroads: Business and Jobs

by Prof. John Kozy article link

June 5, 2011 | Global Research

What's known as the economy has not only had horrid consequences, it is ultimately unsustainable. In two centuries, it has turned human beings into beasts of burden and their rulers into mere teamsters, it has polluted the Earth, extinguished uncounted species and exterminated millions of people, it has denuded forests, melted glaciers, and is in the process of depleting un-renewable natural resources. Someday, no natural resources will be available for industrial processing, and this economy's assets will turn to dusted rust.

The economy, which is nothing but a collection of abstract ideas to which humanity is being sacrificed, has brought all of this about. If human beings and life in general survive, humanity will have to revert to its natural state in which jobs are done in cooperation with nature rather than in opposition to it.

Conventional wisdom is seldom wise; worse, it is often completely false. And when it falls into the category of the obvious, it is doubly dangerous for its obviousness makes it more difficult to question.

No one defines the word 'freedom' or lists the things Americans are free to do that people in other advanced democratic nations cannot, but who questions the claim that the American people are the freest on earth? No one provides a comparison of poverty in America to poverty in other developed countries, but who questions the claim that America is the most prosperous nation the world has ever known? No one mentions that America has not decisively won a major war in more than thirty years although it has fought perhaps a dozen or more, yet who questions the claim that America has the strongest military power yet created? All of these conventional, obvious bits of common wisdom are dangerous; they lead Americans into a false sense of complaisant superiority that is bringing about the country's undoing.

There are many such conventional, obvious bits of common wisdom. An encyclopedia would be required to list them all, but there is one so astoundingly false that I have never been able to understand why anyone believes it even though everyone seems to: businesses create jobs!

In fact, even deciding what this assertion means is difficult. If it means that only businesses create jobs, it is patently false. Not only do governments and even individuals create jobs, jobs existed for millennia before any businesses as we know them came into being. Ever heard of hunters and gatherers? Hunting and gathering are jobs that people worldwide engaged in. So are herding, trapping, fowling, planting, harvesting, building, skinning, preserving as in drying, cleaning, and the ubiquitous cooking. When a mother cooks her family's dinner, she is doing a job but not for a business. When an otherwise unemployed person is hired to cut your lawn or clean your house, you, not a business, are creating a job. In fact, throughout most of human history, these were the types of jobs human beings engaged in; they did not work for businesses! Businesses did not create any jobs. Anyone who doesn't know this should never have been awarded a diploma from any university, not an MBA, a Ph.D. in economics, or a J.D. Not even a simple B.A.

American politicians and economists take this unquestioned falsehood and attempt to make it the keystone of an economic policy and commercial law that makes the company more important than the species. People are made into factory fodder to be used like any raw material; buyers are cautioned to beware because merchants are expected to cheat, the courts will uphold a merchant's claim against a buyer but deny a similar claim made by a buyer against a merchant. In other words, the company is placed in a superior position to the worker, the job holder, the consumer, the person. The economy becomes a Hegelian master-slave relationship which has never been synthesized.

But what the proponents of this false bit of conventional wisdom fail to recognize is that it has a logical converse. Businesses do, of course, hire people and thus create jobs. Business is a necessary condition for jobs of this kind. But in like manner, the availability of labor is a necessary condition for the existence of business. One is no more important than the other. There is no logical or even practical reason to value the business differently than the job-holder. Just as businesses make jobs possible, workers make businesses possible. The only reason business has a predominant position in the economy is that policy makers have either eliminated or prohibited most other kinds of jobs. If you want people to be only factory fodder, prohibit them from being anything else.

One wonders, of course, how people who held jobs for millennia without the intercession of businesses suddenly, almost overnight in historical terms, became factory fodder. It happened because the masses were driven from the land. They were driven into cities where the kind of work people had done for millennia was no longer available. The only critters available for the hunt are other people and the only stuff to be gathered are other people's property. Industrial capitalism turned hunting and gathering, the most basic forma of work, into crimes. Property became more important than people.

How did this come about? We shall never know. The event has been buried by the dust of time, but we do know who tried to justify it.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government argues that there are three natural rights—life, liberty, and property. Thomas Jefferson, who was familiar with Locke's writing, said, "Oh, no. That's a receipe for tyranny by the status quo and altered the trilogy into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What Jefferson saw and Locke didn't was that if all the property were already owned by the aristocracy, making property a right gave exclusive possession of it to those who already had it, which made the Hegelian master-slave relationship irresolvable, and so it still stands today. Worse, it has been chiseled into a legal wall of separation by the American federal courts when they imported English Common Law into American jurisprudence.

What's known as "the economy," industrial capitalism, has not only had horrid consequences, it is ultimately unsustainable. In two-short centuries, it has turned human beings into beasts of burden and their rulers into mere teamsters, it has polluted the Earth's atmosphere, its streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans, extinguished uncounted species and exterminated millions of human beings, it has denuded forests, melted glaciers, and is in the process of depleting un-renewable natural resources. Someday, no natural resources will be available for industrial processing, and this economy's assets will turn to dusted rust. Industrial Capitalism carried within it the seeds of its own dissolution. Its process is a physical reductio ad absurdum. If human beings in particular and life in general survive this collapse, will humanity revert to its natural state? Will the jobs people do be done for the benefit of human beings rather than for an artificially constructed economy?

The economy's leaders have indirectly brought all of this about by their policy choices, but the economy has done it directly. What is happening to humanity is being brought about by the economy which now controls the actions of leaders and the fates of people. Everything that happens is a consequence of it, and it is nothing but a collection of abstract ideas to which humanity is being sacrificed.

Some will say that technology will be our savior. But that is nothing but a belief based upon a hope, a unicorn on the back of a chimera, that is, too, more likely false than not. Technology has been far more destructive than constructive. Every technological advance has brought with it its own horrors. Business is not a human benefactor, and technology is just another kind of business. It does not exist for you and me any more than hedge funds do. It exists only for the sake of the economy.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

Global Research articles by John Kozy

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Lady Gaga: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine

2011-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

James Gustave Speth: Creating A New Vision Of Economic Growth

2011-06-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

The idea of economic growth as an unquestioned force for good is ingrained in the American psyche. But a longtime environmental leader argues it’s time for the U.S. to reinvent its economy into one that focuses on sustaining communities, family life, and the natural world.

Creating A New Vision Of Economic Growth

by James Gustave Speth article link article link

June 01, 2011 | Countercurrents | Yale Environment 360

Is anything in America more faithfully followed than economic growth? Its movements are constantly watched, measured to the decimal place, deplored or praised, diagnosed as weak or judged healthy and vigorous. Newspapers, magazines, and cable channels report endlessly on it. Promoting growth may be the most widely shared and robust cause in the United States today.

If the growth imperative dominates U.S. political and economic life, what happens when growth hits some serious stumbling blocks?

When I was in school in England, the dean of my college told us when we first arrived that we could walk on the grass in the courtyard — but not across it. That helped me love the English and their language. Here is another creative use of prepositions: there are limits to growth, and there are limits of growth.

Let’s first take up the limits of growth. Despite the constant claims that we need more growth, there are limits on what growth can do for us. The ecological economist Herman Daly has reminded us that if neo-classical economists were true to their trade, they would recognize that there are diminishing returns to growth. Most obviously, the value of income growth declines as one gets richer and richer. Similarly, growth at some point has increasing marginal costs. For example, workers have to put in too many hours, or the climate goes haywire. It follows that for the economy as a whole, we can reach a point where the extra costs of more growth exceed the extra benefits. One should stop growing at that point. Otherwise the country enters the realm of “uneconomic growth,” to use Daly’s delightful phrase, where the costs of growth exceed the benefits it produces.

There are some, myself included, who believe that the U.S. is now experiencing uneconomic growth. If one could measure and add up all the environmental, security, social and psychological costs that U.S. economic growth generates at this point in our history, they would exceed the benefits of further ramping up what is already the highest GDP per capita of any major economy.

Though not widely accepted, the case is strong that growth in the affluent U.S. is now doing more harm than good. Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. GDP, productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It can undermine families, jobs, communities, the climate and environment, and a sense of place and continuity because it is confidently asserted and widely believed that growth is worth the price that must be paid for it.

But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy is ruining the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; it hollows out communities; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues — for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off.

It is time for America to move to post-growth society where the natural environment, working life, our communities and families, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with our country’s compelling social needs; and where true citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.

Another way of pointing out the limits of growth is to consider the long list of public policies that would slow GDP growth, thus sparing the environment, while simultaneously improving social and individual well-being. Such policies include: shorter workweeks and longer vacations, with more time for children and families; greater labor protections, job security and benefits, including generous parental leaves; guarantees to part-time workers and combining unemployment insurance with part-time work during recessions; restrictions on advertising; a new design for the twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces re-chartering, new ownership patterns, and stakeholder primacy rather than shareholder primacy; incentives for local and locally-owned production and consumption; strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements; rigorous environmental, health and consumer protection, including full incorporation of environmental and social costs in prices; greater economic and social equality, with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich (including a progressive consumption tax) and greater income support for the poor; heavy spending on neglected public services; and initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad. Taken together, these policies would undoubtedly slow GDP growth, but well-being and quality of life would improve, and that’s what matters.

Of course, it is clear that even in a post-growth America, many things do indeed need to grow: growth in good jobs and in the incomes of the poor and working Americans; growth in availability of health care and the efficiency of its delivery; growth in education, research and training; growth in security against the risks of illness, job loss, old age and disability; growth in investment in public infrastructure and in environmental protection and amenity; growth in the deployment of climate-friendly and other green technologies; growth in the restoration of both ecosystems and local communities; growth in non-military government spending at the expense of military; and growth in international assistance for sustainable, people-centered development for the half of humanity that live in poverty. These are all areas where public policy needs to ensure that growth occurs.

That’s one case against growth — the argument that we should no longer prioritize growth, much less fetishize it as we do now. I believe this case will be pressed with increasing urgency in the years ahead, and I doubt we’ll miss our growth fetish after we say good-bye to it. We’ve had tons of growth — growth while wages stagnated, jobs fled our borders, life satisfaction flatlined, social capital eroded, poverty mounted, and the environment declined.

The case that there are limits to growth — not that we shouldn’t grow but that we can’t grow — is based on the reality that we are entering a new age of scarcity and rising prices that will constrain growth. The world economy, having doubled in size three times since 1950, is now phenomenally large — large even in comparison with the planetary base that is the setting for economic activity. Today’s huge world economy is consuming the planet’s available resources on a scale that rivals their supply, and it is releasing almost all of those resources, often transformed and toxic, back to the environment on a scale that is beyond the environment’s assimilation capacities, thus greatly affecting the major biogeophysical cycles of the planet. Natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, and the planet’s sinks for absorbing waste products are already exhausted in many contexts. According to the Ecological Footprint analysis, Earth would have to be 50 percent larger than it is for today’s economy to be environmentally sustainable.

In effect, humans have entered a new geological epoch — the anthropocene. As Paul Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl explained in an article on Yale Environment 360: “It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene — human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth — is already an undeniable reality.”

If we now live in a world where the natural resources and environmental sinks needed for economic activity are becoming more scarce across a wide front, we should see prices rising. And indeed we do. Prices of many things are rising rather rapidly: oil, coal, food, and numerous non-fuel minerals. Lithium and rare earths are probably not far behind.

If these patterns hold, as seems likely, and one factors in the economic losses due to climate disruption and the higher energy prices due to climate protection policies, it’s hard to imagine that economic growth won’t be slowed. Moreover, as noted earlier, the increasing scarcity of the atmospheric sink for greenhouse gas emissions is going to challenge growth among the affluent countries. Reducing carbon emissions at required rates may not be possible in national economies that are stressing growth maximization.

Author Richard Heinberg and many others have been calling attention to the looming challenge of peak oil. After much controversy, the reality of peak oil is now widely accepted. Oil production did actually reach its all-time high in 2005 and has plateaued since. Peak oil, the point of maximum production after which production begins to decline, may thus have already happened, but, if not, a widely held view today is that oil will have peaked and begun to decline before 2030, perhaps a decade or so hence.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy released the now-famous “Hirsch Report,” Peaking of World Oil Production, which warned that “the problems associated with world oil production peaking will not be temporary, and past ‘energy crisis’ experience will provide relatively little guidance.” But the report recommended accelerating development of oil sands and coal liquefaction and other steps that would send the world rushing down a path that would exacerbate the already grave challenges of global warming. Clearly, it makes no sense to separate the two challenges: energy supply and climate change must be dealt with together — and soon. Clearly, today we are not prepared or preparing for either.

Many who have looked at the combined challenge of energy and climate change have concluded that our civilization, having completed its exuberant, flamboyant phase, is headed toward a dramatic simplification and re-localization of life and the end of economic growth as we have known it. Some even see the collapse of modern civilization as just a matter of time.

In The Transition Handbook, the bible of the fast-growing Transition Town movement, Rob Hopkins identifies three scenarios: adaptation, which assumes “we can somehow invent our way out of trouble”; evolution, which requires a collective change of mindset, but assumes that “society, albeit in a low-energy, more localized form, will retain its coherence”; or collapse, which assumes that “the inevitable outcome of peak oil and climate change will be the fracturing and disintegration, either sudden or gradual, of society as we know it.”

The eventual outcome will likely involve elements of all three of these scenarios, occurring at different times and different places. Hopefully, the “evolution” scenario will predominate.

“Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt…,” Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote in Foreign Policy earlier this year, “We can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This contradiction is humankind’s biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it’s a challenge we can’t possibly address.”

So there we have it: the traditional solution that America has invoked for nearly every problem — more growth — is in big trouble. If we are going to move beyond growth, we will need to build a different kind of economy. We Americans need to reinvent our economy, not merely restore it. We will have to shift to a new economy, a sustaining economy based on new economic thinking and driven forward by a new politics. Sustaining people, communities and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for by-products of market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation. That is the paradigm shift we must now begin to pursue and promote.

James Gustave Speth is a professor at Vermont Law School and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy organization. A former dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, he also co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, was founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He is the author of six books, including the award-winning The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability and Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.

Countercurrents home page

Yale Environment 360 home page

God Is Relationship, And So Is His Family

2011-06-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Stop, Wake Up

2011-05-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

Laurence M. Vance: Signs of the Times

2011-05-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Signs of the Times

by Laurence M. Vance article link

May 30, 2011 | LewRockwell

The Sunday before Memorial Day is not one of my favorites. The "patriotic" things that go on in churches in celebration or acknowledgment of Memorial Day are downright sickening.

Churches encourage their veterans to wear their military uniforms. Special recognition is given to those who "served." Prayers are offered on behalf of the troops, not that they would cease fighting foreign wars, but for God to keep them out of harm’s way and protect them. Mention is made of the troops defending our freedoms.

Churches decorate their grounds and the inside of their buildings with U.S. flags. Sometimes it is a few large flags hanging from the ceiling or adorning the walls. Sometimes it is many small flags stuck in the ground near the church entrance. Sometimes it is both. Some congregations are asked to recite the pledge of allegiance.

Churches sing hymns of worship to the state instead of hymns of worship about the person of Christ and his work. Songs like "My Country, ‘Tis of Thee," "America the Beautiful," "We Salute You, Land of Liberty," and "This Is My Country." Some churches go even farther and sing "God Bless the U.S.A." or "God Bless America." Too many churches sing the blasphemous "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

I know these practices are widespread because of the scores of people that have e-mailed me in disgust about what occurred in their churches on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

In most cases it is not even necessary to visit a church on the Sunday preceding Memorial Day to know what goes on inside. Just look at the sign outside of the church. Instead of a verse of Scripture or an announcement of an upcoming event, you are more likely to see some patriotic slogan, often with a Christian theme.

I have personally seen two signs this year that I find particularly offensive, not only to my Christian faith, but to reality:

Pray for the Troops,

God be with them.

The American soldier and Jesus Christ,

one gives his life for your freedom,

the other for your soul.

Yes, we should pray for the troops. The Bible tells us in 1 Timothy 2:1 that "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men." But what should we pray? That God would bless the troops while they injure, maim, kill, and destroy property where they have no business being in the first place? That God would be with them while they wage unjust and immoral foreign wars? Since when does wearing a military uniform excuse killing someone you don’t know in his own territory that was no threat to any American until the U.S. military invaded and occupied his country? How about instead praying that the troops come home where they belong or that Christian families stop supplying cannon fodder to the military?

That Christ gave his life for our souls is indisputable, but do American soldiers give their lives for our freedoms? You know, the freedoms we have steadily lost since the troops starting defending our freedoms after 9/11? Has there been in American history any foreign war, military action, CIA covert action, or intervention of any kind in any country that was for the purpose of defending our freedoms mentioned in the Bill of Rights? Of course not. Not one Iraqi or Afghan killed by U.S. forces was ever a threat to our freedoms. The troops don’t defend our freedoms, and neither do they fight "over there" so we don’t have to fight "over here." And I can’t think of anything more blasphemous than mentioning Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace in the same breath as a U.S. soldier who unjustly bombs, maims, kills, and then dies in vain and for a lie.

It is time for Christians to slay the golden calf of the military. Christians should stop joining the military. They should stop encouraging their young men to enlist. They should stop being military chaplains and medics. American churches must be demilitarized.

It is a terrible blight on evangelical Christianity that our churches have sent more soldiers to the Middle East than missionaries. If Christians are so concerned about the threat of Islamofascism, then what better way to confront it than with the Gospel of Christ?

****

Should a Christian Join the Military?

by Laurence M. Vance article link

October 11, 2004 | LewRockwell

Christian enthusiasm for war is at an all-time high.

Gullible Christians have not just tolerated the state's nebulous crusade against "evil," they have actively promoted both it and the overgrown U.S. Military establishment. Because the Republican Party is in control of the federal government instead of the "ungodly" Democrats, because President Bush is the commander in chief instead of the "immoral" Bill Clinton, and because the "enemy" is the easily-vilifiable Muslim infidel, many Christians, who certainly ought to know better given the history of state-sponsored persecution of Christians, "heretics," and other religious groups over the past two thousand years, have come to view the state, and in particular its coercive arm, the military, as sacrosanct.

For far too long Christians have turned a blind eye to the U.S. Global Empire of troops and bases that encircles the world. Many Christians have willingly served as cannon fodder for the state and its wars and military interventions. Christians who haven't died (wasted their life) for their country in some overseas desert or jungle increasingly perpetuate the myth that being a soldier in the U.S. Military is a noble occupation that one can wholeheartedly perform as a Christian.

The Question

The question of whether a Christian should join the military is a controversial one in some Christian circles. By a Christian I don't just mean someone who accepts the title by default because he was born in "Christian" America or "Christian" Europe. In this respect, everyone but Jews and atheists could be classified as Christians. The mention of a Christian in this article should be taken in the narrower sense of someone who professes to believe that Jesus Christ is the Saviour (Luke 2:11) and that the Bible is some kind of an authority (Acts 17:11). It is true that this may be too broad a definition for some Christians, and it is also true that many who profess to be Christians hold defective views on the person of Christ and the nature of the Atonement. But for the purposes of this article, the "broadness" of this definition and the permitting of these "defects" do not in any way affect the question: Should a Christian join the military? In fact, the narrower one's definition of what constitutes a real Christian, the stronger the case can be made against a Christian joining the military.

The idea that there are certain things Christians should not do is not only scriptural (1 Corinthians 6:9—11; Galatians 5:19—21), it is readily acknowledged by Christians and non-Christians alike. Christians have historically applied this idea to occupations as well. But it is not just unlawful occupations like pimp, prostitute, drug dealer, and hit man that Christians have shied away from. Most Americans — whether they be atheist or theist — would have a problem with those occupations as well. Everyone knows that there are also certain lawful occupations that Christians frown upon: bartender, exotic dancer, casino card dealer, etc. This prohibition is also usually extended to benign occupations in not so benign environments. Therefore, a clerk in a drug store or grocery store is acceptable, but a clerk in liquor store or an x-rated video store is not. Likewise, most Christians would not work for an abortion clinic, for any amount of money, whether in the capacity of a doctor or a secretary. In other places of employment, however, a Christian might have no problem with being employed, only with working in a certain capacity. This explains why some Christians might not wait tables in restaurants that forced them to serve alcohol, but would feel perfectly comfortable working for the same restaurant in some other capacity, like a bookkeeper or janitor.

The larger question of whether a Christian (or anyone opposed to the federal leviathan) should work for the state is not at issue. Someone employed by the state as a teacher, a mailman, a security guard, or a park ranger is providing a lawful, moral, non-aggressive, non-intrusive service that is in the same manner also provided by the free market. Thus, it might be argued that working for the BATF, the CIA, the FBI, or as a regulation-enforcing federal bureaucrat is off limits, whereas these other occupations are not. The question then is which of these two groups the U.S. Military belongs in. Given the actions of the U.S. Military since Sherman's state-sponsored "total war" against Southerners and Indians, the host of twentieth-century interventions, subjugations, and "liberations," and the current debacle in Iraq, it should be obvious.

The question before us then is whether a Christian should join the military. Although my remarks are primarily directed at the idea of Christian being a professional soldier (a hired assassin in some cases) for the state, they are also applicable to serving in the military in any capacity.

To save some people the trouble of e-mailing me to ask if I have ever been in the military, I will say now that, no, I have never been in the military. For some strange reason, many Americans think that if you have not "served" your country in the military then you have no right to criticize it. There are three problems with this attitude.

First of all, this is like saying that if you have not "served" in the Mafia then you have no right to criticize John Gotti. It reminds me of fellow travelers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saying that if you have not lived in the Soviet Union then you have no right to criticize it. So no, I am not a veteran, but I have family members who were in the military and have lived near military bases and been intimately associated with military personnel since I was ten years old. No, I am not a veteran, but I am a student of history ("Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" — George Santayana), and was born with enough common sense to know government propaganda when I see it. I can also read above a tenth-grade level, which is about all it takes to compare the wisdom of the Founding Fathers with the drivel from Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Rumsfeld.

Secondly, some of the most vocal critics of the military have been in the military, like USMC Major General Smedley Butler. So it is not just non-veterans who are critics of the military.

The third problem with the knee-jerk reaction to this article and me because I have never been in the military is that it is misplaced indignation. I am only examining the question of whether a Christian should join the military. Criticism of the military is not my direct purpose.

Another objection to an article of this nature is that if it were not for the U.S. Military then no one would have the freedom right now to write anything. But if the military exists to defend our freedoms, and does not just function as the force behind an aggressive, interventionist U.S. foreign policy, then why are our troops scattered across 150 different regions of the world? Why doesn't the military control our borders? Why do we need a Department of Homeland Security if we already have a Department of Defense? Why, with the biggest military budget ever do we have less freedom in America now than at any time in history? The U.S. Military could not even defend the Pentagon. The case could even be argued that U.S. Military intervention is the cause for much of the anti-American sentiment in the world. So, like Brad Edmonds, I don't owe and still do not owe the military anything. I trust in God Almighty to keep me safe from a nuclear attack, not the U.S. Military.

The Commandments

Using the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3—17) as a guide, it is my contention that the military is no place for a Christian. As a Christian under the authority of the New Testament, I am perfectly aware that the Ten Commandments are in the Old Testament and were originally given to the nation of Israel. But I am also cognizant that the Apostle Paul said: "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning" (Romans 15:4) after he had just recited many of the Ten Commandments (Romans 13:8—9).

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:3).

The state has historically been the greatest enemy of Christianity. Yet, many Christians in the military have made the state their god. Members of the military are totally dependent on the state for their food, clothing, shelter, recreation, and medical care. They are conditioned to look to the state for their every need. But the state demands unconditional obedience. Shoot this person, bomb this city, blow up this building — don't ask why, just do it because the state tells you to. The soldier is conditioned to believe that whatever he does is right because it is done in the name of the state. The state's acts of aggression are regarded as acts of benevolence. Then, once the benevolent state is viewed as never doing anything wrong, it in essence becomes the all-seeing, all-knowing, omniscient state, since it would take absolute knowledge to know for certain that the person shot, the city bombed, or the building blown up "deserved" it.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Exodus 20:4).

The state has an image that it expects its citizens to reverence and pledge allegiance to. This is especially true of people serving in the military. Perhaps the most famous picture of the flag is the raising of the flag by U.S. troops at Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. But there is another picture of the flag that has occurred thousands of times that the state does its best to suppress: the picture of the flag-draped coffin of a life wasted in the service of one of the state's needless wars. Foreigners who object to our intervention in their country and our military presence across the globe burn American flags in protest. But they are not protesting because we are capitalists who believe in liberty, freedom, and democracy and they do not share our values. Christians in the military must reverence what has often justly come to be viewed by most of the world as a symbol of oppression. They must also pledge their allegiance to it. Christians blindly recite the Pledge of Allegiance without even bothering to find out where it came from, what its author intended, and how the state uses it to instill loyalty to the state in the minds of its youth. Never mind that the author was a socialist Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy (1855—1932), who was forced to resign from his church in Boston because of his socialist ideas (like preaching on "Jesus the Socialist"). Never mind that the idea for Bellamy's pledge of allegiance was taken from Lincoln's oath of allegiance imposed on Southerners after the successful Northern invasion of the Southern states. Never mind that "republic for which" the flag "stands" was, in Bellamy's eyes, "the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove." The Pledge is an allegiance oath to the omnipotent, omniscient state. There is nothing inherently wrong with the United States having a flag, but it has been made into a graven image that no Christian, in the military or otherwise, should bow down to.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain (Exodus 20:7).

The state will tolerate God and religion as long as He and it can be used to legitimize the state. God's name is taken in vain when it is used to justify the state's wars and military interventions. Some Christians in the military envision themselves as modern-day crusaders warring against the Muslim infidel. Indeed, the president even termed his war on terrorism "this crusade." Others, all the way up to the commander in chief, invoke the name of God or His words in Scripture to give authority to their unconstitutional, unscriptural, and immoral military adventures. When a young Christian man (or woman, unfortunately) leaves home and joins the military he often learns to take God's name in vain in ways that he never could have imagined. There is a reason the old expression is "cuss like a sailor," not cuss like a mechanic, an accountant, or a fireman. Singing "God Bless America" while cognizant of the abortions, promiscuity, and pornography that curse America is taking God's name in vain. Likewise, military chaplains asking God to bless troops on their missions of death and destruction are taking God's name in vain. Many Christians were upset a few years ago when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) tried to strike out the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance (which was only added in 1954). They should have cheered instead, for even though the two federal judges (the decision was 2-1) who made the ridiculous ruling that the inclusion of the phrase "under God" was an unconstitutional "endorsement of religion" ought to have their heads examined, America is not a nation "under God," and to say that it is (as when one recites the Pledge of Allegiance), is the epitome of using God's name in vain.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy (Exodus 20:8).

Although the sabbath day is technically the Jewish seventh day (Saturday) and not the Christian first day (Sunday), the basic principle is still the same. Christians the world over set aside the first day of the week to attend church services. Christians in the military are often deployed to some strange city or remote country for months at a time and are therefore forced to violate the precept of "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together" (Hebrews 10:25). Defense consultant Josh Pollack, in his "Saudi Arabia and the United States, 1931—2002," has documented that during the early decades of the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia, Air Force chaplains were forbidden to wear Christian insignia or hold formal services. During the First Gulf War of Bush the Elder, the importation of Bibles for Christian troops was discouraged, and no alcohol was permitted to U.S. troops in accordance with Islamic Law.

5. Honour thy father and thy mother (Exodus 20:12).

It used to be thought that following one's father into the military was a noble thing that honored him. Thankfully, this is not so much the case anymore. Is it honoring to one's father and mother for a Christian to accept the state's amoral values that are taught in the military and reject the values learned from a Christian upbringing? The temptations in the military for a Christian young person away from home for the first time are very great. Joining the military is one of the surest ways for a Christian to dishonor his parents by associating with bad company and picking up bad habits. This is not to deny that some Christians who are well grounded in the Scriptures live an exemplary life while in the military and are a positive force for good. But see the next point.

6. Thou shalt not kill (Exodus 20:13).

This is perhaps the greatest reason for a Christian not to join the military. But there is a difference between killing and murdering. Under certain conditions, a Christian would be entirely justified in taking up arms to defend himself, his family, and his property against an aggressor. If America was attacked, Christians could in good conscience kill and maim enemy invaders. However, when was the United States ever in danger from Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Cuba, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, or any of the other places where the United States has intervened militarily? How then can a Christian justify killing any of them on their own soil? The old adage, "Join the army, meet interesting people, kill them," is now just "join the army and kill them" since you can't meet anyone at 10,000 feet before you release your load of bombs. The U.S. Military turns men into callous killers. The D.C. sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Timothy McVey all learned how to kill in the military. When a Christian in the military is faced with an order to kill, bomb, or destroy someone or something halfway around the world that he has never met or seen, and is no real threat to him, his family, or his country, there is really only one option: "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 4:29).

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14).

Human nature being what it is, the forcing of men and women together, especially for extended periods on Navy ships, has been the source of many broken marriages and unwanted pregnancies. Christians in the military also face incredible temptations when they are deployed overseas. In his seminal work Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnson has described the network of bars, strip clubs, whorehouses, and VD clinics that surround U.S. bases overseas. The former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines "had no industry nearby except for the ‘entertainment' business, which supported approximately 55,000 prostitutes and a total of 2,182 registered establishments offering ‘rest and recreation' to American servicemen." At the annual Cobra Gold joint military exercise in Thailand: "Some three thousand prostitutes wait for sailors and marines at the South Pattaya waterfront, close to Utapao air base." The prohibition in this commandment applies equally as well to men who are not married, for "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:28).

8. Thou shalt not steal (Exodus 20:15).

Through its system of forced revenue collection (the income tax), the state is guilty of stealing untold trillions of dollars from working Americans. Very little of that money is spent for constitutionally authorized purposes. One of the largest expenditures of the state is its bloated military budget. Training, feeding, housing, transporting, paying, and arming thousands of troops all over the planet is a very expensive undertaking. Robert Higgs has estimated the true military budget in fiscal year 2004 to be about $695 billion. Besides being the recipient of stolen money, a Christian in the military may have to steal the lives of the sons and daughters of parents he has never met. He may have to steal land in foreign countries to build bases on. He certainly steals the resources of the countries he bombs. Christians in the military should heed the words of the Apostle Paul: "Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth" (Ephesians 4:28).

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16).

The state is the greatest bearer of false witness that there has ever been. The latest round of lies concerns the war in Iraq. Continual government lies about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, aluminum tubes, chemical and biological weapons, threat to the United States, tie to al Qaeda, and link to the September 11th attacks are the rule rather than the exception. The Christian in the military is supporting a lie and living a lie when he devotes his time and energy to supporting a U.S. war machine based on deception, disinformation, falsehood, and lies.

10. Thou shalt not covet (Exodus 20:17).

Young people generally join the military for the wrong motive. Bored, indecisive, in trouble, unemployed, seeking to get away from home — these are some of the reasons why young men and women join the military. But perhaps the greatest reason young people join the military today is because of covetousness. Recruitment slogans all emphasize how much money an enlistee can earn towards his college education. Then there are enlistment bonuses, free medical care, commissary and exchange shopping privileges, the lucrative retirement program, and the future "veterans preference" to help get that government job after retirement. But aside from money, some people covet an increase in prestige ("The few, the proud, the Marines"). Others covet the power that powerful weapons bring. Some Christian young people join the military because they are patriotic, loyal Americans who have been conditioned to think that they owe the state something ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"). Their patriotism is noble, but misdirected.

The Conclusion

Should a Christian join the military? Should anyone join the military? The U.S. Military, although officially called the Department of Defense, is the state's arm of aggression. If it limited itself to controlling our borders, patrolling our coasts, and protecting our citizens instead of intervening around the globe and leaving death and destruction in its wake then perhaps it might be a noble occupation for a Christian. But as it is now, the military is no place for a Christian.

The argument that you have to become one of them to win them is fallacious. No one would think of becoming a pimp or a prostitute in order to convert them to Christianity. The fact that a Christian is compared to a soldier (2 Timothy 2:3) is no more a scriptural endorsement of Christians in the military than God being compared to "a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine" (Psalm 78:65) is an endorsement of drunkenness.

When the nation of Israel rejected the LORD and desired a king "like all the nations" (1 Samuel 8:5), God described "the manner of the king that shall reign over them" (1 Samuel 8:9):

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;

That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles (1 Samuel 8:11—20).

Christians should remember that "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal" (2 Corinthians 10:4), and that we wield "the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6:17).

That criticizing the military or recommending that Christians don't join it is seen as being un-American or traitorous shows just how effective the state has been with its propaganda. The United States is the greatest country on earth for a Christian to live in, but in spite of its military, not because of it.

Laurence M. Vance writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, and Rethinking the Good War. His latest book is The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his website.

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Criminality of War

2011-05-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Criminality of War

by Laurence M. Vance article link

April 13, 2011 | LewRockwell

... It is unfortunate that many conservative Christians are also conservative warmongers. To them I offer, and to all other conservative warmongers, the compelling insight of Howard Malcom (1799-1879), former president of Georgetown College, Kentucky. What it especially important about Malcom’s treatise on the "Criminality of War" is that it was reprinted in The Book of Peace: A Collection of Essays on War and Peace – published by the American Peace Society in 1845, long before the horrors of twentieth-century wars were chronicled, and even before images of war were captured on photographs.

CRIMINALITY OF WAR

By Howard Malcom, D. D.

President of Georgetown College, KY

That man is a fallen and depraved creature, is every where apparent in the ferocious dispositions of his nature. Hence, to speak of him as in "a state of nature," has been to speak of him as "a savage." A savage finds in war and bloodshed his only means of honor and fame, and he becomes, both in the chase and the camp, a beast of prey.

In proportion as war prevails among civilized nations, it banishes whatever tends to refine and elevate, suspends the pursuits of industry, destroys the works of art, and sets them back towards barbarism. Wherever it comes, cities smoke in ruins, and fields are trodden under foot. The husband is torn from his wife, the father from his children, the aged lose their prop, and woman is consigned to unwonted toils and perpetual alarms. As it passes, the halls of science grow lonely, improvements pause, benevolence is fettered, violence supersedes law, and even the sanctuary of God is deserted, or becomes a manger, a hospital, or a fortress. In its actual encounters, every movement is immeasurably horrid, with wounds, anguish, and death; while amid the din of wrath and strife, a stream of immortal souls is hurried, unprepared, to their final audit.

That tyrants should lead men into wars of pride and conquest, is not strange. But that the people, in governments comparatively free, should so readily lend themselves to a business in which they bear all the sufferings, can gain nothing, and may lose all, is matter of astonishment indeed.

But the chief wonder is that CHRISTIANS, followers of the Prince of Peace, should have concurred in this mad idolatry of strife, and thus been inconsistent not only with themselves, but with the very genius of their system. Behold a man going from the Lord’s Supper, fantastically robed and plumed, drilling himself into skillful modes of butchery, and studying the tactics of death! Behold him murdering his fellow Christians, and praying to his Divine Master for success in the endeavor! Behold processions marching to the house of God to celebrate bloody victories, and give thanks for having been able to send thousands and tens of thousands to their last account with all their sins upon their heads! Stupendous inconsistency!

Surely this matter should remain no longer unexamined. It cannot. In this age of light, when every form of vice and error is discussed and resisted, this great evil, the prolific parent of unnumbered abominations, must be attacked also. Christians are waking up to see and do their duty to one another, to their neighbors, and to the distant heathen. They cannot continue to overlook war. I persuade myself that there are few, even now, who object to its being discussed.

I propose not to discuss the whole subject of war; – a vast theme. I shall abstain from presenting it in the light of philosophy, politics, or patriotism; in each of which points of light I have studied it, and feel that it demands most serious attention. In the following observations, war will be discussed only as it concerns a Christian.

Happily, there are few who would oppose the prevalence and perpetuity of peace. The need of discussion lies not in the bloodthirsty character of our countrymen, nor in the existence of active efforts to propagate and prolong the miseries of war; but in the apathy that prevails on this subject, and the almost total want of reflection in regard to it. A military spirit is so wrought into the habits of national thinking, and into all our patriotic pomps and festivals, that the occasional occurrence of war is deemed a matter of course. Even the fervent friends of man’s highest welfare seem to regard a general pacification of the world, and the disuse of fleets and armies, as a mere Utopian scheme, and chose to give their money and prayers to objects which seem of more probable attainment. This apathy and incredulity are to be overcome only by discussion.

The following observations will be confined to two points.

I. War is criminal because inconsistent with Christianity.

II. This criminality is enormous.

I. ITS INCONSISTENCY WITH CHRISTIANITY.

1. It contradicts the entire genius and intention of Christianity.

Christianity requires us to seek to amend the condition of man. War always deteriorates and destroys. The world is at this moment not one whit better, in any respect, for all the wars of five thousand years. If here and there some good may be traced to war, the amount of evil, on the whole, is immeasurably greater. Christianity, if it prevailed, would make earth once more a paradise. War makes it a slaughter house, a desert, a den of thieves and murderers, a hell. Christianity cancels and condemns the law of retaliation. War is based upon that very principle. Christianity remedies all human woes. War makes them.

The causes of war are as inconsistent with Christianity as its effects. It originates in the worst passions, and the worst crimes, James iv., 1, 2. We may always trace it to the thirst of revenge, the acquisition of territory, the monopoly of commerce, the quarrels of kings, the coercion of religious opinions, or some such unholy source. There never was a war, devised by man, founded on holy tempers, and Christian principles.

All the features, all the concomitants, all the results of war, are opposed to the features, the concomitants, the results of Christianity. The two systems conflict in every point, irreconcilably and forever.

2. War sets at naught the entire example of Jesus.

"Learn of me," says the Divine Examplar. And can we learn fighting from him? His conduct was always pacific. He became invisible when the Nazarites sought to cast him from their precipice. The troops that came to arrest him in the garden, he struck down, but not dead. His constant declaration was, that he "came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save."

True, he once instructed his disciples to buy swords, telling them that they were going forth as sheep among wolves. But the whole passage shows he was speaking by parable, as he generally did. The disciples answered, "here are two swords." He instantly replies, "it is enough." If he had spoken literally, how could two swords suffice for twelve Apostles? Nay, when Peter used one of these, it was too much. Christ reproved him, and healed the wound. He meant to teach them their danger, not their refuge. His metaphor was misunderstood, just as it was when he said, "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees," and they thought he meant bread.

Once he drove men from the temple. But it was with "a whip of small cords." Moral influence drove them. A crowd of such fellows was not to be overcome by one man with a whip. He expressly declared that his servants should not fight, for his kingdom was not of this world. His whole life was the sublime personification of benevolence. He was the PRINCE OF PEACE.

Do we forget that Christ is our example? Whatever is right for us to do, would in general have been right for him to do. Imagine the Savior robed in the trappings of a man of blood, leading columns to slaughter, setting fire to cities, laying waste the country, storming fortresses, and consigning thousands to wounds, anguish and death, just to define a boundary, settle a point of policy, or decide some kingly quarrel. Could "meekness and lowliness of heart" be learned from him thus engaged?

There is no rank or station in an army that would become the character of Christ. Nor can any man who makes arms a profession find a pattern in Christ our Lord. But he ought to be every man’s pattern.

I need not enlarge on this point. It is conceded; for no warrior thinks of making Christ his pattern. How then can a genuine imitator of Christ, consistently be a warrior?

3. War is inconsistent not only with the NATURE of Christianity, and the EXAMPLE OF JESUS, but it violates all the EXPRESS PRECEPTS of Scripture.

Even the Old Testament does not sanction war as a Custom. In each case, there mentioned, of lawful war, it was entered upon by the express command of God. If such authority were now given, we might worthily resort to arms. But without such authority, how dare we violate the genius of Christianity, and set at naught the example of Christ? The wars mentioned in olden times were not appointed to decide doubtful questions, or to settle quarrels. They were to inflict national punishment, and were intended, as are pestilence and famine, to chastise guilty nations.

As to the New Testament, a multitude of its precepts might be quoted, expressly against all fighting. "Ye have heard, &c., an eye for an eye, but I say unto you resist not evil." "Follow peace with all men." "Love one another." "Do justice, love mercy." "Love your enemies." "Follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace." "Return good for evil." "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, and ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you." "If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight," etc. "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither," &c. "Be ye not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." "If thine enemy hunger, feed him, if he thirst, give him drink." "Render not evil for evil, but contrariwise blessing." Such passages might be indefinitely multiplied. They abound in the New Testament. How shall they be disposed of? No interpretation can nullify their force, or change their application. Take any sense the words will bear, and they forbid war. They especially forbid retaliation, which is always advanced as the best pretext for war.

Such texts as have been just quoted, relate to the single matter of retaliation and fighting. But belligerent nations violate every precept of the gospel. It enjoins every man to be meek, lowly, peaceable, easy to be entreated, gentle, thinking no evil, merciful, slow to anger, quiet, studious, patient, temperate, &c. Let a man rehearse, one by one, the whole catalogue of Christian graces, and he will see that war repudiates them all.

Examine that superlative epitome of Christianity, our Lord’s sermon on the mount. Its nine benedictions are upon so many classes of persons; the poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the persecuted, the reviled, those who hunger after righteousness, and the pure in heart. In which of these classes can the professed warrior place himself? Alas, he shuts himself out from all the benedictions of heaven.

The discourse proceeds to teach, not only killing, but anger is murder. It expressly rebukes the law of retaliation; and exploding the traditionary rule of loving our neighbor, and hating our enemy, it requires us to love our enemies, and do good to those that despitefully use us. Afterward, in presenting a form of prayer, it not only teaches us to say, "Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us," but adds, "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive you." What a peace sermon is here! What modern peace society goes further, or could be more explicit?

But let us take a few of the Christian graces more in detail. The Christian is required to cherish a sense of direct and supreme responsibility to God. The irresponsible feelings of a soldier are a necessary part of his profession, as Lord Wellington said recently, ‘A man who has a nice sense of religion, should not be a soldier.’ The soldier makes war a profession, and must be ready to fight any nation, or any part of his own nation, as he is ordered. He must have no mind of his own. He must march, wheel, load, fire, charge, or retreat, as he is bidden, and because he is bidden. In the language of THOMAS JEFFERSON, "The breaking of men to military discipline, is breaking their spirits to principles of passive obedience." The nearer a soldier comes to a mere machine, the better soldier he makes. Is this right for a Christian? Is it compatible with his duty to "examine all things, and hold fast that which is good?"

The contempt of life which is so necessary in a soldier, is a sin. He must walk up to the deadly breach, and maintain ground before the cannon’s mouth. But life is inestimable, and belongs to God. He who masters the fear of death, does it either by religious influence, or quenching the fear of God, and all concern about a future state. There is not a gospel precept, which he who makes arms a profession, is not at times compelled to violate.

Nor is there a Christian grace which does not tend to diminish the value of a professed soldier. Some graces are, it is true, useful in camp; where a man may be called to act as a servant, or laborer. It is then desirable that he be honest, meek, faithful, that he may properly attend to a horse, or a wardrobe. But such qualities spoil him for the field. He must there cast away meekness, and fight; he must cast away honesty, and forage; he must cast away forgiveness, and revenge his country; he must not return good for evil, but two blows for one.

Survey an army prepared for battle; see a throng, busy with cannons, muskets, mortars, swords, drums, trumpets, and banners. Do these men look like Christians? Do they talk like followers of the meek and lowly Jesus? Do they act like friends and benefactors of the whole human race? Are the lessons they learn in daily drill, such as will help them in a life of faith?

Mark this army in the hour of battle. See attacks and retreats, battalions annihilated, commanders falling, shouts of onset, groans of death, horses trampling the fallen, limbs flying in the air, suffocating smoke, and thousands smarting in the agony of death, without a cup of water to quench their intolerable thirst! Do the principles of Christianity authorize such a scene? Are such horrors its fruits?

Inspect the field when all is over. The fair harvest trampled and destroyed, houses and batteries smoking in ruin, the mangled and suffering strewed among dead comrades, and dead horses, and broken gun-carriages. Prowlers strip the booty even from the warm bodies of the dying, jackals howl around, and disgusting birds are wheeling in the air; while the miserable wife seeks her loved one among the general carnage. Does all this look as if Christians had been there, serving the God of mercy? Could such works grow out of the system, heralded as bringing "Peace on earth"?

Turn your eyes to the ocean. A huge ship, bristling with implements of death, glides quietly along. Presently "a sail!" is called from sentinel to sentinel. All on board catch the sound, and gaze on the dim and distant outline. At length she is discovered to be a ship of war, and all strain their eyes to see her flag. On that little token hangs the important issue; for no feud, no jealousy exists between the crews. They do not even know each other. At length the signal is discerned to be that of a foe. Immediately what a scene ensues! Decks cleared and sanded, ports opened, guns run out, matches lighted, and every preparation made for bloody work. While waiting for the moment to engage, the worst passions of the men are appealed to to make them fight with fury; and they are inspired with all possible pride, hatred, revenge or ambition.

The fight begins! Death flies with every shot. Blood and carnage cover the decks. The rigging is cut to pieces; the hull bored with hot shot. The smoke, the confusion, the orders of officers, the yells of the wounded, the crash of timbers, the horrors of the cockpit, make a scene at which infernal fiends feel their malignity sated. At length one party strikes, and the strife is stayed. The conquered ship, ere her wounded can be removed, sinks into the deep. The victor, herself almost a wreck, throws overboard the slain, washes her decks, and turns toward her port, carrying the crippled, the agonized, and the dying of both ships! What anguish is there in that ship! What empty berths, late filled with the gay-hearted and the profane! What tidings does she carry, to spread lamentation and misery over hundreds of families!

Yet in all this, there was no personal feud or malice, no private wrong or offence. All was the mere result of some cabinet council, some kingly caprice. Could any enormity be more cold blooded and diabolical?

But no where does war wear such horrors as in a siege. The inhabitants are shut up; business, pleasure, education, intercourse are all checked; sorrow, terror, and distress prevail. Bombs fall and explode in the streets; citizens are killed in their houses, and soldiers on the ramparts. Women and children retreat to the cellars, and live there cold, dark, comfortless, terrified. Day after day, and month after month, roll tediously on, while the gloom constantly thickens, and the only news is of houses crushed, acquaintances killed, prices raised, and scarcity increased. Gladly would the citizens surrender, but the governor is inexorable. At length, to all the horrors famine is added. The poor man, out of employ, cannot purchase customary comforts at the increased prices. His poverty becomes deeper, his sacrifices greater. But the siege continues. The middle classes sink to beggary, the poorer class to starvation. Anon, breaches are made in the wall; and all must work amid galling fire to repair them. Mines are sprung, blowing houses and occupants into the air. Still no relief comes. Dead animals, offal, skins, the very carcass of the slain, are eaten. The lone widow, the bereft mother, the disappointed bride, the despairing father, and the tender babe, mourn continually. Then comes pestilence, the necessary consequence of unburied dead, and unwonted hardships, and intolerable woe. At length, the city yields; or is taken by storm, and scenes even more horrid ensue. A brutal soldiery give loose to lust, and rapine, and destruction; and the indescribable scene closes with deserted streets, general ruin, and lasting lamentation.

This picture is far from being overwrought. The history of sieges furnish realities of deeper horror. Take for instance the second siege of Saragossa in 1814, or almost any other.

Now is this Christianity? Is it like it? Christianity cannot alter. If it will necessarily abolish all war, when the millennium shall give it universal influence, then it will abolish war now, so far as it has influence; and every man who receives it fully will be a man of peace. If religious persons may make fighting a trade on earth, they may fight in heaven. If we may lawfully cherish a war spirit here, we may cherish it there!

I close by quoting the words of the great Jeremy Taylor. "As contrary as cruelty is to mercy, and tyranny to charity, so contrary is war to the meekness and gentleness of the Christian religion."

II. WAR IS ONE OF THE MOST AWFUL AND COMPREHENSIVE FORMS OF WICKEDNESS.

What has been said, has gone to show how inconsistent, in principle, are war and Christianity. A few considerations will now be offered, illustrative of the practices of war. We shall be thus led to see, not only that it contradicts the genius, and violates the precepts of Christianity, but that it does so in the most gross and gigantic manner.

1. It is the worst form of robbery.

Common robberies are induced by want: but war commits them by choice, and often robs only to ravage. A man who rushes to the highway to rob, maddened by the sight of a famished family, may plead powerful temptation. But armies rob, burn, and destroy, in the coolest malice. See a file of men, well fed and well clothed by a great and powerful nation, proceed on a foraging party. They enter a retired vale, where a peaceful old man by hard handed toil supports his humble family. The officer points with his sword to the few stacks of hay and grain, laid up for winter. Remonstrances are vain – tears are vain. They bear off his only supply, take his cow, his pet lamb; add insult to oppression, and leave the ruined family to an almshouse or starvation. Aye, but the poor old man was an enemy, as the war phrase is, and the haughty soldiery claim merit for forbearance, because they did not conclude with burning down his house.

The seizure or destruction of public stores, is not less robbery. A nation has no more right to steal from a nation, than an individual has to steal from an individual. In principle, the act is the same; in magnitude, the sin is greater. All the private robberies in a thousand years, are not a tithe of the robberies of one war. Next to killing, it is the very object of each party to burn and destroy by sea, and ravage and lay waste on land. It is a malign and inexcusable barbarity, and constitutes a stupendous mass of theft.

In one of the Punic wars, Carthage, with 100,000 houses, was burnt and destroyed, so that not a house remained. The plunder carried away by the Romans, in precious metals and jewels alone, is reported to have been equal to five millions of pounds of silver. Who can compute the number of similar events, from the destruction of Jerusalem to that of Moscow? Arson, that is, the setting fire to an inhabited dwelling, is, in most countries, punishable by death. But more of this has been done in some single wars, than has been committed privately, since the world began. When some villain sets fire to a house and consumes it, what public indignation! What zeal to bring to justice! If, for a succession of nights, buildings are fired, what general panic! Yet how small the distress, compared to that which follows the burning of an entire city. In one case, the houseless still find shelter, the laborer obtains work, the children have food. But oh, the horrors of a general ruin! Earthquake is no worse.

It should not be overlooked, that a great part of the private robberies in Christendom, may be traced to the deterioration of morals, caused by war. Thousands of pirates, received their infamous education in national ships. Thousands of thieves, were disbanded soldiers. War taught these men to disregard the rights of property, to trample upon justice, and refuse mercy. Even if disposed to honest labor, which a militarv life always tends to render unpalatable, the disbanded soldier often finds himself unable to obtain employment. The industry of his country has been paralysed by the war; and the demand for labor slowly recurs. The discharged veteran therefore is often compelled to steal or starve. Thus war, by its own operations, involves continual and stupendous thefts, and by its unavoidable tendencies, multiplies offenders, who in time of peace prey upon community.

2. It involves the most enormous Sabbath breaking.

The Sabbath cannot be observed by armies. Common camp duty forbids it. Extra duties are assigned to Sunday – such as parades, drill, inspections, and reviews. Seldom is any effort made to avoid marches, or even battles, on Sunday. I have been able to find, in all history, but one battle postponed on account of the Sabbath. In thousands of instances, as in the case of Waterloo, it has been the chosen day for conflict.

War tends to abolish the Sabbath, even when the army is not present. The heavy trains of the commissary must move on. The arsenal and the ship yard must maintain their activity. Innumerable mechanics, watermen, and laborers, must be kept busy. During our late war with England, who did not witness on all our frontiers, even in the States of New England, the general desecration of the holy day? Men swarmed like ants on a mole hill, to throw up entrenchments; the wharves resounded with din of business; and idlers forsook the house of God to gaze upon the scenes of preparation.

Do Christians consider these unavoidable results, when they give their voice for war? No. The calm consideration of such concomitants, would make it impossible for them to advise or sanction the profane and abominable thing.

3. War produces a wicked waste of national wealth.

The disbursements of a belligerent government, drawn of course by taxation from the laboring community, form an incalculable amount. Our last war with England cost us more than a hundred millions of dollars per annum. During the last 175 years, ENGLAND has had twenty-four wars with France, twelve with Scotland, eight with Spain, and two with America, besides all her other wars in India and elsewhere. These have cost her government, according to official returns, three thousand millions of pounds sterling, or FIFTEEN THOUSAND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS! The war which ended at Waterloo, cost France £700,000,000, and Austria £300,000,000, or five thousand millions of dollars! How much it cost Spain, Sweden, Holland, Germany, Prussia and Russia, I have no means of knowing, but at least an equal sum. Thus one long war cost Europe at least forty thousand millions! The annual interest of this sum, at five per cent., is two thousand millions of dol1ars, – enough almost to banish suffering poverty from Europe! For all this, NOTHING has been gained. Nay, the spending of it thus has produced an aggregate of vice and poverty, pain and bereavement, more than, without war, would have come upon the whole human family since the flood! Who then can begin to compute the cost of all the wars even in Europe alone?

We often hear much railing against useless expenditure, and proposals for economy in dress, furniture, &c., and it is well. But those who insist on these modes of frugality should be consistent. Let them remember that all the retrenchments they recommend are but as the dust of the balance compared to the expenditures of a war. But vast as are the expenses of belligerent governments, they do not constitute a tenth of the true expenses of war! We must reckon the destruction of property, private and public – the ruin of trade and commerce – the suspension of manufactories – the loss of the productive labor of soldiers and camp followers. But who can reckon such amounts?

Further, let it be considered that all these items must be doubled and trebled in cases of civil wars, and that such form a large part of the catalogue.

Further still, war causes the great bulk of taxation even in time of peace! Witness the annual appropriations for fleets and standing armies, forts, arsenal, weapons, pensions, &c. Even since our last war with England, we have been paying annually, for the above objects, about ten times us much as for the support of our civil government!! "The war spirit" is taxing our people to the amount of unnumbered millions, now in time of profound peace. A single 74 gun ship, beside all her cost of construction and equipment, costs in time of peace, while afloat, $200,000 per annum – eight times the salary of the President of the United States. Nearly all the taxes paid by civilized nations, go in some form or other to the support of war! All the British debt which is grinding her people into the dust, was created by war. The cost of the wars of Europe alone, in only the last century, would have built all the canals, railroads, and churches, and established all the schools, colleges, and hospitals, wanted on the whole globe!

4. War is the grossest form of murder.

Private murders are atrocious – those of war far more so. But the contrary opinion prevails; and we adduce proofs. War enhances the crime of murder on the following accounts:

(1.) It is more cold-blooded and cruel.

Malice prompts private murder, and the proof of it is necessary to conviction by a jury; and the more cool and calculating, the more guilt. But murder in war is more cool and calculating, than even in a duel. The question of war or peace is calmly debated, deliberately resolved upon, and proclaimed in form. Armies are raised, and drilled, and marched, and engaged, with all coolness and calculation. The contending hosts know not each other, cherish no personal hate, and seldom know the true grounds of the contest. All is done with whatever of aggravation attends deliberate homicide.

(2.) It is more vast in amount.

Computation falters when we estimate the numbers slain in war or by reason of it. Three hundred thousand men fell in one battle, when Attila, king of the Huns, was defeated at Chalons. Nearly the entire army of Xerxes, consisting of four millions of persons, perished. Julius Caesar, in one campaign in Germany, destroyed half a million. More than half a million perished in one campaign of Napoleon, averaging 3000 men a day. Paying no attention to the innumerable wars among Pagans before and since the birth of Christ, nor to all the wasting wars of the past seventeen centuries, it is matter of distinct calculation that about five millions of nominal Christians have been butchered by nominal Christians, within the last half century! What then has been the total of war-murders since creation?

Nor is the number of the slain the real total. Multitudes of "the wounded and missing" die; multitudes perish out of armies and fleets without battle, by hardships, exposure, vice, contagion, and climate. We ought, therefore, at least to double the number slain in engagements, to arrive at true sum; and make ten millions of men destroyed within half a century by Christian nations’ quarrels!

(3.) Deaths caused by war, arc accompanied by horrid aggravations of suffering.

The wretches die, not on beds of down, surrounded by all that can relieve or palliate suffering. No soft hand smooths the couch, or wipes the brow. No skilful physician stands watching every symptom. The silence, the quiet, the cleanliness, the sympathy, the love, the skill, that divest the chamber of death of all its horror, and half its anguish, are not for the poor soldier. Private murder is always done in haste, and the sufferer is often dismissed from life in a moment. Not so in war. Few are killed outright. The victim dies slowly of unmedicated wounds. Prostrate amid the trampling of columns and of horses which have lost their riders, or in a trench, amid heaps of killed and wounded, he dies a hundred deaths. If, mangled and miserable, he finds himself still alive, when the tide of battle has passed, how forlorn his condition! Unable to drag himself from the ghastly scene, his gory limbs chilled with the damps of night, tortured with thirst, and quivering with pain, his heart siekened with the remembrance of home, and his soul dismayed at the approach of eternal retributions, he meets death with all that can make it terrific.

(4.) The multitudes murdered in war, are generally sent to hell.

The thought is too horrible for steady contemplation; but we are bound to consider it. "No murderer hath eternal life." Soldiers are murderers in intent and profession, and die in the act of killing others, and with imp1ements of murder in their hands. Without space for repentance, they are hurried to the bar of God. On what grounds may we affirm their sa1vation? O that those that know the worth of souls, would dwell on this feature of the dreadful custom!

(5.) War first corrupts those whom it destroys, and thus aggravates damnation itself.

Bad as are most men who enlist in standing armies, war makes them worse. They might at any rate be lost, but their vocation sends them to a more dreadful doom. The recruit begins his degradation, even in the rendezvous, ere he has lodged a week within its walls. He grows still worse in camp.

In the army, vice becomes his occupation. His worst passions are fostered. His Sabbaths are necessarily profaned. He becomes ashamed of tender feelings, and conscientious scrup1es. Thus an old soldier is generally a hardened offender; and the shot that terminates his life, consigns him to a death rendered more terrible by his profession. Had the money and time, which has been lavished to equip and drill and support him as a soldier, been spent for his intellectual and moral improvement, he might have been an ornament to society, and a pillar in the church.

Mark his grim corpse as men bear it to the gaping pit into which whole cart-loads of bodies are thrown. The property, nay the liberty of a whole nation is not a price for his soul! How then can Christians with one hand give to the support of missions, and with the other uphold a custom which counteracts every good enterprise?

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

How strange, how awful, that to such a trade as war, mankind has, in all ages, lifted up its admiration! Poetry lends its fascinations, and philosophy its inventions. Eloquence, in forum and field, has wrought up the war spirit to fanaticism and frenzy. Even the pulpit, whose legitimate and glorious theme is "PEACE ON EARTH," has not withheld its solemn sanctions. The tender sex, with strange infatuation, have admired the tinselled trappings of him whose trade is to make widows and orphans. Their hands have been withdrawn from the distaff, to embroider warrior’s ensigns. T'he young mother has arrayed her proud boy with cap and feather, toyed him with drum and sword, and trained him, unconsciously, to love and admire the profession of a man-killer.

The universal maxim has been, "in peace prepare for war;" and men are all their days contributing and taxing themselves to defray the expenses of killing each other. Scarcely has a voice been lifted up to spread the principles of peace. Every other principle of Christianity has had its apostles. Howard reformed prisons; Sharp, and Clarkson, and Wilberforce arrested the s1ave-trade. Carey carried the gospel to India. Every form of vice has its antagonists, and every class of sufferers find philanthropists. But who stands forth to urge the law of love? Who attacks this monster WAR? We have not waited for the millennium to abolish intemperance, or Sabbath breaking; but we wait for it to abolish war. It is certain that the millennium cannot come, till war expires.

Shall it so remain? Shall this gorgon of pride, corruption, destructiveness, misery and murder, be still admired and fed, while it is turning men’s hearts to stone, and the garden of the Lord into the desolation of death? Let every heart say no. Let Christians shine before men as sons of peace, not less than as sons of justice and truth. If wars and rumors of wars continue, let the church stand aloof. It is time she was purged of this stain. Her brotherhood embraces all nations. Earth1y rulers may tell us we have enemies; but our heavenly King commands us to return them good for evil; if they hunger, to feed them; if they thirst, to give them drink.

Rise then, Christians, to noble resolution and vigorous endeavors! Retire from military trainings, and spurn the thought of being hired by the month to rob and kill. Refuse to study the tactics, or practice the handicraft of death; and with "a hope that maketh not ashamed," proclaim the principles of universal peace, as part and parcel of eternal truth.

A portion of our missionary spirit should be expended in this department. Shall we pour out our money and our prayers, when we hear of a widow burnt on her husband’s funeral pile, or deluded wretches crushed beneath the wheels of Juggernaut, but do nothing to dethrone this Moloch to whom hundreds of millions of Christians have been sacrificed? Among the fifty millions of the Presidency of Bengal, the average number of suttees (widows burned, &c.) has for twenty years been less than 500, or in the proportion of one death in a year for such a population as Philadelphia. What is this to war? Every day of some campaigns has cost more lives!

We must not abstain from effort, because of apparent obstacles. What great reform does not meet obstructions? The overthrow of Papal supremacy by Luther, the temperance movement, and a host of similar historic facts, show that truth is mighty, and when fairly and perseveringly exhibited, will prevail. It can be shown, that in attempting to abolish all war, we encounter fewer impediments than have attended various other great changes. Even if it were not so, we have a duty to discharge whether we prevail or not. Moral obligation does not rest on the chance of success.

Our obstacle are neither numerous nor formidable. No classes of men love war for its own sake. If it were abolished, those who now make it a profession, could all find profitable and pleasanter employment in peaceful pursuits. Men’s interests are not against us; but the contrary. The people are not blood-thirsty. What serious impediment is there to obstruct the diffusion of peace principles? None more than beset even the most popular enterprise of literature or benevolence. Our only obstruction is apathy, and the unfortunate sentiment that the millennium is to do it away, we know not how. But we might as well do nothing against intemperance, or Sabbath-breaking, or heresy; and wait for the millennium to do them away. Nothing will be done in this world without means, even when the millennium shall have come.

Do you ask what you can do? Much, very much, whoever you are. Cherish in yourself the true peace-spirit. Try to diffuse it. Assist in enlightening your neighbors. Talk of the horrors of war, its impolicy, its cost, its depravity, its utter uselessness in adjusting national disputes. Teach children correctly on this point, and show them the true character of war, stripped of its music and mock splendor. Banish drums and swords from among their toys. Proclaim aloud the Divine government, and teach men how vain it is, even in a righteous cause, to trust an arm of flesh. Insist that patriotism, in its common acceptation, is not a virtue; for it limits us to love our country, and allows us to hate and injure other nations. Thus if Canada were annexed to our Union, we must, on that account, love Canadians. But if South Carolina should secede, we must withdraw part of our love, or perhaps go to war and kill as many as possible. O how absurd to act thus, as though God’s immutable law of love was to be obeyed or not as our boundaries may be.

"Lands intersected by a narrow sea,

Abhor each other. Mountains interposed,

Make enemies of nations who had else,

Like kindred drops, been mingled into one."

Let us feel and disseminate the sentiment that true patriotism is shown only by the good. A man may claim to be a patriot, and love "his country," whose feelings are so vague and worthless that he loves no one in it! He loves a mere name! or rather, his patriotism is a mere name. Whole classes of his fellow-citizens may remain in vice, ignorance, slavery, poverty, and yet he feels no sympathy, offers no aid. Sodom would have been saved, had there been in it ten righteous. These then would have been patriots. These would have saved their country. We have in our land many righteous. These are our security. These save the land from a curse. These therefore are the only true patriots.

Let us unite in "showing up" military glory. What is it? Grant that it is all that it has ever passed for, and it still seems superlatively worthless. The wreaths of conquerors fade daily. We give their names to dogs and slaves. The smallest useful volume guides its author a better and more lasting name. And how absurd, too, is it to talk to common soldiers and under officers about military glory! Among the many millions who have toiled and died for love of glory, scarcely a score are remembered among men! Who of our revolutionary heroes but Washington and Lafayette are known in the opposite hemisphere? Who of our own citizens can tell over a half dozen distinguished soldiers in our struggle for independence? Yet that war is of late date. Of the men of former wars we know almost nothing. Essentially stupid then is the love of military renown in petty officers and the common private. They stake their lives in a lottery where there is hardly a prize in five hundred years!

Let us print and propagate peace principles. Public opinion has been changed on many points by a few resolute men. Let us keep the subject before the people till every man forms a deliberate opinion, whether Christianity allows or forbids war. Let us at least do so much that if ever our country engages in another war, we shall feel no share of the guilt. Let us each do so much that if we should ever walk over a battle-field, stunned with the groans and curses of the wounded, and horror-struck at the infernal spectacle, we can feel that we aid all we could to avert such an evil. Let us clear ourselves of blame. No one of us can put a stop to war. But we can help stop it – and combined and persevering effort will stop it.

LewRockwell articles by Laurence M. Vance

LewRockwell home page

The Family of God

2011-05-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

The Living Gospel

2011-05-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Maude Barlow: Nature Needs Rights

2011-05-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

We have built our economic and development policies based on a human-centric model and assumed that nature would never fail to provide or that technology would save us.

Nature Needs Rights -- Why Our Human-Centric Model Will Doom Us and the Rest of the Planet

by Maude Barlow article link

May 12, 2011 | Alternet | Council of Canadians

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from the recently released book, The Rights of Nature: The case for a Universal Declaration on the rights of Mother Earth, produced by the Council of Canadians, Global Exchange and Fundacion Pachamama. This book reveals the path of a movement driving transformation of our human relationship with nature away from domination and towards balance. This book gathers the wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, activists small farmers, spiritual leaders and US communities who seek a different path for protecting nature by establishing Nature's Rights in law and culture. In addition to this excerpt, the book includes essays from Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, Thomas Goldtooth, Eduardo Galeano, and many others. Copies of the book may be obtained through Global Exchange.

The world needs the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and all humans need to internalize its key principles if the planet, and we, are to survive.

While it is true that many people still live on the land in harmony with the natural cycles of Nature, it is also true that with every passing year, more and more people around the world are moving into the "modern" consumer economy, seeking out a living based on capital exchange and no longer living in sustainable communities and traditional societies. In 2008, the number of city dwellers equalled the number of rural dwellers for the first time in history. By 2030, says the United Nations (UN), more than half the population of the large urban centres in the Global South will be slum dwellers with no access to sanitation. There is a huge scramble by the private companies of the Global North to convert the lands they leave behind into free trade zones to serve a global economy based on the doctrine of economic globalization, unregulated markets, more and cheaper consumer goods and unlimited growth.

Unlimited growth assumes unlimited resources and this is the genesis of the crisis. From fish in the sea, and old growth forests and wetlands, to oil, clean air and water, we are plundering our planet's natural resources. Quite simply, to feed the increasing demands of our consumer-based capitalist system, humans have seen nature as a great resource for our personal convenience and profit, not as a living ecosystem from which all life springs. So we have built our economic and development policies based on a human-centric model and assumed either that nature would never fail to provide or that, where it does fail, technology will save the day.

Even when we recognize the effect of our behavior on the natural world, we pass inadequate laws based on curbing the worst practices, but leave intact the system of economic globalization at the heart of the problem, which gives transnational corporations almost unfettered and unregulated access to the genetic, mineral, timber and water resources of even the most remote parts of the Earth. Thomas Linzey, a U.S. lawyer working to develop the new legal framework to protect Nature, explains that the dominant form of environmental protection in industrialized countries is based on the regulatory system, legalizing the discharge of large amounts of toxic substances into the environment, and is not working. Under a new regime recognizing the Rights of Mother Earth, compensation would not be measured in terms of an injury to people, but according to damage to the ecosystem.

In the absence of such fundamental protections for Nature, political leaders and their big business advisors continue, for instance, to promote international trade and investment agreements that not only limit the ability of domestic governments to protect the natural world for fear such protection may be seen as a "trade barrier," but also award the trade in "green" technology that will be needed to clean up the ecosystems we refuse to protect. If the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth were firmly entrenched in international jurisprudence, nation-state constitutions, and the hearts and minds of decision-makers, trade agreements would be very different than they are today and would be built around the need for more local sustainable systems of food and industrial production, and the protection of natural ecosystems.

False solutions

Protecting the Rights of Mother Earth will also challenge the current trend to commodify Nature in the name of a green economy. While there are many definitions of what a green economy could look like that fit very well with an Earth-centred vision, many in power now use the term to essentially protect the current economic system that promotes more growth, production and global trade. There is no need to change our lifestyle or to curb global production and trade, goes the argument; we simply have to replace bad technology with good technology and we can keep our economic and development models intact.

Let's be clear: no amount of talk of green futures, green technology, green jobs and a green economy can undo the fact that most business and nation state leaders, as well as UN and World Bank officials, continue to promote growth as the only economic and development model for the world. Until the growth model is truly challenged, great damage to the Earth's ecosystems will continue. Further, much of their false green vision is based on a market model to save Nature and create new opportunities for growth and profit.

One example of this false vision includes emissions (or carbon) trading. Governments set a cap on greenhouse emissions (ratcheted down over time) and then give away or sell licences to pollute (carbon permits) to major industries that are supposed to add up to the cap. Firms are enabled to buy and sell the licences on the "carbon market," which sets the price for emissions - the carbon price.

Carbon trading, in effect, privatizes the atmosphere, suggesting that the Earth's capacity to regulate its climate can be understood as a measurable commodity that can be bought, sold and traded. It is predicated less on reducing emissions than on the desire to make carbon cuts as cheap as possible for large corporations. It maintains the essence of the current human-centred market model that has led us - and the planet - to the current crisis. Corporations and governments can buy their way out of needed structural changes to energy practice, production and consumption patterns allowing business-as-usual to reign. Success is narrowly measured simply in terms of cost effectiveness, ignoring issues of power, social justice, inequality and community control over local ecosystems.

In the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (the world's largest carbon trading scheme) corporate lobbying has seen the over- allocation of permits, free giveaways of permits, and rules which have allowed some of the worst polluters windfall profits while carbon prices fluctuate widely - all undermining needed emission reductions. In other words, carbon trading opens up needed climate action to market volatility, "gaming" and corporate influence. Carbon offsets have also seriously compromised the EU scheme's effectiveness.

Carbon offsets are another form of carbon trading and an example of using the market to do a job that should be legislated. Carbon offsets are a "created commodity" that let consumers (under the voluntary market), corporations and sometimes international financial institutions and governments (under cap and trade systems) to invest in emission savings projects outside of the capped area. It is trading perceived as "good behaviour" - such as investing in a tree plantation far away - on the open market in order to offset their right to continue to pollute. Offsets typically involve a shift from the global North to South where "reductions" are cheapest.

Carbon offsets are a multi-billion dollar poorly regulated industry that permit the growth in trade of all kinds and lulls the public into thinking something real has been done for the planet. The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a "flexible market mechanism" under the Kyoto Protocol, is the world's largest scheme. Since carbon offsets are created against a hypothetical business-as-usual scenario baseline, it is extremely difficult to ensure that the offset credits actually equate to carbon cuts. David Victor, the head of Stanford University's Energy and Sustainable Development Program, has found that "between a third and two-thirds of CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts." It is also extremely difficult to demonstrate that emission cuts are additional to what may have happened with offset credit financing. Worse still, there is clear evidence that certain projects applying for the CDM are causing serious social and environmental harm and human rights violations in the Global South. According to Michael Wara of Stanford University, the use of carbon offsets under the EU scheme meant that in 2008 European polluters will have emitted roughly one per cent more than they did in 1990.The now failed U.S. proposals for a cap and trade system would have seen up to two billion tons of offsets per year.

Another example is Payments for Ecological Services (PES), a growing movement endorsed by several major environmental groups, many governments and the private sector, that promotes conservation of natural resources through market mechanisms. "Ecological Services," such as water purification, crop pollination and carbon sequestration, are seen to have a direct dollar benefit to humans; therefore, it is reasoned, it is important to try to put an actual price tag on them. The UN Environment Program has recently done just that, and estimates that ecosystems and the biodiversity that underpins them generate services worth as much as $72 trillion a year - well over the World Gross National Income in 2008 of $58 trillion. The harvest and trade in these "natural capital" services is seen as an integral part of the global economy and so this approach seeks to pull the actual protection of nature into the market economy.

Some PES proponents cite examples that would be well suited to an Earth-centred model. For instance, the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program has for years paid participating farmers to protect their soil and water rather than use harmful chemical pesticides to grow more cash crops. This is not a pure market model, however; rather it is an example of public funds being used to promote diversity and conservation.

But others have a profit model in mind. A market model of PES is an agreement between the "holder" and the "consumer" of an ecosystem service, turning that service into an environmental property right. The consumer pays the holder or owner for protecting the biological diversity of an ecosystem property in accordance with an agreed upon price. Clearly this system privatizes Nature, be it a wetland, lake, forest or mountain, and sets the stage for private accumulation of Nature by those wealthy enough to be able to buy, hoard, sell and trade it. Already, governments and private corporations are studying Public-Private Partnerships to set up lucrative PES projects.

Similarly, there is a strong trend to turn the world's freshwater supplies into a private commodity in the name of conserving it. By turning water into a tradable market good, the case goes, the natural price of it will skyrocket, leading to its conservation. However, the model being promoted is not charging more properly for the true cost of bringing water services to the public or protecting source water, but for the private accumulation of water assets and the hoarding and trading of water. Water trading is growing around the world. Australia converted its water permits to water property rights, with the result that the government now cannot afford to buy back enough water to save the Murray-Darling water basin. Chile actually holds public water auctions and has sold most of its water rights in the South to a private Spanish company.

As well, in the name of a "blue economy," a number of governments and corporations are using their water resources to promote a water-based high tech industry as an incentive to foreign investment and wealth creation. While there is of course a place for water clean-up technology, it will be a tragedy if governments continue to allow the destruction of source water while promoting profit-making water reuse technologies. Already, utility corporations control drinking water services in many poor communities. Billions in the Global South do not have access to clean water simply because they cannot afford it, and many suffer further from water shortages when bottled water companies get long term extraction rights to local water supplies. When private interests control water sources, public oversight is lost as is the ability to manage and protect watersheds. Privatizing water puts watershed health at risk. Commodifying water renders an Earth-centred vision for watersheds and ecosystems unattainable.

An Earth-centred approach

The alternate, Earth-centred model promoted in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, would protect biological diversity as a global Commons and a strictly managed and more equitably shared public trust. The Commons approach is very old and based on the notion that common heritages, such as the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, cannot "belong" to anyone. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community.

At the same time, it is not a return to the notion that Nature's capacity to sustain our ways is unlimited and anyone can use whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the world's biological heritage as well as in the knowledge that our ecosystems must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time. A central characteristic of a true Commons is its careful collaborative management by those who use it and allocation of access based on a set of priorities set by the community.

The Earth-centred model also goes beyond Commons law, which is usually interpreted to mean protecting the right of access by the public to certain natural Commons, such as parks and waterfronts, not the Commons itself. The quest is a body of law that recognizes the inherent rights of the environment, other species and water itself outside of their usefulness to humans. Already, some jurisdictions are beginning to enact laws to protect Earth democracy.

The Rights of Nature was the inspiration behind a 2006 ordinance in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania that recognized natural ecosystems and natural communities within the borough as "legal persons" for the purposes of stopping the dumping of sewage sludge on wild land. Earth rights have been used throughout New England in a series of local ordinances to prevent bottled water companies from setting up shop in the area. Residents of Mount Shasta, California successfully campaigned to have an ordinance on a November 2010 election ballot to prevent cloud seeding and bulk water extraction within city limits. Undemocratically, the ballot question was pulled, though it has not deterred the community and their efforts continue for the 2011 election.

In 2006, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that protection of natural lakes and ponds is akin to honouring the right to life - the most fundamental right of all according to the Court. In 2008, Ecuador's citizens voted two-thirds in support of a new constitution that says, "Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments, communities, and individuals to enforce those rights."

Bolivia has recently amended its constitution to enshrine the philosophy of "living well" as a means of expressing concern with the current model of development and signifying affinity with nature and the need for humans to recognize inherent rights of the Earth and other living beings. The government of Argentina recently moved to protect its glaciers by banning mining and oil drilling in ice zones. The law sets standards for protecting glaciers and surrounding ecosystems and creates penalties for harming the country's fresh water heritage.

Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now as we begin to understand the urgent need to protect the Earth and its ecosystems from which all life comes. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth is a crucial link in this process and will one day stand as the companion to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as one of the guiding covenants of our time.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Chair of the board of Food and Water Watch, as well as an international best-selling author. She has received ten honorary doctorates as well as many awards; including the 2005 Right Liveliehood Award. She served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly.

AlterNet articles by Maude Barlow

AlterNet home page

Robert S. Becker: Rightwing Ten Commandments To Serve Looming Theocracy

2011-05-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

Moses Kaput -- Rightwing Ten Commandments To Serve Looming Theocracy

by Robert S. Becker article link

May 18, 2011 | OpEdNews

Have you read all original "Ten" Commandments lately? Check out Wikipedia for true revelation, namely notions that didn't make it. Why do religious extremists want to post outmoded Mosaic Law on every courthouse and abortion clinic? As law now embodies what matters -- nix on murder, theft, and bearing false witness (perjury), Moses' defunct inscriptions barely suit fringe manias any better than what remains of our secular culture.

What sort of "commandment" is "I am the Lord thy God"? Can belief be commanded? How relevant are defanged prohibitions against taking the Lord's name in vain? Or worshipping idols (American or otherwise), forgetting the Sabbath, or coveting "your neighbor's ox, donkey, male or female slave." That last one works for me. Doesn't honoring parental units (what, for procreating?) go along with positive parenting?

Why not throw in punishing abortion with hanging? Or gay marriage with stoning? More noteworthy by omission are compelling Judaic-Christian wisdom: Jesus' "Love thy enemy," or "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Those compassionate values puncture the heart-deficient evangelicals who mouth distinctively unfeeling, unchristian meanness -- withhold charity, punish the sick, leave hungry outcasts to starve.

Commandments for a Theocratic Age

Time for philosopher-kings to "modernize" the Good Book, especially before wingnuts take over, plastering bad dogma over every door. My task today, however, isn't religious but political -- to detail working fringe dictums that drive extremism today -- presaging a theocratic, fundamentalist government.

1) Thou shalt exalt the Christian God above all pretend deities, for Jesus sacrificed to start the conveyer belt for faithful souls.

My Commentary: Doubters and dissenters of the True Faith, even nice pagans, won't make the chosen cut; as per W., "if you're not with us, you're against us," and presumably in league with the devil. The Rapture rap specifies the next cosmic war depends on Jews (what, again!) driving out infidels from the Holy Land. And non-converters will be crushed by all-powerful Rapture, certainly playing favorites. Think of the cable news coverage.

2) Thou shalt honor the True Faith -- fundamentalist, charismatic, Reconstuctionist Protestantism -- perfectly articulated, praise the Lord, in American English 2000 years A.D.

Commentary: Mystery upon mystery for obsessed fundamentalism has an infinitude of faces and nomenclature: Dominionism, Dominion Theology, conservative Pentecostal (assorted), Charismatic-Foursquare Gospel, Neo-Calvinism, Christian Reconstruction, Christian Patriotism, Theocratic Dominionism, Kingdom Now theology, Christian Nationalism and Theonomy (install Old Testament rules), among others. Through a glass darkly, for sure.

3) Thou shalt exalt like-minded evangelicals as superior, chosen beings. For the elect know original sin and their own -- rewarded with both eternal life in heaven and divine authority to impose their belief system on earth.

Commentary: Circular logic is key to literalist faith -- the missionary exalts depravity in order to transcend it, thus born-again to salvation. Certainly, no doubt about their personal election proves them and their creed universally correct. Not only are the self-anointed saved superior to the unsaved, hence God's favorites, doubters must serve the thrall of the netherworld. White, after all, is obviously not black, thus circular logic rules our most unified voting block.

4) Thou shall exalt America as the most exceptional nation on earth, especially after Christian Europeans took their destined place. Thus, God put Anglos in charge, just like He placed man above plants, animals, and underground oil reserves.

Commentary: Perhaps all races are equal, in theory, but damned if some aren't more equal than others. Doesn't history testify to white ascendancy, especially over the important countries with the most valued resources? Proof's in the pudding -- all those white, rural, small-down, socially conservative enclaves full of Sunday churchgoers. Look, if non-believers could understand the mystery of why elites are perpetually blessed, what would set apart the faithful? Or their denominations' fundraising?

5) Thou shalt exalt free market capitalism, and let no socialist assert anything incompatible between the purity of Christianity and scope of corporate triumphalism.

Commentary: Two sides, same coin, self-evident truth. Rightwing scholars brag how Christianity answers precisely to immutable economics of Milton Friedman (what, another Jewish prophet?). Which says a great deal methinks about both paradigms. The Bible stands foursquare alongside powerful CEOs, endorsing profitability and private property, deregulation and low taxes, trickle down economics, and domination of the earth by Christians. Q.E.D.

6) Thou shalt exalt the most moralistic, impassioned televangelists, for they are the true messengers of God. Ye shall know them by the self-declared intensity of their faith -- for faith alone underscores blessedness.

Commentary: Messengers of the Lord receive direct communication from on high, thus confidently preaching God's will. True ministers don't need Vatican-like hierarchies or respect for history to tell them what goodness is, only a secret chat with the Lord. Of course, one needs ways to tell true from false preachers, the latter revealed as sexual deviants sent by God to test the faithful. Beware all philanderers who covet their neighbor's ass.

7) Thou shalt revere the Holy Bible as literally true and incapable of error -- more infallible than any pope on matters of faith and doctrine.

Commentary: Truly, the task of the true pilgrim is formidable: to unearth the one right path whose denomination understands the Bible in its holiest form. While new prophets pop up every new moon, at least evangelicals no longer have to depend on idolatrous papists from zealots called "the whore of Rome." Still to be resolved, however, is one small linguistic issue -- how perfect, incorruptible Biblical literalism survives, translated from desert scrawls and Egyptian tongues to Aramaic, then Greek, Latin, and Arabic, before culminating in modern English, itself evolving for centuries? So many mysteries, so little time.

8) Thou shalt never abort babies, but attacks on abortion clinics and doctors answer to God's plan. Because the end (life) justifies the means, doing away with baby killers is excluded from the prohibition against murder.

Commentary: Unborn babies are so holy that capital punishment suits adults only, especially Islamic terrorists, serial murderers, government whistleblowers, or those practicing unclean sex. As marriage is made in heaven, offspring of one man and one woman serve the big divine plan -- more true believers. Indeed, not reproducing undermines the order to "be fruitful and multiply" (but not "gay fruity").

9) Thou shalt spend six days taming the beast of government, then one day making up for not serving the poor, sick and needy.

Commentary: Thou shall never apologize or admit error -- except when betraying Saint Ronald Reagan. Thou shall not question ideological leaders, especially from the holier-than-thou Republican Party. Thou shall deny global warming, and human impact, and any Democrat named Al Gore. Thou shall willingly pay tithes for Pentagon militarism, anti-terrorism, police, and border guards. Thou shall salute the Flag and anthem, but never Planned Parenthood, Darwin, or any sneaky president with two (count 'em) birth certificates.

10) Thou shalt honor the total freedom of Biblical morality, especially on states rights, marriage and the dominance of the male. As the Father governs Heaven, let men head the household, control budgets and politics, rule over inferior females and children underfoot.

Commentary: Parental, Old-Time religion hasn't survived for nothing. By fiat, states rights belongs to each decentralized tribe so local majorities shall nullify any federal stature, secede and/or rejoin at will. Isn't freedom about competing forces and healthy dynamism? As our Founders prove, indisputably, our enduring national triumphalism depends on fundamentalist Christian values and leaders.

Conclusion: This is no idle task, just for entertainment. Formalizing suitable modern commandments best assures God stays on our side, not just with happy thoughts and good intentions but infinite power. Do not fearsome enemies rear at every turn? Halleluiah, praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition -- what better ally against Iran, China, Pakistan and North Korea, none of which happen to be Christian? Now that's Very interesting.

Robert S. Becker: Educated at Rutgers College (BA) and UC Berkeley (Ph.D, English) Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, U. Chicago) for business, founding and heading SOTA Industries, high end audio company from '80 to '92. From '92-02 he did marketing consulting & writing; since 2002, he scribbles on politics and culture, looking for the wit in the shadows.

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We Are Saved and Healed By Our Application of God

2011-05-17T12:03:00.000-07:00