Subject: Re: [AthofSV] Re: Argus Newspaper LTE 3/7/05

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:22:51 EST

Posting this essay for those who have not have read it. -Linda P.

Excerpt:  "It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are 
addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us together, oh, 
lord, in our common humanity. Well, we have heard these  exhortations for a 
couple of hundred years, and we are further apart now than ever. So instead of 
coming together in order that the many might be one, I say let us separate so 
that each will know where he stands. From the one many, and each of us free of 
the sky-god, as secular law-giver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation."

Gore Vidal - On Monotheism

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is 
monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old 
Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved--Judaism, 
Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, 
literally, patriarchal--God is the Omnipotent Father--hence the 
loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the 
sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, 
of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he 
is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who 
would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. 
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can 
truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature 
endangers his authority and those of his delegates on earth. One God, 
one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in 
the family at home. 

The founders of the United States were not enthusiasts of the sky-
god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether and placed man at 
the center of the world. The young Lincoln wrote a pamphlet against 
Christianity, which friends persuaded him to burn. Needless to say, 
word got around about both Jefferson and Lincoln, and each had to 
cover his tracks. Jefferson said that he was a deist, which could 
mean anything or nothing, while Lincoln, hand on heart and tongue in 
cheek, said he could not support for office anyone who "scoffed" at 
religion. 

>From the beginning, sky-godders have always exerted great pressure in 
our secular public. Also, evangelical Christian groups have always 
drawn strength from those who have been suppressed economically. 
African slaves were allowed to organize sky-god churches, as a 
surrogate for earthly freedom. White churches were organized in order 
to make certain that the rights of property were respected and that 
the numerous religious taboos in the New and Old Testaments would be 
enforced, if necessary, by civil law. The ideal to which John Adams 
subscribed--that we would be a nation of laws, not of men--was 
quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through 
those supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on 
sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly 
bad and certainly anti-human. 

Roman Catholic migrations in the last century further re-enforced the 
Puritan sky-god. The Church has also put itself on a collision course 
with the Bill of Rights when it asserts, as it always has, 
that "error has no rights." The last correspondence between John 
Adams and Thomas Jefferson expressed their alarm that the Jesuits 
were to be allowed into the United States. Although the Jews were sky-
god folks, they followed Book One, not Book Two, so they have no 
mission to convert others; rather the reverse. Also, as they have 
been systematically demonized by the Christian sky-godders, they 
tended to be liberal and so turned not to their temple but to the 
ACLU. Unfortunately, the recent discovery that the sky-god, in his 
capacity as realtor, had given them, in perpetuity, some parcels of 
unattractive land called Judea and Sumeria has, to my mind, unhinged 
many of them. I hope this is temporary. 

In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the founders made it 
clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national 
religion like that of England from whom we had just separated. It is 
curious how little understood this amendment is--yes, everyone has a 
right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to 
impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his 
superstitions and taboos. This separation is absolute in our original 
republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s 
they actually got the phrase "In God We Trust" onto the currency, in 
direct violation of the First Amendment. Although many of the 
Christian evangelists feel it necessary to convert everyone on earth 
to their primitive religion, they have been prevented--so far--from 
enforcing others to worship as they do but they have forced--most 
tyrannically and wickedly--their superstitions and hatreds upon all 
of us, through the civil law and through general prohibitions. So it 
is upon that account that I now favor an all-out war on the 
monotheists. 

Let us dwell upon the evils that they have wrought. The hatred of the 
blacks comes straight from their Bad Book. As descendants of Ham, 
blacks are forever accursed while St. Paul tells the slaves to obey 
their masters. Racism is in the marrow of the bone of the true 
believer. For him, black is forever inferior to white and deserves 
whatever ill-fortune may come his way. The fact that some monotheists 
can behave charitably means, often, that their prejudice is at so 
deep a level that they are not aware that it is there at all. In the 
end, this makes any radical change of attitude impossible. Meanwhile, 
welfare has been the price the sky-godders were willing to pay to 
exclude blacks from their earthly political system. So we must live--
presumably forever--with a highly enervating race war set in train by 
the one God and his many hatreds. 

Patriarchal rage at the thought of Woman ever usurping Man's place at 
the helm, in either home or workplace, is almost as strong now as it 
ever was. According to the polls, most American women took the side 
of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill. But then the sky-god's 
fulminations against women are still very much part of the psyche of 
those in thrall to the Jealous God. 

The ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sex sexuality has made the 
United States the laughingstock of the civilized world. In most of 
the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, 
private sexual behavior has nothing at all to do with anyone else, 
much less with the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-
god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good 
practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, 
that buggery is a principal cause of earthquake and so must be 
prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote 
Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about 
anything, except perhaps the inadvisability of eating shellfish in 
the Jerusalem area. 

We are now slowly becoming alarmed at the state of the planet. For a 
century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions 
and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. The lower 
atmosphere is filled with dust, we have just been told from space. 
The climate changes; earth and water are poisoned. Sensible people 
grow alarmed but sky-godders are serene, even smug. The planet is 
just a staging area for Heaven. Why bother to clean it up? 
Unfortunately for everyone, Mr. Bush's only hope of winning in the 
coming election is to appeal to the superstitious. So he refuses to 
commit our government to the great clean-up partly because it affects 
the incomes of the 100 corporate men and women who pay for him and 
largely because of the sky-god who told his slaves "to be fruitful 
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have 
dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Well, 

we did just like you told us, massa. We've used everything up. We're 
ready for heaven now. Or maybe Mars will do. 

Ordinarily, as a descendant of that eighteenth-century enlightenment 
which shaped our republic, I would say live and let live, and I would 
try not to "scoff"--to use Lincoln's verb--at the monotheists. But I 
am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. 
They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private 
citizens. We are forbidden abortion here, gambling there, same-sex 
almost everywhere, drugs everywhere, alcohol in a dry county. Our 
prisons are the most terrible in the First World and the most 
crowded. Our Death Row executions are a source of deep disgust in 
civilized countries where more and more we are regarded as a 
primitive, uneducated, and dangerous people. Although we are not 
allowed, under law, to kill ourselves or to take drugs that the good 
folk think might be bad for us, we are allowed to buy a handgun and 
shoot as many people as we can get away with. 

Now, as poor Arthur--"there is this pendulum"--Schlesinger, Jr. would 
say, these things come in cycles. Every 20 years liberal gives way to 
conservative, and back again. But I suggest that what is wrong now is 
not cyclic but systemic. And our system, like any system, is obeying 
the second law of thermodynamics: Everything is running down; and we 
are well advanced along the yellow brick road to entropy. I don't 
think that much of anything can be done to halt this progress under 
our present political-economic system. We lost poor Arthur's pendulum 
in 1950 when our original constitution was secretly replaced with the 
apparatus of the national security state that still wastes most of 
our tax money on war or war-related matters. Hence, deteriorating 
schools, and so on. For some years, I have proposed that we hold a 
constitutional convention on the ground that it would be better to 
get the whole business out in the open for discussion. Unfortunately, 
every one of us has been conditioned by school and pulpit and media 
to believe that the original constitution is perfect even though it 
no longer functions except as a sort of totem like the flag. Congress 
no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the 
constitution as a working machine. The thoughtful are also afraid 
that if the religious folk could review and revise the constitution, 
all our liberties would go. Certainly, they will try. But I don't 
think they'll win. Madison's iron law of oligarchy is too strong. The 
Few, presumably enlightened about their rights, will guide the Many, 
as usual. In any case, it is better to lose our rights dramatically 
at a convention--thus provoking civil war--than to lose them 
gradually and furtively, as we are now losing them. 

Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class 
system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through 
Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us 
that we are a classless society where anyone can make it. Ninety 
percent of our newspaper stories are about winners of lotteries or 
poor boys and girls who, despite adenoidal complaints, become 
overnight millionaire singers. So there is still hope, the press 
tells the folks, for the 99% who will never achieve wealth no matter 
how hard they work. We are also warned at birth that it is not polite 
to hurt other people's feelings by criticizing their religion even 
though that religion may be damaging everyone through the 
infiltration of our common laws. Happily, the Few can not disguise 
the bad times through which we are all going. Word is spreading that 
America is now falling behind in the civilization sweepstakes. So 
isn't it time to discuss what we really think and feel about our 
social and economic arrangements? 

The authors of a recent book, The Day Americans Told the Truth, gave 
it a try. Unfortunately, they revealed that 92% of those polled 
confessed to being habitual liars. This is a bit like the oldest 
recorded joke: a citizen on the island of Crete said, "All Cretans 
are liars." Proposition: is what he said true or false? So the book's 
information on attitudes may not be useful. But the pollsters should 
have examined the reason why people are so frightened that they must 
habitually lie about their true feelings and thoughts. Tocqueville 
suspected that the instinctive tyranny of the American majority would 
produce a terrified conformity. He seems to have been right. 
Certainly, nothing of any importance may be discussed in our 
political life. 

Even today, with two anti-establishment candidates in the field, only 
Brown has begun to examine the amount of money that the national 
security state siphons out of the economy to pay for Pentagon, CIA, 
SDI--as well as the potential cost of the latest scenarios of 
possible upcoming wars in the future. Though the specifics of these 
wars are absurd, the implications are grim: because the Ownership 
will make those wars happen, as they always do, whether comically in 
Grenada or tragically in Vietnam. War is all that they know and all 
that they care about, because through the demonizing of this or that 
enemy they can keep the money flowing to them--while depriving the 
people at large of all those things that other First World people 
possess--from schools to health care. Now the war budget is the only 
subject for a political campaign at the end of what has not turned 
out to be the American century after all. In fact, the year 2000 will 
not only mark the end of American primacy but the end of the hegemony 
of the white race. We shall comprise about 16% of the world's 
population in eight years. Let us hope that the other tribes, 
particularly those of Asia, in their triumph, do not treat us as 
badly as we have treated them. 

Although we may not discuss race other than to say that Jesus wants 
each and every one of us for a sunbeam, history is nothing more than 
the bloody record of the migration of tribes. When the white race 
broke out of Europe 500 years ago, it did many astounding things all 
over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to 
pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to 
everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions. Now 
the tribes are on the move again. Professor Pendulum is having a 
nervous breakdown because so many different tribes are arriving to 
live here and so far not one has had time to read The Age of Jackson. 
I think the taking in of everybody can probably be overdone. There 
may not be enough jobs for too many more immigrants though what 
prosperity we have ever enjoyed in the past was usually based on 
slave or near-slave labor--new arrivals who would work in the 
sweatshops much as they do today in every restaurant kitchen. No 
wonder the Ownership has always denied us a strong labor movement and 
that the 14% of the work force that is organized is constantly 
demonized as tools of the Soviet Union of yesteryear or of the Mafia 
today. 

On the other hand, I think Asiatics and Hispanics are a plus 
culturally, and their presence tends to refocus, somewhat, the 
relentless white versus black war. Where I am as one with my friend 
Pendulum is that the newcomers must grasp certain principles as 
expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. 
Otherwise, we shall become a racially divided state like the old 
South Africa, while enjoying, of course, the new Brazilian economy. 
For 30 years I have drawn attention to the fact that we do not have 
political parties in the United States. This always caused distress 
among the media who are in place to make us think that we have a 
choice every four years to elect a president who will represent the 
people at large. Instead, we get someone like Bush whose only 
program, other than war, is cutting the capital gains tax, the price 
demanded of him by his 100 angels and their friends. I am happy that, 
finally, my views have begun to seep into the public debate. Even the 
dullest newspaper reporter now agrees that there isn't a lot of 
difference between Democrats and Republicans. Also my idea of 
limiting election campaigns to six weeks has been noted favorably, 
while there was actually a discussion on the admirable Crier's 
program that if networks and cable and radio were to give free time 
for the candidates they would not need to raise so much crooked 
money. Sad to say, my noblest cause--the taxation of all religions--
has not surfaced this year, while the legalization of drugs is a non-
subject since drugs have replaced communism on the Pentagon hit list. 
But to revert again to the unmentionable, religion. It should be 
noted that religion seemed to be losing its hold in the United States 
in the second quarter of this century. From the Scopes Trial in '25 
to the Repeal of Prohibition in '33, the sky-godders were confined 
pretty much to the backwoods. Then television was invented, and the 
electronic pulpit was soon occupied by a horde of Elmer Gantrys who 
took advantage of the tax exemption for religion. Thus, out of greed, 
a religious revival has been set in motion, and the results are 
predictably poisonous to the body politic. 

It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are 
addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us 
together, oh, lord, in our common humanity. Well, we have heard these 
exhortations for a couple of hundred years, and we are further apart 
now than ever. So instead of coming together in order that the many 
might be one, I say let us separate so that each will know where he 
stands. From the one many, and each of us free of the sky-god, as 
secular law-giver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation. 

New York Review of Books, 1998

---

From: "lydia rice" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 20:01:52 -0800

Good old Barbara Ehrenreich...

http://www.progressive.org/march05/ehren0305.php

______________________________________________

God Owes Us an Apology

The tsunami of sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of spittle as 
the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest felony. Here we'd been 
placidly killing each other a few dozen at a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, 
Israel, and Palestine, when along comes the deity and whacks a quarter 
million in a couple of hours between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox 
News, and in newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and 
women of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives, and 
even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything.

Theodicy, in other words--the attempt to reconcile God's perfect goodness 
with the manifest evils of His world--has arisen from the waves. On the 
retro, fundamentalist, side, various men of the cloth announced that the 
tsunami was the rational act of a deity enraged by (take your pick): the 
suppression of Christianity in South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking 
in that same locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the 
bikini-clad tourists at Phuket.

On the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's spokespeople 
hastened to stuff their fingers in the dike even as the floodwaters of doubt 
washed over it. Of course, God exists, seems to be the general consensus. 
And, of course, He is perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction 
doesn't ex
tend to tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional 
grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to clean up the 
damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to remind us, "He's a 
'mystery' "--though that's never stopped them from pronouncing His views on 
abortion with absolute certainty.

The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must not have 
noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's penchant for wanton, 
homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made genocide, war, and even those 
"natural" disasters, like drought and famine, to which "man" invariably 
contributes through his inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account 
for in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has 
He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit 
Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in 
church. The faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, 
which was built on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last 
fall's hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida 
while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach.

The Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to 
post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies from 
their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us 
that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic 
plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach? So much, too, 
for the current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the 
Internet, micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and 
taking excess pounds off the faithful--this last being Pat Robertson's 
latest fixation.

If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God 
should be, too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal 
of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral 
deity--at least until an apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so 
busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying 
attention to the Earth's crust."

It's not just Christianity. Any religion centered on a God who is both 
all-powerful and all-good, including Islam and the more monotheistically 
inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami 
evaluation. As many have noted before me: If God cares about our puny 
species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is 
all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn.

In fact, the best way for the religious to fend off the atheist threat might 
be to revive the old bad--or at least amoral and indifferent--gods. The 
tortured notion of a God who is both good and powerful is fairly recent, 
dating to roughly 1200 BC, after which Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and 
Islam emerged. Before that, you had the feckless Greco-Roman pantheon, whose 
members interfered in human events only when their considerable egos were at 
stake. Or you had monstrous, human-sacrifice-consuming, psycho-gods like 
Ba'al and his Central American counterparts. Even earlier, as I pointed out 
in my book Blood Rites, there were prehistoric god(desses) modeled on 
man-eating animals like lions, and requiring a steady diet of human or 
animal sacrificial flesh.

The faithful will protest that they don't want to worship a bad--or amoral 
or indifferent--God, but obviously they already do. Why not acknowledge what 
our prehistoric ancestors knew? If the Big Guy or Gal operates in any kind 
of moral framework, it has nothing to do with the rules we've come up with 
over the eons as primates attempting to live in groups-- rules like, for 
example, "no hitting."

Yes, 12/26 was a warning, though not about the hazards of wearing bikinis. 
What it comes down to is that we're up shit creek here on the planet Earth. 
We're wide open to asteroid hits, with the latest near-miss coming in 
October, when a city-sized one passed within a mere million miles of Earth, 
which is just four times the distance between the Earth and the moon. Then, 
too, it's only a matter of time before the constant shuffling of viral DNA 
results in a global pandemic. And 12/26 was a reminder that the planet 
itself is a jerry-rigged affair, likely to keep belching and lurching. Even 
leaving out global warming and the possibility of nuclear war, this is not a 
good situation, in case you hadn't noticed so far.

If there is a God, and He, She, or It had a message for us on 12/26, that 
message is: Get your act together, folks--your seismic detection systems, 
your first responders and global mobilization capacity--because no one, and 
I do mean no One, is coming to medi-vac us out of here.

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Wed. 3/9, 7:30 - What Really Happened on Nov 22, 1963?
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