In a recent post last week, I started a line of thought about beliefs and political ideals, noting that I have long believed God planned humanity to have a diversity of views. I didn’t think I would ever finish it, thinking nobody would care, but the topic seems to have stimulated discussion, so I’ll plug along.

I’m having second thoughts about my beliefs based on the idea that there might not be any grand theme in the Bible, and if there is, it is wrong. Not just that the Bible is not inspired in the infallible sense that fundamentalists use it to justify clinging to ancient superstitions, or that there is some great mysterious truth behind the myths, as liberals like to say — just that it is a book created by well-meaning people trying to understand a confusing world.

I don’t want to bog down a blog billed as “cool” with theology, but it is clear reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that a main theme is that God favored the Israelite people and planned to install them — led by a prophet with the office of Messiah (Christ) — as rulers of the earth. I imagine that thought would have comforted a people used to being attacked and forced into subservience by powerful empires.

Christianity teaches that the entire Bible was inspired, but it also teaches that the Jews were wrong because A) the Messiah is God and not a human and B) the real Kingdom is in “heaven” and not a political kingdom on earth. The problem is that the evidence inidicates that Jesus and his disciples clearly believed the Jewish ideas. Christian beliefs to the contrary can only be found by picking out odd verses from different books.

Taking the New Testament books as a whole, it is clear that Jesus and his disciples believed that they were going to be involved in the glorious return of God in their lifetime. In the beginning of the book of Acts, the resurrected Jesus teaches for 40 days about the coming kingdom, and the disciples only recorded question is “when?”

Peter said in his first book “the end is near” and Paul gave people practical tips for an ancient version of Y2K. In the books they wrote just before they died, they changed their tune. For example, in his second book, Peter said to ignore those who scoffed at the idea of the end of the world, even though such talk had been wrong. His famous explanation was that “a day with the Lord is like a thousand years,” evidence that spin is not a modern invention!

So does the Bible have any meaning today in political discourse? For all their faults, I believe fundamentalists do have a point — if the Bible is not inspired, it is just another book produced by a bunch of Middle Easterners who reflected the culture of a primitive time. I can’t agree with their ability to explain away — or ignore — the mixture of slavery, polygamy, blood sacrifice, genocide, the death penalty for a wide variety of offenses such as homosexuality, oddball dietary laws and worship rituals. However, the fundamentalist view makes just as much sense as that of liberal Christians, who speak of a mystic truth behind what they see as well-written fables, but fables nonetheless.

This post is philosophical and not political — that’s a topic for another day. Obviously, the history I provide here is very sketchy and my conclusion is thinking out loud. But maybe our task is to try and do justice and what is right for people and this planet without having to justify its adherence to the Bible.

There is no better illustration of how screwed up this country is than the fact that a lascivious, hard-partying shrew with no discernable religious beliefs gets to write a book calling other people Godless.

No scratch that, the best illustration is that the book becomes a best-seller.

I like what Greg Palast, investigative journalist and author of a new book called Armed Madhouse, etc., had to say about Anne Coulter’s loopy theological treatise:

“You want to talk about Godless? OK, let’s go:
Would the Lord lie us into a war?
Would the Lord let thousands drown in New Orleans while chilling at a golf resort?
Would the Lord have removed tens of thousands of Black soldiers from the voter rolls as the Republican Party did in 2004?
You talk about being “Christian” — but with all your zeal to fire up electric chairs and Abrams tanks, you sound more like a Roman.”

That’s a great point — one of the striking things that demonstrate how phony the Christian coalition types are is their lack of personal integrity. By this, I don’t mean that their political aims are unbiblical. Although I do think that, people can debate the meaning of Scripture.

No I mean just how generally crooked, mean and dishonest they are. For example, Tom DeLay spouting faith talk while laundering tax-free contributions to himself and his family. And Ralph Reed, feeling no guilt or shame about stealing from poor Native Americans to enrich himself and his Abramoff-fed cronies. Or James Dobson insinuating that Michael Schiavo murdered his wife. Or George Bush lying about — well, just about everything.

I could go on at length, but it’s easy to see the point. As said by no less of an authority than Jesus the Christ, those who puff out their chests and boast about their spirituality are likely the ones who are truly godless.

Charles Pierce is so good that I would feel remiss in adding my own commentary to his smackdown of National Review’s pathetic attempt to find 50 conservative rock songs. The first sentence says it all: “Oh, Lord, sometimes, you make the fish so big and the barrel so small.”

So just go read it at The American Prospect site.

I have no problems with being both religious and political, but the “Christian left” as a movement is pretty much doomed.
Now that’s not to say that some individual liberal Christians will not become more active politically, and maybe help remove some of the odious Republicans from office. But there will never be a Christian left the way there is a Christian right.
There are many reasons why, but one fundamental one stands out: Liberal Christians just aren’t willing to do — maybe they don’t have — what it takes to be successful in the political context.
What do I mean by that? Bottom line is that there is only one way to affect policy in American politics, and that is to elect candidates who will go to the wall for your proposals. Liberal Christians want to focus on the policy part without getting involved in the election part. As a result, their influence in the aggregate is practically nil.
If there is such a thing as a card-carrying member of the Christian left, that would be me. Raised in a Christian home, educated at Christian colleges, I came to the conclusion at a young age that Jesus would have fit in more on the “liberal” side of the fence if he were alive today. If you translate the Bible’s message to policy, it would side more with food stamps than stamping out gays.
For years I read Sojourners, the first and maybe still most influential Christian left publication run by the Rev. Jim Wallis, who is the poster boy for the movement. But Wallis is so dead set against being perceived as partisan, his writings became almost comically evenhanded. I found myself continually frustrated and angry by his “on-the-other-handism.” Even on issues where the magazine clearly sided with Democrats, he couldn’t come right out and defend the Democratic position. A negative comment about the Republican’s voting for something like funding “Star Wars” had to be followed by a swat at the minority Democrats — who voted the way Wallis wanted — for some trivial slight.
During the 2000 election, when it was clear that Al Gore represented a far more worthy clear choice when it came to the issues that concerned liberal Christians, Wallis was ridiculously evenhanded, obsessing over George W. Bush’s patently phony compassionate conservative rhetoric and faith-based pandering. On core Sojourners issues like racial and gender equality, war and peace and justice for the poor, Al Gore was a screaming better choice. Wallis, however, focused on the splinter issues without noticing the beams getting rammed into his eye.
The point is that getting things done in politics is a fairly dirty business. You win, you get the spoils. With their “God is Neither a Republican nor a Democrat” mantra, Wallis and his ilk remain smartly above the fray but also unable to produce any results. Christian liberals can have the warm fuzzy knowledge that they are technically right about Yahweh’s political affiliations. Meanwhile, the poor are getting poorer, bigots are running the roost and World War III is on the horizon.
No matter how much I despise Jim Dobson and the evil snakes of the Religious Right, I have to admit they know how the system works. They have created influence by getting people elected — they bang their shoe on the table and the Republican establishment quakes.
Now I don’t think that it is the proper thing for Christian liberals to become Democrats in the way evangelical churches have become outposts of the GOP. That is a debasement of religion. And I don’t have all the answers to what is no doubt a thorny and age-old problem.
But some first steps need to be taken. One is that liberals have to admit that there is a dichotomy. Another is that they have to clearly denounce evil for what it is, and if that sounds partisan, well, so be it. There is no truth or justice in phony evenhandedness. Christian liberals like to draw inspiration from Biblical prophets, and that is not the way they operated.

For an intelligent take on the massacre in Haditha, it makes sense to quote Justin Raimondo, one who has been consistently right about the situation in Iraq from Day One.

Raimondo, editorial director for the libertarian Antiwar.com site, reported last year about the administration’s “El Salvador Strategy,” a plan to ratchet up the brutality in Iraq similar to force used in Latin America in the 1980s.

Says Raimondo: “We are now seeing the results of this policy of desperation in practice. Haditha is not just an “isolated incident,” but evidence of a new strategic orientation by the U.S. military – a scorched-earth policy designed to stave off the humiliating prospect of impending defeat …

A pattern emerges: Haditha, Abu Sifa, Abu Ghraib, and all the others now bound to come out in horrifying detail. These place names will become the new slogans of the Iraqi insurgency, which will be fueled as never before – and perhaps immeasurably strengthened by rising Shi’ite anger. As we said in the beginning – nay, before the beginning – the occupation of Iraq will soon take on all the familiar earmarks of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Both Iraqis and Americans will be locked in a deadly embrace of indignities that will soon escalate into everyday atrocities. The Iraqis, like the Palestinians, will become captives in their own land, and their jailers will get progressively more abusive and cruel as a matter of sheer necessity.”

Fact is that the debate over the moral quality of the troops is besides the point. The real culprits are the people who put the troops in a situation that had little chance of success and an excellent chance of quagmire. Putting troops in a strange country amongst people who don’t want them there with no plan to win them over, and little effort to provide for the population’s basic needs, it’s a tinderbox waiting to explode that should be obvious to people who have ever read history.

It is difficult enough for a benevolent empire to control a conquered nation let alone one that has imprisoned and tortured large swatches of innocents whose hearts and minds we were supposed to be winning. The problem with Haditha is that it demonstrates an escalation in violence that is inevitable, unless U.S. policy changes dramatically. Unfortunately, George W. Bush doesn’t do change, which means bloodshed is likely to get worse.

Every day the Bush Administration brings a mind-boggling litany of insanities to the fore.
One of today’s absurdities creating a pile of anger here on the East Coast is the big reduction in federal Homeland Security funds being parceled out to New York. The city’s share of the law enforcement funds was cut to $124.5 million, from $207.7 million last year. Reason? The feds determined that there are “no national monuments or icons” in the city, according to a story in The New York Times.
That’s right, the federal government doesn’t know there are important things in the most important city in the world, which for some odd reason is repeatedly the location of actual terrorist attacks.
In the plane of reality in which the Bush administration presides, terrorists are salivating at the catastrophic national panic they could create blowing up a mall in Topeka or Tacoma as opposed to something unobtrusive like, oh, I don’t know, Rockefeller Center or the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building or the World Financial Center or Times Square or Madison Square Garden or ….

As one who has never been a fan of the Dixie Chicks and probably never will be, I nonetheless have to give them a standing ovation for the way they have not buckled in to the pressure surrounding lead singer Natalie Maines’ 2003 criticisms of our Dear Leader, er, I mean George W. Bush. Watching their grace in interviews and refusal to give in to their graceless critics, one can only wish that leading Democrats like Joe Biden and Dick Durbin had as much balls as the Chicks.

Beyond the personal dignity of the ladies in the band, the brouhaha is Exhibit 14,251 in the argument that there is no liberal media. The Chicks’ records — even the non-political songs, which is the majority of their work — have been banned from most country stations, despite their popularity. That means stations are acting against their economic interest to carry on a ridiculous grudge.

Plus, Maines has been and will continue to be excoriated for years. Not just by unhinged fans, but her right to speak her mind will be the main issue in her media interviews for years to come. The fact is, the vast majority of fans either agree or don’t care what she said about Bush, but the media will focus on this as if it were something critical. Sort of like the marriage of a certain political couple.

And the most infuriating part of all this, of course, is that no public figure gets hounded for praising Bush. Or more on point, for criticizing Democrats. No accusation is wild enough or inaccurate enough or just plain despicable enough to warrant more than a mild rebuke, if that. Right-wing authors routinely accuse Democrats — in specific and general — of being all sorts of things, including murderers.

The White Papers

Keeping with a recent theme at the White Papers, this is the first part of a reflection on Christianity that will take more than one post:

I’ve been troubled, since I memorized the Sermon on the Mount during my teen years in the ‘70s, by the divergence between the teachings of Jesus and the practices of Christians.
There is something decidedly odd about the fact that so many of those who claim the name of the man called the Prince of Peace — who preached non-violence, loving enemies and went to his death without a fight — have such a love of violence and war and knee-jerk contempt for those who do not share their beliefs.
What to make of this? One possibility is that these folks — in the spirit of Pappy O’Daniel in O Brother Where Art Thou I’ll call them “Kill-Your-Enemies Christians” — are not. They are the false believers mentioned repeatedly in the pastoral letters of the apostles Paul and Peter. However, that puts me in the position of judging the spirituality of people, a place I don’t belong.
The position on which I settled was that God intended that his followers to take a variety of positions. My justification for this was from Paul’s image of the church as a body, and his list of spiritual gifts. The idea is that God wills that Christians be both conservative and liberal, to have different theological beliefs, and to have all different types of talents and tendencies. It all melds together into a glorious pot that one day we’ll understand at the end of time.
It is unmistakable that different denominations and sects have used different passages to come to different conclusions about the meaning of scripture. I thought that was because there was some key to understanding that was not granted to us mortals. Maybe God didn’t want everything spelled out to prevent us from worshiping the text instead of the creator.
Now, however, I’m having second thoughts …

More to come sometime when I don’t have to coach hockey.

So you thought the Enron scandal was maybe about corporate thievery or the need for regulation of the energy industry, what with the Bush Administration having appointed Enron foxes to guard the financial henhouses.
Nope.
According to Ken Lay, it’s about his relationship with God.
After his conviction, Lay maintained his innocence and quoted the apostle Paul’s comfort to the persecuted (back in the days when persecution meant a slow, painful death, mind you) : “All things work to the good for those who love God.”
See, California consumers might have been ripped off to the tune of $9 billion, and Enron investors and employees may have lost tens of billions, some losing their life savings. But the real story is that it’s been a test of the faith of Ken Lay, who sees himself as Job….

So one day in 2000 Satan gets engrossed in his iPod and winds up walking into the throne room in heaven.
“Hey God,” he says, scratching a horn and turning down the Bright Eyes song, “Everything is greaat. Notice how I have had all the people in the globe under my thumb since the ’60s.”
“Not my humble servant Kenny Boy Lay,” God says. “For that, I have blessed him with unimaginable riches.”
“Yeah, but take the money away and he will curse you,” says the red one.
“No way.”
“Way. Wanna bet?”
So God sent stock analysts and accountants to create illegal offshore accounts that were discovered by the government, who set upon Enron and destroyed it.
But Ken Lay refused to curse God, even after surrendering many of his personal mansions.
A few years later, God sees Satan. “I told you, Ken Lay remains faithful.”
Says Satan: “He hasn’t had it tough enough. Throw him in prison and without his mansions and servants he will curse you.”
Thus was Lay convicted of a crime he did not commit. And still he praised God, …

Hopefully Lay will serve a long term, giving him time to ponder another Biblical precept, the one about how hard it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom.