MY SERMON ON THE MOUNT 2011

Hopefully there will be no fists flying in today's religious discussion. I got a little ticked off this morning in Dr. Levy's class where he was showing this DVD that appeared to be selling as some "product" like you'd find on an info-mercial for some nutrition product or kitchen aid. Dr. Levy went on and on about how wonderful Jesus was and how he died for our sins and was going to turn the whole class into Church or something. I kind of resent all these staged promotions that talk about how there is a God or Jesus shaped hole in all of us that can only be filled by Jesus.

Basically what I'd like to do is review the "seven deadly phrases" or whatever, that a Christian should never use because the words are like kryptonite to the Faith. I'll start with the one Dr. Levy used on me this morning. He said one shouldn't engage in "wishful thinking" or "Magical thinking". What they mean is that you should never look to God for anything, despite all the protestations as to how great and forgiving he is. Another term Christians should never use is the term "manipulative" because this is really the pot calling the kettle black. They live and breathe manipulation every day of their lives. Another is to label someone a hypocrite, although Christians have gotten a little smarter about this one now. You know my saying about this is that "The Church does not Contain hypocrites; it IS hypocracy". Another term you may hear used as "false humility". This is usually used in sermons about the early days of King Saul when he had doubts about his worthiness to be chosen. Of course there is nothing "false" about this. False humility is parading it around like a trophy you show off on Sunday mornings from the pulpet. You know what they say "A person who really is humble doesn't like to talk about it". In my case if I say something like "I believe that the innocent should not be made to atone for sins of the guilty" this is called False Humility. For instance suppose there is a corporate crook who is responsable for the deaths of millions of people and some jury (probably not in this country) has the balls to render the Death Penalty, does it make sense for some guy to go out and hire a homeless wino and promise him all the liquor he can consume if he will agree to give up his life". No, that's silly; that isn't justice. Another term is to label someone obsessed with religion or obsessive about it. A variation on this theme is "Using religion as a drug". This comes off as super stupid because it's a well known fact that "religion is the opiate of the people". Some other terms that should be used with extreme caution is "Don't assotiate with the wrong people". OK. But tell that to God. God palled around with Satan in the early chapters of Job in the Bible. We are informed even in exorcisums "Don't enter into a dialog with Satan - only give him direct commands". And yet here God not only dialogs with Satan but takes advice from him on how to do his job. How many of you executives out there would appreciate it if some underling told you how to do your job? You wouldn't have it. I rest my case. Another term that should be used with the greatest caution is "Total depravity". Any kind of depravity is bad. "Depravity" is a strong word. But Total Depravity has to be the worst. That means for instance to use a geographic analogy that if you aim a dart at a target but you're not sure where the target is and told repeatedly "you are wrong" and you go, "is it HERE - - is it over HERE - - and no matter where you point you are informed that you are no closser and no further. In other words even with the best of intentions - - a "totally depraved" person is incapable of helping himself. It goes back to the old addage, "If everything is a sin - - then Nothing is a sin". Think about that one. OK, we are done with part one of this.

I would now like to restate the three ultimate Unanswerable questions about God and Creation. The first of which is Why did God even Create the Universe". We know from Genisis that God himself said he regretted that he had made Man. Theologians tells us that God is and always has been a fully actuallized being. That means he can never learn anything new or every improve himself or increase his sense of "actualization" by creating something. Since the Universe is referred to by Christians as being so Evil some even say Satan is running it now- - - so why did God bother? Some may well balk at this whole line of discussion. But the reason they do so is because they don't really believe the Theologians when they say "God can't get any Gooder". This is because they vicariously see themselves as a part of God's ego and so are personally insulted when their god is insulted. I won't do that. I make God defend himself. The middle part of the question is "Why did God allow man to fall to Satan in the Garden of Eden, and spread evil throughout the race and the planet. You can't use the excuse of Free Will for this. So I invoke the example of the loving father. A father, if he saw his five year old son getting a little too close to a steep cliff, perhaps venturing the guard rail, a father would pull him back and adminish him of the danger- and he wouldn't be worried about the child's loss of "Free Will" because he knows that the Dead don't have ANY free will. A rat in a laboritory has a better chance as Free Will than Man, whose fate was decided "from the foundation of the Earth". That's in Revelation. Keep in mind that God was JUST as aware of the consequences BEFORE man did the act as he was Afterwards. With a rat there might be an 85% chance of expected pattern of behavior. But God knew to a "metaphysical certitude" that Man would fall. And finally, once man fell, why not just wipe out the whole species and start over. It's silly to say "He wanted to give man another chance". But we know "chance" isn't a part of God's play-book. We have already established that God will kill men when he gets ticked off enough at them. Now we are only arguing about how many die. Is it a few tens of thousands of people consigned to eternity in Hell- - or Billions.

I'd just like to close with this. Satan as I define him is really God. God is an all powerful and determinate being who doesn't admit morality (in any form we know it) to come into his decision process. This fact alone will explain everything on this page. Satan as such is "God as he really exists". So when this Satan-god challenges the contrived and romantisized God of the Christians, the latter will always lose, is Satan is of a mind to press the point. And the thing is Satan doesn't even have to lie to do all sorts of damage. He can do that just using the Truth. Why not just give up now because no matter how much evidence against the Faith Satan piles on you, he's probably god a bucket of stuff in reserve just waiting to be used. I hope I haven't ruined your day. It would be nice is things were different, but from where I view things, they aren't. I'm not saying we shouldn't be thankful for the good things we have. We should. But to think we somehow "earned" these things by being super religious or "tight" with God, to me is delusional thinking.

TEA PARTY FORCES RUN THE TABLE

I had a lot of trouble entering this blog. They refused my password several times. Perhaps I had caps lock on. Then they ran me through that type the letters thing. Of course Ronnie Reagan's book about his father if mis-characterized by the tea party set. Just because Ronnie would ask his father "are you all right?" (this was after his attempted assasenation) doesn't mean he thought he was incompetent. This whole issue the right brings up is scarcely a blip on the radar screen, and they are going to trash the whole book over it. The book praises Ronald Reagan and states what a basically nice guy he was and how he never said a mean word about anybody. This is in stark contrast to the tea party set which has vicious words to say about all their imagined enemies. It is quite clear that Ronald Reagan would be very troubled by the actions of the tea party crowd today that has moved in to dominate Washington and the media, and that he would not subscribe to their goals of "shutting government down" or whatever. Clearly President Bush was to the right of Ronald Reagan. We wern't involved in any wars while Reagan was in office. But now even George Bush is probably not far right enough for the tea party set. Ronald Reagan was a man who compromized and worked with the opposition. Also Ronald Reagan raised taxes eleven times according to some. He also granted amnesty to illegal aliens. He pulled our troops out of Lebanon. The tea party set just wants to re-write history and turn President Reagan's memory into some sort of political football.

There has been no lack of specific events on the radio to show that we are living in politically troubled times. Now Bernie Madoff is saying that it’s not entirely his fault that he ripped so many people off because “The banks must have known something was wrong but chose to do nothing about it”. There seems to be a lot of union busting going on in Wisconsin. The state legislature wants to make collective bargaining illegal. Talk about turning the clock back a hundred years. And now there are Union protesters who are fighting to preserve their rights but the Governor has called out the National Guard against them. I can’t believe this store hasn’t had more press. John Boehner has said that there were 250,000 new government jobs created “and if some of these jobs are lost through budget cuts than so be it”. The problem is that in actuality 309,000 government jobs have been CUT in the past year or two. These people on the right are just never satisfied and will make up anything. Because if jobs are created, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t there a lot of work that needs to get done in terms of infra-structure and preserving fire, police, and paramedics and teachers and the like? Another state is trying to abolish or drastically modify child labor laws, many at odds with the federal government, saying that children as young as ten should be allowed to work in factories. Elsewhere another state of trying to pass a measure to legalizing the murder of abortion doctors. The wording is a little tricky. I guess it says that “any one who would harm a fetus has the right to be killed on the spot”. So in general these are toxic times for the overall health of American society. Loretta said that one preacher she knew said “I know Black people have souls and deserve to have salvation, but I would never eat dinner with a Black man”. I happened to think how that’s a step up from what Pastor Bill Halliday has said to me. He doesn’t seem to think that I either have a soul or need salvation but that in any rate am so psychologically messed up I need to “get fixed” by some secular therapist, because Jesus can’t help me. The Republicans have been in control of congress for six weeks and all that time have not offered one bill to create jobs despite their campaign slogan that “Jobs and growth are the most important things”. John Boehner wants to slash a hundred billion from the budget, and it’s all on the wrong things. So we abolish things likeinspection of water treatment plants and eliminates student grants, and deprive people of heating assistance in the winter and eliminate all funds for national endowment of the Arts. Meanwhile there is some defense boondoggle that John Boehner is all for that even the pentagon doesn’t want and Defense Secretary Gates has said to scrap. In short the whole tea party bunch running Washington now are pretty much “Out to Lunch”. If this economy tanks in the next year they will have a really hard time not taking responsibility for the economic downturn. President Obama will have an “out” he didn’t have last year. It would seem as though in many ways this economy is still contracting.

FAIRWELL FRIDAY

Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarek has agreed to step down today, Friday, February 11th. The Vice President made the announcement in what Randy Rhodes calls a 28 second statement. It took thirty years to build the dictatorship and only 28 seconds to dissolve it. Naturally the crowds are elated. But I have a few questions. What is the Army's role in all of this? How come the people instinctively trust the Army so that they are even bold enough to climb on their tanks. Now that power has been handed to the Army what will they do with it? Are they really going to have an election in sixty days like they are talking about? Or is there some other secret agreement between the Army and the protesters that somehow power will be turned over to some yet unknown entity. I'm sure people like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh aren't happy about the power transfar because anything Obama is for, they are against. After all Rush cheered when Chicago lost the Olympics. Some people have said that the Moslem Brotherhood and the Tea Party here at home are similar. Both talk about violence and even espouse it, yet they claim not to actually be guilty of it themselves. Both groups say they want to work within the system. It's funny how in other places in Europe the people will directly picket corporations whom they claim to be exploitive. But we don't do that here. Here we have people like Obama who would rather sell out to them. With friends like that who needs enemies?

Thom Hartman continues to make it one of the planks in his platform that the US Supreme Court has no legitimate power to declare a law of congress Unconstitutional. He says none of the Federalist Papers spoke of this but rather said that all three branches would be co equal. The US Constitution spells out specific powers of the Supreme Court including it being the ultimate court of last resort. But nowhere in all these enumerated power does it say they have the ability to just throw out laws, rather than interperet what they mean. Of course George Bush believed in a unitary executive and the power to make "signing statements" qualifying how the laws he signed would be enforced. This is wrong, too. According to Hartman, the remedy for a bad law of congress is to vote that congress out and put in a new one. Rotsa Ruck with that with today's corporate money driven campaigns. Of course in theory voting out the legeslature would remedy the problem. All of these Supreme Court justices such as Thomas and Sculia who have friends up to their asses in political involvement, sometimes very specific involvement such as how to overturn Obama's health care plan. Of course you know that Congress has the power to impeach justices. Their life terms thus aren't really life because it says, "during good behavior". And you continue to hear talk jocks saying the tea party is divided. I believe this is a myth and always has been. But now Randy Rhodes said if she were on the radio in April of 2009 she would have praised the tea party for "finally getting it". Roomer has it now some of them are calling Dick Chaney a war criminal. Maybe that was just some bad joke that got circulated. It's kind of a toss up to say which nation has a better shot at liberty now, The USA or Egypt. People have gotten optimistic before. KTLK was doing those ads in 2006 or so, "now our opinion has become main stream". The reactionary forces of repression seem to be getting stronger all over the world. People had high hope for Russia twenty years ago. How's that working out for them now? They say governments in Europe are making a full scale march to the right because of economic considerations. The capitalism of today is far from anything that Adam Smith envisioned. The far right say that Obama really wants to "wreck the economy" so he can institute some totalitarian system. Unfortunately this notion is not so easily disproved as one would suppose at first glance.

PRESIDENT MUBAREK PASSES

AUTHORITYTO V P SULLIMON

At ten o clock this morning Thom Hartman announced that Egyptian President Mubarek would be stepping down within the hour and was about to make an important speech. It has to be pushing ten or eleven o clock at night by the time this speech was made. They only acknowledged the speech had been made after the fact playing a taped translation of it. President Mubarek says he’s surrendering power and turning all of the responsibilities for running the nation over to Vice President Amon Sulliman. This apparently will not satisfy the crowd. Tomorrow they announced a ten million man march on the square right after prayer time. Are Coptic Christians and Moslems still cooperating with each other? Al Qaeda is keeping quiet about all of this still and they have to be wondering how they can gain power but haven’t figured out a way yet. Supposedly Al Qaeda hates the Moslem Brotherhood for going soft. To complicate matters further now all the government workers have gone on strike and joined the ranks of the protesters. In general the crowd is upper middle class younger people who are doctors and lawyers and government workers. There are roomers that Mubarek is ill with cancer or something and will be traveling to Germany for medical care. In the speech Mubarek said the blood of the martyrs was not shed in vain and he wants to work with them to accomplish their goals. Someone in the Army said “Tomorrow the protesters will achieve everything them want”. I don’t know what that means. Of course this whole thing was launched by some guy working for Google that posted an article on Facebook protesting the death of some protester kid. Randy Rhodes said that today was a day of endings but to my point of view it’s still a day of continued standstill. You never know if the Army has been playing possum or something and plans to massacre everybody tomorrow when they are all gathered together. I don’t know. If I were the protesters I wouldn’t push my luck since I have already obtained so many concessions and promises.

President Obama is not only working to re-inflate the corporate economic bubble and bring about an even worse crisis in 2013 or whenever, but now he’s pardoning big money people for their crimes saying he wont prosecute. Some conservatives will always find fault with Obama no matter how many concessions he makes to the right. They of course are saying that Health Care is a giant conspiracy to drive all the private insurance companies out of business despite the fact that they’ll have mandentory new customers. Now Thom Hartman has explained this one mystery plank of the right wing about “encouraging competition and allowing you to get coverage across state lines”. Apparently this is the farthest thing from giving consumers more power. Instead it’s what happened with the credit card companies all deciding to move to North Dakota because they had the laxest credit card regulations in the entire country and now the whole country has to lower themselves to the least common denominator. Randy Rhodes said that the Tea Party is divided and right wing talk radio is losing listeners. I don’t see it that way. I don’t there’s any doubt that the tea party was about anything

This font is nothing if not a mystery. Trying to alter it is gamey indeed. In my personal life stagnation has indeed arrived. The phone and internet bill is over a week late in arriving. The anti fungal nail cream I was using was working great for a while but about a week ago just stopped working and now I think I'm even seeing retrogression. I wish these nails would just grow faster. The fungus infected nails have virtually stopped growing. On top of everything else I have a cold as of today despite all the Vitamin C I've been taking, along with that Silver-biotic stuff. There is a lurking issue with family members I'm not entirely certain is solved. Perhaps I've only been kidding myself. I'm going to try and enlarge this font now

In other news Lindsey Lohan is headed back to prison for three years because of a necklace heist last week. And a congressman is forced to resign because he posted a shirtless photo on Craig's List to attract women. Jim Webb the democrat who squeaked into office in Virginia is now on his way out. This won't help the Democrat's senate chances in 2012. Of course Joe Lieberman last week announced he wasn't running. Maybe he decided that pandering to the far right was just too political for his tastes. In general it's much less likely now when you tune in C-Span that you'll actually see congress in session. I don't know what's going on there. They spend one day extolling Ronald Reagan. I have heard precious little in the way of actual debating of provisions of bills. We can hope the Patriot Act sunsets but that's wishful thinking.

UNEMPLOYMENT IS THE

LOWEST SINCE APRIL 2009

The unemployment rate is now 9.0%. There was a .4% in the rate in just one month, which you rarely see. Were it to continue we'd be back to normal within a year or two, which the experts say won't happen. I'm not sure what the Republican response is to these numbers and 36,000 new jobs added. Somehow they are going to try and put a negative spin on it. Of course Obama is doing a lot of things wrong and among them is ignoring our trade situation, ignoring establishing some kind of quotas for percentage of US made goods in government contracts, and he is also re-inflating the financial bubble so we will soon have an identical situation to what we had in 2007 and 2008. You would think the President would have learned his lesson not to trust people from Wall Street, but apparently he hasn't. He's putting all his eggs in the basket of the 2012 election and all he cares about is getting the numbers up for two years from now.

In terms of the situation in Egypt there is still no definitive news. President Mubarek is still holding on. Apparently a number of ruling party officials were let go but this hasn't helped ease tensions in "Liberation Square". Two days ago those hired thugs on camels with baseball bats were beating up protesters. But now it's safe for news reporters to walk about again. It seems that Egypt has at least some internet back. They are telling us a spirit of harmony has pervaded the protestors as the army is keeping the pro Mubarek thugs away from the rest of the protesters. People from the right wing such as Glen Beck and World Net Daily are predicting the worst. Whatever happened to that sunny optimism Ronald Reagan was noted for. These would be heirs to the Reagan legacy have less and less in common with him with each passing day.

John Boehner now has a new problem. He has been caught by the National Enquiror having affairs with two different woman both with the initials of L. L. So either he's into Linda Lovelace, or he has some Superman fixation and the L L is Lois Lane. At any rate the most intrusive the Enquirer has ever been was the near CIA tacticts they used to track down John Edward's affairs. They were like a dog with a bone in that case and wouldn't let go. I don't know if any political bias has crept its way into the Enquirer but those Edwards revelations did a lot of damage to the political health of America. I hope they're happy. Why don't they investigate George Bush? It's hard to say how revealed sexual pecadillos will play with the hard right. They say they back Christian morality but I suspect it's more of a come on phrase than actual reality, used to attract people to the tea party movement who otherwise would never join it if they knew what it was really all about and how it's leaders are mere tools of Wall Street.

Back in June of 2006 I made certain statements saying I didn't believe in predestination and I didn't believe in the Big Bang. So have I changed? Even back then the way I phrased it was "I believe it's mentally unhealthy to believe in predestination, even if it turns out to be true". As to the matter of the big bang it's based on the assumption we really do have an expanding universe, because without that the whole theory collapses, if you know what I mean. We are assuming that light encounters no "drag" factor caused by ether viscosity or anything else. Yet the Astronomy Cafe people say that "empty space is not really empty". It's one of their major points. I also said then and still believe that the idea of "the theory of evolution is impossible" becomes a whole lot harder to assert if you really do have an infinite ammount of matter, an infinite ammount of space, and an infinite ammount of time. I spoke then of people's desire to see a "beginning" and an "end" of something. But I also said that as a kid in grammar school I more or less assumed that all these things were infinite. Now they are discovering all these new planets. This rocks one of their most tightly held "religious" assertions that We on Earth are the Only Life in the Universe. If we turn out not to be then Christianity becomes a whole lot more complicated.

DO YOU KNOW HOW

TO SPOT A PHONY?

I'm like to give President Obama kind of a mid term evaluation at this time. People who voted for Obama wanted someone who would cut the huge deficets piled up by the Bush Administration. Many wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay. Many others wanted the secretive activities of the Bush administration investigated and military abuses like renditions investigated. Many others hoped for single payer health care. This President would not do a sell out to insurance companies and give them compulsary free business the way a Republican might do. Many others developed the idea that the President had strongly held religious convictions and a sense of loyalty to his friends. Yet at first oppertunity he threw Reverand Jeremiah Wright under the bus. He disowned him along with twenty years of church attendance. Any traditional Christian would say "He did the cowardly thing, and for the worst motives". Others might conclude "Well if Obama says he's a Christian this incident only proves that Christians are phoneys". Others voted for him because he favored election laws and favored matching funds and not "opting out". Others voted for him because they thought he would work for a more open congress posting legeslation on line without these "Christmas tree" bills that are unamendable. Certainly few voted for him because he would praise Ronald Reagan and bringing about the Reagan revolution. Others voted for him because they though he would faze out the use of dangerous energy sources such as coal, or nuclear power. Others voted for him because they thought he would bring about a more open society and would not try and have whistle blowers such as wikkileaks arrested. Some voted for him because they thought "The Audacity of Hope" meant aiming high in your goals, and not compromizing your asperations. Others hoped the President would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in general end this state of "perpetual war" the country has been in the past ten years. But of course there were others in the race in 2008. Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson and that it was Johnson who in the end, who was more instrumental in getting things done than was Martin Luther King. She pointed to the virtues of political experiance in working with the opposition and not letting them derail your agenda. OK, after all this, how is our President doing? Not very well, is he? In April of 2008 I had already heard enough about Obama to conclude he was a phony and not worthy of my vote. I went on to predict that Obama would lose the nomination and that in the fall I would vote for Mc Cain because at least Mc Cain unlike Obama was an honorable man. Of course by November- - voting for Mc Cain became unthinkable because of his VP pick. Any chance of my voting republican went out the window the day he picked Sarah Palin for his Vice President. And Mc Cain further lost my respect when it became more than apparent that she and not he was setting the tone for the entire campaign. Even if you should disagree with a candidate you could still respect their ability to stick to an agenda. But this President from day one let his enemies define him in ways which Johnson or Kennedy would never have allowed. I mean if a conservative says that liberals are every bit as culpable at creating a climate of hate in this country, than this President, in one of his endless attempts to placate the insatiable right- will just say "OK both are equally guilty of formenting hate." Parenthetically if the tea party really right really believed the left was equally guilty with themselves, they wouldn't be saying "But I'm better than you". Only in Neil Savedra's world is the line "everybody is doing it" acceptable. The President in that speech fell into the trap of "false equivelency". In this way the President showed an apalling lack of leadership which reveled what his enemies were saying all along, that this man did not have enough experiance to be President.

You know I believe in judging a man or a woman for their character, their integrety, and their ability to relate to others in a caring, relivent manner. Are they fair in dealing with others? When they open their mouth do they know what they are talking about? Unfortunately there are others will size up a man on the basis of whether he has made the strictly arbitrary decision to "turn their life over to Jesus". If they haven't done this- - some would say they are not entitled to the human respect to which otherwise they'd be entitled. Neil Savedra says basically all you have to do is say the words, "Jesus is Lord" to assure a ticket to imortality. But unlike what Spencer Tracy says in "Inheret the Wind" you can't just agree with them and "they will be your friends and everything will be fine". Christians are far too xenophobic for that. I'm not saying they can read your minds (But if God can read minds HE knows if you are just "faking it") but Christians have this paranoia about they they confuse with "the gift of dissernment of spirits". Why not just tell people you're an atheist if that's what you are. Why not just "come out", like gay people are doing? Randy Rhodes was going of on atheists. She said they were all arrogant and I was offended at that. Randy said that atheists don’t give any more thought to their beliefs than your typical Joe Blow on the street. She was put off at the idea that an atheist said to her, “You’re too smart to believe in Christianity”. OK. Well, if an atheist said that to me I might just think, “maybe the guy is right. I am too smart to believe in this religious hocus pocus.” By way of object example, if a person said, "I have looked carefully into the matter of the existrence of UFO's and concluded that they don't exist", could you not respect a man for having this belief. Now, what is easier to prove the existance of- - a UFO that people have actually seen, or a God who remains for the most part undefined? I guess in a way "belief" has become the new Sex. It's not something you air in public. They say never talk about religion or politics in bars. Because the worst thing that could happen as you might prove yourself to be more knowledgable than others in the room and that would be unthinkable! Keep in mind often a school teacher will say to a student that hands in a sloppy piece of work, “You’re too smart to be doing inferior work like this”. Should the student be offended and walk off in a huff and say to himself “Well I’ll show her. I’ll do even worse work in the future”. If a boss is hired by a CEO to get a particularly inefficient branch of the office in line, does the new supervisor say “Well, I’m going to put this office’ laziness up to a vote”. Certainly not. He’s going to be taking names and kicking ass. To equate God with Love is the oldest phalocy in the book. Love like infrared or ultra violet rays they talked, is a demonsterable commodity. But you can exhaust yourself looking for evidence of God and you may never find it. I myself am a deist simply because I don’t believe the Universe got here by accident; it’s too intelligently constructed. But the idea of a “fundamentalist atheist” is one of those words, which if he had any legitimacy as a word- - would have been around for centuries and not the creation of Thom Hartman only a few weeks ago. Atheists asks questions and people are afraid of their questions. As was pointed out fundamentalists don’t ask questions. For them all truth was handed down on stone tablets from God. What Randy is really saying in her attack on Atheism is “I’m afraid I’ll lose if I get in an honist dialog with someone who may have thought more about the issue than I have”. You know it was Gene Scott who said “I hate know-it-als”. Well, I don’t hate know-it-alls, if they really know what they are talking about. The thing is with a Christian is you can’t learn anything from a Christian, at least constructive, but anything you managed to assililate from them, even if by accident, will only do damage to your soul in the long run and somewhere, somehow, will come back to bite you in the ass. This is a free country and people are free to believe what they want. They can believe Jesus Christ stood for peace and non violence, when it’s only out of anti semetic racism that these passages were put in scripture. Jesus never condemned the violence of Rome against his own people. Who will stand up to condemn the crusades and all of the other violence of the church, or the rape of the native peoples of the New World started by Columbus and continuing? In short many liberal Christians like Thom Hartman believe in a phantom that doesn’t exist. And to me it’s silly to condemn others for not believing in some religious opiate. And one more thing. No atheist would ever use the line on people “You may think you have a disagreement with me but in reality your battle is with God”. Churchmen use this line on people all the time whom they want to subjugate. An atheist doesn’t have to hide behind something he intented to begin with in some attempt to play a mind game on the person they are trying to subjugate. It really sounds suspicious to say “Well, I’ll respect an atheist as long as he not a fundamentalist atheist”. That’s like Chuck Smith claiming that he has the power to dissern a genuine question about God from one that’s disingenuous. For instance, according to Craig, if you say “Who is God?” that’s an acceptable question. But when told of the Love of God if you bring up all the deaths and violence in the world than that’s not a permissible question. Of course their next line is most likely “Why do you care?” And it’s asked more ion the form of an accusation, as though there was something wrong with you for caring, rather than a question they want you to answer. Let me just add one more thing. Now Craig is a lone wolf in his fundamantalism around here. I admire his bravery. Christians as a whole tend only to be brave in numbers when they have you surrounded, like the characters in Pac-Man. Often they take pride in their cowardess and being able to do fence straddling, like at work, in order to get ahead. Sean Hannity went so far as to say that if you're doing a Philosophy blue book assignment and a religious question comes up, it's just "smart" go give the teacher want he wants and get the grade. In reality getting back to our main point- - Christians don't want to know if you believe A God exists, but rather that THEIR God exists. And remember their watch word, unlike what they say publicly, what they believe in private is "Your God is too Big". Meditate on that a while.

IS OUR NATIONAL SECURITY

BEING COMPROMISED?

I was just watching a debate between Newt Gingrich and two others on C-Span on the topic of Islamic terrorism and national security. Some point out that many who are released from Guantanamo go on to commit more terrorism. Does this mean we suspend all legal protections for those in this country accused of terrorism? Does it mean that we invent some new category of criminal that falls neither under legal protection or the laws of the Geneva Accords? I don’t think so. It’s pointed out that bomber who was arrested in New York around May first of last year was spotted by an alert vender who told a cop and they took it from there. Some may say “It’s dangerous to assume that any criminal arrested is not a radical Islamic terrorist. Some say militant radicalism in any religion is dangerous. Newt pointed out that there aren’t many radical Lutherin Norweegens, for instance. Therefore according to Newt this proved that only Islamic people are radical. We move on to the Egypt situation now. Rush Limbaugh yesterday said that the Islamic Brotherhood is a radical organization connected with Al Qaeda and they want to impose radical Islam by force on the nation of Egypt and make the nation of Egypt as a whole numbered among our enemies. Rush went on to say that the “Drive by media” spent all weekend saying that the Islamic Brotherhood was not dangerous and “apologizing for them” or whatever. In point of fact the only time I heard the first hint they were not dangerous was on one four minute interview on “This Week” and it was the guest who said it and not the talking head reporters. Rush went on to attack the Federal Reserve of this country saying that because of what they did last year in its “monetization of the debt” drive, drove up the price of corn in Egypt and therefore all the food riots in Egypt are really our fault. It was pointed out today however that the Islamic Brotherhood neither organized the protests, but were relative late comers to the movement. Neither are they leading the movement now. Rather it seems to be young people who are suffering economically who are spear-heading the movement. They say they genuinely want democracy and this just isn’t some ruse for radicals to get power, like took place in Iran over thirty years ago. We need to be aware of these things. Now Mubarek has stated that he will not run for reelection this coming September. But this concession is not enough for the protesters because they think between now and then he’ll “pull something” to stay in power. But we can’t let the tea bagger right like Gingrich telling us how to think and what to think. They’ve done it their way for ten years and it hasn’t worked. As was pointed out today now Turkey is becoming radicalized. Of course if we sent 150,000 troops in a small country with advanced weapons we are going to win in that area, at least for a while. But we won’t be getting to the underlying causes of radical movements, or whatever political perswasion. Few people would take President Obama to be some kind of a closet Islamic sympathizer who is weak on terrorism. Indeed there seems little difference between the Obama foreign policy and the Bush foreign policy. If George Bush were still President would Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich be calling him “the enemy” simply because terrorism hasn’t vanished overnight? I don’t think so. Rush Limbaugh is such a congenital liar- - I couldn’t believe what he said even fifteen years ago when I agreed with him. How much less now, that we disagree on virtually everything. We need to deal with events one by one as they present themselves.