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.