Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 146 Editor's Choice: 12
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Further study is needed
[Read the article: How George Bush really found Jesus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is interesting. I was unaware of such a thing as "The sinner's prayer." Though the skeptic in me would like to believe that everything about Bush is totally fake, it appears he has had some spiritual experience in his life.
There is a lesson here for "liberals." The universe is not binary. Things are not absolutely one or the other. George W. Bush can be a "born again" Christian and a sociopath at the same time. He can be deeply religious and a mass murderer simultaneously. He can sit in a classroom reading "My Pet Goat" while the nation is being attacked, and believe he is doing "God's work."
Another area that is unexplored by critics of religion is the varieties of religious or spiritual experience. Just about anyone who engages in spiritual practices - ritual, acts of kindness and charity, prayer, meditation, fasting, etc. - can have an experience of higher energy, of Divine connection, an out of body experience, of bliss or ecstasy, or love of "God." It does not mean you have attained anything. These experiences can be looked at as signposts along the way, as inspirations for further practices.
They are not evidence of exaltation, of a special relationship with the Divine, or of the superiority of one religion over another. George W. Bush probably did have an experience of the Divine. It didn't deter him from mocking Karla Faye Tucker's pleas for mercy. It didn't deter him from enabling the worst attacks on the country in its entire history. It didn't deter him from lying the country into a murderous war. It didn't deter him from reveling the the kidnapping, false imprisonment and torture of thousands of people worldwide. It didn't deter him from enabling the destruction of one of the world's great cities, and the suffering and death that followed. And it didn't deter him from corrupting our system of justice.
As "atheists" would have it, the supposed religiosity of George W. Bush is proof of the folly of religious belief. There is, of course, some truth in this. The actual beliefs of "fundamentalist" "Christians" do not get sufficient challenge. The "Bible" was written by men, edited and rewritten over 20 centuries by other men for purposes mainly having to do with power, control, and orthodoxy. The "Book of Revelations," in particular, has nothing to do with "Jesus," (actually Yaheshua), but is merely the flight of imagination of someone, supposedly John the Apostle, around the year 95. It was John Doe, for all we know.
Deconstruction of the "faith" of George W. Bush is as easy as deconstruction of the fakery of the "religious right," but is not done very well. The human mind tends not to be able to encompass the combination of genuine "faith" and genuine evil. Bush is an icon for our time. We don't know if his "faith" is real, but we have ample evidence of his evil. The fact that he has been the president of the "United States for nearly seven years makes his life interesting and worthy of study, no matter how disgusting such an endeavor might be.
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Word association
[Read the article: Interviews with AP executives on the Bilal Hussein travesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's nothing too hard to figure out here. The guy's name is Hussein. In Arabic it means "handsome one." To "Americans" it means Saddam Hussein. For the typical military mope who encounters someone with this surname, the entire gestalt is "This guy had something to do with 911."
The rest is bureaucracy. Having arrested the guy, the military has to justify what it did, then justify what it did next, then next, then next, then next. Careers become staked on his guilt. The more time he spends in jail, more energy is expended in finding justification for having him there.
Had we had a just reason for invading "Iraq," and honorable men and women planning the invasion and occupation, the justice and honor would filter down to actions "on the ground." (a cliché that has just about worn itself out. Where else do things happen?)
In other words, criminality at the top, criminality at the bottom. We all know the "president" is a criminal sociopath. As a nation, we see fit to keep him in office. We will be sorry, and many of us already are.
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When the truth finally comes
[Read the article: Good riddance to John Howard ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I remember years ago a story in Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, or some such that the "CIA" had subverted the Australian elections through trickery, funding of "right-wing" parties, and propaganda. This was during the 70s, in the time of Gerald Ford, if I remember right. I wonder how much help Howard got from outside forces in his rise to prominence. Maybe when we finally get around to real investigation, prosecution, and imprisonment of the Bush regime, we can find out.