RAVENSGATE KEEP REALM OF MYSTERY

DOES GOD want us to kill innocent Iraqi children? Judging by the apparently unanimous approval in the Senate chamber from all those truth-immune political celebrities watching President Bush's most recent State of the Union address - all of whom are at least overtly religious churchgoers - the message is clear: HE does.

Apparently there is not a single member of Congress who opposes the idea of dropping more bombs on Iraq. Sure, there are a few who want U.N. endorsement, but if they get that - that is to say, if they can ultimately avoid blame for this atrocity by later saying the U.N. said it was OK to do it - there is nobody in the entire U.S. government apparatus who opposes obliterating Iraq, and murdering still thousands more of its defenseless women and children.

If there were, we would have heard them booing that speech, and we didn't.

If there were, we would have heard an outraged Democratic response, instead of the cowardly endorsement of the principles of the Bush plan for continuing genocide that we did hear.

Imagine - not a single member of Congress who will stand up for the most important teaching of Jesus, for the idea that killing large numbers of innocent people for some nebulous and unprovable political assertion is wrong - not only wrong but evil and contemptible. Not only nebulous and unprovable, but deliberately deceitful, because it is not Iraq that has weapons of mass destruction, but Israel - and Americans have no objection to that, even though Israel has unjustly murdered a thousandfold more innocent victims than Iraq has over the past decade. We don't want freedom for the Iraqis; we just want their oil, and the whole world knows this.

The shadow of death is the heart of darkness emanating from the teachings of Jesus Christ and his bloodthirsty father Yahweh, according to these sanctimonious posers in Washington who describe themselves as born-again Christians and devout Jews.

It is now clear that the real axis of evil runs right through the heart of Washington, D.C., and - judging by the polls - right through the hearts of the American people.

For it is the most righteous churchgoers - the followers of Bible-thumping, Armageddon-preaching, Moonie-funded televangelists - who are at the rabid forefront of this call for unjust mass murder, as they nod their heads in agreement and applause at the obviously false rhetoric of George W. Bush preaching massacre and mayhem against all the dark-skinned peoples of the world as his latest "faith-based" initiative. Obedience to a corrupt church is easily twisted into obedience to a corrupt government.

Yet while the evangelical fundamentalists lead the charge toward their desired Armageddon, it is the level-headed respectable Episcopalians and Methodists and Jewish liberals who by their criminal silence provide the real ballast in the immoral inaction of the status quo, by their failure to condemn the bloodthirsty hysteria of their less-temperate brethren.

They bow their heads and feign sublime theological conviction as they utter their devout prayers that their leaders fry the innocent children of foreign countries with radioactive weaponry devised in the deepest bowels of hell.

And for this sincere wish, they contemplate their own reward of a peaceful afterlife in a righteous heaven. None for me, thanks. Can you imagine hanging out with these freaks for eternity?

I HAD an argument a long time ago with someone very close to me. It was that classic "follow the words of God's holy law vs. doing good works" debate

I contended that it really didn't matter what religion you practiced, or if you practiced one at all. As long as you lived an honest life, tried to help the downtrodden, were kind to the less fortunate, and took the stand of rightness against opinions you deemed to be unjust, then you were more likely to be regarded with favor in the eyes of God than you would be if just went to church on Sunday and screwed people the rest of the week.

Being a devout and vociferous Christian, she vehemently disagreed with my assessment. She said, basically, that it didn't matter what kind of good works one did, but rather, that as long as people failed to sincerely accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and followed verbatim the words that were written in the Holy Bible, they were going straight to hell, and that was the end of it.

If you'd just read the book of Revelation, she said condescendingly, you'd know the rules of the game. We win in the end. That's all there is to it.

And that was essentially the end of the argument. There was no bridging the gap.

At the time, I perceived her inflexible protestations as the very definition of madness.

Many years later, I now contend that this is the very argument that keeps the world ever on the brink of war, as people who insist "holy" laws must be followed to the letter and not challenged extend that self-centered self-righteousness to their political leaders, as their church, ever eager to improve its influence on the powers that be, encourages them to do.

The feigning faithful fervently declare that the judgments of their leaders must not be questioned. These leaders must have our best interests at heart, they reason, because they are our leaders. This is why politicians rush to embrace religious factions. This kind of voter loyalty is not something you could get from a sane person.

By this method, I believe that piety leads to tyranny, that wholehearted devotion to creed results in a kind of kneejerk fascism that prevents critical scrutiny of decisions by parable-parroting politicos who just might, when they make political pronouncements, possibly have motives that are less than sincere.

Those who believe in the infallibility of Scripture are a lot less likely to perceive these dishonest motives, because they have been taught to believe, rather than to think. They have been taught to blindly hope, rather than percipiently perceive.

So when these leaders murmur familiar phrases about Christian values and ideals, and their voters choose to believe them, the people extend this same blanket allegiance to politicians that they voluntarily give to their chosen church, and because so much of their own delusional self-image is tied up in this allegiance, they are unable or unwilling to perceive faults in these leaders that are blatantly obvious to others who are not shackled by the profound handicap of blind faith.

These are the shackles of religious belief. This is the prison of God, which now threatens to destroy the planet.

Worse, these same pious politicians deliberately pander to these poor folk who believe rather than think, further ingratiating themselves in the minds of people who are desperate to believe the best and pretend the worst does not exist, especially in their own midst.

I believe that these are the people who are really responsible for the callous and needless murders the United States government commits every day, all around the world. I believe it is the people who dress up every Sunday morning and tuck their bibles under their arms, smile at their neighbors and partake of Christian fellowship who are ultimately responsible for the cynical high-tech butchery that continues to ravage the innocent population of Iraq, and so many other defenseless Third World countries.

They profess that their faith in God is unshakable even as they see with their own eyes that the leaders they put their trust in are murdering innocent people in the name of the very God they worship devoutly.

Americans (and Europeans before them) have a penchant for killing and then inventing some kind of excuse to justify it as God's work. Devout Christians tortured and murder countless millions of "heathens" throughout the Middle Ages because the victims refused to accept Jesus Christ, or the perpetrators refused to accept as truth when people said they did accept HIM, or worst of all, as in the case with Columbus and the Conquistadors, people were killed because they couldn't speak the proper language, and the killers interpreted this as proof they didn't believe in Jesus Christ.

Of course, Christians are not alone. The Jewish people are currently engaged in a pogrom of their own that matches the most horrid behavior of any people in history as they gun down babies and old women in their quest to complete the theft of land from its underprivileged and persecuted Arab inhabitants. And the Muslims have their own religious horrors to be ashamed of as well: the beheading of minor miscreants for misdemeanors, and demanding women live their lives in shrouds because men can't control their own penile fantasies.

But persecution of women is what religions of that type are all about, and it exists in spades in all three creeds. Remember that Jewish prayer: thank God I was not born a woman. Or the Christian ban on birth control to keep women from ever attaining equal status with men. And those Muslim burkas.

It is religious conviction that keeps us from seeing the truth, the priests and rabbis and mullahs who preach hatred of the stranger, and the deep-seated fear of ordinary people who are afraid to speak the truth for fear of persecution that grips the entire world.

Perhaps the last group is the worst offender against the religious precepts they insist they espouse. Because this fearful silence allows hypocritical killers to ply their trades, the really guilty party in the continuing U.S. war against the entire world are ordinary churchgoers whom you see every Sunday dressed in their finery, because it is their cowardly silence and unquestioning obedience to authority that ultimately allows these horrors to continue.

It is the silence of ordinary Americans too busy with their trivial pursuits or too cowed by their striving for illusory status that is ultimately to blame for the needless extermination of so many fine and innocent souls all over the world.

As a disaffected ex-CIA agent now living in another country once told me, "Americans are not a very nice bunch of people."

NOW, AT this juncture, many of you have no doubt noticed my failure to be as vehement in my contempt for Muslims and Hindus and other sects as I have been for hypocritical Christians and Jews, and therefore, I must be spreading Muslim or Hindu propaganda as my way of undermining the the principles of moral, God-centered America. Let me assure you that it is only because I have lived my whole life in America, and have met insufficient numbers of Muslims and Hindus that I am unable to comment on their practices as directly as I can about Christians and Jews.

Having said that, I can also say that the paradigmatic parable of the insanity of all religions that I use most often derives from the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna advises Prince Arjuna that it doesn't really matter how many people are killed in battle because all souls eventually come to him anyway, so go ahead and begin the slaughter.

And although I have recently heard an evocative passage from the teachings of Mohammed about his prescription for tolerance and care of the shrines of other religions, I certainly can be no fan of a philosophy that prescribes death to women for flirting.

Nevertheless, it is obvious to me - and precious few others - that the events of 9/11 were a ruse principally designed to defame the Muslims of the world, to provide an excuse for their persecution and a justification for the invasion of the Middle East oilfields by Western corporations. Every political event of the 20th century - and in some respects long before that - has masked a subtext involving the collective enslavement and defamation of all people in that part of the world, and all these events since the Crusades have been generated by Christian and/or Jewish colonial interests. Just look at the histories of all the Middle Eastern countries, which were all (except Iran) initially constructed out of nothing for political convenience by British Petroleum and its allies.

Just look deeply into the creation of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Saddam Hussein, the Saudi princes and presidents of Egypt and Pakistan and see how the tentacles of their histories always slither back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As is the case now in the American aggression against Iraq, religious propaganda always serves as the convenient cover story for naked political motives, a righteous rhetoric by which to cloak hideous crimes.

We can continue to blame our leaders for their duplicity, but the real fault lies in the hearts of ordinary, God-fearing people. Because they refused to ask the hard questions about the inconsistency of their own beliefs, and particularly in the fascist vilification of strangers, they are now unable to bring themselves to ask the same hard questionsof their own leaders. And as a result, much of the world - including themselves - is now dying for no good reason.

If there is any group against whom a preemptive strike is needed in this world, it is those who cower inside chapels of worship and conclude that the power of their chosen belief exempts them from the need to think clearly and feel sincerely about all those people who are being killed in their names.

John Kaminski lives and writes on the coast of Florida while watching the destruction of civilization by shallow and insincere men who don't tell the truth most of the time and don't really care that they don't.

I don’t know who penned the next two sayings, but I like them and wanted to share them with you.


These things, I warmly wish for you-
Someone to love,
Some work to do,
A bit of o’ sun
A bit o’ cheer
And a Guardian Angel
Always near.


May joy and peace surround you,
Contentment latch your door,
And happiness be with you now
And bless you evermore.



Cheers,

Raven

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