Month: August 2020

Remember, Jesus Was Killed by Law Enforcement

Just a few reminders for anyone calling him/herself a Christian:

Jesus of Nazareth brought the kingdom of God into this world.

Authentic Christians understand that living obediently in God’s kingdom takes priority over every other group, party, and allegiance.

Politics can never establish, empower, or extend God’s kingdom.

Jesus was not white. He was a Palestinian Jew with dark skin and (probably) kinky hair.

Jesus’ teaching and personal behavior overturned a great deal of the social and religious status quo normalized in his culture.

Jesus defied conventional legal authority  on numerous occasions and paid the ultimate price. That is what obedience to God commonly looks like.

In this way, Jesus did not “respect” authorities that disrespectfully abused their power and mistreated others.

Jesus taught his followers to show mercy and kindness to everyone without exception.

Jesus taught his followers never to cooperate with wrongdoing, no matter how “official” its proponents.

Jesus taught his followers to stand for justice and righteousness on behalf of those from whom it is withheld.

Jesus insisted that his people give practical assistance to those in need of help.

Jesus rejected violence and taught his followers always to do the same.

Anyone who imagines that a political agenda, especially an agenda that sanctions violence, will somehow help God in accomplishing his work is sorely mistaken and is NOT following Jesus.

Leaders who do not condemn injustice, whether individual or corporate, do not understand what it means to live as citizens of God’s kingdom.

Neither do they understand their responsibility as leaders.

Jesus never exalts or approves of those who commit violence. He always condemns it.

Jesus always condemns any thought, word, or action (e.g. Tweets and Facebook posts) that demeans or dehumanizes another human being.

Jesus insists that his followers always uphold the truth.

Upholding the truth requires confronting lies whenever possible, confronting lies with truth, and challenging others when they are caught spreading lies among God’s people.

[For example, John MacArthur needs to confess and repent for the lies he has repeated about the Center for Disease Control and his potentially lethal claims from the pulpit (!) that the covid pandemic is a hoax.]

Following Jesus and living in God’s kingdom requires more than faith. Jesus demands faithfulness — a Christian virtue that seems to be in increasingly short supply in the church today.

 

 

 

Is Billy Rolling Over Yet?

Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Cissie Graham Lynch, spoke at the Republican National Convention last night to recite the predictable pablum of the Religious Right.

No, it was worse than that. Mrs. Lynch spewed rank idolatry for the Republican party. It’s the kind of behavior that got Old Testament Balam scorched by the Lord.

But nowadays, she is only one among many, for Trump seems to keep a kennel of false prophets on hand for every conceivable occasion.

Lynch opened her speech with a declaration on the importance of “our faith.”

She didn’t mention whose faith happens to be our faith, but the confusion was quickly clarified. She meant the pagan, American faith placed in our blasphemous civil religion.

This became evident as she listed her topics of concern. They were all the gems of Religious Right activism: abortion, the Supreme Court, and transgendered civil liberties.

Lynch’s flawless interweaving of (1) her descent from Christian evangelist, Billy Graham, (2) a rote recounting of Religious Right political priorities, and (3) the themes of American civil religion all stamped Mrs. Lynch as yet another immoral Siren working hard to bewitch the innocent, the ignorant, and the depraved into shipwrecking themselves against the rocks of bogus national piety.

Alas, if only the Christian faith WAS being persecuted in America today! Perhaps the genuine church could finally shed itself of this dead wood and dull-witted false teachers.

Notice that Mrs. Lynch’s examples of what she means by the Christian faith being “bullied” in the public square all consisted of threats, not to Christian faith or practice, but to the various privileges that church institutions enjoy at public expense.

I am fairly certain that Jesus never commanded his disciples to build religious institutions like schools or hospitals while demanding tax breaks or other special dispensations denied others operating in the same public arena.

Tax breaks and exemptions are nice, if you can get them.

Just as religious institutions (operating in a world unto themselves, ignoring the standards to which others are held) are beneficial, if you can build them.

But PLEASE stop pretending that those things have anything to do with either religious freedom or practicing the Christian faith. They don’t.

Just as losing those privileges has nothing to do with a loss of religious liberty.

So, Cissie, listen up:

No one is stopping you from following Jesus through the American public square.

No one is prohibiting you from living out your faith to your heart’s content.

Stop confusing religious privileges with religious freedoms. They are very different animals.

And please stop the horrible confusion of American civil religion with the Christian gospel.

I fear that you’ve set your grandfather spinning in his grave.

The 75th Anniversary of Nuclear War

Today is the 75th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States remains the only nation to have used

Hiroshima after the bomb

nuclear weapons in warfare.

Brett Wilkins, an independent journalist who often writes for Common Dreams, has a good article at Antiwar.com which tells the story, I suspect, from a new perspective for many readers. It is entitled “Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Every American should also know and remember that we used nuclear weapons offensively when it was unnecessary.

With the passage of time comes more and more evidence about the past.

Over the years, a great deal of evidence has come to light underscoring the

Nagasaki, September, 1945.

fact that almost everything Americans have always been told about America’s justification for wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth in two nuclear conflagrations are lies.

In fact, not only has the story always been false, it was known to be false at the time but was perpetuated as a part of a US domestic propaganda campaign.

Below is an excerpt of Wilkins’ excellent article:

Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.

“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”

Read the entire article here.

Ilhan Omar Continues to Speak Truth to Power

Rep. Ilhan Omar is someone I deeply admire. She is a woman of principle who does not hesitate (as far as I can tell) to speak out on behalf of the

Rep. Ilhan Omar

oppressed, whether in this country or abroad.

Rep. Omar is up for reelection in November. But as someone who defends the rights of the Palestinian people to live freely as equal citizens in the land of Palestine; as someone who condemns Zionist Israel’s continuous oppression of the Palestinians, she is coming under heavy attack from pro-Zionist, pro-Israel lobbying organizations in this country.

This opposition includes a growing number of death threats.

The online journal Mondoweiss has a recent article entitled “The Israel lobby has spent $2 million to defeat Ilhan Omar.”

With all the baseless hysteria in the media nowadays worrying about Russian election interference, the continuing Big-Money election influencing efforts on behalf of Israel make other complaints pale in comparison.

But don’t say that out loud in public. You will be attacked as an antisemite by someone connected to AIPAC.

Here is an excerpt:

But the reaction to Omar has been especially hostile. Many charged that the furious response to her comments quickly devolved into Islamophobic attacks on one of the nation’s first Muslim Congresswomen. Trump capitalized on last year’s uproar, leading chants of “send them back” at his rallies, fanning phony outrage and prompting serious death threats.

The lobby and its allies have zeroed in on Omar for several reasons, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights attorney and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Omar “unabashedly” has called out the lobby, supports BDS, has taken up Israeli human rights abuses, “and hasn’t backed down regardless of how many times folks have come at her with charges of antisemitism.”

“She has come out strongly in support of Palestinian human rights and she has not been afraid of calling what Israel is doing in terms of its control over Palestinian lives ‘apartheid’ — that’s what sets her apart,” Hassan said.

Still, other lawmakers and progressives are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel, and they haven’t faced an onslaught of attacks from the president, his supporters, Israel and centrist Democrats.

Hassan pointed to Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum, a white woman who represents a district next to Omar’s, who has similarly denounced Israel as an “apartheid” state but doesn’t face the same criticism.

That’s likely because Omar is an African-American, Muslim woman, Hassan said.

“She presents an easier target for some folks who want to delegitimize that kind of speech about Israel in terms of accountability and conditioning aid and those kinds of issues,” Hassan added.

Beyond that, Omar has become a leader of the pro-Palestine progressive movement, and knocking her out of office in August would represent a major win for Israel. The lobby’s willingness to spend over $2 million on that objective highlights its importance.

You can read the entire article here.

Gideon Levy: Making Hypocrisy and Violence Sound Nice and Inescapable

Gideon Levy has a new piece in Haaretz newspaper calling for national self-awareness in Israel.

Gideon Levy

Mr. Levy is a modern day prophet; the lone voice calling for national repentance in the Israeli wilderness.

Although this article focuses on the retired general, and now leading Israeli politician Benny Gantz, you don’t need to know much about Gantz or Israeli politics to grasp Levy’s point.

Think of the way our government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia so the Saudis can continue their treacherous attacks in Yemen.

Or look at the Federal agents attacking demonstrators with bats, gas, and

Benny Gantz

pepper spray across this country. All in the name of “restoring order.”

Here is an excerpt:

What the state can do, the individual cannot. Let’s leave aside the jargon where everything the other side does is terrorism and everything Israel does is for the sake of security. It’s common wisdom that what the state does is never considered violence, only self-defense. The state and the army can act as violently as they please, as much as they want, and go as crazy as they want. The state will always do this in the name of lofty values of defense. An individual who acts violently is an anarchist, a serial disrupter of law and order. There are laws that are also supposed to apply to countries, but Israel decided a long time ago that it is not bound by such laws.

And yet, is it possible that in one breath you can threaten violence and stand against it? Knowing the impact that state violence has on the way individuals act? One needs a special lack of self-awareness or a special degree of double standards to make such a claim. What Israel threatens to do in Lebanon is immeasurably more violent than anything the most dangerous anarchist could imagine. Israel’s actions in Lebanon have sowed much more anarchy and destruction than any demonstration. And so Gantz, and all his colleagues have no moral right to speak against violence. It’s almost the only language they know and it’s their bread and butter.

You can read the entire article here.

Trump Appears to Believe in “Mass Human Sacrifice”

President Trump torpedoed son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s, plan for a federally organized, covid testing program because he believed that it would primarily benefit “blue states” (the states that he did not carry in the 2016 election).

A recent investigative article at Vanity Fair explains what happened. I have posted an excerpt below:

Despite the Rockefeller Foundation’s round-the-clock work to guide the U.S. to a nationwide testing system essential to reopening, the foundation has not yet been able to bend the most important curve of all: the Trump administration’s determined disinterest in big federal action.

On July 15, in a video call with journalists, Dr. Shah looked visibly frustrated. The next day, the Rockefeller Foundation would be releasing a follow-up report: It called on the federal government to commit $75 billion more to testing and contact tracing, work to break through the testing bottlenecks that had led to days-long delays in the delivery of test results, and vastly increase more rapid point-of-care tests.

Though speaking in a typically mild-mannered tone, Shah delivered a stark warning: “We fear the fall will be worse than the spring.” He added, putting it bluntly: “America is not near the top of countries who have handled COVID-19 effectively.”

Just three days later, news reports revealed that the Trump administration was trying to block any new funding for testing and contact tracing in the new coronavirus relief package being hammered out in Congress. As one member of the Rockefeller coalition said of the administration’s response, “We’re dealing with a schizophrenic organization. Who the hell knows what’s going on? It’s just insanity.”

You can read the entire story here.

President Trump’s mismanagement of the US pandemic have been largely motivated (above and beyond his gross incompetence) by his partisan efforts at reelection.

Members of Kushner’s task force reveal that Trump was disinterested in their plan because he believed that “blue states” would be hardest hit by covid.

In other words, if he didn’t carry a state in the 2016 election, he didn’t feel the need to help the people who didn’t vote for him.

Let that fact sink in…

Numerous outlets are reporting this story in one form or another (here, here, here, here, and here for only a few examples).

Ironically, the current resurgence of the virus is now hitting red states the hardest, and seems to be a major cause for the current nose-dive in Trump’s approval ratings.

Now that the “mass human sacrifices” are including Republican voters, what will Trump do?

Personally, I am not holding my breath. Trump remains Trump, a gross narcissist who is too ignorant and stupid to care about anyone but himself, even when the nation is dying.