Apparently it is fine to combine open bigotry with deceit in political advertisements. Who knew?!
In his latest Iowa ad, designed to appeal to the very same evangelical Christians who elevated Mick Huckabee in first place in 2008, Rick Perry goes after President Obama for his “war on religion”. He states:
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
In a way, the script speaks for itself, so there’s little need to tear it limb from limb like a beast. All I’d say is that this ad is very telling, not only about Rick Perry’s personal beliefs, but also about the state of his campaign. If Perry was still a frontrunner, he wouldn’t need to go slumming like this. He’s walking dead.
(Source: youtube.com)
Christopher Hitchens accepting the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston 2011.
We have the same job that we have always had, to say as thinking people and as humans that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss will be yours.
(Source: newstatesman.com)
Breivik, the anti-Zionist
“2083: A European Declaration of Independence” – the manifesto of the Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik – is a baggy 1,500-page document, made up in large part of other people’s essays on the Islamic threat to Europe. It can be ascertained from it that his ideology centres about a vehement opposition to multicultural, so-deemed ‘cultural Marxist’ and the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe.
He wishes, amongst other things, to ban the Qu’ran and other parts of the Islamic canon, outlaw the construction of mosques, end mass Muslim immigration to Norway and prevent the accession of nations with large Muslim populations including Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina to NATO and the EU. However, the element that would immediately appear most disturbing, and have the effect of curdling Friends of Israel’s blood, is that he is a self-described Zionist, or more accurately Israeli nationalist, and a passionate and zealous one at that.
Breivik’s purported Israeli nationalism is something entirely different from everything we might recognise as Zionism. Although Herzl’s manifesto was indeed a call to Jewish nationalism, it was written within the context of fin de siècle European movements to create new nation-states which united all peoples which belonged to a certain nationality or linguistic group, such as Germans and Italians.
By contrast, the Oslo bomber’s manifesto explicitly rejects more liberal or general interpretations of Zionism familiar to the United States and Western Europe. When addressing the question of Nazism, Breivik that the “so-called liberal Jews” were disloyal, presumably during the interbellum at a time when calls to emigrate to Palestine increased in volume, “similar to the liberal Jews today that opposes nationalism/Zionism and supports multiculturalism”[sic].
“Jews that support multiculturalism today”, he adds, “are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism as they are to us (emphasis added). So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists”. His conclusions are draped in the language of European anti-Semitism, echoing the calls made in Soviet Russia after the Second World War to target ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.
Read more: http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/breivik_the_anti-zionist_20110727/
One Nation Under God
by Lisa Miller, Newsweek, December 9 2010.
Gay marriage and abortion used to predictably drive religious-right voters to the polls. As recently as 2004, when evangelicals were credited with the reelection of George W. Bush, sex and sexual mores defined the sides in the culture wars. But no longer. As the economy has become the political priority for liberals and conservatives alike, the traditional family-values issues have been blunted—not in their importance to individuals but as weapons in the political theater. What’s motivating religious conservatives now, says Campolo, is a vision of America as God’s own special country, and free-market capitalism as crucial to the nation’s flourishing. Everyone who doesn’t see things this way, according to this perspective, is a socialist or a communist—“Pinkos who are subverting America under the auspices of the president of the United States,” he says. “The marriage between evangelicalism and patriotic nationalism is so strong that anybody who is raising questions about loyalty to the old, laissez-faire capitalist system is ex post facto unpatriotic, un-American, and by association non-Christian.” Support for Obama, in other words, equals an abandonment of American principles equals godlessness. And the spokesman for this movement, adds Campolo, is the Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. “There’s no question in our minds about that.”
Do you see what mankind sees?
“God has spoken to me clearly and guided my hand each step of the rescue. He wanted the miners to be rescued and I am His instrument.” - - Pastor Carlos Parra Diaz.
“I believe this was a test. I believe God does test people.” - - Mario Sepulveda.
Popular interest the world over has been captured by the sixty-nine day tale, of the captivity and rescue from the ‘bowels of the earth’ of thirty-three Chilean miners. The singularity of cross-border news coverage – from the BBC to CNN and onto Al Jazeera and the rest – was a sight unseen since the fall of Saddam Hussein, or the darkest hours of September 11 2001.
The blanket coverage has sounded a distinctly joyous note, highlighting the individual and collective resolve of the miners, and the ingenuity and dexterity of the team of engineers who worked around the clock to free them. The President too – who for his part has wallowed in the glory of the moment, milking it until the udders run dry – has come out of this whole affair rather well.
Casting an ominous shadow in the background though, are the clerical voices seeking to diminish the achievements of man and retelling the heroic story as a parable and an act of God. “What matters is that God is acting through human ingenuity to rescue these men,” the Catholic Bishop Quintana told reporters, his temporary flock. Riving, hissing and spitting venom, they are looking to poison everything, resorting to outrageous mendacity to stand in the footlights, if for only a moment.
The saddest aspect their part of this tale is the influence they clearly had over the miners. The first to surface and be reunited with the sun and the sky said that he believed that this was a ‘test’. Such a statement, as sad as it is to hear coming from the mouth of a fellow mammal, speaks more to the pastors and bishops who decamped around the mine, whispering nothings into the ears of a captured, desperate and impressionable audience. A man who can tell another that an all-powerful and supposedly all-loving entity imprisoned you hundreds of feet below the surface, for three months, as a test of faith!, is someone of the lowest moral character.
Such a deed coming from a clergyman ought not to come as a surprise anyway, if one is to glance at the holy texts they inherit their scruples from. The God of the Bible – imbibed as He is with human characteristics having been created by man four-thousand years ago, and then developed by the followers of the Nazarene some time after his supposed death by thieving traits from the deities of Greece and Rome – is as Gore Vidal notes in Julian not just “jealous, as the Jews say, but evil”.
The sort of test that Mario Sepulveda hinted at was as merciless as the suffering of Job in the Old Testament, whose story has come to embody in the eyes of Christians giving up anything for the love of the Lord. But for the free-thinking, rational and nonreligious beings of this world, his misery occurred at the hand of a vengeful, petty and unforgiving god.
God allowed Satan to take everything from Job; “all that he hath is in thy power.” God permitted the murder of his sons, and slaughter of his livestock and menservants; He plagued him with sore boils “from the sole of his foot unto his crown”. Job was tormented and heavy with sorrow, and questioned the very nature of God (this chapter is better portrayed lyrically by Joni Mitchell than in any pious book of nonsense). “Do you have eyes?” he screamed to the vacant heavens, “do you see what mankind sees? Why have you soured and curdled me? Oh you tireless watcher! What have I done to you? That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?”
In order to have his life returned to him, he first has to subjugate himself to God. “Behold, I am vile,” he repents, going back to our second-rate biblical source, “what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” It is an acknowledgement that this creator, or more accurately destroyer, is the omnipotent one – “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding?” – and that man must always be secondary, deferential to God. It is a sickening thought that the sort of world these priests and bishops would have us living in would be akin to a totalitarian state, where knowledge is always in the hands of the great leader.
So what should be one of the truly joyous stories of human resolve and ingenuity is being debased by a huddle of sinister holy men. By labelling it a miracle and introducing the irrational, as even one topographer dared to do, the achievements of man are doing diminished, as the event is deemed unexplainable. Moreover calling their suffering a test is wicked and cruel, and renders their existence meaningless outside of the realm of this ruthless god.
See this event for what is it – a remarkable triumph for mankind, as individuals and as a collective, in the face of natural disaster. Leave your god out of it.
All biblical quotations come from Authorised King James Version of The Bible, as published by Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 2008).
