Short, ugly, and forever forgotten ...

The failure of gods, and those who claim to be the followers of gods, to make living fuller and better rather than shriveled and harder, is all the proof anyone should need to grasp that the gods do not exist. It hasn't worked out that way of course. World over people are following religion into hate, war, death, and personal denigration and debasement. The middle east is a cesspool of Islamic inhumanity and its residents are, by far, the most religiously degraded members of the human family at the moment. Still, much of humanity is following a similar path. In the US it is the Christians who are on the leading edge of evil.

American Christianity took its hard right turn toward doing harm when American Christians decided that coupling faith with political power was the way to “save” the nation. I was a member of the church back then, an ardent and committed follower of Jesus. Most of my doctrine came from the words and stories attributed to Jesus, which focused almost exclusively on how a person should live their own life, and included how they treated others. Compassion was at the base of it, along with tolerance, an effort to understand. A genuine and selfless love lie at the foundation for it all.

The “Old Testament” was sacred of course, but as the background story of history that focused human hope on the teachings that Jesus shared. In a like manor most of the rest of the New Testament” was expository, also sacred, but exposing the efforts of people to put those same teachings into practice. And, quite frankly, those efforts often seemed contradictory, sometimes deeply flawed, and clearly influenced by the context of the societies they inhabited. Paul's fondness for the imagery of slavery and his relentless misogyny were clearly the marks of a man limited by his society of some 2000 years in the past. The Bible was a source of wisdom and understanding in all things spiritual. No one with any sense suggested it as a text book or "owner's manual".

For some reason, along with the lust of political power came “literal” interpretations of scripture. That seemed okay at first, how could a literal interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself”, the Sermon on the Mount, or the story of the Good Samaritan, go wrong? An American society measuring up to the standards demanded by the sorting of nations into goats and sheep would be a testament to just how far a human society could go toward justice and peace. But those weren't the parts of the Bible the American Church took literally. In fact the Church leadership spent more and more time demanding that the stories of the Old Testament be taken literally, and less and less time bothering, if they bothered at all, with the stories of and about Jesus. Stories once told mostly to children were insisted on as facts of history. Anyone who dared disagree was declared an enemy of god's own word. Every Sunday morning was more hate, more intolerance, more anger, and an ever increasing call to do battle the very people Jesus had called us to love. It wasn't long before the Church was a place I didn't understand, didn't fit, and could no longer endure.

I often wondered why the backlash of those who followed the teachings ascribed to Jesus, against American Christianity, never materialized. Many of my believing friends became professionals (for lack of a better term) in the Church. Ministers and Preachers and the wives of Ministers and Preachers; some going on to be Professors in theological seminaries and universities. In just a few years people who once favored the story of Jesus and the women brought before him to be judged, took to the pulpit to judge everyone from gay people to political liberals to unmarried mothers. Eventually even the poor and the homeless became targets of contempt. Churches grew bigger and more expensive while the preachers took to limousines, Rolex, and TV. I don't recall hearing of a single one of the people I knew rejecting this bastardized Christianity and walking away. But now I think I know why the backlash never came.

Those who would have been true to the teachings of Jesus, who would have lead the revolt against those who turned the Church toward power and greed, are simply not Christians anymore. They left the church, abandoning faith as the central theme of life. The demands of the Literalist and the Judge are those of nonsense and evil. But grasping that leads to the understanding that all of Christian doctrine is based on mythology rather than truth. The Fall, the Curse, Hell, blood sacrifice, the very idea of a god-man, the doctrines of Christianity are irreconcilable with the ideas implicit in many of the teachings of Jesus. Humility, love, understanding, a desire for truth, forgiveness and compassion are the truth of his doctrines. Many of the “Real Christians” followed the teachings of Jesus out of the church and away from the faith.

I suppose I was one of them. But the distance between me and American Christianity is now so great that it is hard to remember, or even imagine, that I once considered myself one of them. There are no gods. Humanity's only hope is to listen to truth reviled in the teaching of the best of its teachers. Among those being some of the words shared by the character of Jesus. Our mythology holds truth and light, offering guidance passed down through the generations. Religion, however, has always been completely compromised. The demand that one worship and accept as an unquestionable authority both a “god” and those who claim to represent same, has as its foundation the lust for power. That lust is the basis for all evil, and the very act of worship, of bowing a knee without even the idea of questioning the rightness of that being worshiped, twists and poisons the heart.

The lust for power is resurgent in the world and thus, so is religion. Yet love is the very opposite of wielding power. When the backlash, the true revolution, the real revival of the human spirit comes - if it comes - it will show itself as the rejection of the power of one person over another. It will include, and maybe start with, the rejection, of religion.

If it doesn't come human kind will have a short, ugly, and forever forgotten history in the cosmos.

What we like

With the Republican sweep of the mid-term elections it was inevitable that calls for impeaching the President would follow. Republicans will not impeach Obama for any legitimate reason, but that does not mean he should not be removed from office. Unfortunately, the reason he should go is equally applicable to everyone who would be doing the impeaching; the massive, criminal defrauding of the American taxpayer during the economic failure engineered by Wall Street, and the subsequent Government endorsement and cover-up of those crimes. If Nixon was rightly driven from office for covering up the criminal activity around the Watergate break-in (and he was) then Obama – and Bush before him – are equally liable for the criminal activity of Wall Street.

That criminal activity is well documented but is as much “out in the open” as it is ever going to get. Reports of the crimes are covered just enough to support the illusion that "someone is doing something about it". The Republican propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after Obama as their need is to protect the interests of the corporations and banks. But they can claim that Obama is a bad guy and thus paint the Democrats as bad guys as well. The Democratic propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after corporations and banks because they need to protect Obama. But they can claim that Wall Street and the corporations are the bad guys, and thus paint the Republicans as bad guys also. Which, as far as the American people are concerned, is about perfect. We do not want much more than some vague allusions to what is really making our political / economic system do what it does, but we do want a reason to pick a side. Which makes a demented kind of sense.

No one wants this can of worms (snakes really) opened and pored through mass media into the public's lap. If that happens the entire greed driven, crony capitalism that is the foundation of American society is likely to crash. Americans like greed driven, crony capitalism. It feeds our lust for “things” and massages the illusion we can all get rich with some work and some luck. It makes us feel special, so special in fact, that we have incorporated capitalism into our religion. God, we claim, is a free market kind of guy who has rewarded the rich for their enterprising ways and punished the poor for being “takers”. We are, at the same time, both victims of a corrupted system, and its biggest supporters. Cherry picking the propaganda to support our own version of greed and thievery, we pick a party and vote to keep the system exactly the way that is is.

What I see now is an America that is something akin to a pure criminal enterprise, one in which we are all complicit.  America's collective ego will simply not allow us to face the depth of corruption that has overwhelmed our society and the part we play in it. The Supreme Court's “Citizens United” ruling, Obama and Holder's refusal to prosecute anyone on Wall Street for crimes clearly committed, and the America public's refusal to engage corruption as a primary issue in any election, would have us all indited at the hands of any just court in the universe.  We are all supporting criminal activity, but none want to admit that we are the bad guys as well.

Eventually such a system has to collapse. There really is no honor among thieves. Betrayals, double dealings, secret pacts, hidden and not-so-hidden violence, fear, intimidation, and threats, are the hallmarks of our political / economic system and, often, of our personal dealings with each other. No nation jails as large a segment of its population as does America. No society happily endures our level of gun violence. No nation comes near to matching our personal consumption of resources and energy.

The truth is nearly impossible to winnow out of the chaff but that is actually fine with most of us. We are really not interested in exposing the system for what it is. It is our system. We like it. We vote for it. We claim it is the best system the world has ever seen and, given half an excuse, will impose it on any other nation by brute force. It has our enduring and unassailable support. And we will go down with it.