Politics, Religion and Sports: Forbidden Topics

I do not know if I am the only person worried about this, but here goes.

There seems to be a massive controversy about building a mosque near the site of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York City.  This is bothering people so much that somebody has asked the president to say something.

Well of course the man said something.  And of course his words were “measured.”  People seem to have forgotten that the country was founded on religious freedom.  This bit about the Founding Fathers (and mothers — yes they did as much as they could) intending the USA being only for Christians is pretty much rubbish. 

Was George Washington a Christian?  Thomas Jefferson wrote in his private journal, Feb. 1800 — “Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself.”

And because he admired the morals of Jesus, Jefferson actually rewrote his own version of the Bible without any mention of God or the divinity of Jesus.

Even most Christians do not consider Jefferson a Christian.

If Jefferson is considered a man of Reason, then he certainly was subordinate to Benjamin Franklin, America’s Renaissance Man who was the paragon of reason.

However, Dr. Joseph Priestley, an intimate friend of Franklin, wrote in his autobiography: “It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin’s  general good character and great influence should have been an  unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did  to make others unbelievers.”

Nowhere in the Constitution do we have a single mention of  Christianity, God, Jesus, or any Supreme Being.

But now we have an outcry because some people think that it  is not a good idea to have a mosque near the site of where  our nation suffered it’s most horrendous terrorist attack in history.  Those terrorists were identified with the Islamic religion.

Prior to this attack, the worst act of terrorism in our nation was perpetrated by another religious extremist.  Professed Christian Timothy McVeigh killed hundreds of innocent men, women and  children when he blew up a truck bomb near the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK.  I lived and worked in that city at that time, and I dealt with the victims and survivors of that  attack.

McVeigh had lived (and perhaps had help from other residents) in Elohim City, OK —  primitive settlement of Christian fundamentalists that shut out many “worldly” pleasures and experiences like TV  (there was reportedly only one telephone in Elohim City at the time McVeigh was  living there).

The attack on the World Trade Center dwarfed the Oklahoma City bombing in scale, but the motivations behind each seem to be  similar — People with a strong religious belief are outraged by the actions of the US Government and resort to horrific acts of  destruction (to make a point or for retribution — who knows?)

Yet it would be ridiculous to insist that no Christian churches could be constructed in Oklahoma City, and to declare Christianity an  enemy of our government.

Not all Christians are deranged and violent, like Timothy McVeigh,  and most intelligent people I know have figured out by now that not all Moslem folks are suicide bombers.  They have a whole lot of different sects, and a whole lot of people in America who are distinguished professionals and such, and mosques in a lot of cities.

We drove by a beautiful mosque in a community in central California just recently.

Okay, I don’t agree with everything it says on this website, but they are trying hard to invite visitors, explain themselves, and be neighborly.

Like Ben Franklin, I sometimes wonder what religion does for civilization anyway.  But I am at least as worried about anybody trying to do the “holy war” bit, or saying they have the best religion.  Even though it was a bit before my time, I know that the Crusades were quite a mess.

Apparently Pres. Obama tried to “clarify” his remarks, and our friends at the New York Times decided he was all too deep into controversy.

I have pretty much had it.  The American people have been lied to, consistently, for so many years, about so many things, I get angry. But unlike some people — a very few, fortunately — I am not about to vent my anger and frustration with violence on a massive scale.

I am seeing America descend into an “us and them” mentality.  This is starting to remind me of a visit to the King Arthur-themed tourist attraction called  “Medieval Times,” where you eat chicken with your  fingers while watching knights jousting and sword fighting.

When you enter, you are given a colored flag to carry and you are seated in a section of the arena where all the others who carry “your” colors are. You are instructed to cheer for the knights who wear “your” colors and to hiss and boo at knights wearing any other color.  I think there were five or six different colors represented — perhaps representatives of different countries.

In the excitement of thundering hooves and clashing swords and falling bodies (those stunt men are really good) you find yourself  cheering like  crazy for “your” knights.  You forget these are probably just college students trying to earn some tuition money and that you were arbitrarily assigned to their team.

You identify with them. You belong to a group of like-minded enthusiasts.

It’s mass hysteria and mob psychology.

It’s not that different from being born arbitrarily in some country, or being born arbitrarily to parents of some race or religion.

Conservative/good and Liberal/bad.

Christian/good  and Muslim/wrong.

We have turned our lives into sports contests.

Religion is pretty puzzling — any religion.  There are paradoxes and strange things that have to be accepted on faith because there is no logical reason.

Politics isn’t much better.  Is a Republican who accepts campaign money  from a big multi-national corporation any different from a Democrat who accepts money from the same people?  Did anyone really look at the Senate voting records of John McCain and Barrack Obama before the 2008 election — as I did — and see that they were virtually identical?  Yet people are shocked that the Democratic president has carried on many of the same policies as his Republican predecessor — and kept many of the same people in their positions.

Sports is something we can easily understand.  It’s so much easier than religion or politics, so everybody seems to benefit when we guide people to treat religion and politics like sports.

Except does anybody really benefit?

Life has never been this simple and it is not now.  We have become a nation of reductionists, who take our political analysis from talk-show hosts, and take every issue and make it a “yes” or “no.”

My political insights are relatively recent.  Once again, my husband has managed to steer me in a really important way.  He asked me if I could sit through a documentary on Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower behind “The Pentagon Papers” that told what was really going on in the Viet Nam war (HINT: The government wasn’t telling the truth).I believe the man was (and is) a saint — every bit as much as those legendary saints who spread the gospel and brought the Good News to their people in their own time.

And although that was about 40 years ago, we are facing the same situation today, with the so called “Wiki-Leaks” that the government is scrambling so hard to try to hide, to disprove and to discredit.

Our government lies to us.  Not just campaign promises, but about the economy, the wars, the disasters such as the BP oil spill. Every time the lips of  the president open, I now ask what deep secrets, what hidden agendas,  are pulling the words from his lips.

Since the administration of Harry Truman, every president (Republican and Democrat) lied to the US public about the situation in Viet Nam. Ellsberg was an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense when he started  being exposed to the truth — and he could not morally live with it.

This was before the internet, so he had to smuggle Top Secret documents out of his office and photocopy them and replace them again without anybody knowing — until those documents started appearing in The New York Times, the Washington Post and every other major newspaper in the country.

Without modern technology, it was a Herculean task to show America  that what they were being told about the war in Vietnam was just not true. The “secret” Pentagon Papers were published.  And everyone knew this. In black and white print in front of their noses.

Then the worst thing that could have happened went and happened.

America forgot.

We went to war in Iraq using excuses that proved not to be true.  We  invaded Afghanistan because the people who flew planes into our Twin Towers were allegedly part of a terrorist organization whose sympathizers and supporters were in that country (although the 19 hijackers involved in the actual plane crashes on Sept. 11 were from Saudi Arabia).

Every president since Harry Truman has lied to us about how our dollars relate to wars.

We have blown our economy like an alcoholic gambler on payday.  Our wars have drained our economy — which was operating at a surplus prior to invading Iraq — until our banks fail, our stock market crashes, our automobile industry goes bankrupt and a huge part of our population is unemployed.

And the government can’t help them because our money has gone to a “GOOD” cause — fighting like the Home Team in a ball game, going for a victory.

Instead of people asking why and how of our government, all I seem to find  are news sites filled with questions about religion.

We are easily distracted, being trained to react to the “threat” of gay people being allowed to marry each other, or the “threat” of a non-Christian religion being allowed to build a worship center in a certain location.

I feel duped.  I feel we are being diverted from nuts and bolts issues by someone pushing our emotional buttons.  Faith is not the problem, as in California, gay rights are not the problem.

If you have been lucky enough to find a faith you believe to be the only correct one in the world, practice it.  You can invite me to dinner and tell me about it; that’s fine and it has certainly happened to me before.  I believe the Constitution gives you the right to this exercise of religion, and I served in the US Army to defend your rights.

If you are lucky enough to have someone you love, just hold them close tonight.  And do not let your government tell you that you do not have the right, because if you are a citizen of the USA, there is nothing that can take your civil rights away from you.  There are no second- class citizens in our country — we all get the entire Bill of Rights.

My president has lots more important things to worry about than mosque building.  Let’s leave him alone on this one and hope he expends some effort on the things that are really wrong in our country.