|
|
AMERICA SPEAKS:
Do Not Fear G-d
By Simon Jacobson
Admission: I voted for President Bush. (I hear the murmuring. Please read on before your unsubscribe). But it was
not a vote for Bush as much as it was a vote against someone else.
That someone was not John Kerry.
My vote was against the liberal establishment of the East and West Coasts that showed utter contempt for faith
in G-d – my faith and the faith of millions of others.
And I believe (faith, again) that I am not alone. I submit that the election was determined by one key factor:
Americans simply could not tolerate the relentless attack we have been witnessing against the faith of Mr. Bush
– not because they support the President and all his policies, but because in the American consciousness there
is a profound sense that faith cannot be so utterly discredited.
The icing on the cake was a New York Times Magazine cover story a few weeks ago (Without a Doubt, by Ron Suskind)
depicting Mr. Bush as a man whose decisions are determined not through reason and political process, but through
Divine inspiration.
He describes the support for or against Bush as a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and
true believers, reason and religion. He quotes Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a
treasury official for the first President Bush: The instinct President Bush is “always talking about is this sort
of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. He truly believes he's on a mission from God.
Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which
there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith.”
Give me a break. George W. is a politician not a saint. He climbed the ladder of power through political machinations
not religious ones. I’ve seen a tzaddik. Bush is no tzaddik. Yet, ironically, many in the media have turned Bush
into a man of absolute faith, and Kerry into a man of reason.
Once the liberal press painted the picture in this radical fashion, pitting the election as one for or against
G-d, the people of faith in this country came out in-masse to vote for faith.
Not that Mr. Bush is necessarily a man of G-d. Frankly, I find it quite hilarious that the left have made Bush
into a Divine man. Why Bush earned that right, only G-d knows. But he has. And that is to his credit. Perhaps it
is due to his faith.
But the issue here is not about President Bush. It’s about faith. This country is fundamentally built on the principle
etched into our currency: In G-d we Trust. And that’s what this election was ultimately about.
I am cynical enough to not believe in the personalities and personality cults created around candidates. In this
mass media, “sound-bite” era, you can only feel sad at the way politicians are marketed, how the campaigns are
geared to manipulate our impressions, not much different than the marketing of, say, toothpaste. So, one can hardly
expect to know what candidates truly stand for.
Americans in particular like to root for heroes – in sports, in entertainment, and why not in politics. People
therefore forge personal allegiances to the candidates, projecting upon them their own lives, just as they may
fantasize about movie stars. Heroes and villains are easily created, and then perpetuated. For some Bush is almost
like a Nazi. For others Bush is the hero and Kerry the selfish liberal. Frankly, all marketing clichés.
Don’t buy into all the messages sold to us through multi-million dollar PR campaigns.
On a serious note, however, getting beyond the cheers and the cries following the election results, I for one am
not taking a stand – pro-Bush or pro-Kerry. They both have their flaws. This article is not meant to support or
criticize the President. It’s meant to address a larger issue that has emerged.
What will go down in history, long after Bush and Kerry are forgotten, is the consensus. Close to 60 million people
made a statement that they want G-d in their lives. When America is challenged, when it is under duress and in
crisis, it gravitates to its roots: That we are here because of Divine providence; that all men are created equal,
which guarantees us unalienable rights. Take away G-d, and you take away the unalienable rights. Because “rights”
on their own are alienable, subjective and arbitrary. And that’s what the election was ultimately about.
The attacks on Mr. Bush’s faith forced the American public to respond. It’s quite amazing to hear that a majority
in the state of Ohio chose to overlook the loss of thousands of their jobs, and instead voted on the grounds of
moral values and character. What does that tell you?
It will be fascinating to see how the New York Times will cover this. Don’t be at all surprised to hear how some,
in their ongoing contempt, will continue to dismiss the morality issue and argue that people were basically hoodwinked;
or that the war in Iraq caused people to support the incumbent; or some other excuse how the public was manipulated
to elect Mr. Bush.
All you have to do is read Gary Wills article, The Day the Enlightenment Went Out, in the Times of November 4th.
He attributes Bush’s victory to the brilliance of Carl Rove. Rove “calculated that the religious conservatives,
if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many
more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.”
He goes on to explain that America, with its “fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance,
fear of and hatred for modernity” resembles Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists more than it does the
European countries. Ann that’s why “the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious
to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.”
Based on this logic, of course, the majority of Americans elected Mr. Bush because they are narrow-minded fundamentalists,
who have extinguished the “enlightenment.”
Some liberals will never concede the possibility that people authentically believe in G-d, and that this faith
may have profound merit.
Interestingly, it’s you liberals that forced people to suddenly confront the issue of G-d – as if Bush was G-d’s
representative, and the other side was not. Bigggg mistake. Had you not been so vehement and contemptuous you may
have had a victory…
And what about the power of a majority – one of the cornerstones of a democracy?
I have a friend who was waxing eloquent about the beauty of democracy. Confident in Kerry’s victory, he was lauding
the strength and virtue of majority rule. “It’s the people – the majority of the people – that ultimately decides.
Numbers never lie.” After Kerry’s loss by close to 4 million of the popular vote, this friend tells me in a deriding
tone: “What can we do about the fact that America has been taken hostage by the narrow minded “religious right,”
and Bush’s campaign has brainwashed the South and the Midwest?”…
What happened to the power of majority? Is the majority only right when they agree with YOU?!
I can’t but help wonder whether the liberal movement today just an outgrowth of the French Enlightenment’s disdain
for "la canaille” [the rabble], a phrase used to denigrate the masses.
“As for the canaille,” Voltaire told d'Alembert, “I have no concern with it; it will always remain canaille.” And
it would remain canaille because it was uneducable. The people would never have “the time and the capacity to instruct
themselves; they will die of hunger before they become philosophers.... We have never pretended to enlighten shoemakers
and servants; that is the job of the apostles.”
The thinkers of the Parisian Enlightenment felt that the people could not be educated because they could not be
enlightened; and they could not be enlightened because they were incapable of the kind of reason that the philosophes
took to be the essence of enlightenment. They were mired instead in the prejudices, superstitions, and irrationalities
of religion. This was the great enemy - l'infâme. Religion, Voltaire wrote to Diderot, “must be destroyed
among respectable people and left to the canaille large and small, for whom it was made.” Diderot agreed. The poor
were “imbeciles” in matters of religion, “too idiotic - bestial - too miserable, and too busy” to enlighten themselves.
They would never change: “The quantity of the canaille is just about always the same.”
Diderot made it clear that “the general mass of mankind can neither follow nor comprehend this march of the human
spirit.” “We must reason about all things because man is not just an animal but an animal who reasons; ... whoever
refuses to search for that truth renounces the very nature of man and should be treated by the rest of his species
as a wild beast; and once the truth has been discovered, whoever refuses to accept it is either insane or wicked
and morally evil.” Diderot believed that we must distrust the judgment of the “multitude” in matters of reason
and philosophy because “its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason and prejudice.” “The multitude,”
he concluded, is “ignorant and stupefied.”
Is this obnoxious elitism the root of today’s liberal paternalism and the welfare state, as Gertrude Himmelfarb
argues in a new book, The Roads to Modernity?
After reading and hearing the passionate arguments being made against the faith-based presidency of Mr. Bush, you
wonder who is more fundamentalist: the faithful or the men of “reason”? Edward Gibbon, the 18th century British
historian (far from an orthodox religious believer) jibed against those French thinkers who “preached the tenets
of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”
In another article (The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment) Himmelfarb quotes Tocqueville,
who was speaking of the French revolutionaries - but he might have been of the philosophes - when he said that
their “salient characteristic” was a loss of faith that upset their “mental equilibrium.” They adored the human
intellect and had supreme confidence in its power to transform laws, institutions, and customs. But the intellect
they adored was only their own. “I could mention several,” Tocqueville sardonically observed, “who despised the
public almost as heartily as they despised the Deity.” This was very different, he added, from the respect shown
by Englishmen and Americans for the opinions of the majority of their countrymen. “Their intellect is proud and
self-reliant, but never insolent; and it has led to liberty, while ours has done little but invent new forms of
servitude.”
Have some Americans regressed to the French form of so-called “enlightenment”?
Truth be told, I have both a skeptic and believer inside of me. But just as I don’t allow the believer to silence
the skeptic, I also don’t allow the skeptic to invalidate the believer. That would be driven neither by reason,
skepticism or faith; it would be plain dishonest.
One can fully understand the paranoia and fear of a religious right taking control and dogmatically imposing their
religious positions. After all, over the last two millennia hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in
the name of religion. The intolerance, tyranny and oppression of the church, ruling with absolute authority had
created a “religious fatigue,” which, coupled with the advancements in open-minded reason and science, finally
came to a climax with the “enlightenment” and the powerful rebellion against religion and religious authority (at
least in its formal form).
And today we don’t need any historical reminders of the destruction wreaked in the name of religion. Fundamentalist
Muslims have waged bloody war against the infidels of the West – essentially a replay of the Christian Crusades
of the first millennium.
In light of all this, the resistance to religious control by government is quite understandable. Indeed, the powerful
fear is in direct proportion to the intensity of church control and the millions of gallons of blood shed in the
name of religion for so many years. After being so severely burned by corruption and abuse, there exists, for good
reason, a deep embedded suspicion of any governmental authority advocating religious beliefs.
Thus, the severe reaction to President Bush and his faith based initiatives.
However, we must never allow our own fears (even legitimate ones) to cloud our vision. Abuse has the power to cause
us to “throw out the baby with the bathwater,” and run away even from healthy experiences. How many people avoid
committed relationships because they have been hurt by loved ones?
The true challenge is to know how to embrace the power of faith – even after we experienced its abuse – and distinguish
between healthy faith and unhealthy faith.
The Founding Fathers were all too aware of religious abuse. Hence, the separation of Church and State. Yet, their
brilliance was the realization that they cannot allow years of abuse to distort mans’ healthy beliefs. Thus, the
same framers of the constitutional separation between religion and government, also began the Declaration of Independence
with the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The nation’s founders understood that without a Creator who created us all equally, “unalienable rights” are no
guarantee. Many monrachs, for instance, believed that they were chosen by G-d and were superior to the common man.
Ironically, so did the elitist French Enlightenment.
Another reason many fear faith and G-d – in addition to centuries of religious tyranny – is due to a lack of understanding
what true and healthy faith is all about (and this too, is a result of the distortions created through centuries
of faith abuse). True faith is not merely the absence of reason. It is an inherent human faculty, part of the “Divine
Image” in which we were all created, that complenents reason, and allows us to reach places that we could never
reach with pure logic alone. Faith is what gives humans: the courage and the commitment to love (something reason
alone could never sanction); the power to discover; the ability to hope; the capacity to overcome impossible odds;
the belief in yourself and in others.
I submit that this is what Americans voted for on Election Day 2004: A vote for G-d in our lives. A G-d that we
no longer have to fear. After years of religious exploitation, we have matured to the point where we can embrace
the virtues and beauties of the sacred, and integrate it into secular life.
This may the challenge of our times: To revisit faith after its misuse and abuse for so long, and reclaim it as
a critical and most powerful tool in our lives.
G-d works in strange ways. Not the people of faith but those that fear faith were the ones that made faith such
an issue in America today. With the intention of mocking President Bush’s “simplistic faith” they inadvertently
deified him and turned him into a (false) saint. In effect, unwittingly they crystallized an issue that otherwise
would perhaps not been quite noticed, and provoked million of people of faith to come out and cast a vote against
the bigotry and dogma of non-believers.
Americans are a very tolerant people. They will tolerate flag-burners and atheists. They believe in freedom of
religion, that every individual can choose to worship or not worship any deity one wishes. Separation of church
and state – a wall between organized religion and political authority – is a must. No organized religion can rule
the country. But Americans will not tolerate intolerant skeptics: Freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
“In G-d we Trust” – a non-denominational universal G-d – is the driving force behind all our freedoms and liberties.
Ironically, faith in a Creator and in the edict that “all men [perhaps it should be amended to “humans”] are created
equal” with “unalienable rights” is the reason that we must respect the choice of a non-believer. I wonder if the
French Enlightenment would have returned us that favor with equal passion? Would they have honored the right and
dignity of each individual to choose faith, even if it seemed to them as inferior canaille?
Be careful what you don’t believe in. Your passion against faith may end up stoking its flames. Your vehement doubts
may give birth to the deepest faith of all.
Which atheist was it that said: “I hate you G-d, just as if you had existed.”
A take off on Voltaire: If G-d existed, you would need people who denied His existence. That denial can be as strong
as faith itself, and perhaps it is just another manifestation of faith.
So, democrats and republicans, skeptics and believers, secularists and the religious, Europeans and Asians, Christians
and Muslims: Whether you like it or not – America has spoken:
Faith, moral values and G-d are the most important priorities in our lives.
This is President Bush’s mandate.
Now let us work on integrating faith and reason.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
mlc | Meaningful Life Center's Weekly Thought
www.meaningfullife.com
|
|
AN AMERICAN SPEAKS
Do Not Fear Higher Consciousness
By Richard Schwartz
Admission: I voted for John Kerry. (I hear the religious absolutists complaining. Please read on before your rejection).
But it was not a vote for Kerry as much as it was a vote against something else.
That someone was not George W. Bush
My vote was against absolutism, fundamentalism, one-sided thinking and the conservative establishment of the majority
of interior America that showed utter contempt for higher consciousness beyond absolutes in a God who is defined
within the boundaries of human conception and the anthropomorphic prisons of linguistic, social and cultural conditioning.
Conservatives do not have the insight that while intelligence and design are conceived, God is a human concept
and therefore cannot be confined to a person, spirit, being, establishment or rational intelligence. But the conservatives
cannot fathom beyond discursive analytical, and in subsequent fundamental thinking, which equate reality to black
verses white with absolute values, one-sided morals and narrow ethics which lack the multifaceted degrees of relativity
and manifold reality. It is here where they fail to see the need for relative contradictions with the whole, as
they most certainly are blind to the recognition that each individual position one stands in determines their so
called ‘truth,’ which always changes according to each position, facet and culture, that there are no absolute
positions.
The cake contains many troubled ingredients long before the ‘icing’ was laid; the Patriot Act for instance; Do
conservatives understand the full impact of this enactment? (Wiretapping, elimination of court orders and due process,
invasion of email privacy and library book censorship – just to name a few). Do they understand the rights of individuals
and the meaning of democracy and freedom? That once rights are removed, whether for the cause of war or peace,
they do not come back? That each successive step towards authoritarian control leads to tyranny? The founding fathers
of our great country were precisely aware of this dilemma and made provisions for such? History reveals that unification,
which crosses the boundaries of autonomy, reverses integrally and tolerance, the very aim of itself.
But the issue here is not about President Bush. It's about dogmatic faith. This country is fundamentally built
on the principle etched into our currency: In G-d we Trust. My God is not the monotheistic God of Christianity,
nor theism in general. Cannot God be without such caged schematical blueprints drawn by culturally conditioned,
socially molded, linguistic restraints? Of course there are limits, but these should be toward integral holistic
existence, not divisive absolutist definitions within one cultural restraint. This is crucial for world peace and
the lives of our children, country and selves.
But again, the issue here is not about President Bush. It's about fundamentalism and one-sided, shallow thinking.
Sincere thinking will not overcome ignorance. And such low level understanding costs lives, destroys our environment
- our planet earth and brings forth much destruction and war with horrendous results. We are truly living in dangerous
times. The God I trust in is not well defined within human concepts that constrain reality in the straight jacket
of one level monotheism, which fails to internalize possibilities but instead solidifies, stagnates and separates
humanity as one absolutist view of exclusive, closed patriotic pride against another of the same. Nationalism is
truly a disease of the segment that fails to see the bigger picture needed to survive as a human race on this planet.
The God of the George W. Bush domain fail to understand that there are many different conceptions of God and each
one is a valid human creation, not the other way around. But this can only happen with psyche development, not
rational thinking, so it remains experiential and non-discursive, intuitive and psychical, something that cannot
be taught in churches and emails such as this.
Absolute faith overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there
is no empirical evidence and no rational explanations. But you can't run the world on either rational or faith
absolutes, and such absolutism is the very reason humanity needs to evolve further to survive. Faith must always
contain a relative nature, as logic itself is circular with no finality and faith must therefore be holistic, integral
and tolerant of other facets that contradict it, as long as it to further the goal of holistic planetary consensus
in ending conflict and hatred, in warfare and environmental destruction.
Pragmatism is the understanding that all of our so-called “truths” are not absolute. It recognizes that humanity
must be de-compartmentalized in areas of thinking towards peace, understanding, tolerance and inclusiveness and
that it can only do this when all other ‘truths’ are compartmentalized, privatized, and recognized to stand in
their relative positions. The absolutist-evangelical, lenses must be set aside. This takes on insightful maturity,
but much more than that in psyche development that borders on awareness of symbols and images that convey profound
depths, which are never found in rational thinking and faith based absolutes. And such failure to see the nature
of multifaceted reality and larger insight in consciousness is the fear of change that permeates the nature of
conservative and fundamentalist thinking.
For some, Bush is almost like a Nazi. For others Bush is the hero and Kerry the selfish liberal. Hitler was voted
in by the people, patriotic people stirred by the emotional and religious trends of the time. He was loved, admired
and considered a great speaker and politician. When the country was undergoing terrible strain, he was there to
emotionally unite, while the masses in patriotic fervor, forfeited their rights in nationalistic blinders in a
‘Patriot Act’ that brought forth the most horrendous crimes against humanity - genocide. This has been repeated
many times over and today with the power of technology it is perhaps the culmination of the human species toward
their survival on this planet. What George W. Bush supporter has any comprehension of this? Their faith based,
human created conceptual prisons on monotheistic God and morality, all so with modern technology, are the very
combinations of ingredients needed to end civilization as we know it. Liberalism, while it may have many faults,
is truly a relief to this absolutist dogmatism that is leading the world towards a major conflict of destructive
and bloody outcome.
One can fully understand the paranoia and fear of a religious right taking control and dogmatically imposing their
religious positions. People devoid of pragmatic tolerance must hanker after absolute certainties, false securities.
After all, over the last two millennia hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in the name of religion.
The intolerance, tyranny and oppression of the church, ruling with absolute authority had created a “religious
fatigue,” which, coupled with the advancements in open-minded reason and science, finally came to a climax with
the “enlightenment” and the powerful rebellion against religion and religious authority (at least in its formal
form). However this enlightenment, in it's trashing of creativity, intuitive insight and imaginative abilities
of radical amazement and reverence, threw out the baby with the bathwater.
I may deplore much of Voltaire’s views, but apparently Voltaire’s canaille was correct, and then again, so was
Plato, in the assessment that you can never raise the conscious level of fundamental absolutists, they need to
progress in what Carl Jung has stated, on a psyche intuitive level, beyond the one-sided faith of monotheistic
moral constraints. And the apostles themselves were limited to the reduction of first century thinking conveying
such in midrashic symbolism and outdated cosmology – all in which the Bush conservatives value as absolutes, intolerant
of all other developments, even those that scientifically find empirically against such views. This is our America
today, a regression against pragmatic tolerance. Do conservatives have any understanding of the meaning of the
word pragmatism? Have they ever read William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Richard Rorty? The answer is no, they
have not and neither have the Islamic absolutists. And so George W. Bush represents ignorance, intolerance and
bloody wars that will cost us our very own children.
“The thinkers of the Parisian Enlightenment felt that the people could not be educated because they could not be
enlightened; and they could not be enlightened because they were incapable of the kind of reason that the philosophies
took to be the essence of enlightenment. They were mired instead in the prejudices, superstitions, and irrationalities
of religion. This was the great enemy - l'infâme. Religion, Voltaire wrote to Diderot, “must be destroyed
among respectable people and left to the canaille large and small, for whom it was made.” Diderot agreed. The poor
were “imbeciles” in matters of religion, “too idiotic - bestial - too miserable, and too busy” to enlighten themselves.
They would never change: “The quantity of the canaille is just about always the same.”
While the above paragraph may be true, it fails to take in intuitive conscious development, in psychical advancement
that acknowledges Godel's Theorem. Godel's Theorem relates to our rationalism and logic, which turns out to always
be both circular, uncomputable, this is why we cannot define absolute truth and God The fact of the matter is all
rational thinking rests and ends in a total paradox, which cannot equate a determination of truth. Our truths are
merely the best set of lies (Nietzsche). Such paradoxes reveal that there are certain logistics and mathematical
statements that cannot be determined true or false. This puts uncertainty in our logistic rationality and mathematics.
Such statements together as "This statement is a lie" and "If the statement is true, then it is
false; and if it is false, then it is true " or the two statements of: SOCRATES: "What Plato is about
to say is false" PLATO: "Socrates has just spoken truly." Our truths lie in relativity with the
best we choose for integral survival as a human species.
The whole point of the above paragraph is simply to relate that we must use our
rational intelligence and faith along with intuitiveness and thus refrain from fundamentalism and judgmental intolerance.
What conservative today of the Bush persuasion has even an inkling of understanding of this most significant development?
I venture to say hardly any, and speaking of this letter below: none.
“Diderot made it clear that “the general mass of mankind can neither follow nor comprehend this march of the human
spirit,” and that “We must reason about all things because man is not just an animal but an animal who reasons;
... whoever refuses to search for that truth renounces the very nature of man and should be treated by the rest
of his species as a wild beast; and once the truth has been discovered, whoever refuses to accept it is either
insane or wicked and morally evil.” Diderot believed that we must distrust the judgment of the “multitude” in matters
of reason and philosophy because “its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason and prejudice.”
“The multitude,” he concluded, is “ignorant and stupefied.”
Diderot had a point, but he based it totally on Cartesian meaning of rational logistics and discursive understandings.
While he was correct in much of his assessment and most certainly freed men from superstitious and religious dogmatism,
he did not acknowledge the higher knowledge of symbolism and metaphorical writings and teachings that attempt to
point to the internal psyche of man. Nor did he understand pragmatic principles that relieves itself from the masses
false morality and uses reality as a tool for tolerance and balanced understanding of individual rights and autonomy.
Intellectualism that looses the ability of childlike naive wonder and awe can only use the reductionism of mathematical
language which eliminates creativity and inspirational dimensions of reality that can be seen in cultures with
liberal, open, diverse, relative morality – something today's Bush conservatives lack in substantial great degrees.
And yet the Bush mentality could keep it's absolutes if it were to pragmatically work towards holistic goals of
global understandings.
Alexis De Tocqueville, the French historian, recognized that in American democracy, the rule of public opinion
had the affect of removing the individual's ability of autonomous understanding and ability to hold integrity against
the pressure of nationalism and collective understandings. And it is exactly such loss of alternatives in thinking
that has influenced the American mindset to float in relativity, only to cling to fundamentals that obscure diversities
in favor of absolutist fundamentalism. Tocqueville had good reason to who despised the public almost as heartily
as they despised the Deity in that both failed to perceive beyond their limited scope of both ego-centric and ethno-centric
bound thinking into unification by autonomous means.
The Founding Fathers were all too aware of religious abuse. Hence, the separation of Church and State, thus “the
right to bear arms” and the blunt deism of Thomas Jefferson, all so to ward off the very current of thinking modern
day American conservatives are pointing to.
The nation's founders, as the deist, Thomas Jefferson, understood that without a Creator who created us all equally,
“unalienable rights” are no guarantee. Many monarchs, for instance, believed that they were chosen by G-d and were
superior to the common man. Ironically, so did the elitist French Enlightenment. Yet Jefferson and the founding
fathers outright rejected the monotheism that is practiced in today's evangelical Christian circles endorsed by
the Bush conservatives, a direct contradiction of what is occurring.
While G-d may work in strange ways. It is up to humanity to develop, grow, transform itself through holistic and
integral practices of culture, environment, and freedom. Censorship, removal of privacy, intolerance of other religious
ideas, oil revenue motivated practices for the monetary illusions of success will only act to deteriorate, segregate
nations causing further divisions, wars and bloodshed. Internally, it will reek further separation of economic
classes, with potentialities of gross proportion that can do more damage than all foreign affairs put together.
I do not fear faith, not at all. I simply do not restrain, restrict and demean my faith into one or more humanly
created conception that reduces reality to intolerant divisiveness, precisely that faith of the conservatives and
evangelical monotheists morality of bias and partisan natures.
I am not an atheist. Agnostic perhaps. A take off on Voltaire: If G-d existed, you would need people who denied
His existence. This is because life is ambiguous, life is a mystery. When anyone, conservatives alike, attempt
to pigeonhole G-d, morality and ethics, life is no longer being lived, only existed and existing in stagnated waters
that will cease to flow the living waters that unify our country, our world and humanity in peaceful discoveries
of developing nature that regenerates into higher, advanced improvement and global peace.
|
|
