God the Father, God the Son

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
--America the Beautiful (1893)

And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nothin'!
--You Haven't Done Nothin', Stevie Wonder

But these rose colored glasses, that I'm looking through
Show only the beauty, cause they hide all the truth

--Rose-Colored Glasses, John Conlee

Mister Herbert Hoover
Says that now's the time to buy
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!
--"Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee", Irving Berlin

_____________

Completing the Trinity we go outside the Bush Clan: Michael Chertoff looks like the Holy Ghost, but there are just so many contenders in this administration. We welcome your vote.

A Sunday sermon for our readers, entitled, the Miracle Worker:

George W. Bush has often said that freedom is a gift from God to man. In this fairy tale of his making, God is the manufacturer of a democracy, which all men will accept and revel in. Mr. Bush knows this because he, like Moses, has spoken to God.

In effect, God and His Kingdom have become a democratic ideal that has become a tool in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©). It is a childlike fantasy from a weak individual who envisions himself as a Prophet (Profit?) President.

However, the historical God has not been friendly to the concepts of either democracy or freedom. Certainly, such a high muckety-muck who ordains what his minions shall and shall not do, and what days they must take off, would never give either of those possessions, for that would be to loose anarchy upon the world. He is more like the celestial High Police Commissioner than a proto-Bertrand Russel.

Freedom and democracy have always been wrested from the hands of unwilling leaders, both church and secular. The very concept of God is not a democratic principle, as it demands obeisance to a power hierarchy. If He or She exists, god is omnipotent, omnipresent and immutable, and His actions are not subject to polls or purple thumbs.

Freedom is a hard-won possession in a social construct, and one usually independent of God. God is a limiting concept on human freedom, because if you buy into it, the only freedom you have is what is dispensed to you from on high. He circumscribes your actions, sanctifying or damning them. He does not unleash you from controls, because in that system, you are as a child, and children would do themselves great harm without rules.

Freedom is not free--this is true, because Ranger saw it on a bumper sticker. But if it is not free in America, then why is it a gift to Iraq and Afghanistan? One of the basic tenets of American capitalism is that there are no free lunches. If it is worth having, then it is worth working for. We all possess the ability to actualize our dreams by the sweat of our brow.

So how has George Bush effected the transubstantiation of "freedom" into a god-given "gift"? Any how did he become the FTD man who would deliver this bundle of joy to the ungrateful recipients?

This gift supposedly has devolved from a God that oversaw the decline of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Dark Ages, and intentionally fought the introduction of reason into the political discourse. The same God that now prompts President Bush and his lackeys to deny the validity of the scientific principle of evolution. That God gave man freedom?

You can not give freedom to a people. Freedom cannot be dropped like a cluster bomb. It doesn't arrive signed, sealed, delivered from a drone. One does not peel back the lid from a repressive regime and find freedom lying in the bottom of the tin.

The Pope continually favored the kings of old and defended their divinely ordained right to rule. God, through the church, has supported manifold undemocratic institutions, and to this day remains non-democratic. The Pope retains his "infallible nature," a concept arising from anything but an impulse to freedom. It is dictatorial, sexist and arrogant.

None of the other religions are any better. The early religious sects which migrated to the U.S. did so to escape religious repression, then proceeded to set up repressive societies disallowing religious freedoms to others. The Salem witch trials were democratic versions of The Inquisition.

The first thing the Spaniards did in the New World after stealing all that wasn't nailed down and selecting slaves was to impose their God upon the native population. They were free to do that, so hegemony confers freedom, but only upon those in the power position. The "freedom" they might confer is dilute, by virtue of their ability to dispense it.

Manifest Destiny and the City on the Hill and all the rest of the God-given propaganda sanctioned our imperial expansion and theft of Mexican and Native American lands. We gladly imposed our God upon those heathens, and though through conversion they too could gain God's favor, they were latecomers to the table.

As a result, they could only gain secondary democracy and freedom, which is to say not really freedom at all. They could get God, yes; democracy, no. At least not until the next life. You snooze, you lose.

Somehow Americans have come to accept Mr. Bush's fantasy of the feasibility of forcefully exported freedom and democracy. Moreover, they call it a virtue. But if this freedom is free, why are the American taxpayers footing a $3 trillion debt for this divine intervention?

Why do Americans accept such fantastical leadership? It would be acceptable if Bush were multiplying the loaves and fishes while the American public struggles to meet their exponentially rising grocery bills.

George Bush doesn't believe in evolution, but his God seems to have evolved from a tyrant to a benevolent custodian of free peoples inhabiting democracies.

This is not so much evolution, but a collective delusion; the result of living in a closed system called Fantasyland, under the dogma of your choice.

--Jim and Lisa