Saddam Hussein does not scare me. Saddam Hussein does not scare me because he is not an imminent or even likely threat to the United States. Say what you will, but as far as threats go, Americans know that Saddam is not even on the list of countries that have plans to do us harm, and more importantly, have the capability to fulfill such a desire.I am scared though, yet of a much more dangerous threat. That threat being our President, George W. Bush. So, there, if I am branded a traitor for saying so, if it causes me to be spat upon by my fellow citizens, or if, as we are hearing on a more and more frequent basis, I am even arrested for saying so, then By God, so be it.
And yet, as vapid and consistently prone to lapses of stupidity this President is, there is in my opinion an even much worse danger in these United States. That danger is the vast ignorance of the American People themselves.
With the capability that we have as an evolved society, where have we gone wrong in our thinking? We are not a bunch of cave men, tearing apart hides of game that we caught with only the barest of weaponry. We are not a people who cannot read, and therefore not able to comprehend principals for themselves. And yet, our country is seemingly bowing to a President who not only stumbles over even the simplest of sentences, yet as we are told bases his decisions on his faith in God?
I'd like to ask the President which God this is that he's praying to. Is it the Judeo-Christian God, or the Jewish God? These are, have no doubt about it, two very different Gods. The God of the Old Testament, was angry, a God of carnage, a God of war, a God that accepted human sacrifice. Is this the God that our President divines his decisions from?
The Christian God is much more tranquil, yet the books in the New Testament makes no bones about the fact that he is indeed one and the same. A man named Jesus who came as a peaceful prophet was not a prophet of War, and yet never denied being the second part of the trinity. This being the case, when he told his disciples that they would not pass before the 2nd coming, is his part in the saga of the Jewish God not called to question when obviously he was blatantly incorrect, making him then not omniscient as we are told God is?
Is Jesus then who Bush prays to? And if so, what are we to think of this, since Jesus himself was at best a confused prophet? When Bush reads the Bible every night as we are told, what does he think of the thousands of innocents ordered to be slaughtered by Yahweh? What of the disinterested God that orders the slaughter of women, children, and even infants? None are saved in the eyes of the Old Testament God. What of the human sacrifice which is on occasion ordered by God? Is this the God that our President prays to and asks for guidance?
You can understand now why I say that yes, George Bush is indeed much scarier to me, when I am told these things. Are we then to be comforted by our Presidents relationship with Yahweh? Comforted by a book of war, and violence, of carnage so great, so vile, it cannot be compared to even the most horrific of literature throughout history?
And what are we to make of the American people, who as I have often experienced, although calling themselves 'Christians' do not even know the name of their own God. They will shudder and become angry when you mention to them the horrors practiced in the bible, the Evangelists pick and choose which verses to preach to their choir, surreptitiously so, because their agenda could never be fulfilled, if they were to preach that as instructed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that if your child is disobedient that he should be stoned with stones. Imagine the gasps from the congregation, why surely no collection plate would ever be the same again if the whole of the Bible was preached, then practiced, by such Christians.
And yet we are only a very small piece of a most intricate history – that history repeating itself now as a War in times when we should, we must demand, that we are not the tribal people of thousands of years ago who sacrificed their children, who made alters of gold to worship their gods, who thought that menstruation was a sin that needed to be repented for. And yet we are going to War, one of the prides of the gods of the ancients, a pride of a people so full of themselves and their gods, that they were willing to compromise their own kind in order to prove that theirs was the God that would be worshiped.
When Bush so ignorantly stated shortly after 9/11 that this was a 'Crusade' did all the bones of the ancients rattle within the ground, did the ghosts of devils and flesh resurrect their heads, did the ignorance of a people before Philosophy, before the understanding of the human mind, before we knew that we could be a moral people without worshiping an invisible god, resurrect their muddled flesh. Bush, in this ignorance, lighted a demon that is the most vilified weapon in all of history. The War of Gods, our Tribe verses their Tribe. That is why they attacked us on 9/11 and that is why this cycle of terror is now being perpetuated by not Saddam Hussein, but yet by the United States.
We cannot win when we refuse to understand why our enemies hate us. How many Americans have read the Torah, or the Koran? We cannot expect many, seeing how those that call themselves Christians have themselves not read even the most nominal of parts from their own Bible. How many Americans have lived overseas? How many have even left the borders of America? We are a lazy, sedentary country, a land whereas is so bountiful, so fruitful, that we think we can be lazy and complacent and ignorant, that because of this comfort we cannot be harmed. It is because of this comfort that we have been harmed, and in which we will continue, in this ignorance, to be harmed.
I have spent seven years studying Philosophy and the Critical Study of Theology. I have read all Bibles, of each ancient tribe. I still am struggling to understand our differences and how as a modern people who do not believe in mystical fairies, we still do not realize that our greatest enemy is not Saddam Hussein, is not Osama Bin Laden, our enemy is a much more villainous host, because it lies within our own resistance, our resistance towards overcoming our own Ignorance.
In ignorance have the atrocities of history been made. In ignorance are they continuing to be made. There is no courage in ignorance, no autonomy in defeat, yet there is courage and honor in knowledge, of allowing ourselves to rise up beyond that of tales of serpents and dragons, of war as a result, of gods created in a desperation for man's fear of his own mortality.
A hero is the man that has the courage to prevent war. The coward is the man who is prepared to undertake War without first consulting the hero.
Andrea W. Royall-Jones
Submitted by Andrea W. Royall-Jones on 3/18/2003
[Our apologies for posting it so late!]
- Ethical Atheist
[Created: 10/24/2003]
[Last Update: n/a]