If You Love Jesus, Burn This Book

This is a chapter from my book FUNDAMENTAL BLASPHEMY aka "Thank You Jesus But No Thank You."

IF YOU LOVE JESUS, BURN THIS BOOK!

Americans and many other people have spent the last few decades winning ground in the fight to obtain certain freedoms and rights in society. Today, more than at any previous time in our country’s history, we risk losing those rights — and not for being black, or women, or gay — we all stand to lose them. In fact, many will not even see it coming. Many will be cheering it on, yelling, “Hallelujah,” while the doors close right before their eyes, because it is going to be done in the name of good, in the name of morality, in the name of stopping crime, in the name of driving out sin, in the name of protecting our daughters from lust, and our sons from iniquity. It is going to be done in the name of God, in the name of creating a lawfully Christian America.
Christian fundamentalists are obligated to believe that every word in the currently approved version of the Holy Bible is true, in the most literal sense possible, in or out of context. Though many more liberal Sunday-social Christians do not claim to be fundamentalists, they nonetheless profess to believe the basic principles of the religion. They believe that the viewpoint afforded by the Christian position is the highest form of truth in the world, and in the final analysis, the only form of good. Fundamentalists must believe that of all the souls who ever took on the flesh to be human, only those who fulfill to the letter all of the qualifications proscribed by their interpretation of the official Scripture are lovingly approved in the eyes of God. All others — those not, like themselves, redeemed by Christ — they must believe are doomed to eternal failure, foredamned to Hell at Judgment, and therefore in their eyes undeserving of the rights and the respect granted to human beings — save of course the right to hear God’s Word, and the inalienable right to make a commitment to Jesus at any moment.
The sad irony is that the Christian way of life is not in itself anything to be despised. It is a good, productive, and honorable family-based lifestyle. Those who live in Christ tend to be socially active participants in good works, and to be caring and generous. A free society of responsible people is an excellent environment for Christian life. Unfortunately, however, fundamentalist Christian society is not an excellent environment for anybody else. A free and diverse society will continually place before Christian eyes the fact that other people do not necessarily conform to those activities which Christian morality (or ideology) demands. In a free society, it is difficult to keep young Christians from seeing that the world presents reasonable, responsible, and successful social and spiritual alternatives to Christianity at every turn. The problem occurs when blindly committed Christians interpret every such alternative as ungodly sinful, and every public display of it a deliberate act of Satanic temptation, a threat to the likelihood that those who are new to the faith will always subject their God-given free will to unreasoning obedience, and make only the Christian choice. I cannot argue with the right of people to so subject themselves, nor even to so subject their children. The problem is what must be done to a free society in order to impose unwilling subjection to the limitations of Christian life upon those people who would prefer to retain their right to choose other ways. To those who place their faith in some other form of worship of God, or who prefer to live by any other lifestyle or cultural orientation, the effect of the enforcement of Christian behavioral codes is as intrusive and oppressive as the Nazis, the Empires of Rome under Caesars and Popes, or the anonymous ant-hill state of Maoist China.
The problem is the built-in bigotry and paranoia typical of the descendents of the Cult of Abraham. In spite of the best intentions of the faithful, the conclusions arrived at by taking the most basic Judeo-Christian tenets of salvation from damnation by blood-sacrifice as absolutely true are (a) the tragic-but-true notion that the rest of the people of the world, ALL of them, are foredamned, and might as well never have existed — that is bigoted at worst, condescending at best, and (b) the horrifying-but-true notion that the rest of the world, ALL of it, is motivated by Satan to deliberately oppose them and thereby to oppose God. That is paranoid at worst, prejudiced at best. The more powerful they declare their devil to be, the more they fear the devil’s world, and the more they feel justified in taking strong measures to defend the faithful from all others.
“Lead us not into temptation,” will be taken as a political mandate by the Saved Administration of Jesus Christ, American, President by Proxy, Lord and Fuhrer of the Righteous Revolution, the Crusade to Get America Going Right. When the Fundamentalist Right takes political control, they will use the power of the law, and of law enforcement, to see that young Christians will not have to suffer the temptations presented by the devil’s alternative lifestyles. From tits on TV to Tsiolkovsky, from Charles Darwin to Gary Gygax, they will purge and scourge all they touch in order to save young Christians from the temptation to make a wrong choice.
Fundamentalists are not weekend-Jesus-club Christians. They are consecrated activists, and they take themselves very seriously. They are blind-faith fanatics, taught to respect a death of martyrdom, prepared to lay down their lives, take up arms, or vote as they are told for Jesus, and taught to be swayed by no reason, evidence, or emotion from their evangelical purpose. “Whatever peace man has on earth is won only through waging unending war against sin,” they declare. “Only by our persevering in that holy war is peace to be maintained.” They call for those who would be Christians to submit themselves unreservedly and eternally to their cause, to be bondslaves possessed totally by their God, to “take the awl in the ear”, a sign which identified one as a slave in Jesus’ time. By their own declaration, Christian freedom is slavery. They call for the faithful to “know only Christ, and Him crucified”, and declare secular knowledge to be Satan’s lies, created to weaken their faith. To a believer in their doctrines, ignorance is strength. They call for each of God’s servants to be “his brother’s keeper”, and to watch his every move for signs of error. In a Christian society, every brother is watching you.
The exhortations to “love thy neighbor, and forgive thy brother,” are purged of liberal misinterpretations by the pious declaration, “An unpatriotic commie homo witch is not my neighbor, he is an evil invader, and my brothers are the Jesus-saved Sons of God, not the Goddamned self-serving Sons of Satan who won’t sell everything to buy into the sacrifice of blood the Bible said Jesus said Abraham said God said is the One Way He will let us off the hook for whatever it was Satan talked Eve into talking Adam into doing.”
One God does not mean One Way. One God means Every Way! Come on, give God a little credit. The One Way doctrine is an expedient little white lie to which most pastors accede, in order to motivate the assembling of a fold, a closed congregation. It seems to be on the same order of prevarication as the “last chance” sign on country gas stations, but taken in the fundamentalist sense, it produces rabid and ruthless bigotry, the most self-sacrificing opposition to and the most self-righteous oppression of all others.
Who will be persecuted under the totalitarian rule of the fundamentalist representatives of President Jesus? To begin with, those who would wield Jesus’ cleansing sword will make war upon sex criminals, which will include pornographers, that is, anyone who shows or describes to anyone else his or her own body, or that of any other person, through any medium of publication, and prostitutes, which includes anyone who knowingly and for any remuneration engages in any activity intended, demonstrated, or alleged to be erotically stimulating to anyone, including show dancers, models, actors and actresses who portray people in erotic situations, and those who talk erotically over the phone. Massage and Shiatsu practitioners, acupressurists, aura balancers, and other such persons who claim they can heal with their hands without invoking Jesus will be suspected of covert erotic practices. Male and female homosexuals, adulterers, temptresses, seducers, and other fornicators, masturbators, fellators, cunnilinguists, racially-mixed couples, manufacturers or sellers or possessors of any erotic paraphernalia, and anyone who contracts a venereal disease, will be declared criminals or at the least social undesirables. Of course, rapists and persons engaged in any erotic activity with a virgin will be dealt with most severely. Anyone accused of lustful intentions by a child will carry an uncleansable stigma. Unmarried pregnant women, persons who perform abortions, and women who have them will be chastised, as well as persons who publicly promote abortion, contraception, or sterilization. Child-abuse and wife-abuse investigators, and welfare caseworkers advocating the rights of children and women, and civil liberties activists will be vigorously opposed. Members of cults — that is, of any cult but their own — will be declared the demon-possessed hordes of Satan. This group of God’s enemies, and therefore the enemies of the State, will include witches, spiritualists, occultists, psychics, mediums, Astrologers, Scientologists, Pagans, Rosicrucians, Unitarians, and Ouija-board users, in addition to the Wiccans, Druids, Atheists, and of course the professing Satanists. Black Muslims, and others of Islam, members of the Native American Church (a heathen drug cult), Buddhists, Hare-Krishnas, Yogis, Taoists, Sikhs, Sufis, Hindus, Voodoos, and devotees of other such Godless false doctrines will be encouraged to go back to wherever they came from. Catholics, like the Jews will be dealt with, but never trusted. Israel will be politically supported, but Jews will be covertly persecuted. They will loudly refute and relentlessly strive to silence all heretics, that is, anyone who expresses a theological notion with which they disagree. In addition to sex and doctrine deviates, they will persecute as moral degenerates all marijuana smokers, users of drugs not sold by prescription, and anyone who possesses any controlled substance without written permission. Owners of handguns and other weapons, bikers, hippies, and long-hairs in old Army jackets will suffer constant suspicion (though the Christians will be heavily armed with "hunting" weapons, and their police will be armed for battle with Satan himself). They will not tolerate the presence of vagrants, bums, and indigents, that is, any unemployed persons who have no permanent address, or who cannot name the pastor of the congregation to which they belong. They will gain tremendous legislative power by mobilizing the middle class against the horrors evoked by Rock and Roll musicians, and those who sell or buy their works, artists who paint demonic pictures, or who use demonic symbols in their work, such as inverted stars, astrology symbols, Hebrew letters, or persons with their tongues outthrust. Publishers, writers, producers, and other participants in any "non-J-rated" films and literature, in any medium, will find it increasingly difficult to find work. Scientists will fall out of favor, in particular, pediatricians, evolutionists, psychologists, logicians, philosophers, theologians, and historians, most of whom will be accused of being among the most Godless of all, the dreaded Secular Humanists. Objective journalists will cease to exist. Another group which will feel the pressure severely are women. There are few so hated and feared among Christians as Feminists, that is, any woman who refuses to subject herself to covering (that is, domination) by a Christian male. They will oppose or undercut all women in positions of power, including politicians, ordained ministers, and military officers, and they will vigorously denounce women body-builders and women who demand anything as would-be usurpers of male privilege. Anyone who openly opposes any of their regulations on the basis of restriction of civil freedom will be called a leftist, a communist, or an anarchist. Those who stand upon the Constitution will be called subversives and traitors for attempting to pervert the meaning of the rights guaranteed by that document to condone evil. Anyone who opposes them by expressing anger will be called a terrorist. Anyone who opposes them on religious grounds will be called an agent of Satan, and a promulgator of the doctrines of demons. Anyone who takes a public position of leadership and opposes them successfully on any issue will be called Anti-Christ. I will be called a false prophet.
Fundamentalist Christianity is not a democratic social structure. It is a Kingdom, a monarchy, an absolute dictatorship. Fundamentalists are obsessed with a totalitarian God, by whose authority they are obligated to live under and to enforce an inflexible law, a law not subject to evidence or reason. Their government on earth will be a totalitarian government, an hierarchical bureaucratic monolith of interpreters and executors of the official Word of God. Other than to give rubber-stamp political legitimacy to the rulings of the powerful interpreters of Scripture, there is no reason for a Christian nation to have a legislative Congress. If the responsibility of the Supreme Court is to determine whether the laws conform to Scripture, there is no reason for a Christian nation to have a Constitution. If the basis of criminal prosecution is the judge’s interpretation of the Scriptural definition of sin, or his canonically-acknowledged spiritual discernment of evil, there is no reason to have a jury of people who are merely obligated by faith to agree with him. If office-holders are known to be ideologically pure Christians, and likely called by God Himself to the Ministry of the Pastor, there is no reason to elect new ones every few years, particularly in the highest offices.
If any group other than Christians – Sunnis, Scientologists, or Neo-Nazis, for example — were making full use of the media and the courts to promote the wholesale dismantling of the democratic process by stacking the seats of power with their own fanatical agents, and overtly declaring their intentions to replace basic American freedoms with their own oppressive moralistic doctrines, they would be declared treasonous, and the SWAT teams would be surrounding their temples. Those people who wish for and take action to gain such power as to make the laws of the United States conform to the higher authority of the dogma of their cult, in so doing rendering the Constitution impotent, the Congress ineffective, and law-enforcement a sectarian tool, are in fact conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States. A President who elevates to power a person whom he knows will interpret or change the Constitution so as to make it conform to Scripture or any other religious, occult, or philosophical creed is in violation of his oath to support and defend the Constitution, and is in fact an active member of that conspiracy. Is that not an impeachable offense?
Political Christian fundamentalists declare their intention is to restore and preserve American freedom. However, they often point out that since human beings are all allegedly born wanting to sin, Christian freedom does not mean the right to choose what you want to do, but rather, to do what you ought. Christian freedom is freedom from disobedience (to their image of God, their edition of His alleged laws, and His self-declared personal representatives on earth), freedom from dissent, freedom from disagreement, freedom from diversity, and freedom from the possibility of making an incorrect choice. Such freedom already exists on earth. There is freedom to conform absolutely to regulation even in the Gulag, Russia’s notorious prison camps.
They name their organizations Liberty foundations, but abhor and condemn liberals. They call themselves conservative, preservers of the American way, yet they seek openly to destroy the most basic elements of the movement which created America, beginning with abolition of the religious neutrality which permitted them to exist in the first place, and continuing through the replacement of democracy with the sham of an electorate subject to the scriptural mandate of a totalitarian monarch in absentia they claim acts through them. On secular issues, a Christian Congress will continue to function very much as it does now, and the Christian Administration will proudly declare that the democratic process is alive and well in America. The difference will become apparent on any issue taken to have Scriptural significance.
Some things need not be changed by law for American citizens to lose the freedoms they now enjoy. Political leaders need not take responsibility for social mobilization initiated through the church. The laws of our country guarantee that the citizen may not be harassed by teams of law-enforcement or investigative persons seeking to discover technical transgressions without reasonable cause to believe a crime is being committed, and without a proper warrant so stating. This law has already been stretched a long way in the futile war to control the drug traffic by force, and in the hands of politically-mobilized Christians it will succumb. The police shall not gain the right to casual entry of your homes, but freedom of religion will guarantee the right of your neighbors to make their nightly devotional prayer walks through town and to stop at your house to inquire about your knowledge of Scripture, and to investigate your adherence thereto. If they are not welcomed into your home when they come in the name of Jesus, your name will be marked, and they will return again and again to either convert you or condemn you. Their testimony as to what they have witnessed as missionaries of Christ in your home will be sufficient cause to warrant official investigation.
Likewise, the First Amendment need be neither abrogated nor violated in order for an effective program of censorship to be imposed. They may not be able in the courts to abridge the right of a publisher who can afford legal defense to publish what he wishes, but once it is published, who will protect the local merchant from the pressure local zealot activists can impose in order to gain his voluntary willingness to remove offending material from his shelves? What merchant will risk boycott, pickets, harassment of his children at school, or Carrie Nation-style invasion of his magazine rack by the Christian Wives Club just for the little profit he might make on any publication on any subject, if it offends organized moralists representing the most powerful religious faction in his neighborhood? How long can those merchants who stand on the First Amendment on principle afford to keep their doors open?
Many middle-class American sheep will not seriously oppose the Christians in their campaign to cleanse America of obscenity. Though the definition of what is and is not obscene is very much a matter of opinion and taste, it is the fundamentalists’ definitions which will be argued in court, and people will be forced to attempt to stand on the Constitution for permission to publish their material whether it is obscene or not. Few mainstream Americans — or Christian Supreme Court Justices — will take the stand that the Constitution is intended to defend obscenity, as defined by the figures of authority in their own churches. They will hide their copies of Playboy and the videotapes they got through the mail, and they will piously agree that strong measures are called for to protect our children from the horror of knowing the sinful truth about sex, and their consequent likelihood of becoming deviate sinners themselves. Once they have established the principle that the First Amendment does not protect the right to yell “Fire!” in a theater, nor to place obscenity before the eyes of the innocent, then the problem facing the courts becomes a matter of rendering judgment case by case on the validity of Christians’ determination to declare some practice obscene. The Court will then be reduced to a position of secondary action, responding to confirm or disallow each new inclusion into the lists of obscene practices. Americans who are unwilling to oppose figures of authority who violate the righteous principles for which their offices stand will permit the precedents of censorship to occur in the courts, and they will permit the zealots to obtain the seats of power. When the Christians then raise up the weapon we let them build to free our children of obscenity and undertake to cleanse our textbooks, libraries, marketplaces, the broadcast media, and our homes of subject matter which is blasphemous, and of that which is heretical, it will be too late to stop them.

****

James Nathan Post

This is a chapter from my book FUNDAMENTAL BLASPHEMY aka "Thank You Jesus But No Thank You."

Of Mouse And Maze

Of Mouse And Maze

You’ve heard it told, perhaps sometimes as a joke about how stupid mice are. Once there was a mouse, and he lived in a maze, in total darkness. He learned his way around in its tunnels and chambers, and soon he could zip his way through them without running into the walls. One time he was running down a long tunnel, and he ran smack into a hard wall that had not been there before. When he got his senses back, he discovered it was a big rock, and he could jump right over it and continue down the tunnel. The next time he came down that tunnel, he didn’t run into the rock, but he remembered the pain of hitting it, so he slowed down and checked to feel if it was there. It was, so he jumped over it and continued. The next time, and every time thereafter, he just ran down the tunnel, jumped over the rock, and ran right on. The joke was that you can take away the rock then, and the mouse will still continue to jump at that point, for ever and ever after.
Some time later the mouse was running down a tunnel, and he ran into another rock. Soon he was jumping every time he came to that place too. One time he ran into a new rock, and since that always reminded him of the other times he had run into a rock, he just jumped. This time he hit the roof. That knocked him silly too, but when he recovered, he found he had to go around that rock. Pretty soon he was running all over his maze, jumping some places, and going around others, looking for the corn room or the water root. He had a clear picture in his little mousey mind of what his world looked like, where the tunnels ran, and where the obstacles were.
As the joke goes, at that point you could take away all the rocks, and the mouse would continue to jump and turn. You could actually take away all the walls to the tunnels too, and the mouse would still continue to run down the lanes he knew, and jump and turn, searching for the corn and water he could as well go directly to, if he were able to respond to the reality of his situation, and not his perception of the picture in his mind. There is a point at which it is no longer funny, but rather horrid to watch the mouse, driven by hunger and thirst, running through the complicated series of endlessly repeated jumps and turns to negotiate a maze that exists only in his own mind. That is what people mean when they say, Kafkaesque.
The mouse’s world, as he thought he knew it, was only an image in his mind. Though he was only a mouse, and had only a mouse’s mind, he was living in an illusion. Do you suppose that a man’s mind is different, even if the maze in which he lives is much more complex? This is exactly what the Eastern religions mean when they say the world is all maya, illusion.
There are no borders. Yet by arming a line, and behaving as though there was a border, we create the illusion of a border there. Dramatized by men with guns, and by walls of stone, it creates the reality we must live in, illusion or not. Enlightenment is what is meant by seeing the difference between the illusion and the dramatization, and observing that what you are actually looking at when you think about the world you live in are only, as the mouse’s, pictures which you carry in your own mind, a virtual image like a computer game in your mind, in which you run and jump and turn, pursuing challenges and prizes, confident you know the nature of the reality around you.
If the collection of pictures we call our mind is something more than just accidental sparklies in a blob of nerve cells, might we carry them with us for long periods of time, spiritually speaking? How long have you been collecting the pictures that make up the image you have of your own existence and world? How long have you been jumping over rocks that have worn back to sand a million years ago? How long have you thought it simply natural to salivate when you hear a bell, or want to fight when you hear “Born To Lose”?
If you take a lesson from the mouse, and you seek to discover where in your own image of the world you are jumping over rocks that are not really there, how might you go about it? If you are looking to find the rocks in your path that make you jump in the dark, how do you tell when you are jumping in response to a picture, or turning, or yelling and running out? Every time you try to look closely at such a moment, and try to see if there is really anything there, what you see first is a picture of running into a rock some time ago, and being knocked unconscious. That knocks you out again, in a way. At some point, you recoil from the pain and shock of those memories, and you don’t look there any more. You do not see that you jump, you do not remember why you jump, and you are unable to look into your own mind to find the answer to that question you don’t want to ask. So you jump. Yes, that is Kafkaesque, and Hesseous as well.
Knowing it happens, that it must self-evidently and certainly happen to every mouse and man, gives you the edge, the ability to deliberately look for ways to accomplish freedom from the maze. There are lots of people out selling maze maps and flashlights, and some of all that works better than others. Ultimately, the light has to come from you, of course, and it quite certainly can. Speaking as though a prophet, John Lennon said, “No guru can see through your eyes. It’s all in your mind, y’know.”

James Nathan Post
www.postpubco.com

Qur'an et al.

I have just been watching a program I enjoy on our public access TV channel. It is readings from Qur'an, most of it sung in its own language, with beautiful scenery and the faces of people, filled with light. Though I don't understand a word, it is so elegant and so beautiful. When I was in Christ, I spoke in tongues sometimes. Though I am no longer of the Christian religion, sometimes I still do. People do not understand what it is. Like one willing to be hypnotized, you give yourself up to the spirit, and things sometimes well up from within you. You do not understand the words, but they speak to the soul, and the soul responds, and you may weep knowing you are saying something very real and very holy. My soul responds to the words of Qur'an that way and I very much enjoy just listening to it, like Bach or Brubeck.

Sometimes they read passages in English, and I always think if they were read to a group of spiritually conscious Christians or Jews without their knowing what they were, they would find themselves saying again and again, "Amen! That is wisdom, that is beauty, that is the God I know in my heart." It causes me grief therefore to see how badly some Christians and some Muslims misunderstand the message of the prophets, and miss the spirit, and find reason to hate and oppress and kill each other in the pages of the books they have made idols of, each only an image of God, graven in symbol on papyrus wrapped like mummies. We are awash in spleen, and unless we find a way to open our minds beyond those books, and open our hearts to that spirit and to each other, then we are soon awash in blood.
James

"Thank You Jesus, But No Thank You."

The War On Mexicans

Our Second Stupidest Mistake



The criminalization of being Mexican and the making of war against them is the second stupidest mistake we have made in the last decade, the stupidest being the granting of unaccountable and unconstitutional power to the covert elements of our government by the deceitful initiation of the unjust wars of aggression against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If that smirking Hermann-Goering-doppleganger Arizona Sheriff Arpaio were ever to be caught alone in Mexico within 100 miles of that border he is so ready to start shooting people over without his gang of club-packing “corrective” goons it is a crime to refuse to grovel before, his head would be on a stick in ten minutes and his body bloating in the sun like a rotting beached whale. Anyone with the most simple sense of the difference between justice and kneejerk law enforcement would have to agree that he deserved it. The same is true of that soulless walking mummy they call their Governor in that state.

The border to Mexico should be wide open, and Mexico a place as it once was, where any American could go with their families and be welcomed, and our country a place where any Mexican could come here and with no more fanfare than it takes to register to vote, sign up for the right to be here. Mexicans make good Americans, or at least they used to before the right-wing fascists of our Republican government made enemies of them. They should be made welcome here, and given the opportunity to do honest work, admitted to our schools and armies, instead of being driven into the criminal underground in order to survive as they try to help their families.

At some point, when we have built the DMZ (De-Mexicanized Zone) on our border, and battalions of armed peacekeepers crouch on that line in the sand with rifles pointed south, we will be violently shown that the enemy is then behind them, already here across the border, about fifty million of them, some citizens, some with papers, and some with nothing but their hunger and their rage. That, unfortunately, is exactly what the “patriots” of the police state are waiting for.

As everyone from Macchiavelli to Orwell has pointed out for centuries, the militant authoritarian security state needs two enemies to survive. One of those is an undefinable foreign enemy, preferably of a different race and religion, one not limited to a particular nation or even a particular activity or ideology. Those are the “terrorists” to be feared, and endless war made against. The other is internal, justifying the treatment of every person in the country as a potential enemy, and therefore subject to the law enforcement modalities of the penal society. Those are now the Mexicans, whose capital crime is simply to be here. The third most powerful factor in such control is a crime which almost everyone commits. Whether through the use of prohibited common herbs or of misused prescriptions to addictive pharmos, that crime is the drugs. When all of us are either suspects, convicts, or on probation, it no longer matters what “rights” the citizens have by law, because those categories of people no longer have citizens’ rights. Where those crimes are made felonies, a point is reached where only those working for law enforcement still have the right to vote. Eventually, as in such states as the historic tragedies of communist Russia, China, and North Korea, everyone is in prison, either in chains, or in uniform.

Whether or not it is still possible to stop it is hard to say, but none can say you were not warned it was coming. When even the Libertarians are howling that common human rights and simple dignity and compassion are only for “us” and not for “them,” then it becomes difficult to say we still ought to have hope.

James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm

PTSD: Prescribe The Suckers Drugs

Ask A General? Get A War.

Ask A General? Get A War.

Sometimes things seem oddly simplistic to me that appear to go right over everybody else's head. Try this one: If you have a problem, and you take it to an architect, he will design you a building. If you take the problem to a doctor, he will write you a prescription; to a warden, he will improve security. There is a broad presumption that in matters of foreign affairs, particularly with nations hostile to us, the military assessment of the situation should prevail. If you take your problem to a general, he will recommend you start a war, and tell you how to run it. If entering a war was ill-advised in the beginning, then to make talk of leaving it into heresy, defeatism, or treason is doubly foolish. Now we hear them saying after eight years of George Bush's accomplishments in Afghanistan, we are losing Obama's War.

James THE ANTI-CYCLOPS PAPERS

Total Separation of Medicine and State?

The Libertarians inform me that Obamacare is wrong, and the correct fix for our abysmal public health system is total separation of medicine and government. I believe they might be on the right track here, if by TOTAL separation they mean to end the laws which make it illegal for anyone to provide to anyone else any kind of ameliorative care without the certifications of the AMA. Open up medicine to true free market competition, and the cost would plummet. End government enforcement of the medical industry’s monopoly on the right to sell medical products and services, and more important, their right to define what is and what is not medicine such that they should have a market monopoly on it, and the price of common health care would go down like a pompom boy in the shower. You'd still pay a ton for a robot heart, or a transplant, but you could get a couple of stitches or a tooth pulled for the cost of an oil change in your car.

I'm all for private business, large and small. I know it’s not what they teach you to get that MBA, which I don’t have, but it seems to me there has to be a point at which something is more important to anyone selling a product or a service than the money he can make doing it. I could be wrong about that.

Don't whine to me about how we have to have the government in there with their law enforcement pistoleros to "protect us" from quacks, or from our own vices. A real free market would quickly weed out the medical quacks. Like being able to tell whether a line of cars is fine engineering, or painted up lemons, we are able to tell the good healers from the quacks without even a lot of education. The healers will clean you up, sew you up, get your body running correctly, and teach you how to take care of it. The quacks will sell you a lifetime prescription for symptom-treating pharmaceuticals that are poisonous and addictive as junk, so you can't quit taking them.... QUACK QUACK QUACK!

What about the good doctors? There are certainly many of them. But… when it costs half a million bucks and more just to get that MD, and half of that every year to buy insurance to protect themselves from predatory suit, and they must charge the patient for superfluous tests made to protect the doctor from the potential plaintiff’s lawyer, the system does not favor the individual who would like to be a genuine health care provider to the commonly-paid citizen.

The political solution to the health care problem? Fuggittaboutit! You could elect the ghost of Lincoln, or Roosevelt, either of them, hell, you could bring back Ronald Reagan, and as long as the discussion is not about providing actual health CARE to people, but only about using the IRS or the Courts and Police to provide mandatory health INSURANCE premiums, we aren't going to succeed, and we'll continue to drop dead addicted to phony opiates and tranquilizers, or go bankrupt for a week’s stay in the Healin’ Hilton. As long as so-called "free market conservatives" think if the CEOs and stockholders are making money our health care system is working, we people won't have real health care, employed or not. Don't forget that for the medical industry, providing health care benefits is not the profit part, it is the expense part, and they will do their best to minimize it. Ever scratch your car? You find your insurance company has a staff of "adjustors" whose job is to find a way to justify paying you less, while raising your premiums. What makes you think medical insurance is different? As with the salaried people who work for the corporations: paying “workers” is not the company's objective, it is just another of its expenses, which they want to minimize. The objective is Conservatively clear: enable the few who hold the papers of ownership of the corporations to make money, and the more the better, ad absurdum. It is basic trickle-down theory, whether under feudal lords, gangsters, CEOs, Popes, or kings, that as long as the rich are getting richer, the rest of us will grow fat on the crumbs falling from their table. Even good shepherds do not build folds because they love the sheep, but because they know the price of mutton and wool. Don't look now, Little Bo Peep, but what is on that table is lamb chops. Baaaaa! Baaaaa!
James Nathan Post THE ANTI-CYCLOPS PAPERS

Do You Defend The Constitution?

Do You Defend the Constitution? Even Against Christians?

About that Constitution some claim to love so fundamentally, and call on our leaders to respect and obey. America is NOT a Christian nation. It was very deliberately and wisely created as a secular nation, Newt notwithstanding. My copy of the First Amendment says, "...no law respecting an establishment of religion...." That is, the law may not be used to promote the dogma or doctrine of any establishment of religion, including any and all sects of Christianity. It also says, "....nor prohibiting the free practice thereof..." That is, even religions which Christians hate cannot be prohibited or persecuted by law, even if some individuals among them perform anti-American acts. There is no question about the Constitutionality of this, whether we like it or not. The right of Muslims to erect a Mosque near or on the WTC site is clearly protected, whether foolish or not.

If 9/11 had been perpetrated by a small group of fanatical renegade Zionist Jews, (like the Al Qaida Muslims) would it then be all right for the USA to carpet bomb Israel, or to deny the right to build synagogues in America, or to start identifying all the Jews and refusing them airline tickets?

The few Muslim Americans I know are exceptionally patriotic, though struggling today with being demonized and their children abused in public and in school. If the Bible-whacking Jingoists treat them badly enough to turn them against us, whose fault is that? After turning the 40 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are already in this country into our nation's angry enemies, do we really need another internal enemy who used to be our friend?

The basic error in the Holy Wars lies in the most fundamental principles which are at the root of all of the factions of the religions based on the occult idol known as The God Of Abraham. The three major factions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are each now nuclear armed and prepared to destroy the world to prove their version of the absurd soap-opera of Eden is more true than the others, and God will give what is left of the world to them alone. If you really care about God, the Earth, the United States Of America, or the human race, you might take a second look at that story.
James Nathan Post NO THANK YOU JESUS