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Self-Righteous Majority Eating Away At Nation's Foundation
posted April 26, 2005The Chattanoogan - Opinion
I keep trying to stay out of it, but they keep pulling me back in. I’d rather stay in a peaceful, light-hearted frame of mind but the great, self-righteous majority keeps eating away at the foundation of this republic like termites multiplying constantly and getting fatter by the day.
With George W. Bush as their head, they’ve taken us to unjustified and unprovoked war against our weak neighbor across the sea, resulting in the needless deaths of as many as 100,000 innocent citizens.
Their worship of Bush stands right up there with the Catholic’s adoration of the pope, in my eyes. I find it amazing that normal people can believe so completely in such fantastic notions as a selection committee electing a mainline to God and that God itself is really doing the voting.
In their eyes, Bush can do no wrong. It’s even all right for him to lie and it’s all right for his minions to lie. The best liars are promoted and sent out as representatives of America to the world.
It is not clear why the self-righteous majority has decided that lying is all right. It may be that they don’t mind it as long as it accomplishes the task. It may be that they are just not morally intelligent enough to pick up on lies.
It is not clear which is the more dangerous, lying hypocrites or the morally impaired thinkers. When you’ve got them both working on the same side it’s hard to sort them out. It’s even worse when you realize that a lot of the morally impaired thinkers are lying hypocrites as well.
I thank God that I live in a country where I can say that the president of the United States is a morally impaired thinker, a lying hypocrite and a silly goose who actually likes to think of himself as the high sheriff selected by God to tame the planet.
Every time I see him strut, as if he had just finished a workout with the dumbbells, I frighten myself with thoughts of me and him in a boxing ring and how much I’d love to rap his monkey skull until it rings like a Chinese gong.
Don’t take that out of context. I said "boxing ring." We’re about the same age and weight. I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and I haven’t done any exercise in about 40 years. I think it would be a fair match.
It’s not going to happen but at least I still have the right under the 1st Amendment to speak my mind, for now. But the way it’s going, I suspect that the right of free speech is headed for a rise in prices under this self-righteous majority.
Look at what they are trying to do with the checks and balances. They want to stack the Supreme Court with morally impaired thinkers like themselves.
I saw one of those self-righteous religious political operatives on television the other night with a gavel in one hand and waving the Bible in the other.
His message to the multitude was that the country would be better off following the rules as set down in the Bible than following the rules of law set by the government and administered by the courts, especially the Supreme Court.
Of course the self-righteous multitude ate that up because they are morally impaired thinkers and self-righteous. If it were left up to them there would be no separation of church and state.
Despite what the self-righteous majority believes, the founding fathers had no intention whatever of forming a church state. They thought they were forming a republic. Which is to say a republican form of democracy founded on the principles of free speech and government of, for and by the people – not a church state headed by preachers and Bible thumpers.
One of the problems of the self-righteous majority is that their thinking is impaired by their self-righteousness. Their thinking just doesn’t reach out far enough. And why should it when you have an electorate as gullible and self-righteous as exists in this country today?
As long as humans remain imperfect there will never be a perfect government. But the American government with its Constitution and Bill of Rights – which is to say its checks and balances of power on which the government stands and operates – is the best government ever seen in the history of the world, in my opinion.
The common, self-righteous majority understands the power of the will of the majority. What they don’t understand and don’t appreciate is the power set aside in the Constitution and Bill of Rights that gives a certain amount of power to the minority as a measure aimed at preventing the misuse of the great power of the majority.
That’s one of the reasons why executive nominations to important positions, such as the Supreme Court, are subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.
Being subject to the advice and consent of the Senate would be meaningless if all that meant was a straight up or down vote on the nomination. If the majority of the Senate were of the same party as the president, what would be the point? The president would have the perfect freedom to install whatever self-righteous, Bible thumping fanatic he wanted.
That’s why the Senate has used the filibuster for more than 200 years. It allows the minority to debate the issue for as long as they want, (or until the debate is cut off by a super-majority vote), in order that the president not be allowed absolute and total power to do as he pleases. Otherwise the term "advice and consent" would just be empty words .
The filibuster is just a gear in the mechanism of checks and balances, to allow as much debate and exchange of opinion as possible in hopes of changing the opinion of those on the other side.
Today it can be stopped by a 60 vote majority. But since a 60 vote majority is a little hard to come by, the current leadership of the self-righteous majority would like to cut that out so that the president can just snap his fingers and get what he wants.
It appears to me that the trend of the self-righteous majority is to put as much power in the hands of the president as possible and do away with as much of the checks and balances as possible.
We left England a long time back, but there seems to be something about a king that the self-righteous majority still has a yearning for. It reminds me of the need that Catholics have for a pope.
Of course, if they were not so morally impaired in their thinking, they might think ahead a little bit to the day when they will not be in the majority and their chickens might come home to roost.
It’s just not a good idea to weaken the checks and balances and put too much power in the hands of a morally impaired thinker and religious hypocrite like George W. Bush, or even a good president. It is not good for America and it is not good for the world. And I don’t like it.
Naman Crowe
namancrowe@yahoo.com
Democrats, though a minority in the U.S. Senate, have blocked votes on several judicial nominations made by President George W. Bush. This inspired a big rally Sunday at the Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. Televised nationally on several religious channels, it was called "Justice Sunday - Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith." In ways, it's too bad that the Almighty was not inclined to repeat the events of Chapter 5 of the Book of Acts, wherein Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, were struck dead for lying. But as it is, we can try plain old logic to demonstrate that the Justice Sunday folks are playing loose with the truth. Just follow their assumptions and see where they lead: They say that Senate Democrats are blocking votes on nominations for federal judgeships because those nominees are "people of faith." It follows, then, that the nominations which did get through must be those for "people of no faith," since they were acceptable to the faith-blockers who would have otherwise used the rules of the Senate to halt the nomination. Now note that of the 215 judicial nominations made by President Bush, 205 have been confirmed by the Senate. This means that 95 percent of the time, Bush must have proposed a faithless judicial nominee - an agnostic, an atheist, a humanist, who knows? Why weren't they railing against the president if they think it's so important to have federal judges who are "people of faith"? Instead, the Justice Sunday crowd was blasting away at the U.S. Supreme Court for "finding a constitutional right to sodomy" and at the U.S. Senate for its alleged failure to perform its proper constitutional role. Current Senate rules require 60 votes to stop a filibuster (unlimited debate) on a judicial nomination. A simple majority of 51 could change that rule to require only 51 votes to stop the filibuster. But Democrats say that if the Republicans (who hold 55 Senate seats) change that rule, then they'll use other Senate rules to bring business to a halt. The federal Constitution is terse about judicial appointments. Article II, Section 2 says the president "shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the senate, shall appoint ... judges of the supreme court and all other officers of the United States." The Federalist Papers offer explanations from several Founding Fathers. Alexander Hamilton called the nominating process "a concurrent authority in appointing to offices," and predicted the nominations "would naturally become matters of notoriety." Elsewhere in the papers, Hamilton explains that the Senate was designed to protect the rights of political minorities; that's why each state, large or small, has an equal vote there. The Senate also was designed to be a counterbalance to public excitements, according to James Madison in Federalist Paper 63: "\[T\]here are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In those critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens ... to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind?" But what does Madison know, compared to R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary? He told the Justice Sunday gathering that, "We are not asking for persons merely to be moral. We want them to be believers." Believing judges like Tomas de Torquemada, who ran the Inquisition in 15th century Spain and burned books and people suspected of heresy? Or John Hathorne of Salem, Mass., a devout man who presided over witch trials in 1692 and sent young women to the gallows based on "spectral evidence"? It's worth a filibuster or two to spare us from such inspired judgment. If that provokes a rule change that lets Democrats bring all Senate business to a halt, then that body will not be approving more tax breaks for billionaires, contriving new felonies or extending the Patriot Act. All clouds may not have silver linings, but this one does.
Q. How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. The light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?
a book review by Michael Shermer
Allison was an attractive Oregonian brunette in a new ageish way, before the new age bloomed in the 1980s. She wore all natural fibers, flowers in her hair, and nothing on her feet. But what most intrigued me in our year of distance dating were Allison’s spiritual gifts. I knew she could see through me metaphorically, but Allison also saw things that she said were not allegorical: body auras, energy chakras, spiritual entities, and light beings. One night she closed the door and turned off the lights in my bathroom and told me to stare into the mirror until my aura appeared. During a drive one evening she pointed out spiritual beings dotting the landscape. I tried to see the world as Allison did, but I couldn’t. I was a skeptic and she was a psychic. The difference doomed our relationship.
This was the age of paranormal proliferation. While a graduate student in experimental psychology, I saw on television the Israeli psychic Uri Geller bend cutlery and reproduce drawings using, so he said, psychic powers alone. Since a number of Ph.D. experimental psychologists had tested Geller and declared him genuine, I began to think that there might be something to it, even if I couldn’t personally get with the paranormal program. But then one night I saw the magician James “The Amazing” Randi on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, replicating with magic everything Geller did. Randi bent spoons, duplicated drawings, levitated tables, and even performed a psychic surgery. When asked about Geller’s ability to pass the tests of professional scientists, Randi explained that scientists are not trained to detect trickery and intentional deception, the very art of magic. Randi’s right. I vividly recall a seminar that Allison and I attended in which a psychic healer shoved a 10-inch sail needle through his arm with no apparent pain and only a drop of blood. Years later, and to my chagrin, Randi performed the same feat with the simplest of magic.
Randi confirmed my skeptical intuitions about all this paranormal piffle, but I always assumed that it was the province of the cultural fringes. Then, in 1995, the story broke that for the previous 25 years the U.S. Army had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Star Gate (also Grill Flame and Scanate), a Cold War project intended to close the “psi gap” (the psychic equivalent of the missile gap) between the United States and Soviet Union. The Soviets were training psychic spies, so we would as well. The Men Who Stare at Goats, by British investigative journalist Jon Ronson, is the story of this program, how it started, the bizarre twists and turns it took, and how its legacy carries on today. (Ronson’s previous book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, explored the paranoid world of cult mongers and conspiracy theorists.)
In a highly readable narrative style, Ronson takes readers on a Looking Glass-like tour of what U.S. Psychological Operations (PsyOps) forces were researching: invisibility, levitation, telekinesis, walking through walls, and even killing goats just by staring at them (the ultimate goal was killing enemy soldiers telepathically). In one project, psychic spies attempted to use “remote viewing” to identify the location of missile silos, submarines, POWs, and MIAs from a small room in a run-down Maryland building. If these skills could be honed and combined, perhaps military officials could zap remotely viewed enemy missiles in their silos, or so the thinking went.
Initially, the Star Gate story received broad media attention—including a spot on ABC’s Nightline—and made a few of the psychic spies, such as Ed Dames and Joe McMoneagle, minor celebrities. As regular guests on Art Bell’s pro-paranormal radio talk show, the former spies spun tales that, had they not been documented elsewhere, would have seemed like the ramblings of paranoid cultists. (There is even a connection between Ed Dames, Art Bell, and the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide in 1997, in which 39 UFO devotees took a permanent “trip” to the mother ship they believed was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.)
But Ronson has brought new depth to the account by carefully tracking down leads, revealing connections, and uncovering previously undisclosed stories. For example, Ronson convincingly connects some of the bizarre torture techniques used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, with similar techniques employed during the FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. FBI agents blasted the Branch Davidians all night with such obnoxious sounds as screaming rabbits, crying seagulls, dentist drills, and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” The U.S. military employed the same technique on Iraqi prisoners of war, instead using the theme song from the PBS kids series Barney and Friends—a tune many parents concur does become torturous with repetition.
One of Ronson’s sources, none other than Uri Geller (of bent-spoon fame), led him to one Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine III, who directed the psychic spy network from his office in Arlington, Virginia. Stubblebine thought that with enough practice he could learn to walk through walls, a belief encouraged by Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a Vietnam vet whose post-war experiences at such new age meccas as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, led him to found the “first earth battalion” of “warrior monks” and “jedi knights.” These warriors, according to Channon, would transform the nature of war by entering hostile lands with “sparkly eyes,” marching to the mantra of “om,” and presenting the enemy with “automatic hugs.” Disillusioned by the ugly carnage of modern war, Channon envisioned a battalion armory of machines that would produce “discordant sounds” (Nancy and Barney?) and “psycho-electric” guns that would shoot “positive energy” at enemy soldiers.
Although Ronson expresses skepticism throughout his narrative, he avoids the ontological question of whether any of these claims have any basis in reality. That is, can anyone levitate, turn invisible, walk through walls, or remote view a hidden object? Inquiring minds (scientists) want to know. The answer is an unequivocal no. Under controlled conditions remote viewers have never succeeded in finding a hidden target with greater accuracy than random guessing. The occasional successes you hear about are due either to chance or suspect experiment conditions, like when the person who subjectively assesses whether the remote viewer’s narrative description seems to match the target already knows the target location and its characteristics. When both the experimenter and the remote viewer are blinded to the target, all psychic powers vanish.
Herein lies an important lesson that I have learned in many years of paranormal investigations and that Ronson gleaned in researching his illuminating book: What people remember rarely corresponds to what actually happened. Case in point: A man named Guy Savelli told Ronson that he had seen soldiers kill goats by staring at them, and that he himself had also done so. But as the story unfolds we discover that Savelli is recalling, years later, what he remembers about a particular “experiment” with 30 numbered goats. Savelli randomly chose goat number 16 and gave it his best death stare. But he couldn’t concentrate that day, so he quit the experiment, only to be told later that goat number 17 had died. End of story. No autopsy or explanation of the cause of death. No information about how much time had elapsed; the conditions, like temperature, of the room into which the 30 goats had been placed; how long they had been there, and so forth. Since Ronson was skeptical, Savelli triumphantly produced a videotape of another experiment where someone else supposedly stopped the heart of a goat. But the tape showed only a goat whose heart rate dropped from 65 to 55 beats per minute.
That was the extent of the empirical evidence of goat killing, and as someone who has spent decades in the same fruitless pursuit of phantom goats, I conclude that the evidence for the paranormal in general doesn’t get much better than this. They shoot horses, don’t they?
God Forbid
Christianity is about happy endings. About the resurrection, Jesus's triumph over death. Its success in the marketplace of faiths came from its democratisation of the afterlife. In contrast, traditional Jewish teachings were vague on prospects of immortality, and any descriptions of eternity do not suggest Club Med. They're strange, mysterious, somewhat grey. However, Christianity and, later, Islam guaranteed five-star accommodation, which is why some Muslims can't wait. With Paradise beckoning, thousands volunteered to march across sands sown with Saddam's landmines in the Iran-Iraq war. More recently, scores have martyred themselves in suicide attacks. In most monotheistic faiths - though ostensibly believing that life, the real thing, begins with death - believers grieve and ululate. Though the dead are leaving this realm of pain and misery for a better place, the lamentations are so deafening that I've long wondered whether Christians, in particular, really believe what they say they believe. What they want to believe. I know what death is like. What colour it is. How all that time passes. No, not because of some near-death experience, but simply because I've been dead already. I've experienced eternity! Read my lips. What happens after death is exactly the same as what happened before conception. Absolutely NOTHING! It's perfect symmetry for the cemetery. Billions of years passed before our births and, as you'll recall, eternity was neither black nor white, not exciting or boring. It just wasn't anything. It's the same afterwards. Readers warn there are no atheists in a foxhole and you'll sing a different song on your deathbed, or like Voltaire, you'll be a last-minute convert. But when near death, I've maintained my cheerful belief in a meaningless universe. And I've learned that the opposite is often true, that true believers can die badly, their tenuous faith evaporating. I've seen it happen, sadly and suddenly, to close friends who'd passionately argued for an afterlife. One, a scientist, had written bestsellers arguing that modern physics endorsed immortality. On his deathbed he bitterly begged me to stop publication of his final book. When a Christian college at the University of Queensland invited me, of all people, to deliver an annual oration, I suggested to an ecumenical gathering of Anglican ministers, Jesuit priests and rabbis that faith was like the rainbow - almost always out of reach, that you could hear a subtext of anxiety and desperate doubt in every other sermon and many a hymn. Believe! cry the voices from choir stall and pulpit. Despite all your anxieties and doubts and fears, dear brethren, have faith! Even when your God seems to be missing in action - in wars, in the terminal illness of a child, in natural disasters, cling to what we teach you and sing as loudly as you can! And, most of all, let your faith dull the fear of death that has always filled the human soul. That's what we're here for! After less than deafening applause, three people came up to talk. Each had much experience of people facing death. The matron of a major Brisbane hospital said, I've nursed quite a few senior churchmen, and many died very badly. The other two, anaesthetists, reported the same sorry behaviour in the operating theatre with noted members of this or that church hierarchy displaying a sad, sudden lack of faith and dignity. Far from helping, far from providing solace, faith sometimes hurts. I watched a family dear to me, devout Catholics, dealing with the slow death of a young daughter. Feeling betrayed by the God they'd tried hard to serve, their prayers ignored, their bitterness intensified the tragedy and their pain. In contrast, many disbelievers I've known well have died with equanimity, even humour, preferring a last laugh to the last rites. No atheists in foxholes? What of the lack of enthusiasm in even the best Christian death? Increasingly there are attempts to repackage the funereal funeral as a celebration of life. Yet in all of Christendom, only the jazz funerals in New Orleans are much fun. Oh, When the Saints Come Marchin' In. I've asked Catholic friends, including vehement critics of his policies, to explain why they were so desolated by the Pope's death. Apart from ending his sufferings, surely death was taking him, of all people, to an honoured place in that better place? And they talked of the death of a father, of not knowing what was going to happen next in their troubled church. Nonetheless, I cannot understand why Christians grieve at the death of any father. Not if they know what's going to happen next in the great scheme of things. Not if they truly believe what they say they believe. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15041048%255E12272,00.html
Anyone could go to Heaven, not just the gods! Though juxtaposed with Hell, it couldn't have been a more alluring prospect. Christians have been enjoying the travel brochures for 2000 years.
If I could be a scientist...I'd invent a way to give George W a brain...along with half the population.
If I could be a missionary...I'd shoot myself and thus improve the world - that or go around renouncing superstition instead of spreading it!
If I could be a failed actor gone political...What? I'm not?
I like to build things. Got it from my dad. In the mid 1930s, during the Great Depression, we lived for awhile in a travel trailer he built. When times got better, he remodeled a succession of our houses. He built me a
motorscooter long before they became commercially available, and electrified our old reel-type lawn mower when nobody had even thought of such a thing. When he retired, he bought an abandoned school, had it moved, and turned it into a house.
What made those and his many other projects possible, of course, were tools.
Tools shape experience. Without the astrolabe, world history would have unfolded differently. Without the cotton gin, it's likely there would have been no Civil War. Take away air compressors, scalpels, hydraulic presses, microscopes and the like, and modern societies would quickly collapse.
Tools translate imaginings into realities. Indeed, tools expand imaginings. Fifty years ago, even the wildest speculation about the uses to which computers would eventually be put didn't come close to predicting how they've stretched our thinking.
Of all tools, none approach in importance those called "words." Because they're so familiar, so much a part of minute-by-minute experience, so taken for granted, we sometimes have trouble thinking of words as tools, but they're basic - tools for thinking, constructing ideas, educating.
The link between words, ideas, and educating led researchers Betty M. Hart and Todd R. Risley to study the verbal interactions - the word exchanges - of kids from welfare, working-class and professional families. In their book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, they say that by the time kids are three years old, those in professional families have heard a total of about 30 million words,
working-class kids have heard about 20 million, and welfare kids about 10 million.
They also kept track of how the kids were spoken to, how much they were listened to, whether or not things were explained to them, how many choices they were given, and what tones of voice were used. The kids of
professionals heard about 700,000 positive words, and about 80,000 negative ones. In contrast, the welfare kids heard about 60,000 positive and 120,000 negative words.
Schools are in the word business. In fact, they're too much into the word business. But manipulating language is the only academic game schools are playing seriously right now, and score is being kept. Everybody wants the scores up, so when teachers say that some of the kids in their classrooms
just don't have the necessary tools, they're told, "No excuses! Deal with it!"
If it were possible for teachers to speak out and still keep their jobs, they'd be telling legislators, "Get real! If you think scores on word-based tests are what quality education is all about, then you need to figure out
how to send us kids all of whom, by the time they're three years old, have heard 30 million words and been encouraged many times more than they've been criticized."
Legislators should hear and act on that demand, but they won't. So giving kids word tests will continue to be the main "education reform" strategy. To accommodate that narrow strategy, whole fields of study are being hacked away from the curriculum. Goodbye, words. Within the remaining fields, corporate-produced "programmed" instruction is turning teachers into robots. Goodbye, words. Field trips and other enrichment experiences are being cut or completely eliminated. Goodbye, words. Kids are being locked into seats
for practice and drill, practice and drill, using condensed, canned reading and writing exercises. Goodbye, words.
It's hard to imagine a policy more likely to turn out a nation of kids who despise reading and writing, a generation less able to put words in the service of imagination, a generation less well equipped to actually think its way successfully through an unknown, obviously perilous future.
A few days ago, an e-mail friend - Hugh McGuire, in Bethpage, New York sent me a paper explaining his work. Evenings and weekends, he gets about 30 parents and kids together in churches, community centers, libraries or homes, and shows them how they can have fun reading stories together. He has them actually do things - read aloud if they're able, mime, talk, visualize action, "crawl into literary characters in plays and stories that will help them understand and articulate emotional conflicts." He tries especially hard to involve troubled families.
Contrast Hugh's strategies with those coming out of Washington.
(No, I can't take credit for this; it was written by Marion Brady, who writes on such things for the Orlando Sentinel.)
As I was driving down the road today my eye was caught by a colorful billboard announcing the upcoming National Day of Prayer on May 5th. I was surprised, because ordinarily I expect such a momentous event to be heralded by the whispering voices of saints and angels inside my head. Apparently I've fallen from their good graces, perhaps because I haven't been praying enough.
The National Day of Prayer is brought to us by the National Day of Prayer Task Force headed by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family leader Dr. James Dobson - the man who discovered that Spongebob was gay. Apparently this activity has been going on for some years on the first Thursday in May, but I had never picked up on the aetheric good vibrations of all that prayer until now.
The idea of the National Day of Prayer is that we should all get together on that one day and use our collective power of prayer to pray for our leaders and our world. It promotes organized prayer events for families, schools, businesses and everyone else to get together and pray our sinful world back to godliness. It's all very positive and very patriotic and underneath it's more than a little bit creepy.
According to Shirley Dobson we need a National Day of Prayer becauuse "As a nation, we have rebelled against the Creator. Our culture is steeped in immorality and self-sufficiency and is growing increasingly hostile toward religious expression." Well, based on what I read on the National Day of Prayer website I'm getting more and more hostile towards at least some forms of religious expression and more and more glad I'm self-sufficient enough not to be sucked into their morass of evangelistic fascism. If these are the people who speak for God then I'm glad to be on the side of Satan and the rest of the rebels.
At the philosophical heart of the National Day of Prayer is a document called the Lausanne Covenant, a truly scary sort of declaration of evangelical holy war on secular society. The scariest sections are section 9 on The Urgency of the Evangelistic Task and section 10 on Evangelism and Culture. In the first they raise the great lament that 2.7 billion people have been "neglected", meaning that they have not yet had Christianity rammed down their throat along with a spoonful of rice in the hand of a missionary, a failure they're very serious about remedying in a crusader-like righteousness. In the second they express their desire to free people from the bonds of culture and instead put them in bondage to scripture. Non-christian culture is evil - "Because men and women are God's creatures, some of their culture is rich in beauty and goodness. Because they are fallen, all of it is tainted with sin and some of it is demonic." So that's the ultimate goal - destroy the demonic cultures around the world, purge the demonic from our own society, and bring the whole world to Christ whether it wants it or not.
The NDP is deisgned as an important step in purging the demonic from our society and bringing faith into every aspect of our lives. The NDP task force lays out everything to help you do your part. First, of course, we all have to pray. To simplify this - since you presumably can't figure out who or what to pray for on your own - they provide a list of what and who to pray for. This list includes all of the Republican leaders of our nation and five key institutions - government, media, education, church and family. They call these the 'Freedom Five'. Interestingly they don't seem to want us to pray for any Democrat leaders. I guess they've decided the Demoncrats are so far into Satan's clutches that no amount of prayer will save them.
The NDP program focuses on organized prayer activities. There are guidelines for organizing prayer sessions at your place of work, or in your neighborhood or in your school. This last is one which particularly caught my eye. It looks like the public schools are one of the most fertile grounds for missionary work among the corrupted children of our godless society. One of the prominent links on the main page of the NDP website is to a section on bringing the NDP and prayer in general to schools, which includes a 31 page PDF manifesto and guidebook called the School Events Guide which is all about absolutely filling your schools with godliness, from prayer in class to starting after school prayer groups, to starting christian athelete clubs, to sneaking prayer into every aspect of the school day. As far as the NDP itself goes, they show how you can make sure your prayer event is held using public school facilities and explain how the Equal Access Act of 1984 makes this legal. They also suggest literally plastering the school with detailed posters about the NDP and your bible or prayer group since that's also protected, not to mention making sure your group announcements get broadcast to everyone on the school PA system. Ironically this program to fill the schools with God goes under the cynical title "Freedom: National Day of Prayer for Students". Take time to read that PDF and look at the photographs. There's something truly disturbing about the pictures of otherwise normal kids praying while surrounded by other kids engaging in their regular school activities. It brings to mind the idea of conversion by viral infection and a kind of environment of silent confrontation which could only be unhealthy for the learning environment.
The hidden agenda aside, what exactly is the National Day of Prayer going to do for us and for the nation? At a time when it's so abundantly clear that what we need is greater self-reliance and a rebirth of personal responsibility - not to mention calling on our government to exercise responsibility and restraint - they want to urge us to look to a higher power for answers. They actually single out self-reliance in the Lausanne Covenant as the single greatest threat to society. People taking responsibility for their actions, solving problems for thenselves and working to make the world better is in direct opposition to their philosophy of turning to God for every solution and the church for every answer.
The problem with this sort of fundamentalist Christianity is that it hammers home a very, very negative message. It tells us that we aren't in control of our own lives. When something goes wrong, blame it on the demonic forces in our secularized society. It tells us that we don't need to take responsibility to solve our own problems and make our nation a better more responsible nation. All we have to do is turn to God and faith and prayer will solve all our problems. And if that doesn't work, then government will solve them, so long as we make sure there's enough godliness in the government. This is a sick, selfish and opportunistic abuse of Christianity and of those Christians weak enough to be sucked into it. It conditions them to look to God and prayer as a great escape clause and to church leaders for day to day guidance. It paints as acceptable the subordination of individual will and representative government to the rule of God and faith.
Bondage to a single, exclusionary, cult-like religious sect isn't exactly what I think of when I see the word 'freedom', and it's not at all what this country was founded on. In fact, many men of faith throughout history - like Martin Luther and John Wesley - argued that it's not what Christianity should be about either. Their fanaticism makes people like Dr. James Dobson and his followers strong. They have no doubts, no questions, no consideration for anything but their agenda. While our minds boggle and we laugh off the idea of a concerted campaign to virally Christianize our children, they just plug ahead with programs like the NDP to make that plan a reality.
As you'll see from their website and literature, the insidious thing about the NDP is that it's so well presented, so effectively marketed, that otherwise rational Christians will feel motivated to join in and think that it's just a harmless, feel-good event. They'll be attracted to the superficial message and never look too deeply at the reality behind it. By joining in they lend the people behind the NDP legitimacy and encourage political leaders to take them seriously and tacitly endorse the many questionable activities and the truly frightening Christian absolutism which are the underlying heart of the NDP agenda.
So, why not do something different on May 5th? I call for a national day of self-reliance. Instead of praying, pick one problem in your life, no matter how troubling, and find a way to face up to it, deal with it and fix it. Or if you're life's going pretty well, look at our nation and the world and identify a problem where your efforts might help make things better. Write a check to a charity, volunteer your time for a good cause, or start speaking out about your issue of choice. And don't look to me or your minister or God for the answers. Pick your own fight and work hard to win it on your own terms. You may be answerable to God down the road, but he's not going to hold the good things you do here on earth against you.
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