All the invocations of god in this week’s piece of absurd theater called the Republican presidential “debates” remind a sane person of nothing more than that the invocation of fear is the best way to keep a population under control of its reigning authorities.
To skip around randomly in humanity’s tortuous journey toward becoming civilized:
The “great” religions of history have kept their believers in line largely through fear of the “wrath of god.” Never mind whose god. The wrathful deities of that “peaceful” religion, Buddhism, are enlightened beings who take on wrathful forms in order to lead sentient beings to enlightenment — that is, to a way of thinking that is in line with its prophets, rule-makers, historians and propagandists.
The frightening wrath of the Christian god knows no mitigation. From its earliest Old Testament manifestations (Romans 1:18-32) it threatened its adherents with death for just about anything questioning its own mythology, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy during its Inquisition period.
The wrathful god of Israel punished his own people not once, but thrice, with kelalah,” the curse of exile, to keep them in line. Today”s version of kelalah” enables Irsrael’s war-mongering government to threaten its people that they will be vaporized by nuclear bombs tomorrow if the P5+1 agreement is ratified by the United States. Oddly enough, it is Israel, not a signatory to the international nuclear non-proliferation agreement, that has a stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is Iran, a signatory to the non-proliferation accord, which has been inspected repeatedly, that has none.
Today, even moderate Muslims acknowledge, as does the journalist and philosopher Hamza Ali Abbasi ,that, “I fear Allah.” He may balance that with a caution that Allah also wants us to love even those who disagree with us, but on the other side in the real world of today is ISIS. Sunni and Shiite pledge allegiance to the same Q’uran, yet slaughter one another in the most inhumane ways. (Is there a “humane” way to slaughter? Never mind.)
The Christian hypocrisy of the most fear-mongering religionists since Torquemada, as the Republican clowns tried to out-god each other, made these things clear:
—Any nation that seriously considers Donald Trump to be a candidate to lead it has sunk beneath the minimum level of intelligence to be considered “civilized.”
—The other would-be presidents can be judged only by the degree to which they inspire fear.
—The fear most to be feared today is Iran. If we take a step toward peace with it, we will all suffer fates worse than death. It is, you see, what it is.
—Gay marriage is to be feared greatly. It will invoke the wrath of god against us, which, conjoined with peace with Iran, will consign us all to to the fires of hell.
—If we do not give up those silly things called civil rights, we will all be enslaved by Putin, decimated by an ayatollah and forced to worship non-Christian gods.
—It might be wise to reconsider those anchored-in-truth demeaning jokes about New Jersey.
—Jeb who?
Ah, me. Drought-stricken New Mexico has had a lot of rain lately, much of it accompanied by awesome lightning shows.
