It’s All About Bringing Down the Anti-Christ

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has a personal open letter that’s being passed around the Internet as an attachment to people’s e-mail messages, and if it comes your way it’s DEFINITELY worth a read. Schultz, along with 100 other business leaders, have taken it upon themselves to plead with Congress to stop what they’re doing and to work together to restore the American Dream which pretty much everybody knows is dead. The letter from Schultz and its message is praiseworthy— but utterly useless. Here’s why.

If you personally know an evangelical fundamentalist who believes that the earth is less than 5000 years old, and that 4000 years ago people (created by God) were riding around on dinosaurs— if you personally know such a believer, then you also probably know that you will never, EVER get such a person to change that belief. Disagreeing with them, and giving them scientific evidence to disprove their notion only solidifies their position. Disconfirmation always strengthens belief in the religious mind. What Schultz and his 100 friends don’t seem to realize is that the new movement within the Republican Party— including but not limited to the Tea Party— is not so much a political force as it is a quasi-religion. You can’t plead with them to work for the betterment of the nation because, in their religious-type belief system, that’s exactly what they’re doing now. What everybody seems to be missing is the true extent of the vitriolic focus of hatred on Obama. Throughout American history, every president has earned some measure of contempt from his political opponents, but until 2008, The President of the United States was never believed to be the anti-Christ. But such has been the case for three years now. You don’t get a believer with a Christian religious mindset to back off on his or her opposition to the anti-Christ just for the trivial notion of restoring the American Dream.

It will only get worse. Rick Perry is the one person who truly understands the situation for exactly what it is, and he will probably be the next president. He kicked-off his presidential quest with a pep rally in a giant stadium that drew over 30,000 hard core Christian believers. This was pure genius. It’s exactly what a person would do as the opening salvo in a war against the anti-Christ.

The problem with the Book of Revelations is that it doesn’t explain all that much about what to do AFTER you defeat the anti-Christ. Come January of 2013, Perry will have to figure that out. Maybe then, he and his followers will start to care about America.

How Would Jesus Solve the U.S. Budget Problem?

In all four gospels there’s a written account of an episode where Jesus chased money changers and livestock merchants from the Temple of Herod by the use of his own physical force. So from the gospels we know this about the Lord and Savior of All Mankind— he was not above pitching a good old fashioned fit in the pursuit of political activism when confronted by an intolerable economic situation. Good for him. This documentation stands in stark contrast to what the gospels say about the actions of Jesus when confronted by homosexuality and abortion (both of which were as common in biblical times as they are now). Quite simply, the gospels say NOTHING about this. Zippo. Zilch. Notta. Jesus, as far as we know, never uttered one single solitary word about homosexuality or gay lifestyle or abortion. These issues may or may not have been off his radar, but they were certainly absent from his talking points.

I bring this up now because I believe the Republicans are missing a great opportunity. For the last 40 or more years, the Republican Party has regularly found someone on their team with a special relationship to Jesus— somebody who could tap into the infinite mind of the Son of God, and report to us what the Big Guy really and truly feels about things like gay marriage or abortion. How else can you explain all the right wing rhetoric about God’s opposition to such practices? The GOP position is clearly not taken from the gospels which are silent on the dreaded sex-related topics.

The newest GOP favorite with a channel (albeit an indirect channel) to Jesus is Michele Bachmann. Her husband, Doctor Bachmann Ph.D. runs the family business— a Christian Counseling service that offers to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight by filling them in on God’s negative opinion of their behavior. I think Doctor Bachmann Ph.D. is squandering a huge opportunity here. If he can climb inside God’s head to get the lowdown on homosexuality, why wouldn’t he also try to get some divine inspiration about topics like budget deficits or how to avoid national bankruptcy? Biblical history tells us that Jesus actually cared about financial malfeasance and economic impropriety enough to get physically involved trying to make things better. I’ll bet Jesus would be more than willing to talk about raising the debt ceiling if only some special person like Doctor Bachmann Ph.D. would ask the right questions during their next discussion. And then Doctor Bachmann Ph.D. could tell his wife, Michele, and she could go to Waterloo and tell the rest of us.

Will This Cut Into the Summer Baseball Schedule?

Harold Camping says he’s not making any long term plans. As the head of Family Radio Worldwide— an independent Christian ministry— he and his minions are spreading the word that the End Times (JesuSpeak for the end of the world) will start on May 21 of this year. Given the fact that old man Camping is 89 years old, he might be correct in his forecast, at least on a personal basis.

He and Christians just like him are looking forward to this final judgment day on the basis of predictions spelled out in the Book of Revelations that seem to match up with current events. In other words, a lousy global economy, an American ass kicking from the Muslims in the Middle East, and the fact that Jews still inhabit Israel— all of this means that the rest of us are toast come May 21st. You just gotta love the way that these mental-case Christians take a single incident or situation and extrapolate it into a hard and fast rule that governs the entire world and the future of mankind. “Ancient cultures always walked in single file. We know this because Biblical scholars have found an ancient illustration of the three wise men approaching the baby Jesus in the manger, each following one behind the other.”

These are the same brilliant intellectuals who think that the world is less than 6000 years old. Their god might be eternal, with the power to create heaven and earth, but his master work (the human race) — according to their belief system— is exceedingly temporary, lasting a mere nanosecond on the time scale of eternity. My question is this: will the end times cut into the summer baseball schedule?

Where's The Love?

On the night of the November 2008 election, California voters restored the ban on gay marriage and closed the opportunity for same-sex unions. That twang you heard was the sound of the collective undergarments of the Religious Right, snapping into a knot to guard their tight little sphincters in the wake of their election victory. “Gay marriage”, we were told, “Is an assault on traditional marriage”. It’s fair to ask just why these religious zealots hold traditional marriage in such high esteem.

The path to traditional marriage involves something called the great American courtship, a ritual that yields the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate on the planet. Here, natural hormone-induced urges are compounded by a lack of sex education, unfamiliarity with birth control, and totally useless abstinence pledges— all courtesy of (you guessed it) the Religious Right. And then, once the traditional couple gets around to tying the knot, the statistics working against them are formidable. In today's America, 43% of all first marriages end in divorce. The failure rate for second marriages is 65%, and for those who believe that three strikes and you're out, they're right 75% of the time. Three quarters of all third marriages fail. When the numbers are aggregated, the divorce rate in America is 52%. It's the highest divorce rate for any nation or culture in the world by quite a wide margin. And the road to divorce can be cruel indeed, for public health statistics tell us that 17% of all wives suffer some level of spousal abuse.

It's no better for the children. Anybody who has taught in public school for more than 25 years will tell you, without exception, that students have diminished in their behavior, their work ethic, their respect for authority, and their overall learning ability. And this diminution has built upon itself incrementally, year by year, until American youth is now the most poorly educated in the industrialized world. The reason behind this decline is that fathers and mothers have abdicated their parental responsibility and left it up to the school system to tend to the upbringing of their children. Mothers no longer consider it a pleasure to dish up a hot meal for the kids, with the result that an astounding number of students get all three meals on weekdays from their school. And if parents are blessed with a high-energy child, they would prefer to medicate the kid with Ritalin rather than use good parenting skills to focus and develop the child's energy.

The California vote which went against gay marriage had received lavish funding from the Mormon Church. This, of course, is the self-righteous theology that believes that if one heterosexual marriage is good, more is better, so we have the Mormon phenomenon of "plural marriage." While exercising their religious faith, some offshoot Mormons begin turning their daughters into sex slaves at age 13 or 14, and for the next few years the young girls are bred like canine bitches in a puppy mill. They eventually grow up into clone-like women who appear on television as brain-dead Stepford wives with their lifeless zombie eyes peering out under Victorian hairstyles. It ain't pretty, but it's, sure enough, heterosexual, and I guess that makes it traditional.

So here's my question. When it comes to the debasement of traditional marriage, and the ruination of the American family, what can gay marriage possibly do that hasn't already been done? And could someone please tell where there's any love to be found in all of this?