The Doctrines of Republicanism

Andrew Sullivan said this in a blog posting on The Daily Beast:

That’s how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

The idea that a Republican could get elected as president in 2012 and we would have to live by these doctrines scares the living sh__ out of me!

We Destroy In Order To Save

According to an article on alternet.org, it has been estimated that the number of Libyans killed in the last six months, including civilians and combatants, has exceeded 50,000.

Our intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, has probably claimed more victims than those killed by the former regime.

According to the accepted propaganda, the U.S. is reacting with moral outrage   and military resolve because Gadhafi attacks his citizens. Truth be known, we are acting (once again) as “savior” because Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world!

But this intervention … was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.

If this were not the case, then why do we ignore (or only perfunctorily acknowledge) the starvation nightmare in the Congo? Where is our humanitarian concern when thousands are dying each and every day?

Time and again, America has been cheered and welcomed by oppressed countries because we were seen as the deliverer … the benefactor of freedom and liberty. UNTIL … the truth comes out about our true purpose. Then we rapidly mutate from liberator to despised enemy.

Once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East.

Our role in this war and all others that are taking place in the Middle East is NOT about national security.  It is NOT about protecting the U.S. from terrorists. It is NOT about providing a democratic environment for the country’s inhabitants. It is about maintaining “our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel.”

Americans need to take off their rose-colored glasses. Innocent men, women and children in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan (among others) are being killed almost daily — not to mention the thousands of U.S. service men and women. And for what? So we can have cheap gas.

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, is reported to have said:

What most Americans do not really understand or admit is: we are living our lifestyles ONLY because it is part of a very, very vicious system of exploitation that dehumanizes and enslaves people everywhere.

It’s time to stop destroying other countries simply to protect the interests of  Western oil companies.

The Heart of the Matter

Is there a problem with “looking into your heart” to decide if God exists, what God really is and isn’t saying, and which parts of the holy text are and are not divinely inspired?

Well, yes, there is. When it comes to questions of what’s actually true in the external, non-subjective world (such as whether God exists and what he thinks and wants) … if you look into your heart to answer these questions, how do you know that what’s in your heart is right … and what may be in your neighbor’s heart is wrong?

Believers tend to conveniently overlook the fact that other believers are looking just as deeply into their hearts … and may be coming up with the exact opposite answers.

Unfortunately, the ultimate arbiter is an invisible, inaudible, intangible being, whose nature and attributes nobody can agree on, and whose ultimate decisions we have no way of knowing until after we die.

Read more on this subject here.