Despair...

The year 2007 is coming to an end - and I am thankful to see it go - I cannot remember a year where the total lack of any national American moral integrity was more manifest.

We elected a "congress" that promised change and then continued down the corporate fascist path without missing a single step. Integrity, like impeachment of the treasonous, has been and continues to be "off the table".

All in the name of "security" - a popular term these days. It is used to cover wire tapping, suspension of Habeous corpus, torture, mercenaries, pre-emptive invasions, constant surveillance, and much more. The modern spin would not escape Tolstoy's observation more than 100 years ago.

"If we would stop rushing for a minute and examine our lives objectively, we would realize that everything we do to try to make our lives more secure is in vain. While spending time on trying to obtain this imaginary security, we forget that our lives can never be secure. Worse, while deceiving ourselves and ruining our true lives in this quest for imaginary security, we often create the opposite effect. A rich man acquires a lot of money to feel secure; and then the money attracts a robber, who kills the rich man. A hypochondriac goes to doctors to try to preserve his life, and then the medical treatment slowly kills him - and if it does not kill him, it distracts him from seeking his true life. Likewise, countries arm themselves to protect their lives and freedom. These "protections" result in the deaths of millions of people in wars as well as deprive these countries of their freedoms..."

Most disheartening and despairing for me is that the American masses continue to be deceived by the marketing genius of these pseudo-Christians speaking from the pseudo-pulpits of the their pseudo-churches, built for pseudo-religions. Something which did not escape Tolstoy's observation either:

"Church creeds are studied and recited as prayers in all the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is read officially only as a Gospel reading once a year and on a weekday at that. It could not be otherwise, because people, who believe in an evil, irrational God who damned the human race and then directed His Son to be a sacrifice and a portion of mankind to suffer eternal torments, cannot believe in a God of Love.

A person believing in a God-Christ who will come to glory to judge and punish the living and the dead cannot believe in the Christ who urges us to present the other cheek to an offender and not to judge but to forgive and love our enemies.

A person who can believe in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament or in the sanctity of David, who on his deathbed ordered the murder of an old man who had insulted him and whom he himself was unable to kill because he was bound by an oath (Third book of Kings, Ch. II, line 8), not to mention the other obscenities with which the Old Testament is rife, is not capable of believing in the moral law of Christ.

A person who believes the Church's dogmas that say that Christianity allows the death sentence and war cannot believe in the brotherhood of man.

Primarily, a person who believes that people can be saved by a belief in salvation or by sacraments has no incentive to devote his efforts towards implementing Christ's moral message in his life.

A person who has been indoctrinated with the blasphemous Church dogma that a person is not saved by his own efforts but can resort to other means, inevitably will resort to those means and will not make the personal effort that the Church assures him is sinful to rely on. Church dogmas - all of them with their emphasis on repentance and sacraments - contradict Christ's teachings in their true sense."

More recently, Ray McGovern a former CIA analyst, has described the American parallels to the rise of the Nazis and a few of the impeachable offenses and Congressional inactions along the way.

None of this would surprise Tolstoy:

Christ's teaching that it is impossible to obtain security for your life and that we must be ready to die at any moment actually brings us more happiness than the world's teaching that we must obtain security for our lives..."

I end the year 2007 - wondering if my fellow baby boomers are really stupid enough to believe that they will simply be forgiven for their personal greed and thirst for personal security.