Jesus H. Christ: Unbelievable!

So I’m staring at my blank LCD screen, desperately hoping that some topic for today’s blog will magically manifest itself.  I do my usual morning exercise of scanning the CNN page and Huffington Post, clicking on articles of potential interest, reading the appropriate content, and bookmarking sites for possible inclusion in a later essay.  Nothing is piquing my interest and I’m not finding any connections or conclusions that anyone else may have missed.  And then the lightbulb appeared over my head…

I noted a piece about five stories down on the HuffPo page:

Syria Airstrikes Kill 553, Including 32 Civilians, During Monthlong Offensive Against ISIS: Monitor

Pretty much business as usual.  A couple of possible blog themes occur to me.: 1- Just as has been the case for almost a decade and half, we’re at war halfway around the world, and it’s something that barely even enters our daily consciousness.  2-The fact that US and “coalition” bombs incidentally took the lives of 32 civilians, including women and children, is treated as nothing more than an incidental finding, like a little arthritis at the knee in an x-ray of a broken leg.  Those civilians died in a variety of ghastly and painful ways, including dismemberment and disembowelment,  but are just collateral damage.  We’ll save our outrage for the next video of ISIS beheading a hostage.

Then I happened upon this one, referencing a story that’s actually about a week old:

Bill Maher 1, Ben Affleck 0

Affleck got into a heated debate with Maher on his weekly HBO show.  Basically, Maher contends that we need to stop being so politically correct about Islam and recognize it for what it truly is, a religion that encourages and applauds violence, debases women, ignores basic human rights, and whose most basic tenet is the killing of all non-believers.  Affleck, a liberal just like Maher (and me, for that matter) argues that condemning a whole religion for the actions of a relatively small fringe fanatic minority constitutes racism, intolerance and Islamophobia.

While we’re considering that fanatical fringe, let’s look at this:

Video Appears To Show Islamic State Militants Stoning A Woman To Death

If those charming fellows in ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Taliban had their way, stories like this wouldn’t even warrant two paragraphs on page 3. They’d be as common as the half page-chronicles of the DUI arrests that appear as regularly as clockwork every Monday morning after a college weekend in our local newspaper.  We’d have stonings for adultery, stonings for rape (mainly stonings of the victim), executions for homosexuality, even executions for sodomy (that’s right, kids…suck a dick and the next thing you may be sucking is cyanide gas).  That’s the way Sharia law is, and I’d wager that Bill Maher would argue that Sharia law is the rule, rather than the exception in Muslim theology.

Meanwhile, back here in the good old USA:

Conservatives Want America to be a “Christian Nation”

Whether it’s Rick Perry or John McCain or Rick Santorum or one of their talking heads, like Dinesh D’Souza, the GOP is pretty much unanimous in its contention that everything here at home, from education to drugs to wages to immigration, would be just fine if we acknowledged our status as a “Christian Nation”, made our laws based on New Testament gospel, and in general, got ourselves “right with Jesus”.

Then, like a breath of fresh air after being locked in a windowless basement, I just happened upon a little link way at the bottom of a page of something completely unrelated:

No Meek Messiah: Michael Paulkovich 

Paulkovich wrote an extensively researched treatise after reviewing the writings of 126 prominent historians in the first few centuries of the first millennium, and noted that not one of them made even a passing reference to Jesus or Jesus Christ or a messiah of any kind…which would be akin to a modern historian writing a summary of the twentieth century and never mentioning Adolph Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, or JFK.  Paulkovich’s conclusion is that Jesus Christ not only was not the son of god or the messiah, but that he never even existed at all, that he is a complete fiction comprised of whole cloth.  It’s as reasonable a theory as any you’ll hear from the roughly ten trillion words expended on the life and times and significance of JC in the last two thousand years and change.

I have a point here.  In the course of recorded history, there have been untold wars and war crimes and pogroms and inquisitions and tortures and deprivations and burnings at the stake and stonings and rapes and beheadings…all in the name of one god or another…all fought and justified over the seemingly universal contention that “my god is bigger than your god”…and all of it is complete utter undiluted nonsense.  No god has ever written a single word or sentence on a single page.  Every utterance in the Bible and the Koran and every other sacred religious tome is actually no different than any given passage in “50 Shades of Grey”…they were all written by a human being and the highest purpose to which they aspired was to…SELL MORE BOOKS.

As long as human beings keep looking to invisible myths in the sky for guidance, those headlines about bombings and wars and atrocities of all kinds are unlikely to change.  Amen.

BW