Let us prey.
Far be it from me to criticize Israel. I come home to find Israel has murdered another child just as I might come home to find my dog has shit on the rug. I knew they were going to do that. If I observe the sins of Israel aloud, don't take it as criticism, because any sin that I might lay at Israel's door could be piled against mine a thousand times over, because I am an American.
And I do not mean in our distant past. The blood of the ethnic cleaners and of the cleansed runs in my veins, my wife's, my child's. But in our living present, our substance goes to subsidize murder and theft on a scale that would make a Netanyahu drool. We are the authors of our antagonists and they are the excuse for our brutality. America had al Qaeda to play Mordred to our Arthur, and Israel has Hamas.
So when I tell you that the Holy Land is a fetid abattoir, understand: I'm not blaming anyone. Jerusalem is holy to the three greatest monotheistic religions, so the slaughter is inevitable. That's what religion is, that's what religion does.
Though I am an agnostic, I am a Christian in the same way that right-wingers will tell you Obama is a Muslim: Muslims consider him one of them because of his ancestry. I was baptized Catholic. I had no choice. So I also cannot criticize Israel, but instead merely observe the inevitable, because when Jerusalem was in Christian hands it was no better. The slaughter in that sacred cesspool when Christians seized it dwarfs any atrocity recently omitted from the American press. Babies may be more dangerous than bullets to Israel today, but my kindred speared infants on spits. This week, my Church blasted Obama's change in abortion policy while exonerating a holocaust-denier, and this was a holy thing. I don't care if they did the latter because the Church was complicit in the holocaust or because our Pope grew up singing songs about "Jewish blood spurting beneath the knife." As outrages go, this one is barely perceptible beside the history of the Church. But they'll keep trying, and I'll still be stained by the sacrament of murderers and fools.
The human costs of the Mexico City policy and the human costs of the holocaust aren't somehow beside the point to the Church, they are the point. The greatest sin of secularism is that it bettered the world. Faith is diminished because suffering is diminished. Like the squalor of the Taliban's Afghanistan or the millionaire who bankrolled Proposition 8 and who wants to change the law so we can stone children to death, they are not relevant unless they can sink us all in brutality, recapitulating the brutish world in which Leviticus actually made sense. The Vatican also denounced in-vitro fertilization, because a childless couple's prayerful suffering is useful to the Church. A solution from science would only make them happy. Liturgy loves misery.
You might object (and I would be disappointed if you didn't) that there are good religious people in the world, but I would remind you that they are good merely because they are innocuous. Any Muslim, Jew, or Christian who subscribes to the values of secular civilization must ignore most of their holy writ. Here is a manual for ethnic cleansing. Call it "Joshua." Here is one for genocide. Call it "Judges." So long as a religious person is only half-serious about their faith, they pose little threat to civilization.
You might also point out that religious people can be good by means other than subtraction. Religious people do good works. So does Hamas. George Bush observed that it was people of faith, by which he meant his own, who got rid of slavery. Here he was ignoring, assuming he had ever known, that the same churches had also ground out piles of lofty syllables to justify that peculiar institution in the first place. Liberation theology legitimized leftist violence south of the border and American Protestants armed the fascists and prayed for the end of the world. For every charity helping victims of famine in Africa, I can show you the faith (or pretension thereof) of the dictator who drove them there.
Starvation is a tool of war, and war is a tool of religion. My ancestors came by their religion at the behest of a king, at the tip of a spear. They had no choice. Even in the last century, they had to at least feign faith or face ostracism, not just social, but economic. Whether it's Akhenaton's new god or Antoninus' asshole of a step-father, all power resides in the God, just as all authority rests in the hegemon. God is the king's mascot.
The nature of the Christian Godhead was determined not by theologians but by street gangs and assassinations. Chronicles in the early Middle Ages refer to fighting the "heathens," but more likely than not they were talking about Arians. A thousand years later, Christian Europe's religious wars abroad came home to turn that continent into the slaughterhouse that terrified the Framers. When we have to learn that lesson, one more time, what will the body-count be? The reason you are free to claim a faith is because religion has been deprived of the brutality they used to use to compel you. Forget that, and the blood will flow. Again.
Secularism freed your conscience. If America truly were "a Christian nation," you wouldn't be free. You might be a heretic. More likely, however, you'd just shut up and obey. Your full credence is not necessary. Obedience is the object. If you do not sacrifice to the God (which entails bowing before the hegemon) you endanger us all. God punished us on 9/11, you'll recall. People of faith fly planes into buildings, our President declares a "crusade," and his supporters' eyes dart back and forth between the news and the Book of Revelation. They say they "have no king but Jesus," which means that they are traitors waiting to happen. This is why fundamentalists are infiltrating the military.
Monotheism is what imperialism scrawls on the sky, the terrifying image of a God who is a terrorist.
And so now, the religious fringe parties who had served as leverage for the Israeli right in parliament stand to become powers in their own right. Violence will follow. It's in their nature, being (a) religious and (b) serious about it. For the ascendant Israeli right, the violence must continue because that's what's driving them to power. Hamas is content to provoke Israel to mass murder because that's what keeps Hamas relevant. And you and I pay for some part of it because too many of our countrymen need Israel so that the world can come to an end, and our politicians are content to launder money through Israel to our own arms industry and back into their campaigns, funneling cash through the bowels of a stinking corpse to pay for the flags and french horns on your TV. What you smell is religion. It is strongest where the bodies are thick on the ground.
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