Monday, July 18, 2005
Guess what? It is possible...It is actually possible to be against Islamic, fanatical terrorists and the Bush administration. How, you ask? Well... 5:33:42 PM | The Islamic fundamentalists who group themselves with al Qaeda and other fanatical groups use religion to encourage followers to enact violence against others and themselves. They are dangerous and must be stopped. As Wole Soyinka said, "The fanatic that is born of this dogmatic structure of the ineffable, religion, is the most dangerous being on earth." They scare me more than any other people in the world. I would like us to try and end religiously motivated terrorism. It seems that terror that is purely politically motivated would be easier to counteract, but I don't know. Politics haven't prevented the Basque separatists from killing innocent people, or the Irish Republican Army from killing innocent people, or the Tamil Tigers from blowing themselves up in order ot kill innocent people. Still, in theory at least, politics can be debated while faith cannot. I do not support the Bush administration because they are not fighting terrorism. Their policies are failing. They are creating more terrorists across the world, as witnessed by the four young men who blew themselves up in London, killing dozens of others, as well as by the continued, overwhelming violence in Iraq. They have basically abandoned our mission in Afghanistan, as witnessed by every conversation I have with my husband. They seem to have no interest in fighting terrorism. Rather, they seem interested in perpetual war for political and economic gain. There are probably other reasons, too. In fact, I'm sure there are. If the Bush administration was actually fighting terror, I would support them even though I am a Democrat. But they are not. Worse, they started a war without a viable plan and on false pretenses, a war that has created a training ground for new terrorists, has taken the lives of nearly 1800 Americans, and the lives of literally countless Iraqis. Through the course of this war and their failed domestic policies, they have created an outlandish deficit and at best a wobbly economy. We are suffering from a failure of leadership. I think Kerry would have done a better job fighting terrorism than Bush has done. In fact, I think any of the democratic candidates would have done a better job. I think a number of republicans would have done a better job too, including John McCain. I am not a fan of McCain's positions on social policies, but I am confident that he would have done a better job in every single way than Bush. Bush has been a nightmare. He has failed us. He continues to fail us. We do not have kings here, we elect presidents, so I am under no obligation to support Bush even when I support members of our military. I hope we have the good sense to elect someone who is competent next time around. Until then, I will continue to rightly criticize Bush and his policies of failure. I will do this because I actually care about America and its people, including members of the military like my husband. I think we all deserve better. We deserve to have a leader who develops coherent, thoughful policies, not one who throws things together on faulty intelligence and wages war by the seat of his pants. Bush has failed us in our fight against Islamic terrorists. The terrorists terrify me. Bush is incompetent. This is why I am against the Islamic terrorists and the Bush administration. That wasn't so hard, was it? (This post is in response to an ongoing discussion over at Tattered Coat. A number of Republican commenters give us the same false choice that Bush does: "You're either with us or with the terrorists." I don't think so.) 
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Atheist? I'm not an atheist! God forbid!!The LA
Times on American atheists in the age of the faith-based
presidency: 10:43:42 AM | Atheists often keep quiet about their
worldview. Some say that to volunteer their atheism offends
believers. Sweeney has been harassed and
threatened so much she has stopped blogging. I know how that is.
Sometimes you just don't want to fight anymore. You just want to live
in peace."We have a social idea that it's rude," says Bobbie Kirkhart, Los Angeles-based president of Atheist Alliance International. [...] "There's this tremendous feeling of being a second-class citizen when you know you're patriotic and working for all kinds of good things for the country, and yet you're ranked with the pedophiles," Futrell says. "You have to have political influence in order to get cultural change of any kind." [...] In 1999, then-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura became a hero for the movement when he refused to endorse the National Day of Prayer and told Playboy magazine that organized religion was "a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers." Actress-writer Sweeney emerged this year as a sort of amiable advocate for nonbelief. "Letting Go of God," which played at a small Hollywood theater, proved so popular that Sweeney is recording a CD of the performance, writing a book based on it and has plans to release it as a film. Her show aims to entertain and disarm audiences as it traces Sweeney's path away from Catholicism. (check out Sweeney on This American Life's Godless America issue) [...] Breaking the news to her devout Catholic parents, however, didn't go well. [Sweeney's] father forbade her from attending his funeral. Her mother complained that "at least being gay is socially acceptable[sigma]. Why can't you just say you're still searching?" Sweeney didn't respond to interview requests, but on her blog at juliasweeney.com, she described the fallout of the recent publicity. The mail was so voluminous and, she writes, "so outraged and so filled with hate" that on June 13 she decided to stop blogging for a while and has considered moving. After reading this article, I think it's good that most Americans are so ignorant of Buddhism. When I tell someone I'm a Zen Buddhist they think I'm religious and I believe in the "God" Buddha, the same "God" that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship. I usually tell them the truth, that Buddha wasn't a god, he was a human being just like the rest of us, and that Buddhism is an atheistic religion, and that many zen temples do not even have an image of Buddha in them which brings up the question of whether or not it is a religion at all (I think it's not). But now I'm not so sure. Maybe I'll keep my mouth shut, make people think by my silence that I agree with them and let them live with their ignorance. These are dangerous times when those without faith are scared to say so. How "free" is that? I'm trying to convince my friend Amy to do a guest post about her "coming out" as a nonbeliever to her parents. When she told them she no longer believed in Jesus, they told her she was "just searching" and that she'd come back around. I'd love it if she shared her story here.
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Last update: 8/3/05; 12:28:42 AM .
