Institutionalized religion has almost always served as a political tool, but its jumbled dogmas befuddle our thinking. Democracy depends on rational thinking.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—share the same God and many of the same prophets give or take a holy man or two. We have to admit the benefits of religions. They have contributed to building civilization throughout history, spreading some level of moral consciousness and culture.
So, what’s all the fuss? Why do these portals to eternal life cause so much mayhem and destruction in the world today?
They’ve certainly served political purposes, unifying people under a similar belief and custom. The mega-religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that surround us today, still benefit folks in some ways. They console and reassure us in times of trouble. Faced with confusing situations, we flock to religion for answers although usually simple and superficial, if not altogether illusionary.
Take the Lakewood Church in Huston, Texas, where Joel Osteen lifts people’s spirits by preaching a cheery version of the Bible, not an easy feat considering the Old Testament’s blood’n guts.
Osteen preaches how positive thinking cures life’s cuts and scrapes. He teaches his enormous congregation that God delivers prosperity to those who pray for it. This version of Christianity opens our eyes wide to the big cookie jar in the sky. By showing the bright side of life, Osteen has built a mega-church, one of the largest, most profitable in the country.
The Lakewood flavor of God and prophets serves up a far more optimistic view than most traditional preachers of Yahweh, Allah, God—different words for the same Big Spirit.
Yet, during the few and brief moments of political guidance, Osteen advises his flocks to follow the authority of elected officials. In passing, he sometimes slips in his political wisdom as some form of ‘the President knows best.’
Submission to authority repeats as a common mantra in most religions. Take the word ‘Islam,’ it means submission. Though, on the contrary, strong democracy depends on critical thinking.
Ol' Time Religion-Fundamentalists
Like most of the neoconservative fundamentalists, Pat Robertson, ol’buddy of G. W. Bush, offers the doom and gloom variety of divine mysteries where God punishes us for our sins and where evil slithers among us and we must stamp it out; ‘if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll kill us here.’ G.W. Bush and his neocon cronies adhere to this ‘old time religion.’
With mainstream religion, the doom gets ever gloomier at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee recently endorsed Senator McCain as presidential candidate.
Hagee’s minions had forged close ties with the fundamentalist Bush White House and they are passing that righteous troche to McCain as well as to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government. Religious fervor inspired the 9/11 attack and other pathological policies among the Islamists. So too, among God-fearing Christians.
CUFI has an agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In this scenario of the Rapture, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation.
CUFI members, like Hagee, eagerly reveal their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow.
McCain is enraptured about Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “I’d like to say on his [Hagee’s] behalf, he’s been a very strong supporter of the state of Israel and when we were doing the No Surrender tour, he came and spoke on behalf of not surrendering in Iraq.”
Among the rapture enthusiasts was Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. A possible running McCain running mate, Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."
Neocons flock to many such flimflam preachers and other highway con artists as Norman Podhoretz as their guru. They do this mainly because they are desperate for votes and they must pander to the uneducated and gullible. For decades Podhoretz contributed to Commentary Magazine, serving right-wing neocons as their ideologue spin-Meister, encouraging the invasion of Iraq and Iran—in his recent book entitled World War IV.
One way to picture this: Podhoretz is to the neocons what Hassan al-Banna is to the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter being an ultra-conservative, right-wing religious-political group. Oh, yeah, that does sound just like the neocons, except it’s the Islamic version. Just like the Republican neocons, the Islamists want to return to the pure source of their divine roots…to get right with God and recoil from modern social progress—reproductive choice, tolerance, diversity, homosexuality, habeas corpus, human rights…ecology…
All too often, especially in current American voting, mangled religious thought has muddled our democratic processes. To understand the Republicans since, say, Reagan, we have to consider fundamentalists like his buddy Jerry Falwell who unified Christians into a political movement. Back then Falwell and other neocons minted a newly perverted version of Christ’s teachings. We have to peek in on fundamentalist thought leaders like Falwell and Podhoretz.
So what is God according to Podhoretz? For him, modern Bible interpreters, including Jewish scholars, have tainted the prophets with pusillanimous Christian teachings of charity and peace.
Podhoretz wants to strip away what he considers a 'modern revisionist view' of ‘our God’ and follow the old prophets in their ‘original thinking.’ He enlightens us with his ‘true and authentic’ understanding of each Old Testament prophet as motivated by a hatred of idolatry, a love of sacrifice, and a sense of Israel as a chosen people.
Like Hagee and Robertson, Podhoretz pulls out the old tribal Prophets of Yahweh’s days and embellishes their rough, hard-bitten conservative attributes. He denounces the liberal, charitable Prophet Isaiah as unworthy of the pages in the Book—as if Constantine’s editorial board should have left Isaiah out of the Bible. Jews are the people chosen to redeem the world.
The simple fact that the Jews survived proves that the prophets got this right. Only if they cling to the covenant between God and themselves can they fulfill their divinely appointed duty. They must support Zionism and eschew idolatry—which Podhoretz equates with the culture of narcissism, moral relativism, feminism, gay rights…and most anything else that progresses society beyond the ‘good old religion’ days of Yahweh long before Christ rebelled against the Roman and Jewish status quo of imperial politics.
A large part of the uneducated and gullible voters have been taught to follow this nonsense. The Neocons use this religious base as one of their most important constituency. They cannot obtain votes from educated, rational Americans.
Neocons and Islamists
No matter how you look at it, churches offer us an ideology, almost always political, a set of answers when we need security and fast solutions. Folks tend to flock to the quick fix philosophies of churches especially in times of trouble. Many of us go to ‘our church’ out of habit, unaware of the underlying political ideology.
The irony of this: the neocons and the Islamists, the Republicans and the Muslim Brotherhood…share many views of ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Their ideologies call for a return to the old, original prophets and to the pure sources of their religion of long ago…before the Enlightenment ushered in Science, tolerance, human rights, and freedom. It’s ironic that the Islamists and the Neocons share so much common ground in ideology.
The Neocons and the Islamists differ perhaps only in economics. Who should benefit from the oil? The corrupt Arab monarchs and the Big Oil corporations? Or the broader society? And this question, according to some interpretations of old sacred texts, is worth going to war.
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