| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Bible Studies with Satan" |
| Date: |
24 Mar 2005 02:34:28 PM |
| Object: |
Wingnut Evangelicals Don't Believe in an Afterlife |
Wingnut Evangelicals Don't Believe In an Afterlife. They are afraid of death. Or
perhaps their worship of mammon and Caesar trumps their belief in their
Bibble...
Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy.
Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of
government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power,
that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the
church?
The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed
broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a
person's relationship with God should remain a private matter.
As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new
government from being run according to the dictates of religious
fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious
fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run.
Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy
around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy.
Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of
Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading
mankind by the nose."
As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill
to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction
and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has
become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this
vote."
A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to
Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was
all about politics.
The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a
hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be
dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But
with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit.
The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as
the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up
between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own
political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to
show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace
out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to
rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video.
As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send
Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and
tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?' "
Jeb, keeping up with the '08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to
declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state.
Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and
states' rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time
they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court,
it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it's Bush v. Constitution.
While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with
red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least
some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they
couldn't win.
The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of
powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent
the Florida courts; now they're trying to pack the federal bench with
trustworthy conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may
yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them
in the Schiavo case.
Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme
Court asking that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube be restored while the federal
court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay
has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor
people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes.
Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized
by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that
God had brought Terri Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the
visibility of what is going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against
the conservative movement, against me and against many others."
So it's not about her crisis at all. It's about his crisis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html?hp
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
