Things like this send me into a fit of rage and grief about the absolute cluelessness and abandonment of the Church in America. The same clueless people who failed to do just a bit of homework to balance what they are being spoon-fed by the Bush administration (with the mainstream media perfectly willing to be complicit in the endeavor, and squelch any criticism or simply “REPORTING THE NEWS”), these same people also call themeselves Christians. If they want to be “clueless Christians” and find out at the end of time how complicit they were in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, then they are proceeding just fine. Bush the other day said something about “those who kill innocent people”, and I seethed with disgust over this man whose shallowness defies any pretension to “Christ changed my heart”, and whose power position makes him indeed a dangrous and unholy man.

It doesn’t take Satanic rituals and pitchforks and horns to make one an instrument of Satan. Just deception, and darkness, and hubris, and the power with which it comes and which absolutely corrupts.

I really don’t know what to do about the Church. I’ll have to spend the next three Sunday s before Christmas back downtown in a Church where I know there are a large group of people who deplore this war and this president for not being intelligent enough and compassionate enough to see the capacity for destruction which his position entails. I myself think he is an intellectual pawn in the plans of an evil, neoconservative regime, which runs far deeper into the back rooms than the oval office can contain.

These thoughts and this type of stance within the Christian tradition may be seen as extreme, but I see an extreme of evil being perpetuated upon our nation, and usually sane and intelligent people are swept up in the mass deception. Think of it. Perhaps a HUNDRED THOUSAND dead, and more than half and perhaps 2/3 of these are women and children. Shame on you George W. Bush. Shame on you Republican party. Shame on you , Church in America. Just change your name from the Church of Jesus Christ to the Church of America and cut out the pretense. The Church can only be found now in the underground. The Church in the open has gonme completely astray. Accept Christ and change. He stands at the door of the Church and knocks, asking the people to let him come in and transform humanity. Transfomrmative possibilities are ever present, but Christ must be let into the process.

The New York Review of Books: On War

the scenes in the hospital corridors in The Fall of Baghdad are a reminder that this war, despite the assurances of the Bush administration, was neither clean nor precise. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been wounded and killed. Anderson, by focusing on a few victims, including two children, helps to counter the glib excuses for the war. He stands in a hospital looking at the body of a small child killed by American bombs, and the image alone mocks all those who promoted the war on humanitarian grounds:
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“Before the cloth covered her, I saw that the girl was covered in blood. Her brother looked as though he were sleeping. But they both were dead. Their mother was there, beside herself with grief. She was the woman I had heard wailing and hitting the walls. Then almost all the onlookers around the mother, including the doctors and nurses, broke down and cried. I was overcome and went outside and sat down. I wept. The children’s father was sitting a few feet away from me, disconsolately sobbing into his arms.”