It's Time for Religion to Go Back Into the Closet

I've had it up to my eyeballs with the religious right.  They're ruining my country, ruining the American way of life and causing a lot of suffering.  Religious leaders are the consummate definition of hypocrisy, and I've had enough.  I will not rest until the line that separates church and state is long, wide and very, very vivid.  Religious leaders and their blind, devout followers have become the antithesis of what faith is supposed to be.  It's time to get this poison out of our government.

First, you should know that I was raised in the Christian church.  I have studied the bible.  I respect it as a piece of historical literature.  I reject it as a code to live by for the most part, yet there are some parts I embrace-- I do believe that Jesus Christ was a guy who didn't really have any bad ideas; love thy neighbor as thy self, take care of the sick, the poor, widows and orphans and foreigners.  Not a bad code to live by, however the parts where people are killed for wearing two different fabrics, women are sold into slavery and the rest of the insanity makes it impossible for me to accept the book as divine mandate.  Not to mention that science has debunked much of it, so I do not accept it as absolute truth.  It simply is not.  Still, the way Jesus taught us to live is not a bad concept.  He was a good man.

It's a shame that a bunch of guys got together centuries ago and decided that they could profit off of his teachings, and that their way was the right one and anyone who didn't go along would be damned--and then killed into the bargain.  And so it was with the crusades, so it was throughout history, and so it continues today.  

Modern Christians just don't get that this country was not founded on Jesus Christ--it was founded on the principle of religious freedom...the right to worship any god one so chooses.  Buddah, Vishnu, Ra, Allah, or Jesus.  Pick a god, worship whom you will.  You're free to do that.  Matters of faith should be a personal thing.  Jesus did say to pray in your closet and not out in the street.  

Religion should never be used as a cudgel to beat your fellow man over the head with, until he is bloodied into submission and forced to see things your way.  Faith doesn't work like that.  It never has and it never will.  Religion has no right to impose its will and its system of values and edicts on those of us who do not embrace it or embrace a different set of values from a different god. 

Yet today's Christian right beats all of us over the head with their bibles and religious system of belief in the form of restrictive legislation.  Their god says it is so, and so it must be for all of us. NO, NO, a thousand times NO.  Their god is not my god.  Their system of belief, and their book of rules do not apply to me.  I do not believe as they believe and my right to abstain from their moral code is bestowed upon me by the Constitution.  I don't have to follow along.

The great men who formed this nation warned us about the dangers of the state meddling in the matters of church.  It also warned us of the dangers of the church meddling in the affairs of governance.  The religious right is not listening and seeks actively to impose their bible on us all.  I will fight them to the death for my right to worship any other god or no god at all rather than bow down to the lord they wish to impose upon me.  I would rather die a free human being than to be bound by their religious ignorance that steals the rights of my fellow human beings and forces them to adhere to their antiquated sense of morality.

I have a message for all of the ultra-right-wing-conservative-Christians:  You're just as bad as the Muslims that you vilify.  How dare you stand there with your pseudo-righteous indignation ranting at a group of different religious zealots when they are so much like yourselves?  It is wrong and deplorable to fly a plane into a building and kill innocent people.  It is equally wrong to stand in front of a health center and murder one man in cold blood because he dares to offer a Constitutionally protected service to women.  And before you say that the death of 3,000 human beings is far worse than the murder of one...it is your bible that says all sin is equal in the sight of god.  And these things are not wrong because god says so--it is wrong because it breaks the rules of a civilized society with laws that say it is so.  

It is equally wrong for a group of "god fearing" men to attempt to legislate women's health services.  Sorry, men...you will never know what it is like to be a woman.  You will never, ever know what it is to be one of us.  You have no right, not here on Earth, and certainly not bestowed on you by heaven, to legislate women's bodies--or anyone's body.  I reject your heaven and your so-called divine authority to impose your will on my body.  The Constitution (which you claim to hold in as high esteem as your bible) grants me the right to decide what happens to my body. Abortion is legal and Constitutionally protected.  Rape is rape and is never the victim's fault.  No matter what.  You can label it all you like, you can define it and redefine it, and it's all the same.  I will fight for the laws that protect my body.

I refuse to accept the marginalization of a group of citizens based on their sexual orientation because your bible tells you so.  I reject your bible and your imagined moral authority once more.  Your bible also tells you that you can sell your daughter into slavery and take our neighboring countrymen into slavery.  I have a feeling Canada might not agree with that bit of scripture.  I don't see many daughters on the American market, but I would never put it past you religious zealots to try.  None the less, if you reject one tenent of the bible as outdated socially, then the same principle must apply to all the edicts of the Bible.  Is that really what you want our country to become?    

I live in a world of fact and tangibility--science and technology.  Your belief in an invisible man in the clouds watching over you does not negate my truth.  As the great Neil degrasse Tyson once said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."  You don't have to believe in science, and I don't have to believe in your god. I have provable facts on my side.  You have faith in a deity you have never seen and have no direct evidence of.  That is your choice. It is not mine however.   Why can't you get that?  You do not have, nor have you ever, had the right to enact legislation based on your personal religious beliefs.  Governance is secular.  Jesus, Mohammed, Buddah, Allah, and Vishnu free.  None of them have any business in our public policy.  

To be quite honest, while Christianity professes to be a religion based on love, it has become a religion based on bigotry and exclusion.  Not by design, mind you.  It's what the leadership has made it.  they've taken the bible and the words of Christ and twisted them.  They've turned what should be a matter of quiet faith and loving ways and turned it into a billion dollar industry that preys upon the weakest and most vulnerable among us.  To be fair, if the churches in this nation want to participate in public policy, it's high time they put some skin in the game and paid taxes.  In fact that's the law.  

Pat Robertson, televangelist and former Presidential candidate, who recently warned his viewers that atheists are miserable and want to make Christians miserable as well, is worth an estimated $30 million dollars.  He's not unique.  Pastor Rick Warren (author of the best selling book, The Purpose Driven Life) is worth an estimated $25 million, and the list goes on and on.  Do they not remember that passage about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven?  I guess that doesn't apply to Robertson or his political funding arm, The Christian Coalition.  

If you really want to see the obscenity of faith, you need look no further than the Vatican, whose net worth is estimated between $10-16.5 billion dollars.  The Vatican is invested in real estate, construction, steel, chemicals, banking, and insurance.  Although a significant portion of their vast wealth goes to the Catholic Church's charitable enterprises, an even more significant portion goes to this:

Just imagine for a minute the number of homeless people who could be provided shelter, how many hungry people could be fed for what this cost to construct?  Is this what the simple carpenter of ancient days wanted his belief system to become?  Is this ostentatious display what Christianity is all about?  What hypocrisy, what absolute self-aggrandizing, utter hypocrisy.  And this is the reason I cannot take Christianity seriously.  It is a mockery of itself.  The simple fact that religious leaders are (pardon the pun) hell-bent on inserting themselves into public policy, shows me that there is an ulterior motive to their actions that has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ and everything to do with their investment portfolio.  

I find it ironic that Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality in his writings and teachings--yet he told his believers to pray in their closets.  It's time that Christian radicals went back in the closet and stayed out of public policy and government.

Sky Diving Off the Fiscal Cliff

It's just this simple--it's us against them.  There are two sets of people in this world--CEO's,  and the people that work for them.  The CEO's are very, very wealthy people and so are their shareholders.  They want to keep all of their money.  They don't want to invest in the country that gave them the opportunity to build their very large corporation.  They expect us to pay for it all, and they've created a seriously large lobbying group to make sure that it happens.

Honeywell CEO Dave Cote

A group of super wealthy CEO's have formed a group that they call the "CEO Fiscal Leadership Council" lead by Honeywell CEO Dave Cote and Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein.  The two of them have gone on a media blitz to tell the country that the best way to pay down the debt is to cut so-called "entitlement" programs.  Have I mentioned that Dave Cote's Honeywell Corporation didn't pay a dime in taxes from 2008-2010?  Nope, not a nickle in taxes, but they got a $34 million rebate from the taxpayers.  Talk about welfare, geez, are you kidding me?  Honeywell enjoyed $5 billion in profits and didn't pay the United States a dime, we paid them.  

Then there's Goldman Sachs, the mega-bank, who received a $10 billion bail out from the federal government (that means you and I--the tax-payers).  Yep, they paid us back (thanks, fellas)!  Goldman Sachs reported 8.4 billion dollars in revenue in the third quarter alone, exceeding Wall Street expectations.  G.S.'s leader, Blankfein thinks that the government needs to "do something, undoubtedly, to lower people's expectations of what they're going to get.  The entitlements, and what people think they're going to get, because you're not going to get it."  

The good news is that Cote of Honeywell realizes that a zero corporate tax rate is not going to fly with the American people, but believes that corporate tax rates should be negligible, "if the US really wants to create jobs."  

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

It should be mentioned that Blankfein took home a tidy 16.1 million dollars in salary in 2011, and was expected to receive a raise and earn even more this year.  Cote took home a little more than $55 million in compensation for 2011.  He paid around $2.5 million in taxes thanks to the Bush era tax cuts.  

So, after the elections, we learned that we need to be active participants in the political process. Our input to our representative makes a difference.  If we shout loudly enough, they will listen.  We must remind them whom they are working for.  There are a lot more worker bees than there are CEO's.  Of course they're not worried about programs like Social Security and Medicare or Medicaid.  They don't need them. 

 They're fantastically wealthy--but we are not, and we need those programs.  They're not entitlements--they're life-line programs. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Food Stamps are a means of survival for a lot of hard working people.  They are important.  We're cutting funding for important things we desperately need as a society like education, and we're still handing out multi-million dollar checks to corporations with billion dollar profit margins?  What the hell is wrong with this picture?  Our government must do better for us.  They represent US.  Yeah, it's time to end welfare--CORPORATE WELFARE!!

How fair is it that we workers pay higher tax rates than CEO's with their multi-million dollar pay checks?  How fair is it that we have to write a tax check for the privilege of living in this country, but a corporation like Honeywell pays nothing?  The fact that they got a multi-million dollar rebate is just another slap in the face to the good hard working people who pay taxes and make this country work.  WE are the job creators.  WE are the engine of this economy.  It's high time we expected a little bit more from the people who benefit from the fruit of OUR labor. 

We have to win this one.  We are at war with giant corporations that believe they don't need to pay a dime to this country and profit off of the benefits of doing business here, making billions off of  government contracts.  They don't want to pay their fair share for anything and instead are trying to make it the sole responsibility of the most vulnerable among us.  

Pick up your phone, send a fax or write an e-mail to your representatives in Congress and tell them you've had enough.  Tell them you believe in shared sacrifice and that the richest among us along with corporations that have enjoyed loop holes in the tax code allowing them to pay zero taxes has gone on long enough. Encourage them to raise taxes on the richest among us. Tell them to end corporate welfare--tell them you've got your eye on them and you're not going to sit idly by and get shafted again.  If they won't work for us, we'll elect someone who will.

Our representatives aren't going to stand up for us if we don't demand they do so.  These CEO's want to throw us off the fiscal cliff while they fly over it in a jet made by Boeing and paid for with tax payer funds.  It's up to us to find our own parachute.  They have theirs, and they're golden.  Enough is enough.  We cannot allow Congress to reduce the deficit on the backs of the poor and retirees and the elderly.  We can no longer sit quietly while our quality of life is diminished and watch the ultra wealthy reap all the benefits the US has to offer.  We have to remain active and engaged in what's going on in our country.  You can find your representatives and contact them by visiting Contacting the Congress.  We have so much to lose and everything to gain by forcing the wealthiest among us and billion dollar corporations to contribute and pay their fair share.