The other thing that goes hand in hand with this new trend is that lots of people seem to have a temper that is barely contained and things like road rage that never went any further than yelling or making rude hand gestures at the car that cut you off now has escalated to the point where some people actually take physical action against the offender usually in a violent way. So in general people are less tolerant than they used to be and they have hair triggers on their anger towards those who in their judgment have dissed them in some way or another. In other words civility seems to have gone the way of other extinct species and we as a society seem to have no problem with opening up with both barrels at people who dare to violate what we consider the norms we should all live by.

Maybe this started with the concept that we all deserve the best that life can offer and to accept anything less is not to live up to your potential. Maybe the corporate mantra that Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street has finally sunk in at the main street level which was “Greed is Good.” Maybe the politicizing of religion has made us all think that compromise between the left and the right is akin to making a deal with the devil and must be avoided at all costs. I don’t know. It seems that there is no more room for compromise within our society and especially within politics where the drama plays out every time an issue comes up that needs a bi-partisan solution. Each time it fails miserably because there is no longer any room for compromise regardless of whether it is for the greater good or not.

Another byproduct of the intolerance of other ideas and beliefs is that it seems that we seem to have come to the conclusion that anything goes as we battle against the viewpoints that we find offensive. In the political arena lies and exaggerations are apparently an acceptable form of winning against your opponent. I can only assume that those who support candidates that lie and exaggerate also condone those statements as a legitimate way to wage war against your political opponent. Maybe the think that the ends (getting elected) justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve those goals. Perhaps the imagery of Ephesians 6:12 has permeated the followers of the Republican party as it says “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

This means that the struggle is not just against the politicians who are running for election but against the forces of darkness that are what is really behind them. If that is the case then any dirty trick and any tactic would be acceptable when battling the forces of darkness. Politicians themselves don’t care one way or the other and just want to win and if they can do so by wooing the fundamentalist vote then so much the better. So is this what we have to look forward to in the coming years? Are people becoming ever more polarized until we reach a point that they move from rude behavior to riots and then on to revolution? Whatever happened to the injunction that you should love your neighbor as yourself? Or is that prefaced with “as long as they are not different from you.”

Perhaps politicians, spiritual leaders and even regular everyday people might want to take a breath as the world teeters on some major changes and think about how they treat one another. Perhaps they might want to think about the respect that is due another human being regardless of whether they believe the same things as you do. The world economy is precariously balanced on a precipice which will only take a few well-placed pushes to shove it off the edge and the environment is heading towards a point of no return in regards to the damage that we have done to it. The rich are getting very rich and the poor are finding it hard to get a job or feed their families. The American dream of owning a home has become a nightmare of forclosures and homelessness. Is this really the world that you want to leave your children and your grandchildren? I really hope not because they don’t deserve to be left to clean up the mess we have made of this world. We are so concerned about leaving a huge national debt to our children but that is only a small part of the damage that mankind has done to this country and the world. Change starts with the individual. Change starts with me and it starts with you.

This surge into the Republican party by the Christian right has been going on since about 1991 or so as the Christian Coalition began to move into the Republican party even more than what Republicans thought possible. This quote from the president of the Alamo City Republican Women’s club shows that what was happening was not agreeable to Republicans of that time either, “The so-called Christian activists have finally gained control,” she explained in her resignation letter, “and the Grand Old Party is more religious cult than political organization.” In a nutshell that is exactly what has happened to the entire party over the years since 1991 when most of this started. The Republican party is no longer answerable to itself for the course that it sets or the planks that will be in its platform but looks instead to the Christian right, Grover Norquist and the tea party to tell it whether the choices it is making is right or wrong.

I have no problem with people voting for the person who is the closest to the ideals of what you want to see happen in your government but this movement goes far beyond that. There is a concentrated effort to groom candidates who will do exactly what they want once they are elected and then run them against established Republicans and take their seats in congress. Once elected these Christian right representatives will no longer compromise and certainly not allow any legislation to pass that is contrary to their interpretation of the Bible. This sounds like it would make a good plot for a political mystery novel or a sci fi story where everyone is replaced by pod people who will live and work in harmony without conflict.

The trouble is that this is exactly what is happening. We saw the results of this when the tea party had a large influx of members into congress on the Republican side of things in 2010. Suddenly nothing could be decided and Capitol Hill was gridlocked as bad as New York traffic during an OWS protest. We even came very close to defaulting on our debts as a nation because they did not want to compromise their position. It was our way or the highway. The tea party is an outgrowth of what was started 20 years ago and many of the tea party representatives are in agreement about being answerable to God for what they do as politicians. This means that they will never compromise their biblical principles to work with other representatives to get things done that need to be done for the American people.

I don’t have a problem with any spiritual path that people want to follow regardless of what they believe as long as it does not injure others and secondly as long as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on others. And of course that is what is so disturbing about this takeover of the Republican party by the Christian right. If you don’t know already the Christian right believes that their beliefs are the only “true” beliefs about God and all others are just deceptions of Satan. Combine that with political power to impose their beliefs on Americans via the power of legislation and you can see the danger. You’ve seen the results of this kind of thinking in the endless assault on gays in America, time after time Roe vs. Wade is a target of a Republican politician somewhere in the United States trying to find a way around the law of the land and lately the all-out effort to stop same sex marriage in its tracks because it is a threat to traditional marriage. The Defense of Marriage Act was their legislative effort to stop these same sex marriages by wielding their power in congress to please the Christian right elements that hold their leashes.

So as you read the news stories where candidates are asked about their religious beliefs and judged worthy or not by them you should be worried as well. I would rather have an atheist elected who will fairly enact laws that are of benefit to their entire constituency than to see a candidate elected based on their fundamentalist beliefs and who will only pass laws if they stand up to biblical scrutiny. If a candidate can put their beliefs aside and allow themselves to see an issue from all sides with no preconceived ideas then I have no problem with them. I don’t see this happening though. As soon as representative breaks ranks with the Christian block that put him in office then they will be tried in the court of public opinion and next election the Christian right will put up another candidate that will do just what they tell them to do. Is that the kind of country you want to live in? Neither do I.

I’m sure that many of you have seen the 4^th movie in the Star Trek series called The Voyage Home and what the main crisis was that Kirk and his crew were trying to fix. For those who haven’t seen it a quick synopsis.  There was a crisis in the future caused by our hunting humpback whales to extinction in the 20^th century. Kirk and crew were traveling to the past to bring a couple of humpback whales back to the future to repopulate the species to solve the future problem. My point is that our actions now will have repercussions on future generations well beyond what we can imagine and we won’t have time travel to fix it with. Watching the actions of big business, of politicians, and of consumers I wonder if anyone is thinking about anything beyond the next week, month or year.

About a week ago I was reading a story about the extinction of the black rhino in West Africa due to being hunted by poaching gangs for their horns and I just had to stop and think about what that meant for a second.  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/11/11/black-rhino-extinct-in-west-africa-in-new-red-list-what-animals-will-disappear-next-115875-23553018/  Due to actions that we took as a race we have wiped this species out in a particular terrain forever. We have deleted it from the future so that the only way future generations will even know this animal existed will be from images and videos that were recorded of them before they died out. This is only one example and one species that recently came to my attention through an article I read but it is by no means an isolated incident. There are many such species that are close to extinction and unless we take action now to protect them they too will be just a memory for future generations that they can read about in a book because they no longer exist in the wild.

So here we are in the 21^st century and whether we admit it or not our actions will have consequences for future generations that will occupy this land long after we turn to dust. We are so desperate not to give up our addiction to oil and move on to a green energy that we are drilling just about everywhere regardless of whether it is right for the environment or not. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not enough to deter us from continuing along this destructive path. We have no idea of what damage we might have done to the Gulf with the millions of gallons of oil that we allowed to spill out into the water but we are sure that we have to continue to do deep water drilling. Why not have oil companies invest some or a lot of their record profits into developing green energy alternatives? Oil is not a limitless resource and some day it will run out. Is that just another thing we are going to stick future generations with?

The Republicans denying that climate change is happening and that we are responsible for what is happening. We are seeing a rise in extreme weather events, we are watching the average temperatures each year climb just a little more and we are watching the draught stricken states burn with wildfires because of the extremely dry conditions. The ice is melting at an unprecedented rate in Greenland and the Antarctic and these politicians who are in a position to address the situation simply deny it and continue to take payments from their big oil buddies to leave them alone and open new areas for drilling. So are these politicians and these big oil executives so consumed with the need to make a profit next quarter that they really don’t give a s**t about the future? That is how it looks to me. Making money now trumps any concern or any possibility that they might be destroying the future for their grandchildren and their great grandchildren.

So as I look at all of these things that we are doing to the planet I wonder what will be left for future generations to look forward to. We are deforesting the rain forest, we will continue draining oil from the planet until the very last drop is gone, we pour our garbage and our chemicals into the environment like there was no tomorrow, we put off moving to some form of renewable energy for our cars, we rip off the tops of mountains in pursuit of coal and on and on. We live like none of this has a price tag that will eventually come due. We may not be the recipients of the bill when it is delivered but you can bet that there will be a bill for our selfish actions here in the 21^st century. I think that the future will judge us all quite harshly for not doing what was right but doing what was profitable for the short term instead.

I was not always as I am now though. There was a time when I was just as inflexible as the next fundamentalist would be in refusing to be moved from what I thought was absolute truth in a world gone mad. There is a comfort in knowing that you are right and that whether anyone else acknowledges it or not you possess the truth. It gives you a feeling of security in a world that strips certainty away from you with the reading of each day’s news.  You know that regardless of what happens that day or the next or the next you will still be in possession of the truth which allows you to exist in the maelstrom of the 21^st century world.

I was not destined to stay on that path of absolute truth because I started to evolve past it and at some point I was able to see that the world is not so black and white when it comes to how we deal with what comes our way but a lot more composed of shades of gray. The wall of beliefs doesn’t just collapse and suddenly you are able to recognize the error of your path but rather it starts with little cracks in the wall. The first crack for me was allowing myself to even consider that another viewpoint other than my fundamentalist view might be valid. I know. That doesn’t sound like a lot but when it comes to the absolutes that make up the fundamentalist’s life there are no little concessions.

There was/is an argument that is posed to those who are undecided about who Jesus was and the argument goes that either Jesus was/is the Son of God or a madman or worse. Those are the only two choices. Black and white. For the fundamentalist there is no shade of gray in that statement and there is no other choice. So if a fundamentalist, in this case me, starts to entertain the idea that there are other ways to reach or commune with deity you have demolished your foundation and are in danger of being lost. So a crack in the wall of a fundamentalist’s beliefs is tantamount to having a wrecking ball demolish the entire thing and letting everything pour in.

I am putting these insights out here to help you understand what you are dealing with in regards to the absolute refusal on the part of fundamentalist Christians to compromise or bend on issues that they feel are settled once and for all. (i.e. homosexuality, same sex marriage, abortion, evangelism) I don’t seek to convert people to my spiritual viewpoint anymore because it is my spiritual viewpoint and has nothing to do with your experiences or non-experiences with deity in your life.  This is not to excuse their actions because I personally believe that deity or God or Goddess is much more than what our finite minds can comprehend and that our concepts of justice, love, punishment, life and retribution are not the same as an infinite deity’s concepts of those same ideas. This is just to show you that the only way they will ever accept your point of view as valid will be if they have an internal revelation that there is more than they think to life and spirituality.

My spiritual beliefs now contain concepts gathered from many paths and I have room in my worldview to accept anyone’s path as a legitimate way to deity regardless of whether they agree with a single thing that I believe in or not. Breaking down the wall has freed me to understand a lot more about this world that I live in and that its diversity of spiritual cultures all over the world are a testament to the absolute infinite deity/deities that lie beyond our understanding. Cracks in the wall of beliefs are the worst nightmare of those who are locked into a fundamentalist mindset because it is like being surrounded by the enemy pounding at your gates and trying to breach your walls. In this scenario they will fight to the last person standing and use whatever tactics necessary to defend themselves against no less than the total annihilation of everything they believe in. This is why reason and logic will never sway a fundamentalist and in fact may be seen as nothing less than the tools of Satan trying to put a chink in the armor. Maybe this will help explain why oftentimes there doesn’t seem to be a rational reason for the way they act. To them there is.

The message of OWS and the other movements around the country that sprang up in support of the original one on Wall Street is actually quite simple if you look at what has become of this country in the last 15 years or so. It is the voice of the average American saying that we are tired of financing all the big banks, the big corporations, the endless wars that the Republicans have dragged us into and we are tired of our politicians listening more to the money that pours into their campaigns by special interest groups than they listen to us. Is that so hard to get? It must be because all I seem to read about in the media is “Who are these protesters and what do they want?”. They ask these questions like they haven’t a clue as to what the catalyst is for all of the unrest and the protests. People are tired of always being at the bottom of the priority lists for just about everyone. Politicians only hear money. I have watched constituents thrown out of public meetings with their representatives because they dared to question the course that their representative was taking. Corporations look to their bottom lines before anything else. I’m not saying that profit isn’t necessary but I do question just how much profit is needed to move the company forward and how much of the profit is to line the pockets of CEO’s and investors. The people who make this possible are the front line people who handle the day in and day out business of making the company run but when bonuses are threatened they are the first people to be laid off and let go. There was a time when companies used to care for their employees which created loyal employees who went above and beyond their job descriptions to help the company because they knew the company had their backs. Now employees have to look out for themselves and the only thing the company is watching your back for is to find the most opportune moment to plunge the knife in without causing too much disruption to the productivity of the division you work for.

Banks that we bailed out are forclosing on our houses. Execs that are laying off front line workers are still getting their bonuses just like their companies were doing great. Politicians still get paid even though they haven’t been able to accomplish anything in the last couple of years. We pay for our representatives to have better healthcare than any of us get but they want to fight against any kind of universal healthcare bills so that all of us get the care we need. Unemployment is at 9% and yet we can’t get the politicians to work together long enough to come up with any way to put this country back to work. And churches that should be looking out for everyone are too concerned with fighting same sex marriage or abortion to really care much about the children who are actually born or the mothers who no longer afford to put food on the table. All I can say is WTF happened to the world we used to know?

So as all the talking heads on the large media networks continue to either attack the OWS movement or look stupidly at the camera and say they don’t know what it is all about I will just shake my head at their ignorance. There is a line from the movie Dune that really covers what is happening quite well. The sleeper must awaken. And politicians and corporations should be aware that when the sleeper does awaken there will be consequences for those who have been taking advantage of the people with impunity. The sleeper will be a political force to reckon with and an economic force as well. Bank of America got a taste of that with the $5 debit fee that they added and then took off under pressure. People won’t take being screwed forever without fighting back. And that’s what OWS is all about.

It feels sometimes like we are all in a pot of water on the stove and the temperature is slowly being turned up day by day. You don’t really notice it because the temperature is being raised at such a slow pace that you don’t really pay attention to it until things reach the boiling point. Suddenly you look around and say when did the water get so hot? I don’t look back at the good old days as being better than where we are now because I know that is not the case. I think that the good old days had lots of problems as well but without instant communication and people coming forth to speak about what was happening to them it just appeared on the surface that everything was peaceful and that nothing was wrong.

The attitude that I mentioned above is the attitude that no one else matters but my party, my beliefs, my bottom line, my bonus, and my interpretation of the facts. Everyone else be damned. It plays out every day on our monitors, in print, in sound bites, in press conferences, in lawsuits, in church pulpits and in corporate offices all across the country as decisions are made not based on what is best for the general public but how it will benefit the leaders of these various groups and the people who believe just as they do. If you don’t believe like they do then you are not worth worrying about. When is it that the church stopped caring about every one regardless of beliefs? When did politicians stop caring about the wishes of those that elected them to office in the first place? When did corporations stop caring about their workers and start putting all of their energy into improving their bottom lines? The temperature of the pot has reached a boiling point and everyone is waking up to the fact that the water is no longer comfortable and becoming less so by the minute. Occupy Wall Street is an example of what happens when people wake up.

To top things off no one is acting like an adult anymore. Congress has been compared to a schoolyard in the way that they interact with one another. Television commentators push (bully) their points of view in lieu of facts and take pride in destroying others who believe differently than they do. Which is one of the reasons that I am very particular that those I do listen to have no agenda of their own to push. I’d rather just have the news and form my own opinion of the facts. Churches have become an extension of the Republican party which leaves me looking for the verse in the Bible that tells believers to go forth and change the political landscape and claim it for Jesus. Personally I don’t think Jesus had much to do with the political system of his time other than to be condemned by it.

People are making up the rules as we go along these days and from where I sit it is every woman and every man for themselves. I know there are those who are moderates and liberals out there who have no desire to push their beliefs on others and do care about their neighbors both near and far but the most vocal of the churches unfortunately also happens to be the ones who would love to take over the government and make this democracy into a theocracy. At that point all other religious views would become secondary to the fundamentalist Christian view of the world. And believe me that is not something you want to have running your government. But if moderates and liberals don’t speak up and don’t vote that is exactly what can happen. Food for thought.

It seems that this “fundamentalist” way of thought is seeping into all kinds of places that it doesn’t belong and this blog is just my way of putting my thoughts out there to offer a counterpoint to the narrative that is being drummed into everyone’s head by spin doctors like we see on FOX news every day of the year. There was a time when the public could depend on the news that was delivered via the three major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. We trusted the news anchors and we didn’t find ourselves questioning the motives of the network when it came to the news they covered and how they covered it. It would have been unthinkable that we look at Walter Cronkite and wonder what political interests he had for delivering the story he just read or the facts that were presented. Those days are long gone and now we as a public have to question just about everything that is given to us by any national news outlet and pretty much have to discount anything that FOX says as being biased heavily towards the conservative side of politics.

There was a time when you didn’t discuss politics and religion with others because deep seated opinions held by those discussing the topics would probably end up in an argument instead of a civil discussion. Those days are gone. I’m not sure where in the Bible it tells believers to convert the world through the political process but that is exactly what the fundamentlist/conservative faction of the church has decided to do. They have made it impossible for the rest of us to live a normal life without becoming involved ourselves to help counteract the lies and deceptions being pitched as truth by those who are intent on getting their way regardless of whether the methods are on the moral up and up. To sit by and say nothing would be disastrous because it would allow those who want to take this country into a theocracy the free reign to do just that.

This blog is my answer to those who would drag us back to the dark ages and subject us all to church authority in areas that the church has no business being. There are those who want to turn back the clock and throw science out the window because it is conflicting with their religious viewpoints. They want to take the progress we  have made over the last 100 years and reverse those trends so that they can feel comfortable in a world that is suddenly questioning the restrictive shackles that have been placed on them by the church for all these centuries. You will hear my thoughts in this blog about politics, spirituality, the environment and anything else that comes up that affects the people of this country and the world in a negative fashion or seeks to control them through religious fear mongering or intimidation. I suspect that some of you will agree with me and that others will just want to yell at me to shut up. The internet is still a free place and the U.S. still believes in free speech so get over it and go read something else if you don’t like the truth.

Thanks for joining me and I hope that you find the journey worthwhile.

Michael