Zeitgeist 20: Stop this Goddamned Iraq war

Submitted by Alex Carpenter on April 13, 2007 - 10:49pm.

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(World)

The Iraq war will cost our generational 1,000,000,000,000 dollars & all our sense of morality to stop it before more humans die for corporate profit.

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(America)

Recently several media pieces show a change in the evangelical landscape of American politics.

This week Francis FitzGerald writes in the The New York Review of Books: During the past two years, a half-dozen prominent evangelicals have published books denouncing the religious right for what they said was its equation of morality with sexual morality, its aggressive intolerance, its confusion of church and state, and its unholy quest for political power. . . .In Washington, Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice-president for governmental relations, has supported the experienced evangelical aid organizations World Relief and World Vision in lobbying for a major increase in US aid for development, debt relief for the poorest countries, cuts in domestic agricultural subsidies, and the inclusion of labor standards and human rights conditions in trade agreements. (Two years ago World Vision campaigned against the Central American Free Trade Agreement because it lacked such protections.)

And I love the quote in her penultimate paragraph: The defection of the centrist leaders from the religious right's agenda has thus far had no obvious effect on the evangelical vote. Still, religious right leaders worry that it will. John Giles, the president of Christian Action Alabama, a powerful conservative evangelical state organization, told the Financial Times that he saw the broadening of the centrist concerns to such issues as the environment and poverty as an effort to divide evangelicals and weaken the religious right. "We can all unite around a few core issues, such as abortion, pornography and gambling," he said. "But when you start talking about global warming, the minimum wage or the death penalty, the consensus breaks down."

That sounds like good news to me. I like it when old systems of oppression break down and the beatitudes seem that much more embodied.
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(Community)

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(Scripture)

God bless you Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007). Thanks for the prophetic and sarcastic prose.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.

If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter if he was God or not?

If it weren’t for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please— a little less love, and a little more common decency."

Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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(You)

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