Monday, July 24, 2006

What God Wants


I work with words a lot, and thus rarely find myself speechless or wordless before anyone or anything. But I have no words to sufficiently express the depravity of this scene, or my revulsion at this image.

This is institutional religion, the cult of institutional insanity, being drilled into kids. It is Orwell's collective in its pedantic mode, teaching that God is hatred, that destruction is salvation, that only group violence can make a chosen people free and safe.

The kids with the markers in the picture are Israeli children. It would, of course, be no surprise to see another photograph of children on the other side, writing similar messages of conditioned ignorance and hatred on the rockets of Hezbollah.

What hope do we have for a future—for the Mideast or for the planet—if the children of our world are being taught, on every side you choose, that indiscriminate killing is the way of God, the path to Life?

Here's another image: one of the recipients of those notes scribbled by children onto bombs. One of the lucky ones: a Lebanese girl with shrapnel wounds.

I hope my previous posts have made clear where I stand on this: the insanity comes from each of the extremes involved; and it has all been brought to you, in this particular evocation, by the United States government and its psychotic obsession with invasion-as-salvation. Thus it is with all theocratic delusions. I have no more words for it; perhaps a poet can do better. Mr. Waters, please:

What God wants God gets God help us all
God wants peace
God wants war
God wants famine
God wants chain stores

What God wants God gets
God wants voodoo
God wants shrines
God wants law
God wants organized crime
God wants crusade
God wants jihad
God wants good
God wants bad
What God wants God gets.


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Author Update: For those of you who look for Terry McKenna's contribution here every Monday, he's well and recovering satisfactorily. Unfortunately, he'll be unable to deliver Monday with McKenna for several weeks to come. I'll do my very best to stand in his shoes here, though I must admit they're way too big for me. If you'd like to send Terry a get-well message, just post it into the Comments, and I'll see that he gets it.

1 comment:

beepbeepitsme said...

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
Anne Lamott