NEWS: Bush Unveils Faith Based Emergency Assistance

Doesn't this halfnut preppie in the White House who only got there because of his political cronies' electoral chicanery EVER stop sucking up to wealthy dominionists? Nope, I guess not.

this doesnt have much to do with the article. wll maybe it does. at class today one of my teachers said that bush is not a bad public speaker.

i thought that his statment was just as funny as this article is.

Fuck the day of prayer...I'm going to use that day to do something meaningful, tangible and positive for the survivors instead.

Bush is so full of shit.

I guess the president did have a plan for reinforcing the levies. PRAYER! He figured that the funds to reinforce them where needed MORE by millionaires and billionaires. Screw the people of New Orleans and the rest of he country.

Well how about.....

That seems pretty tangible to me.

from the L.A. Weekly...

After the Deluge
A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar
by TIM WISE

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, in the Brooks Brothers shirt:

You don’t know me. But I know you.

I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.

You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal — and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word — moralistically scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you attacked them — all of them, without distinction, it seemed — for the behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like guns, or big-screen TVs.

I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues’ “Amens,” why it was that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the people of New Orleans instead — again, all of them, in your mind — chose to steal and shoot at relief helicopters.

I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you nodded agreement to the statement of one of your friends, her hair neatly coifed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry sparkling. When you asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were so much more decent amid the tragedy of 9/11, as compared to the aftermath of Katrina, she had offered her response, but only after apologizing for what she admitted was going to sound harsh.

“Well,” Buffy explained. “It’s probably because in New Orleans, it seems to be mostly poor people, and, you know, they just don’t have the same regard.”

She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot. Praise the Lord.

Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.

Two thoughts: First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and likely for me, that my two young children were with me as I sat there, choking back fish tacos and my own seething rage, listening to you pontificate about shit you know nothing about. Have you ever even been to New Orleans? And no, by that I don’t mean the New Orleans of your company’s sales conference. I don’t mean Emeril’s New Orleans, or the New Orleans of Uptown Mardi Gras parties.

I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in places like the lower 9th Ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor, where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as it seeks its own level. Have you met the people from that New Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you order another sweet tea?

I didn’t think so.

Your God — the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you are — is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about your lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be destroyed, and perhaps 10,000 or more die, many of them in the streets for lack of water or food.

Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, while letting babies die in their mothers’ arms, and letting old people die in wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street? But no, it isn’t God who’s the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, or whatever your name is).

God doesn’t feed you, and it isn’t God that kept me from turning around and beating your lily-white privileged ass today either. God has nothing to do with it. God doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl. God doesn’t help anyone win an Academy Award. God didn’t get you your last raise, or your SUV. And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.

Why didn’t they evacuate like they were told? Are you serious? There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation every day. I know this might shock you. They don’t have a Hummer2, or whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you probably own.

And no, they didn’t just choose not to own a car because the buses are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you’re the kind of person who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these.

Why did they loot? Are you serious? People are dying, in the streets, on live television. Fathers and mothers are watching their babies’ eyes bulge in their skulls from dehydration, and you are begrudging them some goddamned candy bars, diapers and water? If anything, the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.


Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you likely identify — the wealthy white folks of Uptown — were barely touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over them: protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and superior morality. If the folks downtown who are waiting desperately for their government to send help — a government whose resources have been stretched thin by a war that I’m sure you support, because you love freedom and democracy — were half as crazed as you think, they’d march down St. Charles Avenue right now and burn every mansion in sight. That they aren’t doing so suggests a decency and compassion for their fellow man and woman that, sadly, people like you lack.

Can you even imagine what you would do in their place? Can you imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks stranded like this without buses to get them out, without nourishment, without hope? Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery — after all, such folks always have the means to seek safety, or the money to rebuild, or the political significance to ensure a much speedier response for their concerns — can you just imagine?

Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five, days? Without a margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them, I mean?

Oh, and please, I know. I’m stereotyping you. Imagine that. I’ve assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel, Biff? Hurt your feelings? So sorry. But, hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren’t deadly. They won’t affect your life one bit, unlike the ones you carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me, supposing that no one could possibly disagree.

But I’m not wrong, am I, Chip? I know you. I see people like you all the time, in airports, in business suits, on their lunch breaks. People who will take advantage of any opportunity to ratify and reify their pre-existing prejudices toward the poor, toward black folks. You see the same three video loops of the same dozen or so looters on Fox News and you conclude that poor black people are crazy, immoral, criminal.

You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages on chat-room boards, calling looters subhuman “vermin,” “scum” or “cockroaches.” I heard you use the word “animals” three times today: you and that woman across from you. What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black beans and rice into your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I think that was it.

Well, Chuck, it’s a free country, and so you certainly have the right, I suppose, to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this — or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund — so be it. But let’s leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.

Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

*
Tim Wise lived in New Orleans from 1986 to 1996. He is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son and can be reached at timjwise@msn.com. This piece previously appeared on www.counterpunch.com.

Yes, prayer is a nice gesture, but for the president, who is part of our gov, which is not meant to bring religion into politics, this seems a little backward.

stupid hypocritical country.

Yes, prayer is a nice gesture, but for the president, who is part of our gov, which is not meant to bring religion into politics, this seems a little backward.

stupid hypocritical country.

I used to think that "W" was just an ignorant fuck puppet for his father, now I realize he's much worse then that, senior would have had better plan. As far as us non-prayer types go were just un-American, and also the cause of the majority of this nations problems. You know if more people prayed we wouldn't have these problems, Well I've had enough, I'm going to get down on my knees and pray to Jesus, Alah, God, the almighty dollar , etc... for these poor people, since our government wont send me to go help out. I'm sure that theres more of a need for my skills there then sitting at the clinic waiting for something to do. I was told we were over-tasked with people in Iraq, uh-hu riiight... fuck-asses!!

V_S

Amen frogsimmons

[Edited on Sep 09, 2005 by viking_samurai]

National Day of Rememberance I could understand, or National Day of Mourning...but prayer....?

I can see Tony Blair pinching this stupid idea next time there is a disaster in the UK.

Ha! I wonder what those victims did to incur God's wrath in the first place?

Furthermore:

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty."- Albert Einstein

Fuck the day of prayer. They should be having a day of Getting Off Their Asses and Actually Helping People Out. Or a day of Giving People Some Clean Drinking Water. You can't eat prayer, you can't drink prayer, and prayer isn't going to put a roof over your head. They need tangible stuff, not just a bunch of people's hopes and good wishes.

I pray the Lord takes George W. Bush before he starts World War III.

Really? doesn't seem like it to me. In fact it appears that many, if not most, and certainly the most well known, founding fathers repeatedly went out of their way to emphasize that this country was not founded as a christian nation.

For example:
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestos encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the war of Independence:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."
From:
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, pp. 8,9 (Republished 1984, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY)

George Washington, the first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washinton uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
From:
George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)

John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
From:
The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17 (1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a letter by JA to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James Peabody, p. 403 (1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in reference to the treaty, Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 311 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June, 1814.

Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said:"I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote:
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."
From:
Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie, p. 453 (1974, W.W) Norton and Co. Inc. New York, NY) Quoting a letter by TJ to Alexander Smyth Jan 17, 1825, and Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 246 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to John Adams, July 5, 1814.

Thomas Jefferson also created his own version of the gospels; he was uncomfortable with any reference to miracles, so with two copies of the New Testament, he cut and pasted them together, excising all references to miracles, from turning water to wine, to the resurrection.

There has certainly never been a shortage of boldness in the history of biblical scholarship during the past two centuries, but for sheer audacity Thomas Jefferson's two redactions of the Gospels stand out even in that company. It is still a bit overwhelming to contemplate the sangfroid exhibited by the third president of the United States as, razor in hand, he sat editing the Gospels during February 1804, on (as he himself says) "2. or 3. nights only at Washington, after getting thro' the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." He was apparently quite sure that he could tell what was genuine and what was not in the transmitted text of the New Testament...(Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Bible; Jefferson and his Contemporaries, an afterward by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 149.

James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
From:
The Madisons by Virginia Moore, P. 43 (1979, McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY) quoting a letter by JM to William Bradford April 1, 1774, and James Madison, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by Joseph Gardner, p. 93, (1974, Newsweek, New York, NY) Quoting Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by JM, June 1785.

Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence, said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."
From:
Religion of the American Enlightenment by G. Adolph Koch, p. 40 (1968, Thomas Crowell Co., New York, NY.) quoting preface and p. 352 of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man and A Sense of History compiled by American Heritage Press Inc., p. 103 (1985, American Heritage Press, Inc., New York, NY.)

Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble." He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.
From:
Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404, (1972, Newsweek, New York, NY) quoting letter by BF to Exra Stiles March 9, 1970.

Sounds like another sympathizer.

The words "In God We Trust" were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy Hysteria.

The Treaty of Tripoli, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1797, read in part: "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." The treaty was written during the Washington administration, and sent to the Senate during the Adams administration. It was read aloud to the Senate, and each Senator received a printed copy. This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required by the Senate, but only the third time a vote was unanimous (the next time was to honor George Washington). There is no record of any debate or dissension on the treaty. It was reprinted in full in three newspapers - two in Philadelphia, one in New York City. There is no record of public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.

Perhaps you were talking about most of the other founding fathers.


[Edited on Sep 10, 2005 by TheJuanupsman]

Thank you for the reeducation.
No thank you to North Idaho Christian School for teaching me revisionist history and making me look like a fucking moron.

I'm an atheist.

To me praying to a god sounds like writing to Santa Claus, but this doesn't to rank THAT high on the global evilometer

It isn't mandatory

There's no Taliban enforcing it

Just ignore it

Yeah, but lets face it, there's about zero percent chance of this guy recommending a Buddhist as a supreme court judge. Most Americans don't go to church weekly, but it'll still be a committed Christian put forward. A little step towards being a theocracy.

Love and hope isn't going to clean the water and rebuild the city.

The point was that Bush hasn't done that much yet, and we've been waiting for a big response. And this was it. A prayer day.

To be honest, it was much too late at this point for any response to be worthwhile. Still, this faith based thing was a punchline for a joke on the last Real Time with Bill Maher I saw, and now it turns out to be reality. The fact that people have been so unhappy with the excruciatingly slow response to this disaster...come on, I mean, tell me you weren't expecting something more. This was basically, "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and we promise to pay you back when you're done."

Not anymore -
they fucked that up, too.

full text of AP article can be found at link above - registration: sgnews@sg.com password: sgnews2

"The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001." Source

That's still more than a 3/4 majority.

It seems to be that that's a rather too generous definition of Christian. You actually have to believe to be a Christian, and it's hard to see a huge proportion of people who really believe the bible is the word of God and that Jesus is their saviour somehow not bothering to turn up to church even once a week.

From the site you quoted.

Suggesting to me that committed Christians are a minority, a minority which will produce 100% of the court nominations under Bush.

A lot of the Christians I know don't go to church because they feel it's either corrupt or unnecessary, although it's hard to believe 60% of them are like that.


I feel like such a devil's advocate defending Christianity so often in this thread.