The Republican War on America

The Republican War on America     Oct. 19, 2025  Dr. Roger Ray 

click here to see the video

I woke to the news one day last month that Russia had carried out their largest ever drone attack on Ukraine while I was sleeping. Five people were killed, and dozens were injured in this insane war which has been going on for more than 3 years without any end in sight. I have spoken and written about this illegal war and the many war crimes committed by Russia over the past years but what struck me on this fall Monday morning was that the death toll was about the same as the domestic death toll in just one of America’s most violent cities.

 

There were five people killed and eighteen wounded in shootings in Chicago over the weekend. And folks, in spite of how Trump has targeted Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. for his dog and pony show military invasions, these are not the most violent cities in America. Across the nation, more than 300 people are shot every day, about 125 of those people will die. And even if you estimate that half of those deaths were suicides you still have 15,000 Americans being murdered every year – not by foreign invasion – not by drones flying across our borders with Mexico or Canada – this is a domestic war, a civil war, with a casualty count that goes up every single year. 

 

I am horrified by the daily reports of the Russian war on Ukraine, as well as by the way that Israel has carried out its war on Gaza for two years, but because our domestic war on ourselves has been a relentless constant in our lives, we refuse to be shocked by the senseless bloodshed that takes place in our own cities, neighborhoods, and homes. 

 

We have passively come to accept this as being normal but, please, hear me, THIS IS NOT NORMAL! This doesn’t happen in any other country. Listen, my career as a public speaker is coming to an end this year. I have very few opportunities left for me speak truth to power, but I can’t hang up my microphone without one more time begging you to not accept Amreica’s gun related death toll to be anything approximating normal. It is a moral flaw that continues only because of public apathy. 

Even if you take out suicides and accidental shootings, the United States has 32 times the rate of gun murders as Great Britian and France. Japan has so few that they don’t even register and we have six times as many as our gun loving neighbor to the north. Other developed democracies have gun laws that work and still, we have refused to even consider taking the steps taken in other western democracies. This is not normal, it is not acceptable, it is, in fact, inexplicable…. Trust me, I have been questioned repeatedly on this topic when I have given lectures around Great Britian . . . America’s gun laws are a travesty that cannot be excused or explained in any rational way.

A clear majority of Americans favor more strict gun laws but that fact points to a weakness in our democracy. 

We do not have a majority rule democracy. Our system of government allows for political donations can give a minority an exaggerated amount of influence in how laws are written. The NRA is nowhere near as powerful as they were before their recent financial scandals but they still swing a heavy bat in elections and gun manufacturers and, if I may say it this way, the gun loving lunatic fringe continue to have disproportionate influence. 

 

Still, after all of these years, why can’t the majority of Americans not have their way in this matter? Our 24 hour news cycle tends to give our voting public a very short memory. We tend to care about what is in the news today and to forget about what was in the news last week. 

So, it is most likely that we will take action in the wake of a mass murder that dominates the news. Now, it must be said that the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the country are not mass murders but, as I observed in the opening of this message, individual murders in major cities may add up to five or ten per city every weekend but those incidents get lost in the background noise of a country awash in weapons and violence.

But consider our reaction to the most horrific mass murders in the country. The largest to date was the 2017 attack on the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. A lone gunman, from the vantage point of 32^ndfloor hotel room. The heavily armed murderer fired semi-automatic weapons enhanced by a simple device called a “bump stock” which allowed him to fire thousands of rounds in mere minutes. 60 people were killed, more than 800 were wounded. It was a random, senseless act of violence which inspired people to demand action. As always, there were those who wanted to restrict access to semi-automatic rifles, to large capacity ammunition clips, but, in the end, the response was a very tepid outlawing of the bump stock . . . not much more than a symbolic gesture but, at least, it was something. It went into effect in December of 2018 but it was ruled as being unconstitutional by rogue and irresponsible Supreme Court in 2024. 

 

Don’t beat yourself up about it if you didn’t know that the bump stock ban had been overturned. That’s how the news cycle works. Seven years after the largest mass shooting in American history, the story no longer merited airtime when the Republican majority Supreme Court did what they almost always do. . . . they rule in favor of political money and against democracy. . . if that seems strong, I invite you to prove me wrong. 

 

There was no federal reaction to the Pulse Nightclub shooting but in the state of Florida there were several attempts at enacting state gun law reform, all of which were defeated by Republican majorities. 

 

In 1981, Jim Brady, the press secretary for President Ronald Regan, was shot during an assassination attempt against the president. Brady survived but was permanently paralyzed. He and his wife took this tragedy and turned it into their lifelong cause to limit access to lethal weapons which, after a dozen years and multiple failures, the Brady Bill was finally signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993. The bill included a background check, a five day waiting period between purchase and possession, and a ban on assault rifles. It is still partially in force but the ban on assault rifles was written to sunset in 10 years and, of course, it was allowed to sunset. Also, the five day waiting period was dropped when we developed an instant police background check method so, at least there is still that. However, that only applies to gun sellers. If you are selling a gun at a swap meet or gun show, it doesn’t apply. 

 

A few years ago I was seated at a table in a coffee shop next to three young lawyers who were bemoaning their lack of paying clients in their law practice. One of them volunteered that he made much more money selling AR-15s on line than he did from practicing law. That is, he could buy an AR-15 because he could pass the police background check and sell it to someone who could not pass a police background check online for more than the retail price. This is, of course, illegal but evidently difficult to regulate. Which, of course, makes the Brady Bill effectively moot and it makes me wonder what they are teaching in law school these days. 

 

Cities like New York and Chicago have strict gun laws but, unfortunately, American cities are not surrounded by a moat or a boarder wall so their laws are almost entirely ineffective. What has been proven to work in Australia, France, Great Britian, and most of the western world, are gun laws that restrict the kind of guns that can be sold, the volume of ammunition, and the means of storage. It might be impossible to get the United States down to a Japan or England rate of gun deaths measured on your fingers but we should certainly be able to get it down under 10,000 a year. 

 

We have between 45,000 and 48,000 deaths from gun shot wounds every year. My own experience breaks down similar to our national averages. In my 45 years in ministry, I have lost 5 church members to guns. Two were instances of domestic violence, and 3 were suicides. Statistically, you are most likely to die from a self inflicted wound and the second most likely person to kill you is your spouse. Which makes you wonder about the people who think they are keeping guns for self defense. The real reason America has such a tragic record of gun violence is not because we are inherently more violent, it certainly isn’t because of kids playing video games, it isn’t violent movies, or that we have more mental health issues than other western democracies. 

 

It is because we are a nation awash in guns. We have about 300 million people in this country but we have about 500 million guns, which means most people can have more than one but the truth is that half of us don’t have any so the other half of us are stock piling guns like we’re expecting a zombie apocalypse. 

 

Here in Florida, where I live, it is best to assume that any body of water, small or large, probably has an alligator in it, and it is safe to assume that any rude driver who is yelling and shaking a fist at you, also probably has a loaded gun handy. You don’t know how anything with a small reptilian brain is going to act and I’m not specifically talking about alligators. 

 

The latest twist on gun violence has been the Republican reaction to the tragic murder of one of their podcast influencers, Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was an entirely uneducated young man who got a lot of attention and made millions of dollars by saying very controversial and, I’ll say it, astonishingly stupid things. But he should not have been murdered. The fact that he was murdered shouldn’t result in statues being raised in his honor nor having city streets named for him. He was a right wing racist, misogynist, and homophobe and dying from bullet doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him a victim of our national disease of gun violence.

 

But Republicans have tried to portray his death as the result of left wing fanaticism and encouragement of political violence. That is simply not true. There are three times as many right wing lunatics committing political violence as there are left wingers and the people who encourage such violence often live in or work in the White House, so let’s get real. 

 

It’s not video games, movies, LGBTQ activists, transphobic pod casters, or political jargon that is getting people killed, it is 500 million guns in a nation of 300 million people. There will always be people who have mental health issues, personal grievance, or some revenge or attention motive, that is true in every culture, religion, and race in the world. Our problem is an almost entirely unrestricted access to very lethal weapons which can be fire accurately at rather great distances at a speed which causes horrific and lethal damage. 

 

And folks, this is not a both sides are guilty issue. I may have only 5 sermons left in my 45 year long career and I want to say this clearly and I hope that you remember it: If it had been up to Democrats, our gun laws in the USA would be like the gun laws that work in every other western democracy. The idiocy of our gun laws is 100% the responsibility of elected Republicans in both state and federal positions. The only way for America to come to some sanity about gun laws is to stop electing Republicans. Nothing else will work.

 

Now, I have a lot of issues with Democrats, and I would hate to see one party become dominant for long. I would love to see Republicans change to become more patriotic and sane representatives, but right now, The Republican Party is waging war on the American people and they are killing about 50,000 people every year and wounding another 100,000 and that has to stop. 

 

Look, the number of people killed in Gaza each of the past two years is about the same as the number of Americans who died from gunshot wounds in America’s Republican war on Americans. No one would dispute the fact that Israel has been carrying out a War against the Gaza strip for the past two years, right? Those 45,000 people were not dying of Covid every year. It was a war. And in the United States, Republican with their crazy and irresponsible laws have cause the same number of deaths among Americans. It is a war. So stop voting for the jerks who are killing us. 

 

This is so obvious that I shouldn’t have to say it, and you certainly can’t say it is a controversial thing to say unless you thing that 45,000 Americans need to die every year to defend the gun fetish of unstable and dangerous people. 

 

Let’s make America great again by allowing our school children to grow up, and allowing church goers, movie goers, and mall shoppers to make it home safely.

Let the Mystery Be

Let the Mystery Be    Oct. 5, 2025

Dr. Roger Ray    click here to see the video

More than 30 years the pop singer, Iris DeMent released a catchy tune and somewhat labored rhyme scheme that introduced the very profound dimension of theological mystery. She sings:

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying 'bout
Where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Many church members and listeners through the years have been shocked to learn that I don’t believe in life after death, not in heaven, hell, souls, reincarnation, or final judgement. It was a huge disappointment to my mother and, I suspect, to many of you. There is just no evidence and therefore, I see no reason to invest myself in believing in something that sounds so important but which, in the end, has too little substance to even cast a shadow. I’m all about evidence based faith.

 

But DeMent takes a more agnostic stance. Nobody knows and because nobody can know if there is or there isn’t an afterlife, she chooses to just let the mystery be. I like that but I will confess that is hard for me. I like having answers. I like having a method of discovery. But she sings, “I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”

 

I am a newly wed. It is official now. My bride has been granted a visa and permanent status, and we have begun the long journey towards applying for her citizenship in the USA. During the past year I have spent three months visiting her in Thailand. We did all of the tourist stuff but as we got more eager and more anxious about getting her visa granted, we spent more and more time going to various temples to do what Thai people call “making merit.” They don’t simply go to temple the way that we think of going to church, in the rather curious form of Buddhism common in Thailand, they go to Temple to make merit and they make merit by making offerings to the monks who live there and to images of the Buddha as well as certain famous late monks, and other gods, whose favor, they believe, will result in good luck for them. 

 

My wife would assure you that it works because, after all she did get her visa. That’s proof enough for her even though the offerings, kneeling, and various merit earning gestures we went through seem to be rather far removed from the American immigration service procedures to me but, I’m learning to take Iris DeMent’s posture of just letting the mystery be. 

There was one moment in a temple that stands out in my memory, when we visited the small and rather impoverished temple where Hui’s parents’ ashes are interred. We presented the monks with gifts of clothing, food, and personal care items and then we knelt while an older monk led us in prayer. These memorized prayers are recited in Sanskrit, which is even more difficult than Thai to my ears but during this long recitation, I noticed that my fiancé was praying right along with the monk. She knew the exact Sanskrit words to the prayer that the monk was reciting. 

 

When the ceremony was over and we were alone again, I remarked to Hui, “I had no idea that you could speak Sanskrit!” She replied, “Oh, I don’t know what a word of it means, this is just a prayer we recited every day at school, and I have never forgotten it.” I pressed her, asking, “What does it mean? What is the translation of the prayer?” She replied, without a hint of curiosity, “I have no idea.”

 

Being who I am, I was tempted to start googling for answers, for a translation, but I saw that this is just one of the things about an oriental and occidental relationship. I want to mine for answers but for Hui, and evidently, for most of her peers, the prayer was a part of the mysterious universe of their unique Buddhist faith. I realized that she was content to simply let the mystery be. Thai Buddhism looked initially to me to be a religion based on good luck charms but, it appears, there is something much more, something deeper, a quiet faith that isn’t based on knowing the answers, on understanding, or dissecting. 

 

I still like my way better, but I have no need to persuade her to approach faith the way that I do. Which is a good thing because, it is apparent, she hasn’t the slightest interest in embracing my way of being religious.

 

 

We have a hard time with mystics in the modern era. Well, if we are honest about it, we have always had a majority who were more inclined to ignore or ridicule mystics. I will never forget a lecture that I heard M. Scott Peck deliver many years ago in which he said that it is evident that St. Joan of Arc was a schizophrenic who heard the voices of long dead French saints, but Peck added, “it would be a mistake to assume that she was simply a schizophrenic.” She was schizophrenic and a great spiritual mystic.

 

Christians tend to read their New Testaments as if every line of every little book in it carried equal weight and credibility. Clearly, that is not true. We could wish that Jesus had written something himself, something that we could compare with what was written about him, but, alas, he did not. But when it comes to the famous self-appointed Apostle Paul, that is an entirely different matter. The New Testament contains several letters which Paul authored, in his own hand. And it contains several letters written by well-meaning followers that they tried to insist had been written by Paul, and then there is the voluminous Acts of the Apostles, written long after the Apostles it chronicles were dead. 

 

The difference between how Paul tells his own story, and how others tell Paul’s story is as different as daylight and dark. Bear with me, please, to give you an amazing example: In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul is trying to impress his readers with his importance and he describes his conversion experience in this way:  I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. ³ And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— ⁴ was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.

 

Let me try to rescue that from some of the verbiage. Paul is describing a mystical experience in which he doesn’t know if it was something that happened to him physically or if it was a vision. He felt that he was in the presence of God, but he cannot tell us what he saw or heard, only what he felt. Since he doesn’t describe anything at all, there are no paintings of this life changing event, it isn’t portrayed in sculpture or even in modern movies. It is a foggy event for which we do not have a mental image.

 

But if you haunt art museums as I do, you will have seen many depictions of the conversion of St. Paul but they are not based on what Paul said about himself. They are based on what someone who never met Paul, wrote about Paul 50 years after he was dead. In Acts Paul’s conversion is described this way:

³ Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. ⁴ He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” ⁵ He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶ But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”

This version has a street address; there are voices and visions and based on this account you can find many works of art. The author of Acts gives us a movie script from which artists have allowed their own imaginations to run wild…. I will point out that there is no horse in the text but most of the paintings involve a horse . . . it makes for a better story.

 

This is how religion often operates. The birth of the faith is usually rooted in either practical moral teaching or a profound mystical experience, but the instinct of later generations is to turn a mystery into a movie script. 

 

I have taught world religions in college for many semesters and our text books always try to describe each religion by a set of beliefs. When I have taught Buddhism, I start with the four noble truths and the eight-fold path. I can’t be that far wrong, that’s how Buddhism was taught to me at Harvard by very famous professors. But in one of my early conversations with Hui, I discovered that even though she and her friends are life-long Buddhists, they have never heard of the 4 noble truths and the eight-fold path, and, what’s more, they showed no interest in finding out about them. That have an experience of Buddhism that is not based on memorization or what we call “the darhma” the “teachings of Buddha.” 

Christianity, by the time of the Council of Nicaea, was determined that Christianity, to be a religion, had to be defined and their definition was the Nicaean Creed which was later shortened into the Apostles’ Creed which most of you know if you grew up Catholic, or Methodist, or Episcopal, or Presbyterian. It distilled the profound and life changing experience of faith into a paragraph long statement of beliefs. 

 

Again, if I may beg your indulgence for another few minutes: the text of the Apostle’s Creed is this:

I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.

Amen.

This paragraph is recited in churches all over the world as a succinct statement of what the Christian religion is. Please notice that it contains not one word of what Jesus taught. Nothing about loving your enemies, forgiving those who have offended you, praying for those who have persecuted you. There is nothing in the Apostles’ Creed about love, about compassion, just stuff about what you are supposed to believe, most of which is clearly not even true. This, I submit, is the work of theologians. Jesus taught a message of radical compassion. If he taught a religion, it was a religion of love but a few hundred years later, the church, in conjunction with the government, turned the Christian religion into a set of beliefs that were supposed to ward off the flames of hell and get you into heaven. Total rubbish. 

 

Jesus taught his followers to be good people, not self-serving religious hypocrites. Theologians took away all of the mystery by trying to explain everything and distill it down to a kind of divine transaction suggesting that if you can make yourself believe a series of totally absurd things that you can go to an imaginary heaven when you die. No thanks! I think we would all be better off if we just let the mystery be.

 

When I have taught courses in world religions, it was easy for me to teach each religion based on a list of beliefs until I came to the chapter on Christianity and then I realized that the author’s attempt at describing Christianity by listing beliefs didn’t even come close to describing the faith I had observed for years. Even when I was a Christian pastor, that list of beliefs in the Bible as the word of God, a final judgement, the divinity of Jesus…. I didn’t believe those things! 

The textbook wanted to distill religion into beliefs when it would have been more helpful to ask, what do Buddhists and Hindus, Muslims and Jews, and Christians do. How does the mystery of your faith get lived out?

 

I will close with a personal observation. This is my wedding ring, at least this is how it looks in the Jewler’s shop in France where a spike in tariffs have kept it from being shipped but I’ll not say more about that today. It is inscribed with the most treasured and ancient of Sanskrit Buddhist mantras. It ways, “om, mani, padme, hum.” A mantra recited by Buddhists the world over. Literally translated, it says, “Hail to the jewel in the lotus.”

 

Now, you may reasonably wonder why anyone would recite a mantra that praises the bud of a water lily. Again, on the surface, it makes no sense at all. As with most mysteries, you have to allow yourself to go deeper than the surface meaning. 

 

The lotus is a symbol of renewal, as the flower closes and submerges only to re-emerge the next day, over and over. It appears to grow without being rooted in the soil, having life in itself. This will be a stretch for westerners but the lotus is also associated with the wisdom and enlightenment of the Buddha.

 

The ancients believed that reciting this mantra helped to foster a spirit of compassion and to dispel evil thoughts. I don’t know if wearing a ring with this mantra will help me to recite it more often or if reciting it will really help to make me a better man, a better husband, a useful soul in my golden years but I hope so, at least I am willing to embrace the mystery and to just let it be. 

 

I would be the last person to suggest that being spiritual means that you will just accept and believe any silly thing. I am deeply rooted in evidence-based faith but, every coin has two sides. Think, for sure, reason, use critical thinking skills, but do not abandon an appreciation for and a certain amazement in the face of mystery.