Giving Capitalism a Conscience

Giving Capitalism a Conscience

Dr. Roger Ray

August 28, 2024

click here to see the video

 

 

 

Those of you who became adults in the 1970’s, as I did, may recall this famous book, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler; actually, by Alvin Toffler and his wife, Adelaide Farrell, but in 1970 women didn’t always get the credit they deserved. 

The premise of the book is that our society was suffering from a kind of psychological shock that came from the world changing too fast. 

 

One is forced to wonder what Toffler and Farrell would have to say about the third decade of the 21^stcentury. News is happening so fast this year that I wonder what journalists will do when they have to start going out and trying to find stories rather than having news raining down on them like a ton of bricks every day? But I want to try to pull the camera lens back a bit today and take a longer look at history rather than being drawn down into the particulars of our current wars, political elections, and the threat and promise offered by technology, especially AI. 

 

My first memories of my family’s evening ritual was to eat a very early dinner so that we could gather around the black and white television in the den to listen to Walter Cronkite telling us what was happening in the world. There were no 24 hour news stations back in those days. Initially there wasn’t even an hour of news. Cronkite had 30 minutes every weekday evening to tell us what had happened that day whether it was the assassination of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr. The moon landing got extended coverage but most days we got a pretty cursory view of things but always including a death toll from the war in Vietnam. 

 

The reason given for that seemingly endless war was to stop the spread of communism. To a certain extent, maybe it was, since China and the United States were using North and South Vietnam to fight a proxy war against one another that was finally settled, oddly enough, by ping pong; which is a story far too long to go into now. 

 

Suffice it to say that for most of our lives, politicians have at least pretended to be engaged in a battle between capitalism and communism or communism’s little sister, socialism. Most of the conversation around these economic systems has been carried on by people who have no idea what they are talking about though that rarely seems to matter to them. When a politician suggests that state universities should be tuition free, someone will always claim that is socialism, or if they are really mad about it, they will call it communism, even though very few people would ever suggest that tuition free kindergarten through high school is a socialist plot. 

 

No one could win a local election if they started calling all school teachers socialists even though they would be fairly accurate if they did so. Our public schools are supported by taxing citizens, whether they have kids in school or not, to pay for our schools which, at its most basic level, makes our school system a socialist system. As is our congress, senate, supreme court, and our president, whose salaries are paid out of the taxes collected from citizens. But then, the largest budget item in any city is the municipal police so our police, our fire fighters, our highway departments, are all socialist, as is our army, navy, air force, and marines. 

 

We tell ourselves that we are a capitalist country but a whole lot of our economy is based in a socialist system, and, in fact, our capitalist society wouldn’t make much profit if the socialist system of roads, police, fire fighters, and the whole matter of federally managed banking and commerce didn’t make their capitalist enterprise possible. 

 

But the misunderstanding really goes farther than that. Regardless of whether your salary is derived from tax dollars, if you are working to support yourself with a salary from an employer, whether that is Walmart or Amazon or Ford Motor Company, you are not a capitalist. You are labor. You are working for a salary which you use to make a house payment, buy groceries, and provide clothing and transportation to your family. Sure, your pension funds may be invested in stocks, but you are not a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who derives their living from the investment of capital. The engineer at Apple who is designing the next iteration of your iPhone is not a capitalist, but Paris Hilton is a capitalist. 

 

The Hilton family isn’t engaged in changing the sheets in hotel rooms or even working at the front desk handing out room keys. They are the owners of great wealth, and they derive a lavish lifestyle from their investment of their capital. 

 

Because the words “communism” and “socialism” have been used like curse words in our political discourse, we have come to accept that capitalism is an assume American value like mom, the flag, and apple pie. Whenever someone starts to criticize Capitalism, they are setting themselves up to be labeled a socialist and by that, to be discarded as being either unAmerican, or unaware, or crazy. 

 

The most famous proponent of more socialist values in the way in which America uses capitalism is the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, who has made two runs at the Democratic nomination for president, the first in 2016, and the second in 2020. He is even older than Joe Biden so I don’t think that we will see him running for office again, but he is still writing best-selling books which is an odd thing for a socialist to be doing, since he is now a multi-millionaire based on his book sales. Capitalism has some funny quirks to it. I just got my annual royalties check for my three books that are still in print, and don’t worry folks, I’m still not a capitalist!

 

But Bernie was sidelined in both of his runs for the Democratic nomination, largely because he was publicly maligned as being crazy. And it wasn’t just Trump calling him “Crazy Bernie,” but leading Democrats said a lot of the same things, including Hillary Clinton claiming that no one likes Bernie and that he was driving her crazy. 

 

I accept that Bernie Sanders is a bit eccentric and there have been a number of odd twists and turns in his career but, for me, Bernie has nothing to do with the good or bad dimensions of the changes to capitalism that he was suggesting. In fact, if we took the issue one by one and put them to a popular vote, I believe that all of them would pass with majority approval. 

 

The issue that seems to get most politicians all twisted up has been his suggestion that we have Medicare, or something like it, for all Americans. Because the whole healthcare industry is such a cash cow for billionaires and a source of political donations for both Republicans and Democrats, both sides of the political fence insisted that his suggestion was unworkable and, in short, crazy. So crazy in fact, as one popular meme has noted, it has only been successfully implemented in 32 of the 33 western democracies in the world. 

 

When Bernie lost the nomination to Biden in 2020, he met with President Biden to discuss the issues that Bernie was trying to campaign on. There were 10 of them and he and Biden agreed on half of them. They agreed that the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 an hour. They agreed that Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. They agreed on the need to be more aggressive about combating climate change, and even on lowering the Medicare enrollment age to 60. And finally they agreed that we should stop using private prisons and detention centers that make a profit off of incarcerating Americans.

 

Does any of that sound crazy to you? Again, Biden even agreed on those issues, though it is evident that he will leave office without having accomplished these things but, there is least moral agreement. But what are the five crazy things they couldn’t agree on?

 

Of course, they didn’t agree on a Medicare for all plan, even though most Americans would vote for it in a New York minute. 

They didn’t agree on legalizing marijuana, even though this is happening in state by state votes, even in the darkest of red states. They couldn’t agree on forgiving all student loans, though Biden has certainly tried to take steps in that direction. They couldn’t agree on making state universities tuition free although 24 nations have already done it and the list is growing every year. And among Americans, this would be a wildly popular initiative, maybe even more popular than making marijuana legal!

 

And the final issue where they could not ready agreement was imposing a wealth tax on billionaires. So, I ask you, even in these issues that Biden and the Democratic party couldn’t support, does any of that sound crazy to you? It might hurt the people who make big political donations but, should we be letting people buy our elections and public policies anyway?

 

The profit motive inherent to capitalism can inspire innovation. It can spur people on to hard work, saving, and increasing the total wealth of the world but if it is not governed in a way that keeps redistributing that wealth, the greed that drives capitalism can lead to hoarding of resources. There are lots of ways of trying to describe how this is happening but one simple concrete way that Bernie Sanders likes to explain it is just this simple: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett control as much wealth as the bottom half of this 330 million person country. 

 

The existence of poverty in this wealthy nation would presume that even though we are the most wealthy nation in the history of the world, there still is not enough to lift everyone out of poverty. That, men and women, is simply not true.

The problem is a convoluted tax structure that, year after year, has been designed by the wealthy to serve the interests of the wealthy. This allows them to hoard so much of the nation’s wealth that they literally could not spend it all in a hundred lifetimes. What creates poverty? Not a shortage of resources; poverty is caused by hoarding.

These three familiar billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, have already designed and built space ships so that they could personally take a ride in space and there are five more with similar plans in the works. I understand that capitalism will create multi-millionaires who will own multiple houses, yachts, and every luxury imaginable but should our tax system even allow someone to become a billionaire? Is there any reason why any one person should be able to hoard so much wealth that they can shoot themselves into space for a brief joyride when many of their employees can’t afford reliable transportation to get them to, just for example, the Amazon warehouse, where they work? 

 

The wealthy can afford tax avoidance schemes like offshore bank accounts, and outrageous tax deductions for things like corporate jets, but the single mom making your coffee at Starbucks doesn’t have an off shore account. There is not a scarcity of money in this country but there is a clear paucity of compassion and logic. This problem has become much worse in the past decade, with even the majority of government spending to get us through the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 ending up enriching billionaires while many Americans lost income or lost their jobs entirely. Those two years of the pandemic saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class up to the wealthy than any other time in our history. Why was it even legal to profit off of a pandemic that killed a million Americans?

While we were still engaged in fighting in World War II, in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 2^nd Bill of Rights in his state of the union address. Franklin acknowledged that the Bill of Rights that are the first ten amendments to our constitution, while important, had failed to guarantee freedom to Americans nor to provide for their ability to actually engage in a pursuit of happiness. If you are so poor that you cannot gain access to safe housing, needed medical care, food, and education, then you are not really free.

 

Everyone who has had to endure abusive working conditions out of fear of unemployment knows that they were not really free. Roosevelt said, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” 

 

Of course, he was not able to implement all of these goals and we have not finished the job in the 80 years since he spoke these words but he insisted that every American has a right to meaningful employment and that such employment should pay enough to provide for safe housing, food, medical care, and recreation.

 

And that farmers specifically should be guaranteed sufficient prices for their crops to provide them with an adequate living. And that every small business should be protected from large monopolies and unfair competition. He also named access to education and protections in old age from illness, hunger, or homelessness.

 

He saw the end of the war was in sight but he was aware that bringing all of those in the service home to a nation that could not assure them of either education or employment begs the question of what we were fighting for in the first place. 

You are not really fighting for freedom if you are going to come home and have to sleep under a bridge. In the years since this 2^nd Bill of Rights was suggested, we have seen Walmart and Amazon gobble up the marketplace and shut down almost all locally owned retail stores. Family farms have been consolidated into corporate operations so that far subsidies that were instituted to save family farms is almost all going to the five major food corporations in America rather than to farmers.

 

Do you know who the largest owner of farmland in America is? It is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame. Bill Gates is not a farmer, but he owns 269,000 thousand acres of farmland. Why?

 

I’m not suggesting that Gates has any nefarious plans for all of this farmland. I accept his explanation that his intention is simply to make the farms more productive and profitable, which is what rich people do, but it is still driving farmers off of the land and consolidating wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people which, clearly, isn’t sustainable.

 

Capitalism, if we allow it to, will destroy capitalism. In order to sustain a market, you cannot only think about what is best for the next quarterly returns. To have an economy, you have to have consumers who can afford to buy things. Wages have to be sufficient for people to do more than survive. There is more to life than just going to work. If it is possible to end poverty in America then there remains no moral justification for not doing it.

 

That’s just my opinion, it just so happens than I am right.

“Assisting in Our Own Victimization”

“Assisting in Our Own Victimization”    Dr. Roger Ray   August 11, 2024

click here to see the video

One of the oldest pieces of wisdom literature in the world, is a piece of philosophy written in poetry. It is the central portion of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Job. I say the “central portion” because, like a lot of ancient texts, it has gone through a lot of editing over the centuries with very inferior minds trying to force Job to make more sense by giving it a context and a conclusion that just makes the whole thing ridiculous. Ignore the first two chapters about a truly blasphemous wager made between God and Satan and the multiple added endings of the book that offer absurd fixes to the discomfort created by the original work which asks the time-honored question, “Why is there undeserved suffering in the world?” and answers that profound question, forty chapters later, saying, “There is no reason. It just is.” 

 

A lot of religious people try to take the sting out of suffering by insisting that it is God’s will, and God has a plan. I don’t think this is ever very helpful but to those of us of a more panentheist world view, God is not a person who makes plans or has a specific will, nor does God prefer baseball to hockey, or fried chicken over sushi. The universe is God and, in case you have not noticed, the universe is quite capricious. Sure, the universe follows what we call the laws of physics but given the infinite number of variables involved, it turns out to be rather capricious, as we experience it, but we can be reassured that the universe is never malicious.

 

This is important to understand. The universe can seem to be quite random but assigning it intent, like you are being specifically blessed or cursed is a very primitive anthropomorphizing of the universe which is, I am afraid to say, almost certainly not true. The universe has no malice of intent and, sadly, it also has no benevolence. It simply is. Meaning, direction, purpose, those are both human invention and, I insist, human responsibility. We bring structure to the chaos by our intent, our decisions, our plans.

 

The universe is not malicious but people sure can be very malicious. The universe just is, it goes its merry way sometimes dropping undeserved golden apples into the paths of some and spreading disease and heartbreak to others without rhyme or reason. The universe does not seek to bless you or to curse you, that’s all in your interpretation. However, as in most religious trivialities, there is a kernel of truth in the saying that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that it isn’t a divine reason, a lot of suffer comes your way for the simple reason that you have made horrible and irresponsible decisions. 

 

Job’s suffering is portrayed as being the capricious sort. His three friends who come to console him and also correct him, insisting that everything happens for a reason, that God has a plan, that Job had either done something to offend God and God is punishing him, or God has a bigger plan and is teaching Job something, but end the end, Job insists that they are all mistaken. His misfortunes, the loss of his fortune, the death of his family members, his own painful illnesses, were capricious occurrences of nature. Neither divine retribution nor bad conduct on his part, and folks, the plain truth of it is that some suffering is just that way. 

For many years, the longest running show on Broadway was a kind of modern recasting of Job in the person of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. 

Tevye has these brilliant and witty conversations with God. Of course, God remains silent, but Tevye speaks to God about how unfair it is to be a poor Jew at the turn of the century in rural Russia, as the Russian relocation of Jews was beginning. 

 

The play opens with Tevye, forced to pull his ox cart when his horse goes lame, selling milk and cheese to his neighbors. He pauses and says to God, “Isn’t it enough that you give me a life of poverty and bless me with five daughters and no sons, but what do you have against my horse, why must he go lame?”

 

A lot of Tevye’s suffering was just a result of his context. He was born Jewish in a rural part of Russia that would soon be turning against Jewish people. He lived in fairly pre-modern circumstances that left him working very hard but never able to work his way out of poverty. By pure chance, his wife gave birth to only daughters, giving him no sons with whom to share the labor that kept his family alive. 

 

But we see him suffering from his willingness to adhere to traditions that no longer served his generation. Arranged marriages, Jewish conformity to a crushing economic system, and even accepting racial prejudice against one of his daughters marrying a Russian Orthodox man. Most of what broke his heart was his own unquestioning willingness to be victimized by a set of beliefs that unnecessarily made his life hard and, in many ways broke his heart. 

 

I had to watch my parents struggle to very unsuccessfully pretend to accept their eighth grandchild who was my daughter, adopted from South Korea. The idea was as much of an affront to them as some of Tevye’s daughters’ choices in marriage, and like Tevye, they had no real reason to suffer over her brown skin and almond shaped eyes. In fact, they largely missed out on having a relationship with the smartest, most attractive, funniest, and most successful of all of their grandchildren, and I say that objectively. I can back it up with evidence if needed. 

 

Their racial prejudice was a part of their generation, particularly their generation in rural Kentucky, but most of their peers got over that prejudice years ago. They kept theirs by choice and the ones who suffered the most from their choice was just them. Because, folks, sometimes suffering finds us and sometimes we consciously or unconsciously choose it for ourselves when there are much better options right in front of us.

 

If you have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, please stop what you are doing and read it. It Was written by the holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankel, who advocated for Americans to balance the Statue of Liberty on our east coast with a Statue of Responsibility on our west coast. Because, he argued, simply being liberated doesn’t equate to a life lived in freedom. This proposed monument you see here is one arm and hand reaching down to grasp another arm and hand, which, I’m glad Frankel didn’t live to see… I think the artist missed the point of this one. 

 

Soren Kierkegaard said something similar a century before Frankel when he quipped, “People clamor for freedom of speech while avoiding freedom of thought.” We are at liberty to say whatever we want, within the confines of the obvious, “don’t shout fire in a crowded theater” sort of limitation. 

Social media in all of its forms allows us to spew unfiltered opinions, conspiracy theories, prejudices, and embarrassing nonsense at will but somehow it doesn’t seem to educate, persuade, or satisfy our need to be free, does it? 

 

I certainly understand that a lot of the social progress we have made in the past generation has come from very intentional decisions to be compassionate about the innocent suffering of other people. People with addictions, mental health struggles, people locked into cycles of poverty, and especially people who have been marginalized by social prejudices about race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. 

 

But we have, I think, often failed to do the hard work of thinking about how we may have participated in the times and ways in which we have felt that we were being victimized. Elenore Roosevelt was, perhaps, giving herself some license to exaggerate when she said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. . . or, that is at least how she is popularly quoted. One of my counseling professors took her exaggeration and carried it a half mile farther down the field and told his students, “No one can really hurt you unless you help them.” 

 

This is an obvious exaggeration, but I think that Liston Mills used to say things like that in class in order to shock us into deeper self-evaluation. If you choose not to feel inferior when someone is trying to talk down to you, it is surprising how often you can resist being manipulated. When someone is trying to humiliate you, make you angry, insult you, choosing not to reward your tormentor with their desired reaction can short circuit abuse.

 

What Frankel learned in the Nazi death camps was that while they could take your family away from you, they could take your job, your home, your papers, his lifetime of research, they could take even your clothes and shoes, but they could not take away from you how you were going to react to their abuse. Those who gave in and were broken, typically quickly died. Those who resisted, who maintained a sense of their own dignity and worth, despite their circumstances, often were the ones who survived. They couldn’t physically fight back against the Nazis, but they could refuse to accept their view of Jews. 

 

I have often talked with people who felt that they had been terribly abused by their church. One young mother, a nurse, limped into my office one day with bruises on her face and neck, reporting cracked ribs and an injured knee. She was going to have to tell her supervisors at the hospital that she had fallen down a flight of stairs, an explanation she had already used once that year. 

 

She was in a violently abusive marriage, a marriage for which she had broken her vows in a convent, leaving behind her nun’s habit to marry and have children. Her priest told her, scolding her, that this abuse was her cross to bear for having broken her vow to God to be a celibate nun from the age of 18 until she died. As I said in each of our sessions, it was not only her husband that was killing her, it was also the Roman Catholic Church and she needed to leave them both. But she could not leave her husband because she could not imagine leaving her church. 

 

Was she a victim? Yes, she surely was. But, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if you ask yourself if she was enabling her victimization, I have to say that she was. That is not to encourage victim blaming. The first criminal in this situation is the violent spouse but close behind him, in my opinion, was the priest who used guilt to trap her in a cycle of violence. I knew this priest well and he was an elderly, poorly educated man who simply didn’t question the religious prejudices he had inherited and which he was passing on; but most of the priests I have known could figure that crap out quickly, he just didn’t choose to. But this nurse also didn’t choose to leave the religion that was so toxic in her life, binding her to a violent man.

 

You can go down the list of ways in which people are not simply victims, but they are literally coconspirators in their abuse. I spoke at a suicide prevention conference a few years ago and in the Q&A it became apparent that many mothers in the room were very concerned about their young adult gay sons who were contemplating, threatening, or who had attempted suicide. As the conversation continued, I learned that some of them had actually taken their sons to gay conversion programs and many still took their sons to churches that condemned them for being gay. 

 

They were literally putting the gun in their son’s hands while, in their own hearts, living in fear that they might kill themselves. As Kierkegaard lamented, they may exercise freedom of speech, but they just don’t embrace freedom of thought. They could escape a toxic religion that might push their sons to suicide, but they have to be willing to think their way out of the snare of the devil they know. They have liberty but not responsibility. They are free to make their own choices in life but they have not taken the responsibility to make better choices. 

Redemption Song is one of the most famous songs recorded by the Jamaican artist, Bob Marley. In it he implores his people who have suffered oppression by colonists, their own government, religion, and a crushing economic system to “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” It is appropriate for those of us of a spiritual bent to try to understand people who have been unfairly victimized and to show them compassion as well as taking direct action to lessen their suffering. 

 

But Bob Marley is right, none but ourselves can free our minds, and to the extent to which we have been trapped in mental slavery, making us coconspirators in our own abuse, we need to take responsibility for thinking our way out of that. 

 

Strict obedience is not the only way of avoiding religious guilt. Turning our backs on toxic religion is a better way. Working hard, taking on two and three jobs, denying ourselves appropriate rest and reward, is not the only way out of poverty. Sometimes we have to challenge the unfair economic system that creates poverty. 

You don’t have to stay in a toxic marriage, or family, or job, or friendship. Your abusers always try to make you believe that you have no other choice but, believe me, you do. 

 

Your government always tries to convince you that they have your best interests at heart, but even after 40 years of trickle down propaganda, it is increasing clear that the government is peeing on us and trying to tell us it is raining. We don’t have to accept an economy that has been rigged to make the rich richer and to keep the poor in too much desperation to ever organize and change the system. 

 

I will have more to say about that in my sermon that will be posted on August 25^th, 2024. Until then, keep thinking your way out of mental slavery.

Project 2025 as seen by a Pastor

Project 2025 as seen by a Pastor

July 28, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

 

 

 click here to see the video

 

When Empire star, Taraji Henson stepped onto the stage at this years BET awards ceremony in this show stopping dress, probably the last thing anyone expected to hear come out of her mouth was a powerful and loud speech about a presidential transition plan written by the Heritage Foundation, but that’s what we got. She even said, “I know I look good, but it is time for you all to pay attention!” For more than a year we have been hearing admonitions in the news that we should all read the 2025 Project but, realistically, it is nearly 900 pages long and it doesn’t read like Moby Dick or Gone With the Wind. 

 

Its chapters about how to revamp the federal government from top to bottom were written by 36 different conservative thinkers, 26 of whom served in the first Trump administration, some of whom had to do their writing from prison cells. Even though Trump claims to have no association with this huge document, clearly, it was written for his use by his own team who hope to be able to hit the ground running in a second Trump administration, accomplishing things he didn’t even dare to dream of in his first chaotic term in the White House. 

 

Trump is trying to distance himself from this manifesto, which was written by his close friends and associates, but Trump is mentioned by name on 190 pages of this tome, so don’t believe his lies. Still, who wants to ruin a perfectly good day by reading the political musings of people like Peter Navarro and Ken Cuccinelli? I don’t but if you had the moral strength to look up into Taraji Henson’s eyes, you would have seen her fury when she loudly demanded that we “look it up.” So, I did.

 

The 2025 Project is important. It is frightening. It contradicts the values that we spiritual people, people who believe in freedom, justice, and the equality of all people, and we must suffer a bit to be more aware of what the right wing of American politics would like to turn this country and its government into. 

 

There are 4 pillars to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate for leadership. This book is the outline of goals and objectives. The second pillar is a LinkedIn style catalogue of names of people with their ideology who can be hired by the administration. The third pillar is a kind of conservative academy, set up to train the conservative neophytes in how to run the government the way they want it run. 

 

And the 4^th is a literal playbook, outlining the steps to be taken in the first days of the next Trump administration to get all of this transformation started. 

 

Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and former president of the hair-growth for men club, outlines their objectives in the forward with 4 goals that have to be interpreted carefully to get past his sweet sounding language. 

He says that we are in the midst of a second American Revolution which, he added, could be bloodless if the left allows it to be…. Which is to say, they won’t shoot us unless we resist. 

 

The first of his objectives says: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. In the details of the book, we learn how this will be done – by closing the Education Department, allowing book burning and far right Christians to control the school curriculum. They also want to do away, not only with the abortion pill but with contraception, and even no-fault divorce, forcing even violent and toxic families to stay together. They also want to make pornography illegal, putting those who produce and sell it in prison . . . and you can bet that would mean anything that portrayed homosexuality or gender changes as being normal. And they want to ban invitro fertilization for reasons I cannot even guess. They seem to believe that you can actually legislate sexual orientation . . . which they intend to try to do. 

 

Their second goal, Roberts describes this way: Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. In their mind, the administrative state is the Civil Service, tens of thousands of federal employees who have job security. They want to consolidate all authority in the executive branch into the hands of the president who can dismiss anyone and replace them puppets who work at his whim. They want to take down the intelligence forces, the FBI and the CIA, those agencies that have investigated Trump and his organized crime connections. Dismantling the administrative state will also do away with most poverty programs, food assistance, public housing, and things the restrict your freedom, like student loan forgiveness. You know, like Jesus always said, “Do your best to punish the poor for being poor.”

 

Robert’s says that their third value is to, Defend our sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats. Which, again, when you dig into the book’s details, means not allowing people to come here from Muslim countries. It means stationing our armies on the border the Mexico to defend our border with lethal force, and putting the military in our city streets to defend our “bounty” which means the private businesses that might be looted or damaged in a protest. As well as shooting shop lifters or anyone else who threatens the assets of the rich. 

 

And he ends these lofty goals with the most hypocritical statement of all saying that they want to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely- what our constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” Does that mean that women should be able to exercise their God-given individual right to manage their own reproductive life? No, obviously they don’t want women to have that liberty. And does that mean that people should be able to love the person they choose to love? No, not if you are gay, lesbian, trans, or anything that does not fit into their cisgender world view. And does it mean that our children get to exercise the liberty to go to school or a movie or a city park without fear of being murdered by some AR-15 wielding lunatic? No, of course not, even though we have more than 100,000 gun deaths per year now, nothing will come between these fanatics and their freedom to own lethal weapons. The blessings of liberty seem to redound only to their very narrowly defined minority of the white, privileged, conservatives. 

 

As the constant speculation about whether Biden was going to drop out of the race after his abysmal debate performance, the news media seems to be giving Project 2025 more air time and at least reporting on pieces of it, what else can you do with a tome so large as this one but to try to feed it to the public, one bad tasting bite at a time. Still, I will echo Taraji Henson’s emphatic demand that you look it up. 

 

No one wants to read 900 pages of this fascist stuff but if you will just give it 30 minutes of you time for three or four days in a row, you will get a sense of just how dangerous this proposed conservative civil war is.

 

Why do conservative Republicans want to replace what is left of our democracy with an authoritarian, dare we say, “fascist” government, consolidating the power of the president, making him immune to prosecution and turning our President into a king? People sometimes turn to an authoritarian leader when they are afraid, afraid of foreign invasion, of an economic depression, or some other social disruption. 

 

But we are the strongest nation in the world, militarily and economically. Unemployment is at a record low. The stock market is at a record high. What problem are they trying to solve with this reactionary move to erase the social progress make in women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and ecological protections? What are they afraid of? You undoubtably have your own answers to that question but their agenda makes it clear to me that they are afraid of empowered women, they are afraid of racial and religious minorities claiming equal place in our society, and they are terrified of the normalization of gender and sexual orientation diversity. 

 

Clearly, for them, making America great again is an appeal to going back to a previous era. Maybe back to the 1950’s when segregation was legal, abortion was illegal, and gay people were still in the closet. Maybe they want to go back to the early 20^th century, when women couldn’t vote and Jim Crow laws were in force. I wouldn’t be surprised if they may want to go back to a pre-Civil War era. That may seem to be unthinkable to you now but then we have never had a king in America before so we just can’t predict where the safe boundaries would be in a world where a sociopath like Trump could become king. 

 

It has been a long time since I have felt that I had to anchor every sermon to a passage of scripture. I don’t feel any compulsion to do so today, but I find the decision of ancient Judeans to have a king to be relevant. If you do not remember Israelite history very well, let me remind you that there is a debate that goes on in Hebrew scriptures, both in praise of their famous kings and in condemnation of the whole concept of having a king. 

 

Remember, Moses was a religious leader but not a king. Joshua was a military leader but not a king. For the first centuries of Judaean history, their leadership came from wise men and women who were called “judges.” They looked to their tribal and community leaders until they asked their most prominent prophet, Samuel, to choose a king to rule over them. Samuel resisted and took the matter directly to God who, we are told in I Samuel chapter 8, was dead set against the idea but God was willing to let the people make their own mistakes. According to the text, God told Samuel to do it but to first give the people this warning. 

 

¹⁰ So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹ He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, ¹² and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³ He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴ He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. ¹⁵ He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. ¹⁶ He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle^[b] and donkeys and put them to his work. ¹⁷ He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸ And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.”

 

The language is obviously from a small nation that existed 3000 years ago but the basic message remains the same. If we may free and fair elections something we can ignore or refuse to obey. If we allow our courts to make our leaders impossible to hold accountable to any legal standards, if we empower our executive branch to tax, wage war, and pick a ruling class that must be supported by the majority, we will be sorry that we did it, and once you do it, it is very difficult to undo it. 

As slopy and inefficient as democracy is, as Winston Churchill famously said, the worst form of government except for all of the others. An imperial presidency may scratch the itch for power on the part of those who are afraid of the eclipse of white male privilege, but it sure to be bad news for everyone else. 

In this pastor’s opinion, we should do whatever we can to help to protect our system of democracy with checks and balances and accountability to moral standards expressed in law, even for members of the supreme court and whoever lives in the White House. That is, of course, just my opinion but it enjoys the status of also being right.

Religion and Politics – Natural Bed Fellows

Religion and Politics – Natural Bed Fellows    July 14, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

Click here to see the video

 

Back in the good ol days when even state universities had a budget for inviting famous speakers to campus to expose their young audience to influential thinkers, Western Kentucky University hosted William Buckley, the famous conservative host of Firing Line, and the originator of the National Review, to speak to a packed house of teenagers from rural Kentucky. 

 

I was an 18 year old freshman in 1974 and though I had never watched Firing Line nor picked up a copy of the National Review, I was in the audience. He didn’t talk about his recent trip to China with President Nixon when these two global super powers were just starting to talk to one another. He didn’t rail against liberals, gay people, or hippies so much as he just compassionately gave a lot of young people some advice about how to live a meaningful life. 

 

I remember two things he said that evening. One was that he had no respect for anyone who slept more than five hours a night but the other thing I remember was more useful. He said, “You have been warned not to talk about either politics or religion in a polite society. The problem with following that advice is that you will never learn how to have a civil conversation about things that are as important as religion and politics.” 

 

Those were the days when Republican and Democratic members of the congress could publicly debate about the civil rights movement, voters rights, desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion, and at the end of the day they would collect their spouses and children and everyone would get together for an ice cream social. 

In the 80’s, Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neil, and conservative icon, President Ronald Regan, had a pact that they were “friends after 6 p.m.” 

 

A correspondent once brought this up to President Obama a decade ago, suggesting that maybe he should get a drink with Mitch McConnel, to which, Obama replied, “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnel?”

I get it. I wouldn’t want to spend Happy Hour with Mitch McConnel, or Donald Trump, or, if it were even possible, Ronald Regan, but I know that somehow we have to get back to a place where we can sit down at a Thanksgiving dinner and have a polite and meaningful conversation about politics and religion, at a table where people don’t agree but where they can come to understand one another better. 

 

Once public discourse becomes laden with angry accusations, name calling, and dismissive characterizations, people tend to become more devoted to their prejudices and rather than being shamed or bullied into changing, they tend to deepen their devotion to increasingly radical viewpoints. 

 

We Unitarians are fond of declaring that “love is my religion,” which would be wonderful if it were true, but I am afraid that all too often the larger truth is that “acquiescence is our religion.” We don’t talk about religion and politics with people who disagree with us, we just avoid potentially controversial conversations to avoid conflict. And I get that. There are times to just walk away to avoid starting an argument for which there is no meaningful end but peace without some mutual understanding isn’t really peace, is it? It is more like surrender, or maybe indifference. Let me suggest a thought exercise.

 

I’m writing this several days after the first presidential debate in which President Joe Biden, rather than reassuring voters that he is ready and able to serve another term in office, demonstrated an example of every Democrat’s worst fears. He seemed to be very old, confused, and weak. 

 

So, in the aftermath, many were calling for him to back out of the race so that someone in better shape to both win the fall election and succeed in office over the next few years could take his place. Others adamantly defended him saying that he has been an excellent president for almost four years and a weak debate performance should not be made more important than his years of laudable accomplishments. 

 

The stakes in the November election are very high. We see what Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have done to the court and to the country. We have reason to fear the approximate end of Democracy and the onset of a truly weaponized judiciary if Trump is allowed to win this election.

 

I suspect that all of you have decided in your own minds whether we should all support Biden through the fall election or hurry up and pick a replacement candidate, but could you sit at a table with several people who had an opinion different from your own and discuss the merits and liabilities of either choice? 

This matter may have been settled by the time this sermon is posted but it is still up in the air, could you listen to both sides of the argument? There is no guarantee of success in either choice and no matter which way we go, Trump might win, and we will never know that if we had taken the other path, we might have been successful. The stakes could hardly be higher. The outcomes could hardly be more uncertain. Could we discuss our views without demanding that everyone agree with us? Can we defend our view without implying that those who don’t agree with us are unintelligent or uninformed? Could we strive to understand the point of view of those who differ with us and patiently try to make ourselves understood based on discernable facts and readily available information? 

 

If we can, then, I submit, that would be evidence of love. In my estimation, that would be a conversation worth having. Not all conversations are worth having. I’m not going to give much time to anyone who is convinced that the Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor. And, just because you have a civil relationship to offer to someone doesn’t mean that they have one to offer to you but one thing is certain, if we avoid talking about the hard stuff, no one ever learns, no one ever changes, and we all fail.

 

Let me try another illustration on you: In a plea deal, Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been released from a British prison where he had served nearly 6 years after having spent a decade avoiding arrest by living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There are those who believe that Assange was a hero of journalism and free speech and others who believe that he was guilty of some of the worst espionage crimes of this century. 

I have been conversations where the mere mention of his name divided the room into adamant factions. The relevant question in his case is not whether he is a really great guy or not. I don’t know anyone who really wants to carry his banner in a debate about character but was his release of stolen documents a journalistic coups, exposing war crimes and holding the American government accountable for having hidden and lied about these crimes, or is his dump of thousands of pages of classified documents a crime that placed many secret undercover agents in grave danger? 

 

Well, he did both, didn’t he? Which is more important, exposing the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute soldiers who murdered journalists and first responders on the battlefield in Afghanistan, or leaking information that could expose undercover sources? Chelsea Manning, who provided the information to Wikileaks, and Assange have both served years in prison for this leak but the soldiers who murdered journalists and medics were not punished, and, for that matter, the New York Times and several British and European news sources that published the leaked material were not charged with any crime. How can Manning and Assange be guilty, and the media just gets a pass? 

 

I could argue either side of this issue though, as you might imagine, I lean towards supporting leaking information about war crimes in order to keep our government or any other government honest. To that point, bronze statues of Assange, Manning, along with Edward Snowden have been erected in Berlin in praise of their courage . . . Germans know about the danger of allowing a government to operate in secrecy under the disguise of propaganda.

 

I have heard a number of people I really like get very mad about this issue but what I have never heard is a civil conversation among people who have honest disagreements about it. That is a conversation I would love to be a part of but to date, any attempt at discussing the facts becomes a partisan condemnation of either the leakers or the government. 

 

I don’t think that there is a rational defense for Trump’s theft of classified documents that have been left in disarray in unsecured storage. I don’t think that there is a honest defense to be mounted in that case, which is, I’ll suggest, why a Trump supporting judicial system is making certain that the case will either never be heard in court or at least it won’t be heard in time to influence this fall’s election. But if I am wrong, more than a thousand of you will hear me saying this this week, so, in a civil manner, please, tell me how I am mistaken. 

 

There is an anonymous modern proverb that I really love that says: We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. The internet will repeatedly tell you that this is a quote from either Socrates or Plato but, because it is a priority in my life to defend the corpus of Greek philosophy, I can assure you that this didn’t come from Socrates or Plato or any other ancient source but whoever said it doesn’t need a false attribution to support it because it is painfully and obviously true. The reason we can’t get some cases to trial is the same as the reason we can’t have a civil conversation about some controversial topics . . . it is because someone is afraid of the light. That, I contend, is shameful.

 

Over the past several years, I have enjoyed a good deal of attention from listeners of my posted sermons, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. So it should come as no surprise to hear me tell you that from time to time, I would be contacted by the pulpit committee of a church that was searching for a new pastor. I never actually was offered a call from any of those churches because, before we ever got to the point of an actual interview, someone on the committee would be charged with letting me know that if I were to be offered that job I would have to first agree to not talk about at least 90 percent of what I have talked about for the last 15 years. 

 

I cannot claim that I am always right, in fact, I would disagree with a number of things I have said in the past; but I can claim that I have always been honest and if a church is not willing to be exposed to an honest exploration of matters of ethics, well, who would want to work for a church that is afraid of the light?

 

Folks, I am aware that most of you who generously give me a few minutes of your time every couple of weeks, do so expecting to agree with me. Trust me, when I go to our local Unitarian Church on Sunday mornings, the primary reason that I go is because I want to sit in a room for an hour in this deeply red state, surrounded by people who largely see the world the way that I do. I also need to feel that I am not all alone in the world. But it just might be that the most important messages you hear are the ones in which you had to endure a difference of opinion. Don’t only seek confirmation of your own bias. Remain willing to step into the light and heat of honest disagreement on important topics. The only way out of our current dangerous political and ideological quagmire is to engage one another in the light of honest dialogue.

 

My favorite British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, left us with this hope, he said:

I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, that it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels, but to people possessed of wisdom and courage. 

 

I suggest that we give ourselves to that hope.