Gaza One Year Later: The Publicity War

Gaza One Year Later: The Publicity War   

October 6, 2024       Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

One year ago, Hamas terrorists launched an attack within Israel. It started on that Sabbath morning with more than 2000 rockets being fired into 21 communities in Israel. Then 6000 militants poured through, over, and under the border, killing more than 1000 men, women, and children. Elderly people were gunned down as they ran to take shelter in bomb shelters. They attacked day care centers, brutally murdering children and babies. 

 

Some 250 men, women, and children were taken as hostages during the attack; taken back into Gaza and hidden in the tunnels for which Hamas is famous but also some were housed in the homes of Gaza residents who support Hamas. Both men and women were subjected to rape and sexual violence. There are accounts of prisoners being beheaded and people in Gaze literally playing with body parts. 

 

Bloodied, naked women were paraded through the streets of Gaza. Several were gang raped and at least one was apparently raped to death, dying with a crushed pelvis. Several captives have died in captivity. A few have been released. Now, one year after the attack, there are still about 100 people unaccounted for; but it is reasonable to assume that only a couple of dozen are still alive. Survivors reported having been beaten and starved and kept in darkness in tunnels too cramped to even stand up. 

It is unbearable to think that there are still young men and women in captivity, regularly being sexually assaulted and tortured by Hamas and, sadly, other residents of Gaza. The news often comes to us in a way that suggests that there are two kinds of people who live in Gaza: Hamas terrorists, and innocent Palestinians who happen to live in Gaza. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realize that this bifurcation of the population is anything but that clean. The children in Gaza are reared with school textbooks that tell them repeatedly that their highest moral obligation to their faith and to their families is to kill Jews however they can and to work for the end of the state of Israel. Obviously, everyone in Gaza is not supportive of Hamas but a lot of people are, and some are sometimes and not at other times and there is no way for spy satellites or Mossad intelligence to tell definitively who is Hamas and who is not Hamas. I will simply make the observation that while these hostages have been held in Gaza, none of the innocent citizens of Gaza has stepped forward with information to help these poor elderly and children to be returned to their families. We have to be honest about this.

 

Of course, it is impossible to ever be certain of any news accounts since both sides engage in repression of the media as they attempt to put their own spin on everything, portraying themselves as victims and the other side as being guilty of the worst war crimes and even the word “genocide” has been cheapened by how much it has been thrown about. 

 

The terrorist attack last October 7 was horrific but that didn’t keep partisan rumor mongers from trying to make it worse. Hamas did kill 38 children and infants in one daycare center but almost immediately it was reported that they were beheaded. They weren’t. Isn’t it bad enough that they were murdered? 

 

We depend on good journalism to fact check these things and to keep the public informed about what is really going on. But Israel doesn’t give journalist the freedom to report on their own in Gaza. They rarely take journalists into the war zone to show them what they want to show them and, of course, nether Hamas nor Hezbollah allow unfettered journalism to happen under their watch because they also want to control the narrative. Both sides are deeply invested in propaganda, and we are left to wonder what is happening.

 

I have just returned from a month in Thailand where I couldn’t easily access my usual news sources, so I was left to try to figure out what was going on my switching between Russian TV, Al Jazeera, Fox News, and some Chinese news services, all of which had their own agenda and spin. RT can be a pretty good news source until they talk about the war in the Ukraine. I like Al Jazeera on the whole until they talk about Israel and the war in Gaza. Maybe they can’t help themselves but we, as news consumers, have to try to filter out the propaganda and work hard to understand the partisan world we live in.

 

Remember, this is not just a war about land and political power, it is also a war for public opinion, for sympathy, and for support. Even President Biden said that he had seen evidence of beheadings of children, which his administration had to walk back because he hadn’t seen any evidence because it didn’t happen. 

 

The Hamas led attack was an unspeakable act of terrorism, aimed at forcing a response from Israel that Hamas leaders hoped would draw other Muslim militias and nations into a final battle with Israel. You have to understand, Hamas made their attack as outrageous and heinous as they possibly could in order to provoke a similar response out of Israel because they then use Israel’s retaliation both to draw other Arab states into war with Israel and more importantly, to try to turn the world against Israel. 

 

Iran has been funding and supplying Hamas all year and Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel from Lebanon, threatening an all-out attack which has become increasingly likely since Israel’s technologically surprising response with explosive pagers and walkie talkies used by Hezbollah leaders and militants. 

 

If you are a regular listener, you know that I have spoken out against the way that Israel has prosecuted its war against Gaza. I have decried the civilian casualties, the inhumane blockade of food, medicine, water, and fuel from Gaza.

Israel’s tactics have been reprehensible but, even with such unreserved military attacks, Hamas members have made it clear that they would repeat October 7 anytime that they could muster the men and material to do it. They plead for a ceasefire but still have not returned the hostages they are still torturing daily. 

 

Likewise, Hezbollah has called the pager bombs an act of war, but they don’t want you to think about the rockets they indiscriminately fire into population centers in Israel on a daily basis. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have raised gaslighting to an art form that would be funny if it were not being offered seriously. 

 

They want to attack and murder in Israel without reprisal, knowing all the while that reprisals are guaranteed. Again, those of you who have been consistent listeners know that I am a very reluctant supporter of the existence of Israel. Land should never have been taken from Palestinians to establish a Jewish homeland when the Holocuast was a European crime…. Engineered by Germany but assisted in ways that Poland, Russia, and other states want to deny now, but at the time . . . well, more Jews died in Poland than died in Germany and it is debatable how many Jews were killed by invaders and how many were killed by neighbors. There is always the war that is fought on the battlefield and the later war that is fought in the pages of history books and the two can be in open conflict with one another. 

 

I will add as a footnote to the initial theft of land to establish Israel that America and Great Britian did not give the small parcel of land they took very defensible borders. When their neighbors later attacked Israel, Israel’s armies pushed the invaders back and annexed land that gave them control of the high land from which Israel suffered constant mortar attacks in early years. There is no legal defense for their expansionist settlements in the West Bank but the current borders of Israel, if you ever bother to go and see for yourself, were established to give the country security from constant attacks. All of this is more complicated than the media stories we are fed in seconds on TV.

 

I am sympathetic with Palestinian anger over the theft of land that was theirs for generations before being taken to establish Israel. It was a bad idea based on Sunday School nostalgia and it should not have been done but we are at least 50 or 60 years past being able to undo that crime. Palestinian terrorism now, which is motivated by a desire to wipe Israel off of the map, only makes things worse.

 

Even though I think that reparations should be made to descendants of African slaves in America, realistically, we know that no dollar figure will actually fix that sin. Nothing we can do for Native Americans who have managed to survive the occupation of Europeans on this continent could ever unravel what we did to them. 

 

Similarly, there are things that the world should do to help Palestinians to have self-governance and an equal place in the modern world but driving the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea, as the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” suggests is not how Palestinians will get justice. Palestinians want the sympathy of the world, and they have won a lot of the propaganda war, but, terrorism is still terrorism and you can’t have a seat at the table if you are still stabbing the other people at the table with your steak knife.

Last spring we saw a lot of pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the United States. Outrage about the Israeli assault on Gaza led to demands that the USA stop supplying Israel with arms and financial support. The protests often went pretty far beyond calling for a cease-fire and waded, knowingly or unknowingly into anti-Semitism.

 

Now, let me be clear, you can criticize the state of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. There are those who seem to want to play that card the minute anyone objects to anything that Israel does and that is not honest and no one should be afraid to speak up when the war is being prosecuted directly against a civilian population. 

I think that we should applaud student protests that were focused on war crimes being committed by Israeli forces without trying to whitewash the terrorist provocations of Hamas.

 

However, when students began rallying with chants of “Gays for Hamas,” you realize that enthusiasm has drowned out rational thought. The LGBT community is still violently and often lethally oppressed in most of the Arab world, and no one should kid themselves about how bad it is. 

 

I’m excited to hear young adults taking a passionate interest in world events and protesting for social justice but when they try to make Hamas out to be heroes of some sort, they just look like there are being manipulated and used in the propaganda war. Clearly, we can rationally protest Israel’s excesses without having to forget about the terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

 

Again, let’s be honest about this: If the government of the Bahamas started shooting hundreds of rockets into population centers on the Florida coast, would you think that we should respond? If Mexico started firing hundreds of mortars and rockets across the southern border, or Canada was attacking American cities across our northern border, if a thousand rockets flew into apartment buildings in New York, would you think that America should respond? 

 

Historically, we stole a lot of land from Mexico. We invaded Canada and tried to take it over. We participated in a virtual genocide of indigenous people in the Caribbean and replaced native populations with African slaves. But, in spite of that history, if a hot war started between our neighbors and Americans living on our borders, you can bet that our response would hardly be as measured and restrained as many of us expect Israel to be. Israel doesn’t get a green light on war crimes but, folks, Israel has a right, an obligation, to defend itself and if it ever stopped then they would be driven into the Mediterranean Sea and that is a fact. 

 

The reasonable discussion in America should not be about whether or not Israel should defend itself, but we have reason to talk about when and how we will help them to defend themselves and when they have gone too far, and we have reason to withdraw our support. 

 

In my opinion, asking for a ceasefire while there are still hostages being raped, beaten, and starved to death is a non-starter. If Hamas and Hezbollah cannot sign onto any peace accord which accepts the fact that, no matter how wrong and poorly conceived its creation was, Israel is where it is and it is going to stay there, then there is no peace to be had in Palestine. 

 

The current government of Israel doesn’t want a two state solution to this problem because they don’t want a shared border with a strong Palestinian government. The Palestinians don’t want a two state solution because they just don’t want Israel to exist, at least not in the Middle East. But folks, there can be a two-state solution and I insist that nothing less than a two state solution can bring permanent peace to this region of the country. There is a way for Palestine to be free, self-governing, and successful but that way must include making peace with Israel. 

 

I am certain that this talk will be offensive to many of my progressive friends. I still hate war and I even wish that I could figure out a way to be a solid pacifist but in the Middle East, powerful self-defense still seems to be necessary. If you have a workable solution to suggest, I would love to hear from you. 

Misogyny in 2024? Unbelievable!

Misogyny in 2024? Unbelievable!   

 

Dr. Roger Ray   Sept. 22, 2024

 

click here to see the video

 

My sincere apologies for using this obviously fake photo of a bikini clad Kamala Harris in an embrace with Jeffry Epstein but, I assure you, it was the least offensive example of how people rushed to try to ruin Kamala Harris’ credibility with sexual innuendo as soon as she became the heir apparent of the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

 

I’ll remind our long-term listeners that I have referenced more than once the night of the 2008 presidential election when I publicly wept when Barak Obama won the election. Obama was not an ideal candidate in my mind. He was too inexperienced and, frankly, way too conservative for my tastes, an opinion that was certainly validated in the looming housing crisis when he rushed in to save the banks while throwing vulnerable homeowners under the bus, and by calling for a military surge in Afghanistan rather than an immediate withdrawal of occupation forces. 

 

But I didn’t weep because I was sorry that he won the election, I wept because America had, by popular vote, elected a young black man to the highest office in the country and the most powerful position in the world. I would have loved to have been able to give him the benefit of some pastoral guidance in 2009, but who he was, an intelligent, honorable, trustworthy man, in my opinion, would make him one of the two or three greatest presidents in American history. How much better off would the world have been if he could have had three terms rather than two? 

I feel that history validated my concerns about his tendency to favor big corporations over lower income working Americans, but I was terribly wrong in my rather naive interpretation of the meaning of his having won the 2008 Election.

I thought Obama’s win stood on the shoulders of a dawning post-racist American public. I feel kinda stupid about that now, but I was so hopeful. 

 

Maybe it was because many younger voters were eager to help move past racism that Obama won, but younger white men were certainly not united in that hope. The election of Barak Obama sparked a resurgence of racism in America that shocked even this southern boy. I had no idea how deep the racist roots were, not just in the south and not just among old white trailer park dwellers. Obama’s election provoked age-old beliefs in white supremacy, it struck fear in the hearts of people who had never consciously been aware of how much their white privilege meant to them.

 

I will even go so far as to say that most Americans, prior to Obama’s win, knew that Donald Trump was a pathetic, narcissistic, conman, little more than a carnival barker for America’s Id, but Obama’s popularity, exceeded only by his wife’s popularity, made Donald Trump the standard bearer for everything that is despicable and embarrassing about American culture. Maybe everyone who voted for Trump is not a racist, or a homophobe, or a xenophobe, or an Islamophobe, but those rare exceptions can hardly make us give up the generalization that is demonstrably based in the other 95% of Trump’s supporters. 

Let me postulate that without the racist vote, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election by the largest margin in American history.

And if it makes you mad to hear me say that, I will further postulate that you are angry because, in your heart, you know that I am right. 

 

While Obama’s election to the office of the president was not the sign of the end of American racism, it was siren that showed us how much work remained to be done. And I implore you not to be naive enough to believe that another decade of funerals will finish the job. It isn’t just retrenched old people who are keeping racism alive, the most frightening proponents of racism are among the young. 

Stephen Miller was just 31 years old when he joined the Trump administration. He is the one who thought putting the children of illegal immigrants in dog cages was a good idea. One of the meanest and most dangerous ideologues of the Trump administration is several years younger than some of my favorite shoes. 

 

If it were possible to hold a public vote on a proposal to reinstate African slavery in America, do any of you doubt that this little brown shirt would vote for it? I realize that the art of preaching often rests on plausible exaggeration and hyperbole, but you need to be able to tell the difference between fiction and painful reality orientation. America’s ID is strong and there is no shortage of people of all ages, genders, and even races who are prepared to normalize the most deplorable aspects of our national character. 

 

So, when it became apparent that Kamala Harris was going to be the democratic candidate for president, I wasn’t surprised to see the immediate misogynist backlash. I was disgusted, I was disappointed, but I sure couldn’t be surprised.

Of course, entirely unlike what I was saying earlier about the surprising resurgence of racism after Obama was nominated and then elected, we cannot say that the nomination of Kamala Harris was the fuse that lit a sudden resurgence of misogyny.  

It has now been 2 years since the unthinkable happened, when a radically Catholic and Evangelical Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, taking civil rights away from women of child bearing age. Not since the days of slavery have we seen a court that would take away civil rights and literally give control of women’s heathcare to right wing men who have no medical training. Would I be going too far to say, “gave control over women’s bodies to weak men?” Because a strong man doesn’t need to control women; strong men are not threatened by women having civil rights. Strong men want to give women equal rights. It is frightened men, weak men, insecure men who are not certain of their own masculinity who have a need to kill, abuse, or control strong women. 

 

Just yesterday I was in Qatar and walking through the airport and the downtown area of Doha, when I see women covered in black either almost entirely or entirely in 100 degree weather, right down to just having a peep hole in their face coverings, well, I don’t have very charitable feelings about modern Islam. The need to hide women, to disguise and cover up their femininity, that’s not respect for women, is it? Isn’t that fear? Maybe I shouldn’t say things that promote anti-Muslim sentiments, but we have all seen the pictures that show Iranian women in the 70’s and Iranian women now:

Please forgive me if this is too strong, and certainly there is way too much misogyny in Catholicism, Fundamentalism, as well as in Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism: but much of Islam looks to me like a religion for really weak men. Men who love women, desire women, but who are terrified of them at the same time. 

 

All organized religions are in desperate need of modernization and moral reforms but Islam, I am afraid, is marching towards extinction by insisting upon marginalizing the women whose genius and industry they so desperately need. I will have more to say about this in a couple of weeks but, I will tell you honestly, it isn’t that I hate Islam, it is that I am sad for people who fall into this absurd fear of women taking their rightful leadership roles in the world. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan have just made it illegal for women’s voices to be hear in public…. It is not illegal for Afghan women to sing or to read aloud. This is not faith. This is fear. The Taliban defend their ruling saying that the voice of women is bewitching. I’ll admit that I’ve been bewitched by a woman more than once in my lifetime but I don’t think I can blame women for the fact that I was bewitched . . . I’m pretty sure that’s on me. I don’t think that Muhammad was afraid of women. In fact, for his time and in his world, the Prophet was a liberating force for women, at least for the most part. But Islam in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in Afghanistan, this is not Muhammad’s faith, this is the irrational fear of weak men. 

 

So Kamala doesn’t get the blame or the credit for the fearful reactions of weak men in the face of her candidacy. It was going on before her name became known to us, but boy, you sure can’t miss it now.  I live in Florida, which is not, I am sorry to say, the MENSA Club capitol of the world. I am surrounded by grumpy old Trump supporters, many of whom couldn’t wait to suggest to me that Kamala should be portrayed wearing kneepads because, they insist, she climbed the political ladder by randomly giving out sexual favors to powerful men. 

 

The hypocrisy should be obvious, but I am going to spell it out anyway: I have no idea who Kamala dated before she was married. I have no interest in knowing her intimate history because, whatever it is, it isn’t any of my business just like it isn’t any of yours. The implication that she is morally bankrupt because she was probably not a virgin when she got married to Doug Emhoff when she was 49 years old is nothing short of idiotically pathetic. 

 

There have certainly been times when we expected male politicians to show some sexual discretion and more than one career has gone up in flames when it became publicly known just how rapacious their libidinal appetites had been, but in the era of Donald Trump, sexual infidelities have apparently become more of a badge of honor than a political liability. Trump’s history with child molester, Jeffery Epstein’s, fantasy island, his comments about wishing that he could date his daughter, the disgusting bragging about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood recording, along with rape trials and assault charges…. Drunk frat boys in the 1960’s showed more circumspection than Trump has shown in recent history. 

Still, he has the temerity to cast aspersions on Kamala Harris whose is class and character personified compared to Trump. Republicans now seem to be comfortable with the middle-school assumption that sexual conquest is something men brag about and the same sexual encounters are a source of shame for women. None of us should be so primitive that we give such hypocrisy the slightest bit of credibility.

 

But even progressive talking heads on MSNBC just said, without hesitation or qualification, that when the subject of choosing a VP running mate came up, that Kamala would have to pick a white male, which, in my opinion, and you all know that I am right, that just makes oblation to the residual racism and misogyny of the American voting public. I like Tim Waltz, in fact, I like him a lot, but his selection lost some shine for me just knowing that Kamala was being told not to consider picking a woman, a gay man, or a person of color. As a woman of color, if she is successful in her bid for the presidency, she is breaking through some very tough barriers but the fact that she is doing that should absolutely mean that we have evolved beyond having to “balance” any political ticket by having at least one white straight man on the ballot to legitimate a person who happened not to have used white male privilege to get there. 

 

But let’s be honest, equality of the genders is not the same thing as sameness. Men and women are equally intelligent and talented, but we can make some observations about the factual differences between them. Women tend to be shorter. Men tend to be physically stronger.

 

It is also true that almost all mass shootings are committed by men. Almost all terrorists are men. Men are much more likely to be criminals, with 13 men in prison for every incarcerated woman. Men committed more than 80% of the violent crimes in the United States.  So, sure, there are some obvious differences between men and women, and it is a bit odd that being male is not seen as being more of a liability in elections. 

 

We cannot overstate the importance of the fact that Kamala Harris may break the gender barrier for the highest office in America while simultaneously becoming the first woman of color to be president.

 Other nations have elected women heads of state, famously, we remember Indira Gandhi of India, and Golda Meir of Israel, and Isabel Perón of Argentina who came to office in the 1960’s and 70’s. And while many nations have elected women as head of state since then, it is notable that not many have managed to do it twice, with the notable exceptions of Great Britain and Iceland. 

 

Women were not even allowed to apply to go to most medical schools or law schools within my own lifetime but now women make up the majority in both medical school and law school and, in fact, them seem to be excelling beyond their male peers. But while the struggle for equal rights has seen notable successes in recent decades, breaking into politics has been a tough slog. Women make up more than half of our population but in the senate, they hold only a fourth of the seats and women occupy the governor’s office in only 12 states.

 

So, as a thought exercise, may I ask you if you believe that this nation would have universal healthcare, sensible gun laws, and stronger environmental protections right now if we had a majority of women in the congress and the senate? I know what I believe, but what do you believe? Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who, by the way, despise each other, do not represent women’s potential for statesmanship but they do represent the kind of women that Republicans seem to like, gun toting, conspiracy theory loving, lunatics who are best known for lewd behavior in public and talking about Jewish space lasers.  

Women are not like men. They tend to do better in higher education. They tend to be less violent, more compassionate, and on the whole, they tend to be more kind and more moral. So, is America ready to have a women president. Well, in my opinion, it’s about damn time.

The Ten Commandments vs The Beatitudes

The Ten Commandments vs The Beatitudes

Sept. 8, 2024  Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

Usually when a politician does something stupid just to get attention my usual response is to avoid giving them attention. However, Louisiana’s new governor, Jeff Landry, has rung a bell that deserves a moment’s reflection. Earlier this summer he signed legislation requiring every classroom in the state to display a poster sized copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom from kindergarten to state universities. He argues that this is not religious indoctrination but rather it is a matter of civics instruction, stating as fact, that the biblical character, Moses, was, historically the first law giver. . . completely ignoring the Sumerian law of Ur Nammu which predated moses by nearly 1000 years and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which predated Moses by more than 500 years. Which would be like Landry saying that Earnest Hemingway wrote the first book in English without giving props to either Chaucer or Shakespeare. 

 

Landry’s insistence that this is not an attempt at establishing Judeo-Christian tradition as a state religion but rather it is teaching the history of civics, is the same argument offered in Kentucky in 1979 when they tried to mandate public displays of the Ten Commandments, a law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1980. 

Does Landry not know that Kentucky’s version of the law was essentially the same as his? Is he so unaware of history that he actually believes that Moses was the first law giver in the world?

 

I’m gonna have to call BS on this one. Landry is a graduate of Loyal University’s law school, and I cannot believe that anyone could make it through law school without at least a cursory understanding of the history of law making. It isn’t simple ignorance that makes people like Landry say these things. 

 

He is playing on the prejudices of genuinely ignorant people who think that their conservative Sunday School classes taught them actual history. On one level, this is a deeply cynical attempt at manipulating simple people to build his voter base. But, not to manufacture my own conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder if he may be doing this to send the issue up to the Supreme Court to give this out of control court the opportunity to reverse their 1980 ruling. And, seriously, would it surprise any of us if this court actually did just that? 

 

Maybe, just maybe, Landry is dumb like a fox, trying to score a win in the culture war that is trying to enthrone white, Christian, ideology in a newly fascist America? I have lately taken no small amount of encouragement from the sequence of events that pulled Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket, unleashing a wave of enthusiasm that was motivated, largely, by a palpable sense of relief that democracy did not hang on the precarious performance of Joe Biden. But, folks, the election is still a couple of months away and the outcome is still uncertain. 

 

Five years ago, I would not have believed that American democracy was a fragile thing, subject to being lost in the whims of reactionary, racist voters, but we have seen formerly reliable democratic institutions and values falling, as if under the sword of homegrown invaders. Again, who would have believed five years ago that our Supreme Court would be reduced to turning unpopular Roman Catholic beliefs about sex into law and that the Department of Justice would find itself incapable of doing the one and only thing they exist to do, which is to prosecute serious crime . . . totally failing to bring a case about Trump trying to overturn democracy by invading the Capital to overturn an election or fo stealing nuclear secrets and secret military plans and leaving them unguarded in a bathroom in the basement of his house? 

 

People, Vigilance is called for. We cannot afford to be indifferent about these efforts at pulling down the wall between church and state and castrating the Justice Department when we need for them to be powerfully enforcing national security. 

 

But all of that being said in terms of national politics, pastorally, I also have to wonder why conservative Christians would make the Ten Commandments the foundation stone of their revolution rather than the rather more obvious Christian values articulated in the Beatitudes found in Matthew’s gospel.

 

If you will indulge me a few minutes of biblical commentary, the Ten Commandments are found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a book organized around five sermons said to have been delivered by Moses during the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. Matthew, which appears first in the New Testament, is probably the third gospel composed in the second half of the first century. It was written by someone who had organized materials found in Mark and Luke into five sermons allegedly delivered by Jesus. Most of the beatitudes can be found, in rather less overtly religious form, in Luke but in Luke these ideas are a part of a sermon delivered on a plain.

 

Matthew sets this sermon on a mountain. Matthew is determined to present Jesus as a new Moses. He includes many more quotes from the Hebrew Bible than any of the other gospel writers and his echoes of the Moses story are unmistakable. It would be a little neater if there were 10 Beatitudes to match the Ten Commandments and some biblical scholars have done linguistic gymnastics trying to turn the nine “blessed are” statements of the beatitudes into ten but honesty requires us to limit the list to nine. 

Again, not to go too deep into the woods but biblical scholars say that we that we see five layers of editing in our version of Matthew. I can’t prove it, but my own belief is that the first author of Matthew did have ten beatitudes in the original version and one of them must have ended up on the cutting floor of some later editor. I can’t cite any evidence for that other than that the author of Matthew is too careful to have simply miscounted. Counting to 10 is not that hard. 

 

Further, and please bear with me here, the “blessed are” formulation of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart . . . is a way of speaking these things into reality, because they certainly are not observations, are they? 

We don’t see the meek inheriting the earth or the hungry being satisfied. 

Matthew’s Jesus is speaking as God, like saying “Let there be light,” Jesus is speaking the values of the Kingdom into existence. These things will be true because Jesus says that they will be true. Now, why would any modern Christian be spouting off about the “thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and the “thou shalt not be envious of your neighbor’s stuff,” when they have this much more rich and morally relevant beatitudes right in the opening chapters of their New Testament?

No one less that the popular fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut commented on the irony of conservative Christians insisting on public displays of The Ten Commandments rather than the beatitudes of Jesus. He certainly comes off as being generally irreverent, but I know that his son actually majored in religion in college and occasionally worked as a freelance minister, so maybe Kurt was a little deeper read into matters of Christian thought than his novels would indicate, but whether it was accidental or not, he hits on a very valid point. He published this observation in a collection of essays in 2005, just a couple of years before his death as one of his magnum opus critical observations about American values.

 

It is a challenge that certainly deserves to be raised. Jesus, as presented in the gospels, was concerned with the suffering of the poor, with compassion towards those who were grief stricken, rather than the more basic legal concerns of the Ten Commandments that forbid adultery, stealing, and murder. 

 

A kindergartener might understand a commandment to be concerned about people who are hungry but what will a five-year-old think about a commandment not to covet his neighbor’s wife? 

 

Clearly, what is disappointing about conservative Christian activists to me is how little of Christianity seems to appear in their politics and how much they use the Ten Commandments as a stone to be thrown at secular society. It is more of an appeal to the supremacy of their religion over  alternative religious traditions that are growing in number as America becomes more diverse.

What conservatives are reacting to is the very real and rapid decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as being Christians, especially among protestant denominations that declined by 28% between 2003 and 2017. That is a rate of decline that is faster than the demise of Beth Bath and Beyond, Sears, and Red Lobster, with extinction as a very real threat.

 

Since the changes ushered in during the pandemic years, Americans who claim no religious affiliation has now grown to be larger than any one Christian denomination. I’m no religious Nostradamus but I believe that those who identify with “none of the above” will continue to grow. The number of Catholic Americans is certainly buoyed by immigrants from Latin America as most alternative religions are more tethered to immigration than to conversion. 

 

Conservatives have comfortably believed that the United States was, by default, a Christian nation which it certainly never has been but in the post WWII years, Christianity was undeniably dominant and it still is, but the sun is setting on that situation and they mistakenly believe that they can bring the 1940’s back by force. . . which is not how religion works. 

 

This is similar to their howling about the decision to remove teacher led prayer from public schools in the Engle vs Vitale case that the Supreme Court decided in 1962. It so happens that I started school in 1962, and I can remember our very Southern Baptist first grade teacher, Mrs. Allen, leading us at the start of each school day in a recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the flag, she had a devotional reading from the Bible and she led us in a prayer. On Mondays she asked for those of us to stand who had gone to church the day before and then she asked only those who had also gone to Sunday School on Sunday to remain standing, at which time, the two Catholic kids in the class started crying, every single Monday, because Catholics don’t have Sunday School. Mrs. Allen was allowed to torture kids for being Catholic, every single week and you could only imagine what sordid punishments might have come out of her hard little Baptist heart if we had any Jewish or Muslim kids in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1962.

 

To be clear, the Engles v Vitale case did not prohibit prayer in public schools. Kids were free to pray before their meals, at baseball games, and surely there were many prayers going up before tests, it was just that the teacher could not lead a prayer or Bible devotional. The state could not sanction religious indoctrination of children in public schools. Recent Supreme Court decisions seem to be holding the door open to reversing Engles v Vitale, but conservatives are going to be surprised to learn that there is not a Mrs. Allen in all of our elementary classrooms anymore. 

 

School teachers are not reliably Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian and they are, in fact, more likely to be agnostic or atheist and they just might be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist . . . can you hear the School Board controversy arising out of someone doing a devotional reading out of the Bhagavathi every morning in rural Kentucky? 

 

While I am encouraging all of my progressive viewers to be vigilant and to stand up to these very reactionary reforms, it also deserves to be pointed out that conversions at the tip of a spear rarely work out, even if the spear is just state sponsored propaganda. Reversing Roe v Wade two years ago may have warmed the heart of the Pope in the Vatican, but it turned armies of 

The Ten Commandments vs The Beatitudes

Sept. 8, 2024  Dr. Roger Ray

 

Click here to see the video

https://youtu.be/UN-lJHJeMvg?si=GY020rY5Fi2u02Us

 

Usually when a politician does something stupid just to get attention my usual response is to avoid giving them attention. However, Louisiana’s new governor, Jeff Landry, has rung a bell that deserves a moment’s reflection. Earlier this summer he signed legislation requiring every classroom in the state to display a poster sized copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom from kindergarten to state universities. He argues that this is not religious indoctrination but rather it is a matter of civics instruction, stating as fact, that the biblical character, Moses, was, historically the first law giver. . . completely ignoring the Sumerian law of Ur Nammu which predated moses by nearly 1000 years and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which predated Moses by more than 500 years. Which would be like Landry saying that Earnest Hemingway wrote the first book in English without giving props to either Chaucer or Shakespeare. 

 

Landry’s insistence that this is not an attempt at establishing Judeo-Christian tradition as a state religion but rather it is teaching the history of civics, is the same argument offered in Kentucky in 1979 when they tried to mandate public displays of the Ten Commandments, a law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1980. 

Does Landry not know that Kentucky’s version of the law was essentially the same as his? Is he so unaware of history that he actually believes that Moses was the first law giver in the world?

 

I’m gonna have to call BS on this one. Landry is a graduate of Loyal University’s law school, and I cannot believe that anyone could make it through law school without at least a cursory understanding of the history of law making. It isn’t simple ignorance that makes people like Landry say these things. 

 

He is playing on the prejudices of genuinely ignorant people who think that their conservative Sunday School classes taught them actual history. On one level, this is a deeply cynical attempt at manipulating simple people to build his voter base. But, not to manufacture my own conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder if he may be doing this to send the issue up to the Supreme Court to give this out of control court the opportunity to reverse their 1980 ruling. And, seriously, would it surprise any of us if this court actually did just that? 

 

Maybe, just maybe, Landry is dumb like a fox, trying to score a win in the culture war that is trying to enthrone white, Christian, ideology in a newly fascist America? I have lately taken no small amount of encouragement from the sequence of events that pulled Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket, unleashing a wave of enthusiasm that was motivated, largely, by a palpable sense of relief that democracy did not hang on the precarious performance of Joe Biden. But, folks, the election is still a couple of months away and the outcome is still uncertain. 

 

Five years ago, I would not have believed that American democracy was a fragile thing, subject to being lost in the whims of reactionary, racist voters, but we have seen formerly reliable democratic institutions and values falling, as if under the sword of homegrown invaders. Again, who would have believed five years ago that our Supreme Court would be reduced to turning unpopular Roman Catholic beliefs about sex into law and that the Department of Justice would find itself incapable of doing the one and only thing they exist to do, which is to prosecute serious crime . . . totally failing to bring a case about Trump trying to overturn democracy by invading the Capital to overturn an election or fo stealing nuclear secrets and secret military plans and leaving them unguarded in a bathroom in the basement of his house? 

 

People, Vigilance is called for. We cannot afford to be indifferent about these efforts at pulling down the wall between church and state and castrating the Justice Department when we need for them to be powerfully enforcing national security. 

 

But all of that being said in terms of national politics, pastorally, I also have to wonder why conservative Christians would make the Ten Commandments the foundation stone of their revolution rather than the rather more obvious Christian values articulated in the Beatitudes found in Matthew’s gospel.

 

If you will indulge me a few minutes of biblical commentary, the Ten Commandments are found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a book organized around five sermons said to have been delivered by Moses during the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. Matthew, which appears first in the New Testament, is probably the third gospel composed in the second half of the first century. It was written by someone who had organized materials found in Mark and Luke into five sermons allegedly delivered by Jesus. Most of the beatitudes can be found, in rather less overtly religious form, in Luke but in Luke these ideas are a part of a sermon delivered on a plain.

 

Matthew sets this sermon on a mountain. Matthew is determined to present Jesus as a new Moses. He includes many more quotes from the Hebrew Bible than any of the other gospel writers and his echoes of the Moses story are unmistakable. It would be a little neater if there were 10 Beatitudes to match the Ten Commandments and some biblical scholars have done linguistic gymnastics trying to turn the nine “blessed are” statements of the beatitudes into ten but honesty requires us to limit the list to nine. 

Again, not to go too deep into the woods but biblical scholars say that we that we see five layers of editing in our version of Matthew. I can’t prove it, but my own belief is that the first author of Matthew did have ten beatitudes in the original version and one of them must have ended up on the cutting floor of some later editor. I can’t cite any evidence for that other than that the author of Matthew is too careful to have simply miscounted. Counting to 10 is not that hard. 

 

Further, and please bear with me here, the “blessed are” formulation of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart . . . is a way of speaking these things into reality, because they certainly are not observations, are they? 

We don’t see the meek inheriting the earth or the hungry being satisfied. 

Matthew’s Jesus is speaking as God, like saying “Let there be light,” Jesus is speaking the values of the Kingdom into existence. These things will be true because Jesus says that they will be true. Now, why would any modern Christian be spouting off about the “thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and the “thou shalt not be envious of your neighbor’s stuff,” when they have this much more rich and morally relevant beatitudes right in the opening chapters of their New Testament?

No one less that the popular fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut commented on the irony of conservative Christians insisting on public displays of The Ten Commandments rather than the beatitudes of Jesus. He certainly comes off as being generally irreverent, but I know that his son actually majored in religion in college and occasionally worked as a freelance minister, so maybe Kurt was a little deeper read into matters of Christian thought than his novels would indicate, but whether it was accidental or not, he hits on a very valid point. He published this observation in a collection of essays in 2005, just a couple of years before his death as one of his magnum opus critical observations about American values.

 

It is a challenge that certainly deserves to be raised. Jesus, as presented in the gospels, was concerned with the suffering of the poor, with compassion towards those who were grief stricken, rather than the more basic legal concerns of the Ten Commandments that forbid adultery, stealing, and murder. 

 

A kindergartener might understand a commandment to be concerned about people who are hungry but what will a five-year-old think about a commandment not to covet his neighbor’s wife? 

 

Clearly, what is disappointing about conservative Christian activists to me is how little of Christianity seems to appear in their politics and how much they use the Ten Commandments as a stone to be thrown at secular society. It is more of an appeal to the supremacy of their religion over  alternative religious traditions that are growing in number as America becomes more diverse.

What conservatives are reacting to is the very real and rapid decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as being Christians, especially among protestant denominations that declined by 28% between 2003 and 2017. That is a rate of decline that is faster than the demise of Beth Bath and Beyond, Sears, and Red Lobster, with extinction as a very real threat.

 

Since the changes ushered in during the pandemic years, Americans who claim no religious affiliation has now grown to be larger than any one Christian denomination. I’m no religious Nostradamus but I believe that those who identify with “none of the above” will continue to grow. The number of Catholic Americans is certainly buoyed by immigrants from Latin America as most alternative religions are more tethered to immigration than to conversion. 

 

Conservatives have comfortably believed that the United States was, by default, a Christian nation which it certainly never has been but in the post WWII years, Christianity was undeniably dominant and it still is, but the sun is setting on that situation and they mistakenly believe that they can bring the 1940’s back by force. . . which is not how religion works. 

 

This is similar to their howling about the decision to remove teacher led prayer from public schools in the Engle vs Vitale case that the Supreme Court decided in 1962. It so happens that I started school in 1962, and I can remember our very Southern Baptist first grade teacher, Mrs. Allen, leading us at the start of each school day in a recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the flag, she had a devotional reading from the Bible and she led us in a prayer. On Mondays she asked for those of us to stand who had gone to church the day before and then she asked only those who had also gone to Sunday School on Sunday to remain standing, at which time, the two Catholic kids in the class started crying, every single Monday, because Catholics don’t have Sunday School. Mrs. Allen was allowed to torture kids for being Catholic, every single week and you could only imagine what sordid punishments might have come out of her hard little Baptist heart if we had any Jewish or Muslim kids in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1962.

 

To be clear, the Engles v Vitale case did not prohibit prayer in public schools. Kids were free to pray before their meals, at baseball games, and surely there were many prayers going up before tests, it was just that the teacher could not lead a prayer or Bible devotional. The state could not sanction religious indoctrination of children in public schools. Recent Supreme Court decisions seem to be holding the door open to reversing Engles v Vitale, but conservatives are going to be surprised to learn that there is not a Mrs. Allen in all of our elementary classrooms anymore. 

 

School teachers are not reliably Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian and they are, in fact, more likely to be agnostic or atheist and they just might be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist . . . can you hear the School Board controversy arising out of someone doing a devotional reading out of the Bhagavathi every morning in rural Kentucky? 

 

While I am encouraging all of my progressive viewers to be vigilant and to stand up to these very reactionary reforms, it also deserves to be pointed out that conversions at the tip of a spear rarely work out, even if the spear is just state sponsored propaganda. Reversing Roe v Wade two years ago may have warmed the heart of the Pope in the Vatican, but it turned armies of women against the Republican led attempts at making the Handmaid’s Tale come true. 

 

It is 2024. This is a time for critical thinking skills to replace magical thinking. This is an age of reason which must reject deceptive propaganda and either see the churches transformed into places that encourage compassion, where the poor and those who mourn are blessed, or they will need to be emptied and turned into something more useful, like parking lots or community gardens.

 

You may think that this is just my opinion but, I’m pretty sure that this time, I am right. 

  against the Republican led attempts at making the Handmaid’s Tale come true. 

 

It is 2024. This is a time for critical thinking skills to replace magical thinking. This is an age of reason which must reject deceptive propaganda and either see the churches transformed into places that encourage compassion, where the poor and those who mourn are blessed, or they will need to be emptied and turned into something more useful, like parking lots or community gardens.

 

You may think that this is just my opinion but, I’m pretty sure that this time, I am right.