Who is paying the price for my security?

Did you know that the United States' military budget exceeds that of the next 25 nations combined? Did you know that the so-called "Christian West" possesses 90% of the nuclear weapons on the planet? "Christian" America is the only country that has ever dropped an atomic bomb.

Now, try to imagine yourself as an impoverished and disenfranchised person in another part of the world who has been taught that Christians are colonialists and crusaders bent on conquest and exploitation of others' vulnerability and natural resources. (How did our oil get under their sand anyway?) Without condoning vicious acts of terrorism that have been carried out by an extremist minority, can we have some empathy for the fear and rejection of our ways that is expressed toward us? If we can find it in our hearts to have some understanding for why they feel the fear and mistrust that they do, then maybe, just maybe, we can agree that a heavy handed, threatening foreign policy is exactly what we don't need in today's world. It only confirms their stereotypes and misunderstandings of us.

Jesus told us to feed our enemies and show kindness to those who mistreat us. However one justifies bluster and threatening the unleashing of our awesome military might as a feature of American foreign policy, it is far from what Jesus taught. It arises from fear and power preservation, not love. If our security and comfort is coming at the expense of people weaker and less fortunate, it is selfish and unjust.

Maybe you think it's a good thing that the U.S. is the most feared nation on the planet; I don't. I'd much prefer we were the most loved nation. These days I find myself longing for leaders who take Jesus' words to heart and display a will for peace rather than a cocky, intimidating readiness for war. How different might the world be today if we had taken the half trillion dollars the war in Iraq has cost us and invested it instead in food for the hungry, education, medical assistance and diplomacy?

"EXPELLED"...IRONIC, ISN"T IT?

I recently viewed the Ben Stein docu-argument, Expelled. The film leaves one with little doubt that within "accepted" scientific orthodoxy there is an organized and very zealous effort to deny legitimacy to the theory that there may be evidence of intelligent design in nature. Stein compellingly asserts the thought control and censorship that is being carried out by the "mainstream" Darwinian evolutionists is every bit as dangerous as the censorship and thought control that existed in Naziism and Stalinist Soviet Union. My sense of Stein's motive in producing the film is that it was less about defending intelligent design as a theory and more about cautioning us of the dangers of allowing any group to gain a stranglehold on "acceptable" thought and speech within a community.

The priests of Darwinianism, who currently dominate the creeds (textbooks) and temples (lecture halls) of academia pertaining to the origin of the natural world, have declared as heresy any notion that the observable complexity and order in nature indicate a higher intelligence participated in the originating process. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, any member of the scientific community who would dare to speculate otherwise is a heretic. Leading Darwinian atheist, Richard Dawkins, is so adamant in his refusal to even consider the possibility that there may have been some sort of creative influence in the origin of things, that he offers a far fetched speculation from science fiction that maybe once-upon-a-time a more highly evolved extra-terrestrial life form "seeded" the design scientists observe in nature.

At the end of the day, the controversy is more about competing ideologies than hard scientific "facts". No explanation of the origin of the universe can be definitively proven. Both Darwinism and Intelligent Design employ "evidence" from what remains uncertain and unseen (i.e., faith) to explain the mysterious unknowable. So, does anyone see the irony in the fact that advocates of Biblical Creationism (an overtly religious form of Intelligent Design), who historically have been known to execute people who disagreed with them and would probably resort to that again if they could get away with it, are the ones complaining the loudest about the current hegemony of the Darwinists? In either case, whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist, if free thought and free speech are curtailed, truth loses. It is always dangerous when any one group thinks it is authorized to control what everyone else is permitted to learn about and believe.

I Don't Get It

Yesterday Gen. Petraeus brought a report of how things are going in the war in Iraq to the Senate Armed Forces Committee. All 3 presidential candidates (Clinton, McCain, Obama) made statements and posed questions to the good general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Patriots all, in my estimation.

The marathon back and forth offered very little in new information. The surge has had some success in some areas as we have already been told, but there remain many problems yet to be solved, which we also already knew. The general fended off many attempts to get him to project some date for completion of our mission in Iraq. One problem being that the mission seems to have evolved over time. What started as a gung-ho, kick butt military operation to depose Saddam Hussein and get control of imagined weapons of mass destruction that was supposed to be over in 6 months, has become a muddled, imprecise, quagmire of nation building, tribal mediation, economic development and law enforcement. Iraqi government officials are milking our presence and largesse to their advantage as much as possible as they drag out the process of solving their big issues. Why should they spend their resources to sustain the country as long as we are willing to foot the bill?

Barack Obama offered parameters that may help us get a sense of how to measure our progress. On one end of the scale is the Bush-Cheney-McCain ideal that Iraq somehow morph into a stable democracy, a beacon of freedom and civil rights in the heart of the middle east, and an oil rich friend of the United States. By any reasonable estimation that will take decades to happen if it is even possible. On the other end of the scale is the situation that exists now which Obama described as: "a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an al-Qaida base."

So there you have it. After more than 5 years during which more than 4000 American service personnel have been killed (not to mention ally losses and many thousands of civilians), at a cost of a half trillion dollars, what we have to show for it is a messy, sloppy status quo with ongoing violence and rampant corruption. And no end is in sight.

Whose idea was this? I don't get it.