One of my favorite classical pieces is Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture.  If you have it, you can play it in the background to accompany this post.  I’m writing about what’s going on in Rome–more specifically, the Vatican.  It’s a carnival atmosphere—well, as much a carnival as you can expect from that strange Christian sect, the Roman Catholic Church.  You will find that the light tone of the Berlioz piece is perfect accompaniment to this heathen’s sermon as I mount my rock in Hell to preach secular logic and lore.

The Pope’s retirement party creates several interesting questions, with many subquestions, including:  What do you call him?  Is he still the Pope, or Pope Emeritus, or his ex-Holiness?  Apparently that’s settled.  He’ll still Benedict and will be called Pope Emeritus.  I’d just call him Cardinal Ratzinger and use Pope Emeritus only at formal functions, like we do with old campus deadwood.  His function will be similar—Universal Church instead of University X.

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Although I doubt any gun fanatic reads this blog, if you think you might be one, read the following characteristics.  Please note that I’m not talking about a gun enthusiast (simple hunter, skeet shooter, authentic target-range aficionado, etc.).  Again, if you don’t understand the difference between fanatic and enthusiast, read on.  For other people, some of the characteristics below might be amusing, others just plain sad…because there’s always truth in humor!

1) Go to a gun show and watch how a buyer picks up and caresses the weapon, whether he buys it or not.  If the gun seems to be just an extension of you-know-what, he’s a fanatic.  Don’t be surprised at the number of men you see doing this, even if their bathrooms aren’t loaded with porno pics.  Note that this doesn’t apply to women unless she has a particular kind of Freudian envy.  Or, she caresses the weapon while smiling at him.

2) If you’re out in the woods and run across a deer hunter—or any kind of hunter, for that matter—and he tries to convince you he needs an assault rifle to bring down his intended targets, you have a gun fanatic.  This definitely applies to women too.  By the way, what the hell are you doing in the woods during hunting season?  Hunters kill other people, even ones dressed in those loud orange clown suits they’re supposed to be wearing.  Without that suit, you’ll just look like game to them, even if the hunter you meet is like that sharpshooting GoDaddy CEO who’s out to kill an elephant.  Although most hunters, like Dick Cheney, can only hit the broad side of a judge, you can’t count on that!

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How appropriate!  It snowed in the Middle East.  If that’s not symbolic of the Arab spring turning to the Arab winter, I don’t know what is.  Even if we don’t have confidence in nuclear power, solar energy, or natural gas (especially fracking), it’s imperative that the U.S. become energy independent in order to avoid all the turmoil in that part of the world.  The longer I live, the more I believe that the Middle East is a hopeless case, a patient who is terminally ill and better off dead.  If R.I.P. has a political meaning, we should apply it to these troubled lands.  The world needs to move on.

Ben Ghazi showed that Libyans can’t control their own people—or al Qaeda has corrupted the political process.  We now find out that Mohamed Morsi, current President of Egypt and wannabe dictator, is on record saying three years ago that Israelis are “blood-suckers, who attack Palestinians” and “warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”  Maybe he was just playing to his Islamic fundamentalist base, but this doesn’t bode well for future peace between Egypt and Israel.

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The massacre of twenty children and eight adults (teachers, the mother of the shooter, and the shooter) is a tragedy.  In other similar tragedies, gun enthusiasts have warned us about getting too emotional and tampering with a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment…so they say.  The NRA, well-heeled lobbyist organization that it is, often leads the charge.  “Not over my dead body….”  Yes, I’m emotional.  This time the stats are against the NRA.  Twenty children.  I repeat: twenty little, helpless, and defenseless children.

The “fundamental right” these right-wing gun nuts talk about is the “right to bear arms.”  The Second Amendment says:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  That opening phrase is key:  “A well regulated Militia….”  The whole amendment has become twisted to the point where certain states have returned to the days of Dodge City and allow concealed carry “for protection,” meaning that people like George Zimmerman can shoot an unarmed black kid and claim self-defense.  It has become twisted to the point where anyone can go to a gun show and arm themselves better than SWAT members on a police force, as seen a few years back in an armed robbery in LA (a recent news report on ABC news quoted an FBI statistic: they performed background checks and registered more than 150,000 guns that were sold on Black Friday this year—c’mon people, that’s paranoid, perverse, and obscene!).

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Tuesday’s post was about the social singularity that appears in my books and is currently happening in the real world.  One aspect of this is fundamentalism in politics.  Whether human beings are by nature fundamentalist savages or not, it’s clear that fundamentalism across the world is bringing human rights and responsible government to their knees.  Let me elaborate.

The hope of the Arab Spring is being dashed against the rocks by the stormy waters of Muslim fundamentalism.  Mubarak might have been a psychotic sociopath (most dictators are), but he was secular and held the dark forces of Muslim extremism at bay.  The current Egyptian leader, clearly desiring the power of his predecessor, is the other extreme.  It’s obvious that he and his followers want another Muslim theocracy in Egypt.

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Among the world’s five great religions, Islam is the youngest.  It shows.  Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews have generally matured enough to get beyond fanatical and savage protests in reaction to perceived insults to their religion and they punish those who participate in such protests—not so Muslims.  People in the other religions shrug off the intolerance, turn their backs on it, and go on with their lives—not so Muslims.  If Islamic believers who have matured beyond fanatical responses still can’t control their savage and fanatical brethren, something is wrong.

A Muslim quoted in the NY Times yesterday said something like, “I respect Moses, Jesus, and the other prophets.  Why can’t the U.S. respect the Prophet Mohammed.”  This is an example of the myopic thinking of many Muslims, not just fanatics.  How dare they presume to dictate to me or anyone else how I feel about the prophets or anything else?  This kind of ignorance and arrogance is precisely what stands in the way of any solution for Middle East peace.  It’s like trying to reason with your five-year-old about world-shaking issues after he’s caught raiding the cookie jar.  You can’t have a mature discussion with people who are driven to deadly tantrums by their emotions.

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Religious belief has been a double-edged sword throughout the centuries.  Humanity seems to be mired in perpetual Crusades where one group of believers wants to beat the crap out of another group, and vice versa.  Warring crusaders are bad enough, but it’s even worse when those crusaders are using religion simply to take what others have by force and use the difference in beliefs as an excuse.  SOP:  Declare your enemies to be heretics in order to justify your butchering conquests.  Over the years, this often translates into ethnic hatreds that transcend any of the original reasons to go to war.

Religion as the justification for butchery often transcends religion v. religion, of course.  There is some indication that last Sunday’s attack on a Sikh temple was prompted by a white supremacist mistaking the Sikh religion for Islam, not that that would have justified his attack.  Fanaticism often is associated with people with low IQs—if a guy has a turban, he must be Muslim, right?—or with people who are easily manipulated by others, fanatics or not, who seek personal power and gain from the manipulation.

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There are two classes of people who shouldn’t participate in the political process—soldiers and priests.  The reasons for the first are so obvious that DoD Instruction 1334.01 forbids it, but only when the soldier is in uniform.  Other DoD policies actually encourage participation in political life, a practice also encouraged by the GOP and discouraged by the Dems (because all our armed services are now volunteer, soldiers tend to lean toward the right—the Pentagon and its supporters are not known for their progressive policies).

The caveat about being out of uniform is important.  Now consider a priest—a huge example (in more ways than one), New York’s most recent import from St. Louis golden arches, Timmy Dolan (or, is that McDonald’s).  If you note a certain lack of respect for Catholic hierarchy, we’re dancing the same Irish jig here.  I have much more respect for a lowly priest that works hard to help his community than a fat cat placed high in the hierarchy and out in the community only for photo-ops (for example, our Timmy).  Same goes for Protestants—how did a black man ever become head of the SBC?  I’m religion- and sect-blind, by the way.  Religious hierarchies are just another way to pass money from the poor and middle class to the rich oligarchies of the world—I have no use for them.  Whether you’re making the Vatican rich or Pat Robertson rich, it’s all the same scam to me.

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#149:  Those readers who have read my Soldiers of God and, to a lesser extent, some of my other books, know I’m concerned with both kinds of terrorism, home-grown and imported.  In fact, Soldiers portrayed the dangers of the home-grown kind long before the DHS made it a priority.  In that book and elsewhere (including the articles in this blog), I have discussed the distinction between spirituality and fundamentalism.

Many people, from U.S. presidents to megachurch ministers, claim to talk to God, to have a one-on-one with the Old Lady who can explain everything science can’t possibly explain.  I always thought this was part of spirituality and, in some sense, admired people who could do it, although I knew the Old Lady had to be really good at multitasking to talk with everyone.  Now a new book by T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, paints this as something belonging to neither spirituality nor fundamentalism (by the way, the eBook breaks my price barrier since it’s priced at $14.99).  From what I understand about Mr. Luhrmann’s thesis, the person who talks with God is simply having a schizophrenic conversation with a section of his mind he or she has created and called God.

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In this post, I’ll commit the cardinal sin of discussing religion and politics.  Maybe you never were invited to dinner where the host tells you, “Mr. and Mrs. X are also attending.  They are Y religion, so don’t discuss religion.  In fact, don’t discuss politics either.”  If you were, I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to sit down at a dinner table and avoid the topics of religion and politics, because most other Americans just can’t resist them.  Where European, Latin American, and many other countries are obsessed with just politics, people in the U.S. are often obsessed with both.  In fact, I venture to say that religion warps our politics in ways that are often as sad as they are humorous.

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