Where Are the Christian Churches When We Need Them Most?

One of the most important functions of religious faith, observed St. Thomas Aquinas, is to allow people of limited intelligence and people with limited time for study to know important truths about God without having to investigate them personally. After all, few ordinary people are in a position to spend years rationally investigating the tenets of their faith, so, if they are to have any chance at finding Truth during their lives, they need to have it prepackaged for them to swallow on faith alone with the assistance of the Church.

This infinitely wise observation is just as true today as it was in the thirteenth century, and the Christian churches would do well to remember it during these especially turbulent political and economic times. In fact, with the world’s masses aflame with revolutionary ideas at the very same time that governments are going bankrupt, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to remind their unthinking, gullible, and emotional flocks of what is true and just and good. If they fail to do this, and right quick, there is a very real and dangerous possibility that the Christian masses will get swept away by exciting and profoundly immoral ideas that will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, the Christian masses desperately need to have the foundations of Christian ethics beaten into their dense skulls to keep them on the right path during these hours of intellectual temptation. Since many of the ideas floating around the world right now are both alluring and morally dangerous, the Christian masses need a simple set of criteria by which to judge what is right and what is wrong. Fortuitously, God was provident enough to provide Christians (and Jews and Muslims) with a list of ten moral criteria so undemanding that even the most intellectually challenged among them should be able to determine right from wrong.

The list contains two ethical commandments of especial importance today because of the extreme danger that the Christian masses will unthinkingly violate them. The first and most important is that it is wrong for Christians to kill people. One would think that the Christian masses would have been able to memorize and abide by this simple proscription in the two thousand years that Christians have been walking the Earth, but apparently the density of the mass man’s mind continues to defy penetration. Christians in recent years are definitely no less likely to kill than any other peoples, and the danger is that they will kill even more frequently in coming years as economic and political conditions deteriorate further.

Thus, the Christian churches must intervene right now to remind the Christian masses that it is wrong to kill human beings and it is wrong for other people to kill in one’s name. The Christian flocks are increasingly angry, frightened, and impoverished by the political classes’ extravagances, and the temptation will only grow to take out their frustrations on other groups of people, such as the wealthy, Muslims, immigrants, or even their own neighbors. This is all the more true today, when it is so easy to aid in killing other people simply by voting. The majority of Christians do not need to bloody their own hands by shooting unarmed women and old men, for example, but they do irreparably stain their consciences by supporting such killings and paying for them with their tax money. And let’s not forget about the hordes of professional "Christian" killers (i.e., "soldiers") that are presently plying their bloody trade in the three immoral wars that the supposedly "Christian" West is prosecuting in the Middle East.

The task of reigning in Christian killing before it gets even more out of hand will be impossible, however, unless the Christian churches simultaneously reign in their flocks’ nationalistic sentiments. Like most peoples today, Christians have come to worship their own governments with religious fervor, a serious Christian sin in its own right. They thus do not view killings by "their" government soldiers and police as morally analogous to killings by rapists and robbers. Unless this nationalistic moral blindness is corrected by the Christian churches, or by human reason, by emphasizing that the lines drawn on maps identifying different countries are completely morally irrelevant, Christians will never curtail their killing, because they will inevitably view government-sponsored killing of "other people" as somehow morally acceptable. Without help from the Christian churches, the unthinking Christian masses will continue to value, not human life as such, but their "own" people’s lives, and to hell with the rest of the people of the world.

The Christian churches must also urgently emphasize that Christians should not torture, imprison, beat, or otherwise physically abuse other human beings. Nor should they countenance such depraved activities done in their name by their governments. This proscription follows directly from the prohibition against killing, because to put a man in a cage deprives him of his life and dignity during that time just as surely as killing him would, and torturing him makes him envy the dead, which is worse than actually killing him. It should go without saying that Christians ought not to do these things or accept that they be done in their name with their tax monies, but the Christian masses keep approving of them nonetheless. This will only increase as political and economic turmoil increases, and the Christian churches will be morally responsible to a certain extent if they do not do all they can to head it off now.

The second important ethical precept that the unthinking Christian masses urgently need to be reminded of is God’s prohibition against stealing. It is unequivocally wrong for Christians to take property from other people without their consent, and it is equally wrong for them to encourage or to pay other people (e.g., tax collectors or mob strongmen) to do the same thing. Like the prohibition against killing, God’s prohibition against stealing is about as clear as man could possible desire: "Thou shalt not steal." One might be tempted to think that the Christian masses would be able to comprehend something as simple as that, but apparently God vastly overestimated the mental abilities of His progeny. The Christian masses accept stealing, by governments in particular, just as much as any other people, and they tend to particularly approve of stealing from (i.e., taxing) the rich. They apparently think that it is morally acceptable for their government to take money from rich people by force just because Jesus was poor and defended poor people. The fact that Jesus’ own Father explicitly forbade them to steal – even from rich people – does not seem to enter into their moral reasoning. The Christian churches desperately need to undermine this invidious tendency before the increasingly impoverished and desperate Christian masses fall on their rich prey with a vengeance. Failure to head this tendency off will doom Western civilization for the foreseeable future, as the rich take flight with their capital to places that actually care about God’s Commandments. The loss of this valuable economic capital at a time when it is most needed to rebuild after the government created recession will send the Christian West back to the stone age.

Along a similar vein, there is an urgent need for the Christian churches to remind their mindless flocks that it is immoral to counterfeit money. It is just as wrong for me to print fake money to buy your car, for example, as it would be for me to steal it from you outright. The need for the Christian churches to emphasize this ethical precept does not, however, stem from a danger that the Christian masses will resort to the printing press themselves. Instead, the danger lies in the likelihood that the Christian masses will have their entire life savings and livelihoods wiped out by profoundly immoral economic idiots working in collusion with government who believe that prosperity grows on trees. Again, one would think that the Christian masses would already be aware that counterfeiting money is sickeningly immoral and economically destructive, but Christians of all stripes have done virtually nothing to stand up to this form of robbery. This testifies, yet again, to the appalling stupidity of the Christian masses – even when they themselves are being victimized, and the desperate need for the Christian herd to be morally guided by the Christian churches.

One hopes that the Christian churches will begin to lay seeds in the minds of their followers that will counteract these deadly immoral trends. With economic conditions deteriorating and political "leaders" plumbing new moral depths, the need has never been greater for the Christian churches to lead their herds back to the ethical path laid by Jesus and His Father. And that means, first and foremost, that the Christian churches must do their best to stop Christians from killing and robbing other people. One shudders to think that the Christian Churches even need to be reminded of something as fundamental as this.

By Mark R. Crovelli

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28155.htm

The Establishment Eliminates A Threat

The police and the prostitute media have made it impossible for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to get a fair trial. From the moment of the announcement that he had been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, and before he was ever indicted, the accounts given by the police were designed to create the impression that the director of the International Monetary Fund was guilty. For example, the police told the media, which duly regurgitated to the public, that Strauss-Kahn was in such a hurry to flee the scene of the crime that he left behind his cell phone. The police also put out the story that by calling airlines and demanding passenger lists, they managed to catch the fleeing rapist just as his plane was departing for France.

A New York judge denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the basis of police misrepresentation that he was apprehended fleeing the country.

Once he was imprisoned, the police announced that Strauss-Kahn was on suicide watch, which is a way of suggesting to the public that the accused rapist might take his own life in order to avoid the public humiliation of a guilty verdict from a jury.

But what really happened, assuming one can learn anything from press reports, is that Strauss-Kahn, upon arriving at JFK airport for his scheduled flight, discovered that he did not have his cell phone and telephoned the hotel, the scene of the alleged crime. It boggles the mind that anyone could possibly think that a person fleeing from his crime would call the scene of the crime, ask about his left-behind cell phone, and tell them where he was.

Then in rapid succession, reeking of orchestration, a French woman steps forward and declares that a decade ago she was nearly raped by Strauss-Kahn. This was followed by Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madam of the prostitute who did in Eliot Spitzer before he could get the banksters on Wall Street, stepping forward to announce that one of her call girls refused to service Strauss-Kahn a second time because he was too rough in the act.

With hunting season opened, any woman whose career would benefit from publicity, or whose bank account would bless a damage award, can now step forward and claim to have been a victim or near victim of Strauss-Kahn.

This is not to deny that Strauss-Kahn might have an inordinate appetite for sex that did him in. It is to say that long before a jury hears from the maid, or from a prosecutor speaking for the maid "who is too traumatized to appear in court," the jury has been programmed with the verdict that he is guilty.

Why would he run away if he didn't do it?

Look at all the women he has accosted!

You get the picture.

I have written about the anomalies of the case. One of the most striking is the confirmed reports in the French and British press that a political activist for French President Sarkozy, Jonathan Pinet, tweeted the news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest to Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor for Sarkozy, before the news was announced by the New York police.

Pinet's explanation for how he was the first to know is that a "friend" in the Sofitel Hotel, where the alleged crime took place, told him. Is it merely a coincidence that the men assigned the task of removing the Strauss-Kahn threat to French President Sarkozy's re-election had a clued-in friend in the Sofitel Hotel? Did the police clue-in the "friend" before they made the public announcement? If so, why?

What bothers me about the Strauss-Kahn affair is that if the police have evidence that supports their insistence on his guilt, it is pointless for the police to set Strauss-Kahn up in the media. Generally, set-ups like this occur only when there is no evidence or when the evidence has to be fabricated and cannot withstand examination.

As a person who had a Washington career, I find other aspects of the case disturbing. Strauss-Kahn had emerged as a threat to the establishment. Polls showed that as the socialist candidate, he was the odds-on favorite to defeat the American candidate, Sarkozy, in the upcoming French presidential election. Perhaps it was only electoral posturing to help defeat Sarkozy, but Strauss-Kahn indicated that he intended to move the International Monetary Fund away from its past policy of making the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. He spoke of strengthening collective bargaining, and of restructuring mortgages, tax and spending policies in order that the economy would serve ordinary people in addition to the banksters. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation needed to be restored to financial markets and implied that a more even distribution of income was required.

These remarks, together with a likely win over Sarkozy in the French election, made Strauss-Kahn a double-barreled challenge to the establishment. The third strike against him was the recent IMF report that said China would surpass the US as the world's first economy within five years.

People who haven't spent their professional lives in Washington may not understand the threat to Washington that is in the IMF report. Whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility. By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington's power is based on America's economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end.

This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, "The age of America is over." For the first time in decades, other countries can see the prospect of escaping from US domination. They don't have to be puppet states; part of the hegemonic empire. They see the prospect of serving their own people and their own interests instead of those of Washington. European countries, for example, forced to fight for Washington in Afghanistan and Libya, see light at the end of the tunnel. They can now think about refusing.

Although rich and a member of the establishment, and independently of his behavior toward women, Strauss-Kahn made the mistake of revealing that he might have a social conscience. Either this social conscience or the hubris of power led him to challenge American supremacy. This is an unforgivable crime for which he is being punished.

My friend, Alexander Cockburn, an intelligent and civilized person who is derided by right-wingers as a communist, lacks my experience of Washington. Consequently, he thinks that the facts will come out, although he seems to prefer that they come out on the side of the maid and not Strauss-Kahn.

If Alex were the Bolshevik he is said to be, he would know that no high-ranking figure who was serving the establishment would be destroyed on the basis of the word of an immigrant maid living in a sub-let apartment in a building for Aids victims. The very notion that the US establishment craves justice to this extent is a total absurdity. Americans are so indifferent to injustice that the American public shrugs off the hundreds of thousands and millions of women, children, and village elders who are murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and wherever. Washington and the military/security complex, while feeding on power and profit, can claim to be protecting Americans from "terrorists" or bringing democracy to the heathen.

The American criminal justice system is riddled with wrongful convictions and stinks of injustice. The US has a much higher rate of incarceration than alleged authoritarian regimes, such as China, and routinely destroys the lives of young people, and even mothers of small children, for using drugs.

Strauss-Kahn's indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas. Conservatives don't like the French, because they did not support the US invasion of Iraq. The left-wing doesn't like rich white guys and IMF officials, and feminists don't like womanizers. But even if the government's case falls apart in the courtroom, Strauss-Kahn has been removed from the French presidential race and from the IMF. This, not justice for an immigrant, is what the case is about.

Many Americans are unable to comprehend that authorities would remove a threat with a frame-up. But far worst has occurred. Francesco Cossiga, a former President of Italy, revealed that many of the bombings in Europe during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which were blamed on communists, were in fact "false flag" operations carried out by the CIA and Italian intelligence in order to scare voters away from the communist party. Cossiga's revelations resulted in a parliamentary investigation in which intelligence operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated: "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

If democratic governments will murder innocents for political reasons, why wouldn't they frame someone? Whether innocent or guilty, Strauss-Kahn has been framed in advance of his trial.

By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28153.htm