- Bush's "Big Picture" and Baby Poop; seeing Bush's
"big picture" only requires looking at the world through
eyes that have never had much interest in human rights because of a
preoccupation with religion-based political violence in the name of
occupation and dominion
-
- by Dr. Gerry Lower
-
- OpEdNews.com
George W. Bush has often requested the American people to
acknowledge the "big picture," the implication being that
his administration's values, ideologies and policies would be better
understood if only the people would "see the world as I see
it." Organized human effort, of course, always requires that the
people make effort to see with the same eyes so that they can sing
from the same sheet of music.
Toward this end, ABC TV is airing a series entitled, "The Big
Picture: With God On Our Side," a two-part series that explores
the rise of America's conservative evangelicals (a.k.a. - the
religious right) and presents a "religious biography" of
George W. Bush (ABC TV, Wednesday, 8 September, 2004).
From the conservative Republican viewpoint, seeing the "big
picture" requires little more than opening the mind to embrace
the values, attitudes and prophecies of Old Testament Roman religion,
the ashes from which American democracy was birthed. In other words,
seeing Bush's "big picture" only requires looking at the
world through eyes that have never had much interest in human rights
because of a preoccupation with religion-based political violence in
the name of occupation and dominion (e.g. the European colonial
conquest of North/Native America).
Since Constantine's Roman perversion of nascent Christian values in
the early 4th century, the values of religious chosenness and
self-righteousness have been used to accomplish the impossible, i.e.,
conquer the western world in the name of Christian compassion. The
religious Roman program has always been to preach Christian compassion
and to be a defender of Christianity so as to justify forgetting
Christian values in self-righteous conquest and control.
The chosenness and self-righteousness that goes with along with
being a "Christian soldier" has justified and implemented
western conquest from Roman imperialism to European colonialism to
post-World War II American capitalism. Under this influence, the human
population has moved from tribal to national to global levels of
organization. That would be religion's primary role in western
cultural evolution, i.e., human unification at the tip of a
double-edged sword. As the need for further economic unification
diminishes (in a global program nearly complete), the need for
political unification increases. That is where Bush's "big
picture" comes into the picture.
To be sure, one's "picture" of the world does not get bigger
by embracing vengeance, self-righteousness and supernaturalism. One's
picture actually gets smaller because so much of what one claims to
know about the world must be taken on faith alone. More importantly,
there are truly "big pictures" based on human knowledge to
consider in human efforts to run the world.
Natural Philosophy's Big Picture
American democracy was birthed from natural philosophy, and
natural philosophy provides a picture so big as to make religion a
matter of choice and not a matter of imposed obedience and blind
loyalty. It was the religious freedom guaranteed by the separation of
church and state that made real miracles happen in America, a land
where religious rivalries were meted out on Sunday afternoon softball
fields instead of religion's killing fields.
The natural philosophy of Jefferson's day, for example, transcended
religion, seeing it as an early effort to define the world in ways
that turned out to be wrong. Defining how the world actually worked
had fallen to Isaac Newton. Natural philosophy saw nascent Christian
ethics (before Constantine's Rome) as the source of western human
rights and it saw Old Testament Roman religion as the source of
self-righteous conquest, despotism and "tyranny over the mind of
man."
America's Deist fathers made a clear and clean distinction between the
values of nascent Christianity (compassion and human rights) and Old
Testament religion (vengeance and law), seeing these value systems as
being mutually-exclusive and not belonging together in the same book.
The rewriting of western scriptures resulted in "Jefferson's
Bible," intentionally devoid of religious superstition and
supernaturalism, in honor of nascent Christian human rights.
The dialectic values of democracy are neither liberal or
conservative, they are human and they transcend the values of western
religious systems and eastern ethical systems. That is precisely why
these values have acquired human respect on a global basis, as
Jefferson knew they would. Dialectic human values are part of a world
picture at least twice the size of the Bush administration's "big
picture."
With Bush's "big picture" in political dominion, the people
in America will have no option but to ride out western religion's
blind descent into apocalypse, as religious capitalism makes its
deathbed grasp for dominion of the global economy that it has helped
create. One way or another, religious capitalism will retain power to
its own prophetic end. Bush and the religious right wing leave no
other option.
Under the Bush administration, America has crossed too many lines
(e.g., the separation of church and state, the separation of civilian
and military authority) that are critical to the success of our
founding father's democracy. Returning to the values of democracy will
require a return to the natural philosophy (updated, of course) that
birthed American democracy in the first place. Because capitalism has
survived at the expense of family and community economies, the
re-instatement of democracy in America will require, as it did the
first time, socioeconomic change of revolutionary proportions.
Making that return to natural philosophy and dialectic human values
will require that religious capitalism continue to discredit itself on
moral ground, in the name of the American people and in the eyes of
the world. That end has been largely accomplished with Bush's
unprovoked war on Iraq, a war immoral in compassion-based Christian
eyes (do not hit first, do not hit back) and unjustifiable even in
vengeance-based religious eyes (do not hit first, do hit back). The
world has long since left behind the criminal "morality" of
barbarianism (do hit first, do hit back).
Pre-emption is the product of the Bush administration's religious
capitalism, and the educated world sees it as a moral failure, no
matter how big the Bush administration's picture of the world might
be. America's inability to recognize this egregious departure from the
values of nascent Christianity and democracy is part and parcel of
what is meant by the "dumbing down" of America. All honest
and intelligent thought begins with the values of human knowledge
(science and natural philosophy), nascent Christianity and democracy,
not at all with the values of religion and capitalism.
Reality's Big Picture
Because of America's wealth, military power and political power in the
world, the Bush administration assumes a God-given right to be right,
to be the world's policeman, judge, jury and executioner, to do
whatever it takes to remain in fiscal and political dominion.
Accordingly, many Americans have thrived on the notion that America is
the greatest nation in the world. That, of course, was only true when
America still honored the values of democracy.
Since World War II and the political dominion of corporate America via
an "influence for a fee" government, the US has emphasized
the pursuit of profits while the European democracies have continued
to honor "the people" and the values of democracy. As a
result, the US is the only western democracy that does not guarantee
medical care for its people, the only democracy abandoning
Hippocratean ethics to practice an exclusionary medicine based on
money. This is not a characteristic of a "great" nation.
Today, 25 nations in Europe, representing 455 million people, have
united to create a "United States" of Europe, the European
Union. Its $10.5 trillion GDP is now larger than the US GDP, making it
the world's largest economy. The EU has taken over as the world's
leading exporter and the world's largest internal market. EU members
also tend to have a longer life expectancy, a lower infant mortality
and a more equitable distribution of wealth than do American citizens
(Jeremy Rifkin, Daring to Dream," Guardian UK, September 1,
2004). In spite of American strength in the world, America has been
failing for decades, caught up in cultural extremism.
All of this is related to America's own internal culture war
between capitalism and democracy. Europeans see that Americans
"live to work" while Europeans prefer to "work to
live." The difference is an average paid vacation time of 6 weeks
in Europe and 2 weeks in the U.S. The difference is going to European
pubs to philosophize and pontificate and going to American bars to
escape. Under capitalism, Americans find freedom in autonomy and the
nuclear family. The more wealth one secures in America, the more
independence and freedom under capitalism. Under democracy, Europeans
find their freedom not in autonomy but in community. "It's about
belonging, not belongings." (Rifkin, Daring to Dream).
The value of a Euro now eclipses the value of a US Dollar by a
third. If the Euro were to become the sole oil transaction currency in
the Middle East, the US will be paying more and getting less. Control
of that market so vital to the "American way," virtually
requires physical control of Middle Eastern oil fields. The underlying
desperation and operational rationales for the Bush administration's
unilateralism, its intimidation of the European democracies and its
unprovoked attack on Iraq begin to emerge. Democracies that take care
of their people are a threat to the dominion of religious capitalism
in America.
Additional acts of belligerence by the Bush administration on the
global stage (and they are coming, one can be sure) will not be taken
lightly by those yet honoring the values of democracy. The response of
the world, primarily the European Union, will be to discredit
religious capitalism by arranging for its fiscal bankruptcy and ouster
from the global political arena. With the failure of vengeance-based
religion and crony capitalism, the doors will be open to natural
philosophy and the redefinition of democracy in human rights terms to
include the workplace and the marketplace, the doors will be open to
nourishing democracy on a global basis,
For what the Bush administration spends in Iraq and Afghanistan in
three months, America could feed the unfed world and, in league with
Britain and the European Union, establish compassionate and
knowledgeable approaches to world peace in our lifetimes. This cannot
happen within the confines of Bush's "big picture,"
literally the religious world view which natural philosophy and
democracy rejected two centuries ago.
The real "big picture" is that the people on this earth are
currently embedded in a cultural evolutionary program that is playing
itself out, largely without their conscious awareness. We fail to see
the "bigger picture," in which the Bush administration is a
ideologically-corrupt pawn in a cultural program that was written
millennia ago, a self-terminating program to be replaced by
democracy's self-correcting program.
The moral and fiscal bankruptcy of religious capitalism will bring
to a close an era of human unification, much of which was at the point
of a double-edged western sword. This end is not only prophetic in
coming, it is required out of evolutionary necessity if the people and
the land are to survive. The people and the land, of course, will not
only survive but they will thrive in a human world released from
political and spiritual dualism and the despotism and violent death it
has nourished.
As we stand on the edge of the western religious abyss, we stand on
the threshold of an American dream, the real "American
dream" of fairness and equality for the people. The amount of
bloodshed in between will be determined by the people of America and
the world and how long it takes them to recognize and stand up against
cultural extremism, how long it takes them to opt for Jefferson's
human way out of religion-based political violence by re-establishing
democracy with a basis in nascent Christian human rights. That would
be the "end of time" for religious despotism and the
"second coming" for Christian human rights, would it not?
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Author's note: As alluded to in the above paragraph, the imagery
of Old Testament religion typically has a counterpart in the real
world. Consider, for example, the concept of heavenly
"angels," as representatives of and messengers from God. In
the real world of natural philosophy, there is an exact equivalent of
angels, and they are ubiquitous and easily recognized. All real angels
arrive on this earth with one characteristic in common, i.e., they
poop their pants.
-----------------
Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the eastern shadow of Mount Rushmore in the
Black Hills of South Dakota. His website at www.jeffersonseyes.com
provides an introduction to dialectic thought and postmodern
natural philosophy. He can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com
- Read more of his articles at his Archives
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