A WOL reader wrote me that the rise of religious bigotry frightened her.  The two articles below were my reply to her.

Dear X,

 Your question helps me formulate my writing.  A lot of my articles come from questions like yours.

 I would write you back in detail anyway.  Readers who actually write me are very important to me.  That's the whole point of WOL.

 Speaking of religion, let me start with my own.  What no preacher mentions is that many of Jesus' words that we hear the most about, were exactly what He was NOT talking about.

For example, we all hear "The poor we have always with us."   But that was precisely the point Jesus was NOT making.   He went on to say that what He was on earth about was not the perpetual problem of the poor, but the fact that Christ Himself was right there in front of the people trying to show them the path to salvation:

"I am the way, the truth, and the light.  No man goes to the Father but by me."

He was talking to Jews.  He told them to their faces that their Jewish Law would not save them any more than pagan worship would.

But fashionable preachers use "The poor we have always with us" to show that Jesus was really on earth as a political revolutionary.

A United Methodist preacher wrote me that Jesus died on the Cross so there would be no caste system on earth.

No way.

Jesus never even mentioned slavery, which lay at the base of his society.  The Book of Titus (the shortest book in the Bible) says if you are a master be a good master, if you are a slave, be a good slave. 

Sean Hannity says that Jesus died on the Cross for interracial dating.

The wedding Jesus blessed, the marriage at Cana, was rigidly limited by Jewish Law to the marriage of two Jews ONLY.  This violated what Hannity says Jesus was all about.

Jesus did not mention the restriction on the marriage at Cana.  Why should He?  This had nothing to do with His mission.

So Hannity commits good old fashioned blasphemy without the slightest hint of a conscience.  After all, he is being Politically Correct, so who cares about Jesus?

Conservative preachers endlessly quote Jesus as saying that he was here on earth to fulfill the Jewish Law, not to destroy it: "Not a jot or tittle."   From there, preachers go on to prove Jesus was here to save the State of Israel.  Actually Jesus went ahead and knocked down the whole basis of the Jewish Law, the Ten Commandments themselves, by reducing them to "Love God" and The Golden Rule.  He worked on the Sabbath, and made it clear that was an example. 

Jesus's point was that He was the fulfillment of ALL moral laws.  This included the huge monotheistic religion of the Persians, of which the Magi were priests.

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this earth."

But on this earth people use Jesus for power and to push any issue they happen to like.  This is straight, good old fashioned blasphemy.   Jerry Falwell uses Christ to back Israel, and Arabs use their religion for the other side.

You are right, this is hideously dangerous.  A third of Germany's entire population was wiped out in the Thirty Years' War between Protestants and Catholics.    But the problem does not start with Arabs.  It starts here.  We gave Arab land to a group of people who are largely the descendants of CONVERTS to the religion of Judaism.

There are more genes of the actual old Jewish population of Palestine in the Palestinian Arabs than in the Jews to whom we gave the Palestinian homeland.  

Now we are screaming about THEIR religious bigotry.

Jesus said that before we point out the mote in someone else's eye we should take care of the beam in our own.

Once again, you are right.  Western history teaches us that there is nothing more dangerous than using religion for political purposes.  That is what we did.  That is what we are doing.

"With Washington's tacit approval, on November 1, 1963, Diem (the President of South Vietnam) and his brother were captured and later killed. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas."

by Professor Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College:

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/

 
There is no such thing as "tacit approval" of cold-blooded murder.  This is especially true of the Chief Executive of the United States, whose job is to enforce the laws.  If you know a murder is about to be committed and you condone it, you are a murderer.

So President Kennedy ordered the assassination of the Chief Executive of South Vietnam exactly three weeks before he himself was assassinated.

This sounds like some kind of expose of a conspiracy.  It's not.  It is a matter of public record.

The reason this sounds like the exposure of a conspiracy is because history that liberals and respectable conservatives agree to forget is usually wildly outrageous.  That's why they agree to forget it.

Diem, not to mince words, was dictator of South Vietnam.  In 1963 he was defeating the Communists with relatively little American help.  But a bunch of Buddhists didn't like him and they burned themselves alive in the streets in protest.  This upset the New York Times, which had front page pictures of the burning monks.

To a Man With A Memory, the situation in Iraq is a replay of Vietnam in 1963.   Diem was successfully resisting the Communists, but liberals didn't approve of him. 

In 1963, as in Iraq today, it was just a matter of time before we could pull out of the South Vietnam ruled by Diem.

Then the liberals decided Diem was a bad man and we killed him.   You know the rest.