Bad Religion

by Pa Rock
Praise Leader

Once, a few years ago, I had my feelings hurt when I tried to access this blog from a computer at a business center at a U.S. Army hotel in Seoul, South Korea.  I was denied access because the hotel’s computer god had arbitrarily decided that the Ramble contained “hate speech.”  That set me to doing some serious soul-searching, and I eventually acquitted myself of the heinous charge.

It is true that I have been less that complimentary of certain politicians over the years, particularly Arizona politicians – but my rants against those desert desperadoes and degenerates have never been based on race, gender, sexual orientation or hat size.   They just do such strange things and beg to be talked about on slow news days.  Hell, entire magazines could be published on Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio – weekly magazines!

But I don’t think that I hate.  I don’t even like hate.

I have a friend – and he is a friend at some level – a man who used to be a neighbor.  He and his wife lived close by when I was a resident of the trailer park here in Arizona.  At that time they were medically retired with serious health and money issues.  They were also heavily involved in a Christian church.    I also suspected that he had some issues with our country having a black President.

After I moved to Okinawa, my friend added me to his email distribution list and I learned just how far over-the-edge he had slipped.   He was suddenly referring to President Obama as a “socialist” and bellyaching that Obamacare was going to destroy the country - that from an individual who was completely dependent on government-funded health care.  While I strongly suspected that my friend’s irrational hatred of the President was based in racial prejudice, I wasn’t absolutely convinced until recently when I received an email from him with a photograph of a middle-aged black man with tattoos, wild hair, and glazed eyes.  The accompanying text said that it was an actual photograph of Trayvon Martin and that the photographs put out by the media were several years old.

 In other words, the kid’s image had been cleaned up considerably by the liberal, mainstream media.

In other words, he deserved to be shot.  He was black, wasn’t he?

My friend from the trailer park isn’t a bad person.  He and his wife showed me many kindnesses while we were neighbors, including feeding me lunch the day that I found out that my father had died.  But he does have some issues related to how he feels about people whose race is different than his own– and I feel like much of that prejudice is rooted in his church.

Now the “fair and balanced” television network is bleating on and on about how dangerous it is to tolerate Muslims in America.  What constituency are they appealing to?  A recent United States Vice-President bragged about his desire to turn mosques into cathedrals.  Whose votes was he pursuing?  A congressman on Long Island is currently using the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse to call for more government surveillance of Muslim communities in America.  What message is he trying to deliver?

It’s all hate, and it’s all firmly based in religion, and its all ultimately about status, money, and power.

As John D. Rockefeller once famously said, “Let us prey.”