No Prayer

Lots to catch up on over the next few days, and I’ll do my best.

The Bucks County Courier Times provided this bit of amusement this morning from Suzanne Fields (though they did call for Rummy’s head yesterday, which is miraculous for them).

I usually stay with the television channel after Fox News Sunday for the first five minutes of the Rev. Joel Osteen's sermon from Lakewood Church in Houston. He always begins his message with a joke, often funny, sometimes a bit corny, but usually with a nugget of insight if not truth.

Yep, I guess that’s part of the Sunday freeper daily regimen, though I actually look forward to hearing a lot more than “a nugget” of truth or insight after the Gospel reading. And if you want to find out more about this Osteen guy, here is more information.

I guess I’m kind of “old school” in a way, but I know when I have to do penance (sometimes after writing some of these posts). It’s uncomfortable at times, but I know I have to be reminded of that on occasion. Whenever anyone tells me nothing but how wonderful I am and how wonderful everything else is without any balance or acknowledgement that often things really aren’t that way at times, I am naturally suspicious, and it sounds like this Osteen guy is nothing but a cheerleader.

The other Sunday he told of a big-game hunter out to get a grizzly bear. He prayed for prey. He tramped through the big woods for hours, but never saw even a trace of a grizzly. Weary and dejected, he finally sat down on a hickory stump and leaned his gun against a nearby sapling, to rest for a while. Suddenly, he looked up to see a mighty grizzly bearing down on him. With no time to reach for his gun, he breathed a desperate prayer: "God, give this bear religion, so he won't kill me." The bear halted dead in his tracks, rose on his hind legs, spread his mighty paws, and looked to the heavens with thanksgiving. "Thank you, God," the bear shouted, "for sending this wonderful meal I'm about to eat."

What a knee slapper, huh? It is a bit of a metaphor for Bushco, though, when I think about it.

Mixing religious faith and politics is front-page news, as anyone who reads a newspaper knows, and the pastor's joke mocks the notion that God answers specific requests. But prayer is not about a wish list, and a recent study (financed by a foundation grant of $2.4 million) purported to find that prayers for specific works of God, as in curing disease, are not effective. But the faithful understand that prayer is about seeking the will of God, and being content in it.

“The faithful” who I know understand that when we pray for something, sometimes God says no. We each have experiences of how difficult it can be to deal with that. Sometimes you are NEVER content with it. I guess that’s what Fields is saying, though apparently not this Osteen guy.

When I read what Fields said about “being content,” I thought of the scene in “Forrest Gump” where Jenny comes back home with Gump to her shack where she grew up being abused by her father. Even though he is long dead and the house is an utter wreck, in her rage, she picks up rocks one after the other and throws them at the house, suddenly stopping, and in the folksy, poetic way that Tom Hanks as Gump delivers most of his lines in the movie, he merely says, “Sometimes, you just run out of rocks.” I wonder if that kind of feeling or emotion is something that Osteen or Fields or some of these other “holier than thou” types will ever understand.

Oh, and by the way, here comes the hook.

President Bush is often criticized, usually by those of no faith, for talking about his faith in the public square, for referring to it as guidance in making public policy, but in doing so he is well within the precedent of those before him as occupants of the Oval Office.

Do you have quotes from any of Dubya’s predecessors as proof? I thought not.

This quote from Joe Biden in the most recent live “Real Time” episode bears repeating here:

Smart people pray. This guy uses it in a way to avoid having to know the hard things. The idea that you should pray after going to war or making a hard decision – I understand that. Republicans use prayer as a political organizational tool, not a road to redemption (applause, and rightly so). I met with Bush a lot, and I said to him, “How can you say these things without knowing the facts?” and he says, “I have good instincts” (yeah, for ruining everything he touches). If he conflates prayer with his decisions about where to send missiles, then that’s dangerous. That’s over the edge. I think he makes these decisions based on his instincts and then prays that he’s right.

The "social gospel" of the 20th century shaped the civil-rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, for example, and this president's policy of "compassionate conservatism," of faith-based initiatives, is an attempt to harness the spiritual energy of believers. Moreover, the president's faith may be even more central to his foreign policy.

Quoting Bill Maher from the same episode:

I constantly read about how people in this administration didn’t know crucial information on Iraq, like that there are Sunnis and Shiites – you know, really big stuff like that – and my guess is that while Bush was praying, he should have been learning instead.

Oh, and did you catch the way Fields takes two COMPLETELY contradictory concepts and hammers them into one sentence in an effort to make them sound legitimate? First she mentions the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement as a “social gospel” (I’ve never heard that term before – though church leaders protested also, notably the recently deceased Rev. William Sloane Coffin, it was not a movement based in a particular religion) and then mentions “faith-based initiatives” which, as far as I’m concerned, has a fragmentary connection at best to the 60s protests in the sense that they are primarily window dressing to put a happy face on systemic, long-term problems affecting those most vulnerable in our society, much like, apparently, whatever type of theology Osteen is preaching, if you can call it that.

George W. Bush is often compared to Woodrow Wilson, whose father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers, and to Ronald Reagan, who saw the world as split into warring camps of good and evil.

Please let me know who is making these astonishingly idiotic comparisons of Bush to a visionary statesman like Woodrow Wilson so I can properly ridicule that person (and of course, Wilson held out long past the last moment to send our troops to war, which turned out to be exactly the right course of action, whereas Dubya charged into it).

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding finds another comparison. "When it comes to faith and foreign policy . . . " she writes in the Wilson Quarterly, "it is more fruitful to compare the Methodist Republican Bush with the Baptist Democrat Harry Truman."

If this Spaulding person believes that, then she’s been drinking from the same freeper Kool Aid as Fields.

President Truman praised faith as a force for good against the "Bolshevik materialists," for containing communist expansion in the Cold War and for sending troops to save South Korea. The moral challenge as articulated by Mr. Truman linked faith and freedom, inspiring him to confront a foe that denied that "human freedom is born of the belief that man is created equal in the image of God and therefore of governing himself."

Harry Truman was responsible for the Truman Committee which oversaw military wastefulness in World War II prior to becoming president, supervised the formation of the United Nations and U.S. entry into that body, oversaw the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II, and had a plaque on his desk stating “the buck stops here.” These acts bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything Dubya has or ever could hope to accomplish as well as his conduct as president. And for Fields to imply that there was some kind of religious rationale for the U.S. to send troops to South Korea is one of the most absurd statements that I have ever read.

When George W. set out to liberate Iraq, his faith contributed to his belief that America had a mission to shape a balance of power to favor freedom. Spalding writes that George W. is less a Wilsonian idealist than a Truman individualist, who believes that our conflicts must be won on moral grounds. Both presidents have drawn on the story of the Good Samaritan for both domestic and foreign policy inspiration.

I’ve already pointed out how ridiculous it is to compare Bush to Truman, and if anything, it is more ridiculous to try to compare him to Wilson. By the way, here are some quotes from our 28th president that I found to be illuminating:

A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.

Oh, and I'd like a linguistics expert to explain to me when the definition of "liberation" became "destruction in the quest of empire expansion."

Mr. Truman looked on the East-West dichotomy as an intellectual and spiritual struggle for men's minds. He saw the Cold War as a battle between the "world of morals" and the "world of no morals."

Again, Fields provides no link to an actual quote from either Truman or Wilson.

In his second inaugural address, with the threat of terrorism looming large, George W. said that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democracy movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The message was spiritual in the sense that man will use his free will to create a democracy if there is no tyrant to tyrannize. The elections in Afghanistan and Iraq were thus crucial.

Ah yes, the elections. Let’s disregard the fact that they have had little effect on the governance of these two countries, shall we? The Taliban is taking over Afghanistan again and Iraq has deteriorated into civil war. “Oh, but that’s only happened in four of the Iraqi provinces, you libtard.” Yeah, the four provinces WITH THE DENSEST POPULATIONS, MOSTLY HELD BY THE SUNNIS!

Again, it is laughable for Fields to insinuate that there was a religious component to the struggle against communism in which Truman was heavily involved. It was geopolitical at its base. You want to argue there was a moral component? Sure. But a religious one? Please…

Mr. Truman observed a moral dilemma emerging from the communist rejection of God. George W. sees the evil in radical Islam's rejection of decent and civilized behavior as taught by Judaism, Christianity and the tolerant strain of Islam. Both men regarded the clash of good and evil as central in the global battle for men's minds, with the devil always in the details. Man has free will, but he must sometimes be inspired to choose freedom.

Please explain to me how Iraq can feel “inspired” to choose “freedom” when we blast the country to pieces fighting a war waged for reasons that turned out to be lies. I don’t want to hear this “spreading Democracy” garbage. All together now…Iraq had WMD and links to al Qaeda, and Hussein could hand off WMD to al Qaeda to cause another 9/11. All lies…

Dubya has NO CONNECTION AT ALL to any president who has preceded him because he doesn’t want to govern. He wants to rule. He has decided that that is the role of the President, and given the near-total acquiescence of Congress, I’m tempted to ask again the same question Bill Maher asked of Biden a few nights ago: “Why do you guys even bother to show up for work?”

Update: I’m sure Fields thinks something like this is just peachy, by the way (re: the whole “moral values” thing – hat tip to Atrios).

I think Digby nailed this; there should be no need to have some ceremony stating these things. It should be implied conduct if that is what the daughter chooses – yes, abstinence is best, but statistically, it’s not realistic to assume it will be that way. Besides, there should be some ceremony like this for sons, which would be equally screwed up.

And I don’t consider this be anything like a religious or even a spiritual activity. No one is performing this act on behalf of something perceived as a greater holy force than what may or may not exist on this earth. In other words (as Digby says), the father is presumed to be the surrogate “god” or “high priest.”

Just don’t ever wonder why I take shots at red staters with behavior such as this. We can laugh at its lunacy, but the ones who are really getting hurt are the kids, and that’s definitely not funny.