Just a Closer Walk with Thee

At the latest debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, an average citizen was afforded the chance to ask the candidates a question, in what was an increasingly common example of the infantilization of politics masquerading as the "democratization" of the same. What could be more democratic, after all, than allowing everyday Americans to demand answers to the toughest questions from their would-be representatives on live TV?

Well, the question profered by this man who, it pains me to say, is a very average American, illustrated the depth of the lobotimization of leadership that this country is subjecting itself to. This earnest citizen wished to know from each candidate whether "the power of prayer could have lessened the impact of Hurrican Katrina."

And each one of the candidates, these would-be statesmen, these sometime-scholars, stood there and answered that question as if it they had been asked how they planned to balance the budget or end the war in Iraq. What does it say about our country that anyone hoping to be president must act as if they believe in an all-powerful and personal God, and that many of them undoubtedly actually do believe in such a megalomaniacal farce?

One candidate after another solemnly intones that he can not possibly know the purpose behind God's "design". This abdication of logic holds that the hurricane was part of a "design" that is far too complex for any man to interpret. So, there is a God who loves and forgives each of us individually while simultaneously executing designs that kill thousands of us in waves of wind and water.

There is nothing complex about this design. It is simply sociopathic. A God that "blesses the United States of America" and is constantly asked to "continue" to do the same was somehow out to lunch on September 11, 2001. When one woman was pulled from the rubble after the collapses, it was, of course a "miracle", although God deemed 3,000 others unworthy of such intervention, even though he loved them all equally and had created them all in his image.

While God continues "to bless the United States of America" on one hand, he allows our army to be bled to a draw by dark-haired men in sandals on the other. Again. Within that defeated army, we have chaplains, paid by the government to reassure dying Christian men that they are going to an invisible place in the sky as a reward for having broken every one of Christ's teachings in their final months.

While we all waited for word from the trapped coal miners in Utah, signs went up urging, of course, that we "pray for a miracle". The implication here must be that the all powerful God was pre-occupied with some other pressing matter when the mine was allowed to collapse but that if we asked him with enough zeal, he may intervene to reverse his oversight.

I have written before on this blog that I am a man of faith, but the kind of mentality that most Americans have about God has much more to do with themselves that with God. Theirs is the mind-crushing solipsism that holds that God is so interested in each and every one of us that he can and does intervene in our lives. On the global stage, this pattern is repeated, with God favoring specific nations and causes.

For potential leaders of the world to be asked a question about prayer diverting hurricanes, and to respond to that question seriously and soberly should horrify us. Why? Because there is no difference at all between that question and these: "Senator Clinton, do you believe that you could move objects with your mind if you concentrated hard enough?" "Senator Obama, can a man walk on water?" "Senator Edwards, what is the most important lesson to be gleaned from The Lord of the Rings?"

These are questions based on superstition, metaphor, and fable. That is all. And that is all that faith in a biblical and personal God can ever be. If such spectres are how you get through life, then God bless you. I mean that. But they can not be treated as legitimate subjects of "debate" for the people entrusted to run the planet.

We all know, for example, that if any presidential candidate said that they did not believe in a personal God, their campaign would be over. Think about that. We require people to believe in patently false stories and clearly imaginary actors and totally unprovable ideas, all with an extensive history of blood and enforced ignorance behind them, as a precondition for being trusted with awesome temporal power.

The "Holy Books" are not providential. They are provincial. They are the fifth-hand accounts of illiterate nomads in the backwaters of desert empires thousands of years ago. To believe that these men, who held slaves, murdered children, raped women, and exterminated neighboring tribes in the name of God, have a monopoly on moral precepts is literally insane.

It made sense to interpret a violent storm as wrath from God in the days before meteorology. To do so now is to needlessly and masachistically shackle ourselves to a brutal and unreasoning past which we so pride ourselves as having eclipsed. Not one candidate on the stage refered to the hurricane as a natural process born of jet streams, pressurized air, or water temperatures. All simply punted, bowing in impotence and ignorance before "God's design".

What does it say about us and our society and our "modernity" that the God of the Old Testament, that jealous, genocidal, and sadistic thug, still holds such sway over the levers of America's power?