Political stuff

Great essay by Kurt Vonnegut here.

Couple of great quotes:

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

About Bush, and Alcohol, he has this to say.

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants

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Vonnegut also brings something to mind, something that I'd like BigHominid to comment on.

As I look at Dubya, I wonder to myself how anyone with his apparant set of values can claim that he is a Christian. First of all, I am not a Christian. Consider me an educated, and curious outsider. But somehow, I don't think Jesus would approve of Bush's version of Christianity, whatever that is.

I have known a few southern-type Born Agains in my day, and unfortunately Bush is typical of them. The belief at the core is that they have "seen the light", opened themself to Jesus, and they are saved. It really doesn't matter what they do, as long as they accept Jesus as their personal savior. Back in college, a friend trying to convert me to his version of Christianty tried to explain to me how, in theory, he could do just about anything but it would be OK becuase Jesus hase forgiven him through salvation. I however was damned regardless of what I did in life because I hadn't accepted Jesus. It was my friends mission in life to bring others into this fold I guess.

Maybe that's how Bush sees Christianity. Get to know Jesus, be forgiven and get your friends to help buy you a share of a baseball team, or get daddy to get you an executive position with an Oil Company. Then life is hunky dory. In a serious note, the notion that acceptance of Jesus is all that is required strikes me as incredibly similar to Islam. Submit to the will of Allah, follow the rules, and you gain righteousness.

This isn't what I get out of the Sermon on the Mount. But then again, I'm just an outsider looking in trying to understand. I see mercy, love, compassion and sympathy for those less fortunate, with an liberal dose of dogma thrown in. Couple this with a disdain for opressors and hypocrites. That's what I see. But that's just me.