Saturday, October 22, 2005

Losing my religion

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that bothered me, but I couldn't explain how it bothered me. It read:

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich"

I just couldn't help thinking that, yes, it may do that, but I don't think it's keeping the rich from murdering the poor, or the oppressed.

Let's take the issue of the Iraq war. President Bush has led our fairly wealthy country into a poor and formerly oppressed country and we are killing their people, our brave soldiers and other country's military personnel so that our fairly wealthy country can sleep better at night - to be blunt about it.

So maybe what bothers me the most is that our President, who is deeply, ridiculously religious, feels it's ok to kill the poor, the oppressed or even the innocent, so long as it makes us feel ok. But does he not see that we aren't ok with it? There are millions of people who believe that what we are doing in Iraq is wrong and our children are the cost of his rationalization.

I have so many thoughts running through me about this that I cannot put into words right now, so I think I'll come back to this topic over the next few days and weeks.

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