Competing interests, anyone?
From the NYT: World Leaders Release Plan for Resolving East/West Rift
Mr. Annan said in a written statement: “The problem is not the Koran or the Torah or the Bible. Indeed, I have often said that the problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave toward each other.”
Also from NYT: For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’
Mr. Hagee says his message for the White House was, “Every time there has been a fight like [Lebanon in July] over the last 50 years, the State Department would send someone over in a jet to call for a cease-fire. The terrorists would rest, rearm and retaliate.” He added, “Appeasement has never helped the Jewish people.”
One side says to educate and to teach people how to see each other as human. The other says to bomb them all. Gee, I wonder why we don’t have any peace in the Middle East? At this point, I’m really wanting to re-read Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All. The storyline used to seem like an over-the-top farce of people trying to force God’s hand for the end times. Now, it seems not only plausible, but likely.
Posted by Allison in spirituality & religion, annoy me, culture, politics |
November 14th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I recently read an article that quoted a prominent religious figure who advises our Prime Minister as saying that global warming wasn’t worth fighting against because it is an example of End Times prophecy. Let the word heat up, and fires and floods and hurricanes be the result, because then the Second Coming is nigh. That’s so frustrating.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:20 am
While I agree that there has been a damaging mixture of God and politics since Bush came to office, the second NYT article you linked to seems to be a collection of vague assertions and innuendo without containing anything particularly newsworthy. Quoting the article,
“Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming.”
How many? A thousand? A million?
“(T)he alliance of Israel, its evangelical Christian supporters and President Bush has never been closer or more potent.”
There’s no evidence given for this.
“Now, in tandem with the Israeli government, many evangelical Christians have focused on a new villain, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
There are six paragraphs in the article detailing evangelicals’ concern about Ahmadinejad. It’s weird because the tone makes it seem like this is some crazy preoccupation of evangelicals, but considering Iran’s recent actions, there are plenty of people, religious and non-religious, who are scared of Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions.
The article tries to tie the Bush administration’s support of Israel to the influence of evangelical voters, but the U.S.’s support of Israel has been ongoing through both Republican and Democrat adminstrations for 50 years, so the argument is a red herring. I’m an atheist, and I think there are plenty of non-religious-wingnuttery reasons for believing that Israel has a right to react aggressively to terrorist attacks. I also believe that there is a strong current of anti-Semitism in the U.N. which results in Israel being consistently condemned for their responses to terrorism, while the original terrorist attacks are ignored by the U.N. This makes me skeptical of Kofi Anan’s remarks.