less than this

Here we go. Again, from The National Archives Experience (at archives.gov), we have the full text of the Bill of Rights (which is to say, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution). Again, I encourage you to see exactly what it has to say about God and religion, with careful consideration of Christ's place in what our founding fathers put into law.

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The following, copied and pasted from The National Archives Experience (at archives.gov), is the full text of the US Constitution as it was originally written.

I'm putting it here, so you can hit Ctrl-F (or equivalent function to find a particular word or phrase in the body of the text) and count how many times God and religion, more specifically Jesus and Christianity, are mentioned in the US Constitution. I recommend, of course, that you read the entire text of the document, so that you can understand the full context of what I'm trying to get across to you here.

I'll put the Bill of Rights, which is to say the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, in my next post so you can examine it as well.

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Presuming that the destruction on 9/11/2001 was, in fact an attack by terrorists outside the US, and presuming further that those terrorists were -as seems quite widely to be held as de facto truth- carrying out the attack on behalf of al Qaeda, a military response against al Qaeda seems justified. Since al Qaeda is not a nation, any reasonable military response must be expected to be deployed into whatever nations and regions in which al Qaeda is operating in order to strike out against this -presumed- imminent threat. Which we did, for a few months (the most important of al Qaeda were out of our sights (and out of our minds?) within about 9 weeks), except that when al Qaeda fled into the lands of our ally, we did not follow them. After March of 2002, as far as I can tell, the only thing the US pro-actively did with regard to al Qaeda was to shut down the department within the CIA which was concerned with hunting its leader. ((But we stayed in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and other rebel groups unrelated to al Qaeda and 9/11.))

Years later, after we'd kicked out their secular leaders and before Iraq began to govern itself as a theocracy (read: during the military occupation of Iraq, from April, 2003 to June 28, 2004), al Qaeda and a separate Jordanian terrorist organization took interest in Iraq, and several months after the sovereign Iraqi Interim Government was in charge of Iraq, the two terrorist groups officially merged and the new Jordanian branch of al Qaeda began to move into and take action in Iraq as its new democratic government was trying to form. Due to insufficient and inadequate actions and control by American/coalition forces in both regions, al Qaeda now has a strong presence in both Pakistan and Iraq. Finally, and only by creating a vacuum of power and by destroying any semblance of security in Iraq, al Qaeda is present there, and now, -presuming al Qaeda was involved in the 9/11/2001 attacks- going after al Qaeda in Iraq -presuming we have the new Iraqi government's consent to do so- is starting to make sense.

But please. Don't try to tell me that there's a straight line from the WTC to Iraq. The "al Qaeda" we're fighting there weren't even al Qaeda until over three years after the attacks; before we invaded Iraq they were "Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad" and they didn't even like al Qaeda. The al Qaeda that is presumed to have been behind the destruction of the WTC is pretty safely hanging out in the already-nuclear-weaponized country of Pakistan. You may have heard of Pakistan recently in the news, on account of the increasingly-out-of-control terrorist groups they harbor have started striking out against their neighbor India. Or not. Maybe you like propaganda better than facts.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

-Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)

I tend to consider myself long dead, my own life so far gone it's no longer part of the equation. The metaphor when I was younger was 'imaginary' -that I didn't really exist, but you were just imagining me- but I've slipped into somewhat darker territory since then, and the new metaphor is that I'm long since dead. The dead, you see, have no needs of their own. The money, time, expense, energies et cetera spent in the name of the dead are not to serve the needs of the dead, but to serve the living. Coffins, gravestones, funerals and wakes and murder trials and crime scene investigations and embalming -- it's all to serve the needs and desires of the living. The dead would be just as satisfied without these things as with them, but seem content enough to go along with whatever it is the living wish to do with and around them - they bend gracefully, completely, finally to the wishes of those around them. As time passes, the living think less and less about those who have gone before, until finally the long dead are all but forgotten, replaced by ... all the details of each persons' lives, jobs, living loved ones... and then the dead are there for the living when they are needed, and equally there when they are forgotten. Out of sight. Subservient. Just as you need them to be.

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