Thoughts on Tuesday

(First of all, Movie Monday moved to Tuesday in that my review is: just go and see Slumdog Millionaire. It seems to be winning all sorts of awards. Its music is very uplifting and it bills itself as: a soaring, crowd-pleasing fantasy; a buoyant hymn to life. Our world is probably moving into a new paradigm, world-wide depression and this could become a scary place in the near future. Just go see Slumdog Millionaire. Enjoy the moment and dream.)

And now to the thoughts:

The subject of religion in the United States always wraps around my head. We seem to have more believers than any western industrialized country and we also seem to have the worst social safety net of any western industrialized country. Now, I’ve made the leap to connect the two.

Hear me out because I don’t think the connection is shaky. First of all, to make the connection more plausible, let’s only talk about “good” people. I do this because an argument against a social net (national health care; pension guarantees; free higher education, etc.) is: Oh, those people always take advantage. So, I’ll eliminate “those people” and only talk about the good.

That is, those good people who walk the conventional road in faith; attending their houses of worship and not breaking any laws that cause violence to others. These are the people who tell you that the poor are best helped when the rich get tax breaks.

These are the ones with which I stood on line once waiting to get blood drawn. It was a convivial group and their conversation turned to how other people (the “bad”, I guess) took advantage of the health care system. It was early in the morning and I hadn’t eaten and just wanted to get out of there, so cowardly I only thought: You’re standing in line for services from a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy which has convinced you that the poor and not the rich are screwing you. In a small way, in that one moment, by my silence, I had become an enabler of evil. It was not my proudest moment.

However, let’s look at the meme expressed there: the poor exploit society and we, good citizens, must help the ruling bureaucracy to keep them in line. It’s a powerful meme, skillfully propagandized throughout this country and finds a willing ally in most traditional religions.

All religions seem to teach people to worship their God and do good works for the least fortunate. But when the pedal hits the metal: almost all bail.

They teach “Thou shall not kill.” yet bless the troops leaving for war. They march on D.C. to protest abortion rights but fail to send their millions to rallies protesting: poverty, our statistic of 1 in 100 Americans in jail, our obscene health care/insurance system, the disparity in wages between workers and CEOs; the list is probably endless.

Religious leaders might write protest letters but they have an unholy alliance with government because this relationship is extremely symbiotic. You could say the benefit to both is worth trillions.

My theory is that we lag behind other countries in a social network because religion is so out-of-whack with its influence in this country. The rest of the world has a mixture of believers and non-believers. Here, it’s in the 90% range for religious affiliation. Even without the statistics, just chart the role religion played in the recent inaugural ceremonies. Jon Stewart parodied the number of times “God” was mentioned and Obama’s first stop on his first day in office was to a religious service.

This does not bode well for rational people. We complain rightly about the influence of lobbyists: NRA, AIPAC, insurance companies, etc. But what about the religion lobby? That lobby, our leaders embrace. Religions worship sky gods with magical powers with stories which, if not protected by the umbrella of religious belief, would put the believer in a psychiatric ward.

A Democratic congressman would walk away from a citizen wearing a “Stop Abortion Now” button but would at least give a handshake to the citizen spouting: Praise the Lord. God will provide. It seems that God trumps every hand.

So as government and religion waltz the danse macabre, citizens, as a whole, sleep nights untroubled by the vast numbers of adults and children who are struggling and suffering in what is jingoistically described as the greatest country in the world.

Religion is better than soma.