Is America really a Christian nation? Can we say that we are truly favored by God over all other countries? While you’re coming up with answers to those questions, try this answering this one with a straight face: Are carrying on a war in Iraq and building a natural gas pipeline in Alaska (according to Sarah Palin) really missions from God?
Christians and Jews have always claimed to have God on their side. Yet these major religions are split into dozens of small sects and several major denominations. They often teach that the other competing sects are wrong and do not have God on their side. America claims to be a nation that is based on Judeao-Christian teachings and ethics while pointing out its secular governmental structure.
Muslims also claim to have God on their side. Islam is also split into many sects, both large and small. Each of these sects feel that Allah favors only them and demands that they put to death anyone who is an “unbeliever,” infidels including those claiming to be Muslim, that do not believe exactly as they do.
Within both of these major religions there are hundreds of self-appointed leaders who claim special relationships with God/Allah. These men often work themselves into positions of influence over the political leaders of the countries they live in. Prominent conservative religious leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson in the U.S. - and literally hundreds of Imams throughout the Islamic world -maneuver themselves into these often revered positions. Like Othello’s Iago, they often manage to get the ears of national leaders and eventually influence them to sometimes do horrible things in the name of God – like going to war or creating laws that persecute others who do not believe as they do. They’ll justify these actions, including war of one sect against another, as “doing God’s will.”
We worry about the power of Islamic theocracies in the middle east and Southeast Asia, and yet we can’t imagine that one would ever be set up in America. Americans are not all Christians and should not be governed by just the tenets and teachings of just one religion, especially one that claims to be the only religion that God will support over all others.
We vote for a President and members of Congress, not for a Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops. In America we expect our political leaders to have their own privately held religious beliefs, but at the same time do not want them to force those beliefs on the rest of us.
George W. Bush has taken the position that we should use our military power to offer and guarantee the same freedoms that Americans take for granted for everyone else in the world. Yet he and the conservative religous right of the Republican Party in their evangelistic fervor want to actually take away our religious freedoms by imposing their own religious dogma upon the rest of us. Thus we see the beginnings of an American Theocracy.
Is this not what the Catholic Church did during the Crusades and the Inquisitions? Is this not similar to the religious extremes during Cromwell’s dictatorial rule of England? This approach sounds very much like the what the Taliban has done to whole populations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Do we really want this to also be in the future for America?
Can you really imagine an all-powerful “Supreme Being over the Universe,” who is supposedly a “loving God,” wanting us to harm or destroy each other as well as killing and maiming innocent women and children only because we don’t all agree on the same doctrines and church traditions?
PDF 
Comments from Readers