News Flash: False Statements Preceded War

I guess I understand the reasons why the corporate media has avoided using the word "lie" to describe numerous and various statements by our president, but it's hard not to use that word in analyzing the leadup to the Iraq war.

But two organizations recently released a study that stops just short of using that term, after doing exhaustive research of what was said by administration officials in comparison to the information that was available at the time.

The study, which got a surprising amount of media coverage, identified 935 false statements regarding Iraq over the two-year period following September 11, 2001.

The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

...

It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

The full study can be found on the Center for Public Integrity's web site, which also contains a graphic that would be humorous if so many human lives had not been lost. Titled "False Statements by Month," it shows the number of lies growing steadily throughout 2002, peaking in February 2003 at 140, and then gradually declining after that.

I'm not sure that most Americans needed such a detailed study to realize that the administration is morally and spiritually bankrupt, but it's nice to see someone willing to call a spade a spade, backed up by irrefutable research, and get some media coverage for doing so.

Worst Healthcare in the Industrialized World

Well, it was already obvious to me that health care stinks in the U.S., and now even the corporate media is reporting this fact. A recent article (as well as a report I heard on NPR) describes the latest analysis by the Commonwealth Fund that ranks our country dead last in timely and effective healthcare delivery among 19 industrialized countries studied.

[The study] looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.

The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.

The result of this slower improvement is that the U.S. moved from 15th to 19th since 1997-98. Interestingly, the number one country was France, a country derided by conservatives for its socialist leanings. That nation's healthcare system, fully funded by the government and serving citizens and visitors alike, is often noted for its quality of care, efficient administration, and effective public health strategies.

Some might say that as long as we're improving here in the U.S., what's the problem? The problem is that we're improving from a pretty dismal low point. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessarily in our health care system is inexcusable. Yet this is a little-reported aspect of our healthcare crisis. Journalists, polititians, and even educated liberal activists typically have the financial resources to avoid situations of marginal care, and family and friends with the ability to advocate for them if they do wind up in such a situation.

But there are many without those resources, and it's this demographic that fuels our high mortality statistics. Our two-tier system--good insurance for some, little or no coverage for others--creates the situation of uneven care that we see today. It also increases costs for everyone.

"It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the US," said Ellen Nolte, lead author of the study.

Had the United States performed as well as any of the top three industrialized countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year, the researchers said.

Our country needs universal care. The most efficient and effective delivery system for such care is a single-payer government system, which is politically untenable. The major Democratic presidential candidates have decent proposals--not as good as single payer, but better than nothing.

And one more thing--don't let the AMA get too involved in writing the rules. Alternative care must be a big part of improved health in this country. The M.D. no longer has the godlike status of a generation ago. The best care is a balanced approach--compassionate, spiritual, scientific, and holistic.

Alternative Giving

This year, almost all of our Christmas gifts for family members were made through the alternative giving program at our church. We're a liberal church, and many of us have families that are mostly conservative, theologically and politically. We're also a mostly middle class church, and most of our families don't have material needs.

As a result, our missions and outreach ministry saw an opportunity to provide an alternative to the traffic jams around the malls, the dilemma of trying to buy gifts that avoid offending the values of either the giver or the recipient, and the perceived obligation to buy someone another trinket that doesn't have lasting value. It also signaled the end of most of my own efforts to convince my family that my faith and my politics are better than theirs, mostly by giving liberal books as Christmas gifts.

Our alternative giving program enabled people to give donations in honor of friends of family members to any of a couple dozen charities that were pre-screened by the committee. Those who wanted could write a single, tax-deductible check to the church, from which the money is dispersed to the charities. I paid the charities directly to enable employer matching of the gift.

Our committee selected 20 or so charities, all of which reflect our church's values, and some of which reflect values of more conservative people. My family members did not receive donations to the charities on our list that advocate a response to global warming, equal rights for sexual minorities, universal health care, civil rights for oppressed people, and so forth, because those would have made them feel uncomfortable politically. Instead, we gave to Habitat for Humanity, Care, Medical Teams International, and Save the Children--charities that are consistent with the values of just about everyone. Yet across our church, almost all of the charities on our list received a donation.

The program was a tremendous success in our church, and the committee found in its research that a number of families in the church have practiced alternative giving for many years. One family described the family Thanksgiving celebration, which includes a time when everyone goes through the Heifer Project catalog and requests alternative gifts--a cow or a dozen chicks for a poor farming family, a well for a village without clean drinking water, etc.

Alternative giving has become something of a fad within progressive circles, with many web sites offering resources and ideas, and even radio commercials on our progressive talk station. It's even becoming more common in evangelical churches, something that offers me additional hope that Rick Warren's generation of evangelical leaders will have more balanced priorities than the generation of Jerry Falwall, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson.

Who Is God?

Last summer, my church had a 6-week discussion class on Paul Alan Laughlin's excellent book, Remedial Christianity: What Every Believer Should Know about the Faith, but Probably Doesn't. I highly recommend this book for all Christians, liberal and conservative. It's the first book I've seen that deals honestly with traditional Christian theology--its positive points and its inconsistencies. It also deals honestly with the history of how traditional Christian theology developed during the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. as a way to solidify Constantine's empire, shutting out alternative theologies that existed at the time.

While Laughlin certainly casts a critical eye on traditional beliefs, his tone is not derogatory or dismissive. In fact, unless s/he is particularly hyper-partisan, a conservative Christian should find the book's tone non-offensive, and would indeed find valuable content within, even while disagreeing with the author at points. The book is written as a textbook for undergraduate-level "Introduction to Christianity" classes, so it's accessible to non-specialists that have attended at least some college.

Anyway, the first chapter on The Bible in Historical Perspective covered material that was familiar to me from my academic background. However, having avoided the study of pure and systematic theology, the rest of the book was very eye-opening to me--particularly Chapter 2, "Christian Theism and Its Alternatives."

I had always had a problem with the traditional view of God--a separate being with a separate identity, inevitably male, theoretically loving of all creation but practicing love only for those on "his side." As a pastor, I explained away some of the more offensive commandments in the Hebrew Bible by saying that God was "meeting people where they were and nudging them toward the ideal of human equality." There's some validity to that statement, and the trend continues into the New Testament in my opinion. But something in the traditional view of God that made it difficult for that claim to make a lot of sense.

I had read books by writers such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan that seemed to have a healthier view of God, but I had not been able to get a handle on the relationship between these various theologies.

Laughlin hits the nail on the head by explaining that the various views of deity differ in two areas: transcendence and immanence. Transcendence refers to the "otherness" of God, while immanence refers to the nearness or "within-ness" of God. Thus there are four possibilities:

• Theism (active God above), the traditional view of God in monotheistic religions, involving high transcendence and a relatively weak immanence. God is separate from the universe and everything else, and is active to some degree in the world today.
• Deism (uninvolved God), well known as the theology of many of the U.S. founding fathers, involving high transcendance and no immanence. A separate God created the world, set it in motion, and then became uninvolved.
• Pantheism (everything is God), an element of many Eastern, Native American, and New Age spritualities, involving virtually no transcendence and very strong immanence. The spirit or concept of God infuses the universe as a whole; thus the universe is God. When this concept is used without reference to "God," it's called Monism.
• Panenthism (everything in God), espoused by Borg, Crossan, and other progressive Christian theologians, and involveing very strong immanence and a certain amount of transcendence. Panentheists agree with pantheists that God saturates and infuses the universe as a whole, but they see God as "the entire universe and then some." God is present everywhere and in everything, and also has another aspect that is untouched by the universe.

You might have guessed that I have gravitated to panentheism, now that I understand it more fully. Now I want to go back and read more of Borg and others, now that I have a "nail to hang them on." I'm also excited that our pastor, Peg Pfab, has agreed to teach a class delving more deeply into these concepts as a part of our adult education program this spring.

Among several books I'm reading now is another book by Laughlin, Getting Oriented: What Every Christian Should Know about Eastern Religions, but Probably Doesn't. It's a great read so far.

Merry Christmas

Contrary to the right-wing complaint that there is a "war on Christmas," I see the profound influence of Christmas on people of all faiths and non-faiths:

• A friend I recently met is the adult education minister at a non-Christian new age congregation, but celebrates Christmas with her family as the time to refocus on a giving life.
• The message board at our local Baha'i worship center currently reads: "Jesus: A Gift from God."
• My corporate intranet featured a picture of the Christmas tree in our office in Pune, India, where Hindus, Christians, and others celebrate the holiday.
• My office, consisting mostly of non-churchgoing folk, is well-known within our company and in Washington County for our hands-on work in the community, including providing Christmas gifts and food for around 20 families (in an office of 250+ people).
• The commercialization can be maddening, but it can't be denied that totally secular people have fallen in love with the inflatable yard figures--the Cat in the Hat with the Grinch, Santa on a motorcycle, etc.

The point is that for good or for bad, Christmas is a cultural, religious, and spiritual phenomenon globally. It's a contribution of my faith tradition to the spirituality of the world at large.

And the true meaning of Christmas? From this global perspective, I would say that the Christian doctrine of incarnation symbolizes our union with the universe and with each other. Jesus did not come to establish a systematic theology. He came that we and the universe might be transformed. As Zechariah sings in Luke's story,

"By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace."
(Luke 1:78-79)

Merry Christmas!

For the Bible Tells Me So

Last night my wife and I watched the new documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, and I highly recommend it. It features interviews with five families from evangelical Christian backgrounds who had to deal with the fact that one of their number was gay or lesbian. The prominent names among the five are Bishop Gene Robertonson of the Episcopal Church and former congressman Dick Gephardt (whose daughter is gay). The others were the family of a young gay man who came out as a teenager several years ago; a woman whose daughter committed suicide after the mother rejected her identity as a lesbian; and an African-American Baptist preacher's family whose daughter is gay.

The movie also features theologians, sociologists, and clergypeople, inlcuding Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and others. Their interviews focus on the biblical text and the sociological phenomenon of homophobia. They offer good perspectives on the six or seven biblical verses that are ripped out of context by fundamentalists and evangelicals to provide a "biblical veneer" to cover their fear and exclusion of people different from themselves.

It's a series of well-weaved-together quotes and clips, and it illustrates in a powerful way the spiritual growth that these issues forced within several normal American Christian families. Toward the end of the movie, one of the families participates in a march at the Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs, staged to call attention to the homophobia propogated by that ministry.

The movie is a clear illustration of the well-documented fact that people who know a gay person are much less likely to be opponents of the "homosexual agenda," and are almost certainly less belligerent about it if they are. But gay people who exist in fundamentalist and evangelical communities typically don't come out, and thus most people in those communities do not know an openly gay person.

Political issues around GLBT rights are not really moral or theological issues for most. Certainly allowing gays to marry won't hurt heterosexual marriages. The real issue is fear--fear of the unknown, fear of the 'other'. It's the same reason that the current Republican rhetoric against "scary brown people"--Latinos and Arabs--is so effective. It's fear of the 'other'.

A friend of mine is an engineering manager at a local tech company, and a member of his team is a lesbian. He has had several experiences of co-workers who learn of her orientation for the first time, and their first response is always, "But she's so nice!"

Once Americans realize that GLBT people are just normal, everyday, nice people, we will have come a long way. I'm very optimistic that today's younger generations, once they hit critical mass in our culture, will lead the way for us.

Countdown on Climate Change

A couple of my friends have "coundown watches" that are counting down the seconds to the end of Bush's term. I only hope that his term ends as scheduled; I have a real fear that he might pull something to stay in office. More on that in another post.

One reason to celebrate 1/20/09's becoming more imminent is for the sake of the earth. The Bush administration's blatant disregard for the environment has softened a bit with the political winds, but his practice is to disregard, or even change, the findings of science to fit his political ends. The latest salvo is the EPA's decision yesterday to deny California and 14 other states the right to regulate greenhouse gases from cars. My home state of Oregon is included in this initiative, which will do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country than any other.

Why should the federal government care if a state wants to enact regulations more strict than the federal standards? Federal leadership on these issues has been anemic over the past seven years, leading more than 200 cities and 25 or so states to enact their own environmental standards. Now the party that has always trumpeted "states' rights" has denied them the right to do this in a very crucial area.

California, Oregon, and other states have already indicated the intention to sue. As has been noted on at least a couple blogs, the fastest method of reversing this terrible decision lies with the 2008 elections.