So much for adoring the Baby in the Manger — an observation about fake Christianity

26 December 2018

Speaking of Christmas

Religious principles should require thought and action, shouldn't they?

Today, I begin comparatively small and build to a larger point.

When Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned, Danny Sjursen, an ethically inclined soldier, said that:

At a global level, the grown-ups have neither tempered the president’s more bizarre policies nor offered a humbler, more modest military approach themselves.

Mattis’s “2-2-1 policy” has the Pentagon ramping up for potential fights with[:]

two “big” adversaries (China and Russia),

two “medium” opponents (Iran and North Korea),

and

one “sustained” challenge (conflicts and terrorism across the Greater Middle East).

Few have asked whether such a strategy is faintly sustainable, even with a military budget that dwarfs that of any other power on the planet.

Trump’s original adults in the room set the table for endless war.

I’ve been serving in the U.S. Army during this period, while dissenting from prevailing foreign policy.

After spending 18 years in uniform, including tours of duty in both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, and observing a slew of retired generals and policymakers who oversaw those very wars champion yet more (failed) conventional thinking . . . forgive me for wondering . . . if I weren’t the last true adult in the room.

Sjursen continued with another moral parallel

He observed that:

Our country, which today does most of its teaching with bombs, is complicit in some of the worst humanitarian and refugee crises in the world.

And, by and large, it will not receive its victims, refuses to hear them and bars entry to most. That this is so, is, I fear, an unforgivable testimony to us all.

The moral? — So tell me, who's waging the real war on Christ?

Conservatives of a certain ilk love to trumpet the "war on Christmas" — evidently not recognizing that the true assault most often comes from those who most claim to uphold the celebration of Jesus' birth and meaning.

Institutionalized greed, propagandized fear, and overrunnething hypocrisy make poor bases for religious principle. Yet the shortfall appears to escape most Establishment churches.

Thus, I often wonder what the point to most of American Christianity is.

Except, of course, as a control mechanism for self-righteously blind sheep. Enter Jim Mattis and all the other supposed adults in the room.

PeteFree.com

So much for adoring the Baby in the Manger — an observation about fake Christianity