the trials of life

“Where have you been, Jimbo?” many of you are asking.

It seems like forever since I wrote something on this blogsite, but I just haven’t had anything important to say until today. What I have to say is that President Bush and I seem to be in complete agreement on something today.

In Afghanistan, there is a man on trial for converting to Christianity. Apparently, in Afghanistan, that is the most heinous thing one can do. If the man is convicted, he will be executed, as converting from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan is punishable by death. I say it is wrong; Bush says it is wrong. It appears that we are in agreement on something.

Many of you are probably saying that something is wrong here. If Bush says something is right, I’m usually going to say it is wrong. If he says something is black, I’ll usually be saying it is white. So, when both of us seem to be on the same side, it has to be confusing to many of you. Don’t be concerned, however. By the time this is over, I’ll be suggesting our President has spit for brains.

We have been moving steadily for a number of years toward the acceptance of Christianity as our national religion. I don’t have a particular problem with Christianity. If the truth were known, if they divided us all up into individual groups, you’d probably find me in with the Christians. The problem I have is making Christianity our national religion. You may recall that many of the early settlers of this country came here for the purpose of worship as they chose and to escape a nationalized religion. The founding fathers wrote into our bylaws the freedom to worship as we please. They were willing to fight for what they believed in and were willing to do violence to those who would take away those religious freedoms. I would like to believe that if those founding fathers were around today, they would take offense with those who would try to amend the constitution to include their religious beliefs. I would expect that they would willingly slaughter those of the religious right who would mix their religion with governance, just as they slaughtered those who proposed the same course back in their time.

Anyway, what we have in Afghanistan is mixing religion and government. We like to brag here in the United States that we are conservative and we believe in God. In places like Afghanistan they are really conservative and they really believe in their God. They have thoroughly integrated their religion into their government and if one commits a sin, they break the law. They are the model of what our religious right tries to be, except they make the religious right here look like a bunch of pussies.

The truth is, we want to be a democracy or a republic, but we don’t want to be theocracy. We want to worship our God on the Sabbath and carry him (or her) with us during the week if we wish, but we don’t want to integrate him into our government and let our government play God. Otherwise, we might become another Afghanistan.

As for our President, let him worship all he wants, but Lord, grant him the wisdom to see that an American theocracy in no better than an Afghan theocracy. When the Afghans put a man on trial for converting to Christianity under the threat of execution, it makes them look really stupid. It provides evidence to back the argument that we are better than they are and our country, our rules of law and our way of life is better than theirs. I agree with our President that what they are doing in Afghanistan is wrong. I just hope he agrees with my side of the argument that we never, ever want to be like them.

At least that is our opinion here in Jimbo’s world.