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As a Pagan who was raised Jewish, I’m obviously going to answer, ‘No!” The U.S. is a pluralistic nation, founded by refugees seeking religious freedom in the land of indigenous peoples who had practiced their own, earth-based traditions for hundreds of generations before Christians arrived on these shores.
The war in Iraq is a disaster on every level, moral, spiritually, humanitarian, military. Trying to improve the situation by sending in more troops is like trying to salvage the Titanic by revving up the engines after it’s hit the iceberg. A reversal is called for, not more of the same, destructive course.
The values that we draw from our religions are certainly part of any political campaign. But we could certainly do without the parading of religiosity, the establishing of one’s religious credentials, the use of religious—and let’s face it, we mean, overwhelmingly, Christian---language.
I can think of nothing more unfaithful to the strong Jewish traditions of social justice than the current climate of vicious denunciation towards anyone who raises criticisms of Israel’s policies.
The U.S. left the track of morality when we invaded Iraq.
Our thin excuse of ‘pre-emptive’ war fell apart when no weapons of mass destruction were found. We abdicated any possible claims to morality at Abu Ghraib. In more than four years of war, we have yet to establish order or basic security—at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives, including uncounted Iraqi civilians and children and more than three thousand of our own soldiers.
In good faith, our young men and women put their lives on the line for policies they were told would benefit our country. Yet in the U.S., the war has starved our resources for every nurturing, caring function of government—from effective response to emergencies like Katrina to even providing adequate counseling and aftercare for our own returning servicemen and women.
I’m cheering for my Pagan sisters and brothers who are demonstrating on this Fourth of July for the right to have a Pagan chaplain in the military. Our constitution, which they have volunteered to defend, grants us the freedom of religion. That doesn’t mean “freedom of any religion we approve of but not those that make us uncomfortable or that we’ve never heard of.” It means freedom to follow the calling of one’s own faith and conscience.
Would I vote for a resolution affirming the importance and contributions of Christmas and Christianity? As my readers may have noted, I’m a Pagan, but I’d vote for such a resolution—heck, I’d even introduce it, if it went like this:
It’s all very well to propose amending the Constitution to be in line with ‘God’s standards’—the question is always, which God? What set of standards? And who gets to decide?
“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to make real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
That’s the message on the top of Obama’s website—a message of faith, belief and empowerment. It speaks well, both of him and of us, that his message is receiving such a strong response.
Martin Luther King has had a huge impact on my life. I was still a child during the height of the civil rights movement, and I remember watching the Freedom Rides on TV and begging my mother to let me go to the South. She assured me that there would still be injustices to fight when I got older, and sadly enough, she was certainly right about that.
I was seventeen when King was murdured, and already an antiwar activist in my high school. But it was in the early eighties, when I took part in nonviolent direct actions against nuclear power and nuclear weapons, that I began to read his writings and study his ideas. I became a nonviolence trainer and have had the great privilege of introducing new activists to this form of struggle for nearly three decades.
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