Dr. Gerry Lower, Eugene, Wisconsin

The United Nations has recently been enmeshed in establishing a new "Human Rights Council" and a draft resolution has appeared from the president of the General Assembly, Kofi Annan (1).  It begins by reaffirming the concept of human rights and it notes that human rights are "universal, indivisible, inter-related and interdependent" (1).  Just how human rights are so related is not specified, although this knowledge is obviously relevant to the work of the United Nations in promoting human rights. 

Within the world of Natural Philosophy and Democracy there is a far more human definition of freedom than that characterizing America under the dominion of religious capitalism, one which transcends the freedom to be legal (obedient) or ethical (politically-correct).  That would be the freedom to be honestly human.  This dialectic synthesis provides freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religious oppression and despotism.

These freedoms recognize that we are already born free TO DO anything we want - provided we are willing to suffer the consequences.  The path to real freedom, freedom of thought and word and action, comes down more to eliminating unfairness and injustice and unnecessary oppression - as built right into the ancient cultural "isms."

These are the only two freedoms in a democracy that stand alone, i.e., freedom of religion and freedom from religious oppression, the two essential objectives of the separation of church and state.  In other words, democracy allows one to believe as one chooses (we trust ourselves to think for ourselves) and democracy allows one to be free from imposed restrictions and beliefs.

Insofar as we are interested in our freedoms TO DO, we must first have the freedom to think for ourselves, freedom TO BE THOUGHTFUL AND CARING.  Here is where HUMAN RIGHTS come into the program.  In order to be thoughtful and caring, we need to have the right to honest self-knowledge, knowledge of how we got here and why we are here, not political or religious fabrications.  This, in turn, is where freedom FROM oppression and falsehood comes into the program.  These are freedoms meant to keep us honest.

Real freedom TO DO is more related to being free to make ones own decisions based upon what one knows and cares about, being free to do what is right (what is honest and fair as opposed to what is legal and righteous or ethical and politically-correct).  In other words, our freedoms TO DO in America are embedded in our human rights, rights which free us from unnecessary and imposed restraints.   Despots and power mongers (religious and otherwise) uniformly know that the way to usurp peoples freedom is to deny them their natural human rights.

In the minds of Americas fathers, the only way to guarantee our freedoms is to guarantee our rights.  Natural human rights really have no direct relationship to what we as individuals can or cannot do in the real world.  Human rights have more to do with universal human needs which must be guaranteed and honored in the outside world, e.g., guaranteed  educational needs and medical care.

HUMAN RIGHTS Interrelated and Interdependent

The human rights in Jeffersons Declaration, i.e., Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, can be reformulated within developmental frameworks such that their relationships to each other can be better appreciated.  Likewise, the need for lifelong continuity in the implementation of human rights is more readily apparent.

  The right to self-determination, i.e., liberty is usually considered the cornerstone of human rights in the western world.  This right guarantees that everyone is free to make their own decisions and influence their own destiny.  Establishing this right as primary, however, is largely a matter of diplomacy designed to give others the benefit of the doubt, because this right assumes that everyone involved in decision-making is honest, knowledgeable and thoughtful.

This has seldom been the case, and it is clear that before one can make ones own decisions, one must have self-knowledge, knowledge of how and why the world works.  In the developmental sense, therefore, the primary human right is the right to self-knowledge, the right to human life itself.  All other human rights follow from this right as follows:

LIFE The Right to Self-Knowledge (always dependent on others)

All of life in the human world begins with values (as the most intimate form of self-knowledge) and self-knowledge.  The right to self-knowledge guarantees the right to life, it guarantees being alive in the only way that differentiates the people from other living creatures, knowing where we come from, knowing who we are and knowing why we are here.

The right to self-knowledge is equivalent to the right to be human.  That self-knowledge must begin with dialectic human values and human pan-cultural knowledge, not with the various ancient cultural mythologies.  That self-knowledge must be personal, and it must be historical and evolutionary, because that is how the real world works.

LIBERTY The Right to Self-Determination (always dependent on others)

There is little use for knowledge if it cannot be used in decision-making and doing (which is the primary purpose of knowledge).  It follows, therefore, that a second human right is the right to self-determination, the right to liberty, the right to make ones own decisions in maintaining ones own path through life.

  FRATERNITIE The Right to Self-Improvement (always dependent on others)

There is, likewise, little use for knowledge and liberty if they cannot be used for self-improvement, to learn and grow and mature.  It follows, therefore, that a third human right is the right to opportunities for self-growth, development and maturation, the right to improve oneself in the interest of the whole.  This is all a function of fraternité, having family, friends and community and schools to provide an honest, nurturing, learning environment throughout.

PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS The Right to Self-Worth (always dependent on others)

There is little use for knowledge, liberty, and maturity if skills and talents cannot be used to benefit the whole.  It follows, therefore, that a fourth human right is the right to self worth, the right to a meaningful existence, the right to know that one has made a difference to someone or something, the right to dignity and respect.

DEVELOPMENTAL CONTEXT

These four human rights, placed into developmental context, are clearly interrelated insofar as each right is derived from the one before it, with the fourth right providing the objective for the first three.  The fourth right to self-worth is as fundamentally important as the first three rights in that some sense of self-worth is required in order to devote oneself to self-knowledge, self-determination and self-improvement.  We are left with a sphere of highly-integrated, logical human rights forming the core of a human democracy.  It is from these rights that all civil rights are properly derived.

Nowhere does anyone have a right to do as one pleases.  That position has more to do with license than with freedom.  The Bush administration is a global exemplar.  Nowhere does anyone have a right to enslave people at meaningless labor for inadequate income. That  position has more to do with greed and self-righteousness than with fairness.  Enron-style crony capitalism is a global exemplar.  Nowhere does anyone have a right to impose religious superstition upon reasonable people.  That position has more to do with despotic religious folly than with American wisdom.  Under the Bush administration, we in America are a contemporary global exemplar.

One of the more apparent reasons for America's failure to keep up with the European democracies in addressing human needs and human rights is because under religious capitalism's dominion (which places us in competition with each other for necessities), the people have been coerced into giving up the right to fraternitié, the right to be friends with each other, the right to depend upon and care adequately for each other as humans.  We no longer share very much, we compete for it.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Eugene, Oregon

The bulk of the human world is currently conflicted between the past and the future, and the past is doing everything possible to prevent the future.  In doing so, of course, it guarantees the future.

Most of this global conflict is over values. America is conflicted between the values of religious capitalism and the values of democracy.  Israel is conflicted between the values of Judaism and the values of democracy.  Iran is conflicted between the values of Islamism and the values of democracy.  China is conflicted between the values of Confucianism and the values of democracy.  All over the world, the conflict is between the values of the despotic cultural "isms" and the values of democracy.

The United Nations is currently enmeshed in establishing a new "Human Rights Council" and a draft resolution has appeared from the president of the General Assembly, Kofi Annan (1). [This week a resolution approved ,with US dissenting, calls for the election of new council members on May 9 and a first meeting of the council on June 19. NYT. --Politex] It begins by reaffirming the concept of human rights and reaffirming various published documents on the subject, e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  It does mention that human rights are "universal, indivisible, inter-related and interdependent," and it itemizes various governmental and bureaucratic approaches to the nourishment of human rights on the global stage.

While the fundamental importance of human rights is reaffirmed, there is no mention of the origins and history of human rights, there is no mention of the role of human rights within a democracy, and no mention of the state of democracy in the world. This knowledge happens to be critical to the goals of the United Nations as an international exercise in democracy.

We seem to have forgotten that human rights constitute the sole bottom line in Jefferson's democracy, not to be compromised by vengeance-based western legal systems and not to be compromised by politically-correct eastern ethical systems (3).  In other words, given the importance of human rights, it is the values of democracy that need more to be addressed and how the concept of human rights relates to the practice of democracy.

This is necessitated because the modern world's first formal democracy has fallen from grace under capitalism's bipartisan dominion since World War II.  Unable to distinguish between the values of democracy and the values of corporate capitalism, America has de-evolved in half a century to the point of believing itself justified to promote "democracy" (i.e., corporate capitalism) with preemptive war in the Middle East.  With the exception of Britain, America's old colonial oppressor, very few nations have been able to see things that way.

In other words, when it comes to nourishing democracy outside of its own borders, America no longer has much to offer, a superficial nation more interested in profit margins than in people and peace (4).  For this reason, it is worthy for the United Nations and all people to consider human rights within the context of democracy and not as a stand-alone concept.

  Current Conflicts As Values Conflicts

What the entire world is going to witness during the dawn of the 3rd millennium is the prophetic end of religious capitalism in the world.  The need to unify the world at the tip of a western sword has been fulfilled over the past two millennia under the auspices of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, in a journey from tribalism to nationalism to globalism.  The world has, as a result, become increasingly an economic unity and there is very real need for a global economic system based on human rights, fairness and equality.

The ancient cultural "isms" that have held the human world together over the past few millennia, i.e., Judaism, Romanism, Islamism, Hinduism, Confucianism, were uniformly conceived in despotism and dominion of the few over the many.  They produced a despotism of law unrelated to human knowledge in the west, and a despotism of ethics unrelated to human knowledge in the east, Abrahamism and Confucianism being complementary opposites.  All ancient "isms" have returned to fundamentalism in response to globalism, the western "isms" calling for a prophetic end to it all.

There is certain merit, then, in rekindling common discussion as to what America's Revolutionary fathers had in mind two centuries ago when they framed the Declaration and defined democracy.  We must reconsider our nascent American values with an eye toward rising to the challenges of the 3rd millennium.

Reaffirmation of the Values of Democracy

With the upcoming prophetic failure of religion and capitalism (already accomplished in the eyes of the world), there will be a need for the western democracies to reaffirm the values of science and natural philosophy (e.g., Honesty and Integrity), the values of Jeffersonian Democracy (e.g,, Fairness and Equality) and the values of nascent Christianity (e.g., Compassion and Human Rights), all within the embrace of a Meritocracy.

Allegiance to human rights (knowledgeable behavior) is taken as the only bottom line, not allegiance to laws (obedient behavior) and not allegiance to ethics (politically-correct behavior).  The world does not need legal people or ethical people, it needs honest people with allegiances to human knowledge and the values of democracy.  It is only from honest people that laws and ethics properly flow.

Direct Democracy

A direct democracy requires direct decision-making by the people on all relevant national issues.  The role of Congressional bodies is redefined, with members serving in an advisory capacity, i.e., to consider knowledgeable options and to offer recommendations to the people, in the people's interest.  Democracy was never designed to be a playground for the rich and powerful.  It was designed to empower the people (2).

Minimum Income

Each adult citizen would receive half of a living income based on time alone.  All citizens would be expected to contribute a portion of their time and talent to organized family and community programs on the local and regional fronts.

Maximum Income

Living mates, couples (regardless of sex) and parents would constitute one working human.  In achieving humanhood, it simply takes two.  Each couple (one working human) could earn up to four living incomes, each member working a 3 day work week under a meritocracy.

  Meritocracy

The concept of a meritocracy requires rejection of the mindless notion that wealth signifies intelligence or merit.  More often it does not signify that at all.  A human meritocracy is properly based on time, labor, competence and contribution (TLC2 ).  As a secular objective this translates as TLC = "Tender, Loving Care."  As a Christian objective, if you please, this translates as TLC= "The Love of Christ" (4).

People-Owned National Resources

The people, as citizens, own all governmental real estate, federal buildings, national forests, national parks and all natural resources, e.g., air, water, oil, coal, tritium, etc.  Because citizens are provided this natural ownership, all natural resources are delivered at cost or with any revenues returned to general governmental funds.

Employee-Owned Corporations

The people, as employees, own all corporations and corporate assets.  No money-handling "upper level" management, no stockholders, no gambling, no greed, no corruption, no taxes.  Businesses operate as usual with all profits after expenses directed into general governmental funds belonging to the people (2).  The people collectively make the profits, not a tiny handful of crony corporate aristocrats who see themselves as being worth orders of magnitude more than those who actually do the work.

Medical Guarantees

The people are provided health care from conception through death.  The marketplace is removed entirely from influencing medical priorities and decision-making, which are properly made on knowledgeable and compassionate ground.  Local family clinics are placed once again under local physician control, house calls are reinstated along with physician compassion and personal involvement and everything western medicine has abandoned in the name of corporate greed.

Educational Guarantees

The people are provided educational needs from Kindergarten through PhD/MD (K-20).  Nourishment of knowledgeable and logical decision-making within the context of democracy, no matter what hangs on it or who hangs for it.  Nourishment of science and natural philosophy in education beginning with Kindergarten.  "Higher" education beginning in high school, emphasis on the history and evolution of democracy, the objective being to teach our children how to look at and think about life as a whole - in the material sense, in the spatial sense, and in the temporal (historical and evolutionary) sense.

Community Guarantees

The people are provided programs for the nourishment of community health and maturation.  Establishment  of "shires" - horizontal communities with vertical voice.  Shires are defined and organized around common human ground, e.g., geological, geographical, workplace-related communities, etc.  Communities are responsible for stewardship of community turf within the larger context.

Family Guarantees

The people are provided programs for the nourishment of family health and maturation.  Nourishment of home-based cottage industry to keep mom and dad at home with the kids. Emphasis on corporate employment that allows as much work as possible on the home front through networking.

Energy Guarantees

The people are provided programs for integrated approaches to the provision of energy while eliminating the causes of global warming.  Coordinated prioritization of national energy resources, emphasis on wind power, water power, and nuclear fusion, aimed at the most efficient and least polluting energy for a given region.  Harnessing nuclear fusion will eliminate the oil industry altogether.

Agricultural Guarantees

The people are provided programs for the nourishment of a sustainable agriculture, more labor intensive, less energy intensive.  Fair and equitable prices for agricultural commodities would allow restoration of family farms and ranches and rural communities, supplying employment for over 20 million people in America alone, emphasis on land stewardship.

Environmental Guarantees

The people are provided programs for the nourishment of a sustainable environment.  Massive global reforestation programs, with billions of trees planted to restore watershed quality and arable land.  Massive efforts for the a priori elimination of trash (i.e., don't make it in the first place).  Massive efforts to safeguard the natural environment from biologically-foreign chemicals.  Massive efforts to repair damage already done.

  Communications Guarantees

The people are provided programs for the nourishment of cultural exchanges via high-speed Internet access in every home (community-wide WiFi systems).    Real-time audio-visual communications (watch my lips move) on a global basis to maximize the quality and fidelity of human information transfer.  Development of high-resolution, digital 3D virtual earth tours of the thousands of heavens here on earth to allow anyone to visit virtually anywhere in the world from their homes.

Implementing Necessary Changes

All fully democratized programs require looking at life as a whole, that being the only way to get the details right. Within that whole, the people provide the details most appropriate to their culture, country and climate.  All of these programs require looking at life from the local point of view in order to establish how best to integrate the details into a view of the whole.  In other words, the only good politics are local politics (6).

The elements of a human rights-based democracy bear almost no relationships to American democracy under religious capitalism.  As a result, the implementation of a knowledge-based human democracy will involve the self-elimination of Old Testament religion and greed-driven capitalism from the political arena.

Within the frameworks of cultural evolution (the larger cultural process in which all people have become embedded during the past two centuries), that would be the sole purpose of the Bush administration and its neoconservative agenda of religious capitalism, i.e., to bring an end to the dominion of religion and capitalism so as to inadvertently open the doors to a global democracy.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, Eugene Oregon

"Tony Blair has proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally George Bush.  Contradicting warnings from advisers not to mix politics and religion, the Prime Minister said that his interest in politics sprang from his Christianity and its 'values and philosophy' had guided him in public life."  His remarks "invite comparison with President Bush, a born-again Christian, who has made a virtue of bringing religion into politics" (1).

Naming the prime advocate of war first, one can only wonder from where in the four Gospels Bush and Blair came up with justification for preemptory war.  Explaining how he managed to live with his decision, Mr. Blair replied: "If you have faith about these things then you realize that judgement is made by other people.  If you believe in God, it's made by God as well" (1).  While Mr. Blair makes a distinction between "other people" and "God," these two sources of judgement turn out to be one and the same.

  If anything, the Bush-Blair embrace of religion demonstrates just how far away these two prominent world leaders have fallen from the values and viewpoints of the modern world's first formal democracy - in the name of a remarkably corrupt corporate aristocracy and an uncaring marketplace (2).  Both men are unable to make a distinction between the values of corporate capitalism and the values of nascent Christianity and democracy.  Both are unaware that neither of them know what they are talking about, speaking as they do from within a "culture of corruption" (3).

Democracy, of course, is entirely dependent upon the separation of church and state.  This principle guarantees both religious freedom and freedom from religious oppression.  By bringing religion back into government, both Bush and Blair have broken a cardinal requirement for a sane and meaningful government of, by and for the people.  Religious justifications are properly abandoned in government because they do not have a definable basis in human honesty or logic (3).

Both Bush and Blair are willing to have the people believe that they are "doing the work of God."  As men of faith in the supernatural, they could be doing nothing but their god's work, a notion that they also take on faith alone.  One can presume that they both refer to the god of Abraham, the god at the core of Judaism, Old Testament Romanism and Islamism, a god that embraces capitalism in the west and terrorism in the middle east but a god that has never dreamed of democracy.

In other words, both Bush and Blair are coming at the world with the same religious justifications as their enemies, the same religious justifications used by the British from whom America escaped (well almost) over two centuries ago.  This is where both Bush and Blair error in millennial proportions - to the detriment of their own citizens and the people of the world.

God is, after all, the decision-making apparatus of the world.  In the natural philosophical world view that gave birth to American democracy, God resides in the "head and heart" of every person, more precisely in "the will of the people, substantially declared" (4).  In Jefferson's Deist world view (in which America's Revolutionary fathers lived their personal lives), God was not a supernatural external agent but a real human internal agent (4).

In other words, Jefferson saw that events in the cultural world (e.g., declarations of war, peace treaties) were the result of decisions made by a small number of rich and powerful people (and the people who follow and support them).  These people, e.g., the 18th century British colonialists, employed religious arguments to justify their unfair, despotic rule over their colonies, typically in the name of the Christ and, of course, actually in the interest of the British colonialists and the British throne.

Jefferson therefore placed God in the head and heart of every person so that God's authority could be claimed by no one, only by everyone according to the values of democracy, human rights and human knowledge.  This fundamental change in the location and nature of God followed naturally and logically.

If one removes god (whatever god's nature might be to the Abrahamists), one removes the source of creativity from the western cultural world, right along with the source of laws, punishments, vengeance and self-righteousness.  That creative source must be replaced and Jefferson replaced the will of a supernatural god with the "will of the people."  That is what keeps you and me, as humans, in the theological equation.

All authority and responsibility properly reside in the people.  Otherwise, the people are being asked to be responsible for the authority and work of fools.  The people in Britain and America would never have done to themselves what they have allowed religious capitalism to do them.  In order for the people to appreciate the need for responsibility, they must hold authority.  Is this too complicated for cultures of "intellectual corruption"? 

America's founding fathers were remarkably thoughtful and caring people by capitalism's standards.  We refer to several of them as being brilliant because of the light they have shed on what it means to be fully human on earth.  Their brilliance is not so much due to the vast knowledge base of men like Jefferson and Franklin and Paine (which didn't hurt a thing) but mostly due to their being honest and caring people who saw themselves in others and others in themselves.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, Eugene Oregon

"Haven't you heard, its a battle of words" - Pink Floyd

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" - John 1.1

As thoughtful people know, of course, cultural world conflicts are actually properly defined as a battle of values and ideas, in spite of the Roman emphasis on "words."  It was in Rome's imperial interest to keep the people ignorant of the very concept of ideas and the notion that they might have one of their own now and again.  This kept the people ignorant as well of the human spiritual relationships between ideas, words and actions, relationships as old as law and ethics and centrally relevant to science and democracy.

In the year of our Lord, 2006, when the western world is at the  peak of its fiscal and military glory, when America under the Bush regime is actively poised to take religious dominion of a global corporate capitalism, why do religious capitalists presume the very worst?  Why do they subscribe or pander to those who subscribe to the ancient Biblical notion that the world is soon coming to an "end of time?"

Why do they do so at such an inopportune time in their own ascent to dominion, as if they aware of the utter deceit beneath their ways?  How could they not be aware?  It is relatively easy to be ignorant, but it is difficult to lie without knowing it.  The combination of ignorance and lies blended together by the Bush administration is fatal regardless of all great and good intentions.

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" Pink Floyd

This is the enigma of western religion, that it could be so sure that it is doing the work of God on earth (by devoting nearly two millennia to conquest and dominion in the name of the Christ) only to turn around and call for an end to its own dominion in a prophetic "end of time."  From their beginnings, all three branches of Abrahamic religion have predicted their own demise on this planet, ostensibly so that their believers might go to heaven.  Many adherents are apparently happy to contemplate that end, finally ridding themselves of everything feminine and a life-sustaining fertile earth.

There is a reason for this prophetic belief in an "end of time" and that reason would be that the ancient authors of western apocalyptic literature clearly recognized the harshly despotic nature of their times.  They knew that they were defending themselves from despotism and, at the same time, that they were fighting back with despotic approaches of their own.  That would be the nature of law held absolutely and punishment meted out without mercy.  It is in fact, and always has been, more devil that deity in design, and a despotic Rome adopted it whole heartedly in the 4th century in the name of the Christ.

Fighting fire with fire may or may not stop an existing fire, but it always increases the amount of existing damage.  Accordingly, no matter how much holiness they might ascribe to their words, ancient Biblical authors knew that the day would eventually come when religion-based justifications for earthly vengeance and violence would come to a necessary end.  The path of despotic conquest is ultimately dead end because both human patience and the earth's resources are finite.

There is a clear need, then, for the people to consider how to prepare for the coming self-inflicted "end of time."  This requires that we consider how the "end of time" might come to pass and how we ought think in order to recover from its aftermath, keeping in mind that the "end of time" will involve discrediting both religion and capitalism from the global political arena - forever - with a concomitant rebirth of democracy on the global stage - forever.

"The Great Gig in the Sky" Pink Floyd

Bringing On The "End of Time"

Bringing on the end of time would be the primary evolutionary purpose of post WWII religious capitalism and it would be remarkably easy to ensure, given that the Bush administration has already discredited itself and America in the eyes of the larger world.  The only requirement to initiate the "end of time" would be a single act or response to an act that would trigger multiple wars and social chaos among the fundamentalist nations of the Middle East.

In other words, due in large part to the Bush administration's unjustifiable preemptory attack on Iraq, the potential for chaos in the Middle East is greater than ever before.  The turnover in Middle Eastern leadership has guaranteed power vacuums that have increasingly been filled with even more extremist leadership.

Because of the Bush administration's approaches to "democratization" (i.e., crony capitalization), Iraq has become more a tripartite theocracy under fundamentalist Shiîte dominion, and with allegiances to Iran.  This is easily a scenario in which both the U.S. and Iraq lose.  Iran, in turn, has taken an increasingly belligerent posture in its quest for nuclear weaponry and a voice on the world stage. Palestine has empowered Hamas in another fine display of religious "democracy."

"God only knows it's not what we would choose to do" Pink Floyd

Should the Bush administration choose to involve the American people in a directly causal way in the "end of time," e.g., a preemptory military strike on Iran's nuclear production facilities, any retaliatory response from Iran would likely be directed at Iran's perceived regional enemies, e.g., Israel.  An attack on Judaism and capitalism would quickly bring hell to earth's surface with counterattacks on Islamism.  The Abrahamic religions have been head to head in the Middle East for over a decade and they are well enough armed to be able to fulfill their own prophecies.

The only non-violent way to bring an end to religion-based capitalistic incompetence and corruption would be for those nations to whom the U.S. is in the depths of debt, e.g., China and the European Union, to simply call all U.S. loans back.  The Bush administration has little real appreciation that beneath its military and imperial machinations is the requirement for money.  Without money there is no machine, no military and no war.  With no option but fiscal bankruptcy, the U.S. would have little choice but to listen, for the first time in over half a century, to the logic of human rights and democracy and the hopes and dreams of people all over the world.

"So, so you think you can tell heaven from hell"  Pink Floyd

Recovering From The "End of Time"

Without religion and capitalism, the entire American right wing would be immediately lost for causes.  In other words, the people who are most likely to have direct and indirect causal involvement in the "end of time" would have no solutions to the aftermath of the problems which they would have created and no solutions to the problem of rebuilding American democracy. This utter incompetence on behalf of democracy provides an opportunity like none seen in two centuries of American history.

Making amends for America's failure to honor nascent Christian human rights is an effort that must come from outside the values of religion and capitalism.  This will require a national return to the values of America's Revolutionary fathers, as embedded in Jefferson's Declaration.  Following the "end of time," we will not only need but we will want to reformulate America's Constitution so that our operational policies are finally consistent with Declaration human rights, natural philosophy and the wisdom of the Christ that separated supernaturalism from reason (which is why Jefferson separated church from state).

From the beginning, the primary purpose of nascent Christianity was to eliminate the world of con artists, i.e., "lawyers, moneyhandlers" who saw themselves as doing the work of God, those whom the Christ threw out of the temple.  Under Bush's religious capitalism, these people run virtually everything they possibly can in America, and that ain't enough.  Imagine that.

From the beginning, the primary purpose of democracy was to ensure individual security by guaranteeing freedom - not freedom to do as we please (as fools choose to believe), but freedom from fear and ignorance, freedom from laws that guarantee unfairness and inequality, freedom to be an honest and knowledgeable and caring people.

The End of Man and the Beginning of Human

The state of democracy in America is worse than ludicrous, especially with the emergence of the self-aggrandizing notion that the entire world could and should be like America, a corrupt, crony capitalistic regime, a "plantation" nation without knowledgeable or competent leadership. There are simply not adequate earthly resources to attain that dubious goal.  Moreover, the thoughtful and caring people of the world, on the whole, would never tolerate being literally defined by greed-driven corporations.

Adequate concepts of human do not emerge from diets defined by McDonald's and Burger King, wardrobes defined by WalMart and K-Mart, entertainment defined by Sony and Disney, escape defined by Budweiser and Jack Daniels.  These are, in fact, all-American escapist lifestyles, compliments of corporate capitalism.  Those who pursue money and power thrive at the top by eating the bottom and justifying their rule with the continuous need for war (without which capitalism simply cannot long remain in dominion).

The saving grace of America is the literally millions of citizens who lived through the 1960s and watched as their dreams for a more human world were dashed by capitalism and put on hold in the interest of survival.  We now know for fact what most younger people knew in the 1960s, i.e., that capitalism is inherently corrupt, it has no inherent interest in individual human rights or family, community and national values, it has nothing to do with God and even less to do with democracy.  Its about nothing but money.

Greed-driven corporate capitalism has destroyed American democracy beyond recognition.  It has made a mockery of the concepts of fairness and equality, it has wasted our natural resources, it has littered our land, it has destroyed our family farms and ranches and rural communities, it has destroyed our relationships with our children, it has brought Americans a half a century of war and poverty amidst wealth and political mindlessness, it has snubbed our former allies, it has dumbed us down as a people and it has left us lost from ourselves.

Capitalism has led America into the depths of intellectual crime and corruption and robbed as many honest and talented and creative people of a meaningful existence as any despotic belief system before it, paying all its homage to the rich and powerful, rewarding mostly those who can stomach the greed and the game.  All good Americans who can remember the 1960s, those who could see corporate corruption coming half a century ago, will soon have their day in the American sun.

It would be an enormous undertaking to consider the number of deaths in human history that can be directly attributed to belief in wesetern religion, i.e., Judaism, Old Testament Romanism and Islamism, the three vengeance-based, apocalyptic branches of Abrahamic religion.  Supporting these ancient despotic "isms" is not the people's job on this planet.

The most important job on this planet is to take honest and loving care of "the little ones."  They are tomorrow's people.  They are world peace in diapers.  They are little citizens admirably suited for a global democracy - and it all begins at home with safe and secure, healthy and happy moms and dads.

Is this too complicated for Old Testament Roman "christians" enraptured by Bush's war on the world and the heavens?  Have they not been told all of this before?  For Christ's sake, they might once consider believing it.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, Eugene Oregon

Several European countries have recently published political cartoons that portray the Islamic prophet, Mohammed, in less than saintly terms.  A good deal more attention has been provided this publishing phenomenon than it deserves, in both the western world and in the Islamic world.

The cartoons were seen in the Islamic world as being an insult to Islamism and its prophet.  The resulting outrage in the Islamic world quickly translated into the torching of international embassies and massive street displays of violent hurt feelings.  All in all, publication of the cartoons has been seen as leading to an escalation of violence in the Middle East.

  The response of the Bush administration and the politically-correct western world to this new excuse for violence has been to condemn the cartoons as being in poor taste, disrespectful of others and their appearance in print to have been most most unfortunate.  The implication is that journalists ought be ethical, that they have a responsibility to something other than expressing a commonly held viewpoint in the western world.

The publication of the cartoons did not destroy the embassies, Islamic radicals destroyed the embassies because their feelings were hurt, nothing else.  Is this too tough for the religious and the politically-correct?  How can the publication of a few words and pictures on paper justify the destruction of national embassies?  How does any of this relate to human honesty?

If the Islamic peoples do not want their god and prophet caricatured in newspapers, they might consider doing as the citizens of most knowledgeable democracies (not the U.S.) have done in keeping their superstitious religious disputes out of democracy's business.  The notion of maintaining anything resembling a democracy under fundamentalist theocratic rule is simply the height of blind ignorance.  As a contradiction of terms, there can be no such thing and that is precisely why the Bush administration's theocratic agenda can do nothing but fail in both America and Iraq.

If the Islamic conception of Abraham's god were at all honest and true, what could a mere mortal even hope to say that would offend that which cannot be offended?  Radical Islamists make the god they claim to worship out to be weak and easily-angered deity, unable to rise above even the concerns of fools, a god prone to ranting and raving and vengeance and violence via Islam's most ardent supporters.  In doing so, radical Islamists become the god they worship.

All of this discourse, of course, is based on the assumption that the Islamic version of Abraham's god has observable, material control and influence over the real world.  As with the Abrahamic god beneath Judaism and Roman "christianity," the Islamic version of god can only have worldly impact via the words and actions of its believers.

Largely for Christ's sake, poking fun of the Roman god and His worldly spokesmen has been a staple of the Euro-American western world since Martin Luther posted his theses on the doors of the church at Wittenburg in the early 16th century.  It birthed Protestantism, it accelerated the decline of the Roman church (the scourge of Islam) and it opened the doors to the modern world of western nations employing scientific knowledge under a semblance of democracy.

While a respectful approach to dealing with the western gods and prophets might be considered to be politically-correct, it is to ignore the overwhelming bulk of American history in making human progress away from despotism (at least until the post-WWII era).  In other words, a politically-correct approach to Old Testament British dominion would not have floated many Revolutionary boats in the years just prior to the American Revolution.

How many times in America have we seen political cartoons portraying a devout Catholic priest with his hands down in some little kid's pants?  How many times have we seen political cartoons portraying George W. Bush as a born-again nincompoop?  How many embassies have been blown up in America following the publication of irreverent and "unpatriotic" cartoons?  At least Americans are still able to restrict their religiosity to words.

It has nothing to do with political cartoons, now does it?  It has only to do with fundamentalist fanatics, those who would take violent action to preserve a god in which they have only a primitive faith unrelated to human knowledge, whether they be dedicated to Old Testament Romanism or Islamism.  We have created a world in which human ignorance is calling human ignorance bad.

In Jefferson's hands, democracy began by declaring nascent Christian human rights as America's new bottomline, not the laws of the gods and not the ethics of the rich and powerful who define the laws of the gods and practice ethics as they please.  Human rights came to the forefront by drawing a solid line between the affairs of church and those of state.  This essential line merely prevents the fears of religious fundamentalists and the hopes and dreams of the honest American thinkers who founded the United States of America on solid turf, no supernatural ground in sight.

  The Middle Eastern nations are populated by millions of educated and thoughtful young people who would happily swap what they have for a little democracy (or so the American people were told).  Honest and caring people can have no real hope for that outcome under a theocratic state, not in Iraq and not in America.  Bush's belated objective of bringing democracy to Iraq was a dead plan before it was dribbled out into public as an alternative justification to make up for having been dead wrong about previous justifications.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, Eugene Oregon

We really ought be teaching our children how and why to look at life as a whole.  If we did so, they would know that female and male are the two sides of being fully human.  They would know that eastern and western cultures are the two sides of being humankind.  They would know that the living Land and the People are the two sides of life on earth.  They do not need to be told these things.  They need to think these things ... for themselves.

Seeing life as a whole would do wonders for human comprehension, human cultural evolution and peace on earth.  It would nourish honest human relationships with the Land and, as importantly, honest human relationships with each other, as a People.  Seeing life as a whole is an integral aspect of human cultural maturation and we need to be going for it.  The precedent was set in science (if not yet democracy) by Eintstein's generation.

One of the more compelling reasons for looking at life on the whole is the fact that this is the mind's natural approach to seeing things (even the words you are reading).  If, for example, the first and last characters in a word are in place and correct, the order of the remaining characters in the word does not matter so much for the purposes of reading.  The word will remain quite readable.

This can be easily proven to oneself.

On of the mroe cpolmielng ronases for looinkg at lfie on the wolhe is the fcat taht tihs is the mnids nuratal apcaproh to sneieg tgihns (eevn the wrods you are rndeiag).  If, for expmale, the fisrt and lsat ctaachrers in a wrod are in palce and cecrrot, the oredr of the rnneimaig chcaterars in the wrod deos not mttaer so mcuh for the puerposs of riedang.  The wrod wlil reamin qutie redabeal. The reason the mind makes effort to see things as a whole is because it is so much more efficient to do so.  One does not have to expend the time and effort required to contemplate each character in a word in order to read the word.  In order to comprehend the whole, it is not necessary to acknowledge all the details that comprise the whole, only the details that embrace and define the whole.

This is all part of the mind's natural efforts to comprehend things as a whole.  It is the way the mind naturally works, always looking for ways to connect new found knowledge to everything else it knows.  It is that inherent human capacity for absorbing knowledge and employing it in creative effort and synthesis, driven by human necessity and faith in a more intelligent tomorrow.  It is the only source and the only seat of human deity.

Seeing things as a whole is the way the mind naturally works if it were not for the extremist influences of authoritarian ethical systems in the eastern world and authoritarian religious systems in the western world.  Both make effort to restrict thought toward relative and absolute extremes, respectively, from political correctness to law and order, as if there were no need for honest human thought.  Both ancient cultural approaches maintain tradition in the interest of preserving the status quo, in the interest of the wealthy and powerful.

It is difficult to appreciate life as a whole when the ancient cultural "isms" dictate, at their extremes, that we only see half the whole, the maternal side or the paternal side, political correctness or law and order, acceptance or control, sharing or competing, socialism or capitalism, one extreme or the other, no middle human ground.  There is a time to be "nice" and accommodating and there is a time to be "obedient" and legal.  All the time, there is a time to be honest and ethically moral.

Under the religious capitalism of the Bush administration, the American people have been sold a millennial bill of Roman goods.  The Bush CEO administration makes and is able to make no distinctions between the values of greed-driven, crony corporate capitalism and the values of fairness-driven Democracy, human rights and equality in the eyes of God.  The Bush born-again administration makes and is able to make no distinctions between the values of Old Testament Roman religion (vengeance) and the values of nascent Christianity (compassion), as the human source of the human rights beneath all existing and would-be democracies on earth.

Under the values of Bush's religious capitalism, nothing can be seen as a whole.  To do so would be to expose the Bush administration's cultural halfness and extremeness, its disregard of everything feminine and maternal, its disregard of human knowledge and human rights.  This is not the way to win the hearts of honest and caring people, and the Bush administration has long since lost most American citizens.

Under the values of Bush's religious capitalism, the People are disallowed any views other than those of religious capitalism.  These inherently half-witted, dishonest and coercive approaches are corruption and despotism defined, right in downtown America.  The religious right wing and the politically-correct mainstream press will never survive it.  Too many people know that these people lie and fabricate in the name of Jesus and Jefferson.  Too many people see the Bush administrations sins of commission and the mainstream press's sins of omission, respectively.  We are just waiting for the fat lady to sing.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, Eugene Oregon

On the second day of December, Fox News Network reported the results of their "opinion dynamics poll" regarding Bill O'Reilly's statement that "There is a war on Christmas in the U.S. today." Of those responding to the poll, 42% said they agreed with Bill's statement. The majority, 48% of those polled, were in disagreement with O'Reilly's statement, and the other 10% essentially said, as always, that they did not know anything (1). In this instance, those who know nothing are in a desirable position because of the high probability that neither active side in the debate knows what they are talking about.

It is O'Reilly's notion that his "War on Christmas" is being hotly pursued by liberals and atheists and those who would have the audacity to agree with the radical notion of separating church and state. Bill just came unhinged, you see, by the media's use of the term "Holiday trees" in place of the term "Christmas trees" - which Bill dutifully interpreted as an effort by evil people to remove Christ from Christmas. In Bill's Old Testament world, it is an absolute requirement that its adherents live in the Here and Now, no history allowed, no evolution allowed, no cultural context allowed. It makes for ignorance defined.

Meanwhile, Fox News is making effort to sell "Holiday" decorations with Bill's name on them (2), a pair of balls to hang on what better be your "Christmas" tree. It makes a little money for Fox News Network and Bill gets his name hanging from some dupe's tree. Bill has taken an overt path to ignorance bordering on the psychotic, while Fox News has taken an overt path to religious hypocrisy bordering on the psychotic (3). Together, they have accomplished the impossible, i.e., to be right and wrong at the same time.

Bill is, of course, entirely right in claiming that there is a "War on Christmas." At the same time, Bill is extraordinarily wrong to assign his wrathful blame to liberals and the detractors of religion and capitalism. Surely Bill must know that wars are far more prone to stem from right wing, conservative interests. It was against these interests that the Revolutionary War was fought. Surely Bill must know that the war on Christmas began long ago, shortly after WWII, when capitalism took over both political parties, leaving America with only liberal and conservative capitalists at the helm.

In the interest of clarity, then, it is worthwhile to consider the real war on Christmas and its causes, of which Bill O'Reilly is entirely ignorant and oblivious, due largely to the enormous degree to which he has allowed his thought to be compromised by greed-driven capitalism and everything that is wrong with America.

Wouldn't it be a boon to America if Bill O'Reilly, as an American champion, knew something about American history? Wouldn't it be helpful for him to know something about the minds of men like Jefferson and Franklin and Priestly and Paine? Wouldn't it be helpful if Mr. O'Reilly knew why our Fathers separated church and state?

Wouldn't it be helpful if Bill knew that the very concept of human rights emerged on this planet in the work of Jesus, that Jefferson and Franklin did their level best to build nascent Christian values directly into the Declaration, without recourse to supernaturalism and Old Testament religious rot. Wouldn't it be helpful if Bill knew that his grasp of nascent Christian values and how to implement them in the real world is an exercise in utter religious hypocrisy?

When someone bedevils O'Reilly does he look to the Old Testament to find vengeance or to the New Testament to find forgiveness? Is he even able to make a distinction between these diametrically-opposed moralities that a Roman emperor crammed into the same "divine" book?

Certainly Bill can remember when Christmas was a coming together of families and friends, when people took the time to make each other presents with their own talents and skills, when a gift was a warm hug and a hot toddy (or a cold beer), when people felt good about being in each other's company.

Certainly Bill can remember when there was a serenity and peacefulness about Christmas that did not require a trip to Walmartâ ¢ or Saks Fifth Avenueâ ¢. He must know that Christ's peace has been utterly shattered by capitalism's greed-driven machinations, its inherent cheapening of everything it touches by assigning a dollar value to everything it touches.

Certainly, Bill can remember when people lived in horizontal communities where they needed each other in order to make their communities work - as opposed to working in a vertical corporate world (with Dick Cheney at the top) and not knowing the names of neighbors two houses down the street, and not caring to know. Bill must remember when our worlds extended a little bit further beyond ourselves.

Certainly Bill must know that in order to preserve himself as a spokesman for religious capitalism, he must blatantly ignore facts that are self-evident to everyone, e.g., that Christmas has become so over-commercialized as to be next to meaningless for millions of people who must deal every day with a world that is a good deal more real than is Bill O'Reilly's mythical World of Bush.

It is, for Christ's sake, some 230 years since the Declaration was penned to define what we in America are all about, i.e., human rights and democracy. That can be taken literally because what Jefferson did in the Declaration was to enshrine the concept of human rights that was birthed in the work of Jesus, the Christ. Why is this so damned difficult to grasp?

Our fathers fully recognized that the values for which the Christ gave his life had nothing whatsoever to do with the values of Romanism that killed him, that the values of nascent Christianity were not something one held aloft and talked about, they were something that were properly the core values of society - to be acted upon in good faith, not used to justify greed and lust for power as the Romans had done.

Nascent Christian human rights were to be guaranteed to all people, end of discussion, and the American people were supposed to pick up the "ball of liberty" and run with it such that it might "roll round the world." We have allowed old British capitalism's greed and faux religiosity to compromise those goals from day one, and Jefferson and Franklin knew it. It would take nearly another century before Lincoln was able to take Jefferson seriously.

Bill O'Reilly, like George W. Bush and the members of Dick Cheney's neoconservative cabal, is one of those people who speaks and takes action based on his own perverted world views and one never knows whether to laugh or to cry; to laugh because of the utter mindlessness of it all (and what it says about the Bush administration in America) or to cry because of the utter mindlessness of it all (and what it says about the state of democracy in America).

Such a pity it is that Bill O'Reilly is unable to make a distinction between the values of religious capitalism and the values of nascent Christianity. There is not a single aspect of American democracy that religious capitalism has not compromised beyond knowledgeable recognition.

So this year, consider celebrating the birth of the Christ, knowing that his blood flowed from east to west 2000 years ago and from west to east 2000 years later. It was from Jesus that the basic concept of human rights emerged on this earth. Every nation on this planet in which the people want human rights and democracy (from China to Ukraine and Venezuela to Iran) is holding the cross of Jesus on high, even if they don't know, like Bill O'Reilly, the least damned thing about Jesus and Jefferson.

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota

George W. Bush has often requested the American people to acknowledge the "big picture," the implication being that his administration's values, ideologies and policies would be better understood if only the people would "see the world as I see it." Organized human effort, of course, always requires that the people make effort to see with the same eyes so that they can sing from the same sheet of music.

Toward this end, ABC TV is airing a series entitled, "The Big Picture: With God On Our Side," a two-part series that explores the rise of America's conservative evangelicals (a.k.a. - the religious right) and presents a "religious biography" of George W. Bush (ABC TV, Wednesday, 8 September, 2004).

>From the conservative Republican viewpoint, seeing the "big picture" requires little more than opening the mind to embrace the values, attitudes and prophecies of Old Testament Roman religion, the ashes from which American democracy was birthed. In other words, seeing Bush's "big picture" only requires looking at the world through eyes that have never had much interest in human rights because of a preoccupation with religion-based political violence in the name of occupation and dominion (e.g. the European colonial conquest of North/Native America).

Since Constantine's Roman perversion of nascent Christian values in the early 4th century, the values of religious chosenness and self-righteousness have been used to accomplish the impossible, i.e., conquer the western world in the name of Christian compassion. The religious Roman program has always been to preach Christian compassion and to be a defender of Christianity so as to justify forgetting Christian values in self-righteous conquest and control.

The chosenness and self-righteousness that goes with along with being a "Christian soldier" has justified and implemented western conquest from Roman imperialism to European colonialism to post-World War II American capitalism. Under this influence, the human population has moved from tribal to national to global levels of organization. That would be religion's primary role in western cultural evolution, i.e., human unification at the tip of a double-edged sword. As the need for further economic unification diminishes (in a global program nearly complete), the need for political unification increases. That is where Bush's "big picture" comes into the picture.

To be sure, one's "picture" of the world does not get bigger by embracing vengeance, self-righteousness and supernaturalism. One's picture actually gets smaller because so much of what one claims to know about the world must be taken on faith alone. More importantly, there are truly "big pictures" based on human knowledge to consider in human efforts to run the world.

Natural Philosophy's Big Picture

American democracy was birthed from natural philosophy, and natural philosophy provides a picture so big as to make religion a matter of choice and not a matter of imposed obedience and blind loyalty. It was the religious freedom guaranteed by the separation of church and state that made real miracles happen in America, a land where religious rivalries were meted out on Sunday afternoon softball fields instead of religion's killing fields.

The natural philosophy of Jefferson's day, for example, transcended religion, seeing it as an early effort to define the world in ways that turned out to be wrong. Defining how the world actually worked had fallen to Isaac Newton. Natural philosophy saw nascent Christian ethics (before Constantine's Rome) as the source of western human rights and it saw Old Testament Roman religion as the source of self-righteous conquest, despotism and "tyranny over the mind of man."

America's Deist fathers made a clear and clean distinction between the values of nascent Christianity (compassion and human rights) and Old Testament religion (vengeance and law), seeing these value systems as being mutually-exclusive and not belonging together in the same book. The rewriting of western scriptures resulted in "Jefferson's Bible," intentionally devoid of religious superstition and supernaturalism, in honor of nascent Christian human rights.

The dialectic values of democracy are neither liberal or conservative, they are human and they transcend the values of western religious systems and eastern ethical systems. That is precisely why these values have acquired human respect on a global basis, as Jefferson knew they would. Dialectic human values are part of a world picture at least twice the size of the Bush administration's "big picture."

With Bush's "big picture" in political dominion, the people in America will have no option but to ride out western religion's blind descent into apocalypse, as religious capitalism makes its deathbed grasp for dominion of the global economy that it has helped create. One way or another, religious capitalism will retain power to its own prophetic end. Bush and the religious right wing leave no other option.

Under the Bush administration, America has crossed too many lines (e.g., the separation of church and state, the separation of civilian and military authority) that are critical to the success of our father's democracy. Returning to the values of democracy will require a return to the natural philosophy (updated, of course) that birthed American democracy in the first place. Because capitalism has survived at the expense of family and community economies, the re-instatement of democracy in America will require, as it did the first time, socioeconomic change of revolutionary proportions.

Making that return to natural philosophy and dialectic human values will require that religious capitalism continue to discredit itself on moral ground, in the name of the American people and in the eyes of the world. That end has been largely accomplished with Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq, a war immoral in compassion-based Christian eyes (do not hit first, do not hit back) and unjustifiable even in vengeance-based religious eyes (do not hit first, do hit back). The world has long since left behind the criminal "morality" of barbarianism (do hit first, do hit back).

Pre-emption is the product of the Bush administration's religious capitalism, and the educated world sees it as a moral failure, no matter how big the Bush administration's picture of the world might be. America's inability to recognize this egregious departure from the values of nascent Christianity and democracy is part and parcel of what is meant by the "dumbing down" of America. All honest and intelligent thought begins with the values of human knowledge (science and natural philosophy), nascent Christianity and democracy, not at all with the values of religion and capitalism.

Reality's Big Picture

Because of America's wealth, military power and political power in the world, the Bush administration assumes a God-given right to be right, to be the world's policeman, judge, jury and executioner, to do whatever it takes to remain in fiscal and political dominion. Accordingly, many Americans have thrived on the notion that America is the greatest nation in the world. That, of course, was only true when America still honored the values of democracy.

Since World War II and the political dominion of corporate America via an "influence for a fee" government, the US has emphasized the pursuit of profits while the European democracies have continued to honor "the people" and the values of democracy. As a result, the US is the only western democracy that does not guarantee medical care for its people, the only democracy abandoning Hippocratean ethics to practice an exclusionary medicine based on money. This is not a characteristic of a "great" nation.

Today, 25 nations in Europe, representing 455 million people, have united to create a "United States" of Europe, the European Union. Its $10.5 trillion GDP is now larger than the US GDP, making it the world's largest economy. The EU has taken over as the world's leading exporter and the world's largest internal market. EU members also tend to have a longer life expectancy, a lower infant mortality and a more equitable distribution of wealth than do American citizens (Jeremy Rifkin, Daring to Dream," Guardian UK, September 1, 2004). In spite of American strength in the world, America has been failing for decades, caught up in cultural extremism.

All of this is related to America's own internal culture war between capitalism and democracy. Europeans see that Americans "live to work" while Europeans prefer to "work to live." The difference is an average paid vacation time of 6 weeks in Europe and 2 weeks in the U.S. The difference is going to European pubs to philosophize and pontificate and going to American bars to escape. Under capitalism, Americans find freedom in autonomy and the nuclear family. The more wealth one secures in America, the more independence and freedom under capitalism. Under democracy, Europeans find their freedom not in autonomy but in community. "It's about belonging, not belongings." (Rifkin, Daring to Dream).

The value of a Euro now eclipses the value of a US Dollar by a third. If the Euro were to become the sole oil transaction currency in the Middle East, the US will be paying more and getting less. Control of that market so vital to the "American way," virtually requires physical control of Middle Eastern oil fields. The underlying desperation and operational rationales for the Bush administration's unilateralism, its intimidation of the European democracies and its unprovoked attack on Iraq begin to emerge. Democracies that take care of their people are a threat to the dominion of religious capitalism in America.

Additional acts of belligerence by the Bush administration on the global stage (and they are coming, one can be sure) will not be taken lightly by those yet honoring the values of democracy. The response of the world, primarily the European Union, will be to discredit religious capitalism by arranging for its fiscal bankruptcy and ouster from the global political arena. With the failure of vengeance-based religion and crony capitalism, the doors will be open to natural philosophy and the redefinition of democracy in human rights terms to include the workplace and the marketplace, the doors will be open to nourishing democracy on a global basis.

For what the Bush administration spends in Iraq and Afghanistan in three months, America could feed the unfed world and, in league with Britain and the European Union, establish compassionate and knowledgeable approaches to world peace in our lifetimes. This cannot happen within the confines of Bush's "big picture," literally the religious world view which natural philosophy and democracy rejected two centuries ago.

The real "big picture" is that the people on this earth are currently embedded in a cultural evolutionary program that is playing itself out, largely without their conscious awareness. We fail to see the "bigger picture," in which the Bush administration is a ideologically-corrupt pawn in a cultural program that was written millennia ago, a self-terminating program to be replaced by democracy's self-correcting program.

The moral and fiscal bankruptcy of religious capitalism will bring to a close an era of human unification, much of which was at the point of a double-edged western sword. This end is not only prophetic in coming, it is required out of evolutionary necessity if the people and the land are to survive. The people and the land, of course, will not only survive but they will thrive in a human world released from political and spiritual dualism and the despotism and violent death it has nourished.

As we stand on the edge of the western religious abyss, we stand on the threshold of an American dream, the real "American dream" of fairness and equality for the people. The amount of bloodshed in between will be determined by the people of America and the world and how long it takes them to recognize and stand up against cultural extremism, how long it takes them to opt for Jefferson's human way out of religion-based political violence by re-establishing democracy with a basis in nascent Christian human rights. That would be the "end of time" for religious despotism and the "second coming" for Christian human rights, would it not?

Author's note: As alluded to in the above paragraph, the imagery of Old Testament religion typically has a counterpart in the real world. Consider, for example, the concept of heavenly "angels," as representatives of and messengers from God. In the real world of natural philosophy, there is an exact equivalent of angels, and they are ubiquitous and easily recognized. All real angels arrive on this earth with one characteristic in common, i.e., they poop their pants. --posted 09.20.04

Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the eastern shadow of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. His website at www.jeffersonseyes.com provides an introduction to dialectic thought and postmodern natural philosophy. He can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com.