Blasphemy & insanity

       These are dark days in Washington, D.C.

       If blasphemy is in the air, insanity rules on the ground.

       I’ve been deliberately silent recently, hoping that the current occupant of the White House might miraculously turn into a functioning humane being and the toadies he’s surrounded himself with might summon the courage to push him away from disaster.

       Neither prospect appears likely.

       The White House clown and his VP sidekick now see fit to lecture Pope Leo on Christian theology, while right-wing extremists devise new smears to revive long buried but never quite dead fears of Roman Catholicism.

       Slipping away from his bogus Board of Peace to pursue war with Iran, our fearless “leader” devotes an Easter message to condemning Leo for pursuing peace. He even accuses Leo of being “WEAK on crime.”

       This tirade, of course, comes after he threatens to bomb Iran back to the stone age for daring to stand up to him and posts another ridiculous picture of himself in the guise of Jesus.

       When even some of his staunchest supporters appear shocked by this image, he claims he thought it portrayed him as a healer.

       (Does he really believe anyone will believe that? Well, Franklin Graham apparently does, and Paula White, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who usually jumps up and down waving his “born again” credentials but now appears to have been born again in a different way.)

       An Atlantic staff writer says these episodes reveal that to our “leader,” religion is about power, not morality.

       No surprise there. Only a few months ago, he declared that the only thing constraining him was his “own morality.” As if there were such a thing. His “morality” is solely what serves his personal interests.

       He even views Leo’s election as pope as due to him. He says Leo “was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with” an American leader.

       It’s hard to deal with that kind of fantasy. Some attribute it to dementia, but it’s a more fundamental disorder than that, and the signs of it have been there for years. To paraphrase one commentator, what kind of man says and does these things?

  —————

       It gets worse.

       Many of his functionaries wallow in a deeper fantasy that could get us all killed.

       The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has gotten hundreds of complaints from U.S. military personnel in the Middle East about officers who proclaim that this war is “all part of God’s divine plan” as outlined in the book of Revelation.

      One officer allegedly said that our “leader” has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

       This is not a casual misinterpretation of scripture. This is monstrously bad. This is satanic.

        On September 9, 2001, my Sunday sermon concerned caring for our children, globally as well as locally. I remember one line especially well: “If Palestinians have a form of country music, a popular song right now might be, ‘Mamas, don't let your sons grow up to be suicide bombers.’ ”

          Two days later, suicide bombers carried out terror attacks against targets in New York and Washington, and thousands of Americans died.

          My remarks were not prescient, though any observer of the international scene might have foreseen some awful thing developing. (My remarks also were not “prophetic,” in the standard “evangelical” Christian sense, meaning predictive. Prophecy is not about predicting the future. Prophecy is evaluating the present in light of God’s will for the future.)

       Here’s the thing: When the minds of Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists are both warped by similar satanic impulses, awful things are going to happen. Again, this is not prescient or prophetic. It’s just common sense.

       Don’t look for much of that in certain seats of power these days.   

       Or in many of our churches.

       We are now in the midst of "America Reads the Bible," continuing to April 25. Hundreds of celebrities are reading portions of the Bible in a continuous livestream. It’s billed as “a sacred opportunity to call our nation back to its spiritual foundations.”

       Among the readers are Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, who has never encountered a Bible verse he couldn’t misquote (or even repeat a misquote from a movie), plus our so-called “leader,” who is scheduled to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22.

       Read that one for yourself. The ironies pile up from start to finish!

       Let me conclude today with this Bible reading, Matthew 5:11, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Think of Pope Leo when you hear, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” On his account, not your own.