Why does God always get a pass?

If you were standing next to a drowning child and all you had to do was reach out and pull the child in, but you did nothing, you could be charged with negligent homicide. So why does God get a pass when he/she had the power to divert the tornado just a little bit to avoid Greensburg KS? Did he/she really mean to nail Greensburg? If something good happens we praise God; when something really bad happens, he/she gets a pass. Let's face it, if you treated your children the way God treats his children, you'd be in jail for child abuse. Unless of course, there is no God, in which case everything makes sense.

Biological Weapons

Rats by Robert Sullivan is a fascinating study of rats and their cohabitation with humans. One particularly interesting section was on rats and plague, which, as you may know, is spread to humans by the rat flea. Apparently the Japanese were the first to experiment with the use of plague as a biological weapon during WWII under the direction of General Shiro Ishii. He discovered that the best was to infect a city with plague was to fill clay bombs with infected fleas. An attack was successfully conducted against the Chinese city of Changde. A clue that the outbreak was caused by humans rather than rats was that the rats began dying of plague weeks after the humans, a reverse of the normal situation.

General Ishii also practiced vivisection on live humans. He was never tried for war crimes, apparently having made a deal with the Americans who got copies of his notes and papers which formed the basis for the early American attempts at creating biological weapons. He retired a respected medical man.

The United States began experimenting with biological weapons in the early fifties and tested their weapon distribution methods on unsuspecting Americans. In one case, Navy planes sprayed the eastern Virginia coat with microbes similar to Anthrax but "thought to be harmless," and as late as 1966, soldiers dressed in civilian clothes dropped light bulbs filled with the microbes on the tracks in New York subways in order to measure how the microbes dispersed -- all without the knowledge of the public or Congress.

Stats, the Bible and the Christian Right

Some data to consider. These numbers were compiled by a Catholic priest.

1. There are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible.
2. Not one verse relates to gay marriage.
3. Only two verses could even remotely have anything to do with abortion.
4. Over 5,000 discuss alleviating poverty.
5. The number 1 item of the published Christian Coalition's agenda was preserving the Bush tax cuts.

Maybe the Christian right needs to reorient its priorities.

Slavery, Property, and Miscegenation

In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that read, "Children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother." Seems otherwise innocuous, but this statute reversed English common law under which the status of the child frollowed that of the father.

The implications were huge. It meant that slave owners could impregnate as many slave women as they wanted secure in the knowledge that the children that resulted would become their property, increasing their wealth and slave population. This provided a huge incentive for white men to sleep with their slave women.

This intertwined sex and race and led to the powerful taboo of black men marrying or even looking at a white woman. The long-term result of this taboo was the epidemic of the lynching of black men.

Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson

KISS

"There's no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There's an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You always have personalities in uniform--I had them in Vietnam--who will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular psyche is liable to do. You don't have rules for your good people. You have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they're your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind of changes in them, any relaxation or even a hint of it, you're opening Pandora's box. And I fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice-president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers, Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of the them."

An administration official who had served in Vietnam explaining Abu Ghraib. Quoted by George Packer in The Assassin's Gate.