[Mb-civic] A grieving mother speaks out & "The Baby & the Cross"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Rewarding Incompetence
by Cindy Sheehan
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/rewarding_incompetence.php
December 21, 2004

In only a few days, Christians around the country and the world will be
celebrating the birth of Jesus, also called the Prince of Peace. The
backdrop to Christmas this year, of course, is the war in Iraq a majority
of Americans now believe was a mistake.  Cindy Sheehan's heart-felt 
rebuke
to Time offers a perspective we hope the nation will hear more of in 2005
as we contemplate the consequences of our leaders' recklessness.

Cindy Sheehan lives in California.
--------
=====================================================
=====
Dear Time Editors:

My son, Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. This has been
an extraordinary couple of weeks of "slaps in the faces" to us families of
fallen heroes.

First, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, admits to the world
something that we as military families already know: The United States 
was
not prepared for nor had any plan for the assault on Iraq. Our children
were sent to fight an ill-conceived and badly prosecuted war. Our troops
were sent with the wrong type of training, bad equipment, inferior
protection and thin supply lines. Our children have been killed and we
have made the ultimate sacrifice for this fiasco of a war, then we find
out this week that Rumsfeld doesn't even have the courtesy or compassion
to sign the "death letters," as they are so callously called. Besides the
upcoming holidays and the fact we miss our children desperately, what else
can go wrong this holiday season?

Well let's see. Oh yes. George W. Bush awards the Presidential Medal of
Freedom to three more architects of the quagmire that is Iraq. Thousands
of people are dead and Bremer, Tenet and Franks are given our country's
highest civilian award. What's next?

To top everything off, after it has been proven that Iraq had no weapons
of mass destruction, there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over
1,300 brave young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in ruins,
what does Time Magazine do? Names George W. Bush as its "Man of the 
Year."
The person who betrayed this country into a needless war and whom I hold
ultimately responsible for my son's death and who was questionably
elected, again, to a second term, is honored this way by your magazine.

I hope we finally find peace in our world and that our troops who remain
in Iraq are brought home speedily after-all, there was no reason for our
troops to be there in the first place. No reason for my son and over 1,300
others to have been taken from their families. No reason for the
infrastructure of Iraq to be demolished and thousands of Iraqis being
killed. No reason for the notion of a "happy" holiday to be robbed from my
family forever. I hope that our "leaders" don't invade any other countries
posing no serious threat to the United States. I hope there is no draft. I
hope that the five people mentioned here (and many others) will finally be
held responsible for the horrible mistake they got our country into. I
hope that competence is finally rewarded and incompetence is 
appropriately
punished. These are my wishes for 2005.

This isn't the first time your magazine has selected a questionable man
for this honor, but it's the first time it affected my family so
personally and so sorrowfully.

Cindy Sheehan
========================




The Guardian
December 24, 2004

Comment

Empires prefer a baby and the cross to the adult Jesus

>From Constantine to Bush, power has needed to stifle a
revolutionary message

By Giles Fraser

Guardian Every Sunday in church, Christians recite the
Nicene Creed. "Who for us and for our salvation came
down from heaven. And was incarnate of the Holy Ghost
and of the Virgin Mary and was made man; was crucified
also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was
buried; and the third day rose again according to the
Scriptures." It's the official summary of the Christian
faith but, astonishingly, it jumps straight from birth
to death, apparently indifferent to what happened in
between.

Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and
Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too
young or too much in agony to shock us with his
revolutionary rhetoric. The adult Christ who calls his
followers to renounce wealth, power and violence is
passed over in favour of the gurgling baby and the
screaming victim. As such, Nicene Christianity is
easily conscripted into a religion of convenience, with
believers worshipping a gagged and glorified saviour
who has nothing to say about how we use our money or
whether or not we go to war.

Christianity became the official religion of the Roman
empire with the conversion of the emperor Constantine
in 312, after which the church began to backpedal on
the more radical demands of the adult Christ. The
Nicene Creed was composed in 325 under the sponsorship
of Constantine. It was Constantine who decided that
December 25 was to be the date on which Christians were
to celebrate the birth of Christ and it was Constantine
who ordered the building of the Church of the Nativity
at Bethlehem. Christmas - a festival completely unknown
to the early church - was invented by the Roman
emperor. And from Constantine onwards, the radical
Christ worshipped by the early church would be pushed
to the margins of Christian history to be replaced with
the infinitely more accommodating religion of the baby
and the cross.

The adult Jesus described his mission as being to
"preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to
the captives and to set at liberty those who are
oppressed". He insisted that the social outcast be
loved and cared for, and that the rich have less chance
of getting into heaven than a camel has of getting
through the eye of a needle. Jesus set out to destroy
the imprisoning obligations of debt, speaking instead
of forgiveness and the redistribution of wealth. He was
accused of blasphemy for attacking the religious
authorities as self-serving and hypocritical.

In contrast, the Nicene religion of the baby and the
cross gives us Christianity without the politics. The
Posh and Becks nativity scene is the perfect tableau
into which to place this Nicene baby, for like the
much-lauded celebrity, this Christ is there to be gazed
upon and adored - but not to be heard or heeded. In a
similar vein, modern evangelical choruses offer wave
upon wave of praise to the name of Jesus, but offer
little political or economic content to trouble his
adoring fans.

Yet despite the silence of the baby, it should be
perfectly obvious to anyone who has actually read the
Christmas stories that the gospel regards the
incarnation as challenging the existing order. The
pregnant Mary anticipates Christ's birth with some
fiery political theology: God "has brought down the
powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, he
has filled the hungry with good things and sent the
rich away empty", she blazes. Born among farm
labourers, yet worshipped by kings, Christ announces an
astonishing reversal of political authority. The local
imperial stooge, King Herod, is so threatened by
rumours of his birth that he sends troops to Bethlehem
to find the child and kill him. Herod recognised that
to claim Jesus is lord and king is to say that Caesar
isn't. Christ's birth is not a silent night - it's the
beginning of a revolution that threatened to undermine
the whole basis of Roman power.

Little wonder, then, that influential US Christian
commentator Jim Wallis created a storm earlier in the
year when he penned an attack upon "Bush's theology of
empire", helpfully illustrated with a picture of Bush
made up to look like the emperor Constantine. "Once
there was Rome, now there is a new Rome," argued
Wallis.

Constantine was converted to Christianity by a vision
that came to him on the eve of the battle of Milvian
Bridge: "He saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and
resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from
light, and a text attached to it which said, 'By this
sign, conquer' ". Soon the cross would morph from being
a hated symbol of Roman brutality into the universally
recognisable logo of the Holy Roman Empire. Within a
century, St Augustine would develop the novel idea of
just war, trimming the church's originally pacifist
message to the needs of the imperial war machine.

Like Constantine, George Bush has borrowed the language
of Christianity to sup port and justify his military
ambition. And just like that of Constantine, the
Christianity of this new Rome offers another carefully
edited version of the Bible. Once again, the religion
that speaks of forgiving enemies and turning the other
cheek is pressed into military service.

The story of Christmas, properly understood, asserts
that God is not best imagined as an all-powerful despot
but as a vulnerable and pathetic child. It's a
statement about the nature of divine power. But in the
hands of conservative theologians, the Nicene religion
of the baby and the cross is a way of distracting
attention away from the teachings of Christ. It's a
form of religion that concentrates on things like
belief in the virgin birth while ignoring the fact that
the gospels are much more concerned about the treatment
of the poor and the forgiveness of enemies.

Bush may have claimed that "Jesus Christ changed my
life", but Jesus doesn't seem to have changed his
politics. As the carol reminds us: "And man at war with
man hears not the love song that they bring, O hush the
noise ye men of strife and hear the angels sing."

· The Rev Dr Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and
lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford

giles.fraser at btinternet.com Guardian Unlimited (c)
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1379412,00.html

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