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Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories June 19 / 20, 2004 Diane Christian Morality and Death: a Meditation on Bush and Blake Josh Frank How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature Col. Dan Smith Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan Brian Cloughley A Profound Disruption of the Senses June 18, 2004 Chris Floyd Blood Victory Dave Zirin Danielle Green, Basketball Player & Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War Justin E.H. Smith The Christian Question in American Politics Gary Leupp The "Long-Established" Link?: Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi   June 17, 2004 Noel Ignatiev Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine Kurt Nimmo The Bush-Kerry Conundrum Ed Cardoni The Persecution of Steve Kurtz Ron Jacobs Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do Dave Lindorff Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years" Greg Moses Geneva Ignored Norm Dixon How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons   June 16, 2004 Lenni Brenner A Question for Kerry Supporters Davey D Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan Daniel Wolff Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner Abuse? Bruce Jackson Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake Patrick Cockburn Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power Facilities Gary Handschumacher Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads JG Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop Mario Benedetti Obituary with Cheers Vicente Navarro Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who is Rodrigo Rato? Website of the Day Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch June 15, 2004 Harry Browne Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe Neve Gordon The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited David Palmer Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI John Blair Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming Dave Lindorff God Wins in TKO Bill Quigley Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step In Patrick Cockburn Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast John Chuckman John Kerry, Political Placebo June 14, 2004 John Stanton / Wayne Madsen Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins the Party Kathy Kelly Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies? Bruce Jackson Bush Gets Testy About Torture Lee Sustar Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs Kurt Nimmo The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit 9/11 Jim Davis Hard Right Nativism Eliot Katz Death and War Uri Avnery The Nightmare Comes True Website of the Day Instruments of Statecraft   June 12 / 13, 2004 Peter Linebaugh Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede Team CounterPunch CP's Favorite Albums Jeffrey St. Clair Troy, Now and Then Gary Leupp Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq? Brian Cloughley US Military in Crisis Antonio Ponvert, III Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection Ben Tripp The Polls Get Stupider Joe Bageant Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash" Ron Jacobs The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency Forrest Hylton Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés Christopher Brauchli Federal Bureau of Errors Kurt Nimmo Going After Qaddafi, Again Wayne Madsen Israel's Slap at Reagan Anthony Loewenstein Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World Michael Donnelly A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous Greg Moses Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah? Susan Davis Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban Joseph Ramsey Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground Niranjan Ramakrishnan The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century Wayne Saunders The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup Poets' Basement Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert Website of the Weekend Insurgent Music

June 19 / 20, 2004 A Meditation on Bush and Blake Morality and Death By DIANE CHRISTIAN Morality and mortality are almost identical words in English. The words in the Latin roots are similar too—mores (customs) and mors (death). And they are linked concepts in biblical myth. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is death in the Genesis story. Adam and Eve were warned not to eat of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil; they should have eaten of the tree of life. Death in much religious thinking is not just biology, it’s moral punishment. Some Christian thinking reserves the power of death solely to God—life is not to be tampered with from zygote conception through to life’s end. The Catholic Church in the last thirty years opposed the death penalty largely in support of its anti-abortion position. Abortion, execution, euthanasia are proscribed in this view as life is deemed ‘a seamless garment,’ not to be torn by man. Life and death belong to God. This is not the view of President Bush who espouses a warrior Christianity eager to slay evildoers. Nor is it the view of jihadist religious warriors like Osama bin Laden who espouse a warrior Islam eager to slay infidels. They both proscribe abortion as violating the sanctity of life but they embrace execution as holy in the name of the moral destruction of evil. ‘Evil’ is the label that renders others killable. Figuring out evil and controlling it is what social ‘mores’ (‘customs, affairs, situations’ from the Latin) or morals are about. But religious warriors like Bush and bin Laden see morals not as human customs but as divine commissions. They believe in their righteousness and the evil of the other. They believe they are a higher law. Both Bush and bin Laden argue that they have a right to the power of death—not because they have great wealth and weaponry, but because they are good and others evil. Many blame religion for this kind of thinking despite the Alexanders & Caesars and Stalins who conquered for glory and empire and power not for God. Blake, a great religious thinker during the Enlightenment, thought it was morality not religion that was the problem. He said “If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour.” * * * Dividing people into good and evil abstracts humans into entities worthy or unworthy of life; it licenses a kill. For Blake good and evil apply to acts. Humans are capable of both. For Blake Christ was the Saviour because he championed not abstract purity or goodness but a humanity which mastered its own evil and did not return that of others. “The Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin,” he wrote, “can never be the cause of a War or of a single Martyrdom.” It wasn’t that Blake didn’t know about the Crusades or the Inquisition but he understood that invoking god and being godly weren’t equal. He thought religions that preached vengeance for sin were false, of Satan—a word that means not ‘the evil one’ but ‘the accuser.’ He took the God principle back to the distinction between life and death. And he thought that basically man will have a religion—either of Jesus or of Satan, either a human face or an avenger. He saw Christ not as accuser-warrior, but as lover-savior. God is not the killing principle. Judge a tree by its fruits. Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo and author of the new book Blood Sacrifice. She can be reached at: engdc@acsu.buffalo.edu Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004 Peter Linebaugh Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede Team CounterPunch CP's Favorite Albums Jeffrey St. Clair Troy, Now and Then Gary Leupp Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq? Brian Cloughley US Military in Crisis Antonio Ponvert, III Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection Ben Tripp The Polls Get Stupider Joe Bageant Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash" Ron Jacobs The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency Forrest Hylton Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés Christopher Brauchli Federal Bureau of Errors Kurt Nimmo Going After Qaddafi, Again Wayne Madsen Israel's Slap at Reagan Anthony Loewenstein Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World Michael Donnelly A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous Greg Moses Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah? Susan Davis Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban Joseph Ramsey Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground Niranjan Ramakrishnan The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century Wayne Saunders The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup Poets' Basement Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert Website of the Weekend Insurgent Music   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /