New Quaker Notebook

Bush listens to demons. In my last blog I poked satirical fun at George W. Bush for his June 2003 declaration to Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen and his Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and also, by the way, to create a Palestinian state.[1] In some ways it really is funny because, after all, this is a man who passes out on pretzels and can't seem to get through a speech without a radio transmitter on his back. And it's funny, too, because he's the president of the United States.

But it isn't funny, really, and I should have avoided the low road in the issue of Bush's apparent, direct encounter with the living God. I think there isn't much furor over his comment because some Christians really believe that he has this special relationship with the Father. I guess these are the same people who voted for him as "God's man" in the White House. It's also been denied that he even said what the Palestinian ministers said he said, but that is tantamount to calling them liars, isn't it?[2] Many non-Christian Americans don't believe him because they don't think anyone has that relationship, least of all George W. Bush. Many Christians also don't believe him because we were warned by Jesus to "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves" [Matt. 7:15 NKJ]. And we have had our share of these false prophets, quite a few of them within this generation—Herbert Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong, Jim Bakker, Marjoe Gortner, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts[3], Jimmy Swaggart, and too many others.

What Bush was claiming was a spiritual leading, and Christians have tests for such things. That's how we're able to tell the fakes from the bonafides. Friends have used a five-fold test for spiritual leadings:[4]

There are other tests for discernment[5] but Bush is not able to take advantage of these because, for him, his faith is "a very, it's very personal."[6] By keeping his faith personal and well within the narrow confines of his prayer circle, he is unable to follow Paul's charge to "Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil." [1 Thess 5:21-22] By thus creating a new religion for himself, he is entirely free from any conflicting standards and can swagger with an arrogant heart, believing that he and the-god-who-speaks-to-him are chums. But he himself will never be able to discern whether the voice he hears is the same that has spoken to all true prophets or whether it's the lying words of his own personal demon.

1. BBC News, Common Dreams News Center, October 6, 2005.
2. Specifically, see Press Briefing by Scott McClellan , October 6, 2005: Q Have you ever heard the President say that God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and— / MR. McCLELLAN: No, and I've been in many meetings with him and never heard such a thing. / Q Are you aware of the—there's a BBC broadcast tonight that's quoting the Palestinian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister as saying that they were in a meeting with the President in June of '03, and there are some very detailed quotes here, saying that the President said to them, "God told me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan,' and I did," and then "God told me, 'George go and end the tyranny in the Iraq'" and so forth and so on? / MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's absurd. He's never made such comments.
3. I'm old enough to remember when Oral Roberts claimed to have had a vision from God in which God told him to build the City of Faith Medical Center, which Roberts opened in 1981 (and closed in bankruptcy in 1989). In addition to the 900 foot Jesus who told Roberts that the City of Faith would be successful, my favorite has to be when Jesus appeared to him in person and told him to find a cure for cancer.
4. Here I'm relying on Hugh Barbour's "Five Tests for Discerning a True Leading" available at the Tract Association of Friends.
5. See, e.g., the wide-reaching study Thus Saith the Lord? (Creation House, 1999) by John Bevere; see my approbative review of the book in Quaker Books for Friends. On this subject I also highly recommend Knowing God's Will (InterVarsity Press, 1991, 2nd ed) by M. Blaine Smith.
6. Transcript of Debate Between Bush and Kerry, With Domestic Policy the Topic, New York Times, October 13, 2004: "My faith plays a big part in my life. And when I was answering that question what I was really saying to the person was that I pray a lot. And I do. And my faith is a very, it's very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm's way. I pray for my family. I pray for my little girls."

President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq—and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9:00 pm on Monday 10, Monday 17, and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ..." And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

[ READ MORE » ]

Love is hate, war is peace. So FEMA's incompetence has managed to whitewash the City of New Orleans. The large black population, literally washed out of the Big Easy by Hurricane Katrina, may never come back—and what do they have to return to? The Charity Hospital system, their health safety net, is probably going to be dismantled,[1] and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has so far awarded less than 2 percent of the $1.6 billion in contracts to minority-owned businesses in the region.[2]

As this plays out, too, we have Col Stephen Davis, commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team 2 in western Iraq, saying to a crowd of 300 Iraqis who were angered by house-to-house searches and summary detentions:

"We're not going anywhere," he told the murmuring crowd, adding that as long as there were attacks against Iraqi or American troops the house searches and roadblocks and bridge closings would continue.

"Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire from the base," he said. "I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace."[3]

Why do the babies starve
When there's enough food to feed the world
Why when there're so many of us
Are there people still alone

Why are the missiles called peace keepers
When they're aimed to kill
Why is a woman still not safe
When she's in her home

Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
And we're all free[4]

CIA reads New Quaker Notebook. I just have to say I'm flattered that someone at the Central Intelligence Agency (that would be the CIA, as in cia.gov) is reading the New Quaker Notebook. Someone there likes good reading. Today makes 23 returning visits to the blog so far.

More Freakonomics. Steven D. Levitt, one of the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, responded to William Bennett's comments about abortion and his use of the authors' arguments in Freakonomics during his September 28 broadcast of the Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America. Says Levitt, in part:

If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. Immediately after he made the statement about blacks, he followed it up by saying, "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." He made a factual statement (if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down), and then he noted that just because a statement is true, it doesn't mean that it is desirable or moral. That is, of course, an incredibly important distinction and one that we make over and over in Freakonomics.

Now this is a different claim than one he presented in his May 2001 article on The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, written with John D. Donohue III. There Levitt and Donohue argued on empirical grounds that:

The evidence we present is consistent with legalized abortion reducing crime rates with a twenty-year lag. Our results suggest that an increase of 100 abortions per 1000 live births reduces a cohort's crime by roughly 10 percent. Extrapolating our results out of sample to a counterfactual in which abortion remained illegal and the number of illegal abortions performed remained steady at the 1960s level, we estimate that (with average national effective abortion rates in 1997 for all three crimes ranging from between 142 and 252) crime was almost 15-25 percent lower in 1997 than it would have been absent legalized abortion. These estimates suggest that legalized abortion is a primary explanation for the large drops in murder, property crime, and violent crime that our nation has experienced over the last decade. Indeed, legalized abortion may account for as much as one-half of the overall crime reduction. Assuming that this claim is correct, existing estimates of the costs of crime (e.g., Miller, Cohen, and Rossman [1993] suggest that the social benefit to reduced crime as a result of abortion may be on the order of $30 billion dollars annually.

But it is one thing to reach a conclusion based on empirical information; it is another thing entirely to declare "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." The problem is not that Levitt is happening to agree here with Bennett, but that both are just pulling this from their back pockets and presenting it as if it's a simple math product, which it isn't. Bigotry also happens to intelligent people, like red hair and intestinal gas.

What I see. The US has dug itself into an entrenched trend toward the worst elements of fascism. The New York Times today reports on the unprecedented growth in prison life sentences. Its recent survey disclosed that 1 in every 10 prisoners is serving such a sentence:

Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.

A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation's prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences. The number of lifers has almost doubled in the last decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population. Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes.

Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words "without parole" appended to their sentences. In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number rose to 28 percent.[1]

In addition to these sad facts about the prison industrial complex in the US, we ought to add the Bush administration's grievance that Congress isn't giving enough money for Pentagon expenditures, with an arrogant warning to lawmakers "not to add any amendments to regulate the treatment of detainees or set up a commission to probe abuse." You would think that a $440.2 billion defense spending bill would be enough to spread happy democracy through warfare (with wanton, depraved torture thrown in as lagniappe) but apparently not for the Busheviks, as this adminstration continues to spend and spend for defense and weaponry in what is really just a long American tradition of war and war-ability. The World Policy Institute finds that such advocacy for the corporate weapons industry is landing the current administration in a flat contradiction:

Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush's pledge to "end tyranny in our world" than the United States' role as the world's leading arms exporting nation. Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition allies in conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these alleged benefits often come at a high price. All too often, US arms transfers end up fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of US adversaries. As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, while pledging comparable high-tech military hardware to its rival India, US arms sometimes go to both sides in long brewing conflicts, ratcheting up tensions and giving both sides better firepower with which to threaten each other. Far from serving as a force for security and stability, US weapons sales frequently serve to empower unstable, undemocratic regimes to the detriment of US and global security.[2]

Lest we blame the GOP for this, the other half of our so-called two-party system seems to favor guns and bombs and war equally as much.[3]

But add to this picture, too, the recent finding by the Government Accountability Office that the "administration of President George W. Bush broke the law as it resorted to illegal 'covert propaganda' in trying to sell its key education initiative to the public."[4]

So I see a real trend, at a time when the core supporters for the Busheviks are just too busy worrying about getting raptured—or at least looking at it, feeding the Rapture business from dimly-lit pews in American Christian churches.[5]

1. Reuters, September 30, 2005. And we've already passed a landmark in the world's prison systems. In the January 4, 2000, Buffalo Beat, Michael I. Niman reported this about America's prison industrial complex: "In 1998 the US surpassed the former Soviet Union and won the crown as the globe's foremost jailer with an incarceration rate of approximately 690 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. By comparison, that is almost 6 times Canada's incarceration rate (115), over 12 times Greece's rate (55), 19 times Japan's rate (37) and 29 times India's rate of 24 prisoners per 100,000 citizens."
2. World Policy Institute's June 2005 Special Report entitled "US Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict?" (US Military Aid and Arms Transfers Since September 11).
3. See the Mother Jones Arms Around the World report at the end of the 20th century. There are also the ongoing statistics provided by the The Federation of American Scientists Arms Sales Monitoring Project.
4. "Bush Administration Found Involved in Illegal 'Covert Propaganda'," Agence France Press, October 1, 2005. News article is archived at Common Dreams News Center.
5. The newest installment of the Left Behind theatrical series, Left Behind: World at War is distributing the movie in churches. See Agape Press, August 24, 2005. Article is archived at the Left Behind website.