Christian Madness Vacation Tour! (sales tax extra)

I only did half a rant on the Kook who was running around Haiti shanghaiing children to populate her soon to be built orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

The other half of the rant had to – has to – do with the weird state of “Christian” people in this second world country (checked our credit ratings lately?) towards the people, mostly of a different color in most cases, and in the third world.

Add to that the bizarre threat or was it a command to “Go teach all nations” the Christian way whatever that flavor of the month philosophy is this month on (Comedy Central) TV evangelism or Capitol Hill (by way of non-profit lobbyists with loads of cash).

Apparently that same article that describes the possible criminal activities of Laura Silsby and her bunch of Baptist do-gooders out on a little adventure in the bush – is how offensive this whole thing plays in the rest of the planet.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

If I was a Muslim, or a Buddhist or a non-believer, I would look at Haitians, poor as they are, and see that they do have a social network of relatives they can turn to in times of needs. And if not, there are the orphanages. Plenty of them. Trying to get the rest of the planet to adopt children nobody else wants.

And here is this nose up in the air white Baptist American grabbing kids and running for the border to set up shop for her own gain. Americans, to the rest of the world, no longer look like the sane providers and saviours they once did seventy odd years ago when we helped, by force of arms, to directly defeat global Fascism and indirectly Stalinist Communism.

What did Laura Silsby think she was going to do? Did God have a plan for her success? (suddenly I sound like Joel Osteen). Build a Jim and Tammy Baker Amusement Park/Orphanage and rake in the cash as she made commercials showing sad little children and give interviews on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club?

What kind of a bubble world does she live in? Where is her humanity and her old fashioned sense of dignity and self worth? Where is she in this whole freaking Jesus Christ Ponzi scam that Christianity seems to have become in the past forty years or so?

She lives in the modern American E-Van-Gel-ical Christian reality of selling Jesus as a market commodity or product. “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?” I have heard a thousand times from some nitwit in the streets, in the mall, at a bus stop, at my front door. And my straight man line back is - “Does he come with a guarantee or at least a ten year warranty?” You have no idea how many times I have stopped the Jesus Freaks in their tracks with that line. Amen!

But seriously folks, since the Reformation, intelligent people have built, put a challenge on themselves to both learn to read and to learn to decipher the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Somewhere along the timeline for the Americans at least, it turned into a consumer product and a “don’t worry about anything else” once you bought the Jesus Gizmo, whatever it really is. That’s why when we started a war on Iraq and Afghanistan, George Bush felt safe to tell us to “forget about it” and go to the mall and shop some more on your grandchildren’s credit.

Getting back to the article about the crazy American missionaries, there is a ending note about how the Baptists, like the rest of all corporations, have outsourced the old fashioned missionaries who tried to get to know the people they were trying to convert. (outsourcing – reduces the benefits and retirement costs of evangelism)

The way I see it on a timeline, John XXIII did more than try to put some fresh air in the Vatican that now has it windows hermetically sealed. He also set a fire under paranoid white people in the South and the Heartland that saw a threat from a word called “Ecumenical”. Scared the shit of these “good” “Christians” enough to build walls and hunker down for the “end times”. What losers some of these evangelicals be. It is truly sad.

Now religion in America is a full corrupt arm of the politics of this country in sore need of unity, love and fairness – but instead we get “NO” or latte liberals who don’t really want to touch the unwashed masses either.

I see a sad person. I feel his sadness two thousand years later. I see the great sadness of Jesus as he lived in a very sad time and place such as our own when everything had a price including one’s immortal soul.

Nowadays, why be a missionary from modern burned out humanity America? Why be a missionary when you can be a tourist missionary two weeks in the third world vacation plan to enrich you spiritually and so you do not to have to touch the rest of humanity outside your tour guided bubble – not really touch global non-Christian reality. (Take a picture of me, won’t ya, with the poor people for me to show the folks back home?)

Best Christian Vacations

The white American gated community mentality and gated on their mind and soul Christianity (madness) is one reason I am shopping around to call myself anything but a Christian, cultural or otherwise, these days.

Child Trafficking for Christ? Alleluia?

The new global equation as it now stands is not so crude to state that people, collectively or individually, are commodities to be bought and sold for profit. But in truth we are all grist for somebody else’s mill these days. Capitalism and its workings are the secret, sacred words of GOD that only a few rich people truly understand (natural law).

Case in point, Laura Silsby, a good Baptist Christian businesswoman with a long trail of stiffing employees out of their wages, civil lawsuits with customers on her online shopping service and even lawsuits with her own lawyers for non-payment of legal bills. They recently foreclosed on her home and official address of her charity for the poor children of Haiti. On her Facebook Page, she is a fan of “Politicians”: Sarah Palin – “Products”: Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.

Last year she gets a vision of starting an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for the children of Haiti before the recent earthquake. She gets this vision not from her God but from her children’s nanny who is from Haiti. Cash flow was a problem in getting the orphanage off the ground. But the competition for bodies, I mean children, went ballistic with the likes of Bill Clinton and W started getting in on the Haiti charity thing etc. Onward and upward for “God’s holy work”.

You get some of your fellow Christians in the local Baptist church in Idaho all stirred up, who volunteer, and you start picking up small bodies in the devastated streets of Haiti. If you are the anointed of God like so many losers lately like, Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign, Sen.“Ricky Ricardo” Coburn and Sen.“Waterloo” DeMint, the laws of mankind and or Haiti do not matter. “We’re on a mission for God” as Joe Belushi said in his great movie “The Blues Brothers”.

Laura calls around, no confidentially is adhered to, gets hold of a couple in Kentucky already in the process of adopting some Haitian kids from a legitimate orphanage there when the Earthquake hit, and they tell her to bugger off – but oh no, she puts that particular orphanage on your hit list. You pose as the friend of a woman you have never met when you get to that orphanage to pick up their kids to save or ransom or whatnot.

The kids are already evacuated and then you ask the orphanage if they have any extras. Then you get parents to accept your spiel about a better life in the white world and they hand over their kids to the rich white lady and off you go - ten very odd “missionaries” and thirty three kids in a school bus - off to the border only to be arrested and rightfully so for “child trafficking”.

The rest of this grisly tale of faith, greed and insanity are illustrated in an excellent article from the Guardian by Ed Pilkington in New York and Inigo Gilmore in Callabasse.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

What was it about the 10 Baptists that gave them the hubris to believe they would provide better care for Haitian children than those children's parents? The acknowledged leader of the group was Laura Silsby, 40, who since the arrest has maintained the line that "we simply wanted to help these children. We did not understand [Haitian] rules."

Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn't stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife's friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

So what exactly were the Baptists up to? Were they guilty, as charged, of entering a disaster zone, when people, particularly children, are at their most vulnerable, only to exploit them? Or were they, as they have insisted, simply out to help Haiti's traumatised orphans?...

The first puzzling fact is that of the 20 children who boarded the bus at Callabasse that day, many were not orphans. They had loving, albeit desperately poor and struggling, parents. Maggie Moise, standing outside her home, described the moment she handed over her nine-year-old twin sons, Volmy and Kimley. She had been approached by Adrien, who told her some white people wanted to help her family.

"They said they wanted to go with our children. They put the names of the children on a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. A white woman told me, 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a ¬brochure of where the children would be going to live. I signed the paper."

Whether you are a giant hedge fund ponzi scheme or a lunatic entrepreneur, running around, kidnapping children for the purpose of trafficking them for charity cash flow or profit for the glory of yourself and of course for the God thing, you are still exploiting them. There are laws. There are nations. There are limits to what individuals and groups and governments can do to help the people of Haiti during this period of recovery after a disastrous earthquake.

Crazies, stay home!