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 nameIf 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 VacationsThe 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.
