The following is an excerpt from an interview with Tom Robbins that appeared in the July 2008 issue of Shambala Sun:
Question: In real life, the religious right has gained a lot of power in the U.S. over the past number of years. What are your predictions regarding how this situation will develop in the years to come?
Answer: There may seem to be a whiff of paranoid fantasy about it, but it's really not unreasonable to suggest that the Christian right presents by far the greatest threat to human existence in all of history.
I have a friend, a high-ranking officer in Naval Intelligence, who assures me that the U.S. intelligence services, military and civilian, are becoming packed with evangelical Christians. Congress and the White House are known to be heavily influenced by evangelicals, their doctrine, their votes, and their money. The danger they present is that they desperately want widespread war in the Middle East, they hunger for the fire and blood of Armageddon, thinking that it will force Jesus to come back and remove the "righteous" from this earthly existence that confuses and disgusts them.
U.S. foreign policy is now based on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, which is to say, based on the ravings of a long-dead misogynistic madman. When he lived in Ephesus, the first thing the Apostle John saw every morning upon awakening was the gigantic statue of Artemis, with her multitude of naked breasts, and she made him crazy... The Book of Revelation is the result....
As sentient beings, as a part of the One, the fundamentalist spawn of John deserve our compassion, but because they increasingly imperil all life on the planet, they must also be vigorously opposed.
End of excerpt.
Many of us voted for change we could believe in, but Barack Obama disappointed us when he invited Rick Warren, right-wing Christian extremist, to give the invocation at his inauguration ceremony.
Note: Tom Robbins is an author and Rick Warren is a misogynist and homophobe. When Terry Shiavo's husband sought to remove the feeding tube from his brain-dead wife, Rick Warren said that the removal of the feeding tube was "an atrocity worthy of Nazism" and suggested that if she awoke from her coma she might implicate her husband as the cause of her ill health. After her death an autopsy revealed that her brain was filled with fluid which verified the opinion of doctors that she would have never awakened. One doctor disagreed with the others. He was Dr. Bill Frist, leader of the GOP in the senate.
Bill Frist diagnosed Terri Schiavo's condition without conducting an examination of her and he was wrong. It should be noted that Frist admitted to mutilating cats in medical experiments and that pretty much tells you all you need to know about his character or lack thereof.
So what have we learned? When you choose a doctor, check to see if s/he is elected to office - politics might conflict with the practice of medicine and when you vote for change, you might find out you just got more of the same old same old.
