for cross-posting; I just made this same comment elsewhere, but it fits here too.

You said, "Being poor, in Bush’s eyes, means they are less then insects." Agreed, but where does that come from? I can't speak for the entire Religious Right, but I DO know Baptists.

The Baptists seem to think that, if you are disadvantaged, you must deserve it somehow.

I wonder if this sentiment is a holdover from Calvinism, from which Baptism has grown.

One of the tenets of Calvinism was that personal wealth and status were proof of God's blessing.

What it comes down to for me is a belief in a "scale of human worth." The belief that some people are just BETTER than others, and are therefore more deserving of health, shelter, justice, and so on.

I cannot accept any idea of a scale of human worth. We all laugh the same, scream the same, bleed the same, and die the same. If you were to take a small strip of flesh from my fore-arm, and another from the Pope, or a King, and compare them under a microscope, you would not find threads of gold in the King's flesh, or any other thing to differentiate the two.

Pardon me if I simplify this:

Either there is a Creator, or there isn't.

If there isn't a Creator, then each one of us is worth a few dollars and some change in chemicals... carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, etc., and we are all worth about the same. (a little more if you're overweight.)

If there is a Creator, then each one of us is a Child of God, with the spark of divinity inside us all.

Either we are all worth close to nothing, or we are all priceless. Either way there is no scale of human worth.

I wonder if this sentiment is a holdover from Calvinism, from which Baptism has grown.

One of the tenets of Calvinism was that personal wealth and status were proof of God's blessing.

Yep, at least over here they still seem to believe in this inversion of the bible word "ask and you will be given" (in other words, if you haven't been given you've obviously not asked the right way) and that since God looks after his own (The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want (Ps 23,1)), those who want don't belong among the herd. Who cares that this asumtion goes against the first Christian "rule" of loving God, yourself and your neighbour and that it opens door and windows to pride and self-righteousness.

However, in the case of Bush, I don't think it's any religious influence. He is just an egoistical and egocentric ass.

The Chimp is actually a Methodist. Not the liberal, United Methodist church, but the much more conservative and less tolerant Methodist Church. Laura brought him into the fold.

Interestingly, the rest of the Bush family are Episcopalians, which is a fairly liberal sect.

President Clinton is a Baptist.

Tithing and support of one's congregation are not limited to the Christians. Poor Jews have been shunned from Synagogue before. Every religion seems to give special 'Blessings' to the supporter who supports most. The poor are generally overlooked, as they are a strain on the budget and pay no return.

Tithing and support of one's congregation are not limited to the Christians. Poor Jews have been shunned from Synagogue before. Every religion seems to give special 'Blessings' to the supporter who supports most. The poor are generally overlooked, as they are a strain on the budget and pay no return.

Didnt mean to double post this. My bad.

But just out of curiousity, how do other religions behave? I know the Catholics ask for %20.

Do they really? I was brought up Catholic and went to Catholic schools, and I never heard that. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's true, but where did you find that out?

... but I cannot agree with your postulate, which is that human life (all life, for that matter) is worthless and meaningless if there is not some superhuman Creator floating around out there somewhere. The corollary of this is that there can be no moral standards for human beings unless there is a divine Creator. The postulate is false and therefore the corollary must also be false.

That IS the obvious flaw in my argument. Maybe it was irresponsible of me to simplify things THAT much. (This is not a new set of points with me; it's something I worked out to bash conservatives with (offline) when they say things that strike me as de-valuing human life. It's a blunt-as-hell argument, perhaps too crude for these pages.)

I can see how it might offend a committed secular humanist, one whose moral principles are maintained outside of any organized religion.

Paul Kurtz has always pointed out that a belief in God is not necessary for morality. He strikes me as sincere, and I believe in his respect for moral principles, Godless though he may be.

Consider me a non-secular humanist.

But privilege that is to blame. These people, Bush and his ilk, where given everything they ever wanted on a silver platter. From the moment they where born they had everything and what they couldn’t have legally they would just take anyway. Even when caught the law would be deterred by their last names, their wealth and their connections. This leaves a person with a very very dark mindset: believing they can have anything that they want and nothing can stop them.

Such a mindset tends to lead one to be very selfish indeed, for if you can take whatever you want then nothing else matters. There is no hard work, no having to rely on others to survive, no bonds forming out of comradeship struggling to the same goal. Without these things, and many more, a person ends up so self centred they are unable to even feal what another person’s misery would be like. No worse they may even become so enthralled by the pain they can inflict, and get away with inflicting, that they might seek out to inflict more and more pain on a greater amount of people.

Religion has nothing to do with it. They do gravitate towards religions that promise them personal gains in the afterlife but such is also a symptom of their mindsets and not the cause. If no such religion existed they would be atheist in nature, using the belief in the absence of god to justify why they can get away with the crap. But luckily for them a religion exists that doesn’t just forgive their sins, letting them off the hook one last time, but also rewards them for inflicting pain on 'heathens.' At least their interpretation of it says so...

Bush, unfortunately, is the prime example of such an upbringing. With every negative that could of brought reality to his world the name Bush alone was enough to shelter him from it. Be it wars he never fought in because of his name, to crimes he committed yet never saw justice over because of his name or even elections that where stolen to give him the presidency because of his name. Nothing real was allowed to interfere with his self-centered view of the world.

Every little thing that happened in his life has fuelled this mindset that he can inflict as much pain as he wants and get away with it becouse to do so was his birth right...

In many of the places I've worked, the boss tends to get deluded about his own self-importance. I can't help but notice a similar pattern: employees do what the boss says because he pays them, of course, but the boss often sees it differently over time.

If he lets himself, he will believe that his people do what he says because he's so great, so much BETTER than his inferiors, that they look up to him and want to be him. None of his employees will argue with him, but that's not work ethic or anything (or fear of dismissal;) it's because he's right all the time. If the business develops "cash-flow problems," and the workers are expected to be paid less, or less often all of a sudden, some of them will leave the company. This always astonishes the narcissistic boss. "But, but, they were loyal to ME!, ME personally, because I'm so great!" I imagine them to say.

My wife reminds me that this also happened near the end of the Roman Empire. She says that when generals could no longer pay their soldiers, they were surprised to find the soldiers turn against them.

Maintaining the fiction of meritocracy is useful to this way of thinking in America. If a man has status and wealth, according to this fiction, it is because he has EARNED it. Supposedly we live in a country of self-made men, but I see no evidence of this. Dilbert wasn't so far off.

By the same argument, a house or a car is only worth its component atoms... Ridiculous. The fact that there is no god makes no difference to the value of the emergent properties that supervene on the gross physical construct that is people. Either way, the existence of volition and intelligence in one pile of atoms certainly makes it very different from another pile of atoms.

Value is entirely subjective in nature, true, but I think very few people would choose a drum of chemicals over a television, even if the two contained the exact same components.

Profiting from disasters and wars is precisely why Blackwater, Inc., the corporate mercenary company, is in business. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to pay for the services of those mercenaries in New Orleans. The great hidden cost of the Iraq war is the amount paid to keep 124,000 Blackwater mercenaries in that country.

Read Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill.

We don't have to imagine war and disaster for profit. We have it right now. And the taxpayers are footing the bill.

And of course the founder and head of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is a "born-again Christian" as are many members of his private army.

Christians working as killers for hire -- wouldn't Jesus be pleased.

Too true. So that means the fundies have their own personal army. Scares the hell out of me if I think about it for too long.

Even under Clinton FEMA was working but there was also a darker side. FEMA had all sorts of nasty powers that could be brought into play at the stroke of the president’s pen. FEMA could confiscate every square inch of land in the US and enslave the people, all considered ‘legal’ at that, with these powers. For that reason groups of people have formed, some with clear intentions to ensure this power isn't abused silently and others forming around misconceptions that these powers can be considered evidence of the government wanting to enslave us all, they could be right. In any case these groups formed. FEMA couldn’t build a concentration camp without these people there to take pictures and post them online.

Yet I believe that most of the people in positions of FEMA won’t abuse those positions; they are ‘old timers’ on the political stage. Having been hired under different administrations over a wider amount of time the personal of FEMA’s isn’t formed from the loyal followers of this any administration. The administration can change the head of the group but to revamp the whole organization would be seen as a power grab… basically the attorney fiascos but on a much larger scale.

Those watching groups would have a field day with that sort of attempted subversion of power!

So we have FEMA with all this power but not unified in obedience to a single leader. Using such a group would be impossible, the power they control is there but without some massive excuse it lies dormant and untouchable even by the president. If he signed off to enact their powers without just cause then ‘leaks’ of wrong doing will be bathing the media daily, even before the first order is carried out. The damage it would cause is unimaginable, riots at the very least, and a revolution at the worse.

So they want to subvert this power and what better way they put someone in charge with the objectives to turn the whole organization into an inefficient and incompetent failsafe against disaster?

The next major disaster that happens and FEMAs ‘drops the ball’ we might see Bush demanding that the whole branch gets cut from the budget. He could easily argue that they failed not just once, but twice, and he isn’t going to wait for a ‘third strike.’ Like most idiots he slipped up when he said it was a hell of a job, the job never was rebuilding New Orleans but showing the world that FEMAs is unable to control a minor disaster.

Wonder, oh wonders, just what group would then be given the position to be the failsafe against national disasters… could it be Homeland Security? This group formed under Bush’s watch and you can bet he has his people in any position that matters and even the minor ones are most likely vetted to ensure that most are filled by the 20% loyal to Bush.

Then the stroke of the pen will happen and no one will leak what the group is planning to do till it is too late for the people to rise up and stop them.

Yes, I have zero trust for Bush and can easily see a thousand ways I could abuse his position for personal gain. I doubt his handlers haven’t thought these very same thoughts…

Glad you pointed this out. I was going to mention it if you hadn't.

She says she's leaving, you know.

Stupid, of course, but understandable. Always amazes me that Cuba is one of the leading nations in terms of supplying aid. Not wealth but tangible, real, aid in the form of supplies and personal. You don’t hear anything like that whenever the US talks about them do you…

I still have to ask: What happened to the $800 million + money that were given as aid. Was it rejected and sent home to the nations that supplied it or did bits of it just ‘vanish’ off the books like any aid money that goes to Iraq?

I was hearing about this on the Washington Journal this morning.

They were saying that Cuba had specialized rescue teams and equipment to deal specifically with providing relief to victims of natural disaster. Experts trained in handling the many and varied problems associated with flooding and so forth.

Makes sense for Cuba to have this; they have to endure a harsher hurricane season than most of us do. I think that the people suffering in the aftermath of Katrina would have welcomed such expertise.