I like President Obama. I haven't felt the same affection for a president since John Kennedy was murdered. Moreover, I think he has done a very good job in the White House, especially since he has to deal with such a strident opposition. I respect his judgement as a professional politician concerning how much legislation he can get through Congress and his reluctance to push too hard. He has tried to be reasonable with unreasonable people.
I am glad he has ended the Iraq imbroglio, though some troops remain, and is preparing to end the American commitment of soldiers to Afghanistan, albeit with some residual presence there.
He has implemented a very tough policy against al-Qaida, including the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, without any prior notice to their government. In truth, the Pakistani government has given lip service to helping with anti-terrorist work, but done nearly nothing except take a lot of American aid.
The drone aircraft strikes trouble me a lot. I think it's more than time to reconsider whether the enmity that they provoke outweighs any successes they achieve.
Worse, I am profoundly disappointed that the president uses drones to kill Americans abroad who are suspected of working with al-Qaida. Any American, no matter how odious, deserves due process of law, unless the threat is imminent and there is no other way to prevent an overt act of murder. Allowing a president - any president, since this will serve as a precedent for Obama's successors - to kill anyone he thinks is a threat makes our democracy much weaker, not stronger. Again, though I trust this president, it's vital that we remember he will be leaving office on January 20, 2017, and who knows who his successor will be.
Now, since I'm sitting in my living room typing this instead of going to Mass as a good Catholic should, I think I'll say a few words about the church and my own religious convictions. I'm a lapsed Catholic. It's seven years now since I attended Mass.
Part of the reason is that it's just very pleasant to stay home, drink coffee and read the Sunday paper. Part of it too, is the sex scandal that has enveloped the priesthood in the last twenty years.
Pedophile priests are terribly disturbing. As shocking as the revelations of child abuse were, almost as bad was the news that the church could afford to make large cash settlements on the victims, an amount of money now known to top $100 million. Every parish I ever was part of seemed to be on the edge of solvency and priests periodically cajoled parishioners to make larger donations. And all that time they had enormous investments squirreled away!
Finally, and egregiously, it is now known that church administrators - that is, bishops - orchestrated cover-ups of the sex abuses, transferring pedophiliac priests, and tried to squelch any reports of their crimes. I'll leave it to prosecutors to decide if there were obstructions of justice, but regardless, it was a great moral failing.
It also greatly bothers me that several prelates of the church sent letters to Catholics, telling them in effect that voting for a political candidate who wants to keep abortion legal is a sin. I admire and proclaim the church's positions against war and in favor of worker dignity, but I cannot agree with a religious leader telling the faithful they sin by voting against a church position.
The messenger may be flawed, but that doesn't invalidate the message. Priests who preyed on children needn't mean that the gospels are any less true or good. So to say it briefly, I think there is some sort of God, a prime cause of all the matter in the universe, but that spirit does not involve itself in human life at all. I believe there was a Jesus, a wandering preacher who proclaimed a coming kingdom after history ended, and urged that we forgive and love each other. I cannot make myself believe he did miracles or was any more divine than you, dear reader, or I.
That's it for Sunday morning. Today's LA Times crossword was very inventive.
No comments:
Post a Comment