Religious Ethics and Government: A Pious Amalgamation by President Bush and his Faction (2005)

Religious Ethics and Government: 

A Pious Amalgamation by President Bush and his Faction.

To understand the relation between religion and ethics one needs to know the definitions of both. Ethics defined by Dictionary.com, “A set of principles of right conduct; a theory or a system of moral values,” and Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online defines ethics as “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation; a set of moral principles or values; a theory or system of moral values.” Juxtaposed to ethics, religion is, “a belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe; a personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship; A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader,” defined by Dictionary.com.  And with this foresight, one can determine that one’s egoistic principles will decide whether something is acceptable or unacceptable, i.e., what is perceived as good or bad. From The Genealogy of Morals, first essay, “Good and Evil, Good and Bad,” by Friedrich Nietzsche, he defines a duality of ethics in mankind: right versus wrong or good versus bad.  Nietzsche contends, “The judgment of good did not originate with those to whom goodness was shown; rather it was the good themselves that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian,” thus, supporting an ideologue of one religious faction and their ethical beliefs that subsequently, oppress, and condition the rest of the populace by their devout, and biased perspective of right and wrong or good and bad.  And in society today, people’s ethics, morals, religious beliefs, and civil liberties are amended, resulting from a political movement that is subversive, and insidious in nature. Religion and ethics are what drive a country’s political supremacy and prowess, i.e., both aspects in relation dignify the United States’ stature and preeminence, hence, this nation in contemporary time. And the best paradigm of this today is one culprit or rather one political administration that is using its religious ethics or morals to alter not only America and Americans, but also, all countries over the globe.  Therefore, and distressingly so, the sinister marriage of religion and ethics has doomed the United States Government and its people, to numerous mendacities, many preemptive measures, and the convolution of the United States Constitution, infringing Americans civil liberties. The United States Constitution consists of ten amendments in the Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” reads the First Amendment, and all these protocols are blatantly dishonored, presently. Suffice to say, relations between ethics and religion are ostensibly, presently entwined, and this is a travesty. Ethics and religion should never be coalesced by any government, because it will subjugate or oppress its people via tyranny.  And nowadays, at the forefront, is one unethical global entity that is depicting this conduct: the United States Government.

America in the 21^st century is daily becoming more dominated by religion and ethics or religious ethics, to be more accurate.  President George W. Bush and his faction of cronies are implementing their principles on America and Americans daily, i.e., Christian based creeds are thrust into mainstream society under pious ethnic tenets, violating the United States Constitution’s First Amendment, freedom of religion, i.e., separation of church and state.  Nonetheless, American’s civil liberties are eroding, while the Bush administration inflicts their religious beliefs onto Americans and our nation, the United States. Religion is separate from government, so that a bipartisan democratic government can flourish.  Moreover, to repudiate, and ensure that absolutely no partisan practices thrive, i.e., to impede any discriminating laws favoring one ethnicity or religion, especially when that dogma depicts the denouncing of other people’s civil liberties via autocracy.   Therefore, the relation between religion and ethics today, in the Bush era, are ostensible. Bush, the United States President, and his supporters, are imposing a Christian based, neo-conservative movement that supersedes the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion, and establishment of religion, by superimposing his or these morals into conventional American politics, thus, promoting one religion over another, and moreover, even alluding to or endorsing one at all.  For example, on Wednesday, August 3, 2005, the Washington Post published an article, “Bush Remarks On Intelligent Design Theory Fuel Debate,” written by Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, illuminating President Bush’s morals or ethics. “Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . So people can understand what the debate is about; part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”  Hitherto, “Different schools of thought” are fine to explore if one chooses to do so, but it is completely erroneous and disturbing to have an acting president promote his moral proclivity to “creationism” and so insolently too.  Despite that assertion, he should not be sanctioning any type of religion to the American populace, and as a result, honor the separation of church and state, in the Bill of Rights.  However, his pugnacious demeanor is apparent and disconcerting; a professor from Kansas once called “creationism in a cheap tuxedo,” and the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Barry W. Lynn said, “The president doesn't understand that one is a religious viewpoint and one is a scientific viewpoint,” furthermore, Bush’s remarks are “irresponsible.” Lynn also added, that President Bush displayed a “low level of understanding of science,” with his affirmation.  In another Washington Post article by the Associated Press, published on Tuesday, August 2, 2005, from Washington, Bush expressed an ethical and religious decree of his.  “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said, “You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas?  The answer is yes.”  His beliefs are buttressed by his Christian conservatives, which represent a significant portion of Bush's voting foundation; and now he and his followers are pushing in public schools, the conjecture of intelligent design, which is theoretical. Conversely, numerous scientists have repudiated this theory as an effort to force religion into science education, and expunge Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and natural selection.  Furthermore, in a Washington Post Article on Saturday, “Bush: Funeral a ‘Reaffirmation,” written by Jim VandeHei on April 9, 2005, Bush’s creeds were again palpable and foreboding.   It reported that on Friday, April 8, 2005, at the service for deceased Pope, John Paul II, President Bush talks of his own faith and pushes his religious beliefs, almost as a mandate for future America, and future Americans.  “There is no doubt in my mind there is a living God; and there is no doubt in my mind that Lord, Christ, was sent by the Almighty.  No doubt in my mind about that,” proclaims Bush, “Today’s ceremony, I bet you, for millions of people, was reaffirmation…and a way to make sure doubts don’t seep into your soul.”  One can only assume that he was inferring that he is here for the sole reason of spreading “truth” around the world, in countries that do not possess or yearn his religious and political tenets, i.e., his religious ethics or self-righteous ethical code.  “A lot of Christians gain strength and confidence from seeing His Holiness in the last stages of life,” he expounds, “I think a walk in faith constantly confronts doubt, as faith becomes more mature. Because you constantly confront, you know, questions.”  Why does he advert to “doubt,” about what?  Is it his doubt? Or is it supposed to be America's doubt?  Bush always speaks in incongruous rhetoric, if you listen to him, then you will hear a blatant pattern or modus operandi. He accentuates his viewpoint by asserting, “My faith is strong; you got to constantly stay in touch with the word of God in order to help you on the walk.”  What “walk?”  Somehow we are all on a “walk,” and more disturbingly, on his “walk.”  What if one does not care to join him in his walk? His assertion also implies that one needs to have conversations with a deity to assist one in making the right choices in life, which is what most religions demand so that one becomes reliant on an ideal, instead of oneself.  His religious beliefs only underscore his idiocy as someone who appoints himself as “doing God’s work,” in his unflappable religious faith, and further erodes the United States Constitution by his dissociation to the laws in the Bill of Rights.  And this only underscores the fact that relations between ethics and religion have been perverted, and moreover, how we as a nation, are dangerously promoting, and blindly following Imperial Tenets of past Empires.  

Hence, Bush supplanting many of his cronies into the Supreme Court, to circumvent laws and more important, to amend them permanently, provoking many bitter battles in Congress and the Senate.  Most noticeably, and recently, the almost abolished protocol, called the filibuster, the only option for politicians who disagree with an acting president and any of his choices to promote or supplant someone. President Bush’s intrusive morals have caused tremendous acrimony within the Senate, Congress, and America.  Accordingly, Bush and his administration's ethics coerce Americans, for politically partisan reasons, which is not what ethics  are for.  It is unethical to allow one’s personal, and subjective views to be transposed in politics to push one sanctimonious agendum, especially when most Americans feel the antithesis of that conviction.  An assertion shared by other politicians, e.g., one primary liberal lawmaker opines, “It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and poignantly appended, “People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.”  As a consequence, those pronouncements underscore how ethics today are binded with religious correlations, and moreover, how Bush is impervious, and delusional in his own rhetoric. His cognitive dissonance is alarming, and Americans should heed his vernacular, because if they do not, then Americans will wake up in the nightmare of a religious kingdom and ponder how this happened in America, a so-called bi-partisan democratic nation. Bush is displaying psychosis, an acute psychological disorder in which connection to reality is void and extremely distorted.  MedlinePlus on-line definition of psychosis is “a loss of contact with reality, typically including delusions (false ideas about what is happening or who one is) and hallucinations (seeing or hearing things which aren't there).”  And he depicts many of these characteristics with his reiterated torpidities about ethics, morals, religious beliefs, and his propensity to make war with other countries, despite how many fabrications he and his faction state, produce, and promote to the American populace.  This is Bush’s objective based on his spiritual moral principles. This abdication by the American people is morosely gloomy, because the more people enable President Bush, means the more that his religious ethics become interjected into the American psyche, contemplations, demeanors, and viewpoints.  Thus, destroying what America embodies: freedom. Furthermore, another disgusting fact that he did not orate to Americans is how he has also sanctioned certain laws or acts that defy or infringe the civil liberties of all Americans, even the most defenseless: children; e.g., the No Child Left Behind Law is a conditional law and contingent on the school’s acquiescence to forfeit all social security numbers of their student body.  And once the school consents to this stipulation will the government approve financial assistance or funding. Furthermore, one of the most controversial subjects in the public discourse is stem cell research, which pertains to embryonic stem cells of a human embryo. Stem cells can develop into any 220 types of cells found in the human body, e.g., blood cells, heart cells, brain cells, etc. These embryonic stem cells, deliberated by many in the scientific community to contain the utmost prospective; moreover, many researchers contemplate them as presenting the greatest capability for the alleviation of human suffering since the progress of antibiotics. The particular concern is a stem cell technology called somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT. Somatic cell nuclear transfer happens when the nucleus of an unfertilized egg is replaced with the nucleus of a normal body cell that contains a full set of genetic information. This develops within days, into a human embryo within a nestled cluster of stem cells. Currently, greater than 100 million Americans suffer from diseases that can ultimately be treated or ameliorated more efficiently with stem cells, e.g., heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. However, ardent ethics interject from the minority of devout people that superimpose their creeds onto others.  And again, President Bush and his faction are averse to the use of stem cell research. “In Heartland, Stem Cell Research Meets Fierce Opposition,” a Washington Post Article written by Peter Slevin, on Wednesday, August 10, 2005, “Social conservatives in the Missouri legislature are effectively blocking some of the most ambitious research envisioned by the Stowers staff, saying that research with embryonic stem cells is so immoral it should be a crime.”  The article also states that Bush “has restricted government funding to a limited number of stem cell lines that existed in 2001 and has threatened to veto any expansion.”  Moreover, the president of Missouri Right to Life, Pam Fichter, said, “We oppose embryonic stem cell research because it destroys the embryo,” appending, “They're trying to define human life by its geography; it doesn't make any difference if it's in a petri dish, implanted in the womb or in a nursery. A human life is a human life. Are we going to say a 4-year-old is more human than a 2-year-old?” Furthermore, President Bush proclaimed his pious ideologue on this debate, in a science magazine the year prior.  He opined, “Anything short of a comprehensive ban would permit human embryos to be created, developed and destroyed solely for research purposes, thus, underscoring his ardent ethics that this is sac-religious and deemed as a heresy.  These dogmatic tenets are blindly ignorant and dismiss any dissent from people with contrasting viewpoints or ideals.  And more alarmingly, they omit any bi-partisan discourse of the subject, thus, clearly violating the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

Now, the merging of ethics and religion is abominable for our country. For example, President Bush’s administration uses their ethics to squelch freedom of speech, right to assemble, and freedom of expression, by the arrests made during the August, 2005 GOP Convention, in New York City.  Thirty-five hundred people, Americans, New Yorkers, arrested, detained, and processed through the criminal system, violating their liberties of due process, false imprisonment, right to assembly, and petition.  And this is resulting from people having a discrepancy of opinion compared to President Bush, and his faction of cronies.  This is not America the free, or the beautiful, but rather, an insidiously perverted faction that combines religion and ethics, which are unethical, immoral, and unjust to America and Americans.  Contiguous now, is Britain and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  Because of the recent London terrorist attacks in July of 2005, he is mandating racial profiling, a shoot to kill policy, and moreover, wants people of the Muslim decent to leave the country if deemed to be fanatical in any way.  This is very much what the Nazis did in 1939, to one ethnicity, the Jewish community, under the control of Adolph Hitler.  Hitler and the Nazis attacked the communists, then the Jews, then the trade unionists, then the Catholics, and the Protestants.  This is why the interconnecting of the religion and ethics is defiantly malevolent, and needs to be countered and impeded or President Bush’s administration will use its ethics to infiltrate, invade, occupy, and justify wars in other countries, e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, possibly North Korea, and China. Additionally, Americans cannot accede to these tenets, ethics, morals, or pious creeds; classify them as you will, but Americans must dignify the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution, to ensure a bi-partisan democracy that does not subjugate its people with sanctimonious visions. However, if this precedent persists, then the world will continue to contemplate America despairingly, and wonder how America preaches such high morals, when these morals are feckless in execution.  Wouldn’t America’s forefathers deliberate on the United States now and be ashamed, since their prose was perverted and as a result, rendered virtually ineffective?  Suffice to say, until Americans are congruent in equality and bi-partisanship, religious and ethics will be codified to spawn a new America.  Consternation reigns in Americans, and contrition is an attribute that President Bush and his Judeo-Christian neo-conservative movement will not abdicate, unless a civil revolution manifests, to protect American’s freedom. Yet another example, President Bush and his faction are also using their ardent ethics to amend the pro-choice abortion law.  He and many of his cronies want to abolish a woman’s right to abortion, despite the possibility of compromising the general welfare of the woman.  The Roe versus Wade law passed on January 22, 1973, is in peril and a woman’s right to choose will be expunged and thus, amended, taking the woman’s right to abortion away and making it a criminal act to have or seek an abortion.  This illuminates and underscores the perversion of combing religion and ethics. Furthermore, juxtaposed is one of the most potentially detrimental instances of the incestuous merging of ethics and religion.  One law that defines our country and upholds the most important fabric in the Unites States Constitution is equality; and inequality will be at center stage in less than 2 years. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law on August 6, prohibits any restrictive voting laws that impede citizens of African-American ethnicity from voting.  More important, it enabled federal oversight of voter registration and elections.  Hence, a striking ascent in the quantity of African-American registered voters in the South. President Bush’s faction is also going to let the voting act of 1965, expire in 2007.  This cannot happen, because this will erase all who have fought and died for this law of equality to become law.  The ramifications in allowing this law to expire will turn back time, and revert our society to the racist, and racially motivated days in the early 60’s.  When one ethnicity is singled out resulting from ignorance and prejudice then by definition that nation is an oppressed society and under Imperial tenets, much like the days of Germany, when Hitler reigned, and many ethnicities were systemically extirpated, because of pious ethics.  

Americans have to defend their civil liberties and uphold the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights that ensures all Americans shall not be discriminated in any way, despite, race, creed, or religious beliefs.  If Americans refrain or fail to do so, then America is not this great country that it professes to be, and moreover, it is indicative of how other countries see America and all Americans as an arrogant, aberrant, and ignominious nation that stipulates protocols that it deduces as immoral in other countries in the world.  The United States Constitution is laudable in prose and has to be venerated by its people and government; our nation is supposed to be a country for the people, of the people, and by the people, as Abraham Lincoln once opined.  That concept is inscribed in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, which reads, “CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION, OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF; OR ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES.” Religion and ethics or more candidly stated ardent ethics have only destroyed what our nation was founded upon in principle. Ethics and religion  should never be coalesced by any government, because it will suppress or tyrannize its people via despotism or totalitarianism.  Hence, the abolition of religion in ethics and a dogma that a nation’s populace must adhere to or follow. Americans need to heed tenets of great philosophers of the past. Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Frederic Nietzsche, and Karl Marx all have written discerning prose for everyone to heed.  If the populace allows this merging of religion and ethics, and bemoans the origins of humans, then we disrespect evolutionary facts for fictional conjecture. “Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be,” writes Charles Darwin in, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; “every slight modification, which in the course of ages, chanced to arise, and which in any way favored the individuals of any of the species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement.”  Hence, the metaphor that the United States is the “single tree” that supplants itself into other country’s religious and political culture, in the name of its own egoistic dogma’s.  Moreover, the paradigms that Americans adhere to can be changed, but hitherto the paradigm shift or scientific revolution has not come to its fruition, yet. However, there are always warning signs or anomalies beforehand, preceding a paradigm shift or scientific revolution. And if Americans open their eyes, and stopped thinking inside the box, then things will change and thus, impede any ardent and ethic based canons.  Heretofore, the populace does not perceive these anomalies, because Americans are not “thinking outside the box,” therefore, Americans are continuing to “do normal science,” and thus, society forfeits its rights unwittingly and uncontested.  Thomas Kuhn elucidates paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, chapter III, “The Nature of Normal Science” and chapter X, “Revolutions as Changes of World View”: how people possess a biased view of something, and how hard it is to change that viewpoint. “A paradigm is an accepted model or pattern, and that aspect of its meaning has enabled me,” Kuhn states, “The success of a paradigm is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples.”  Therefore, the populace does “normal science,” and too frequently, “never think outside the box.” Kuhn expounds on this assertion; “A part of normal theoretical work, through only a small part, consists simply in the use of existing theory to predict factual information of intrinsic value.” Consequently, all the actions by this administration are the anomalies that represent unheeded forewarnings.  Nietszche further portends about the egoistic values of good and bad, good and evil; “One should be warned, moreover, against taking these concepts pure and impure too ponderously or broadly, not to say symbolically; all the concepts of ancient man were rather at first incredibly uncouth, coarse, external, narrow, straightforward, and altogether unsymbolical in meaning to a degree that we can scarcely conceive.”  Reiterating his opine that the rich and elite decide what is good and what is bad, based on their own dogmas, but more important, he presages that the populace should not let others, especially a non- secular group that dictates what is right and wrong, good or bad.  However, if Americans allow this to happen and continue to enable this doctrine, then “Society as a whole is more and more spitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing  each other, the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat,” reads The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: i.e., one ardent creed will dominate and overshadow the entire populace, and subjugate, oppress, its people, by totalitarianism.  But one of the best forewarnings of combining ardent pious morals and ethics comes from one man that the world knows all too well.  And his pious tenets are alarmingly represented today. To illuminate the indifferent, nefarious, and egoistic ways that Bush and his cronies promote their overzealous religious ethics via mendacities, an “expert” on deceit and deception proclaims, “The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are, in the depths of their hearts, more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.”  Additionally, “The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones; such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts; even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true. Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end,” wrote Adolph Hitler in the first volume of Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925.

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