Is God an American Voter?

"To the captives, come out, and to those in darkness, be free," the president said.

"It seems a straightforward remark, almost a statement of the obvious," says Nicolson, author of a history of the King James Bible. "But to anyone familiar with the Bible, those few words ring far larger bells" because they come from a biblical passage (Isaiah 49.9) with a much more sweeping message:

"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me, to preach good tidings unto the meek, he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God: for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation."

Nicolson says that Bush, in laying claim "to the robe of righteousness," was articulating a "vision of establishing the Christian God's dominion on earth" via war.

The implications for Iraq are disturbing, he says.

"To those who see war as an occasional and necessary evil, the developing situation in Iraq is a disaster. Violence is feeding violence. The Abu Ghraib pictures, the rounding up and detaining of thousands of civilians and the cockpit-shot film of an American pilot firing missiles into the streets of Fallujah: all of that has fuelled and will fuel decades of future rage and resentment," he writes.

"But for any Christian who is driven by an apocalyptic and millennial vision, these events are exactly what should be happening. Terrible and desperate violence, blood and grief are all, for them, mileposts on the road to God's dominion," Nicolson says.

and

It is one of the saddest ironies of our time that as America tries to calm the fires of theocracy abroad, it should be stoking milder versions of the same at home.

Can we please make religion a private matter? Shouldn't people be at least as embarassed about their irrational beliefs as they are about their sexual preferences?

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