Of Senate Invocations and Dominionist Diatribalism
Hindu priest and interfaith relations director Rajan Zed was given the opportunity to offer the opening invocation before the US Senate, the first time a Hindu has done this. His sentiment was summed up in his invocation:
We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds... Peace, peace, peace be unto all. (Source)
Some fundamentalist Christian wing nuts who had planted themselves in the audience found this intolerable, and so retorted:
... no Lord but Jesus Christ! ... there's only one true God! ... we are Christians and patriots.
These "protesters" were arrested on the misdemeanor charge of disrupting Congress. The leader of their particular cabal of Dominionists, Operation Save America, one "Reverend" Flip Benham, responded to the incident by proclaiming that
Not one senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the gospel of Jesus Christ!
This is typical revisionist bullshit, of course. In fact, most of the founding fathers were deists at most, and none of them were particularly devout and they definitely were not fundamentalist scriptural literalists. This idea that dominionists have of themselves as patriots is easily demonstrated by statements like this. In truth, fundamentalists of the ilk of Benham and his lot are exactly the opposite of patriots. They're essentially anti-American, insofar as they seek to return to a kind of government and societal structure that is in every way a reversal of the very causes of the revolutionary acts of the people who founded this country. They are thus the basest, most deplorable traitors one can imagine; they literally wish to overthrow the United States and turn it into exactly the kind of theocratic, divine-right state that was prevalent in Europe before the Enlightenment, that pivotal period in human history whose proponents were the very thinkers whose ideas informed the framers of our Constitution — not the collection of old myths and letters over which Benham's pernicious pack of Pharisees slaver so slavishly.
Moreover, these protesters' proclamations of there being no God but Jesus demonstrate exactly the esteem they ascribe to the notion of freedom of religion. In case anyone hasn't figured it out (or admitted it) yet, people like these are absolutely opposed to that concept. What they want is control, not freedom. They're nothing more than would-be inquisitors who, if the opportunity ever arose, would be setting up teams of stormtroopers to attack heretics, other-believers and non-believers alike. They would certainly sit in judgment of the beliefs of others and act according to their own twisted doctrines. Make no mistake, these people are militants, as a brief perusal of their website (linked above) will demonstrate to all but the densest and most denialist who walk amongst us.
Personally, I don't see the need for any invocation to be delivered at the opening of a congressional get-together. The whole idea of having to invoke an omnipresent entity in the first place is a basic fallacy; it's as if one were sitting in the living room of a friend's home only to have that friend call you on the phone and invite you to drop by. One would think that one's friend might b having some sort of mental issue if they did that, would one not? So whether one is a believer or not, and what particular religion to which one might subscribe, is moot. There is something rather comedic in the whole idea of invoking a universal deity who is, according to the words of Zed himself, "inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the heaven." This is, of course, no more or less ridiculous than any given Christian prayer or invocation designed to attract Jehovah's/Jesus' attention to some particular place. It's one of the most easily recognizable evidences that religious concepts as they stand today are relics of a time before which men began to examine and consider, instead clinging to traditions that originated in prehistoric superstitions of roaming spirits that weren't omnipresent and omnipotent, that needed to be bargained with in attempts to avert disaster, death and disease, and that weren't so much salvific as they were scary.
Given my druthers, we would have a government based on reason instead of superstition and no invocations, whether Hindu, Christian or Taoist in the chambers of Congress. Nonetheless, if any one belief system is going to expressed in this Congressional ritual and the US is going to retain the concept of religious freedom in its foundational document, then room must be made for all such belief systems held within the American populace. If we're going to have Christians delivering an opening prayer, then we must also have Jews and Hindus and Santeros and Wiccan wizards do the same from time to time. Perhaps we could have a census to allot the number of such invocations according to the proportion a given religion occupies in the populace.
I think it would be easier, though, to simply do away with the whole rite and have our congress-critters go and conduct their prayers and petitions in private. Public displays of religiosity conducted under the auspices of government function inevitably provide a stage for the minions of the Flip Benhams and Fred Phelps with which our land has been saddled. Perhaps instead of merely giving lip service to the idea of enlightenment, the people who make the laws of this country would do well to actually put into practice the concepts that have dome to us from the Enlightenment, without which they would certainly have needed to find some line of work outside of government in the first place unless they had been so fortunate to have been born into a family enjoying the fruits of the divine right of nobility. That bizarre and superstitious concept is to be found in both Hindu and Christian religious doctrines (among many), and we do have a good deal of evidence as to where it takes humanity: the needless suffering of the bulk of the people, whether as European peasants or low-caste residents of the subcontinent.
One "true God?" If not for the death of reason itself, how would anyone know whether or not they'd found such a thing? "True" gods are the products of minds that are at once closed and strewn about with paleolithic dung heaps, and it is precisely onto those heaps which we should fling "true God" theology itself if we are going to continue our progress away from the shadowed mentality of timorous ancestry.
