"Dynamite Them All and Let Jesus Sort Them Out"

[Otto]

A Modern Christian's guide to Moral Perplexities (...)
"Dynamite Them All and Let Jesus Sort Them Out" (ATD 178)

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Hedges: I look at the religious right, the radical religious right,
those people who want to create a Christian nation, as a mass
movement. I don't give them much religiosity at all. I think they have
acculturated the Christian religion with the worst aspects of American
imperialism and American capitalism. They prey on the despair of tens
of millions of Americans in this country who have been completely
disenfranchised and shunted aside with the creation of this American
oligarchy. That is the engine of the movement. These people, their
lives have become train wrecks, their communities have been physically
obliterated with the flight of manufacturing jobs, or they live in
these soulless exurbs, in places like Orange County, with no community
center, no community rituals—you know, they don't even have sidewalks.
And they're lonely, and they're alienated, and they're lost. And
that's the fodder that demagogues use to amass totalitarian movements.
And they do that by offering these people a world of magic, of belief
in destiny and miracles and angels, that Jesus has a plan for them.
And they essentially remove them from the reality-based world. That's
what creationism is about.
http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20070206_chris_hedges_christian_right_war_on_america/

We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth
than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture
and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in "The
Cycles of American History," wrote that "the great religious ages were
notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary
sense -- not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and
oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery,
persecution, torture and genocide."
http://www.alternet.org/stories/47679/