Bas says to me tonight, “I wish there was a way to show the rest of the world that we weren't all blood thirsty war mongers like Bush, that dumb-ass cock-knocker.” We talk about a website where people can post their picture and a simple message to the rest of the world, that we oppose any more wars or violence, but that we are prisoners of our government. One such site is www.votenowar.org but I think we may need more. This site does not show the pictures and signatures of the tens of thousands who have signed it. This site would be a simple message to the rest of the world that regardless of what our president says or does, that we aren't out to hurt you. and we trust that you aren't out to hurt us either. That we aren't half as interested in our rather twisted and brutish foreign policy as we are in just keeping the peace around our own borders and getting our economy back up to where we need it to be.

  

II

Tonight we watched an episode of The World at War called, The Final Solution, about the Nazi death and concentration camps during World War II. We listened as the survivors talked about the screams of the people being shoved into the gas chambers. About their constant prayers to their God. About the utter brutality and the insane game that went on for almost five years as over five million of them were murdered in mass numbers. We heard the stories of the women being stripped and shot with their screaming children still clinging to them. we watched as the bulldozers pushed hundreds of dead lifeless bodies into big pits in the ground. And as Jewish prisoners dragged their friend’s and relative’s skinny-little chicken-like bodies through the dirt into mass graves that they themselves had to dig, only to be shot and thrown into when they were finished.

As we watched, we talked about this concept of God that we carry so strongly within us. As many of the survivors talked of God and asked the question where was God when these people were screaming for him to help them, day after day and year after year. Many of them who were very devout Orthodox Jews before they got to the camps could not understand why God was ignoring them and so they killed themselves when he did not eventually offer any help or means of salvation for their plight. They realized for the first time that perhaps we really are alone here on earth. Where strength and the will to live, and not justice or God, rule the land.

Ironically, last night I spent a lot of time talking to God, asking for him/her/it to come into my life more. Tonight I watched this documentary. And it has forced me to wonder about many things. We tell ourselves that God is just. But we have never seen justice on the earth before. We tell ourselves that God is good. But the bad far outweighs the good on earth, most of the time. We tell ourselves that God is all powerful and that he sees and controls all things here, and yet all we see is the opposite of this. We see a constant struggle for humanity to stay alive and out of trouble and only through our own strength and will to live do we survive, and many of us over the last few thousand years have not survived. Many races have disappeared. So where is this God during all of this? The Aztecs, the Mayans, the native Americans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Pagans, all have had their own version of God. God changes; our idea of God is constantly changing as time passes.

Perhaps god is all powerful, but then he is certainly not all good. Or perhaps the opposite is true, that he is all good but just not very powerful. This was an idea I heard Norman Mailer first propose in a symposium on the subject. Either way, we got something awfully wrong a long time ago.

I wonder if God is not more of just an ideal we hold in our own minds. That perhaps God is not more than our own ideal of what we want Man to be. Of what we can someday become ourselves. A comforting assuring bigger-picture inner voice, perhaps our higher self, our soul if you will, grasping at an ideal that we can be more than we are now. I think this may be a safer idea to hold for the time being. For if God does exist, and there is so much suffering all over the world, in every corner of the globe, then he is either very cruel, almost malicious I would say, or he has just been on vacation for the last six-thousand years, and hasn’t checked in to see what's been going on down here.

Where was God during the Jewish Holocaust? And where was God during the mass genocide of millions of North and South American Indians? Or the genocide and enslavement of millions of Africans? Where was this God? Why were the prayers not answered? And why do we continue to pray? It is a big can of worms, that’s for sure.

It gets really tricky when you start looking at it like this. During WWII, the Jewish people were very religious. They believed wholeheartedly in their version of this God ideal—the Jewish God. And the Germans were also religious believing in their own Christian version of God. Now who was right? Where was God in all of that? Now the Germans certainly won that battle between the Jews and the Germans, even though they lost the war—they killed over six million of them, so was God on their side? Was that German-Christian God the winner? And what about when the Europeans came over to the Americas and started trying to force their version of God on the Native Americans? The Indians had their own ideas and version of God. Many Gods actually. But of course the white man assured them that they were wrong and they should start worshipping their version of God. And to prove it to them they robbed them and murdered them just to show them who was right. Of course they did this to show them that God is a kind and good hearted and just and merciful God. Makes sense right? Oh yes. So much sense.

And now we have a lot of fighting between the Christians and the Muslims, and the Jews and the Muslims. All in the name of whose God is the right version. (At least that's what they tell themselves and the rest of the world—although if I were a betting man, I'd say it had a lot to do with money land and politics, but hey what do I know?) Hey, forget Slim Shady, will the real God please stand up?

It's one thing to argue with someone who is the better football team. You go to the game, you watch the teams play and in the end the better team wins. It's a whole other matter when there is no team and no actual game and every one just sits in the stands staring at an empty field and says:

"Did you see that? Our team just threw a fifty yard touchdown.” “No they didn't! Didn't you see our team tackle your quarterback on the forty yard line?” “Well no, because we don't believe in the forty yard line. It says it right here in our rule book: there is no such thing as a forty yard line.” “Well that's just ridiculous. It says right here in our rule book that not only is there a fifty yard line, but that when one of our players passes over it, their soul gets an extra five yards and gets to kill one of your players.” 

It's one thing to love the game and support your favorite team. But show us your team first.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/DailyNews/celebrity_activists021211.html

Last Great Movie: Two Can Play that Game. Very funny!