Editor:
Richard Rowley’s letter last week defending President Bush’s domestic spying policy was timely. However, my attention wasn’t so much on his detailed explanation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments as it was on his final paragraph.
He thanked the Lord for the men and women who serve to protect us as if the “Lord” had anything to do with it. He begged God’s blessing on not only the president, his staff and our soldiers but also on the United States of America.
The question is, whose God was he talking about? Was it the God of the Christians, Muslims or Jews? Or maybe he meant the God of the Hindus or some other religious group. He also apparently has no such blessing for atheists and agnostics, yet they possess the same protections under the law that theists do.
This type of blessing, of course, has been uttered by millions of people over the years, but it illustrates an underlying problem in a pluralistic society like modern America. Religion has become a meaningless facade for organizations that only exist to promote false hope. While most of Europe, Russia and China have acknowledged the probability that there is no deity, Americans continue to “play church” and deny the lack of evidence for anything supernatural.
I think it’s time for us to grow up and become mature citizens of the universe by accepting responsibility for our own destiny. We need to stop appealing to a non-existent God to help fix our problems and learn to be brave enough to fix them ourselves.
In summary, evolve or die! We alone can make this world into a paradise for our descendants, or we can plunge humanity into oblivion. God has nothing to do with it. The choice is ours, but we only have ourselves to blame if we fail.
Keith Cantrell
Sweet Home