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My friend Nick put a link on his blog that a friend sent him or something like that, to this article. If you're lazy, the best two thoughts are below. ___________________________________________________________ How about Jesus� Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. � And so on. Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that�s Moses, not Jesus. I haven�t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. �Blessed are the merciful� in a courtroom? �Blessed are the peacemakers� in the Pentagon? Give me a break! ________________________________________________________ But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren�t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls� basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. Which one are you in this country? It�s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren�t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut. If some of you still haven�t decided, I�ll make it easy for you. If you want to take my guns away from me, and you�re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you�re for the poor, you�re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you�re a conservative. We�re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call �Native Americans.� How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. What could be simpler?