Whose Side Is God On? Kony's? Roy Moore's

Take religion or leave it. Some people get a lot of comfort from it. My problem has never been with religion per se; it's always been with armed religion. If God's on your side... well, anything goes. Right from the days of the Bible you had permission-- even a duty to-- butcher women and children... as long as you're doing God's work. The conquistadors enslaved and wiped out most of the population of what's now known as Latin America, in the name of Jesus. You know what those beheadings by ISIS are all about? Right, God's will. Religions and weapons... always bad. Never good. Never.

I worry that all the fake religionists down South-- the Trump base-- are so heavily armed. These people shouldn't be allowed to play with butter knives unsupervised and now the Republicans are making sure they can turn their legal semi-automatic weapons into machine guns with the bump stock devices Paul Ryan refuses to allow a vote on.

It wasn't that long ago that these same religionist freaks were funding Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. Remember them? About 5 years ago I read a piece in The Atlantic about Kony's crazy war and how he had God on his side. Josh Kron wrote about a "powerful network of [American] Christian activists, traditionally dominated by the Christian right, that has at times brought mass attention, almost single-handedly, to some of Africa's worst and most ignored conflicts, from South Sudan to the Nuba Mountains, Darfur to the Lord's Resistance Army. The movement has also sparked controversy. It is a community of activists that wields disproportionate influence over African affairs, from military politics to public health to social policy. As they work to organize a global effort to catch the leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a distinct but not-so-distant wing of the same movement helped to implement Uganda's notorious anti-gay law, which legalizes the killing of 'repeat' gay men." Right wing activists in America funded Kony's slaughter of as many as 100,000 people in Uganda. You know... God on their side. He says his army is fighting for the Ten Commandments-- like Roy Moore, another armed religionist crackpot who believes God's on his side too.

This week NPR interviewed Alexis Okeowo, author of A Moonless, Starless Sky, "about about ordinary Africans who are standing up to extremism, people who are in their own ways resisting religious and cultural fundamentalism in acts of everyday bravery." It's worth listening to:


The whole idea of Kony's Lord's Resistance Army was-- of course-- to turn Uganda into a theocracy... so he would cut off people's hands if they worked on the Sabbath. And kidnap 60,000 children and make them fight in his army when he needed to do "God's work." Like all religionist crackpots, Kony, who thinks he's a fundamentalist Christian, says he's "the spokesperson of God." He's supposedly still roaming around in the remote bush of the Central African Republic, avoiding an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.