Here is the 9/11 sermon link as well.

The messages you are viewing are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select the boards given in left menu

An Easter Sermon

Jesus knew viral marketing.

In the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John complains that nondisciples are selling bootlegged copies of Jesus� miraculous powers. �Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.�

Jesus tells John to quit obsessing about the intellectual property and to focus on getting the brand out. �Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.� Jesus adds, �Whoever is not against us is for us.�

Fast-forward two millennia. Weeks after 9/11, George Bush says roughly the opposite. His famous �You�re either with us or against us� means that those who don�t follow his lead will be considered enemies. The rest is history. Today, Jesus has more than a billion devoted followers. Mr. Bush has ... well, fewer than that.

The religious left � yes, there is such a thing � complains that Mr. Bush ignores the Bible�s moral injunctions. But leave morality aside. If he could just match the Bible�s strategic savvy, that would make a world of difference.

Consider a teaching of Jesus that seems on its surface devoid of strategic import. �You have heard that it was said, �You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.� But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.�

Christians often cast this verse as innovative, a sharp break from Jesus� Jewish tradition. But the same idea can be found in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and here it is clear that the point of the kindness is to thwart the enemy: �If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads.�

Coals of fire? As the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible explain, submitting to this treatment was an Egyptian ritual that �demonstrated contrition.� (And how!) �The sense here seems to be that undeserved kindness awakens the remorse and hence conversion of the enemies.�

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn�t. It�s unlikely that sending Osama bin Laden a Hallmark card would induce paroxysms of self-doubt. Still, there are other ways that reining in hatred can hurt your enemy�s cause.

Suppose, for example, you were nurturing a nascent religious movement in the Roman Empire, and your antagonists welcomed excuses to harass you. Suppose, that is, you were the Apostle Paul. When Paul preaches kindness to enemies, he uses not the formulation found in the Gospels, but the one from the Hebrew Bible, complete with the coals of fire.

Of course, Mr. Bush is more in the shoes of the Roman emperor than of Paul. America isn�t a small but growing religious movement. It�s a great power threatened by a small but growing religious movement � radical Islam. But the logic can work both ways. Great powers, by mindlessly indulging retributive impulses, can give fuel to small but growing religious movements. If you want to deprive jihadists of ammunition, make it hard for them to persuade others to hate us.

Right after Paul espouses kindness to enemies, he adds: �Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.� Sounds like na�ve moralizing until you look at those Abu Ghraib photos that have become Al Qaeda recruiting posters.

The key distinction is between man and meme. Yes, a great power can always kill and torment enemies, and, yes, there will always be times when that makes sense. Still, when you�re dealing with terrorists, it�s their memes � their ideas, their attitudes � that are Public Enemy No. 1. Jihadists are hosts for the virus of hatred, and the object of the game is to keep the virus from finding new hosts.

The Internet is fertile ground for memes, and jihadists are good at getting the brand out. One of the few things Osama bin Laden has in common with the Jesus of the Gospels is belief in the power of viral marketing.

The ultimate in viral marketing was Jesus� ultimate sacrifice. Deemed a threat to the social order, he was crucified under Roman auspices. But the Romans forgot one thing: If you face a small but growing movement that threatens the imperial order, you shouldn�t attack the men in ways that help the memes.

Mr. Bush says his favorite philosopher is Jesus. One way to show it would be to spend less time repeat- ing the mistake of the Romans and more time heeding the wisdom of Christ.

_________________

Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.

I was reading on ABC.com and found this article in the comments section. I don't know much about the Huffington Post, so this may be taken with a grain of salt. I thought it was interesting though.

Meet The (White) Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon
Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
March 21, 2008

Meet the man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's now famous tirade about America's foreign policy inciting the terrorist attacks of September 11.

His name is Ambassador Edward Peck. And he is a retired, white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32-years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter -- hardly the black-rage image with which Wright has been stigmatized.

In fact, when Wright took the pulpit to give his post-9/11 address -- which has since become boiled down to a five second sound bite about "America's chickens coming home to roost" -- he prefaced his remarks as a "faith footnote," an indication that he was deviating from his sermon.

"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday," Wright declared. "He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true: America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Wright then went on to list more than a few U.S. foreign policy endeavors that, by the tone of his voice and manner of his expression, he viewed as more or less deplorable. This included, as has been demonstrated in the endless loop of clips from his sermon, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuking "far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye."

"Violence begets violence," Wright said, "hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."

And then he concluded by putting the comments on Peck's shoulders: "A white ambassador said that yall, not a black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice... the ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them... let me stop my faith footnote right there."

So it seems that while Wright did believe American held some responsibility for 9/11, his views, which have been described as radically outside the political mainstream, were actually influenced by a career foreign policy official.

Who is Peck? The ambassador, who has offered controversial criticism of Israeli policy in the West Bank but also warned against the Iraq War, was lecturing on a cruise ship and was unavailable for comment. But officials at Peck's former organization, the Council for the National Interest, a non-profit group that advocates reducing Israel's influence on U.S. Middle East policy, offered descriptions of the man.

"Peck is very outspoken," said Eugene Bird, who now heads CNI. "He is also very good at making phrases that have a resonance with the American people. When he came off of that Fox News, a few days later he said they would never invite me back again."

And what, exactly, did Peck say in that Fox News interview that inspired Wright's words?

Here are some quotes from an appearance the Ambassador made on the network on October 11, 2001, which may or may not have been the segment Wright was referring to. On the show, Peck said he thought it was illogical to tie Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and that while the then-Iraqi leader had "some very sound and logical reasons not to like [the United States]," he and Osama bin Laden had no other ties.

From there, Peck went on to ascribe motives for what prompted the 9/11 attacks. "Stopping the economic embargo and bombings of Iraq," he said, "things to which Osama bin Laden has alluded as the kinds of things he doesn't like. He doesn't think it's appropriate for the United States to be doing, from his perspective, all the terrible things that he sees us as having been doing, the same way Saddam Hussein feels. So from that perspective, they have a commonality of interests. But they also have a deeply divergent view of the role of Islam in government, which would be a problem."

Mine also said he failed to mention this case when being questioned. Well, there's a thousand stories out there. It really doesn't matter to me. It doesn't affect how I think of him one way or the other.

But this is not where I originally saw it - I believe it was covered on PBS which is where I saw it.

I didnt want to put the report here as there is some profanity that Bush has used to his staff but here is the link.

By the way, that wasn't a good quote. That was a GREAT quote. In fact, your entire post was great. Thanks very much for posting it. You are so right and I couldn't agree with you more.

Good article - really talks about how nasty the media has been in this, and also more.- good read

I went on the website you referenced and could not find this. Please back it up with the actual link.

I'm sorry that I didn't save the link to the video clip I mentioned. I did a search for Obama messiah on Youtube just now and I didn't find the one I mentioned. Much to my surprise there were tons of such videos with accusations. What I did find was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FyEZdy-Rag&feature=related (Again, I don't know how to make a link but copy and paste in your browser. It appears to be the real deal. I didn't watch it all the way through as I am really, really busy today, so you can watch it and draw your own conclusions.

If you go to youtube and search for Obama messiah you'll probably find the original one I was talking about which I believe to be a fake. The above link, appears to me to be Obama himself in his own voice with his recognizable body language.

I made a mistake in my other post. I didn't mean to write that she asked the same questions. I meant to write that she asked the same tone of questions, putting down Obama. All in all, compared to the Biden interview, it was a McCain lovefest.