About Religion, Fear and Politics
By Ronnie LoBello
I’m proud to say that I am not a member of any religious organization. I’m not a Christian a Jew or Muslim. However Christianity is the religion that probably influenced my life the most, being Italian descent and all.
My father was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church after he devorecd his first wife, church rules you know, The catholic church has been a major part of the LoBello families faith for generations, It seems very cold hearted to ostracize someone for discovering that they don’t love the one they are married to, or vice versa. I grew up in a family that had been divided into several parts over Religious Idealism. My mother came from an Irish protestant background, which caused a lot of conflict because of; predigest narrow mindedness on both sides of the family. Soon my mother and father separated. (Not for religious reasons.) During this time I experienced life in two foster homes the first one was fairly institutional, run by a Lutheran Christian organization it was strongly recommended that I attended church and Sunday school. As a good seven years old, I generally did what I was told. By the time I was in the second foster home, the people who ran it were some other kind of Christian thing. By this time it’s just a lot of the same, just said in different languages. After this I lived with my oldest half sister who was Baptist convert from catholic, and was really going over the top with it. Don’t get me wrong I still think she one of the best people you’ll ever find.
Ok it didn’t stop there; later on when I was about eleven years old I’m now living with my dad who believes that all religion is a bunch of voodoo hoha. But he now has a Jewish girl friend that would let me stay at her house after school until my dad would get home. Often she would help me with my homework. She also thought me a lot of Jewish values and took me to temple now and then too. This was a refreshing look at religion and life, and by this time I have just started to get the meaning of it all and putting in perspective a better understanding of the world. Later still when I was about nineteen years of age I had a friend who was a member of the Church of Scientology.
She told me a lot of great things about L. Ron Hubbard, so attended some classes there and read some books by L. Ron such as Dianetics and a few others. Scientology seems to be on the borderline of being a business cult and or fraternity, but I felt that it didn’t have too much to do with spirituality although it still has a lot of good philosophy and knowledge of the human psyche.
I do not have much knowledge of the Muslim world although I live on Chicago’s north side near Loyola University where large populations of Muslim people live. One thing I have observed is that they are respectable people who do not seem to judge others for their religious background but by the person they are. Not like the hateful angry people portrayed on the TV news.
The Islamic fundamentalist I keep hearing about who want to kill all those who are Christian or Jewish either are not in Chicago or really don’t exist except in the twisted minds of the mislead and misinformed. Politicians use the dividing line between the religions to create the fear of the unknown in order to divide and conquer, there is another religion that is a virus to many of the world religions these are the Neocons. Neocons pretend they are, or support Christians or Jews when it is necessary to gain financial support for their political campaigns, by kissing up to different religious or interest groups and placing wedges between these groups by dividing people with fear and by building hatred of each other. By doing this the now can set the stage for war and by using false flag operations
This has been done in the attacks on September the eleventh and the London subway bombings and if you do your research you will find hundreds of examples. Why do they do this? Because there is a great deal of profit made on the business of war. For example Dick Cheney has ties to Halliburton corporation, Gorge Bush comes from a long line of Oil men and close ties to foreign oil families and so on.
The Neocons have infiltrated the governments of United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, this why they do the unspeakable acts of war such as the US invasion of Iraq and UK who just seems to go with any thing the US says, or the Israeli attacks on the Lebanese and Palestinian people.
Most all people are intelligent enough to see that, except for about thirty percent, mostly Americans, can’t see how wrong this is and how corporate driven all this killing is. Why can't Americans see the corruption is because of the corporations run news media? Because the majority of Americans get their news from Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN. These network news sources are all paid for and owned by the largest corporations and its supporters, and the very same people that make profit off of war. And be aware of all the people like you and me that hold small jobs such as retailers and factory workers are the worker bees of the great machine and must learn to make better decisions in our lifestyles.
What I am trying to say is that we have to listen to all points of view and beliefs of all faiths. The one thing that I truly believe is that all people come from the same source or god or whatever you believe and know body really knows what that is no one knows what or who god is. What we do know is that we can get along a lot better with tolerance and expectance of each other as long as people preach hatred and fear we are on a downward spiral. It scares me when I here words of hatred coming out of religious leaders mouths such as Pat Robertson’s remark about killing Hugo Chavez or the leader of Hamas talking about complete destruction of Isreal, the pope reciting ancient text from hate mongers of the past and the Neocons feeding into all this so they can sell there weapons to both sides George Bush kisses up to all sides he claims to be a Christian but work with Israel against the Arab States and then makes business deals with the rich Arabs while they shit on the poor Arabs. Obviously religion and Corporations should stay separate and stay out of government and visa versa. Government must work for the people I mean all people.
