We Need More Marys

I will post a nice Christmas Eve sermon later tonight. But we should recall that the infancy narratives in the gospels are set in a time of Empire's paranoia and corresponding ruthlessness.

The "light of the world" comes from a humble place. It is difficult to find a more anti-Empire message than Mary's Magnificat:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

This is no schmaltzy Christmas rhetoric. This is an ancient writer using the character, Mary, to speak truth to power. That is the real Christmas story.

Our narrative is set in the global, militarized, corporate Empire. What Eisenhower warned could come--the military industrial complex--has come on steroids. As Empire's foolish infinite growth fantasy has reached its limits and the planet's limits, panic ensues.

Paranoid like Herod (in Matthew's gospel), those in power will do anything (and have done atrocious things) to maintain and take whatever they can for themselves before collapse.

We need another Mary. We all need to be Mary.

Your Christmas Eve movie is a speech delivered by David Ray Griffin in 2007 at Iliff School of Theology in Denver called 9/11 and Nationalist Faith.

"People of Faith" are often accused of allowing their faith to override evidence. This is sometimes the case. With regard to 9/11, the greatest obstacle to seeing the truth - that 9/11 could have been an inside job - is not the lack of evidence, but what can be called 'nationalist faith' - the belief that America is the "exceptional nation" whose leaders never deliberately do anything truly evil, at least to their own citizens.

If you haven't seriously considered doubting the official government conspiracy theory, you might start here.

Understanding the full truth of 9/11 seems to require two separate awakenings.

The first, awakening to the fraudulence of the "official 9/11 story," is a pretty simple brain function and only requires a little study, logic or curiosity. We can help a lot with that part here and it's a major purpose of this site.

The second step, however, consciously confronting the implications of that knowledge--and what it says about our media, politics and economic system today--is by far the harder awakening and requires an enormous exercise of nerve and heart. (As the Chinese say, "You cannot wake up a man who is pretending to sleep.") In other words, this part of the journey depends more on character than on maps and evidence so we can't help you much here, except to point out inspiring heroes and heroines who have courageously faced that truth, spoken out, and survived. (Though we might also point out the intriguing fact that our 9/11 heroines now outnumber 9/11 heroes by about six to one.)

David Ray Griffin is one of those heroes. Michael Ruppert is another. Cynthia McKinney is one of the heroines. As are the Jersey Girls.

Your Christmas movie: