Category Archives: Religion

Woody Guthrie Didn’t Have a Home in This World Anymore

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The story goes that when Woody Guthrie was on the road in the 1930s, he heard people in the migrant camps singing an old Baptist hymn called “This World Is Not My Home” (sometimes also called “I Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore”). It’s a song about the better world to come. Here’s how it begins:

This world is not my home, I’m just passing through
My treasures and my hopes are all beyond the blue
Where many many friends and kindred have gone on before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

Over in Glory land, there is no dying there
The saints are shouting victory and singing everywhere
I hear the voice of them that I have heard before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

Guthrie didn’t like the other-worldly message at all, so he wrote new lyrics, turning it into a protest song, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore”:

I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ’round,
Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

Was a-farmin’ on the shares, and always I was poor;
My crops I lay into the banker’s store.
My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn
I been working, mister, since the day I was born
Now I worry all the time like I never did before
‘Cause I ain’t got no home in this world anymore

Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see
This world is such a great and a funny place to be;
Oh, the gamblin’ man is rich an’ the workin’ man is poor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

He could have written that last verse yesterday.

Garry Wills on Who’s Afraid of the Pope

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Garry Wills is one of America’s leading intellectuals. He’s now 80 years old and has had a brilliant career, but he’s still going strong. From the New York Review of Books blog:

Now, as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued: “He would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” they say. They do not know exactly what the pope is going to say in his forthcoming encyclical on preserving God’s creation, but they know what he will not say. He will not deny that the poor suffer from actions that despoil the earth. Everything he has said and done so far shows that Francis always stands for the poor.

Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears…..

The real issue here is not science vs. ignorance, or the UN vs. xenophobia, or my 97 percent of experts against your 3 percent. It is a case of the immensely rich few against the many deprived poor. The few are getting much of their wealth from interlocking interests that despoil the earth. The fact that the poor get poorer in this process is easily dismissed, denied, or derided. The poor have no voice. Till now. If the pope were not a plausible voice for the poor, his opponents would not be running so scared. Their fear is a testimony to him.

More here.

If God Did Not Exist…

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It would be necessary to invent him. Oh, wait…

Voltaire didn’t quite put it that way, but he didn’t have a blog.

Here’s how Randy Newman put it in “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)”. (The music is below if you want to listen while reading.)

Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel suppose to multiply
Why must any of the children die?
So he asked the Lord and the Lord said

“Man means nothing he means less to me
Than the lowliest cactus flower or the humblest yucca tree
He chases round this desert ’cause he thinks that’s where I’ll be
That’s why I love mankind”

I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
From the squalor and the filth and the misery
How we laugh up here in Heaven, prayers you offer me
That’s why I love mankind

The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak

They said “Lord the plague is on the world
Lord no man is free
The temples that we built to you have tumbled into the sea
Lord, if you won’t take care of us
Won’t you please please let us be?”

And the Lord said
And the Lord said

“I burn down your cities, how blind you must be
I take from you, your children and you say how blessed are we
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That’s why I love mankind, you really need me
That’s why I love mankind.”

In a different vein, Brian Wilson made some recordings in the 90s with Andy Paley that have never been officially released. They’re known as the “Wilson/Paley Sessions”. This song is “Must Be A Miracle”. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5ToKRUARz4

The New Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL)

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the latest crisis in the Middle East. That’s the one involving the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The Levant, by the way, includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and part of southern Turkey.

As of now, the Islamic State is more of a military force than a nation. They’re fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mainly funded by sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Their apparent goal is to create a new Muslim empire or “caliphate”. So far, they control significant portions of Iraq and Syria. Lately, they’ve been putting extreme pressure on the Yezidis or Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnic group in northern Iraq. The Yezidis aren’t Muslims. They practice an ancient religion related to Zoroastrianism. To protect the Yezidis, the United States is now carrying out airlifts and airstrikes. President Obama doesn’t see a quick end to this latest conflict or American involvement.

Here are excerpts from an article by Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books:

As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by ISIS on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people… In a few weeks of fighting in Syria, ISIS has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition….The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of ISIS becoming weaker and less capable of resistance…

With weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, ISIS no longer needs so much outside help. For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden.

Calling the rise of ISIS or ISIL “the ultimate disaster” for the United States and Europe sounds more like overstatement than British understatement, but the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state that aims to forge a new Muslim empire intolerant of religious minorities certainly isn’t good news. The vacuum we created by getting rid of Saddam Hussein seems to be filling up. 

Sarah Silverman Receives Divine Guidance

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I like Sarah Silverman a lot. She’s funny and does good work. Plus she has eaten popcorn with Jesus (who apparently looks like a West Coast hippie, just like in the movies).