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May 19, 2009

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”

The above was included in intelligence updates Rumsfeld gave to President Bush during the Iraq War so that his resolve to kill wouldn't waiver.

Well I don't know about you. But having to give your President Bible scriptures to keep his resolve to keep killing seems somehow Unchristian.

But then I gave up on being Christian awhile back. It wasn't Jesus that turned me off so much as it was Christians like Bush.

I really couldn't understand how lying and cheating your neighbors in business and supporting an unjustified war to kill innocents was very Christian. Yet, there I was having to listen to my fundamentalist friends go on and on about how capitalism is God's way of making us free and how Bush was doing the "Will of God."

If you believe all of the things those true Bible believers tell you about God then you would likely come to hate God.  Fortunately, I never believed them because I read the New Testament many times and I read how Jesus told us to "Turn the Other Cheek" and to "Love" one another. Somehow killing Iraqis for oil didn't seem like something a Loving God would condone.

Still, there is another lesson in the story of Bush fighting wars by the Bible.

Just look how that war came out.

It was a bloody mess. It made America hated by nearly everyone in the world and we are still there today trying to occupy that country while keeping some type of order.

Fighting the war by the Holy Book didn't appear to be a good idea. It would have been better for President Bush to use some good judgment and a bit of heart as a leader rather than to try to fit a war into the pages of the Bible.

This is probably a good life lesson for both believers and non-believers. Don't expect one book to give you all the answers.  God -- if you believe in God -- or nature has given us brains with the ability to reason.  Fortunately, most of us were given some human feeling and it is always a good idea to apply that when dealing with human problems.

Humans always want others to do the thinking for them.  Even the President, a supposed leader, decided that a book or some other authority was going to give him the answers.  But as history teaches us over and over, if we want a better life and a better world then we have to make good choices based a lot of awareness and proper judgment.

The tragedy of the Bush years and the killing of more than 1,000,000 people is that not only did our leaders abandon common sense but so did many Americans.

A book, a talking head, or a supposed leader are not going to be able to give us all of the answers. Instead we have to do something adults are supposed to do -- and that is think for ourselves