Greg Beale
3 min readSep 8, 2020

Religious Fever and the First Amendment….

“It just can’t get any worse” and then it does…With wildfires the worst in history and a killer pandemic that has become a political football, we are squabbling over how to teach or kids?

Really?

Ok, the first thing is safety…and crowding children into poorly ventilated class rooms is not it.

We have ignored education for years. The conservatives have run the funding of public schools into the ground, with a constant attack on state and local taxes.

Prop 13 has resulted in literally destroying the public education sector of our state.. It has taken a long time, but now landlords are spectacularly rich, while schools fall apart, with no nurses or other support personnnel; one big reason for not opening up schools!

Teachers are underpaid and unappreciated. And it seems they are expendable. My son in law is being forced to teach in person to kindergarteners who are virus spreaders supreme.

And worse, the pandemic is famous for asymptotic spread of the virus, especially in children.

So even fever tests will not keep the virus from coming into a classroom, spreading the virus and killing the teaching staff.

And nobody has the money to properly ventilate schools. Anti-tax and anti-school fever took care of that a long time ago.

Many schools, during pre global warming days, have NO air conditioning because it wasn’t 105 in September! And thanks to the anti tax wing nuts, they don’t have it now.

What the pandemic continues to do is to punish under governed America…it punishes because the conservative world view believes that the less government the better.

The pandemic proves it doesn’t!

So we are under governed…and radical Christians hold rallies in the State Capitol that relishes in anarchy posing as religion. They did it in Redding, and now the same fascist Christians, who just have to gather together every Sunday to worship, are bullying us all!

I mean for years most of these quasi Christians never got close to a church, but NOW they are having their ‘First Amendment Rights trampled”.

What REALLY is at stake here is not the worship service, but the part where the hat is passed for contributions. Many churches have adopted distance worship and bible readings…those mega churches who resist have wealthy and well paid pastors and others who are feasting at the holy grail…

Read the Bible daily and a weekly distance service to repent…what else do you have to do? For years people watched evangelical services on TV and skipped the Sunday in person visit…In this case, the contributions went to TV evangelical pastors, making them media stars and very rich as well!

In our mythological Western HIstory, we praise the rugged individualist Pioneers whose only worship, there were few churches in the frontier, was reading the Bible at home!

The evangelical lobby is behind this..Bethel Temple, a right wing hate church who even sponsors killing “queers” is the more extreme…and it’s all about money.

So we hear the sobbing pastor, who is “sacrificing” to an wrong allegiance to the 1st Amerndment.

That Amendment says that Congress will make no law ESTABLISHING A RELIGION.

And what else? It does not warn about the the separation of church and state…not really..but establishing a religion..so where is the evangelical grounds for protest?

They don’t have one.

The idea here reflects the times of when the Constitution was drafted, when religious warfare, literally was tearing Europe apart…a few years later, a genocide based on differences between the Jewish religion and Christianity, saw Christians KILL 6.5 Million People!

Why? Well because the Nazi’s proclaimed the establishment of religion, that left out Jews. People forget that the Holocaust was at its base a religious war, just like the Spanish Inquisition that killed millions.

So we now trust evangelicals for not having ulterior motives during the Pandemic?

The collection plate over health; that’s the issue here.

And that same madness, of touting some kind of weird political agenda in trying to save lives by “standing up to a virus” is just gold stone crazy and it is tearing this nation apart. God will NOT PROTECT YOU FROM THE PANDEMIC…HE HAS MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO, LIKE SEND A MESSAGE THAT WE ARE RUINING THE PLANET IN OUR LOVE FOR THE AUTOMOBILE.

There Is NOTHING WORSE than a religious fanatic who is trying to “save you”.

It’s the collection plate….

Greg Beale

Stanford grad, BA Political Science, MA from Sac State, Varsity Football Player, in public education as teacher, coach, athletic director, and administrator.