Mar 24, 2013

God Vs Devil—A letter to Bill O’Reilly at FOX News

Following is a letter I wrote to Bill O’Reilly at Fox News recently

While flipping channels, I happened to hear you saying something like “Do theologians believe the existence of Devil,” just before you went to the commercial.  I didn’t watch the segment since I turned the TV off after flipping a few more channels. I don’t like watching much TV, since I feel our corporate-owned media—focusing exclusively on profits—is influenced by the devil (equating goodness to God and pandering to evil to the Devil); even once objective government funded public TV is now financed by corporations and thus being held hostage at the expense of facts.
To discuss the issue of Devil that you brought up, people have a strange notion that the USA is being run by God, taking care of the sick, assuring children don’t starve and get a good education etc, and consequently  have such huge deficits and debt. These people don’t seem to realize that the real reason for huge debts is the trillions of dollars in corporate welfare that ends up only in the hands of the extremely wealthy that in turn had created the widest wealth gap between an extremely few super wealthy and the rest which is more than in any other civilized nation and in addition, than any time in the history of the USA.  

(Last time the income gap has been this wide was just before the great crash of 1932. There is a good reason for it: when the middle class don’t have money to save and consume, capitalism won’t survive; giving more wealth to already extremely wealthy only run asset bubbles, as we are experiencing now, exporting inflation to the poorest nations on  earth (due to unaffordable commodity prices) but not affecting us yet since our inflation comprises of two third labor cost and that is going drastically down as the wealthiest in the nation export jobs to slave-labor nations to make even  more profits.)
I was born in the third world and have lived in many parts of the world thus experiencing how some people without any guilt do and say evil things to others. Also being a voracious reader I have read many books written by humanists writers such as Norm Chomsky and Chris Hedges-both, unofficially, censored by our media— illustrating the evil powerful people do to others (with tears in my eyes).  A few months I lived in Sweden, convinced me that Sweden is the “heaven-on-earth” making sure no one dies not being able to afford healthcare and assuring everyone gets free education all the way till they qualify to find a job that pays them a livable wage by law.  Being curious to find out the reason for this miraculous system, I was told that came about when the church joined in hands with the unions, corporations and the government to come out with their system which is driven by the teaching of Jesus Christ; now that is a nation being run by God (I hope Devil will not appear there in the form of rightwing political philosophy—this has nothing to do with conservatism, which is not a bad thing).

On the other hand, if the USA continued in the direction it is going now, then I feel that Devil will have the upper hand in running this nation. Look at what’s going on: not only a huge segment of the people cheering the politicians and the Media, advocating eliminating any social safety net (against their self-interest—testament to the power of brainwashing) but also asking for increase in building weapons of mass destruction (even when the USA is spending more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined—let me add, a huge welfare program for the military industrial complex that is bankrupting us) so that the multinational corporations, see any democratically elected leader in our hemisphere turns benevolent to help the common people and not serve just a handful of ruthless who own their nations (most people in those nations are beyond brainwashing by their media so they elect those who promise to help them), can convince the US government to help overthrow that leader to enable the corporations to exploit slave labor and resources without any limitations to make more money for those few already extremely wealthy.
I wish to add that I tried screenwriting in Hollywood for a few years when I tried to use my lifetime experience observing evil in good people writing a few screenplays about how good people do terrible things inspired by Devil. One such screenplay was turned into a movie by BBC Films (“Happy Now?”- 2001) and was shown in the London Film Festival (unfortunately most of my original intentions were not in the final draft of the screenplay).

Incidentally, when posing the issue of the devil, you showed a clip from the latest controversial film from “History channel” where the actor who portrays devil look bit similar to President Obama.  At a time, when President Obama is asking to increase minimum wages so that so many hardworking Americans can have three meals a day (forget about health insurance; even that won’t be enough to meet the appetite of the greedy health insurance cartel—devil influenced?—profits), by showing that clip, if you were trying to insinuate that President Obama is the “devil” then you are being influenced by the devil too. Be careful. It is those who oppose any break for the hardest working people in this nation are the ones being influenced by the devil.