The 2012 Republican Presidential Race/Iowa,New Hampshire/Moral Qualifications/Philosophy/Ritual Purification-Bathing

I will stipulate that none of the Presidential candidates running seem to have the manageable competence on the economic and environmental challenges facing the United States, yet neither does President Obama seem to have a clue even though he expects to have a billion dollar re-election campaign to reclaim the right to enjoy parties with celebrities in the White House and make excellent speeches with little substantial content that puts Americans to work and reduces federal indebtedness to China, Japan, India and whomever.

With the vanishing face of Gaia we get the idea that the environment may suffer a decline ahead equal to or greater than the economic decline of middle, working class and poor Americans. Politicians have taken to supporting mass media owned by corporations and concentrated wealth outsourcing and degrading the future prospects of Americans and their ecosphere on the North American continent. The President has achieved gaying up the District of Columbia, the federal bureaucracy and the U.S. military and created a national corporate medical insurance care hybrid with corporate snares into government provisioning of services that is designed to benefit the middle class instead of the poor.

An F.D.R. kind of President would have created a national medical service for the poor and let the middle class able to buy insurance pay for it themselves. Otherwise they have no reason to unionize demands for better health benefit packages.

The Presidential primary season affords us the opportunity to speculate about the moral purity of the candidates and who will fall from political grace through ceremonial impurity such as the media may reveal. Purification rituals have evolved over the millennia reaching today's political standards.

A Presidential political candidate should have some powerful religious organization or priest attesting to his or her moral purity during the primaries. Only the morally pure may qualify to order war upon poor foreign people sheltering terrorists and hire wealthy corporate contractors to prosecute battle for decades through proxies from poor countries paid 2 dollah an hour. Only priests supporting high political standards could affirm President Obama's moral qualification to order that gay sailoring for the U.S. Navy is o.k. There are differences on abortion and worship of money and oil in public schools with the equivalent of religious colleges holding opposite opinions yet right purification ceremonies make candidates ready for political battle without suggesting that Congress take a pay cut to help balance the Federal budget. What sort of moral purification will serve to prepare a President to support use of corn to produce gasohol when the corn needed to produce a gallon of alcohol is said to be enough to feed a starving soul for a year?

If we are to understand the political reasoning for the moral value candidates in the Iowa Republican straw poll we must understand the criteria for maintaining ritual purity in matters concerning the Temple in first century Jerusalem.

Jews in the precincts of the Holy Temple were required to be clean in respect of God. That meant they had to follow select paths of conduct that would not make them impure or unclean.

Bathing was an important part of ritual and actual purification before meals. Certainly on would keep regular ablutions for ordinary cleanliness, and before eating important meals (not political brunches) immersion in a special ritual bath was required.

In the dry middle east keeping water around during the dry seasons was tough. Stone baths might have a minimum of water standing in them, slowly evaporating. Rules were made about how much water was needed to make an effective ritual purification.

Reusing that water meant that menstrual blood would disqualify an individual from using the special ritual cleansing pool, so also would other substances that would pollute the water, and lepers as a class were regarded as unclean-the ritual cleansing pool would do them no good.

In the modern era the CDC might designate some people as ceremonially unclean analogously, if they are regarded as transmitters of lethal or even bad diseases. With more sophistication than the ancient Jews (except for Jesus and Paul and Peter too) we may think that individuals or classes probably are not unclean from a caste point of view yet even so we would not want to share the same bath water for purification purposes anyway. Luckily for us Americans are much more sophisticated today on matters of purity.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples after they ate rather than before providing an example of service unto the brethren a they venture out into the world on their ordinary lives; the true place for ritual purification being in one's conduct toward others rather than in washing up for dinner. It is easy today to confuse washing up for dinner with religious devotion I suppose if one has an idea of social hierarchy and leadership as the true meaning of Christmas or the new fall television line-up.

In Iowa Mitt Romney has wisely remained at a distance rather than have his Mormonism put through the hierarchy of fundamentalist scorn. He may win in New Hampshire though and even get gifts of honey glazed hams along the campaign trail. Romney seems the best conventionally prepared economic issue candidate unenslaved to the oil industry with a chance to get elected. Where is the Ralph Nadir of our time the electorate should ask, yet they do not.

Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas is also entering the race and seems to have the right ceremonial political-SUV drive in church hierarchy credentials. He probably gets lots of top quality potato salad and barbecue and knows many people in the oil industry.

Long ago, far away in a cave; The Suba Cave of the forerunner John the Baptist several miles from Jerusalem, John would immerse people in a ceremonial bath-pool, and they would have oil place on their right foot to sanctify it. We learn from Jesus, Paul and Peter that the entire idea of outward forms of ritual purification have little value-it is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ the Son of God that is required. Today church hierarchical practices continue to displace the personal relationships of a community of faith. A special church priest-the word priest is never used in the Bible as a role for Christians and is only mentioned twice in a different context in the New Testament. The priesthood should be that of the believers with Jesus Christ as the sole actual priest, and even the Christ being the High Priest as described in the Book of Hebrews is used once to indicate the finality of His sacrifice-himself.

Today churches should be the reinforcement to each individual Christian's pilgrim's progress through the vicissitudes of life. A life account for each Christian should be maintained regardless of where he or she goes in the U.S.A. They should be regarded as equals in the brother and sisterhood instead of separated in a caste system of clergy and laity.



The Iowa straw poll may provide us with some candidates that feel specially anointed to be incompetent and economic affairs and interests of the nation. It will be comforting to know that they also get it wrong on religion. Well, at least the F.D.A. assures the ritual purity of the food when it isn't contaminated with e coli or salmonella. Too bad they can't do much for the pollution of the Gulf Waters. The creature from the black lagoon must have been supercharged by the Gulf Horizon spill.



The public basically realizes the financial sector of Wall Street takes about 35% of Wall Street profits and it plays the global account with computer program trading programs to skim value. None of that is very helpful for the U.S. economy and doesn't employ many in the U.S.A. In fact too many people not manufacturing anything in the U.S.A. and investing abroad create a cartoon like circumstance of trillion of dollars of abstract profit taking off of one laborer actually working someplace. Maybe the entire global currency gets a little bit inflated-although inflation or over-valuation of a currency could be a kind of monetary relativism that might be described with special theory of relativity criteria better than with currency indexes of value. abstract, monetary value is not a value system equivalent to actually important things like the world ecosphere. Wrong value judgements in the popular sector can definitely lead to deleterious eventualities.