Matthew Parris was mistaken for saying that Africa needed God and missionaries to walk tall in this 21st century

The diary below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal and adapted for Political Cortex.

Allow me to digress from the usual politics and current events topics of my blog writing to acknowledge the anniversary of John Lennon's death. I was only eleven in 1980 and watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell delivered the news. I had recently learned all the lyrics to the Beatles, Rubber Soul album and was especially moved by the lyrics to "In My Life."

Personally I've never been a great believer in icons. Lennon himself delivers a stirring rebuke to the myth of icons with his classic composition God early in his solo career. Yet Lennon to me was different. Lennon was an artistic genius and international statesman.

Countless words of condemnation have been heaped upon George W. Bush and his hard-Right regime – a crescendo growing louder by the day, with voices from across the political spectrum. But the most devastating repudiation of the Regime's foul ethos was actually delivered almost 2,000 years ago by the man whose birth is celebrated at this season of the year.

We speak, of course, of Jesus of Nazareth, whose Sermon on the Mount, as reported in the Gospels, called for a revolutionary transformation of human nature – a complete overthrow of our natural instincts for greed, aggression, and self-aggrandizement. This radical vision – erupting in the turbulent backwater of a brutal world empire – is the true miracle of Jesus' life, not the clusmy fables about virgin births, magic tricks and corpses rising from the dead. The vision's living force sears through dogma, casts down the pomp of church and state, and gives the lie to every hypocrite who evokes the name of Jesus in pursuit of earthly power.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image.  Sound familiar?  That idea has been circulating for at least four thousand years.

How about this one: in the beginning, man created God in his own image.  Not quite as old, but popular enough.  The exact formulation is essentially modern, but some Greeks and Romans were saying something very like it about their gods better than 2,000 years back.

So, option A or option B?  One or the other is almost certainly right, but it's unlikely that any of us will know the answers in our lifetimes (Warning: this statement void in case of rapture).  Does it matter which idea is right?  In a personal sense, there's little that could be more important.  In a political sense... maybe not as much as you think.

But even if you're B all the way, it would pay for you to have some understanding of the people in the A camp, who this God character is, and how he became such a pain in the keester.