Crazy to be Christian?

 
Last Sunday I mentioned  the trial of a man in America's Afghanistan for what is in that country the capital crime of converting from Islam to Christianity.
 
I suggested America's so-called Christian so-called president and his fundamentalist Christian base should come to the defense of this one brave Afghani Christian.
 
News reports Thursday morning covered the somewhat perfunctory responses of Bush and his backers, some of them using my own words; and now a new wrinkle in the story has emerged in that the Afghani Christian may be judged insane by the Afghani courts. 
 
This might save his life, but at what cost to the concept of freedom of religion supposedly being introduced into Afghanistan society?  It allows the government of Afghanistan to ignore the anachronistic injustice of this law and sidestep the great legal issue by calling this brave Christian a lunatic.
 
Ironically, this is a very American solution to the problem; America loves to declare to be insane people it does not dare judge on their constitutional merits; and I am wondering if America did not advise Afghanistan to take this course.
 
There are two things about this story which I would like to mention today.
 
First, the suggestion here is the American media and government did not know about, or were silent about, this story before and for several days after I reported it here.  While I am not allowed to work in my profession of journalism, journalists often cull and obliquely refer to my work; and while I am not allowed political freedom, politicians sometimes claim my work and words to be their own.
 
George W. Bush, whose administration has been bitterly cruel to me from its early months, does not mind puffing himself up with my work.
 
Journalists and politicians know in their thousands that I am persecuted and homeless, but this is not knowledge that they have the courage to honestly and openly admit.
 
Of course I noted the plight of that Afghani Christian in the hope it would help draw American attention to it; and as I had hoped, American journalism culled the story from me.
 
This culling of journalists' work by journalists is common.  I culled the story from The Kahleej Times of the UAE, an excellent newspaper.  I culled the new wrinkle about insanity from The Independent, an excellent English newspaper.
 
Second, it is worth noting that just about all, if not all, the countries of the world use psychiatry as a second legal system which often supercedes the true legal system.
 
While the United States has been punishing me for some 35 years for my anti-war statements during the Vietnam War, it is able to keep me in a torture chamber by calling those statements insane.
 
This contrived psychiatric judgement, based on the mutually agreed upon bearing of false witness, allows the great constitutional issues concerning crime, charge, trial, conviction and cruel and unusual punishment to be ignored because that whore of medicine and de facto state religion of the United States, psychiatry, takes a higher position than the Constitution.
 
So, it is not surprise to me that a Christian man in America's Afghanistan is being treated in the American way.
 
In terms of modern psychiatry, Jesus, too, would be condemned as insane.