Ted Cruz doesn’t care what lie he tells. He’s only too happy to cobble together some fantastic fable and sell it to stupid people and profit from it. That’s who he is. Cruz is a profiteer. It’s been said for years now that he spends more time on his podcast or being interviewed than he spends representing the people of Texas in the Senate and that’s certainly believable. Here he is going toe to toe with Tucker Carlson on the issue of Iran. Naturally, Cruz is aligned with the religious fanatics and the concept that their version of Gawd wants us to start a war in Iran.
I can’t stand Ted Cruz but Tucker Carlson works for Putin.
— Trey Sturgis (@trey_sturgis) June 18, 2025
Carlson may work for Putin, but if he does, Putin has made it crystal clear that he has no respect for him. Putin made Carlson wait two and a half hours to do an interview a few years back. It’s said that “punctuality is the courtesy of kings” and clearly Putin did not regard Carlson as a fellow monarch, but as a serf that could bloody well wait for the king to show up, or pack up his gear and leave. Carlson sat there and waited, most likely to Putin’s amusement.
But consider the idiocy of what Ted Cruz just said: the people who wrote the Bible (and in all truth, nobody knows how much and to what extent the original text has been tampered with. Scholars debate this all the time) were able to foresee a future Israel, with its present day politics, its present day armaments, all of the realities of the present day. That is what Ted Cruz would have you believe.
And he would have you further believe that Almighty God needs the United States (or anybody for that matter) to carry out some kind of a military strike, when the fact of the matter is that God could send earthquakes, frogs, locusts, you name it, at any given time to anyplace on the planet, and wipe out that place if he wanted to.
My take on religion has always been that God gave man free will and so if we exercise free will to our benefit and to the benefit of others, that’s a good thing. I’m sure that’s what God wants. But history has proven that God will allow the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition or the Holocaust or anything you can conceive of, because that’s the other side of free will.
We can use our free will to build or to destroy and that’s just fine with God. That’s the test. Here, children, take your free will and do with it what you will. And live with the results. And everything that you see around you in this world is both the result of somebody using their free will properly and improperly. Good vs. Evil.
Or, you can believe that Ted Cruz is right and people over two thousand years ago were able to look in a crystal ball and foresee today’s Israel and issue instructions about it.
I would love it if somebody would ask Ted Cruz about some of the really awful passages in the Bible, like “heaping burning coals upon thine enemies head” or “killing thine enemies children” and tell us if we should do those things, as well.
Even Biblical scholars will admit up front that there are parts of the Bible that are bloody and gory and inhumane and should be ignored. I hope somebody will ask Ted Cruz about these things but I’m not holding my breath.
This religious madness, however, is potentially going to kick off a war with Iran and we could see it blossom into WWIII. Which, according to the fundamentalists, is a good thing. 144,000 people will go up in the rapture, the rest of us are toast and this is supposed to be “God’s will.”
I don’t believe that’s God’s will. I think God’s will is that we exercise our free will, and if we choose to blow ourselves up, so be it. He won’t stop us.
I agree.
Whew. Tha Bible covers a lot of years, even if you leave out all the years before Moses dies and his brother Aaron and the Jewish ex-slave reached what is now Israel. IRC, during those thousands of years, there were times when Israel had kings, times when they were conquered, ruled, and forcibly remoed by Babylon and other powers, times when they were conquered by Greece, including when Antiochus ruled for Greece, times when they were conquered by Rome, during part pf which the Herodian dynasty ruled as figureheads for Rome, or Rome ruled theoug a Roman governor hand picked for the job, or both. Sandwiched in there were times when Israel was not a unified nation but a collection of provinces. And this is just off the top of my head – I didn’t do any checking, but I think I’m right, though perhaps I have left some things out. What Biblical Israel is he even talking about?
Unrelated, I think the “coals of fire” is a metaphor – a metaphor for the feeling of shame the enemy will get when you meet evil with good – which literally does make the head warmer with blushing, if you have any shame at all. At least that’s what I was taught growing up in the LCMS, a denomination not known for liberalism.. And C.S. Lewis thought that psalm about killing the enemies’ children was one of the “horrible example” passages, but could also be interpreted as a metaphor for what to do when a thought comes to you that you know is not a good thought but it feels so good – as so many of us do today as we look at the Apricot Antichrist – treat that thought as a child of the enemy and kill it, before it turns into serious evil intentions.