Please bomb us back to the stone age!
Blaming the victim as a practice
“US and Iran Agree to Cease Fire, Avoiding Threats of Imminent Devastation,” according to the New York Times. Only 90 minutes before the first bombs were scheduled to drop on bridges and petroleum refineries, a 10 Point plan was agreed to. Whew! Just in the nick of time. No doubt this ceasefire disappoints the 93 million people of Iran, who were asking to be bombed.
The people of Iran were actually asking the 47th president of the United States to bomb them. At least according to the president’s testimony, when justifying his threat to bomb the nation of Iran back to the Stone Age. A "whole civilization will die tonight" — what some call civilizational genocide — if Iran fails to meet a deadline to strike a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz, warned POTUS on Tuesday, April 7, 2026. The Iranians "would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom," said the president.
In The New Yorker, an actual Iranian on the ground is reported to have said something different. “And how [POTUS] has no idea what he’s doing or saying. He’s just giving the regime free propaganda material to work with.” But let’s get back to our topic, namely, the victim asking to be pummeled, shot, and bombed.
There is a name for this: “blaming the victim.” It has become common practice in the White House. When Renee Good was shot in the head through the open driver’s door of her car and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, POTUS immediately declared that it was her own fault. She “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” he bellowed. “She “behaved horribly,” he added. He also said Ms. Good had a “highly disrespectful” attitude toward law enforcement. New York Times journalist Anushka Patil reported that the president suggested that it justified her killing.
When the quisquous president later learned that Ms. Good had MAGA Republicans in her family, her status changed. “When I learned her, her parents and her father in particular is like — I hope he still is, but, I don't know — was a tremendous [MAGA] fan….” After changing his assessment, the president described the shooting death as a “tragedy,” about which he “felt terribly.”
When it comes to the 130 or so alleged drug runners in the Caribbean whom POTUS ordered killed by the US Navy, none of them, to my knowledge, ever converted to MAGAism. So, their deaths were not mourned, regretted, or grieved.
From Killing Individual Persons to Killing Entire Civilizations
The nation of Iran is bigger than Renee Good or Caribbean boatsmen. Yet, POTUS seems quite willing to put an entire civilization to death, just like he puts individuals to death. After all, it’s their own fault. They deserve it. Unless, of course, they convert to MAGAism.
Like Emperor Nero in ancient Rome, this American president feels very good about himself when, with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, he can determine who lives and who dies. To determine somebody else’s life or death makes one feel very powerful. What we see in this post-Easter period is that his thumb movement determines which civilizations live and which die. What’s next?
What’s next? Killing Planet Earth?
I wonder what the future of Planet Earth holds for us. Might POTUS threaten to put an end to the life-giving fecundity of our world’s biosphere? To destroy the world with a thumbs-down! Wow! Now, that would certainly make a magalomaniac feel powerful!
I wonder if our Planet Earth might ask the current US president to bomb it into infecundity. Or, I wonder alternatively, whether our Planet Earth might convert to MAGAism and save us all. What a deal!
Substack PT 4036. Please bomb us back to the Stone Age!. Blaming the Victim as a Practice
Substack PT 4016 POTUS Power over Life and Death: Redeeming America’s Future 8
Substack PT 4017 Countering the Cursing in the American Language. Redeeming America’s Future 9
Substack PT 4023. The winds of America’s next wars are already blowing
Substack PT 4028. Prayer, Jesus, and Pope Leo XIV. Praying in the Department of War
Patheos PT 4029. The Immortality of Money
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Meet Ted Peters. For Substack, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and an emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. In 2023 he published, The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. More recently, he has published an edited volume, Promise and Peril of AI and IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (ATF 2025), and, along with Arvin Gouw, an edited collection, The CRISPR Revolution in Science, Religion, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2025). Soon to be released is a volume of essays, A Handbook on Astrobiology, Astrotheology, and Astroanthropology, co-edited with Carolina Azucena Sanz de la Fuente and Arvin Gouw, with ATF.
See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site.
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