I posted this in links yesterday, but I’m putting it here because I thought it was funny and worth more notice. I really hate these intelligent design (creationism) people and the way they continue to try and pervert science and education. Expelled and Ben Stein are even worse because they try to link Nazism and Fascism to science and evolution. Their tactics, of course, are right out of the Goebbels playbook.
It seems to me the answer is no. The coverage is almost uniformly laudatory, dazzled by the spectacle with an occasional word about the globe-spanning sexual abuse scandal. Does coverage of the church need to be “tough”? No. But the arrival of the pope shouldn’t be covered as if Jesus himself landed on that jet.
Personally I find all the hoopla and presidential deference given to what is, essentially, the visit of a religious leader a little out of proportion, weird, and kind of troubling. I mean, Gordon Brown is a far more essential world leader and yet you don’t see the president coming to greet him on the tarmac.
I know I’m in a minority on this, but I just find it weird.
Related: I am curious, however, what the Pope plans to say about the child rapists his church helped to hide for all those years.
“[Doug Coe is] a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”
“Jesus says, ‘You have to put me before other people, and you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler, that was the demand of the Nazi Party. You have to put the Nazi Party and its objectives in front of your own life and ahead of other people!”
“I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China, a table laid out like a butcher table, they would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an axe and cut her head off.”
“They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother-father-brother-sister—their own life !”
“That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.”
Clinton’s prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or “the Family”), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship’s only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has “made a fetish of being invisible,” former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan.
Clinton declined our requests for an interview about her faith, but in Living History, she describes her first encounter with Fellowship leader Doug Coe at a 1993 lunch with her prayer cell at the Cedars, the Fellowship’s majestic estate on the Potomac. Coe, she writes, “is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”
I try so hard not to write about this racial stuff, but then Amy Sullivan writes this:
But I’ll be back in a few hours to talk about why the Democratic party outsourced religion to black churches, and how that’s hurt the party. It’s also left most Americans with a Disney-fied impression of African-American religious leaders as folks who sit around listening to gospel music all day, spout inspirational phrases to slap on calendars, and generally act like Denzel Washington in “The Preacher’s Wife.”
By “most Americans” she means of course “white Americans”.
You may remember Sullivan as the author of a piece decrying the tepid sports cuture of Washington without once mentioning the Washington Redskins. In that instance, as well, Sullivan substituted white upper class DC for the more mainstream, blacker rest of Washington (aka most people who live in DC). She also has a habit of saying Democrats don’t like religion.
Yes, I well remember noted African-American and Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter. African-Americans Bill Clinton and Al Gore both also made a big show of their Baptist faith, while African-American John Kerry frequently mentioned his time as an altar boy.
For the love of God, someone tell Amy Sullivan to STFU.
UPDATE 2: A friend notes: “Ghettoized” religion. Ghetto.
The pastor of my church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who recently preached his last sermon and is in the process of retiring, has touched off a firestorm over the last few days. He’s drawn attention as the result of some inflammatory and appalling remarks he made about our country, our politics, and my political opponents.
Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.
Like I’ve said a million times: show me a religious fundamentalist and I’ll show you someone with a screw loose no matter which god they worship.
A Muslim man jumped to the aid of three Jewish subway riders after they were attacked by a group of young people who objected to one of the Jews saying “Happy Hanukkah,” a spokeswoman for the three said Wednesday.
Friday’s altercation on the Q train began when somebody yelled out “Merry Christmas,” to which rider Walter Adler responded, “Happy Hanukkah,” said Toba Hellerstein.
“Almost immediately, you see the look in this guy’s face like I’ve called his mother something,” Adler told CNN affiliate WABC.
Two women who were with a group of 10 rowdy people then began to verbally assault Adler’s companions with anti-Semitic language, Hellerstein said.
One member of the group allegedly yelled, “Oh, Hanukkah. That’s the day that the Jews killed Jesus,” she said.
When Adler tried to intercede, a male member of the group punched him, she said.
Another passenger, Hassan Askari — a Muslim student from Bangladesh — came to Adler’s aid, and the group began physically and verbally assaulting him, Hellerstein said.
“A Muslim-American saved us when our own people were on the train and didn’t do anything,” Adler said.
What kind of knuckle dragger thinks Hannukah is a commemoration of “the day Jews killed Jesus”? Like, what rock do you hid under to believe something so ignorant?
Apparently some of the attackers said “this is a Christian nation”. Wonder where they get that kind of rhetoric from?
So here’s the deal, Muslim folks: give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t discuss exclusion from the world then periodically go apeshit. I’m tired of all the hardcore religious nuts in the world thinking society has to adhere to their rules and if not they throw a temper tantrum. There’s a long history of this from all sides. Everybody thinks they’re right, and in that fight they get ridiculous. You win the stupid prize this week over naming a teddy bear Muhammad. Give me a break. Please. Your God is very special to you and that’s between you and him, but to the rest of us?
We don’t care. In civil society Muhammad, God, Yahweh, Zeus, etc. are on a level playing field. You don’t get to be a part of the modern world if you’re going to flip out over stuffed animals.
When some of the world’s leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They’ll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.
The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design should be taught in public school sciences classes.
At any given time in history one religion or another is the dominant crazy one, but at the end of the day all the nuts look the same.
Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of “good” and “evil” and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.
It said extremists from each of the three faiths often have tangible grievances — social, economic or political — but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law, including killing civilians and members of their own faith.
The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead of a conference on Thursday in New York titled “Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization.” The report will be updated and published after the conference.
I can’t be the only one who finds strident atheists like Sam Harris as annoying and dogmatic as their religious fundamentalist counterparts. Its people like that who alienate the mushy religious-nonreligious middle like myself.
The last couple of years there have been a lot of stories in Europe, America, Asia, and beyond about the friction between Christians and Muslims. Too often we see the storyline - especially here in America - of people finding the differences in culture (ie. Islamic prayer) being taken as terrorist behavior.
On the flip side, I think a lot of people on the Muslim side of things believe that everyone else has to bend over backwards for them. The idea of a free and open society is that while we all have a right to our own gods (or lack thereof) there is also the right to mock the hell out of sacred cows.
I embrace the idea of a culture that is free to make fun of Jews, Christians, Atheists and yes, Muslims (and any other belief system you can think of). The concept that you’re going to issue a fatwa on anyone who speaks harshly of your culture while also arguing about tolerance is just two-faced.
I don’t think anyone gets a sensitivity exception. In the eyes of a free society nobody’s God (or Allah) gets to beat out anyone else’s.
Kirsten Powers - Fox News analyst and Democrat - errs on the side of Hugh Hewitt, right wing talk show host and Republican shill. The issue: religious fundamentalism. As I discussed earlier, Powers appears to see this widespread persecution of the religious that isn’t actually happening (that the illustration of her point is a few writings on Huffington Post proves to me how shaky the ground she’s standing on is in an age where the previous attorney general considered his God as the absolute law instead of the constitution he swore an oath to).
It is a common criticism today that if you divine your truth from the Bible, that is unacceptable. But if you divine your truth from your own internal dialogue or from talking to friends or from a philosophy other than that which is found in the Bible, then that truth is okay.
Nobody cares where your truth comes from. The issue here is - how far does your truth get to impose on me? Even if I believe exactly what you do, you’ve got no right to push it on me.
This is the pushback evangelicals in power like the President get. Once you’re in that office, your beliefs form the backbone of your decisions and positions, but in our government you represent all of us no matter the affiliation. That is what the evangelicals who are involved in politics don’t seem to understand. The presidency of the United States is not a papacy.
I’ll preface this by noting that when it comes to religion I’m probably best qualified as agnostic. I was raised in a Christian household, went to a Catholic school at one point and believe that there’s a higher power to the universe - it’s just that I tend to have a problem with the earth-based emissaries who claim to speak for God while filling their own pockets, touching little boys, or trying to make their brand of religion the official one. Live and let live I say, and so do most people on the left.
Which leads to this from Fox News pundit and Democrat Kirsten Powers. Powers claims that two books from atheist Sam Harris is clear evidence of Christian-bashing and part of a pattern. Come on.
In my lifetime there will never be an atheist or agnostic president, and the prospect of a Jewish or Muslim one seems pretty shaky as well. While America is not a Christian nation in the mold the right wants it to be, it isn’t exactly diversity central among the ruling class - Democratic or Republican. The difference is, Democrats and liberals tend to view their religion as their own religion and don’t make value judgements on other human beings based on which God they do or don’t worship. But when it comes to the right, if you aren’t a Christian - especially an evangelical - you might as well go to the back of the bus. Even worse is the current band of Christians in charge, who seem to not understand that no matter how strong your religious faith may guide you and lead you (and that’s fine and great and all great leaders have had their faith guide them), when you serve in our government one book of laws prevails over all others.
But Powers - Democrat - says one atheist wrote a couple of books and this totally invalidates the well-documented history of those in power pushing their brand of religion.
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