Category Archives: Religion

February 10, 2011 · 7:31 pm

Budget Cuts and Bad Faith – Jim Wallis – God’s Politics Blog

I do like to remind myself and others sometimes that not all Christians are Evangelical loonies….

I continue to enjoy reading Sojourner’s Magazine that my friend Renee put me on to…

Great article/blog on Social Justice and true Christian expectations…

House Republicans announced a plan yesterday to cut $43 billion in domestic spending and international aid, while increasing spending for military and defense by another $8 billion. This proposal comes just months after billions of dollars were added to the deficit with an extension of tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. House Republicans focused in on only 12 percent of federal spending, and targeted things like education, the environment, food safety, law enforcement, infrastructure, and transportation — programs that benefit or protect most Americans. They also proposed cutting funding for programs that benefit the most vulnerable members of our society, such as  nutrition programs for our poorest women and children. We don’t yet know all the cuts Republicans are targeting in their proposals, but it’s good to finally know what their priorities are.

Under the proposed budget cuts, deficit reduction will not come from the super-rich; it will come from the rest of us. And the poorer you are, the more vulnerable you become, and the more you will pay for the burdens of deficit reduction. For example, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a program that helps provide food to hungry mothers and their children faces a $758 million cut. Also, the proposed budget cuts $544 million in international food aid grants for organizations such as World Vision. AmeriCorps, a program that provides public service opportunities for our young adults, would be eliminated entirely. But our military and defense budget, which sends our young adults off to kill and be killed, would receive an $8 billion increase.

It used to be very popular for Christians to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” They even wore bracelets with the initials “WWJD.” The bracelets acted as reminders that as Christians, our actions should always reflect the values and example we see in the life of Jesus. Already, in a first wave of response to the proposed cuts, thousands of Christians told their members of Congress that they need to ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Cut?” They believe, and so do I, that the moral test of any society is how it treats its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. And that is exactly what the Bible says, over and over again.

via Budget Cuts and Bad Faith – Jim Wallis – God’s Politics Blog.

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February 6, 2011 · 6:10 pm

Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV

Excellent article about the real legacy of Ronald Reagan…

This is exactly how I remember it…

Hat tip to PamsHouseBlend.com for originally posting this….

America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent evocations of an imagined man.

In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember “glasnost,”  “perestroika,” and the impact of Levis, Coke and “Dynasty”?) is credited with “tearing down” the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up during his “conservative” presidency is ignored;  “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” still works, even though theory-originator David Stockman says it doesn’t; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the “Great Communicator” – who conned working-class “Reagan Democrats” while catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even before there were trained replacements.

AND:

For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the far different “mourning in America.” And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn’t even bother covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no “AIDSgate” for Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays deserved what they got – they deserved to die.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Patrick Buchanan, Reagan’s Press Secretary, said AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Antigay Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist) away from Reagan:

”[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan’s chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

 

via Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV.

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February 6, 2011 · 12:26 pm

The Siege of Planned Parenthood – NYTimes.com

Great article by Gail Collins in the NY Times…

Here is a brief excerpt.  I encourage you to click the link to the full post:

As if we didn’t have enough wars, the House of Representatives has declared one against Planned Parenthood.

Maybe it’s all part of a grand theme. Last month, they voted to repeal the health care law. This month, they’re going after an organization that provides millions of women with both family-planning services and basic health medical care, like pap smears and screening for diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

AND:

Planned Parenthood doesn’t use government money to provide abortions; Congress already prohibits that, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. (Another anti-abortion bill that’s coming up for hearing originally proposed changing the wording to “forcible rape,” presumably under the theory that there was a problem with volunteer rape victims. On that matter at least, cooler heads prevailed.)

Planned Parenthood does pay for its own abortion services, though, and that’s what makes them a target. Pence has 154 co-sponsors for his bill. He was helped this week by an anti-abortion group called Live Action, which conducted a sting operation at 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states, in an effort to connect the clinic staff to child prostitution.

“Planned Parenthood aids and abets the sexual abuse and prostitution of minors,” announced Lila Rose, the beautiful anti-abortion activist who led the project. The right wing is currently chock-full of stunning women who want to end their gender’s right to control their own bodies. Homely middle-aged men are just going to have to find another sex to push around.

via The Siege of Planned Parenthood – NYTimes.com.

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February 5, 2011 · 11:51 pm

Wallflowers at the Revolution

Another insightful column by Frank Rich in the Sunday New York Times:

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of “Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.

More: Wallflowers at the Revolution – NYTimes.com.

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January 29, 2011 · 11:20 pm

A Chicken Chain’s Corporate Ethos Is Questioned by Gay Rights Advocates – NYTimes.com

I haven’t been comfortable with these people for a long time…

I don’t eat there anymore.  Not just because our politics clash, but because the sandwiches are greasy and gross…

Instead, if I’m going to sin, give me a Chicken Biscuit from Mrs. Winner’s any day….

Nicknamed “Jesus chicken” by jaded secular fans and embraced by Evangelical Christians, Chick-fil-A is among only a handful of large American companies with conservative religion built into its corporate ethos. But recently its ethos has run smack into the gay rights movement. A Pennsylvania outlet’s sponsorship of a February marriage seminar by one of that state’s most outspoken groups against homosexuality lit up gay blogs around the country. Students at some universities have also begun trying to get the chain removed from campuses.

“If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay,” one headline read. The issue spread into Christian media circles, too.

The outcry moved the company’s president, Dan T. Cathy, to post a video on the company’s Facebook fan page to “communicate from the heart that we serve and value all people and treat everyone with honor, dignity and respect,” said a company spokesman, Don Perry.

Providing sandwiches and brownies for a local seminar is not an endorsement or a political stance, Mr. Cathy says in the video. But he adds that marriage has long been a focus of the chain, which S. Truett Cathy, his deeply religious father, began in 1967.

The donation has some fans cheering and others forcing themselves to balance their food desires against their personal beliefs.

via A Chicken Chain’s Corporate Ethos Is Questioned by Gay Rights Advocates – NYTimes.com.

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Filed under Food, Politics, Religion, The South

January 27, 2011 · 8:35 am

Steve McSwain: Are We ‘Nones’ Becoming a Virtual Congregation?

I’m not quite sure why I’ve been so fascinated with religion lately…

It may be because I am reading so many interesting articles from people who share some of my thoughts and concerns with organized religion…

I’m particularly enjoying Steve McSwain’s articles on Huffington Post.  I actually bought his book and have it on my Kindle.

Now I just need to find time to read it…

It just occurred to me that what this is becoming is a kind of virtual congregation. I never planned on this happening, but I cannot say that I am displeased either.

I left the pastorate nearly two decades ago, broken and disillusioned. Some of the pain I experienced was the consequence of my own life choices. The rest was the consequence of my disillusionment with organized religion. In my estimation, the church had become — and almost universally remains — critically ill. In fact, as I say in my book:

“If the current decline in church attendance were the medical case history of a hospital patient, the diagnosis would read: ‘Chronically ill; resistant to change; on life support; likely terminal.'”

“The church itself is the one institution most in need of the very thing it proclaims to the world — salvation. It boasts of knowing God, but by the sheer numbers who have given up on the church, it is right to question whether the church knows God at all.”(The Enoch Factorhttp://stevemcswain.com, p. 56).

So, I left, in terms of personal involvement and interest. In that respect, I was one of those whom researchers today call nones. The difference is, unlike most, I was a religious leader and a none — that is, a former pastor who had walked away from the ministry. I took up consulting with churches and parishes, Catholic, Evangelical, and Protestant alike. While clearly disingenuous, I didn’t know what else to do. All my professional training was in religion. Besides, I didn’t hate the church. I was just disillusioned by it. Deep within, I held out hope the church would change. I remain hopeful to this day.

I wandered, however, and wondered for many years whether a church existed anywhere that remotely resembled the teachings and practices of Jesus. I found most taught their traditions and practiced them with rigidity. They seemed lost in the madness of their differences from each other, as well as their dogmas, doctrines, and endless debates.

via Steve McSwain: Are We ‘Nones’ Becoming a Virtual Congregation?.

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January 26, 2011 · 9:30 pm

Is Evangelical Christianity Having a Great Gay Awakening?

My friend Renee sent me this and introduced me to Sojourner’s Magazine where this article appears.

I must say, it is making me revise my views about organized religion and admit there are some Christians who are not as judgmental, self righteous and self-absorbed as I thought…

Kind of a weird journey for this New Age Spiritual,agnostic, psuedo-Buddhist,  Jewish Wannabe, Gay Man who was raised in- and detests- the judgmental Southern Baptist Church and the Right Wing Political Evangelical’s message of hate….

I’m going to try to be more open-minded as I ask others to be…

It’s easy when Christians start saying some of the same things I do…

From Cathleen Falsani at Sojourners.com:

Some of my dearest friends are gay.

Most of my dearest friends are Christians.

And more than a few of my dearest friends are gay Christians.

As an evangelical, that last part is not something that, traditionally and culturally, I’m supposed to say out loud. For most of my life, I’ve been taught that it’s impossible to be both openly gay and authentically Christian.

When a number of my friends “came out” shortly after our graduation from Wheaton College in the early ’90s, first I panicked, and then I prayed.

What would Jesus do? I asked myself (and God).

According to biblical accounts, Jesus said very little, if anything, about homosexuality. But he spent loads of time talking, preaching, teaching and issuing commandments about love.

That was my answer: Love them. Unconditionally, without caveats or exceptions.

I wasn’t sure whether homosexuality actually was a sin. But I was certain I was commanded to love.

For 20 years, that answer was workable, if incomplete. Lately, though, it’s been nagging at me. Some of my gay friends are married, have children, and have been with their partners and spouses as long as I’ve been with my husband.

Loving them is easy. Finding clear theological answers to questions about homosexuality has been decidedly not so.

That’s why I’m grateful for a growing number of evangelical leaders who are bravely offering a different answer.

In his new book Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self and Society, Jay Bakker, the son of Jim Bakker and the late Tammy Faye Messner, gives clear and compelling answers to my nagging questions.

Simply put, homosexuality is not a sin, says Bakker, 35, pastor of Revolution NYC, a Brooklyn evangelical congregation that meets in a bar.

Bakker, who is straight and divorced, crafts his argument using the same “clobber scriptures” (as he calls them) that are so often wielded to condemn homosexuals.

“The simple fact is that Old Testament references in Leviticus do treat homosexuality as a sin … a capital offense even,” Bakker writes. “But before you say, ‘I told you so,’ consider this: Eating shellfish, cutting your sideburns and getting tattoos were equally prohibited by ancient religious law.

“The truth is that the Bible endorses all sorts of attitudes and behaviors that we find unacceptable (and illegal) today and decries others that we recognize as no big deal.”

Leviticus prohibits interracial marriage, endorses slavery and forbids women to wear trousers. Deuteronomy calls for brides who are found not to be virgins to be stoned to death, and for adulterers to be summarily executed.

“The church has always been late,” Bakker told me in an interview this week. “We were late on slavery. We were late on civil rights. And now we’re late on this.”

More:  http://blog.sojo.net/2011/01/25/is-evangelical-christianity-having-a-great-gay-awakening/

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January 25, 2011 · 6:33 pm

Martin Thielen: What’s the Least You Can Believe and Still Be a Christian?

Very interesting article from HuffingtonPost.com.

Click the link at the bottom for the full story…

When I first met Danny, he said, “Preacher, you need to know that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe the Bible. I don’t like organized religion. And I can’t stand self-righteous, judgmental Christians.”

I liked him right away!

In spite of Danny’s avowed atheism and my devout Christian beliefs, we became close friends. Over the next year Danny and I engaged in numerous conversations about faith. During that time Danny softened his stance on atheism. One day he announced with a laugh, “I’ve decided to upgrade from an atheist to an agnostic.” Several months later Danny said, “I’ve had an epiphany. I realize that I don’t reject Christianity. Instead, I reject the way that intolerant Christians package Christianity.” A few weeks after that conversation, Danny said, “Martin, you’ve just about convinced me on this religion stuff. So I want to know–what’s the least I can believe and still be a Christian?”

“What’s the least I can believe and still be a Christian?” What a great question! Danny’s provocative question prompted me to write a new book, using his question as the title. Part one of the book presents 10 things Christians don’t need to believe. In short, Christians don’t need to believe in closed-minded faith.

For example, Christians don’t need to believe that:

• God causes cancer, car wrecks and other catastrophes

• Good Christians don’t doubt

• True Christians can’t believe in evolution

• Woman can’t be preachers and must submit to men

• God cares about saving souls but not saving trees

• Bad people will be “left behind” and then fry in hell

• Jews won’t make it to heaven

• Everything in the Bible should be taken literally

• God loves straight people but not gay people

• It’s OK for Christians to be judgmental and obnoxious

More:   Martin Thielen: What’s the Least You Can Believe and Still Be a Christian?.

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January 24, 2011 · 6:55 pm

Q & A: Billy Graham on Aging, Regrets, and Evangelicals | Christianity Today

If only more religious leaders would follow his advice…

I also would have steered clear of politics. I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now.

via Q & A: Billy Graham on Aging, Regrets, and Evangelicals | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

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January 23, 2011 · 11:10 am

Twelve Concrete Ways To Live A ‘Compassionate Life’ : NPR

Interesting article about a new book from NPR…

From Confucius to Oprah, people have preached compassion for centuries. But how often is it put into practice? Karen Armstrong believes religion, which should advocate for compassionate living, is often part of the problem. In Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life, she describes ways to add kindness to daily routines.

AND

“The religions,” she says, “which should be making a major contribution to one of the chief tasks of our generation — which is to build a global community, where people of all opinions and all ethnicities can live together in harmony — are seen as part of the problem, not as part of the solution.”

Despair is a dangerous thing, because once people lose hope, they can resort to extreme measures.

The golden rule, a commonality throughout religion and guiding force for compassion, “asks you to look into your own heart, discover what gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anyone else.” It’s tricky, because each situation and individual must be evaluated differently.

But making space for the other “in our minds and our hearts and our policies” is essential to Armstrong. “We are always talking about the importance of democracy. But I think in our perilously divided world, we need global democracy, where all people’s voices are heard, not just those of the rich and the powerful.”

And Armstrong willingly answers the charge that her prescription is naive. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., of Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela, she says. “One sees what one person can do,” the tremendous impact a decision to seek reconciliation, not revenge, as Mandela chose. “You have to be optimistic,” Armstrong says. “Because when optimism fails and despair takes over … then you’ve got a problem.”

MORE:   Twelve Concrete Ways To Live A ‘Compassionate Life’ : NPR.

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