No. Gay rights legislation is not trampling on freedom of religion.
Religion
Going to the Chapel
Putting the capital “A” in “Atheism:
Yesterday, The Sunday Assembly—the London-based “Atheist Church” that has, since its January launch, been stealing headlines the world over—announced a new “global missionary tour.” In October and November, affiliated Sunday Assemblies will open in 22 cities: in England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, the United States and Australia. “I think this is the moment,” Assembly founder Sanderson Jones told me in an email last week, “when the Sunday Assembly goes from being an interesting phenomenon to becoming a truly global movement.” Structured godlessness is ready for export.
The Assembly has come a long way in eight months: from scrappy East London community venture (motto: “Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More;” method: “part atheist church, part foot-stomping good time”) to the kind of organization that sends out embargoed press releases about global expansion projects. “The 3,000 percent growth rate might make this non-religious Assembly the fastest growing church in the world,” organizers boast.
The whole thing sounds to me like a Kiwanis or Rotary club that meets on Sundays. It has a vague do-good mission, but in reality it’s more of a social club than anything else (not that there’s anything wrong with that). If you’re interested, here’s how to start your own Atheist megachurch, and here’s information on the world-wide roadshow that the founders are taking, called “40 dates and 40 nights”.
Saturday Evening Open Thread: “Jihad vs. the Shopping Mall”
Purely for entertainment purposes, NSFWCorps’ The Ward Nerd (John Dolan)
… There’s an idea in the progressive Twitter-sphere at the moment that jihadis are just a figment of scared Fox-News victims’ imagination. Well, that’s a reasonable point if you live in North Carolina or any of the other six states that have officially banned Sharia Law. None of the legislators who passed these bills know anything about Sharia, and none but the real loonies among them think it’s a threat to take over Oklahoma or South Dakota. It’s just an excuse to grandstand for the Teabaggers who are old and cranky enough to show up for every midterm election when the rest of us have better things to do.
And, of course, the few real nuts who do think Sharia is an imminent threat are exactly the kind of people who’d enjoy life under Sharia law, where burglars lose a hand and stonings let your average rightwing retiree take a direct role in minding other peoples’ marital business.
The problem is that, when you’re an American progressive reading daily accounts of these cretins’ latest legislative victories, you pretty much have to push back, and in the process of pushing back you end up falling for your own version of American exceptionalism, which says that there can’t really be such a thing as a crazy jihadi, that those people are just misunderstood liberals who, if the US let them alone and Israel stopped provoking them, would think pretty much like us…
The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. There isn’t any Sharia Law in North Carolina, but there damn well are US-style malls in even the most conservative Islamic countries.
In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch —literally watch—the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day…
It was such a huge relief to come out of that sun and into the wide, cool, tinted-glass mall. The sun hurts in Najran, and the landscape has no color but army khaki, burnt sienna, ochre—all the least-favorite crayons in the box. You go in the mall and the logos of all the high-end retailers of Europe and Asia wink at you, and there are even chairs and benches for the tired grandmother to slump in while the kids try their skate-shoes on the marble floors. No one is contesting the space with you, for once. The sweat dries, you feel more benevolent as you relax, no longer fighting other drivers for the right to continue living. You’re almost anonymous, a very rare thing in places like Najran.
Naturally, the whole town comes to the mall whenever it can. And naturally, the state, or the local culture—Saudi Arabia doesn’t attempt to separate those concepts—did its best to hold the alien element of the mall at bay. The most dramatic demonstration of this containment effort came at prayer time…..
As always, you’ve got 47 hours to enjoy the whole thing, unless you decide to subscribe. In which case you get The War Nerd, plus Leigh Cowan talking about science & porn & pornographic science, and Yasha Levine hating on California sprawlmeisters and Cory Booker, and Mark Ames on workplace violence, and a whole bunch more fine entertainment.
Apart from cheering the creeping collapse of global fundamentalism, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
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I will collect you and capture you
Don’t lighten up, Francis:
Pope Francis is warning that the Catholic Church’s moral edifice might “fall like a house of cards” if it doesn’t balance its divisive rules about abortion, gays and contraception with the greater need to make the church a merciful, more welcoming place for all.
[….]“The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently,” (Pope) Francis said. “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
Of course, Francis is the ostensible head of this organization he is criticizing, so….Just words! Use the bully pulpit more! Be a leader!
The reality is we are living in an age where individual leaders — presidents, popes, Speakers of the House — don’t have that much power. I don’t know much about how the Vatican works but I did read that Ratzinger decided at some point that he himself couldn’t control the organization at all, so I suspect Francis can’t either.
But if Francis can move the church even a little bit away from its obsession with green balloons, it will be a big fucking deal. The American Catholic Church has become a big Republican PAC, and conservative leaders made it into one by using issues like abortion and gay marriage. If that changes, it could make big difference in American politics.
Things I Hate With The White Hot Heat Of A Thousand Suns
This, for one:
Gary Humes, a programs manager with the Navy, was entering the building where the shootings took place around 8:20 a.m. when he was met by people fleeing the building and warning of a shooter inside. He and more than 100 others ran to another building across the street, while others ran to the Navy museum nearby.
“I decided to go into work a little late this morning,” he said. “I guess God was with me.”” (from The Navy Times story on today’s mass shooting*).
Should we thus infer that God was not with the dead and wounded?
I’m not going to get into the problem of evil in this space. There are ways religious believers reconcile themselves to the obvious fact that bad things happen to good people — or at least people for whom the evil outcomes are undeserved by any reasonable calculation. There are certainly logically coherent ways to understand the presence of evil in the world as a strong indicator of the absence of deity actively intervening in human affairs. Neither of those true statements is in play here.
Rather: hosannas like the one above are to me the markers of failed religion. I don’t me Mr Humes himself. Dodging the kind of horror he did today would make anyone — me certainly – feel an almost giddy (and guilty) sense of relief. He gets a pass from me on anything he says in the moment. But it’s still possible to read something in the verbal formula that someone in such straits reaches for in such moments of trial. And the “God is with me” trope — that to me is the signal of a religious culture thoroughly getting it wrong.
Or, to put it in another frame, what would Jesus say?
This, for example:
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
…
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ (Matthew 25)
Image: Aelbert Culp, Landscape with Cattle, c. 1639-1649
Things I Hate With The White Hot Heat Of A Thousand SunsPost + Comments (136)
‘Cause the Bible Tells Me So
Tom posted about the church in Texas that had a measles outbreak. Here’s a little update:
[…] According to several reports, however, at least some congregants of Eagle Mountain were opting out of vaccinations — because church leader and televangelist Kenneth Copeland exhorted his followers to eschew them. In one 2010 webcast, Copeland describes immunizations as “criminal,” saying that “as parents, we need to be a whole lot more serious about this … in being aware of what is good and what isn’t, and you don’t take the word of the guy trying to give the shot.” He goes on to discuss a potential link between vaccinations and the growing rates of autism among American children.
Even though multiple media outlets have found that video, Copeland’s spokesman is denying that he’s anti-vaccine. The official pastor of the church where the sick children’s parents attended is Copeland’s daughter, Terri Copeland Pearsons. She issued this greasy non-denial denial:
“Some people think I am against immunizations, but that is not true,” the statement said. “Vaccinations help cut the mortality rate enormously. I believe it is wrong to be against vaccinations. The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time. There is no indication of the autism connection with vaccinations in older children. Furthermore, the new MMR vaccination is without thimerosal (mercury), which has also been a concern to many.”
Copeland Senior, pictured above with his wife Gloria, preaches the prosperity gospel, and has been the target of an IRS investigation over use of the two private jets he flies out of Kenneth Copeland Airport near Fort Worth, Texas. Since no kids have died, this dust-up will probably be just a little bump in the road in Terri’s quest to continue the family scam.
“We challenge them”
This is from one of the public education sites that I read, out of Chicago.
I thought this was a great interview:
For the past 4 months in Raleigh, every Monday is Moral Monday. Late in the day, as people get off work, they surround the Statehouse with rings of protesters. Mass arrests are scheduled, followed on Thursdays by well-organized press conferences by those arrested. Every Monday the protests get larger—now exceeding 15,000 in Raleigh, with big rallies throughout the state. The movement is multiracial and has spread well beyond North Carolina’s capital out to the mountainous west of the state, to small towns and tiny hamlets. The leader of this movement is a Disciples of Christ minister, the Reverend Dr. William Barber III.
I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Barber earlier this week. With the NAACP as its nucleus, the Moral Monday Movement is an expansive coalition embracing an impressive number of organizations in all fields, labor unions, religious congregations, professional societies, and even fraternities and sororities. And they are on a roll.
“We’ve got a strategy. We never expected this thing to take off as it has. But we had to sit down and say, ‘where are we going with this?’” Barber explains. “We started off with one rally, and now we’re at the point of having 13 mass rallies in all 13 Congressional districts across the state. We’ve even had one of the county Republican party chairs renounce his own party,” as the result of the backward legislation the GOP has rammed through the North Carolina Legislature.
The Moral Monday folks have put their heads together and done the math. This will require a massive voter registration effort designed to boost the percentages of African American registered voters as well as a shift among a portion of white voters.
The plan involves mass participation in voter education and mobilization. Unions and professional societies will play a big part, by having their members trained to register voters (and to deal with the new and exceptionally stringent, obstructive regulations about voter identification). “If each of us does 50 registrations, we can make our goal of 45,000 new voters,” Barber explains. “That’s why we must start now. It’s totally attainable.”
Last month, Barber told us, the movement spread to some of the whitest, most heavily Republican parts of the state, where the Tea Party had until recently held sway. Now that people are beginning to experience the effects of budget slashing including removal of protections for teachers and other public employees, the picture is changing. “We were invited to speak up in rural Mitchell County, way up in the mountains,” Barber said, “and we found ourselves at a church way up there, in the evening, packed with several hundred people—an all white crowd—waiting for us.” It used to be Klu Klux country up there, and Reverend Barber admits he was somewhat apprehensive about what kind of reception he might receive. He was greeted by the assembled joining together to sing Blessed be the tie that binds/Our hearts in Christian love. “They were fired up for Moral Monday.”
“We are tired of the Christian Right which is so wrong trying to dominate the moral high ground,” Barber explains. “We challenge them: Are you really ready for a moral debate? Are you ready to defend what you have done? Of course they don’t want to debate. It most certainly is a moral issue. Cutting people off from health care, from their jobs, taking food off their tables. They have no integrity and they hide from debate.”