Post by Phil Ferguson

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via NPR.

He wants nothing to do with the “criminals” and wants his name off of the list.

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his views began to change in the 1970s, when he was introduced to free thinkers. As he didn’t believe in God anymore, he thought it would be more honest to leave the church. So he wrote to his diocese and asked to be un-baptized.

“They sent me a copy of my records, and in the margins next to my name, they wrote that I had chosen to leave the church,” he says.

That was in the year 2000. A decade later, LeBouvier wanted to go further. In between were the pedophile scandals and the pope preaching against condoms in AIDS-racked Africa, a position that LeBouvier calls “criminal.” Again, he asked the church to strike him from baptismal records. When the priest told him it wasn’t possible, he took the church to court.

Last October, a judge in Normandy ruled in his favor. The diocese has since appealed, and the case is pending.

“One can’t be de-baptized,” says Rev. Robert Kaslyn, dean of the School of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America.

Kaslyn says baptism changes one permanently before the church and God.

“One could refuse the grace offered by God, the grace offered by the sacrament, refuse to participate,” he says, “but we would believe the individual has still been marked for God through the sacrament, and that individual at any point could return to the church.”

French law states that citizens have the right to leave organizations if they wish. Loup Desmond, who has followed the case for the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, says he thinks it could set a legal precedent and open the way for more demands for de-baptism.

Yeah!

Via The Maddow Blog.

Indiana’s Republican-controlled Senate yesterday passed a bill that would allow for the teaching of creationism in schools. The bill’s sponsor, Republican State Senator Dennis Kruse, tells the Indianapolis Star that he knows the Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional back in 1987, but so what? “This is a different Supreme Court,” he tells the paper. “This Supreme Court could rule differently.”

It is against the constitution and the supreme court has ruled that it is unconstitutional – well… Fuck that!  My religion is true and I want everyone to know it!

The Senate minority leader managed to amend the bill so that it mandates teaching theories from several religions, including Scientology, if a school district chooses to add creationism to the curriculum. That might make religion-as-science less attractive for school districts around the state. It’s the same kind of strategy that used by the Democratic minority in the Indiana House this week, when they managed to get drug-testing for lawmakers included in a bill to drug-test welfare recipients.

Maybe Dennis needs a drug test.

Senator Kruse is also pushing a bill to allow schools to open the day with the Lord’s Prayer. As with his creationism bill, he’s slipping religion into the classroom under the flag of choice, but that choice only goes so far. The school district gets to decide whether to “require” that creationism be taught. In an interview with the Christian Post, Kruse described the bill’s origins:

“Pastors and members of my Sunday School class encouraged me to introduce the bill this year,” said Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse, author of SB 89, to CP.

“I have thought about introducing it over the last decade and decided not to do so until this year.”

Republicans won control of the state legislature in the 2010 elections, and this year they’re moving ahead in a hurry. Indiana, your time is now.

He made a law because his pastor wanted it.  This is why religion cannot play a role in our government.

The stupid – it burns!

Via MSN.

About half way down on the right side of the page is a stupid poll.  It needs your help!  I don’t like the title “Teen forces….”  NO!  She pointed out that they were violating the constitution and asked the school to take it down and the would not.  She then took it to court and won.

So….  Follow the link at the top and go vote – you know what to do!

The Santorum family is taking a lot of heat in the press for their “do as I say, not as I do” family culture. Karen considered abortion while hubby worked to deny it. Rick wants the government to restrict access to contraceptives, force schools to educate extramarital sex is a sin, and criminalize abortion providers. Now it’s revealed that Karen lived with a boyfriend out of wedlock for nearly a decade in her twenties. And her boyfriend was an abortion provider.

The press is gleefully ignoring the general historical state of pubcon hypocrisy and hysterically reacting to their transgressions as signs that pubcons cannot differentiate personal belief from public policy. Liberals think if pubcons are to have such a standard they must themselves follow it.

Pubcons have reacted defensively at this attack and in some sort of Jedi mind trick are saying the past is history, people make mistakes, they are repentant, let’s move on, there’s nothing happening here.

But there is and it is an entire misunderstanding of how pubcons and liberals think differently about the world and morality. Their communication to each other, as brilliantly demonstrated by the current DC politics, in posturing and talking past individuals to the ideological bleachers behind. Both sides plead for consistency, purity, and insist they are true to their belief, faith, ideals, reasons, whatever. Obama is stuck like a duck in the middle and it would be no surprise if he were caught late at night wandering the White House halls in hebephrenic hysteria!

The new Tea Party representatives are particularly green as many of them came from nonpolitical backgrounds and haven’t a clue what political maneuvering and compromise means. As if politics were the expression of purity when politics is the dirty and brutish intermingling of disagreeable people feigning politeness to get their constituent’s desires realized.

I saw no greater paradox and irony than Orrin Hatch and the late Ted Kennedy sitting together and sharing a joke, a conversation, and what Hatch called “a tremendous brotherly affection.” Politically, it was the most intelligent action both of them could take. If it were sincere all the better. Imagine the required compartmentalization.

All they needed in their coffee klatch was the late Paul Wellstone and Strom Thurmond, the former the most liberal representative in recent history and Strom the arch nemesis of civil rights who led the longest solo filibuster in history.

No, as I am formulating over at www.frontiersofreason.com both sides are reasonable and true to their premises. You cannot approach them using the same logic. But as a tease, David DiSalvo’s book “What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite” is liberal balm and does deal with new resolutions against computational malfunctions. I just don’t yet see how you get pubcons or liberal intuitionists to care.

Liberals believe in individual rights, fairness, and equality. Pubcons believe in group cohesion, obedience, and certainty. As Jonathon Haidt notes in The Edge

“People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.”

Yet, liberals love art reflecting good and evil, from Star Wars to Vampire Diaries; how on earth does an atheist stand the constant, banal appeal to “the force?” Daniel Everett responds to Haidt by relating an interview with John Wayne:

“They tell me that things aren’t always black and white. I say, ‘Why the hell not?’”

Cognitive science sheds some light on this:

“conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.”

This explains why Ron Reagan’s son is a gay atheist and why Madeleine Murray O’Hare’s son was a born again Christian. While children are most likely to not fall too far from the tree their genetics have their own mind, so to speak. Perhaps epigenesis as well, the rolling thunder of genetically embodied decisions based on external, environmental factors.

This genopolitcs, for example, has demonstrated that genetic predispositions of conformity versus creativity and their resulting serotonin and dopamine release affect political party and religious affiliation. Republicans because of their genetics are more likely to go to church, join a political party, and vote. Democrats tend to be more creative, more novelty seekers, and hence a little bit more antisocial. Let me put it this way: it really does no good to call pubcons sheep, or liberals extremists. It’s not pejorative, they are compliments.

Conservatives feel like they should vote and liberals think they should vote. Conservatives don’t get why they should use reason to overcome their strong visceral sentiments and liberals don’t get why conservatives don’t use reason to overcome their gut feelings. Conservatives use an appeal to authority as moral light and liberals want to think out their choices.

Perhaps this is because conservatives would have to fight an addictive rush to change their gut feeling while liberals are yielding to an addictive rush by thinking out issues.

Interesting how “follow your gut” or “think from your heart” tend to cross the boundary.

The value of group think in corporations is obvious. In situations such as the regimented battlefield instant obedience has merit. In situations requiring creativity, teamwork, cooperation, and conformity kill necessary innovation; as would also happen in guerrilla warfare on fresh terrain.

You can’t be a team player if the goal is to find something different and further from what the team is currently experiencing. Brain storming is social masturbation, and the real creativity comes before or after the meeting with individual and person-to-person communication. Good meetings, if creativity and productivity are the desired goals, are basically rubber stamps of ideas engendered and politicized elsewhere.

Heber C Kimball past president of the Mormon church and considered to be a modern prophet, as they are wont to do, was known to swear freely from the pulpit. This common manner made him one of the most beloved of church leaders though it marked him. His reply: “Hell, they can’t excommunicate me. I repent too damned fast.”

This is key to understanding pubcon inconsistency. When your morals relate to an absolute authority involving obedience, and group adhesion there must be a way to be inconsistent, avoid cognitive dissonance, and yet remain pure and included. The confessional, repentance, and absolution of sins allows anyone to recover from any transgression and remain within the absolutely necessary fold.

It is terrifying for liberals to think someone can do the most heinous crimes all of their life, as an extreme example, and still, at their death bed, ascend to goodness and moral inclusion by asking for forgivance. Liberals think responsibility and truth are important but to pubcons, inclusion and abeyance are important.

If you wonder which side you are on consider Pascal’s wager. Would you repent at death or would you remain true? Now as Bertrand Russell noted it is really quite rare that this case occurs in reality. It occurs much more early in life when an atheist stays in the closet for the sake of family and society as might a gay, a pedophile, or a so called Uncle Tom.

When you read Hitchens’ Letter to a Young Contrarian do you have an epiphany or do your say yuck?

Sam Harris in his essay “Lying” chastises sweetly and demurly those who lie for conformity or politeness; that people typically diminish their own well being for this process. He is clear: it is near always better to be honest even if it requires masterful mental gymnastics. For many, this simply does not ring true as Mark Twain says well:

“The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”

Mark had his finger on the pulse of the people. Rather than risk familial friction, rather than leave their home, rather than disrespect their society, roughly half of us, if politics are correct, will lie out out their ass, eloquently, consistently, and happily with the rush of inclusion and social love.

The other half listen to a different drummer and follow Thoreau:

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

No, for pubcons and closeted liberals, Machiavellianism is the proper way to expand principle while preserving peace, and no good action occurs from within a cell.

These basic differences define personality types expressed politically as liberal and conservative. Without some sort of geopolitical apartheid it is going to be difficult to mediate consensus towards a future requiring just that. I do not have a good answer yet but I also know in better defining the problem we get closer to the solution.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

via Think Progress.

When Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) proposed his 2012-2013 budget this week, he admitted that it was “inadequate for the needs” of the state’s people.

Move out now!

The budget makes $286 million in cuts, including a 6.4 percent cut to a higher education system that has been plagued by funding cuts and rising tuition for years.

Who needs college?  I’m sure they are still funding k-12. Right?

…it will result in less spending on Kentucky’s students and schools, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

…resulting in a cut of more than $50 million to that funding formula.

Well, when you are broke you have to make tough choices.  You cut the things that aren’t needed.

At the same time, the $43 million tax break Kentucky approved for a Bible-themed amusement park — which will include a 500-foot by 75-foot reproduction of Noah’s Ark — could go into effect for the first time under Beshear’s budget.

What?  Screw the kids of the state twice.  Once by taking away education and then a second time by filling their minds with this bull shit.

In addition, the budget includes $11 million to improve a highway interchange near the park. Proponents of the park, Beshear included, have claimed it will boost tourism and create jobs, but those assumptions are based on a report done by the park’s developers.

Those teacher can get jobs booking church tour groups.

Unfortunately, that means lawmakers could jeopardize Kentucky’s substantial gains in K-12 education and ensure ballooning tuition rates at its colleges and universities, all while they preserve tax breaks for what critics have dubbed the “Ark Park.”

There have been a few changes to the pledge…

Rick Perry has left the field. Thank goodness. After having Santorum win Iowa with a 34 vote margin in a state that doesn’t allow recounts and probably can’t count them right in the first place. But then it’s all about state rights, Perry is history. Remember Virginia where they wouldn’t put candidates on the ballet having lack of sufficient, validated petition signatures?

It seemed like the GOP would soften and go for Romney but in fact they didn’t, or I should say haven’t yet. Louise, my spouse, had been warning me about Santorum and I refused to believe that such a kook would ever be able to effectively run.

It only shows how incredibly desperate the GOP is. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since more people believe the rapture is near than go out and vote. Hell, more people read the Left Behind series than go out and vote–at least that’s what it would seem here in the backwaters of West Virginia where even the squirrels attend church. I suppose it takes a hellfire, brimstone, family candidate to stir up enough interest to go prove them elitist, snobbish, expensive-coffee drinkers wrong. Everyone knows we’re the righteous travelers to heaven and the rest of you be damned.

So I thought to myself, who’s crazier, Perry or Santorum. Almost by definition Santorum had to be now because Perry dropped out but I typed in ”Rick Perry Crazy” and hit search.  I wanted to prove that Perry had been too crazy to even be considered, kind of like Harold Camping, the Michigan Pastor who after being wrong several times still insists he knows the exact date when the streets will flow with blood and the righteous shall ascend.

Why not? The GOP has not been in such a disarray and confused about who to nominate since, since, I don’t know when…hmm…since Kennedy was assassinated; Johnson was promoting his great society and Barry Goldwater from Arizona was shaking conservative trees while espousing religious tolerance and endearing himself to corporate types. No good pubcon wants a tolerant believer in office.

Johnson won in 1964 with 61% of the vote. The widest margin since 1820 and the sixth most lopsided election ever, the fifth most popular margin. No election since has been so lopsided. My grandfather could hardly pass a day without cursing Johnson, without slang, as he saved that for niggers, wops, kikes,and jeuws; though he respected jews they worked harder than anyone else and he was mindful of my sour looks as my dad was a jew though I never met him. I wrote three letters to President Johnson and Ladybird which earned his ultimate respect–but they weren’t castigations.

Johnson portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist and Goldwater couldn’t get support from the real extremists. He was too soft. He actually got support form deep south Democrats. The same ones that would, when they came to their senses, become Republicans. And those gentile southern ladies who charmed with hospitality decided the Democratic party was anathema for helping the poor by using public money. After all as the bible says “there will always be the poor”. Who needs social welfare programs if humans are such sinners that there will always be the poor. Get a job, go to church, and mind your manners!

This kicked the seat of the modern conservative movement ushered in by William F Buckley Jr, an intelligent, eloquent but crazy bastard, who in 1955 started the National Review with:

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.”

Buckley described his faith by saying, “I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.” Once again proving you are the faith you are raised in and and it has nothing to do with any content of the faith itself.

In any case, still suffering from the war of yankee aggression who on south earth would want big government to come down and tell them those black boys could date their gals. Hell they couldn’t even socialize with them even if they did attend their church, which they shouldn’t, couldn’t. Everybody, and I mean everybody went to church. Lack of attendance was the worst sin of all. By this rule secularists were pure evil and really quite suddenly school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality became the rallying call of the modern conservative movement.

In 1973 Michael Harrington, coined the term neoconservative against the policy ideas of Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. But it would be Kristol who would become the godfather and would abandon his New York Secular Jewish friends like Irving Howe and other New York intellectuals discussing socialism in the sixties, after their intellectual fathers had bashed Stalinism in the 30’s and 40’s as leftists, for being too argumentative against tradition. A departure well described in the documentary “Arguing the World”. Neocons were leftists who abandoned their friends for reality. Kristol is famous for saying a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Clearly the mugger clipped Kristol’s head before taking the money and running.

Kristol a classicist, anti-utopian, and believer of “persuasion” and not ideology objected to welfare programs, international “revolution” through nation-building/militarily imposed “democracy” and application of Fabian Socialism/Keynesianism models.

And so here we are today looking up “perry crazy” and wondering how the even more crazy Santorum is looking good to pubcons. What? I see link after link of Perry bringing home a dead baby for a day and an interview where the host gawffs and then has to retract his lack of manners concerning their privacy.

Puhllleeeze, you mean the Perry who brings faith into politics and has no qualms telling the rest of us we’re going to hell because our private belief is wrong and lying, telling us we’re going to hell in the public square is the moral thing to do.

Even worse that he and his ilk hide behind the bible saying they are not judging but knowing damned well that no one can read the bible and not get that you’re going to hell unless you believe the word of God. Isn’t that what evangelism is all about? You are going to hell unless you believe the bible is the word of God and you go through Christ!

I find this far more offensive than bringing a dead baby home. Hell, he could have cannibalized it and I’d be less offended. Grossed out but not offended. Aside from legal considerations, bury it in the yard, mummify it and keep it in the  bedroom, stuff it for the sofa, bronze it and put it on the shelf but keep your damned faith out of politics and out of my house!

If you are motivated by your perverse faith, fine. Tell me you think abortion is wrong because a couple cells are a person but don’t tell me God told you a soul became the instant that sperm broke the cell wall and that’s why you vote like a fool. It’s just not politically moral that I hear it. It’s private. Go take your religious pornography elsewhere.

Too much, this is too much. I can’t even go on to the next search on “santorum  crazy”. I have to have some coffee and take a walk-jog.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Bits and pieces excerpted from President Obama’s 2006 speech, on faith and religion, are floating around recently. It is worth reading in its entirety. It is a full discussion of his gripes about liberals, conservatives, and their inability to come together based on faith; how and when does a person interject their religion or not into politics. Here is the entire most-quoted section in his “Call for Renewal”:

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This paragraph is slammed as renouncing bringing faith into politics. Religious folks do not want to consider whether their politics are good for everyone. It is as if they want Kant’s categorical imperative to be the realm of personal choice: “I believe the bible and so should everyone else and if I can’t make everyone believe the bible everything I believe in because of the bible should also be believed by all.” By this standard any personal choice could be universalized as insistence: I believe everyone should read Darwin and let’s make it law. Darwin is certainly more relevant than the bible. If I were stranded on a desert island I would bring Russell’s History of Western  Philosophy and only because I don’t know of a more comprehensive single volume history; perhaps for you it would be Shakespeare or the Engineer’s Handbook, maybe a guide to rural technology?

“Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Unfortunately these pretty words are an assertion and not a description. By hesitating to use the word pluralism in the previous paragraph he missteps and by the time he gets to the second it’s too late. Obama misses a huge political framing. Pluralism is not liberal. Pluralism is constitutionally conservative.

“Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.”

We weren’t a democracy until indentured servants, slaves, and finally women in 1920 were given the vote. Democracies are by definition pluralistic. Pluralism does not even require democracy. Obama is supporting the secularist James Madison, and it would have been nice had he noted this. Madison feared factionalism and wrote such in Federalist paper #10.  A faction is:

“a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Madison defines the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues such as what regime or religion should be preferred.

Furthermore from Madison:

“the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” … ”A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.”

Dang, Madison sounds like a materialist, Marxist even. From Wikipedia:

Madison particularly emphasizes that economic stratification prevents everyone from sharing the same opinion. Madison concludes that the damage caused by faction can be limited only by controlling its effects.

He then argues that the only problem comes from majority factions because the principle of popular sovereignty should prevent minority factions from gaining power. Madison offers two ways to check majority factions: prevent the “existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time” or render a majority faction unable to act.

Republic and minority rights. Obama’s point on pluralism would more fairly be aimed at representatives who’s job it is to mediate the self interest of the voter. In the following statement he should be saying he would rather have representatives, grounded in morality and ethics.

“In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.”

“But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Whew, did your head spin? Mine did. He tries to mollify this contrasting approach, of a religious citizen and a secular representative,  by appealing to what John Rawls in the major point of his rewrite of A Theory of Justice  Political Liberalism calls overlapping consensus.

“Thus, to repeat, the problem of political liberalism is to work out a political conception of political justice for a (liberal) constitutional democratic regime that a plurality of reasonable doctrines, both religious and nonreligious, liberal and non liberal, may endorse for the right reasons…

“Yet the outcome of the vote is to be seen as reasonable provided all citizens of a reasonable just constitutional regime sincerely vote in accordance with the idea of public reason…

“Some may, of course, reject a decision, as Catholics may reject a decision to grant a right to abortion. They may present an argument in public reason for denying it and fail to win a majority. But they need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case. They can recognize the right as belonging to legitimate law and there fore do not resist it with force. To do that would be unreasonable:… That the Church’s nonpublic reason requires its members to follow its doctrines is perfectly consistent with their honoring public reason.”

Obama seems to be trying to forward this without calling it liberal, or more accurately constitutionally conservative, but ends up not recognizing that most pubcons wish to change the country period to promote their own cause and are unwilling to stop until there is a theocracy founded not in reason but biblical authority. It’s almost like he has to chastise secularists to make it look like he is beating everyone equally. Pubcons must shed some of their absolutism at the door and secularists can’t expect them to do so.

“Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not just “I,” resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.”

In a way I think this is cowardly and in another way I see him desperate to get mutually hating people to come together. Really, the Koran does list Jesus as a prophet. Really, the Mormons do believe Christ was a prophet. Really, the old, Jewish testament did predestine Christ’s sermon on the mount. Really, the Thetans of Scientology are the sins of humanity. It is appealing to try to cut through the Gordian knot of life-defining differences with the sameness sword but at some point you just can’t. The most egregious act is not secularist but theocratic. Secularism is the house and theology is the guest.

Obama then decides he needs to bash progressives a bit and support minority, democratic political input by saying how religious folks are self-correcting as if atheists and agnostics were not the real movers and shakers of change–bet the founding fathers, white-boy plantation owners, are rolling in their graves having given up fortunes to help develop a country in which they believed with all of their pocket books as travels absentia and war ruined them. In a republic it is the job of our politicians to moderate these interests as secularists in office; that it may be our wish that citizens could be informed enough for a direct democracy but they also may not or even wish not. Of course, when a representative votes or speaks as a citizen they can vote or blather for whatever they want. While pretending to chastise conservatives he actually goes for secularists.

“While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

“For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it”

Once again he disses those late, great plantation owners who gave up their fortunes to support this great Republic. Religious freedom was  more in response against Episcopalianism which was legally mandatory and monarchical. Our founding citizens were most motivated by Calvinistic Presbyterianism which was the second most popular church in America at the time of the revolution and certainly the most activist of them all.

“Only the Presbyterian Church lined up solidly behind the colonists, and without them independence would not have been possible. Oh, and that Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson? It came along a full year after Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote their own declaration of independence. The Mecklenburg Declaration, written on May 20, 1775, “by unanimous resolution declared the people free and independent, and that all laws and commissions from the king were henceforth null and void.”

I really want to believe in Obama. I really want to think we elected him for a reason and not equal opportunity. He does a great speech for the most part and is intelligent and has been thwarted at every angle but he just can’t get religion right in spite of his notion he is an anthropologist studying religion.

“I was not raised in a religious household. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.

“On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.

Detachment? Do you see much detachment about religion? This is as hypocritical as saying he is not going to have a war on drugs and then condoning more arrests than ever before. In 2007 before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ Obama asked for evangelicals to abandon their faith-based principles by denying they were really, truly faith based.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,”

This is simply silly. Faith was used to bring people together against others, as a source of power. Exclusion is the other side of inclusion. In some cases it was against oppressors. In others it was to maintain status quo. In others to oppress. I find it difficult, if at all, to find examples where it was to bring everyone, and I mean everyone, together, unless they were willing to follow their particular faith universalized.

Even today in so called interfaith meetings, why is it not intrafaith, they do not even try to address secular issues, they are incomprehensible. Islam is about peace, my ass. Christians turn the other cheek, my ass. Jews seek solace in gentiles, my ass. That their exclusion is somehow divorced from their inner humanness has no evidence or ideology. This is as ridiculous as my 17 year old son exemplifying George Orwell’s deservedly paranoid fear by saying war is peace because you have to have war to have peace.

“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.”

They are eager to fight not for division but principle of faith. Evangelicals truly believe you must go through Christ to get to heaven and the world would be a better place if everyone followed their faith to the letter. Without faith, chaos reigns, and the end is coming soon. Faith didn’t get hijacked, absolutism is the logical result of their faith.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.”

“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich.” “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.

What? I appreciate rhetoric but the bible is so mishmoshed that, for example, abortion folks can use “thou shalt not kill” for fetuses but can also justify killing people being heretics, apostates, and fellow killers. Nevertheless, unless he wishes to discuss hermeneutics between the Greek testament and the Hebrew Pentateuch they are, for the most part, reading some bastard version of the King James. In any case any translation, devoid of hermeneutics, cannot deny the specific statements concerning slavery, gay bashing, and misogyny. I am not being facetious here. As a lawyer knowing the constitution is interpreted through legal precedence Obama shouldn’t demean a crowd by being folksy. Bush got away with it because he was a fool, a shrub. Obama should be too smart to role model folksiness.

The problem is while reading the same damned sacred text people won’t come to a coherent conclusion and it’s because it is a bad book. That is the entire issue. That is why Catholics don’t even read it as a whole and rely on a priest and pope to cherry pick phrases and extrapolate broadly–a dead baby is really saved because it shouldn’t have to remain in purgatory and so doesn’t have to really receive Christ. While I appreciate the postmodern aspect that every reading is a writing, and every interpretation is a misinterpretation, when it comes to bible talk this is the equivalent of saying those disagreeing aren’t good Christians. What arrogance. Of course they are reading the same version. I say get rid of the accursed book, as Jefferson hoped in 1821:

“that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This country which has given the world an example of physical liberty, owes to it that our moral emancipation too.”

Pubcons truly and deeply do believe in the covenant of the 10 commandments and truly and deeply believe that the abortion issue, the gay issue, and intelligent design issue cause the big problems like war, theft, and utter economic collapse. It is really simple to them. That’s why you don’t see pubcon intellectuals right now and why they are aggressively and openly anti intellectual. A cow can clearly follow the sacred text.

In their mind analysis, reason, and deep thought take away from the utterly simple and clear truths available to everyone. The purity and value of individual interpretation was not so much democratic as a deep belief that everyone should arrive at the same conclusion, if they follow the bible, and if you don’t we’ll make our own sect and try to universalize that. The rhetoric is done, the argument over, let the final judgement begin. That is why they are called fundamentalists, nuances and intelligence are as valuable as zits on a kid.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Jessica Ahlquist and Taylor Grenga are still fighting to keep the illegal prayer out of Cranston High School.  After Taylor talks – she gets booed by crazy christian parents.
The superintendent speaks up and explains to the adults that they are begin huge douche bags!  I am impressed.  They need to have this guy talk to the GOP debate crowds.