Greg Palast - Queen of Angels’ Condoms

I arrived into this world at the Queen of Angels hospital in Los Angeles into the hands of Dr. Sidney Kolodny. Queen of Angels, judging by the number of nun-nurses running about, is a Catholic hospital.

Dr. Kolodny was Jewish.

Last night, I heard Senator Rick Santorum tell us that President Obama has attacked Catholics and freedom of religion by barring church-controlled businesses from excluding contraception care in their employees' health plans. Joining the shriek-fest against the president's decision, the sanctimonious little ex-senator prattled on about big bad government crushing religious freedom.

That's just arse-backwards.

Read More:

http://www.gregpalast.com/queen-of-angels-condoms/#more-5702

Gary G. Kohls - What Kind of Christianity Is This?

From time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.

Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).

Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/25/what-kind-of-christianity-is-this/

Robert Jensen - Prophetic Politics: Charting a Healthy Role for Religion in Public Life

Does God take sides in the elections? Is there a voters’ guide hiding in our holy books? Should we pray for electoral inspiration?

Secular people tend to answer an emphatic “NO” to those questions, as do most progressive religious folk. Because religious fundamentalists so often present an easy-to-caricature version of faith-based politics -- even to the point of implying that God would want us to vote for certain candidates -- it’s tempting to want to banish all talk of the divine from political life.

But a blanket claim that “religion and politics don’t mix” misunderstands the inevitable connection between the two. Whether secular or religious, our political judgments are always rooted in first principles -- claims about what it means to be human that can’t be reduced to evidence and logic. Should people act purely out of self-interest, or is solidarity with others just as important? Do we owe loyalty to a nation-state? Under what conditions, if any, is the taking of a human life justified? What is the appropriate relationship of human beings to the larger living world?

These basic moral/spiritual questions underlie everyone’s politics, and our answers are shaped by the philosophical and/or theological systems in which we find inspiration and insight. Since everyone’s political positions reflect their foundational commitments, it doesn’t seem fair to say that those grounded in a secular philosophy can draw on their traditions, but people whose political outlooks are rooted in religion have to mute themselves.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/prophetic-politics-charting-healthy-role-religion-public-life-1328365026

Abby Zimet - Angels We Have Heard On High: Activist Priest, 83, In Solitary Confinement

Jesuit priest and peace activist Father Bill "Bix" Bichsel, 83, is in his second week of a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement at Washington's SeaTac Federal Detention Center, where he'd been held for an earlier action against a proposed nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee. A member of Disarm Now Plowshares, Bichsel has been arrested several times for nonviolent civil disobedience at military bases, nuclear weapons manufacturers, and the School of the Americas. He is currently being punished - including having to wear shackles at his hearing - for an "unauthorized" visit by two Buddhist monks who drummed and prayed outside for him. Despite cold and health problems, Father Bichsel says he sings to himself in his cell. His resolve remains strong to fight against nuclear weapons and other US policies "that are without conscience." He has alot of work ahead of him.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2012/01/27-1

Rob Boston - Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right's Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election

He’s been married three times and is an admitted adulterer, features that would seem to make Newt Gingrich an unlikely standard-bearer for the hyper-moralistic brigades of the Religious Right. But with a little mental gymnastics, all things are possible.

“Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage,” Steve Deace, a prominent Religious Right leader in Iowa, recently mused to writer Michelle Goldberg of “The Daily Beast” website. “How do we reconcile that?”

One way is to do what Deace did and compare Gingrich with King David, the Old Testament figure who committed adultery with another man’s wife but later repented.

“I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows,” Deace added.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153685/why_is_there_so_much_god_in_our_politics_the_religious_right%27s_theocratic_plan_for_the_2012_election

Emi Koyama - Christian Fundamentalists and Private Military Contractors? The Strange Bedfellows of the Sex Slavery Anti-Trafficking Movement

By Emi Koyama, Bitch Magazine

Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on December 20, 2011
http://bitchmagazine.org/

In the 2008 film Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative whose undercover past is called into action when his daughter is kidnapped while traveling abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Using his counterterrorism skills to torture and murder those who stand between him and his daughter’s captors, he eventually rescues his daughter and comes home a hero, with no consequences exacted for the violence he’s inflicted in the name of his daughter’s safety.

The film was a commercial, if not critical, hit (a sequel is forthcoming in 2012), perhaps because, like many a made-for-TV movie or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, it served a voyeuristic interest in the world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking involving attractive young, white, middle-class female victims and ethnically Other (Eastern European in this particular case) male perpetrators. Its success also mirrored the real-world events of a presidential administration that justified the use of torture—euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—as a valid means of preventing catastrophic terror attacks, and which dismissed reported cases of extreme prisoner abuses like those at Abu Ghraib as exceptions: safety at any cost, by any means necessary.

The self-purported inspiration for Bryan Mills was retired colonel Bill Hillar of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets), who was a popular keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant on the topic of human trafficking. Claiming to have multiple advanced degrees, he gave lectures, trainings, and consultations in which he described his daughter’s abduction into sex slavery to law enforcement officials, private groups, and college audiences. According to Hillar, his daughter was abducted and sold to a brothel while traveling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Using his professional connections as a counterterror specialist, Hillar supposedly, like Neeson’s character, traveled around the globe in search of his daughter. But, as he sadly told audiences, his story did not have the same ending: Despite his efforts, his daughter never came home.

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Gwynne Dyer - The False Equation of Religion Equals Morality

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/19-2 

Published on Monday, December 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Gwynne Dyer

In the United States, where it is almost impossible to get elected unless you profess a strong religious faith, it would have passed completely unnoticed. Not one of the hundred US senators ticks the "No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic" box, for example, although 16 percent of the American population do. But it was quite remarkable in Britain.

Last Friday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the Church of England to lead a revival of traditional Christian values to counter the country’s “moral collapse”.Last Friday, in Oxford, Prime Minister David Cameron declared that the United Kingdom is a Christian country “and we should not be afraid to say so.” He was speaking on the 400th anniversary of the King James translation of the Bible, so he had to say something positive about religion – but he went far beyond that.

“The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today,” he said. “Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend.”

Where to start? The King James Bible was published at the start of a century in which millions of Europeans were killed in religious wars over minor differences of doctrine. Thousands of “witches” were burned at the stake during the 16th century, as were thousands of “heretics”. They have stopped doing that sort of thing in Britain now – but they’ve also stopped reading the Bible. Might there be a connection here?

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow - CONVICTED in Court -- and PRAISED by the Judge!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/CONVICTED-in-Court--and-by-Rabbi-Arthur-Wasko-111215-76.html

December 15, 2011 By Rabbi Arthur Waskow Yesterday I stood trial in Washington DC Superior Court for the pray-in last July  in which I joined with ten other religious folk in the Capitol Rotunda, seeking to focus Congress on the need to pass a budget responsive to needs of the poor, the disemployed, the homeless. (I was alone for trial yesterday because my cancer and its treatment had made it physically impossible for me to be with the other ten when they stood trial.)   I decided against the "deferred prosecution/ probation" arrangement offered by the prosecution partly because it would have required taking 3 days away from sacred Shalom Center work, coming from Philadelphia to DC 3 separate times to pee into a test tube to be tested for drug use -- and much more because it would have required me to promise not to get arrested in the next months. (I may very well choose to risk arrest again as the movements for social / political/ religious transformation go forward.) So I pleaded guilty to "disrupting traffic in the US Capitol," a violation of DC law. What I told the judge (Harold Cushenberry ) in my pre-sentencing statement was --

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Wendy Michaels - The Churches and the Unholy Patent

Salem-News.com

Wendy Michaels for Salem-News.com

http://salem-news.com/articles/december112011/unholy-patent-wm.php

The US government and those behind the flu vaccines seek to create an aura of religious blessing to their intentionally destructive vaccines.

(WASHINGTON D.C.) - The federal government (CDC and HHS) wants to go into churches, temples, synagogues and mosques to give vaccines.

There is a constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state in the US. It's there because the founding fathers, having seen the harm it caused in Europe, did not want the church to become a ruling force here.

But we are looking at he state overwhelming the church. Those behind this move (and it is most definitely commercial forces wishing to sell vaccines) seem to believe that they can use "health" to override the Constitution, and to trump the church (temple, mosque) and spirituality itself. They have worked hard to raise medicine to the level of a religion and are attempting to equate their filthy product with religious practice and with goodness and benevolence.

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Chris Hedges - Where Were You When They Crucified My Movement?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_were_you_when_they_crucified_my_movement_20111205/

Posted on Dec 5, 2011

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges gave an abbreviated version of this talk Saturday morning in Liberty Square in New York City as part of an appeal to Trinity Church to turn over to the Occupy Wall Street movement an empty lot, known as Duarte Square, that the church owns at Canal Street and 6th Avenue. Occupy Wall Street protesters, following the call, began a hunger strike at the gates of the church-owned property. Three of the demonstrators were arrested Sunday on charges of trespassing, and three others took their places.

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

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