Religion

TomGram: The Palin Effect
How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party
By Max Blumenthal | TomDispatch.com

Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Twitter account, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. Read more.

Fort Hood Tragedy Sparks Islamophobic Response
By Stephen Lendman

A personal note. This writer was stationed at Fort Hood in summer 1956, a quiet time, post-Korea and pre-Vietnam, when terrorism and Islamophbia weren't issues, and shooting only happened on firing ranges to learn and improve marksmanship.

On November 5, The New Times headlined, "Mass Shooting at Fort Hood, saying:

"the Army confirms that the gunman (thought to be killed) was Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. Reports said 12 were dead (raised to 13, including one civilian) and 31 others wounded from an incident at the base Readiness Processing Center where troops prepare for deployment. Two other soldiers were detained as suspects. Another was believed at large. The shooting began about 1:30PM after which Fort Hood was locked down."

Hasan and the proselytization factor
By Mikey Weinstein President and Founder, Military Religious Freedom Foundation | Newsweek

As we turn our collective eyes to the tragedies of Fort Hood this week, we mourn the men and women who offered themselves up to serve our country overseas, only to make the ultimate sacrifice in a senseless act of violence back home.

But the shootings at Fort Hood should be an important wake up call to the continuing religious intolerance that has been allowed to blatantly and systemically manifest in our nation's armed forces. Too often, honorable men and women who have joined our military are comprehensively denigrated and made to feel worthless because, although they wear the same uniform, they do not pray in the "approved" church or to the "correct" God or to no God at all.

Let me be clear, there is absolutely no excuse for the alleged actions of Nidal Malik Hasan. What he did is reprehensible, and goes against everything the American military stands for.

But we must realize that the alleged mistreatment Hasan received in the American military almost certainly played a key role in his disaffection. Reliable reports indicate that fellow soldiers gave him a diaper to wear on his head, mocking Islamic headdresses. His car was keyed by an Iraq veteran because he had an "Allah is Love" bumper sticker, and others suggested he should ride a camel instead. Read more.

Denying responsibility for the wars one cheers on
The NYT columnist who has supported four wars on Muslims in six years decries the Islamic disregard for human life
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon

David Brooks' column today perfectly illustrates what lies at the core of our political discourse: namely, self-loving tribalistic blindness laced with a pathological refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions. Brooks claims there is a unique evil that one finds in the "fringes of the Muslim world":

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so. Read more.

Bill Berkowitz: America's First All-Christian Prison May Be Coming Down the Pike
by Bill Berkowitz | Buzzflash

If Bill Robinson gets his way, Wakita, Oklahoma, a small town near the Kansas border consisting of 380 residents, will be the home of the first all-Christian prison in the U.S. Robinson, who runs a Dallas-based outfit called Corrections Concepts Inc. (CCI), hopes to have the facility up and running within 16 months.

Located in Grant County and founded in 1898, Wakita (pronounced Wok-ih-taw) was "featured in the 1996 blockbuster movie 'Twister' starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in which [the town] was destroyed by an F4 tornado …," according to Wikipedia.

OneNewsNow, a news service of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, recently reported that while there are a number of prisons with "Christian or faith-based units," no prisons have "an all-Christian staff." "All of the employees will be Christians," Robinson said. "We have an opinion letter from the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] that says we can do that." Christian guards and staffers would supervise volunteering inmates.

The news service pointed out that "The facility would house only prisoners who want to transfer there. They will not be required to go to church or Bible study, but will be required to sign an agreement to participate in some prison programs. Inmates will be offered classes in literacy, GED requirements, and life skills."

"It's a faith-based, work ethic, corrections initiative where we take men in their last 12 to 24 to 30 months before their earliest release, and they have to volunteer to come, which makes us constitutional," said Robinson, an ex-con and prison minister. Read more.

Man who threatened Obama sentenced
By Jimmie E. Gates | Clarion Ledger

Christopher said he never intended to harm Obama. He said he made the threat to gain attention for his cause that he is the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse is coming in 2012 and much of the world will be destroyed.

A Wisconsin man was sentenced late today in federal court in Jackson to three years in prison for making a threat on the Internet to assassinate then-President-elect Barack Obama. Read more.

Horror at Fort Hood Inspires Horribly Predictable Islamophobia
By John Nichols | The Nation

Thursday's shootings at the Fort Hood army base in Texas -- which left at least 12 people dead and more than 30 others wounded -- were of course the "horrific outburst of violence" that President Obama bemoaned and condemned.

But, because a soldier identified as the gunman had a name that led to the presumption that he was Muslim, the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia.

News reports named the man who used two handguns in the assault on his fellow soldiers at a base that is a prime point of departure for troops headed to Iraq and Afghanistan as Major Malik Nidal Hasan. The major, who was wounded during the incident, was identified as a psychiatrist who had served in the Department of Psychology at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda Naval Facility in Bethesda, Maryland, before his transfer to Fort Hood.

Hours after the incident, and hours after news anchors and politicians cited his religion as an explanation for the shootings, a family member told reporters Major Hasan was indeed a Muslim. Read more.

No to Single Payer, Yes to Prayer?
For Those Who "Suffer From a False Belief"
By Missy Comley Beattie

A recent Los Angeles Times article by Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger detailed a provision to the healthcare band-aid, one introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch and supported by other congressional luminaries like Sen. John Kerry, which “requires insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.”

After reading this, I immediately began to excavate for information about the Church of Christ, Scientist, whose name seems more than a little oxymoronic. According to the site, beliefnet.com, “suffering is a false belief” that originates in the mind. “Physicians are not viewed antagonistically; but their methods are seen as ineffective because they treat disease as originating in the body rather than mind.”

By Stephen Lendman

On October 28, New York Times writer Nick Bunkley wrote the following:

"Federal agents (today) fatally shot a man they described as the leader of a violent Sunni Muslim separatist group in Detroit." Targeted was Luqman Ameen Abdullah "whom agents were trying to arrest in Dearborn on charges that included illegal possession and sale of firearms and conspiracy to sell stolen goods."

The Times echoed FBI allegations that Abdullah "began firing at them from a warehouse (and) was shot in the return fire...." Ones also that he said:

-- "America must fall;"

-- if police tried to arrest him he'd "strap a bomb on and blow up everybody;" and

-- that he urged his followers to get bulletproof vests by "shoot(ing) a cop in the head and tak(ing) their vest."

LETTER TO THE PASTOR OF ST. PATRICK’S

On Sunday, October 4, 2009, Martha Cone was one of five people who attended St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Armonk in a bannering campaign that has been conducted in Westchester County over the last two years to encourage clergy and parishioners to oppose the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is her letter to the pastor of the church prompted by the grabbing and shoving of two of the group by an usher and the silence of the congregation after what they witnessed.

###

White Plains, October 8, 2009

The Reverend John F. Quinn
St. Patrick’s Catholic Church
29 Cox Avenue
Armonk, N.Y. 10504

Dear Reverend Quinn:

Enclosed please find the mission statement of the little group that visited your church last Sunday (Oct. 4) with our peace banners. I wrote it because this was not the first time we encountered extreme anger from parishioners. In the confusion that followed the incident I omitted to leave it behind.

The War on Language
By Chris Hedges | Truthdig

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons. Read more.

Former right-wing leader warns of religious right violence: ‘Anyone can be killed’
By Larisa Alexandrovna | Raw Story

Frank Schaeffer is an outspoken critic of the politicized Christian evangelical right. He sees the "End Times" movement as anti-Semitic. He fears that a right-wing terrorist might assassinate the President of the United States.

None of these talking points would be novel on the left, but Schaeffer is hardly a bleeding heart liberal. His father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, is considered to be the godfather of the modern religious right movement. Schaeffer himself took up the family mission and became a prominent speaker and writer, promoting many of the sentiments that have given rise to the politically active, extremely well organized and zealous movement of today. He left the religious right in the 1980s, and was a Republican until 2000.

In an interview with Raw Story, Schaeffer -- who has a new book coming out this month called Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) -- discussed his concerns about the radicalization of the Christian right and the increasingly violent rhetoric he foresees turning into actual violence.

"Since President Obama took office I've felt like the lonely -- maybe crazy -- proverbial canary in the coal mine," Schaeffer said. "As a former right wing leader, who many years ago came to my senses and began to try to undo the harm the movement of religious extremism I helped build has done, I've been telling the media that we're facing a dangerous time in our history. A fringe element of the far right Republican Party seems it believes it has a license to incite threatening behavior in the name of God."

"The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high," he added. "They want revenge on all people not like them -- forever." Read more.

Church Blogging # 23
CHURCH CROWD SILENT AFTER PROTESTERS ARE GRABBED, SHOVED
By Nick Mottern

On Sunday, October 4, Martha Conte, Gayle Dunkelberger, Nora Freeman, Debbie Kair and I attended St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Armonk, NY in our bannering campaign to encourage clergy and parishioners in Westchester County to work to end the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

We experienced a disturbing incident in which the pastor, the Reverend John F. Quinn, had to intervene to prevent an usher from trying to wrestle me over backward after the man had grabbed Debbie’s shoulder and attempted unsuccessfully to rip one of our banners from her hands.

Since he came from behind us, it was not clear whether the usher, a man in his late 60s or early 70s, had read either of the banners we held or whether he was simply enraged by our intrusion into the service. He was accompanied by at least five or six other men, some pressing in on us with him while others tried to restrain him.

Father Quinn told us later that St. Patrick’s is a “peace church,” but after the service not one soul in the church spoke to us and most averted their eyes from us. Also disturbing was the behavior of parishioners who made it difficult for Debbie to enter the line going to the altar for Communion, which came toward the end of the service. “They glared at me and walked right in front of me,” Debbie said.

Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy About God, wrote:

I quit my leadership role in the far right religious movement when it began advocating violence against those who had a different political or moral view. Now I am speaking out, and have joined with Velvet Revolution to organize a movement to stop far right violence. We’re doing this because more and more of us see that if unchecked, the inflammatory garbage spewing from the Right’s hate machines will result in tragedy — in other words violence.

I started pondering the question of what we could do right after the assassination of Dr. Tiller by a religious extremist. I felt that it wasn’t enough to call for boycotts of right wing commentators who spew their hate, because that did not really address the core problems. In fact as a former right wing religious “pro-life” leader I felt compelled to publicly apologize for the “America-is-like-Nazi-Germany” rhetoric that my late Evangelical leader father and I helped create in the 1970s and 80s that inexorably led to justifying violence in the Tiller case.

Now I want to endorse a campaign to address these issues. It was launched last week at StopDomesticTerror.com by VR. On Tuesday, I posted this article in Huffington Post asking everyone to join this important campaign.

High court to decide if war memorial violates Constitution
By Bill Mears | CNN

A federal judge has ordered the Mojave Cross, a war memorial erected by a veterans group 75 years ago, to be covered. It's boxed in plywood. The issue is less about what the cross symbolizes and more about where it sits: In the middle of the Mojave National Preserve, which is government land....Riley Bembry, who served as a medic in World War I, helped erect the cross in 1934. It sits on a 4,000-foot plateau and was a place of reflection for many vets who retreated to the desert in part to recover from severe lung diseases caused by mustard gas attacks during the Great War. An annual Easter service is held there, but until recently only locals knew about it. The site is not on any maps.

Driving along a pockmarked road amid rocks and Joshua trees in a lonely southern California desert, religious controversy might be the last thing you'd expect to encounter.

And if you don't look too closely, you're likely to zip right past the focus of a hotly contested Supreme Court battle. Read more.

Sean Faircloth, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition of America wrote:

I write to let you know that the Secular Coalition for America is working to defeat three proposed amendments to the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill that would alter public policy to privilege religious people. These amendments are in some House versions as well.

Of great concern is a bipartisan amendment sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) that would require private and public health plans to cover all "spiritual care" - whether or not the individual has religous objections to medical care. This proposed funding undermines our Constitution and will open up your tax dollars to scam artists.

This amendment will make an existing problem worse. Religious people who object to medical care already have some "spiritual care" covered by Medicare and Medicaid. This "spiritual care" includes reimbursements for payments that Christian Scientists make to members of the Church who pray for them when they are ill. Numerous children have died while receiving this "spiritual care" when modern science would easily have saved their lives. And you helped pay!

Under the new amendment, all health plans would be obligated to cover such expenses. The Hatch-Kerry bill amendment doesn't stop there, expanding this practice to all Americans, regardless of whether or not they object to medical care. Tax payers would help foot the bill for this religion-based care, care offering no scientific evidence of effectiveness. "Care" which, in fact, endangers lives by placing government approval on non-scientific practices.

10 Ways the U.S. Military Has Shoved Christianity Down Muslims' Throats
By Chris Rodda | Alternet

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was founded in 2005 by Mikey Weinstein, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel, after the harassment his own sons faced as Jewish cadets at the academy led him to discover that the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Air Force Academy was far from an isolated problem.

It was a militarywide issue that needed to be confronted head on. But it quickly became apparent that MRFF's initial mission of protecting the rights of our men and women in uniform was only addressing part of the problem.

The evangelizing and proselytizing of Iraqi and Afghan Muslims by private religious organizations and U.S. military personnel also had to be exposed and stopped -- particularly the materials and media available via the Internet and television that could be used by Islamic extremists as propaganda for recruiting purposes....

Top Ten Ways to Convince the Muslims We're On a Crusade

10. Have top U.S. military officers, Defense Department officials and politicians say we're in a religious war.

9. Have top U.S. military officers appear in a video showing just how Christian the Pentagon is.

8. Plant crosses in Muslim lands and make sure they're big enough to be visible from really far away.

7. Paint crosses and Christian messages on military vehicles and drive them through Iraq. Read more.

Research Finds that Atheists are Most Hated and Distrusted Minority
By Ole Ole Olson | News Junkie Post

Intolerance is a bitter beast. There are many groups in America that are subject to discrimination and prejudice, but none are more hated than atheists. Research conducted a couple years ago at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis found that atheists are more distrusted than muslims or homosexuals in the US.

Austin Cline from about.com writes, “Every single study that has ever looked at the issue has revealed massive amounts of bigotry and prejudice against atheists in America. The most recent data shows that atheists are more distrusted and despised than any other minority and that an atheist is the least likely person that Americans would vote for in a presidential election. It’s not just that atheists are hated, though, but also that atheists seem to represent everything about modernity which Americans dislike or fear. Read more.