Tag: Jesusland

Senate Passes Stem Cell Bill

Jon Ponder

Wedge issue: It probably doesn’t have the saliency for Democrats as a wedge issue that gay marriage has for Republicans, but Democrats in the Senate yesterday put their GOP colleagues on the record on the issue of stem cell research.

The bill restricts research to embryos that would “otherwise be discarded” and whose donors gave their approval.

The president and his chorus on the irrational right claim that the research kills human life because embryos are destroyed to obtain the stem cells. However, the bill passed yesterday is very specific about which embryos would be used:

The bill would permit funding for research on embryonic stem cells regardless of the date of their creation, so long as they were donated from in-vitro fertilization clinics, they would “otherwise be discarded” and donors gave their approval.

Perhaps Bush and his followers will pledge that after dramatic new cures result from stem cell research that they will refuse these treatments if they are diagnosed with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease or similar illnesses

Boycott Your Church

Trish

Or just expect more from it.

Pensito Review reader Rick left this eloquent and strong comment about why folks like us aren’t doing church anymore:

I stopped going to church after our shameful shock and awe of Iraq. I believe God spoke loudly and clearly February 8th when over 8 million people of conscience poured out into the streets and pleaded that we not do this. This we did, and this we would’ve done even if it would’ve required tanks in the streets of America to enable it.

My faith is not wrapped in a flag. My conscience is not deadened to silently condone torture. And I can’t fellowship with those whose consciences are that dead.

I’m not going to church this Easter, as well as not joining with family, because I don’t silently condone torture nor can I shut up about it. I’m supposed to zip my lip and not offend the morality of other family members who “love my country”. Excuse me. My morality is offended, much more deeply than those offended by my protests could ever fathom because of their shallowness. Abu Grahib was the 9-11 event to our morality. Where is the outrage?

This president is not ashamed or embarrassed to use tortured confessions. This country is not ashamed or embarrassed to use tortured confessions. Need I say more? I don’t suspect there is any questioning of this in the churches of this country. Rather, there is pray for our troops. And just what are our troops doing?

My faith is not wrapped in a flag. My conscience is not deadened to silently condone torture. And I can’t fellowship with those whose consciences are that dead… nor with those who sing happy hymns while being totally oblivious to what we are doing, what we’ve become.

Why I Won’t Be in Church on Easter

Trish

As Christians and people of Eastern Orthodox faiths observe their holiest day this Sunday, one of their number has a few questions about what they think it means to follow Christ.

Christian commentator Roland Martin speaks for many.

When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant only caring about two issues,­ abortion and homosexuality?

Roland Martin: “I’ve grown tired of people who pimp God”

Ask the nonreligious what being a Christian today means, and based on what we see and read, it’s a good bet they will say that followers of Jesus Christ are preoccupied with those two points.

Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that’s no big deal.

The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it’s high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith.

Martin puts his finger on one of the reasons I and so many others have all but turned our backs on faith, and can’t be pushed into an organized religious service with a Mack truck.

…it’s troubling to listen to “Christian radio” and hear the kind of hate spewing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in the faith.

In fact, I’ve grown tired of people who pimp God. That’s right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it’s time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.

I mean no disrespect to the people closing their businesses to celebrate Good Friday, or those joining the throngs at church on Easter Sunday. But the joy of religion is long since past for me. And until it becomes more about quietly setting the highest example for others to follow and less about judgement and scorn, it will probably remain that way.

Study: If God’s On Our Side, We Kick Ass

Buck Banks

Ever felt like going Old Testament on somebody? You know, maybe exact some divinely sanctioned retribution on a neighbor or the guy who cut you off on the expressway this morning, secure in the faith that you’re backed up by your crew — Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Well, according to a recent study, that apparently is perfectly natural for us hyper-aggressive over-zealous human types.

‘We hypothesized that exposure to a biblical description of violence would increase aggression more than a secular description of the same violence. We also predicted that aggression would be greater when the violence was sanctioned by God than when it was not sanctioned by God.’

Apparently, if we believe that “God is on our side,” we find it easier to inflict pain and suffering on perceived enemies. And if we think God sanctions violence, we are way more likely to “bring it on.” Those are the findings of social psychologist Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan, who said he is very “disturbed” by the results, though he wasn’t surprised by them.

“I think many people use God as their justification for violent and aggressive actions,” Bushman said. “Take the current conflict in Iraq as an example. Bush claims that God is on his side. Osama bin Laden claims that God, or Allah, is on his side.”

Name a religion, any religion, and it’s a good chance that at some time its adherents attacked, killed, enslaved or burned at the stake other humans who held a different set of beliefs. How Bushman sussed that out in a laboratory setting is fascinating:

Bushman assembled teams of researchers at two very different universities, Vrije University in Amsterdam, Holland, and Brigham Young University in Utah.

Only half of the students who participated in the study at Vrije reported that they believe in God, and only 27 percent believe in the Bible. At Brigham Young, 99 percent said they believe in God and the Bible.

“We hypothesized that exposure to a biblical description of violence would increase aggression more than a secular description of the same violence. We also predicted that aggression would be greater when the violence was sanctioned by God than when it was not sanctioned by God.”
[…]

If ‘Immorality’ Is the Military Standard, Why Are Adulterers Allowed to Serve?

Jon Ponder

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Peter Pace equated gay people with adulterers in his now infamous statement in which he described homosexuality as immoral:

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Pace said in a wide-ranging discussion with Tribune editors and reporters in Chicago. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

“As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” Pace said.

The difference, of course, is that adulterers are not routinely prevented from serving in the military.

Adding salt in the wound, new figures out today suggest that the military is not persecuting gay service members as agressively as they have in the past:

According to preliminary Pentagon data, 612 homosexuals were discharged in fiscal 2006, fewer than half the 1,227 who were discharged in 2001. On average, more than 1,000 service members were discharged each year from 1997 to 2001, but in the past five years that average has fallen below 730.

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

Schism: Young Evangelicals Turn Away from Christian Nationalist Agenda

Jon Ponder

The number of liberal evangelicals appears to be growing and this has the Christianists who run the religous wing of the Republican Party ready to howl:

“Are the only really ‘great moral issues’ those concerning abortion, gay marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence?”

A new generation of pastors has expanded the definition of moral issues to include not only global warming, but an array of causes. Quoting Scripture and invoking Jesus, they’re calling for citizenship for illegal immigrants, universal healthcare and caps on carbon emissions.

The best-known champion of such causes, the Rev. Jim Wallis, this week challenged conservative crusader James C. Dobson, the chairman of Focus on the Family, to a debate on evangelical priorities.

“Are the only really ‘great moral issues’ those concerning abortion, gay marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence?” Wallis asked in his challenge. “How about the reality of 3 billion of God’s children living on less than $2 per day? — What about pandemics like HIV/AIDS — [and] disastrous wars like Iraq?”

Not surprisingly, the liberal bent of this new movement has the talibangelists up in arms. Three leaders of the Christian right — professional homophobes Dobson of Focus on the Family, Don Wildmon of the American Family Assn. and Paul Weyrich of American Values — have written a letter that is highly critical of evangelicals who do not follow their strict rightwing political agenda.

The letter took particular aim at the Rev. Richard Cizik, a prominent evangelical lobbyist who has promoted environmental protection as a moral imperative. Citing the creation story in the Book of Genesis, he has called the fight against global warming a directive “straight from the word of God — no doubt about it.”

The letter accused Cizik of “dividing and demoralizing” Christians by pushing this agenda and called on his employer, the National Assn. of Evangelicals, to silence him or to demand his resignation.

Fighting gay civil rights has generated millions of dollars for these religious-political groups, so it is not surprising that they are up in arms.

Rev. Wallis says that his congegants aren’t ready to become Democrats but that younger members are put off by the old evangelical agenda.

He told the Times that during a recent visit to an evangelical college, students were “furious” at Rev. Jerry Falwell because he had recently described global warming as a satanic plot to divert Christians from more pressing moral issues, such as spreading the Gospel.

“James Dobson and the religious right are outside the evangelical mainstream. That’s just a fact,” Wallis told the paper. “That doesn’t mean they have no power. But their monologue is over. Their control of the agenda is over.”

Newt Was Committing Adultery While Pushing Anti-Gay Marriage Act

Jon Ponder

In the fall of 1996, while the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated, four politicians who were key to its becoming law were adulterers, including two who were involved in adulteries while the bill was being debated.

Gingrich dumped second wife Marianne in 1999 after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis. She should have seen it coming. Newt famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

The world has long known that Pres. Clinton, who signed the bill in September 1996, was having an affair at the time with Monica Lewinsky. But now, for the first time, then-House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich has acknowledged that he was having an affair with his current wife, Calista Biseck, while he was married to his second wife, Marianne.

Gingrich confessed his adultery in an interview this week with James Dobson, a professional homophobe who heads Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s most virulent anti-gay organizatons.

Sources say the affair had been ongoing at least three years (and possibly for five years) prior to his divorce in 1999. In any case, it is clear that while Gingrich was cheating on his wife, in his role as Speaker he put the passage of DOMA at the top of the agenda for the House six weeks before the 1996 presidential elections.

And that was the real point. DOMA was a cynical election-year ploy devised by Republicans to drive a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his supporters in the gay community. DOMA presented Clinton with two bad options. If he vetoed it, Republicans would use it to enflame their homophobic base. If he signed it, he would risk dampening support from gays on election day. In the raw calculus of politics, Clinton chose the least risky option and signed it.

The other two adulterous politicians were recently retired Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP presidential nominee that year, and who had admitted to having an affair while married to his first wife — and then-Rep. Bob Barr, who first proposed DOMA, and who reportedly was unfaithful during at least one of his three marriages.

Gingrich apparently dumped second wife Marianne after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis in 1999. In true Newt fashion, the Speaker notified his wife that he was ending the marriage during a phone call while Marianne was with her family celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. Marianne Gingrich should have seen it coming. Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

Gingrich is considering running for president in 2008.

PBS to Air Inconvenient Truths About Mormons — and Romney

Trish

PBS is working on a two-part special on Mormons, set to air April 30 and May 1. The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam says it could hurt Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney, since the less Joe Sixpack knows about the tenets of the cult (oops, I said the C-word), the better.

“PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week…It’s bad math for the Mittster”

The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons call themselves, cooperated with “The American Experience ” and “Frontline, ” the show’s co-producers. [Filmmaker Helen] Whitney in turn pays the church the compliment of taking its faith very seriously indeed. The positives are there for all to see: the Mormons’ triumph over persecution in mid-century America; the dramatic “exodus” from Illinois to Utah, the “country no one else wanted,” according to Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of the Mormon pioneers; the devotion to family and community.

But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange…

“The Mormons” even tackles the ultimate red herring, “celestial marriage,” Joseph Smith’s term for polygamy…”The Mormons” estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 fundamentalist believers practice polygamy. Whitney has footage of 11 happy children passing plates around the dinner table, with three mothers and a father in attendance. Heather has three Mommies! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Michael Sullivan, “Frontline” executive producer for special projects, calls the project “respectful but frank. We’re not out to get the Mormons.” He says “there is a small section on Romney” in the portion of the documentary that is still being edited. Romney declined to be interviewed for the show.

What does it all mean? PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let’s say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches “The Mormons.” That’s almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It’s bad math for the Mittster.

‘Titanic’ Director’s New Film Claims to Have Found Coffins of Jesus, His Wife and Son

Jon Ponder

At a news conference today, filmmakers will announce the release of a new documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which claims to have found ossuaries belonging to Jesus, his wife, Mary Magdalene; their son, his mother and other family members:

Scientific analysis of limestone ossuaries (bone boxes) and physical evidence found in a 2,000-year- old tomb in Talpiot, Jerusalem, provide credible new information that the tomb once may have held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. [The documentary] from executive producer James Cameron [who won an Oscar for “Titanic”] and director Simcha Jacobovici, exclusively reveals what might be the greatest archaeological find in history.

The film presents the latest evidence from world-renowned experts in Aramaic script, ancient DNA analysis, forensics, archaeology and statistics. Among the major discoveries chronicled in the program is new evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene, also known as “Mariamene e Mara,” may have had a son named Judah.

This could be a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Christianity, but what may prove to be even more interesting and instructive is seeing how the Christian establishment reacts to this revelation.

Over the past two millenia Christian belief has been structured to remain isolated and unaffected by scientific fact, so even if this new finding were to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, hardcore Christians would find a way to reconcile it with their faith-based view of the world — as they have done with intelligent design as an alternative to evolution theory and the pray-away-the-gay movement as an alternative to psychology (and, what the heck, human nature).

This is understandable because without the fantastical embellishments that were added a generation or two after Jesus’ life by the writers of the Gospels — that his mother was a virgin impregnated by God and, especially, that he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven — the church would lose its mystical sway over its followers.