Music: Dar Williams — The Christians and the Pagans
December 24th, 2011
Posts filed under 'Religion'
Bollywood v. Radical Islam
A fascinating discussion of the challenge posed to radical Islam by Bollywood:
May 5th, 2011
Mormon women calls for loving others, opposes church on gay marriage
I put this video on MormonsforMarriage.com during the Prop 8 debate. At the time, speaking out via this video threatened my temple recommend and calling, and I chose to take it down to protect my standing in the church. I regret that decision and put it back up as a tribute to the legend of Valentine:http://www.dovesandserpents.org/wp/20…
February 17th, 2011
Music: Atheists don’t have no songs
From the 2010 New Orleans Jazzfest:
[H/t PACIFICVS, which has transcribed the lyrics.]
November 14th, 2010
Accountability for torture necessary to heal the sould of our nation
Three members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in Pasadena, representing three faiths, have published an oped
Healing the soul of a nation
By Rev. J. Edwin Bacon, Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater and Dr. Maher Hathout
Prior to the Bush administration, many of us thought the practice of torture was beneath the United States government. It is certainly antithetical to our central values that all people are created equal and are endowed by certain inalienable rights – to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In June, we joined with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and interfaith religious leaders in decrying the evidence uncovered by Physicians for Human Rights that the U.S. government not only practiced torture but also experimented on detainees to refine torture techniques. While this month’s report of unethical medical experiments on Guatemalans in the 1940s elicited public apologies from the Obama administration and a commitment to a thorough investigation, the only response to the evidence of these more recent experiments involving torture has been public denial by the CIA and silence from the White House. Medical experimentation without consent is wrong wherever it takes place. We need to uncover the full truth about our government’s use of torture in order to begin healing our nation’s soul.
Thomas Merton was once asked the question, “What is the contemporary face of evil?” Merton’s answer was dehumanization. A whole host of immoral practices grow from one central cancerous thought: that certain lives are less valuable than others.
This lie has taken root in our time, for there is no life that is of less value than another. All of us have within our soul the living image of God. Every human being is sacred. When we do any harm to someone else, we have done that harm to God. Our practices of torture have unleashed into the world a flood of dehumanization, the effects of which we will feel and know for generations to come.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that African-American people were not the only victims of racism. “Oppression has two victims,” he said. “Both the recipient and the perpetrator of racism are victims.” This is true of torture as well. We have reports of American soldiers who, having tortured detainees, are especially susceptible to suicide. Alyssa Petersen was one such soldier. She refused to participate in “enhanced interrogations” on naked detainees and days later took her own life. The official report said, “She could not be two people.” Alyssa Petersen could not escape the torture inflicted on her own mind, soul, and body by the acts she was tasked with committing.
In protecting persons from torture, we are also protecting those who would inflict torture. You cannot cause intentional pain to another, who bears the image of God, without suffering trauma in your own soul.
Truly, the victims of torture include both its victims and its perpetrators. To an important degree that includes us all.
Accordingly, healing for victims of torture must also include everyone.We must do everything we can to become agents of healing instead of oppression and torture. And true healing involves honest accountability.
That is why you and I have a moral responsibility to urge President Obama, Congress and Attorney General Holder to initiate an investigation and ensure safeguards that torture and involuntary human experimentation will never happen again in the name of the United States. President Obama has refused to do so, effectively sweeping it under the rug arguing that he wants to “look forwards, and not backwards.” But no victim can recover from the past by ignoring what occurred. The only way we can look forward with clarity of vision is to look backwards to heal what is wounded in our past. There is much moral reckoning that must be transacted. Trauma victims and trauma theory tell us that trauma cannot be healed unless and until it is acknowledged, reverenced, recognized and given a moral content.
We must alter the mindsets which allow for such heinous evils as torture. Allowing torture against human beings has become our new norm because of the blanket excuse, “They are terrorists.”
In this way we have replaced the title God gave to the human being – child of God. In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to purify our conscience by God’s daily visitation. The Jewish tradition sees that each person is created in the image of God, as we read in the book of Genesis, and therefore each face is the face of God. The Koran tells us to honor the progeny of Adam.
This is our prayer for our nation, that by the visitation of God our actions toward other human beings might be realigned with God’s vision of them. The first step toward realigning our national conscience is openly and honestly accounting for U.S.-sponsored torture and the experimentation on human victims that bolstered torture practices. That is the only path to healing torture survivors. It is the only path to healing the soul of our nation. It is the only path to healing the soul of the world.
************
Rev. J. Edwin Bacon is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Maher Hathout is senior advisor of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater is senior rabbi of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.
October 23rd, 2010
Gainsville attacks free speech of Koran-burning (almost) pastor
I was no fan at all of the Koran burning threatened by a Gainsville, FL church. But I am certainly no fan of Gainsville’s attempt to charge the church $200,000 for the costs for extra police for the event. Hasn’t the First Amendment made it to Florida yet? The publicity-hungry fools at the church had every right to demonstrate if they chose to. Their action, if they had carried it through, would have been a valid expression of Freedom of Speech.
I disagree with their action because I disagree with its message. But I defend their right to express their views. I’m distressed that Daily Kos endorsed the attempt of Gainsville officials to punish the chu8rch for their action. Don’t they remember that freedom is speech is above all freedom for those with whom we disagree?
September 21st, 2010
Wills: Pope attacker, not pope submitter
I don’t usually pay much attention to doings in the Catholic Church, as it has long ago lost any claim to moral authority, and not just because of the pedophilia crisis. After all, any organization that ran a series of concentration camps in which unwed mothers were locked up and worked for Church profit until they died long ago lost any moral authority. But Gary Wills’ description of how Pope Benedict XV is desperately co-opting a fierce church critic who wished for the death of a previous pope is downright amusing. There seem to be few limits to what the Church leaders will do to try and revive their brand:
Stealing Newman
By Garry Wills
Pope Benedict XVI is the best-dressed liar in the world. And in England he presided over the best set-designed lie imaginable. He beatified the nineteenth-century Oxford theologian John Henry Newman, presenting him (in the penultimate step toward canonization) as a docile believer in papal authority, an enemy of dissent, and a rebuke to anyone who questions church authority. When the pope declared authentic the bogus miracle on which he bases the beatification—the claim that a deacon from Boston was cured of a spinal disease after praying to the cardinal—he said in a letter from Rome to England last February “In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises, it is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate.” This is a Newman few who are acquainted with his radical views would recognize.
Newman is a touchy matter in England. He left the Anglican church, thinking it historically disabled as a channel of Christian teaching. To that extent, Benedict is in a good position for claiming Newman’s allegiance to Rome. Admittedly, this is hardly a way to promote ecumenical peace between English and Roman Catholics. For many years Rome would not canonize martyrs like Edmund Campion because they were killed under Queen Elizabeth. Admitting to hostility between London and Rome was considered undiplomatic. But now the pope wants to say that Newman was a standing affront to the church of England—and to say it in England, where he has encouraged Anglican priests to come join the Catholic church. Perhaps, too, he thinks this is a way to reclaim wavering loyalties of the British, and especially the Irish, who have expressed revulsion at the sexual scandals ofpredatory priests. The pope is breaking his own rule in making the beatification by his own personal act rather than by a brief of the Congregation of Sacred Rites, so he obviously means to be dramatic despite his reputation as an undramatic man.
Whatever his motives, the pope is blatantly defying historical truth when he says that Newman is a model of submission to church authority. Newman was a restive Catholic under constant scrutiny and criticism from Rome until a new pope (Leo XIII) bought him off with a cardinal’s robes when he was eighty and tamable.
He was a fierce critic of Pope Pius IX (beatified in 2000 by Benedict’s predecessor). Pius was pope for over thirty years, and Newman said that any man holding that office even for twenty years was bound to become a tyrant. He was allied with Lord Acton in opposing the “tyrant majority” at the Vatican Council that in the year 1870 declared the pope infallible. He wrote of the Council: “We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a pope to live twenty years. It is anomaly, and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”
Before the Council made the fatal declaration, Newman wrote to his closest friend Ambrose St. John hoping that the Italian forces threatening to take away his secular power would succeed, or that Pius would die: “We must hope, for one is obliged to hope it, that the pope will be driven from Rome and will not continue the council or that there will be another pope. It is sad he should force us to such wishes.” That is far from the figure the current pope will offer the world as a model for submissive belief. Benedict was once a scholar and now claims to be infallible in matters of faith or morals. But on the clearest facts of history he is a dissembler and disguiser. Were Newman alive to hope for preventing this distortion of his history, would he hope for the pope’s demise, as he hoped for Pius IX’s death before he did such damage to the church by claiming “tyrannical” powers?
September 19th, 2010
Ken Braun: A remembrance of 911
From Ken Braun and RootsWorld comes this moving account of a few people who tried to counter hate in the wake of 911:
I used to manage a record store on New York City’s Warren Street, right around the corner from the Burlington Coat Factory that is now the proposed site of the Cordoba Center, widely (but misleadingly) called “the Ground Zero mosque.” Four short blocks north of the Twin Towers, my colleagues and I used to jokingly call our store the World Music Trade Center.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, as I was on my way to work, pieces of airplane fell on the roof of our building and a tsunami of ash and grit got inside and ruined almost everything. Four customers I knew, and possibly others I had seen in the store or talked to, were killed that day; at least two of them were Muslim.
My staff comprised three Christians, two Jews, one Muslim, one atheist and my agnostic self. When we were able to reopen our store just before Christmas, we set up a display near the entrance, with a sign reading “Islamic Music from Around the World,” which was exactly what we offered on that center rack. We also gave a prominent place in the Asian section, along one wall, to secular Afghan music that had been banned by the Taliban, especially a CD by a singer whose death in a car crash his fans believed to have been engineered by Al Qaeda.
Like many of the small businesses in the neighborhood, our store got a lot of people coming in after their pilgrimage to Ground Zero, wanting to spend some money to help repair a small part of what had been wrecked. We were glad to see them, but many of them turned around and walked out as soon as they saw the first word on our sign: Islamic. “O my God, can you believe this?” was the most moderate exclamation we heard. Other visitors looked through the CDs on display and perhaps picked up a few, some headed for more familiar sections, and some approached my colleagues or me to say “I don’t know anything about Islamic music. Can you recommend something?” We were glad to; Islam has inspired a lot of fascinating and beautiful music. One gentleman, a delegate to the United Nations, having heard about our display, came to our store just to thank us for it. And then there was the guy who strode in and tried to overturn the center rack. When he couldn’t (it was too big and heavy), he scattered some CDs on the floor, stomped on them, and walked out shouting “Burn in hell!”
We had actually been planning to move the Islamic music back to one side next to the Judaica section, but after losing some CDs to a jackboot, we decided that we had to hold our stand against fundamentalism and Islamophobia. We kept the display front and center. In the end, neither terrorists nor reactionaries but music pirates and internet freeloaders closed our store.
It was much smaller and far less significant than the Cordoba Center, but I think of that record store when I hear the calumnies hurled against “the Ground Zero mosque.” Like its visionaries and supporters, my colleagues and I were trying to counteract ignorance and bigotry and hatred in whatever way we could. Because it was ignorance and bigotry and hatred that had fallen on us – all of us, everywhere – on 9-11. Remembering the days and weeks that followed, I admit to feelings of pride at having done a little something to defend our American freedoms of religion and expression. But sadness overwhelms the pride. After nine years and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths since 9-11, we still haven’t learned that day’s lessons. – Ken Braun
2 comments September 10th, 2010
Parker: The mosque must be built
Republican Kathleen Parker understands what Howard Dean doesn’t. She says the mosque must be built:
It is hard to imagine that anything has gone unsaid about the so-called Ground Zero mosque, but an important point seems to be missing.
The mosque should be built precisely because we don’t like the idea very much. We don’t need constitutional protections to be agreeable, after all.
This point surpasses even all the obvious reasons for allowing the mosque, principally that there’s no law against it. Precluding any such law, we let people worship when and where they please. That it hurts some people’s feelings is, well, irrelevant in a nation of laws. And, really, don’t we want to keep it that way?…
But the more compelling point is that mosque opponents may lose by winning. Radical Muslims have set cities afire because their feelings were hurt. When a Muslim murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, it was because his feelings were hurt. Ditto the Muslims who rioted about cartoons depicting the image of Muhammad and sent frightened doodlers into hiding.
The idea that one should never have one’s feelings hurt — and the violent means to which some will resort in the protection of their own self-regard — has done harm rivaling evil. It isn’t a stretch to say that the greatest threat to free speech is, in fact, “sensitivity.”
This is why plans for the mosque near Ground Zero should be allowed to proceed, if that’s what these Muslims want. We teach tolerance by being tolerant. We can’t insist that our freedom of speech allows us to draw cartoons or produce plays that Muslims find offensive and then demand that they be more sensitive to our feelings.
More to the point, the tolerance we urge the Muslim world to embrace as we exercise our right to free expression, and revel in the glory and the gift of irreverence, is the same we must embrace when Muslims seek to express themselves peacefully.
Nobody ever said freedom would be easy. We are challenged every day to reconcile what is allowable and what is acceptable. Compromise, though sometimes maddening, is part of the bargain. We let the Ku Klux Klan march, not because we agree with them but because they have a right to display their hideous ignorance.
Ultimately, when sensitivity becomes a cudgel against lawful expressions of speech or religious belief — or disbelief — we all lose.
August 19th, 2010
Scoundrel Time: Howard Dean opposes mosque
There was a brief period when one could hope that a new generation of Liberal politicians would have the integrity that has long been missing in our political class. But that hope, like “Obama hope,” is fading fast. The “liberals,” Obama excepted, are lining up with the forces of intolerance. First Harry Reid, now Howard Dean opposes building the mosque , following up those comments with attacking those supporting the mosque as “inflexible”:
Well, I think another site would be a better idea, again, but I’d look to do that with the cooperation of the people who are trying to build the mosque. I believe that the people who are trying to build the mosque are trying to do something that’s good, but there’s no point in starting off and trying to do something that’s good if it’s going to meet with an enormous resistance from a lot of folks.
These are among the stupidest comments ever made. What good thing didn’t meet resistance? Abolishing slavery? The 8 hour day? Building unions? Women’s suffrage? Civil rights? I guess all these were a bad idea because they “enormous resistance from a lot of folk.”
Evidently Dean tries to claim that its simply that no religious institution should be near that “hallowed ground.” Daily Kos demolishes that silly argument:
That line of reasoning fails miserably, however, when you consider that therealready is a mosque in the same area and that there are at least three churches even closer to Ground Zero than the proposed Islamic community center and mosque, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, Trinity Church, and St. Paul’s Chapel.
Evidently, Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Ted Olson, are as likely to stand up for basic decency as Democrats. However, Glenn Greenwald does remind us that a few Democrats aren’t completely craven in the face of controversy:
After hearing Dean say this, I wrote on Twitter: ”Please: nobody ask Russ Feingold what he thinks of Park51 – really couldn’t stomach hearing him say it should move – difficult race or not.” Thanksto amites for pointing out that Feingold — in an extremely difficult re-election battle in a purple state — has already spoken out in favor of the community center remaining right where it is. Just as impressively, Alexi Giannoulias — the Democratic nominee for Senate in Illinois (for Obama’s old seat) who is also in a very close race – came out and strongly supported Park51 as well. So those two stand in stark and impressive contrast to Dean. And see this Ann Tenales cartoon suggesting a new campaign ad for Harry Reid.
Phil Ochs described the liberal dilemma in the 1960′s in his wonderful:
Love Me, I’m a Liberal
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I’d lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalI go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don’t talk about revolution
That’s going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalI cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I’m glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don’t move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalThe people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can’t understand how their minds work
What’s the matter don’t they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalI read New republic and Nation
I’ve learned to take every view
You know, I’ve memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I’m almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There’s no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalI vote for the democratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I’ll send all the money you ask for
But don’t ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberalOnce I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
UPDATE:
Josh Marshall on Dean’s statement:
Late Please Make It Stop It’s Too Painful Update: Sam Stein at Huffpo rung up Dean to see if he wanted to revise and extend his remarks and Sam basically ended up giving the good doctor another chance to demonstrate that he apparently doesn’t know anything about what’s going on. Dean says the Cordoba House proponents are being inflexible. And maybe they are. But he also makes clear that he takes “the congregation at its word that it is a moderate congregation trying to heal the wounds of 9/11.” Only there’s no congregation. It’s a investment group (Soho Properties) and a Muslim non-profit (the Cordoba Initiative) trying put this together. Ahh, never mind. But he does point out that “best way to heal the wounds is not to have a court battle, but to sit down and try to work things out.” Good point, only there’s no Court battle. It’s done. They got the approval. Maybe someone will get Mayor Bloomberg ginned up about Muslim plot to make us all eat Halal food. But there’s no court battle.
Doing your homework. What a concept …
August 18th, 2010