Christianity

Fascism in Italy got its ass kicked in WW II. In fact, unlike German fascism that took the combined efforts of the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union to defeat, Italian fascists were even fought to a standstill by the Greeks in WW II and had to have their sorry asses saved by the Germans.

But even today there are Italian losers who are so scared of anyone different from themselves that they follow the failed, stupid and loser ideology of Mussolini.

Their latest cause seems to have some resemblance to Bill O'Reilly having his panties in a bunch over an imaginged "war on Christmas." The Italian fascists have their collective panties in a bunch over...Christmas decorations. Yes, Italian fascists are such losers that they are terrified of Christmas decorations! From BBC news:

Right-wing politicians have protested at the inclusion of Islamic symbols in nativity scenes in northern Italy.

Elaborate cribs with figurines enacting the nativity decorate most Catholic churches in Italy at this time of year.

A priest at a Genoa church put a mosque and minaret in his crib, while a crib at a Venice school also had a mosque.

The Genoa branch of the anti-immigrant Northern League reacted with fury. But a senior church figure said there are no firm rules on what can be included.

Skepticism about Palin has been growing and for a good reason.

I've watched the segment where Sarah Palin talks about Roe vs. Wade and I have to tell you, I think it is one of the most insightful commentaries to come out of her mouth. I think she did a really good job at sounding level headed.

Yet listen to it very closely and what you can hear is an extremist taking her political views for a little mainstream spin and, fortunately for us, coming short.

So let me back track here a bit and go back to and issue that popped up a few weeks ago : Under then Mayor Palin, Wassilla was one of a handful of cities in Alaska that charged victims for rape kits. And what has been most astounding about this policy is Palin's response to the allegations : She claims to have not know about the practice. This from a woman that was voted into office in Wassilla by less than 7,000 votes.

Long time readers know I have a soft atheist spot for Liberation Theology. I'll come back to discuss this post later, just wanted to give you this awesome discussion of Black Liberation Theology by the man who wrote the book about it, James Cone.

Check it out.

Creationism vs. Evolution. Heliocentric vs. geocentric solar system. We are all familiar with the conflicts between scientific and faith-based thinking. Many historians, including Edward Gibbon, largely blame the rise of Christianity for the decline of reason as the Classical world became the Medieval world in Europe. So this is not a new concept. But it is an idea explored in great depth in the book The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. Subtitled “The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason,” Freeman traces first the origins of reason-based thought in Greek philosophy, and then the rise of Christianity in all its sordid details. Freeman’s analysis of the rise of Greek philosophy is fairly cursory and simplified, but in it he traces not only the rise of scientific thought as we might know it through the Aristotelian tradition, and sets up for the rise of faith-based thinking ironically through the Platonic tradition. The former centered on empirical observation as the basis of knowledge in a manner that is very similar to the modern scientific method. By contrast Platonism places “pure reason” at its center and rejects empirical observation as a basis for knowledge. Although Platonism sought to be a purer form of reason, Freeman argues that by putting the human mind over empiricism, and by establishing the belief that only a very few elite thinkers are qualified to tell everyone else what is true and what isn’t, Plato essentially provided early Christianity with the tools it would need to supplant reason with faith and learned argument where no one is an unquestioned authority with the idea that a hierarchy of elite thinkers can dictate truth.

My college-loving book and culture nut daughter blogs, too. Writes rings around me already, to be honest, and certainly around the unhoned writer and thinker I was at her age!

She gave me permission to crosspost her latest work here. It's true I thought Liza, Lorraine, moiv and CaLiberal (who I keep wanting to call Callie!) would especially like it, but also I want her POV accessible here at Culture Kitchen, because I hope it will speak to a larger progressive audience in the too-often-unheard voice of young feminism, from the direct line of fire in the culture wars.

RUMINATIONS ON OLIVE OIL
Standing in line at a fancy grocery store, I spotted a display among many :
EXTRA EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL! It proclaimed.

Excuse me? I thought. Extra extra? Isn’t that a little unnecessary?

That is to say, I never really understood the concept of Extra Virgin Olive Oil to begin with. Is it made from olives that aren’t allowed to touch other olives? Are they modestly shielded from life’s elements by tarps?

And Extra Extra Virgin Olives - what on earth does that entail?

Or does the “virgin” refer to the oil itself? Has it never been mixed with another oil, commingling and developing new, brassy flavors? I certainly hope not, one takes for granted when one buys olive oil that it is, in fact, olive oil, and not some other hybrid. But then it seems that they shouldn’t have to bellow about its virginity so explicitly.

My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.

There is a subtext underlying the various discussions circulating in Cyberspace at the moment--running the gamut from the controversy surrounding the Edwards campaign, to the Megametameltdown focusing partly on what constitutes "free speech," to what will likely be the next charge brought against Barack Obama from the Left (i.e., it's not his Muslim past that's the problem, it's his Christian present) and, of course, it all comes back--at least in a roundabout way--to that elephant still lurking in the liberal-left living room: understanding, in terms of real world political strategy, just what it is that Lesbian Feminist author Bernice Johnson Reagon was saying in her now quarter-century old speech/essay on Coalition Politics:

You don't go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive.

And ...

I want to talk a little about turning the century and the principles. Some of us will be dead. We won't be here. And many of us take ourselves too seriously. We think that what we think is really the cutting line. Most people who are up on the stage take themselves too seriously-it's true. You think that what you've got to say is special and that somebody needs to hear it. That is arrogance. That is egotism, and the only checking line is when you have somebody to pull your coattails. Most of us think that the space we live in is the most important space there is, and that the condition that we find ourselves in is the condition that must be changed or else. That is only partially the case. If you analyze the situation properly, you will know that there might be a few things you can do in your personal, individual interest so that you can experience and enjoy the change. But most of the things that you do, if you do them right, are for people who live long after you are long forgotten. That will only happen if you give it away. Whatever it is that you know, give it away, and don't give it away only on the horizontal. Don't give it away like that, because they're gonna die when you die, give or take a few days. Give it away that way (up and down). And what I'm talking about is being very concerned with the world you live in, the condition you find yourself in, and be able to do the kind of analysis that says that what you believe in is worthwhile for human beings in general, and in the future, and do everything you can to throw yourself into the next century. And make people contend with your baggage, whatever it is. The only way you can take yourself seriously is if you can throw yourself into the next period beyond your little meager human-body-mouth-talking all the time.

Ted Haggard had a bad day yesterday. His self-loathing, his hatred of his body and its desires, desires he has stifled and twisted, caught up with him--publicly, and shamed, he resigned his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals.

But, yesterday, I also had a bad day. I spent much of yesterday crying, sick to my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and contemplating the various implements within my own house that could be used to effect my own demise.

Jesus commanded that we should love all people as we love ourselves. But perhaps Ted Haggard and many, many of his compatriots do not love themselves; therefore, they cannot love others.

I get that kind of pain.