Theocracy

How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Safia Amajan was murdered yesteray in Afghanistan. The other American war. The one we were successful at, driving the Taliban out, and restoring peace and democracy to. That war. Remember?

Is it just me or does the West just not get it when it comes to Islam. I remember thinking Bush was incredibly stupid when he called the fight against al-Qaeda a "crusade," a word BOUND to inflame tensions with Muslims. Now the Pope says something even worse.

I mean, I am Jewish and pro-Israel, but even I am well aware that if you go around saying bad things about Mohammed you are going to piss off a lot of people. I fell pretty solidly on the side of freedom of the press when it came to the Danish cartoons and thought the Muslim reaction was unfounded. But the Pope has just been inexcusably rude to Islam and thinks a half assed apology will suffice.

From Guysen Israël News:

Pope Benedict XVI "sincerely regrets" his comments deemed offensive by Muslims. The Pope is sorry that his speech was misinterpreted and hopes that the "true spirit" of his comments will be understood. The Holy Father had said in his speech, "Show me something new that Mohammed brought and you will find only inhuman and diabolical things, such as his order to spread his faith by the sword." The Vatican press release did not however go as far as to make an apology in the name of the Pope.

Um, so just what WAS the "true spirit" of calling Mohammed's teaching "inhuman and diabolical?"

Planned Parenthood is fighting the South Dakota ban on abortion and they are asking you to host or attend a potluck fundraiser for choice.

Potluck House Parties will be held across the country to raise money and build awareness for the campaign to defeat the abortion ban in South Dakota.

Sign up to host a Potluck for South Dakota with your friends and family!

Use their online tools to create, manage and promote your potluck.

The host whose potluck raises the most money will win a Newman’s Own gift basket and a trip to New York City to meet Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards!

Or you can find a potluck near you to attend.

I should get some extra brownie points for posting this on Labor Day

Sometime ago an alter ego of mine enlisted in a fundie mailing list. So from time to time I receive spam that is just too whack for words.

I present thee, Children's Miracle Music. It is a program that turns children ,"with the push of a button", into happy little slaves who can only buy their parents love with their labor.

[via YouTube - Children's Miracle Music]

Oh.

The program is supposed to shift the role of the parent from "task master" to "self-government trainer".

Wow.

So a kid in this household can only have their mother's and father's affection and special attention if they work for it. This would explain the over-flowing love and kindness of people like Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan.

By the by : notice how religion is never mentioned but all the visual cues are there.

And politicians still wonder why when I interview them, "how do you stand on the separation of church and state?" is one of my standard questions, the second one being "what's your view of parental rights?"

To anyone who has been a long-time reader of culturekitchen will know that my politics are fiercely founded on the right to privacy, secularism and the questioning of parental rights.

[via The Raw Story | Harris: Separation of church and state 'a lie']:

In a lengthy interview with Florida Baptist Witness, struggling U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris asserts, among other things, that the separation of church and state is a fallacy.

"We have to have the faithful in government and over time," the Witness quotes Harris as saying, "that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers."

Most mornings, because of custody schedules and the way things work out, my drive into work is 40 miles, 25 of which are after I've dropped off the kids and I'm alone in the car. The drive is by rote now. I often have that sensation of actually not knowing how I got to the point in the drive when I will suddenly become aware that I'm at X or Y. I'm alert, though; other drivers are not in any danger. I just zone out. Usually, I listen to the local college station that plays alternative music. That's my preferred genre. I like to think that constantly listening to new music will prevent me from being one of those ossified folks who insist that there hasn't been any great music made in ______ years. Whatever, dude. Some rolling stones do gather moss as it turns out.

The other day, however, I was flipping through the radio dial catching bits and pieces of things. In the morning, I can hear everything from "Democracy Now!" to the blathering of bubble-headed bleach blondes doing morning schtick with their drive-time companions.

  I live out in the country, so "Christian stations" are as frequently encountered as roadkill woodchucks, and usually, I pay them about as much notice. But some woman was talking about her sexual purity, and I couldn't help it. I needed to hear what all the self-flagellating was all about. It just about made me cry. I did not hear the preceding discussion, so I wasn't sure about what exactly the nature of this woman's sexual "sin" had been, but I listened in rapt fascination and a sick feeling in my stomach as she recounted how she carried around her "brokenness" for ten years, until the night, in darkness because she didn't want him to see her face, she confessed her long-ago sin to her husband. Her husband, she said, responded in a Christ-like manner, by holding her and offering her forgiveness, allowing her to put the past behind her and move onto her new state of purity. The male interrogator was delighted at how her husband had been able to witness Christ to her. The cynic in me also could have sworn that there was a sexual charge to his voice: he had, after all, just been privy to a woman's confession of sexual sin, and I imagined that he had a woody imagining himself in a similar situation. Perhaps, he thought, her husband's forgiveness had been followed by a laying on of hands, or perhaps the sprinkling of holy semen upon her body? But I digress.

Get the Pope, the President and the Prime Minister on the phone, quick! I've had an epiphany, a flash of understanding about the nature of the divine that should literally SAVE THE WORLD.

It's revolutionary, you ready?
Come closer.
Here it is --

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. That's it.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Even the most devout believers in each religious tradition are therefore nonbelievers of everything else, no matter what doctrine or denomination they claim as their own, or whether they claim any religion at all.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Of someone's else's religion. Of someone's else's truth, and lies.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever because in order to believe one thing, you must disbelieve everything else.

For any one given religious belief, most of us will be in its nonbelief camp.

Every person on earth is a nonbeliever.
The recent post from Thomas Jefferson 198 years ago, got me pondering all this:

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion.

Not too long ago, I discussed the fall of Mogadishu as another sign that Islamic extremists are winning and that the United States under Bush has failed to successfully combat al-Qaeda and it's related groups. One such diary got attention from BBC Radio, which had me on one of their live call-in shows.

Some responses to my fears that Bush's failures are enabling a new, extremist Caliphate in the Muslim world criticized me for being too quick to judge Islam harshly. I take such criticism to heart because my beef is with religious extremists of all kinds and those fools, like Bush, who aid and abet their oppressive, terrorist agendas. I have no beef with any religion in particular or religion in general. It is extremism and terrorism that I object to.

I am sorry to say that my characterization of the Somali Islamic fundamentalist regime as being akin to the Taliban was not unfair. It seems dead on accurate. From Salon.com:

July 05,2006 | MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Radical Islamic militia fighters in Somalia shot and killed two people who were watching a banned World Cup soccer broadcast, a radio station reported Wednesday.

I wonder how Joe Lieberman is feeling about his Right Wing Christian extremist buddies these days? And how will this play in Crown Heights where Hassids love the Right Wing Republicans?

Hate Crimes have been on the rise in America since 9/11, and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups in America have increased by 33% in the past five years. A peak in attacks on Muslims after 9/11 was rapidly followed by an increase in anti-Semitism in the US and worldwide. There was a slight decline in anti-Semetic incidents in 2005, but incidents are still at disturbingly high levels.

Back in February I reported an incident that, while not a hate crime, was certainly a frightening trend. In Indiana, a prominant politician told a group of Jews that their opinion on the recitation of Christian prayers at legislative sessions didn't matter because they only made up 2% of the population. This is a further sign of the rise of Republican, Christian Taliban in the US.

But now it is pogroms. I use that word carefully. In Delaware, two families, one Jewish the other as yet anonymous, were forced to flee the town due to threatened violence by right wing Christian fanatics who were pushing Christian prayer in school.

There are a whole host of folks on this site who are better at talking about fundamentalism than I am, but it's a topic I return to frequently. I see it all around me. And while I cannot always articulate just how freaked out I am by the ways of thinking that define fundamentalism, to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice: "I know it when I see it."



So, imagine my delight when I came across this article today. "The four fundamentalisms and the threat to sustainable democracy" by  Robert Jensen presents a provocative argument that it is not just religious fundamentalism, but a variety of fundamentalisms that create a threat to sustainable democracy here in the United States.

Let's start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote "The Fundamentals"), but I want to use it in a more general fashion to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.

It's funny that Jensen uses the term hubris. I tend to reserve the term as that which applies to people I consider tragic heroes, the classical sense of the term, where the one flaw (and it's always fatal) is to have pride great enough that one thinks one is better than the gods. For that, people are made to suffer, To be struck down.