And we shall call his name Muhammad.
Unfortunately for Muhammad, Mother Nature has reduced him to water vapor and called him back to the heavens.
We shall miss him… and his hat.
Can you believe somebody stole Muhammad’s hat?
My conservative friends manage to keep me abreast of all the scurrilous right-wing emails that are fraught with lies, deception and stupidity. A new one is making the rounds complaining about the new president dollars that the mint has just issued.
The allegation is that “In God We Trust” has been left off this new coin: “By omitting these words, our politically correct, secularist leaders made a conscientious decision that either 1) God does not exist, 2) that God exists but can no longer be trusted.”
The email goes on to say, “I am personally offended and fed up with the denigration of God and Christianity in my country. I am certain George Washington would never have agreed to his picture on the coin if it in any way diminished faith in God.”
Setting aside for the moment the fact that the writer is abysmally ignorant of Washington’s religious beliefs, the real kicker is that the inscription is on the coin. In a departure from tradition – something conservatives are loathe to tolerate – the inscription is on the outside edge of the coin and not on the obverse or reverse. The date, “E Pluribus Unum,” and the mint mark are also there. (Visit the U.S. Mint’s page devoted to the new dollar to see all of the markings in great detail.)
To send such a message the writer had to be: 1) dull-witted; 2) deliberately lying, or 3) non compos mentis – not that those terms are exclusive nor infrequent attributes of the writers of right-wing screed.
Watch for this one and, if the sender has violated the protocols of email and revealed all recipients, which they seem inclined to do, reply to all of the recipients with a dose of the truth. I get interesting responses from the “reeducated.”
Such tomfoolery would be out of place in Sweden, which trails only Estonia in the percentage of the population that doesn’t believe in God.
(I should note that it is possible that the writer obtained some of the early issues that missed the edge printing but that error was publicized widely and the defective coins have become collector’s items. I doubt that such is the case with this author of the off-the-wall criticism that I received.)
- The Old Viking
Salman Rushdie turned 60 today. He was recently honored with knighthood for his contributions to literature.
Here’s how Muslims in Pakistan celebrated:
The Pakistan parliament yesterday called on the government to reverse the decision to award Rushdie a knighthood or face further protests from Muslim nations.
“If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, his act is justified,” the minister for religious affairs, Ijaz ul-Haq, told Pakistan’s national assembly, according to the translation from Urdu by Reuters. He urged Muslim countries to break diplomatic ties with London.
“This is an occasion for the [world's] 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” said Mr ul-Haq, the son of the former Pakistan military leader, Zia ul-Haq. “If Muslims do not unite, the situation will get worse and Salman Rushdie may get a seat in the British parliament.”
His comments were reported on local news networks and provoked an angry response around the world. Effigies of the Queen and Rushdie were burned in the eastern Pakistan city of Multan as students chanted “Kill him! Kill him!”
Mr ul-Haq said his main intention had been to examine the root causes of terrorism; he denied he was encouraging suicide bombing.
So he wasn’t encouraging suicide bombings, he was just saying that if you are Muslim and deeply offended by something Salman Rushdie wrote about your god in a fictional book, then it’s okay for you go blow yourself up and kill a bunch of other people that happen to be in your vicinity.
And apparently if you are a student with a whole lifetime ahead of you, then you don’t have to kill yourself. You can kill Rushdie or at least encourage others to do so.
Organized religion is so great at uniting people and promoting hatred and violence around the globe. What would we do without it?
Pat Robertson spewed some more hateful crap on his show yesterday:
“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city, and don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”
Interesting… Weren’t the ID supporters saying that it wasn’t about creationism or God?
Thanks for clearing it up Pat.
Pat Robertson is insane.
Pat Robertson on Sunday said that Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of expressing its anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year’s Emmy Awards. “By choosing an avowed lesbian for this national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s wrath,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” on Sunday. “Is it any surprise that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres’ hometown?”
(snip)
“This is the second time in a row that God has invoked a disaster shortly before lesbian Ellen Degeneres hosted the Emmy Awards,” Robertson explained to his approximately one million viewers. “America is waiting for her to apologize for the death and destruction that her sexual deviance has brought onto this great nation.”
(snip)
“God already allows one awards show to promote the homosexual agenda,” Robertson declared. “But clearly He will not tolerate such sinful behavior to spread beyond the Tonys.”
Story here.
So… Pat Robertson’s god unleashed a Category 5 Hurricane on Ellen Degeneres’s hometown of New Orleans to smite her for her “sexual deviance?” Ellen wasn’t there, but there were many thousands of poor people, sick people, and children that either did not know to leave or had no means of leaving. So God just took it out on them? He smashed their houses, killed many of them, and created a huge stinking mess of Ellen Degeneres’s hometown because she’s a lesbian? One would think that a god capable of such powerful destruction could be a little more discriminate. Like maybe target Ellen with a lightning bolt, a falling tree, or maybe, if He favors strong winds and water, He could just conjure up a mini tornado to pick her up and fling her in the Pacific Ocean.
Pat Robertson belongs in an asylum, not on T.V. I mean really, can you imagine what must be going on his head? He worships a god that kills thousands of innocent people because of one person’s sexual orientation. It’s a wonder the man can even walk around, let alone spew his hateful thoughts across the airwaves.
One million viewers…
Curiosity got the best of me today, so I went surfing around the right-wing web sites to see if I could find any outright condemnation of Robertson’s remarks. Granted, I don’t spend a lot of time on the wingnut sites, but I am familiar with a few of them.
I started at the web site for The Christian Coalition – the organization founded by Robertson after his failed run for the presidency in 1989. Roberston stepped down from his post there in 2001. I was curious to read what this religious organization might have to say about their founder’s call to assassinate Chavez. I found this:
“What Robertson was basically arguing is that it’s time to deal with this problem,” the MRC [Media Research Council] spokesman [Rich Noyes] offers. “I think ‘assassination’ was an unfortunate word [for Robertson to use]. On the other hand, it seemed to get this conversation going in a way that it hasn’t before.”
Not much of a condemnation…
Are any of you out there familiar with The Christian Coalition? According to an article by Bill McKibben titled “The Christian Paradox” the August edition of Harper’s Magazine:
The Christian Coalition of America – founded in 1989 in order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christioan values that made this the greatest country in history” – proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts.”
I’d say they’ve strayed a bit from their original mission. I’ve already digressed, so let me digress a bit more. Over the past few months, Harper’s has published some excellent articles about the role of religion in America. I have previously commented on them here and here. Read them if you have the time…
I also visited James Dobson’s Focus on the Family site and found nothing at all. Same for Billy Graham’s website.
I then visited the Right’s equivalent of Common Dreams, TownHall.com, and found one column by Marvin Olasky in which he said:
The televangelist should have remembered Spiderman’s message that “with great power comes great responsibility.” By his blurting, Robertson aided Venezuelan autocrats such as Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel, who sarcastically said that assassination advocacy was “very Christian” and went on to argue that “religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity.”
If you read the whole column you’ll find that Olasky doesn’t think Christian fundamentalism is a great problem, but that Muslim fundamentalism is a great problem. I have a problem with any kind of fanatical fundamentalism so I wrote him a note asking him to read Luke 19:27. I used this verse as an example of ahow anyone can cherry pick quotes from another religious text and make it appear worse or more violent than his own religion. Olasky actually responded to my email, but it was an incredibly lame response. (More about that later.)
So I did a little surfing to the right expecting to find outright condemnations of Robertson’s crazy call to assassinate the president of a country we aren’t even at war with, and I didn’t find any strongly worded articles. They were all soft.
Conservatives have no problem throwing roundhouse punches to the face of anyone on the Left, but they sure have a problem landing a blow on one of their own who really deserves it.
Chris Hedges’ article in the May issue of Harper’s, “Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters,” exposes the leaders of the NRB, a group of 1600 Christian radio and Television broadcasters, as Dominionists, a group of militant Christians who believe that Christians should dominate our nation and eventually the world. Hedges reports that:
Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all.
This isn’t just about arguing for one’s rights to speak freely about religion in public spaces. It’s not about allowing government officials to openly express their belief that Christianity is the one “true” religion. No, their mission is much grander. They have no regard for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. They believe that their brand of Christianity should rule our nation and the media, and those who don’t believe as they do should be converted, imprisoned, or executed.
Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.
So are you thinking this is a bit extreme? Are you thinking that maybe these radical, hate-filled beliefs are attributable to only a small, extreme faction of the members of the NRB? Think again. Hedges reports that Frank Wright, the new president of the NRB spoke before the group and promised:”
… he will fight to block the passage of hate-crime legislation, something many Christian broadcasters fear might be used to halt their attacks on gays and lesbians.
“For the first time in history, representatives and senators may pass hate-crime legislation,” he says, “which is one step to oppose what you do as against the law.
“If we had to give equal time to every opposing viewpoint, there would be no time to proclaim the truth that we have been commanded to proclaim,” he says. “We will fight the Fairness Doctrine, tooth and nail. It could be the end of Christian broadcasting as we know it if we do not.”
I had to read that passage a few times to make sure I read what I thought I read. They DON’T support “fairness.” They don’t support a fairness doctrine because they think it might be used to stop them from preaching their hatred of homosexuals, and that would lead to the “end of Christian broadcasting as we know it.” If that’s what they think, then they must know that their broadcasts really are all about smacking down people who don’t live and think the way they do.
James Dobson, the leader of Focus on the Family (FOF) based in Colorado Springs, is recognized by many as the leader of the Dominionist movement. He, like Pastor Ted Haggard, speaks frequently with the Bush Administration. Hedges reports that Dobson:
…calls for a constitutional amendment to permit prayer in the public schools. He sponsors a group called “Love Won Out,” which holds monthly conferences around the country for those “suffering” from same-sex attraction. He likens the proponents of gay marriage to the Nazis, has backed political candidates who called for the execution of abortion providers, defines embryonic stem-cell research as “state-funded cannibalism,” and urges Christian parents to pull their children out of public-school systems. He has issued warnings to the Bush Administration that his extremist agenda must begin to be implemented in Washington and by the federal courts if the Republican Party wants his continued support.
I don’t think the majority of people in this country shares Dobson’s “values” or support Ted Haggard’s militant brand of Christianity, yet they have the ear of our president. I’d like to know what they’re telling him and how much it affects his policy decisions. I you visit the FOF website, you’ll find a list of their guiding principles here. They are written in a way that seems much less radical than what Hedges reports, but if you read the last one carefully, you’ll find that it says “We believe that God has ordained three basic institutions – the church, the family and the government…” That is of course quite contrary to what the framers of The Constitution believed, for nowhere in The Constitution is God, Jesus or the Bible mentioned.
At the end of his piece Hedges shares with us a warning from Dr. James Luther Adams, his ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School:
[He] told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.
We greatly appreciate Harper’s Magazine printing these articles for us, but most people get their news from television, so they’re not going to hear about this extreme faction of Christians. Wouldn’t it be great if the PRESS actually did its job and one of the major TV network news channels broadcasted a story about Dominionists to the masses in prime time? Would the leaders of New Life and Focus on the Family object to the “liberal media’s” portrayal of this sect of Christians? We’ll probably never find out because the networks won’t risk alienating any part of their audience, especially a segment as well organized as they are. The networks don’t want the hate mail or the boycotts.
Sigh…
Did anyone else hear last weekend’s edition of This American Life titled “Godless America?” I missed the first half hour, but I caught the second half when Julia Sweeney told a story about how she was prompted to renew her faith, so she returned to the Catholic Church and began studying the Bible. She went on at length about all the troubling contradictions she found in the Bible. Her story reminded me of all the confusion that I felt as a kid in Sunday school and Bible Study. Julia Sweeney quoted one verse that really stuck in my head because I had just finished reading the Harper’s article.
Luke 19:27, (Jesus speaking here): But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
I don’t know if there is a god, but the people behind Force Ministries think there is and that He’s on our side. Check out their website. Quite a few people I know have visited the website, and the most common response I get is, “Is this a joke?” It’s not. Once you get through the red-white-and-blue flash presentation complete with war music and visuals of heavily armed soldiers, you’ll find their mission statement at the top of their home page: “Equipping military personnel for Christ-centered duty.” I’m no theologian, but I do seem to recall that Christ was a pacifist. I cannot imagine him working with the U.S. military in any way other than demanding an end to the war.
So who are the people behind this organization? Pastor Greg and Amber Wark of San Diego, California. You can get a good look at them here. You’ll find that Greg Wark “holds a Bachelors degree in Biblical studies, a Masters degree in Theological studies, and a Doctorate in Ministry.” Great… he must have got hung up on all the gory parts of the Bible like what you’ll find in the books of Joshua and Samuel. (Warning: There are extremely graphic photos of victims of war in that last link. An index of some of the more violent passages of the Bible can be found here without the gory photos.)
I think that the people at Force Ministries would serve their god much better if they read The Ten Commandments where they’ll find at number six: “Thou shalt not kill,” and if they read The Beatitudes, they’d find at number seven: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”
All this God and Bible stuff got me thinking of Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.” Dylan said it best:
So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
