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Christopher Hitchens gets to the heart of it with these words from a Slate column titled “White Fright:”

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Mr. Fish doesn’t need words.

And take a look at this video that was embedded in the Hitchens column. 

This guy looks like he’s trying to be Benjamin Franklin, but he’s no Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was enlightend.  This guy is not.  Neither are most of the other people interviewed in this video.

The billionaire whiteys that control the U.S. media and thus the political discourse in our country called out Obama to defend offensive remarks delivered in sermons made by his longtime pastor and, instead of crumpling like a shamed puppy, he delivered a brilliant speech in Philadelphia today.  I would say it’s right on par with the speech he gave at the 2004 convention.  Excerpts:

…

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

…

On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

…

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

…

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

…

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

…

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

…

(link to transcript of speech)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president that could organize his thoughts into eloquent prose and then deliver that prose in an emotional, inspiring speech?  Now that would be change in a dramatic fashion. 

Read it all here.

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? 

So this is how we are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

The committee staff report said Blackwater guards had engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, and in the vast majority of cases the guards fired their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded. In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and the company sought to cover up other episodes, the report said.

The staff report said that State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet, and in one case last year, helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that the company’s guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

…

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report said that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

And we thought Abu Ghraib made us look bad.  Our government hired mercenaries at Blackwater along with their pals in the State Department are doing their best to make us look even worse.

The price for murdering a guy started at $250,000 (pretty low by U.S. Standards) and quickly dropped to $15,000 so as not to encourage people to commit suicide to enrich their families after they willingly provoke Blackwater security guards to kill them.

That kind of reminds me of some scenes in the Hearts and Minds documentary where they talked about how the government and the media spread propaganda about how the people of Vietnam did not value human life – that their lives were worth nothing.  It was bullshit of course, just like this is. 

Do they really think that there would be a rash of Iraqis volunteering themselves to get shot for a couple hundred thousand dollars?  I don’t think so…

So the price went down to $15,000 and then to $5,000 at the urging of an anonymous State Department official.  That’s great.  Our military doesn’t count Iraqi fatalities, and our hired guns aren’t accountable to anyone, until now I guess, and when they start shooting, they pretty much unload and leave any wounded innocent bystanders to fend for themselves.

When they are confronted by grieving family members, they hand out $5,000.  Not even enough to buy a decent used car.

They don’t seem to be following their own “Core Values.”

P.S.  Says here that Erik Prince, Chairman and CEO of Blackwater, is a fundamentalist Christian.  Guess that means God gave him a license to kill.

What does that mean?  Is that “blow” like in “You know how to whistle don’t you”  Just put your lips together and blow?” Or is that “blow” as in “cocaine,” or is it blow like “fellate?”  Take your pick.

Nonsense?  Yes…  but not if you are a high school student.  Those words may be interpreted by an authority figure as loaded words that advocate something prohibited in a school policy.

Kind of like “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”  Does that phrase promote marijuana use?  Promote Christianity?  Nonsense?  definitely…  Is it likely to promote some kind of harm or disturbance that the government wishes to avoid?  Not likely.  Was it disruptive?  Not until the principle demanded that the students take it down.

But that didn’t stop the Supreme Court from ruling 5-4 against Joseph Frederick, the one student holding the banner that refused the principal’s order. Principal Morse wanted it down because she interpreted it to promote drug use, and she believed that schools should be able to enforce their zero-tolerance drug policies.  Okay, I’ll give them that authority on school grounds and at school functions.  But holding up an obliquely worded message designed to attract television cameras at an Olympic Torch Relay event on non-school property?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  5-4?  That’s a 9-0 vote in favor of a citizen’s right to free speech in any modern democracy.

Was it more offensive because it said “4 Jesus?”  Depends on what you believe.  Roberts did not mention it in his majority opinion.  But I have to think that if Hendrickson’s banner read “Bong Hits 4 Buddha” it would not have received much attention and a legal case, if any, would not have progressed to the Supreme Court.

If you are interested, you can read the whole Supreme Court opinion here.  I did, and I found that Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion (starting at page 45) made far more sense than Roberts’s majority opinion.

So drugs are bad, especially when mixed with Christianity.  What about sex?  Last I heard, the schools weren’t enforcing a zero-tolerance-for-sex rule and they weren’t testing kids to make sure they were virgins.  So could a principal prohibit students from hoisting a nonsensical banner mixing sexual innuendo during a similar event?

Someday we may find out.

So, what I suggest is that we further test the boundaries of student speech.  If you know any high school students, feel free to encourage them to see how far they can go with any of the following ambiguous messages:

Shoot Up 4 Shiva

Pipe Licks 4 Mary

Light up 4 Allah

Huff 4 Hosanahs

Eat Tabs 4 Yahweh

Mainline 4 Mwari

Cracking 4 Christ

Jello Shots 4 Jehovah

Sloppy Seconds 4 Agnostics

Adrenachrome 4 Atheists

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?

Here are some excerpts from an article by Ross Douthat in the newest Atlantic Monthly about the rise of religion in Europe and the rise of secularism in America.

Nothing divides the United States from Europe like religion. America has its public piety and its multitude of thriving sects, Europe has its official secularism and its empty, museum-piece churches. Ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God, while only about 60 percent of Britons, French, and Germans say the same. American politics is riven by faith-based disputes that barely exist across the Atlantic, while European debates take place under a canopy of unbelief that’s unimaginable in the United States, where polls show that a Muslim or a homosexual has a better chance of being elected president than an acknowledged atheist.

…

America’s secular turn actually began in the 1990s, though it wasn’t until 2002 that two Berkeley sociologists first noticed it. In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had “no religious preference” had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population. This unexpected spike wasn’t the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as “a symbolic statement” against the religious right. If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, “then liberals’ alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized.”

Five years later, that institutionalization seems to be proceeding. It’s showing up in an increasingly secularized younger generation: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 20 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds reported no religious affiliation, up from just 11 percent in the late 1980s. …
… Indeed, the America that many secularists seem to desire looks an awful lot like the Europe of today, where politicians who mention God are a rarity, and governments keep a wary eye on “sects” that stray too far outside the mainstream.

Yet the Europe of tomorrow may look more like … the United States, with a politics that’s increasingly shaped by clashes between believers, or between belief and unbelief. Already, the Continent is experiencing a low-grade culture war, created by the collision between the religious zeal of Muslim immigrants and the secular culture that surrounds them. In flash points that range from the murder of the anti-Islamic filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland, to the controversy over the supposedly blasphemous Danish cartoons, to the question of whether to admit Turkey to the EU, secular Europe has found itself in unfamiliar, God-haunted, almost American territory.

…

Religion stirs up the most controversy, a group of Harvard economists recently argued, when roughly half the population is actively religious; conflict ebbs when the devout constitute large majorities or small minorities. The more evenly divided a culture finds itself on the ultimate questions, the more likely politicians are to pursue “strategic extremism” and mobilize one side against the other.

…

America has long avoided this trap by enjoying near-universal piety; Europe, at least lately, has escaped it by cultivating near-universal skepticism. But if the religious gulf between the two continents narrows, the divides within each one are likely to open ever wider, and religious peace turn increasingly to culture war—or worse.

Just what we need… more crusades.

Jerry Falwell collapsed and died today in Virginia at the age of 73.  I can think of no better way to remember this man that was so filled with hatred and disgust for those who did not believe as he did than through some direct quotations.  Here you go…

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country”

Actually I think it was Thomas somebody from Virginia that invented that.  Jefferson?  Paine?  probably both…

“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them”

“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”

“Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan in America”

Say what?

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being”

“The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews”

Hmmm… I’m not born again and I am a member of the ACLU.  I don’t feel like a failure… haven’t gassed or burned any Christians… Perhaps I’m not living up to my potential…

“The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc. “

“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability”

and of course this famous hate filled rant following 9-11

“…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

What a nice old man Jerry was.  So loving and tolerant… just like Jesus.   Not.

Have a Nice Trip…

Go here to read what his arch-nemesis Barry Lynn had to say upon hearing of his passing.

I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion.  I belong to an unholy disorder.  We call ourselves “Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.”

Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country.

sign me up.

According to this column from The Guardian, it looks as though the right wing has taken their strange brew of fundamentalist Christianity and politics about as far as they can, and now things are starting to move back towards a more tolerant middle:

…a growing number of American Christians are uneasy about allowing religion to become so politicised and so closely associated with one party. Fundamentalist Islam has also made a difference; it has reminded the bulk of Americans of the wisdom of the American constitution – keeping religion and state firmly apart.

For two faiths coexist in the United States: one is devotion to God and the other to the Constitution. The genius of the founding fathers was to make sure that the two did and do not mix. Religion is a private matter, with which the state is barred from interfering – and which is barred from interfering with the state. Fundamentalist Christians have had ambitions to overturn that long-standing convention

…

The mood has been reflected by an extraordinary little book, Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. It has become a bestseller. Harris quotes passages from the Bible that I did not know existed, such as one in Exodus discussing the demands you should make when selling your daughter into slavery. One passage from Deuteronomy encourages Christians to stone to death anybody who tries to draw them away from their God. As for governing America according to the 10 Commandments, Harris is withering; four do no more than outlaw other religions and the rest are a routine expression of core moral precepts.

For a book which ridicules religion and ruthlessly exposes the inadequacies of the Bible to become a bestseller is a classic Schlesinger-style signal that times are a-changing. And politicians are feeling the mood swing.

Those are good signs, but then there is this reminder that the pendulum still has quite a ways to fall back from its apex high on the right.

A year ago, he was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home reports on the number of “decisions” — soldiers committing their lives to Christ — that he inspired in the base’s Freedom Chapel.

But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity’s exclusive claims about salvation and a “universalist streak” in his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.

“I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of God,” Larsen says. “When you think back over the Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I’m done. . . . I will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach that particular individuals or faith groups are damned.”

Larsen’s private crisis of faith might have remained just that, but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan roots.

…

He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview of various faiths at the Chaplain’s Basic Training Course at Fort Jackson, S.C., in 2005.

Well you probably can guess how his request to switch from a Pentecostal chaplain to a Wiccan chaplain turned out.  Request Denied Sir!  There will be no Wiccan chaplains in the U.S. ARMY SIR!

It’s a pretty interesting article.  Read it all here.