Prometheus 6

I was going to link this one in the previous post, but on reflection I find I actually like the thing, even though it sits in the Washington Post's On Faith section, which I promised the other deities I wouldn't mess with.

Righteous History
Posted by Susan K. Smith on August 28, 2008 9:09 AM 

We are people of privilege. I say that because we are living in a moment in history that is almost too great to comprehend. From our beginnings as slaves in this country, we are witnessing the ascension of an African American to heights our ancestors might never have imagined. Many of us didn't either.

When Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president of the United States of America on Wednesday, a link in the chain of our history was broken. From slavery and the insult of being considered property, our people have moved to the possibility of one of our own being on the verge of the presidency.

It is almost too awesome to take in. At the moment Senator Obama was officially nominated, black people wept. My friends' parents, both octogenarians and participants in the Civil Rights movement, sobbed. A little boy, fascinated but not fully understanding what was going on, asked, as he watched his parents cry, "Are we supposed to celebrate or something?"

Many Christian clients, including the Watsons, liked what they saw at a friend's brith milah, also known as a bris. Others are conservative Christians who want to follow Old Testament tradition or learned about holistic circumcisions from the Internet, their doctors or others, Kushner said.

Home Circumcisions Appealing to Christian Parents
Jewish Community's Mohels Infuse 'Holistic' Procedure With Spiritual Meaning
By Nicole Neroulias
Religion News Service
Saturday, August 23, 2008; B09

Mark Kushner pulled up to the Watson family's suburban Philadelphia home a week after the birth of their first son, Colin. In the dining room, he unpacked the tools of his trade: sterilized surgical instruments, topical anesthetic, prayer shawls and a small bottle of kosher wine.

The shawls went back into his black bag. But to Megan and Christopher Watson's happy surprise, the mohel -- pronounced "moyle," the title for a Jewish ritual circumciser -- had copies of several prayers appropriate for the Presbyterian parents to read for the occasion.

After touring the Postville plant on July 31, a delegation of 20 Orthodox rabbis, including leaders of kosher certification organizations from the United States and Canada, concluded Agriprocessors was “an A-1 place,” said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, vice president of the National Council of Young Israel, an Orthodox group. 

Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant
By JULIA PRESTON

An immigration raid at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant has opened a wide rift among Jewish leaders over the company’s ethical conduct and led to new interest in a campaign to create wage and safety standards for workers producing kosher food.

The Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville, Iowa, lost about half its work force when 389 illegal immigrants were detained there in May, causing shortages of kosher meat and poultry in butcher shops and supermarkets across the country.

Immigrants caught in the raid told labor investigators of unpaid overtime, lax safety measures and under-age workers at the plant. Their stories have troubled many kosher consumers and given impetus to a campaign known as Hekhsher Tzedek (which means “justice certification” in Hebrew) to create an additional seal of approval for kosher-certified products, indicating that the producers met certain standards for the treatment of workers.

1 in 2 believe prayer trumps doctor's prognosis
20 percent of docs also say God can reverse terminal prognosis, study finds
The Associated Press
updated 4:29 p.m. ET, Mon., Aug. 18, 2008

CHICAGO - When it comes to saving lives, God trumps doctors for many Americans.

An eye-opening survey reveals widespread belief that divine intervention can revive dying patients. And, researchers said, doctors "need to be prepared to deal with families who are waiting for a miracle."

More than half of randomly surveyed adults — 57 percent — said God's intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand such treatment.

When asked to imagine their own relatives being gravely ill or injured, nearly 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a hopeless outcome.

Good and evil and Obama
To the Democrat, it's OK to act on a religious conviction if it serves a liberal cause.
Jonah Goldberg
August 19, 2008

So...is it NOT okay to act on a religious conviction if it serves a liberal cause?

For Obama the politician, such scriptural quotations often serve as an all-inclusive writ to impose his religious views on others when it comes to fighting poverty, global warming, racism, etc.

I can't believe someone arguing against reproductive rights would have the balls to make that statement. Though, come to think of it, most folks who actively campaign against reproductive rights are naturally endowed with them.

But when the question turns to abortion, political Obama insists on a policy of moral agnosticism and political laissez faire. Asked directly when life begins as a legal matter, he punted, insisting the answer was "above my pay grade."

Ethiopians with any hope, however faint, of eligibility for Israeli citizenship have descended on camps in the city of Gondar, scrambling to prove their Jewishness. Men in prayer shawls sway back and forth in makeshift synagogues and children in skullcaps sit on mud floors learning the Hebrew alphabet and Jewish holidays.

But centuries of intermarriage and a lack of documentation have made it extremely difficult to prove who is a Jew, and the group awaiting their flight to Israel last month were supposed to be among the last, because the Israeli government has decided that the influx must stop.

Israel's welcome for Ethiopian Jews wears thin
By ARON HELLER
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 16, 2008; 1:57 PM

GONDAR, Ethiopia -- Sitting in a leaky, flyblown hut, a few dozen Ethiopian villagers are anxiously waiting to be transported to another world.

They have just been given word that their years of waiting are over, and that soon they will make a 2,000-mile journey by land and air with what is probably the last wave of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel.

I would never have thought to check Snopes for a response to this idiocy

As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds the One World religion (slogan: "We Are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the Senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

I understand as long as you really believe you're kosher you're not responsible for the lapses of the one who prepared the food. But now you know...and it's the source of the vast majority of kosher meat in the country.

You see, there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.

Dark Meat
By SHMUEL HERZFELD

Washington

ACCORDING to the Jewish calendar we are now in the month of Av, a period of increasingly intense mourning that culminates with a total fast on the Ninth of Av, which this year coincides with Sunday, Aug. 10.

One of the customary practices in these nine days is the avoidance of meat: it’s the way we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, where daily animal sacrifices were once brought.

Refraining from food is symbolic, of course. The idea is not just to avoid meat but to limit ourselves so that we can better focus on the spiritual.

However, recently discovered Vatican papers showed that the order had never been declared heretics, burnings at the stake for the leadership not withstanding.

Rather, it appeared that the order’s suppression was more a piece of realpolitik on the pope’s part to pacify Philip, who was somewhat irked by the prospect of the powerful order increasing its continental activities after Jerusalem fell to the Turks. ...

Despite the order’s brutal apparent suppression, its legacy has been claimed by numerous successor organisations, and besmirched by popular authors ad nauseum.

One of the successors, Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani, is apparently recognised by Unesco.

Knights Templar to Vatican: Give us back our assets
By Joe Fay
Published Monday 4th August 2008 13:21 GMT

The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France.

If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system.

The part of McCain's commercial that holds the deeply coded racism is the Moses iconography. Just think about what Moses is credited with. He freed a nation that was unjustly enslaved.

The problem in the Bible Belt is they not only know Go Down Moses, but as Old Testament Christians, they believe it. They know the wages their own God serves to slavers. You may rule as long as Egypt did, but when God calls an end to it,

No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let my people go,
Let them come out with Egypt's spoil,
Let my people go.

Pharaoh said he'd go across,
Let my people go,
But Pharaoh and his host were lost,
Let my people go.

Jordan shall stand up like a wall,
Let my people go,
And the walls of Jericho shall fall,
Let my people go. 

This is where their concern about an era coming to an end is rooted. It's why the fear of reparations. It's because they believe in divinely dispensed justice, and they know this time they are Pharaoh.

Pastor Hagee's Extreme Makeover
By Harry Hanbury on Jul 24, 2008

In late May, after three months of deliberation, John McCain called Pastor John Hagee "crazy" and renounced his endorsement. But Hagee has come back stronger than ever -- thanks to friends like William Kristol, Joe Lieberman . . . and the public relations firm 5W, which also represents Microsoft, Snoop Dogg and Pamela Anderson. This week in Washington, D.C., Hagee's non-profit organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), brought together five thousand supporters of the bedeviled pastor, and a new regime of media relations was much in evidence.

via Pharyngula

Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.

This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. It is just a cracker!

Catholics worldwide became furious.

One of the arguments a dissenter on Obama's plan to extend Bush's faith based program presents an argument that makes things worse.

Here is one scenario. In his speech Obama laid down this groundrule: “if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them - or against the people you hire - on the basis of their religion.”

But what to do with religious groups for whom proselytizing is part and parcel of their theological mission and self-understanding? I know of, for example, more than a few types of Evangelicals who believe it is of the utmost importance that they devote their lives to bringing people to Christ. (And remind me to tell you one day of the Jews from the Chabad movement who once booted-up and invaded a soccer field I was playing on, running alongside the perplexed footballers asking each one “Are you Jewish?”).

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.” ...

Regarding Mr. Knohl’s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. “There is one problem,” he said. “In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.”

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

“It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all.”

The problem is, government funded tasks are not essentially religious. There's also the nonsense that a single Baptist in the midst of a Jewish owned organization causes the organization to no longer be Jewish. Unless they're asserting the equally absurd argument that one Baptist would cause an influx of Baptists that must be hired.

When you're talking about leadership positions in a religious organization, faith and knowledge of doctrine is a legitimate job requirement. There's no need to legally validate discrimination to protect them. And the government isn't paying for leadership positions in churches.

Mr. Rosen also noted that “without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds.” If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Is Planned Parenthood federally funded? Besides, anti-abortion types cannot properly council folks who have decided to have an abortion. Again, we're talking job requirements here.

Add to that the fact that Planned Parenthood is neither church nor state and so the separation of church and state doesn't apply to them any more than anti-discrimination law applies to family businesses with like 20-30 employees.

Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government
By PETER STEINFELS

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

While the aftermath has been generally chaotic, the most inconvenienced deity appeared to be the God of Abraham, who is worshipped by billions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

"Ideally, I'd just take all of them in one pile, but there are about a thousand little sects and denominations and all that nonsense that I have to act like I care about," God/Yahweh/Allah said. "Did you know there was a guy who practiced Santeria on that bus? Christ, what a nightmare."

Various Deities Still Sorting Through Victims Of Tragic Queens Bus Accident
August 3, 2007 | Issue 43•31

NEW YORK—An emergency coalition of deities from several major world religions is still sorting through the wreckage of a tragic bus accident that claimed 67 lives Friday in the culturally diverse Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens.

According to authorities, at approximately 6:45  p.m. the Q45 bus crashed into a power generator at a busy street corner after swerving to avoid a slow-moving group of elderly Chinese pedestrians. Police say that a Korean laundry, an Irish pub, a Senegalese restaurant, and a churro stand were also severely damaged in the resultant smoke and flames.

More than half a dozen gods reportedly responded to the scene within moments of the crash.

This person is actually beyond the reach of reason because his understanding of cause-and-effect is flawed.

Dr. James Dobson’s June 24 radio show critiqued Obama’s use of Scripture in justifying his political policies and positions. The next day Obama responded to the evangelical leader’s critique by saying that Dobson was “making stuff up,” which McCullough said was “an indirect way of calling Dobson a liar.”

Obama-Dobson argument a “political blunder” for Obama

Washington DC, Jun 29, 2008 / 06:04 pm (CNA).- Gary McCullough, director of Christian Newswire, has called Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s attack on Focus on the Family president James Dobson a “political blunder” that could have a significant impact on Evangelical swing voters who were otherwise lukewarm towards Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain.

I don't talk politics with my daughter but so often, but it came up kind of organically a week or so ago. She's an Obama supporter (of course...) and she has her rational reasons for it, but she recognizes the charisma thing has had its impact. She says the case is more of the same with the potential for getting worse vs. getting rid of the Bushisms with the "potential for something awesome" to happen.

Me, I don't do charisma so I've been able to assess things as good and the bad, as strategic master strokes and rank, amateurish errors in his campaign. It's not easy for a politician to actually impress me.

Drawing forth this reaction impresses me.

Dobson's judgment was based on Obama's keynote address at a "Call to Renewal" conference on June 28, 2006. In fact, this speech was impressive in many respects. As an evangelical and conservative who has deep concerns about Obama's policies and political philosophy, I nonetheless welcome such a statement by a leading Democrat. 

The Reverend McCain
By Francis Wilkinson

In an essay on The Times Op-Ed page in March, the writer Neal Gabler suggested that the reason John McCain has enjoyed excellent relations with the press is that they are birds of a feather. According to Mr. Gabler, Mr. McCain is “an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness.”

The flip side of this shared reverence for irreverence, however, is the discomfort it induces in those for whom sincerity is serious. Though Mr. McCain belongs to a Southern Baptist congregation in Phoenix and made headlines last year calling America a “Christian nation,” he still oozes a fighter pilot’s four-letter regard for piety. Many Christian conservatives, who’ve been battling purveyors of ironic detachment ever since Clarence Darrow showed up at the Scopes trial, don’t get the joke — and don’t want to.

Religion in America: Non-Dogmatic, Diverse and Politically Relevant
Religious Beliefs & Practices / Social & Political Views: Report 2
June 23, 2008

Key Findings

A major survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States, as documented in a survey of more than 35,000 Americans that comprehensively examines the country's religious landscape.

Black churches show people that "you may not have money, you may not have houses or land, but you have value," says Murray. 

Believers in the Pews--and the Polling Booth
A new study on the intersection of politics, religion and race.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 11:45 AM ET Jun 23, 2008

The more religiously active an American is, the more likely he is to vote Republican--unless he's black. That fact emerged in the second part of a Pew Forum study on the landscape of religious life in the United States, released this June.

For an 'Obamacon,' Communion Denied
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; A15

Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Republican, firm foe of abortion and veteran of the Reagan Justice Department, had been denied Communion.

His sin? Kmiec, a Catholic who can cite papal pronouncements with the facility of a theological scholar, shocked old friends and adversaries alike earlier this year by endorsing Barack Obama for president. For at least one priest, Kmiec's support for a pro-choice politician made him a willing participant in a grave moral evil.

Kmiec was denied Communion in April at a Mass for a group of Catholic business people he later addressed at dinner. The episode has not received wide attention outside the Catholic world, but it is the opening shot in an argument that could have a large impact on this year's presidential campaign: Is it legitimate for bishops and priests to deny Communion to those supporting candidates who favor abortion rights?

Obama Quits His Church
By Jeff Zeleny

WASHINGTON – Senator Barack Obama is ending his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he has belonged to for about two decades and one that had become a lightning rod in his Democratic presidential bid.

Mr. Obama informed his campaign advisers of his decision today, according to people familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the candidate. Mr. Obama is scheduled to explain his decision tonight in South Dakota.

For Mr. Obama, this is the latest effort to distance himself from a church that had repeatedly drawn negative attention to his candidacy. And, in turn, Mr. Obama drew negative attention to the church on Chicago’s South Side, where he was married and his two daughters were baptized.

It is true that Jesus was not a political activist; he joined no party and issued no Contract With the Roman Empire. But it is a stretch to interpret his personal challenge to the rich young ruler as a biblical foundation for libertarianism.

The Jewish tradition in which Jesus lived and taught demanded that just rulers make a minimal provision for the poor, including no-interest loans and the distribution of agricultural commodities. (Look it up: Exodus 22:25-27 and Deuteronomy 24:19-21.) The apostle Paul held a high view of government's role in promoting justice and urged the willing payment of taxes -- a biblical demand more severe, for some of us, than all those sexual prohibitions. And Jesus's followers, fanning out along Roman roads, eventually expressed strong views on slavery, infanticide and the debasement of women -- political views that followed naturally from their belief in a radical equality before God.

The Libertarian Jesus
By Michael Gerson
Friday, May 30, 2008; A13

Compassionate conservatism began with some questions: Is it possible to apply conservative and free-market ideas -- school vouchers, the promotion of community and faith-based institutions, the encouragement of wealth-building and social mobility -- to the task of helping marginalized Americans? In the wake of liberal failures, do conservatives offer any hope to addicts and the homeless, to disadvantaged children in need of mentors and adequate education, to people living among the broken glass of durable poverty?  [P6: No, but keep reading anyway]