Monthly Archives: December 2008

Kucinich condemns Israel!

Nearly all Democrats of note have expressed unquestioning support of Israel’s insanely over the top “response” to so-called “terrorists” in Palestine.  Not my man Kucinich.

He’s not only condemned it, but has referred to it as “disproportionate, mass violence” that is a “violation of international law” that Israel is not exempt from.

Kucinich likened the Israeli attacks on Gaza to its war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006. In both cases, he said, civilian populations were attacked and “countless innocents” were killed or injured.

“All this was, and is, disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law,” Kucinich said in a statement. “Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable.”

It does my heart good to hear an American politician publicly condemning Israel.  It has killed over 300 people in three days (compared to one death in the entire history of rockets being fired into Israel).  It’s planning a ground invasion soon and has declared that Israel will continue it’s assault against Palestine until “the bitter end” and that the worst is yet to come.

Scholars to study Historical Jesus

Well over a decade ago when I was still very interested in the truthfulness of Christianity a group of scholars got together and decided to find out if the words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Christian text where in fact accurate.

They concluded that Jesus was little more than a two thousand year old street preacher who said/did less than half of what has been attributed to him.

Now there’s another group getting together and their goal is somewhat different in that they plan to determine if there actually was a street preacher named Jesus.

An initiative of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst-based secular think tank, and its Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), the project is an extension of the no-less controversial Jesus Seminar, which has been convening twice annually for 23 years.

There’s one key difference: Whereas the Seminar has operated on the premise that Jesus was an actual person – it was what he said and did that is up for grabs – the scholars in this latest effort regard Jesus’s existence as a “testable hypothesis.”

…

Like judges in a courtroom, project members will sift through mountains of material to ascertain what evidence is admissible, stripping away theological and mythical accretions.

“We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us,” writes project chair R. Joseph Hoffman, an historian of religion at State University of New York, on the initiative’s website.

The scholars say they do not believe their task is to produce a “plausible” portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives the Gospel writers had in telling his story, and their intended audience.

Personally, I’m of the mind that there was no literal Jesus as to my knowledge there really isn’t any historical record of the man himself, just the various Christian sects.  Even if there was such a man, I think he’s lost to time and can never be reconstructed without the invention of time travel.

It’s the lack of silence that offends – part 2

Earlier this year I wrote about a group of evangelists who claimed that not wanting to be recruited into their brand of Christianity was an act of anti-Christian persecution.

In recent years, Christian persecution has taken on a variety of forms in the United States—from a rising intolerance for proselytising to the eradication of nearly all historical Christian references in public school textbooks.

Rick Warren has apparently taken a page out of their book because he’s now declared that he’s a victim of hate speech:

Why is Warren a victim of what he likes to call “christophobia”?  Because many of have not remained silent but have done what we can to expose this pious fraud as the bigoted a-hole he’s always been.

The future of abortion in America?

Below is a video of an Irish women named Louise talking about her abortion interspersed with commentary about the state of reproductive freedom in Ireland.  In short, there is none.

Contraception was only made legal in the mid 1980s and is still quite expensive. Abortion is outlawed in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The penalty for having an abortion and/or helping a woman obtain an abortion in Ireland is up to life imprisonment.

While Irish women can now get information about abortion while in Ireland, they must leave Ireland in order to obtain an abortion. Such travel has only been recently allowed and about 600o women make the trip every year.

These women spend, at the very least, 1000€  ($1400), which as you can guess, is cost prohibitive to many women in Ireland.

Make no mistake either.  This is exactly the situation the so-called “pro-lifers” here in America wish to see happen here in our own country.

They want abortion outlawed.  Many do not even support access to contraception. They want to, in short, create a nation of Louises.

A bridge too far

Much has been written about the insult that is Rick Warren giving the invocation at the inauguration of a Democratic president and de facto leader of a political party that is supposed to honour the civil and human rights of all, not just the civil and human rights of straight, preferably white, men.

No one, however, has in my opinion put it as well as Katha Pollitt in her piece in the LA Times today:

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton — or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

I know, it’s hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain’s case, it doesn’t really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters — feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community — by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.

She goes on to detail all the ways Warren’s particular brand of Christianity stands in stark contrast to what Democrats are supposed to stand for and what many Americans happen to actually believe themselves.

She finishes with this:

In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: “It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.” That’s all very well, but excuse me if I don’t feel all warm and fuzzy.

Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who’ve spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration’s wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.

I’m all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama’s base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.

Truer words have never been written down. Warren is an insult to the base of the Democratic party and to Americans in general.  Obama should be ashamed of himself.

1 2 3 … 6  Scroll to top