(from God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens)
". . .Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion. . ."
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Romney's misrepresenting Obama's welfare plan. The need for fact-checkers. Serious and terminal illness, helplessness and grief. Willful ignorance. Political polarization. The approaching end of summer. Droning, monotone, musically elementary folk singers who are hugely popular. Office politics. Lack of leadership. Bad poetry. Higher prices. Senseless killing. Theistic religions with archaic tenets. Endless, mindless drivel from the media about stupid people who have money but no sense.
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(from wikipedia.com)
". . . Leonard Norman Cohen is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.
While giving the speech at Cohen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 10 March 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters."
The critic Bruce Elder wrote an assessment of Cohen's overall career in popular music, writing, "[Cohen is] one of the most fascinating and enigmatic. . .singer/songwriters of the late '60s. . . [and] has retained an audience across four decades of music-making. . . Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon) [in terms of influence], he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century."
The Academy of American Poets has commented more broadly on Cohen's overall career in the arts, including his work as a poet, novelist, and songwriter, stating that "[Cohen's] successful blending of poetry, fiction, and music is made most clear in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, published in 1993, which gathered more than two hundred of Cohen's poems . . .several novel excerpts, and almost sixty song lyrics. . .While it may seem to some that Leonard Cohen departed from the literary in pursuit of the musical, his fans continue to embrace him as a Renaissance man who straddles the elusive artistic borderlines." . . . "
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To William Lori (archbishop of the archdiocese of Baltimore),
First, you must understand that there are people who are devout, practicing Catholics and there are people who are NOT. Accept them all as human beings possessed of the dignity and deserving of every right and privilege that entails. And that means equally and without discrimination.
While you say and think that your right to practice your religion freely is being obstructed, I say that you are deceitful. In pretending that your hospitals or other healthcare facilities offer 'healthcare' services to everyone without discrimination and then refusing to provide your very own employees (who carry out the tasks that make those services possible) healthcare that any and all 21st century rational people would expect to receive, makes you little more than a hypocrite.
You blatantly claim that your 'dogma' prohibits you from offering birth control or abortion services to your very own staff, yet you will happily accept federal funds and claim that your ineligibility to receive those funds is the government prohibiting your RELIGIOUS FREEDOM???!!! This stance reveals that you are pre-scientific, tribal and irrational.
Please wake up, read, think, digest and bring yourself up to date. The year is 2012, not 1600.
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. . . I guess she doesn't believe in evolution NOW. . .
(from CNN)
"Leah Libresco, who’d been a prominent atheist blogger for the religion website Patheos, announced on her blog this week that after years of debating many “smart Christians,” she has decided to become one herself, and that she has begun the process of converting to Catholicism.
Libresco, who had long blogged under the banner “Unequally Yoked: A geeky atheist picks fights with her Catholic boyfriend,” said that at the heart of her decision were questions of morality and how one finds a moral compass.
“I had one thing that I was most certain of, which is that morality is something we have a duty to,” Libresco told CNN in an interview this week, a small cross dangling from her neck. “And it is external from us. And when push came to shove, that is the belief I wouldn’t let go of. And that is something I can’t prove.”
According to a Patheos post she wrote on Monday, entitled “This is my last post for the Patheos Atheist Portal,” she began to see parts of Christianity and Catholicism that fit her moral system. Though she now identifies as a Catholic, Libresco questions certain aspects of Catholicism, including the church’s positions on homosexuality, contraception and some aspects of religious liberty.
“There was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth,” Libresco wrote about Catholicism in her conversion announcement post, which has been shared over 18,000 times on Facebook. “I asked my friend what he suggests we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together.”
At the end of the post, Libresco announces that she is in a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults class and is preparing for baptism. She will continue to blog for Patheos, but under the banner, “A geeky convert picks fights in good faith.”
According to Dan Welch, director of marketing for Patheos, Libresco’s post has received around 150,000 page views so far.
“Leah's blog has gotten steadily more popular since she arrived at Patheos, but a typical post on her blog is probably closer to the range of 5,000 page views,” Welch wrote in an email. “Even now, a few days later, her blog is probably getting 20-30 times its normal traffic.”
Libresco’s announcement has left some atheists scratching their heads.
“I think atheists were surprised that she went with Catholicism, which seems like a very specific choice,” Hemant Mehta, an atheist blogger at Patheos, told CNN. “I have a hard time believing how someone could jump from I don’t believe in God to a very specific church and a very specific God.”
Mehta says that Libresco’s conversion is a “one-off thing” and not something that signals any trend in atheism. “The trends are very clear, the conversions from Catholicism to atheism are much more likely to happen than the other way around,” he said. . . "
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". . . Anyway, from the Miserable Puritan came the Restless Pioneer, and from him, the Lonely Cowboy, always riding off into the sunset, looking for something just down the trail. From this rootless, dissatisfied ancestry has come the Bisy Backson, who, like his forefathers, has never really felt at home, at peace, with this Friendly Land. Rigid, combative fanatic that he is, the tightfisted Backson is just too hard on himself, too hard on others, and too hard on the world that heroically attempts to carry on in spite of what he is doing to it . . . "
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. . . not that Howard. Howard Bess. The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.
Howard says this week, and rightly so, that it's just plain impossible to leave religion out of politics. In fact, lots of Christians actually believe that American was formed by Christians and for Christians to be a purely Christian nation. In believing this, they think that the 'will of God', as they perceive it, takes precedence over all. In short, says Howard, they want control. Population growth is huge, air and water are becoming more and more polluted and we still sidestep the fact that this is all caused by fundamental religious conviction. Howard says quite correctly that the Catholic church is a major polluter of the world through the promotion of population growth.
The recent misstatements on the part of a presidential candidate and a number of religious folks saying that the government is inhibiting their freedom of religion betray their ignorance. They can ". . . believe whatever they like, but when they propose that their doctrinal beliefs be made the law of the land, their beliefs become proper subjects of discussion in the political arena. . . " says Howard.
I can't speak for Howard, but from all I've read from him, he thinks similarly in this regard, but I, John Shelby Spong, Science of Mind adherents and a growing number of thinking, questioning, educated seekers do not pretend to know the 'will' of a 'God' based upon ancient texts, mistranslated and misinterpreted over thousands of years. In fact, God to us is the ground of being. It (notice I didn't say "HE") is a life-power flowing among all things, but first and foremost, from human beings. So it stands to reason that anyone who holds an agenda to diminish the life of any human person, especially because they think that a book which contains the last word on the subject, tells them to, is very sadly mistaken. Likewise when they think that book entitles them impose some archaic social practices on the rest of the population, they once again err grievously.
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. . . Rick Santorum is obviously unqualified, and his entire campaign is based upon inflammatory rhetoric, fundamentalist religion, and theatrics. . .
Just witness just some of the gems uttered by the Republican candidate:
“. . . I think the Democrats are actually worried he [Obama] may go to
Indonesia and bow to more Muslims. . . ”
". . . Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s OK; contraception
is OK. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that
is counter to how things are supposed to be. . . ”
" . . . “That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child,
man on dog, or whatever the case may be. . . "
". . . A few days ago, GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum put his foot
in his mouth by saying “I don’t want to make
black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money". . . “I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I
started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of - blah
- came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn't," . . . “And I can tell you, I don't use - I don't - first off, I don't use
the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than
I use ‘black' ... I think sometimes you want to give someone the
benefit of the doubt if it's a little bit of a blurred word. . . "
. . .BUT, upon hearing yesterday's news, I suddenly viewed Rick Santorum as . . . well, as a human being. . .
". . . GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s campaign
says his hospitalized daughter is recovering and could be released
soon. Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said Monday that
3-year-old Bella could be released from a northern Virginia hospital by
the end of the day. She was hospitalized Friday. Her father did not
campaign Monday so he could be with his daughter, who suffers from a
rare genetic condition. Bella was hospitalized earlier this year with
pneumonia. Her father faces an uphill battle against front-runner Mitt
Romney in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Santorum
often says Bella wasn’t expected to live beyond her first birthday. . . "
I can't say "I'll pray for her" because since I don't believe petitioning an invisible, omniscient, theistic and invasive being accomplishes anything (one of many areas where I disagree with Santorum). But, I can say with all honesty and sincerity with regard to Bella, I hope all goes well.
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