Culture Wars

Mind you, I'm inclined to hold my nose and vote for the man, but I'm not deluded as to who he is. Trinity United Church of Christ is the church Obama attended for 20 years, but apparently slept through every sermon and never visited their website, and only six months ago "disavowed" their rhetoric - presumably he did so as soon as he became aware of it.

"Commitment to the Black Community. The highest level of achievement for any Black person must be a contribution of strength and continuity of the Black Community.

Really? Replace the word "black" with the word "white", particularly in the second quote, post it on a European-American Baptist church website and we'd have a firestorm of controversy, possibly riots in the streets, but it's OK for African-American Trinity Baptist to post this on their website, because they're NOT "racist".

Now, if you're really brave, cut&past this into an email and try sending this to your friends. See what a reasonable response you get. Make sure you pick those who judge themselves to be more open-minded and reasonable than most people. See how many appreciate you using your freedom of speech rights. Be forewarned, making such an unpopular point won't endear you to most and may end of a friendship or two. However, is principle more important than friendship or is it the other way around?

UN investigates 'forced suicides' in Turkey
By Daniel Howden
Published: 25 May 2006

Yakin Erturk, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, travelled yesterday to the eastern Turkish city of Batman to follow up on reports in local media that up to 36 women had killed themselves since the start of the year. This figure is already much higher than the number for the whole of last year.

Many of the women who have died were allegedly the victims of "forced suicides", where husbands or relatives pushed them into killing themselves to cleanse a perceived offence against family honour.

The family remains paramount across Turkish society and adultery or sex before marriage can be seen as crimes by more socially conservative elements.
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Fundamentalist Christians are only a few short generations from similar behavior. I am willing to bet some secretly envy these Turks who act as "instruments of God's judgment" in enforcing Biblical tenets.

Illegal immigration to the United States exists in the volume it does, because Central America already and Mexico on the verge, are becoming a failed states - states whose social and economic policy is allowing and encouraging unfettered emigration north. The reality is there are regions and cities in Mexico and Central America, which are outside of centralized government control. Can any American imagine the assassinations of numerous city mayors, chiefs of police, nationally recognized journalists, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church and a presidential candidate from a major political party? Can Americans imagine a Cabinet Secretary and a former president implicated in money laundering for a drug cartel? This is the reality of Mexico and Central American countries, functioning democracies in name only.

No pundit in the mainstream media has broached the root cause of illegal immigration –social and economic policy failure south of the border. Notice immigrants illegally in the country felt safer and embolden demonstrating and protesting in a country in which they have no legal standing, instead of demonstrating in equal numbers south of the border demanding the social and economic justice their own governments have denied them for generations and continue to ignore. America ignores this reality at our own peril. Vicente Fox will happily dump the problem on our laps while he and his cronies continue to rape the wealth of Mexico, et al. and contribute, through the drug trade, to the corruption and loss of our greatest natural resource – American youth.

Mr. Fox has called for open unrestricted borders on many occasions, making the American taxpayer the patsy for his failure in governance. Fine Mr. Fox, you want open borders. Let the FBI, the CIA and the UN in first. We along with the international community will come in and administer your country since you obviously cannot.

From an article by by Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times.

“There is no denying that because of the absence of any distance between religion and politics in Islam, most Muslim grievances are couched in the language of religion.”

“What is at issue here is that the fundamentalists of both sides are equally at fault. The secular fanatics are as much responsible for fanning the current flames of hatred and turbulence in Europe and other Muslim countries as their Muslim counterparts.”

“… secular fanatics should also examine their own behavior about the overall issue of insulting someone else's religion, then call it merely an exercise of free speech…"

“However, expecting a due regard to Muslim religious sensibilities (or toward other religions) is very much part of polite behavior that those countries claim to be championing everywhere in the world”

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The first paragraph highlights the major error in Mr. Ahrari’s thinking. When a religion becomes the basis for governance, it ceases to be merely a personal belief system and crosses into the realm of political ideology. When government is theocratic, then criticism or derision of political policy and views become, by necessity, criticism of religious dogma, (the West overcomes this contradiction by explicitly separating the realms of religion and politics). In a theocratic environment, the only way to assure religion is not insulted is to make political criticism unlawful, as it is in many cases in Iran. In the present case, it would amount to the unlawfulness of criticizing the founder of a political movement i.e., Mohammad.

If religion is merely morally informing the political views and decisions of individuals, as it is in the West, then one can criticize political policy without engaging in direct criticism of the informing theology. It cannot be the case that Islam is at once the basis for government and law, but given special dispensation from political or satirical criticism. In this context, the founder of a political movement must remain open to criticism and yes, even derision. As the founder of a religion Mohammad may indeed deserve of the respect Muslims demand; as the founder of a political movement he is in a no more privileged position than Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan. In the context of a “Muslim Reformation”, Muslim interests are served by decisively defining and differentiating these contradictory positions, not by demanding special dispensation.

Furthermore, equating religious fundamentalism with “secular fundamentalism” is untenable. Religious fundamentalism as expressed within Islam is a totalitarian ideology; the same is not necessarily true of secularism – a secular society may be totalitarian, but it may also be democratic or something else. In a secular society, modes of personal and public conduct are open to debate and alteration with changing mores, perspective and custom. A fundamentalist regime derives primarily from a priori government and personal rules of conduct. By definition, “dogma” is not open to debate or alteration.

While I can empathize with the outrage Muslims feel at seeing their prophet depicted in these cartoons – as a Christian I would feel the same about a similar depiction of Jesus – it is precisely the power of liberal democracy that no one theology or ideology is held in some special esteem or consideration. If this were not so, it would be unreasonable and hypocritical for Muslims to expect tolerance and acceptance in predominately Christian Europe or America. Everyday in Muslim countries heinous depictions of Jews and Christians are disseminated through their mass media. Every Friday imams in mosques all over the Muslim world spew their hate filled, vitriolic, theocratic rhetoric with impunity. Before the Muslim world asks that the Christian west remove the mote from their eye, they should remove the log from their own. Freedom in the West unlike “freedom” in Muslims countries, means freedom for all, including those one may disagree with and those whose beliefs and practices one might find offensive.

"THE AMERINAZIS HAVE PLACED AMERICA ON THE BAD SIDE OF OUR LORD, JESUS CHRIST, AND AS A RESULT, AMERICA IS SOON TO BE TOPPLED:" Posted by DEAN BERRY at November 7, 2005 09:40 AM

Ben Stein said it best recently in an article "China: Friend or Foe?" which appeared on finance.yahoo.com, Wednesday, November 23, 2005.

Quote: "Who Wins, Who Loses? Young Americans who study hard, learn serious subjects, do not lose themselves in computer games, avoid doomed industries, learn good work habits, save prudently, and invest sensibly will be well off no matter what happens in China or Taiwan or India.

Americans who are slothful, do not pay attention to economic trends, learn no useful skills, do not save, and do not invest wisely will roll downhill fast.

But for the disciplined among us who learn from the Chinese the keys to wealth as the Chinese learned from us and we learned from all of history, the future is bright."

To this, I would add, "... and that those avoid dragging the country into debate over irrelevant drivel."

The state of the Union has NOTHING TO DO WITH JESUS!!! There are plenty of examples throughout the world of nations prospering without Christianity. The quicker we as a nation can dispense with what should be a personal matter being interjected into the public arena, the better off we and our descendents will be.

Some in our society are obsessed with interjecting religion into the public forum, ignoring precisely the history of religious intolerance that led the passengers on the Mayflower to seek the North American shores.

Is religion a determiner of a nation’s prosperity or demise? Many tend to think so, in my opinion, out of historical ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, history does not repeat itself, but people do repeat their mistakes if they do not learn from them.