Singapore

The religious police in Saudi Arabia

Christians have no greater ally than Israel

Religion News Service | By Lauren Markoe
Posted: 09/11/2014 1:17 pm EDT Updated: 09/11/2014 1:59 pm EDT

(RNS) After he said “Christians have no greater ally than Israel,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was heckled off the stage at a Wednesday night (Sept. 10) gala to raise awareness of beleaguered Mideast Christians.

Cruz, the keynote speaker at the Washington, D.C., dinner, sponsored by In Defense of Christians, a new organization spearheaded by Catholic and Orthodox Christians, prompted boos and cries of “stop it!” and “enough” and “no!” as an increasingly louder crowd told him to get off the stage.

The incident, first reported by the online news organization The Daily Caller, was captured on video by EWTN, the Catholic television network. The video shows that Cruz tried to continue speaking, but many in the audience, in a hotel ballroom, expressed anger when he included Hamas in the list of militants out to destroy religious minorities in the Middle East.

Middle Eastern Christian leaders condemn 'barbaric' persecution

Published 10 September 2014  |   Carey Lodge


Politicians, policy makers and faith leaders have urged the international community to step up its response to religious persecution in the Middle East.

Meeting for the inaugural IDC (In Defence of Christians) Summit in Washington this week, representatives from Middle Eastern churches condemned global inaction, insisting all nations must immediately address the growing crisis in Iraq and Syria.


According to the Washington Post, Patriarch Mar Bechara Boutros Cardinal Rai, Maronite patriarch of Antioch and all the East, said: "Far too long the world has stood there watching these atrocities without lifting a finger while the local government has proved to be utterly incapable of saving the lives of its citizens."

The plight of Christians in the region has been of particular concern after being targeted specifically by Islamic State (IS) militants in a bid to create a caliphate.

Last week, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby noted that the Middle East is the "birthplace of Christianity, and home to indigenous Christian communities that have been an indispensible part of its history".

He warned that the region is "in desperate danger of losing an irreplaceable part of its identity, heritage and culture."

The IDC summit yesterday echoed this sentiment, with Aram I Keshishian, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia of the Armenian Apostolic Church, branding the crisis a "global evil".

"Religious freedom is not just an American right, it's a universal right," Cardinal Patriarch Rai, speaking before several members of Congress, added.

political censorship

Our campaign in Wyoming to end the political censorship of world-class science standards that include climate science is gaining increasing national attention. More and more Wyomingites are speaking out for the right of our kids to have access to the highest quality science standards, free from political, economic and ideological censorship.

Those responsible for the anti-science legislation are on the defensive. They’ve been telling anyone who will listen that “outside interests” are stirring things up and that they speak for Wyoming parents and citizens, despite working hand in glove with a national group that has been campaigning against Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) across the country.

It’s time to tell Wyoming legislators and Governor Mead in clear terms that they weren’t speaking for us when they used a sneaky maneuver – a footnote amendment to the state budget bill -- to stop the Board of Education from adopting the best science education available to Wyoming kids.

Please sign our letter to Wyoming legislators and Governor Mead today: 
http://act.engagementlab.org/sign/WYSci_letter/?source=change

Here’s the choice facing Wyoming. We can move forward with 21st-century science standards that have been developed and recommended by leading science educators from Wyoming and throughout the country. Or we can allow ideological groups who don't accept the findings of science to hobble our kids’ educations.

Let's show state legislators and Governor Mead there’s a groundswell of public support to repeal this offensive footnote that stifles science education in Wyoming. The future prospects for Wyoming students are on the line.

Two state legislators (Rep. Hutchings and Rep. Reeder) told the State Board of Education that the Legislature was representing the will of their constituents when they voted to prohibit the Board from even considering the NGSS. Yet, there was no public discussion when the footnote was passed in the 2014 Legislature. It’s time for that discussion now.

Let’s tell those who claim to represent Wyoming citizens that we want great science standards. If the anti-science groups and legislators are not speaking for you by denying Wyoming kids a world-class science education, please add your name to our letter, and share it with everyone you know.

Sign the letter: http://act.engagementlab.org/sign/WYSci_letter/?source=change

Thank you for taking action!

Sincerely,

Cate Cabot, Mom and Climate Parents member 
Kelly, WY

Marguerite Herman, Mom and Climate Parents member 
Cheyenne, WY

caught in the middle

Corporations are NOT people. While it is true that what guides them is the human activity of their executives, boards of directors, managers and employees, all the human emotional factors of the people in the corporation pass through a “filter” created by the two basic rules:

1. Maximize profit
2. Do whatever is necessary to continue the business.

(Rule number 1 should be modified when it conflicts with rule 2)

It is a slippery road to give personal rights to corporations. The corporation is an amoral entity, i.e., not governed by human moral values. It lacks guilt for what it does, or empathy for those it harms. What's worse, this "sociopathic" entity is given the rights of a human being, but not similar responsibilities. A corporation is particularly dangerous because of its great concentration of money, power, and political influence--which it uses freely to reach its goals. To give a concrete example of the dangers of giving corporations personal rights to allow corporations to participate directly on political campaigns is a very serious threat to democracy.

To elaborate and clarify the point of freedom of speech and corporations let’s consider the case of Media corporations, those whose actual activity revolves around disseminating information and opinion. While journalist, writers, news anchors, and the like have 1st amendment rights, the corporations that they work for do not. This might be a subtle point but it is crucial. When corporations do have positions on some issues, and they always have an agenda, this is NOT freedom of speech, it is censorship. This censorship is exercised trough the firing or ostracizing of staff or source that go astray of the corporate line. Thus, to give corporations freedom of speech rights is actually antithetical of the spirit of the first amendment.

One should not confuse the individuals working within a corporation with the corporation proper. Corporations as such do not have national loyalties. Standard Oil supplied the German government during WW II as Coca Cola did. 

The U.S. Federal tax system also helps corporations operate in this amoral way by allowing them to deduct from their profits, with some limitations, the cost of public relations campaigns to cover for the damage they cause, the compensation to victims, the cleanup operations, the cost of legal defense, legal damage awards, and the cost of lobbying to change the laws in their favor or gain exemptions from the law. In other words, if they are caught, corporations pay the costs of their destructive, illegal activities with tax-free money. (Tax free for one corporation = somebody else pays more taxes.)

In their current form, corporations are the most dangerous things on earth--because they threaten the survival of humankind and the entire planetary ecosystem.

Birth control does not mean abortion I am not in favor of abortion but I am against using this kind of complicated issues for political ends. How do one balance in black and white gun ownership and the statement that murder is wrong? In the same way that gun advocates justify killing a human being outside the womb (to themselves) by redefining murder according to the circumstances, others justify killing a human being inside the womb (to themselves) by redefining abortion according to the circumstances.

Tea party types do believe that killing is proper under some conditions and are against governments interfering with the freedoms of people, so why be in favor of government regulations of any kind? Criminalizing behaviors is not a solution for social problems.

According to the CDC (the only agency in the United States that has the ability to monitor and track abortion rates) in 2009 there were 15.1 abortions for every 1,000 live births. Of those abortion 91.7 percent were performed earlier than 13^th week of pregnancy, and of those the majority, almost 70 percent, were performed prior to the 8^th week of pregnancy. Additionally, statistics show that many of the abortions that occur later in pregnancy are performed for medical reasons.

In this highly informative article published on Patheos.com, the author explains the many reasons she lost faith in the right wing’s pro-life movement.

“Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For example, the abortion rate is 29 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in Africa and 32 per 1,000 in Latin America—regions in which abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries. The rate is 12 per 1,000 in Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds.”

There’s a circus of political shows with no other end that entertain and distract. Like for example that speech of a democrat meant to be an attack on Republican policies when Reagan had just passed an immigration amnesty, and now it is used for opposite purposes. Life is not as simple as good conservatives on the shadow of God against evil liberal lefties doing the devil’s work.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lowe's Home Improvement has found itself facing a backlash after the retail giant pulled ads from a reality show about American Muslims.

The retail giant stopped advertising on TLC's "All-American Muslim" after a conservative group known as the Florida Family Association complained, saying the program was "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."

The show premiered last month and chronicles the lives of five families from Dearborn, Mich., a Detroit suburb with a large Muslim and Arab-American population.

A state senator from Southern California said Sunday he was considering calling for a boycott.

Calling the Lowe's decision "un-American" and "naked religious bigotry," Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, told The Associated Press he would also consider legislative action if Lowe's doesn't apologize to Muslims and reinstate its ads. The senator sent a letter outlining his complaints to Lowe's Chief Executive Officer Robert A. Niblock.

"The show is about what it's like to be a Muslim in America, and it touches on the discrimination they sometimes face. And that kind of discrimination is exactly what's happening here with Lowe's," Lieu said.

Petition

The Florida Family Association, a Florida hate group, has been aggressively targeting TLC's new reality TV show, "All-American Muslim,"  calling it "propaganda" that "hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."

Worse, hardware giant Lowe’s caved to pressure from the group and pulled its advertising. A Lowe’s spokesperson called the show a "lightning rod," even though the show merely shows ordinary Muslim Americans leading normal lives!

Maha Hilal and Darakshan Raha, two Muslim-American women from Washington D.C., sprung into action and started a petition on Change.org to get the company to reverse course. Will you sign Maha and Darakshan's petition calling on Lowe's to reverse its decision to pull advertising on TLC's "All-American Muslim" and apologize for its misguided action?

Florida Family Association's biggest problem with "All-American Muslim" is that "the show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish."

Lowe’s is a business that makes decisions just like any other: based on its public image and its bottom line. If thousands of us sign Maha and Darakshan’s petition, we’ll show Lowe’s that customers and all Americans want companies that stand for tolerance and respect, not hate and fear.

Please sign Maha and Darakshan's petition and tell Lowe's to apologize and reverse its decision:

http://www.change.org/petitions/lowes-home-improvement-apologize-and-reinstate-advertisements-on-tlcs-all-american-muslim

People are using Change.org every day to win incredible changes in communities all over the world. Please stand with Maha and Darakshan now to help them win.

Thanks,

- Weldon and the Change.org team



P.S. Thousands of petitions are started on Change.org every month. Here are some that need your support now:
Nilton Deza has seen whole communities destroyed by toxic waste, displacement and abusive labor practices gold mining. Join his campaign asking Macy's to join the "No Dirty Gold" campaign this holiday season.
Maria Eyles is a disabled widow in Southern California. She's fighting Wells Fargo to get a loan modification so she can afford to stay in her home.
D.C. college student Katie Breslin is petitioning to get Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence (SAFE) kits and trained staff in every D.C. hospital so no sexual assault survivor is turned away without treatment.
95% of puppies sold by Petland USA come from mills where dogs are bred again and again, creating a lifetime of health problems. Join the campaign to get Petland USA to commit to not selling puppies from puppy mills -- just like Petland Canada already has.

Bartholomew’s messages

This year’s reports of record melting of the earth’s ice sheets and extreme droughts have given a new urgency to Bartholomew’s messages about the degrading natural world. While economists and politicians prescribe more growth and consumption to overcome economic crises, the patriarch insists that the real crisis is cultural and spiritual, and can be overcome only by moving away from rampant materialism.

All human beings, he has said, should draw a distinction “between what we want and what we need.”

In September, he published a strongly worded encyclical calling on all Orthodox Christians to repent “for our sinfulness” in not doing enough to protect the planet. Biodiversity, “the work of divine wisdom,” was not granted to humanity to abuse it, he wrote; human dominion over the earth does not mean the right to greedily acquire and destroy its resources. He singled out “the powerful of this world,” saying they need a new mind-set to stop destroying the planet for profit or short-term interest.

civil rights abuses

NONE ARE MORE HOPELESSLY ENSLAVED THAN THOSE WHO FALSELY BELIEVE THEY ARE FREE

By S.R. Shearer

Niemand ist hoffnungsloser versklavt als jene, die fälschlicherweise glauben, frei zu sein.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

William Blum, an investigative journalist in Washington, DC, writes in his excellent book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower:



"Overtly and covertly, legally and illegally, the military-industrial complex (in the United States) has joined forces with the prison-industrial complex, linked further to the omnipresent national security-police complex, all clasping hands tightly with the War on Drugs, in a declaration of War on the American people and the Bill of Rights. This Authority juggernaut - enamored with its own perpetuation, glorification and enrichment - has convinced the American public that without its storm troopers all hell would break loose and the safety and security of the citizenry would be on a life-support machine. In this undertaking, it has had the indispensable assistance of intimidated legislatures, an uniconoclastic judiciary, compliant media, and a president --- who - in the words of civil-liberties columnist Nat Hentoff - 'in this century ... has afflicted the most harm on our constitutional rights and liberties. [Please see our article, "Apostasy: Christianity In The Service Of A Religio-Political-Corporate-Terrorist State."]"
Blum then presents a list of civil rights abuses that he culled from public sources (i.e., newspapers, journals, etc.) that occur regularly on a day-to-day basis in the United States which - when taken together - show with unmistakable clarity how far "civil rights" in the United States have been eroded and how dangerously close we are today to being a police-state. AND THIS IS THE COUNTRY THAT EVANGELICAL LEADERS LIKE TIM LAHAYE, JERRY FALWELL, D. JAMES KENNEDY, JAMES ROBISON, ETC. CALL THE "NEW ISRAEL OF GOD?" THIS IS THE COUNTRY ABOUT WHICH PAT ROBERTSON SAYS:



"If America is free, people everywhere can hope for freedom. And if America goes down, all hope is lost to the rest of the world" ?
One wonders if all these so-called "men of God" have been lingering too long around the "second-hand smoke" of the "pot-heads" they've taken such delight in condemning over the years. The truth is there if they want to see it; indeed, one would have to be blind to miss it, so that in these men - ALL OF THEM -



"... is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive ..." (Matt. 13:14)

Neo Middle Ages

Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans' views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.

All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.

Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.



Miss USA 2011, the 60th anniversary of the Miss USA pageant.

The Middle Ages (adjectival forms: medieval, mediaeval, and mediæval) is the period of European history encompassing the 5th to the 15th centuries; and normally is marked from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (the end of Classical Antiquity) until the beginning of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the periods which ushered in the Modern Era. The mediaeval period thus is the mid-time of the traditional division of Western history into Classical, Medieval, and Modern periods; moreover, the Middle Ages usually is divided into the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages.

In the Early Middle Ages, depopulation, deurbanization, and barbarian invasions, begun in Late Antiquity, continued apace. The barbarian invaders formed new kingdoms in the remains of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century North Africa and the Middle East, once part of the Eastern Roman Empire, became an Islamic Empire after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with Antiquity was not complete, because most of the new kingdoms incorporated many of the extant Roman institutions; while monasteries were founded as Christianity expanded in western Europe. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, established an empire covering much of western Europe; the Carolingian Empire endured until the 9th century, when it succumbed to the pressures of invasion — the Vikings from the north; the Magyars from the east, and the Saracens from the south.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after AD 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and crop yields to increase. Manorialism — the organization of peasants into villages that owed rent and labor services to the nobles; and feudalism — the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords, in return for the right to rent from lands and manors - were two of the ways society was organized in the High Middle Ages. Kingdoms became more centralized after the breakup of the Carolingian Empire. The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts, by western European Christians, to regain control of the Middle Eastern Holy Land from the Muslims, and succeeded long enough to establish Christian states in the Near East. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism and the founding of universities; and the building of Gothic cathedrals, which was one of the outstanding artistic achievements of the High Middle Ages.

The Late Middle Ages were marked by difficulties and calamities, such as famine, plague, and war, which much diminished the population of western Europe; in the four years between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death killed approximately a third of the European population. Controversy, heresy, and schism within the Church paralleled the warfare between states, the civil war, and peasant revolts occurring in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Age and beginning the Early Modern period.

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Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment

by John Atcheson

 

We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.

Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment.

Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages. Literally.

The Eternal Return of the Elite

Vilfredo Pareto

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto



This monograph first saw the light of day in 1901 and has been understood as a somewhat famous attempt at a non race-based understanding of 'elitism'. The failure of this attempt to be either genuinely explanatory or entirely successful seems, by almost all accounts, to have been historically verified by fascisms repeated descent into racism. But, given the utter failure of the Fascist movements of the post World War II era to gain traction, one wonders if perhaps now Pareto can, at last, be given a fair hearing. One even wonders if Pareto is fairly characterized as a fascist.



Be that as it may, Pareto still might have much to teach us about the interactions of elites. According to Pareto, elites rise to power, maintain dominance, and then fall; but only if another elite is struggling to take its place. (One is here reminded of Lenin's remark against Trotsky, I believe, 'that no state ever fell without being pushed'.) History is, according to this text, a circulation of elites; and for Pareto, the ideologies that these elites represent are only of secondary importance. What one must always keep in mind while reading this book is that, for Pareto, Liberals and Socialists (that is, the leaders of these ideological positions) are equally elites. By the 'elite', I should point out, Pareto always means the leadership of a class.



Pareto distinguishes between subjective and objective factors; the latter being real objects while the former are psychological states. Thus belief and unbelief are, for Pareto, equally psychological states. In fact, according to our author, belief is often the sign of a rising elite. Note that by 'belief' he doesn't merely mean religious beliefs; according to Pareto socialism is a belief, that is, it is a psychological state. Indeed, for Pareto, perhaps somewhat surprisingly given his right-wing tendency and reputation, nationalism itself is also a belief. Now, he doesn't propose to ignore these beliefs; on the contrary, it is the skepticism of the rulers towards beliefs that weakens them in the face of the rising elite. These 'myths' are a part of history and need to be explained.



The 'religious sentiment' (i.e., belief) of the masses is what leads to revolt. This sentiment is exploited by the rising elite in its attempt to overthrow the ruling elite. (In this matter the 'skepticism' of the ruling elite is no small aid to the rising elite.) And what we also need to keep in mind is that logical argument almost always fails in these matters; people believe for non-rational reasons, sentiment must be met with sentiment, i.e. socialism must be countered with nationalism. In fact, in these pages Pareto, over a hundred years ago, by describing the similarity between Christian and Socialist behavior, seems to indicate the possibility of a convergence of Christianity and Socialism vis-à-vis the ruling bourgeois. This possibility is currently being explored, thanks to the collapse of 'really existing socialism' in the USSR, by the most au courant leftist continental theory.



Keep in mind that, for Pareto, it is the 'decadence' (i.e., it is 'less apt to defend its own power') and the unabated rapacity of the old elite that causes it to perish. Indeed, he says of this decadence and rapacity that the old elite "could prosper if one of them were absent." Scientifically, or so Pareto maintains, there really is nothing to choose between. Speaking of some historical examples of some crimes of new elites Pareto says, "The old elite, when it was in power, did even worse, so that one cannot conclude from these facts anything against one or the other regime..." Pareto simultaneously holds that reform is the most dangerous moment for the ruling elite, and that the waning of power is perfectly compatible with a rise in the use of violence. In fact, one comes away from this book feeling that the things that Pareto held in most contempt were inefficiency and incompetence and, indeed, some of his most contemptuous gestures in this matter are reserved for the capitalists.



In any case, the problem seems to be that the falling class, no longer believing in itself, can no longer attract the best young people to its cause. The rising class has 'belief' and hope, the falling one only has its privileges. Persecution seems to be no remedy for this. Indeed, thanks to persecutions, "many people of doubtful loyalty and unsteady character were eliminated and professional politicians kept away." ...Very amusing! But here, in 1901, Pareto sees the best of future generations going to socialism while all persecution does is prune the revolutionary plant.



In fact, if one carries away anything from this book it is that old elites must eventually fall. We learn here that socialism is the heir of Christian 'belief'. And since Christianity is dying, all the old elite can do is delay the inevitable 'homecoming' of the common people (and their 'religious sentiment') to socialism. Thus 'belief' replaces 'belief'. Again, there is little rationality in this process; Pareto is at pains to emphasize the 'subjective phenomenon'. This is why nationalism is the best answer to socialism; one counters one irrationality with another.



This book is really only a long essay, the hardcover edition before me has 75 pages of text, 18 pages of notes, and a 22 page introduction. The notes are quite good and should not be passed up. For example, while nicely playing off his understanding of socialism as but another belief, Pareto, after discussing some socialist 'sectarians', writes, "One day we will perhaps have the Holy Inquisition of the socialist faith. (Note 18)" The Soviet 'show trials' of the thirties were indeed this Inquisition. This really is a superb book, a worthy companion piece to all the great political realists of history - from Machiavelli to Gramsci.

she hated Hindus and Muslims since 9/11

New York: A 31-year-old woman suspected of shoving an Indian immigrant in front of a subway train has been charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime after she told the police that she hated Hindus and Muslims since 9/11. Prosecutors Saturday identified the woman, who allegedly shoved India-born Sunando Sen of Queens, in front of a subway train Thursday as Erika Menendez of Bronx.

"(She) said in sum and substance 'I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers. I've been beating them up," Queens District Attorney Richard A Brown said in a statement.

Witnesses cited by CNN said a woman paced the platform and talked to herself Thursday evening shortly before pushing Sen as the 11-car train entered the station. The body of 46-year-old Sen, a graphic designer for posters who ran a small copying business called New Amsterdam Copies on the Upper West Side, was pinned under the second car after it came to a stop.

Judaism and Christianity in the Middle Age

On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543

by Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Translated by Martin H. Bertram