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POPS"The Family" - Fundamentalism, Friends In High Places Headquartered in Washington, D.C. at a place known as the "C Street Center" or "Fellowship House," this 1890 townhouse, located behind the Madison Annex of the Library of Congress and near the United States Capitol, has 12 bedrooms, nine bathrooms, five living rooms, four dining rooms, three offices, a kitchen, and a small "chapel". The property is exempt from real property taxes because it is classified as a "special purpose" use. District of Columbia law exempts from taxation "buildings belonging to religious corporations or societies primarily and regularly used for religious worship, study, training, and missionary activities" and "buildings belonging to organizations which are charged with the administration, coordination, or unification of activities, locally or otherwise, of institutions or organizations entitled to exemption."
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POPSWhat's with all the zombies?
Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence. "Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says. In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted. Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are,
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POPSRepublicans only want government to intervene when they suffer Suddenly, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on something other than Star Wars wasn't such a terrible idea. years ago, Wellstone carefully spelled out to the New York Times how he and his conservative colleague had joined together on the issue of mental healthcare. "There has been a personal, crystallizing experience in each of our lives. You almost wish it didn't have to work that way, that all of us would care deeply anyway about people who were vulnerable and not getting the care they need. But this kind of thing happens a lot in politics for fully human reasons." If the Republican right manages to kill healthcare reform this year, then perhaps some brave Democrat should introduce a new kind of bill -- cutting off every member of Congress from the "public option" .
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POPSThe Women's Crusade In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism.
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POPSScary Fundamentalists
When people adhere to fundamentalist principles they are often driven to extreme action in support of their beliefs and so the rest of us, the rational world, have to deal with the fallout. Murders and atrocities are committed in the name of God and they have been for centuries now. It is depressing to consider how long the religious battle has been raging because there can be no end to it unless religion itself disappears. If Protestants and Catholics can´t get on with each other what chance is there of either getting on with Muslims? Religion has been responsible for death and persecution on a grand scale. The war waged between the Catholic and Protestant faiths has left an especially deep scar in the UK and even in my home country of Scotland there are still religiously motivated acts of violence (thankfully rare nowadays). However on a world scale the violence caused by religious intolerance is still the greatest threat to peace today. As an atheist I am always surprised by the
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POPSA Way out of the Fundamentalist Divide Last week Jim Wallis, Sojourners founder and contributing editor, wrote about the importance of funding the common ground as the only hope for navigating a constructive path out of the chasm created by opposing fundamentalist positions. Reading about the bill in one of the great social chasms of our time, it is clear to see that common ground is key.
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POPSWe are Storytelling Apes: let Faith decline A pithy, powerful critique of Armstrong and the apothatic tradition. Fairly clearly (I think) an equally pithy response could be made centred upon the fact that the criticisms partly support Armstrong's position, and do not contradict it. However, the critique of her overarchingness is totally valid: the examples of Hamas and women are indicative of the near universal tendency of a certain class of writers/thinkers to believe they need to pull a definitive view of everything from their glittering theories. The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, Karen Armstrong, The Bodley Head, 2009
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POPSAmateur Astronomer Credited with Jupiter Finding
Take a listen to this story. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106913242 Here's what happened to me. I realized that much of my curiosity about space has been stifled because for the past 40 some years I've bought into a simple biblical understanding about creation and my place in the universe. The wonderment of the earth being the only planet currently hospitable to life may have caused me to worship god more, but it didn't stimulate any intellectual ponderings that might cause me to learn about the universe, life forms, the mystery that is around us. Nope, the answers were neatly packaged. And that is the problem with the certainty of modern religious expression - fundamentalism does not push one to question. The creation myth made me safe in my little god cocoon, disinterested in questions like where did all of this come from. In like fashion, the christian nation myth held by so many fundamentalists in our nation makes them safe little xenophobes who hav
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POPSThe Case for God: Karen Armstrong (review) <<<Armstrong's new book is shaped as a response to these two distortions. She wishes to remind us of the mystery of God. Her sympathy is with the great Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians who have denied that any human attempt to put the divine into words will be accurate. We are simply too limited to be able to know God; our apprehension must hence be suffused with an awareness of our provisional and potentially faulty natures. She writes: "He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God 'exists', because our concept of existence is too limited.">>>
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POPSThe Family - Christian Conservatism's Secret Society "He said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave as examples men who he believed understood the way power should be wielded. He actually gave as examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin." Video at 2nd clipped source. The C Street House is, in my view, no different than a terrorist den. I'd really like to know how all the mouthy Christians around here acquit this with their junior moralizing.
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POPSThe "Generation M" Manifesto More: There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M." What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s… I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours. It's Gen M's job to foot the bill for your profligacy — and create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.
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POPSHold Your Applause for OBAMA The brutal reality of expanding foreign occupation and harsher and harsher forms of control are the tinder of Islamic fundamentalism, insurgences and terrorism. We can blame the violence on a clash of civilizations. We can naively tell ourselves we are envied for our freedoms. We can point to the Koran. But these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.
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POPSEven the Palestinians are worried about Obama... "Funding a government that consists of Hamas ministers means, in many ways, that the money will eventually end up in the hands of those who are planning rocket and suicide attacks. If Hamas is permitted to join any government without meeting the conditions of the international community, it will be seen by many Arabs and Muslims as a victory for violence. And such a move will only invite more terrorism. Appeasing Hamas means appeasing Osama bin Laden and the enemies of all the moderate Arabs and Muslims, as well as modern civilization. The terrorists will change, if at all, only once they realize that they are increasingly being isolated and have no chance of prevailing. "
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POPSWhen is Enough?
The author starts out with a liberal manifesto but the real point of this blog post is how Pakistan is creating a “Mortal Danger” to the world by buckling under to pressure from the Taliban. Sec of State Clinton stated the Pakistani government, in deep denial, is losing ground against the Islamic insurgents and it badly needs to decide which side it is on and get focused. There is also a very disturbing video every Westerner should see concerning how committed Islamic terrorists are towards the destruction of the US. While we consider various half measures on how to deal with terrorists and those who want to destroy America and make the world over into a prison of intolerant fundamentalism, wherein women are property and human rights are irrelevant and where we all have to worship as they tell us or die, they are moving inexorably forward towards the possession of nuclear and biological weapons. They want to take us back to the 7th century - and I, for one, don’t want to go
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POPSJesus Killed Mohammed: Religious Extremism inside the U.S. Armed Forces Cont.... "“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say." Who are the religious fanatics here?
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POPSMisconceptions Like many concepts people hold, atheism is often viewed as a belief system filled with dogma and intent on pushing an "agenda". This article may help to dispel this false notion.
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