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POPSCatholic Patriarchy If your reaction to this clip is a blase "who cares" then the odds predict that you have a penis. It's remarkable that after centuries this outmoded way of thinking still holds sway. And what's even more remarkable is that women are sometimes responsible in not more forcefully opposing this outdated dogma.
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POPSReligion Out of Govt Our government is designed to operate without regard to religion. Unfortunately, many have not figured that out yet.
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POPSObama, Religion and the Public Square
Yet there is more to Mr. Obama and religion than the recent headlines might suggest. Here is how he put it: "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition." In his now-famous address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, John Kennedy called for "an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." He went on to state that a president's faith should be "his own private affair."
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POPSThe Economics Of Democracy In Muslim Countries The Status of Democracy Index (SDI) measures each country's progress toward democratic governance through multiple variables. First, it measures governance through four variables: how heads of state and members of the legislature are selected; political party development; suffrage; and the maturity of civil liberties The Status of Democracy Index rates each of these nine variables on a three-point scale: 0 (nonexistent), 1 (emerging), or 2 (fully present). Some of the variables, such as media freedom, religious liberty, and respect for human rights, are easy to quantify, whereas measuring human development is more subjective. Economic freedom can be scored on the level of governmental interference in the economy: 0 (strong), 1 (moderate), and 2 (low). It is then possible to convert the totals to a percentage for ease of digestion. Only three of these countries—Mali, Guyana, and Suriname —are considered full democracies. http://www.meforum.org/article/1921
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POPSAustin Dacey surprises One of the surprised : the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and leading neoconservative culture warrior, has welcomed Mr. Dacey’s argument. Good read: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/perceiving-2-fallacies-a-secularist-faults-his-fellows/
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POPSBenedict XVI and the US Model for Religious Liberty Background information: DICI is the press agency of the Mother House of the Priestly Society Saint Pius X (SSPX). The SSPX, a society of Traditionalist (Vaticanum-II-critical) Roman Catholics, was founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (excommunicated in 1988). Scripts by and about Pius X: PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS - ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS X ON THE DOCTRINES OF THE MODERNISTS LAMENTABILI SANE (in the spirit of THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS CONDEMNED BY PIUS IX ) Pius X's antimodernism (in German language) Vaticanum II: DECLARATION ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
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POPSIslam and Secularism Volkhard Krech, professor for religious studies , has come to the conclusion that some religious traditions, such as Judaism and Protestantism, represent "secularization factors." Other faiths, such as Islam and evangelical churches have a tendency to combine a strong sense of both national and religious identity, mixing politics with religion. The Berlin Islamic scholar Gudrun Krämer made clear that a "massive rejection" of secularism prevails in most Muslim countries. In Islamic discourse, secularization is regarded as a "hostile takeover" of Muslim society. Instead of the notion of the separation of religion and state, the idea of "empowerment" is stressed. Islam calls for believers to actively participate in the power structures of the state. As a mixture of nationalism and Islamism, the so-called "national Jihad" is pushing its way into the political arena and has given birth to the notion of the "Islamic welfare state."
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POPSEurope or Eurabia I am among those who foresee Europe becoming dominated by Islam...and much sooner than anyone expects.
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POPSKhaled Abou el Fadl: "God Does Not Have an Equal Partner" Khaled Abou el Fadl is both a prominent Islamic jurist and an American lawyer. In his many books he has accused radical Islamists of ignorance concerning the Koran and Sharia law. "We can debate God's will as much as we like. I encourage Muslims to do so in order to discover God's will," says Abou el Fadl. "If, however, we adopt a law and the state implements it, we cannot assume that it represents God's will. If, on the other hand, we give the state the power to represent God, that is not a democracy, but a form of ideology. This contradicts Islamic theology, because God does not have an equal partner." This is why the divine law should only cover questions of faith and should not be subject to the state. It is not the job of the state to regulate the relationship between God and the faithful. Deutsche Fassung: Khaled Abou El Fadl: "Gott hat keine Partner"
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POPSChild Homicide: When Prayer Fails Podcast with Shawn Peters, author of "When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law" Also, Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason". And a host of others. Visit FFRF podcast page to find some very interesting people on freethought topics.
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POPSPsychology of Terrorists From review of collection of former terrorists.. The suggestion is that 'ordinary' psychopathology is involved: aggression towards self turned outwards onto others and the world where the things one hates about oneself are projected onto the world. This process enabled by becoming part of a community which employs the same method of converting self-hatred to world-hatred. Everyday stuff really.
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POPSReligion and Abortion This article makes a cogent argument that religion actually promotes abortions rather than diminishes them. Link to full article for more info.
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POPSGlobal Muslim Networks, The Gulen Movement Amazingly enough, the Gulen movement has built up a significant presence in northern Iraq, through schools, a hospital and (soon) a university. Although this arena of Turkish-Kurdish conflict is not the easiest environment for a Turkish-based institution, the movement has deftly built up relationships with all the region's ethnic and religious groups. The influence that the Gulen movement has quietly accumulated would be a surprise to some veteran observers of Islam. Asked to name the world's most active Islamic network, many a pundit would think first of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose reach has extended a long way from Egypt, where it began in the 1920s as a movement of resistance to the twin evils of secularism and colonialism. And it remains true that in every Western country (including the United States) where Muslims are politically active, the influence of the brotherhood—or at least of movements that grew out it—is palpable.
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POPSPashtuns Oust Gen. Musharaf's pro-Taliban Allies The ANP are followers of the famous pacifist Pashtun Leader, Khan Ghaffar Khan, known as Bacha Khan, who led non-violent resistance movement against the British. After the creation of Pakistan, Bacha Khan was kept under house arrest in Pakistan and his allies were prevented from participating in elections for decades.
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POPSThe Headscarf in Turkey Turkey’s headscarf ban is even worse than the above, because unlike wearing a cross or a religious bracelet, some Muslim women feel that wearing a headscarf is a religious requirement. A more apt analogy might be government officials forcibly preventing Christian students at American universities from going to church on Sunday. In response to reasonable religious freedom requests from women who wear headscarves, Turkey’s anti-religious secularists seem to be borrowing sound bites from American Islamophobes. One secular member of Parliament said that allowing women to wear headscarves at universities “will ultimately bring us Hezbollah terror, Al Qaeda terror and fundamentalism.” That’s like saying that Catholic students going to Mass on Ash Wednesday will lead to the IRA planting bombs on campus.
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POPSTurkey: the essence of the secularist debate I am with the first view. Secularism should include the freedom of view and the removal of primitive impediments to democratic participation. the lifting of the Kurdish linguistic ban is a step forward too. Even if the move results in accelerating value clashes and violence, the principle holds true.
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POPSRomney's "Religion" Romney's blatant rejection of the substantial number of non-believers in the country was deeply disturbing. His declaration equating religion and freedom was a slap in the face of the estimated 20-30 million non-believers that are US citizens. I'm gratified that this has attracted some attention in the media. Of concern is the blasé manner in which Romney put this idea forth. This was a prepared speech and I'm sure much thought went into it. If it was an ad lib moment he might duck under the cover of "misspeak" but in this instance he can't. Time will tell if this simply fades away or if it will come back to haunt him on election day.
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POPSBigots Project Their Bigotry Onto Romney Mit should focus on his business talents from here on out. He ought to "nutshell" the Mormon issue a la JFK, then portray himself as the answer to the potential economic doldrums ahead, as well as those who are invested in American economic defeat with their many negative pronouncements and predictions. That nervous searching, behind the eyes, that I've seen in the debates, signal too strong a wish to say what he thinks we want to hear. Focus on your strong suit,Mit. If he was a Democrat, he'd have been praised for his "freedom of religion" speech.
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POPSAtheists Don't Deserve Freedom And as Joan Walsh added: But I wasn't reassured, I was alarmed. Romney blasted "the new religion of secularism," referring to those who continue to argue for strict separation of church and state, which apparently, like certain of the Geneva Conventions under the Bush administration, is becoming "quaint." I sometimes find the anti-God stridency of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grating. Listening to Romney's speech I realized what a necessary corrective it is to corrosive political pandering. Calling secularism "religion" is a cheap shot worthy of Bill O'Reilly, not a major presidential candidate. I can't help hoping Romney's speech fails to soothe religious conservatives, because the sooner the Republican Party faces up to the destructive cost of its electoral dependence on religious extremists, the better off our country will be.
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POPSA Look into the Muslim Headscarf Hysteria in France
The Conseil d'État eventually ruled that students could not be refused admission simply for wearing headscarves, but it also gave teachers and principals the power to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether such signs of religious affiliation were permissible. In 2003, two teenage sisters were expelled from their high school for refusing to take off their headscarves. The Lévy sisters are the daughters of a lawyer who considers himself "a Jew without God" and a Kabyle teacher who had been baptized a Catholic during the Algerian war. The girls had converted to Islam after their parents' separation and had donned the scarves as part of that process. In an interview with Le Monde, the girls' father declared, "I am not in favor of the headscarf, but I defend the right of my children to go to school. In the course of this business I've discovered the hysterical madness of certain ayatollahs of secularism who have lost all their common sense."
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