Religious wars

Robert S. Becker’s agnostic view:

Jesus’ birthday was strafed by a failed suicide bomber along with predictable fatalities in Afghanistan. Reading Sarah Vowell on our Puritan forefathers only confirmed our own beginnings, depicting how the first Europeans, as if freed from Old World decadence, embraced two menacing fantasies. The first asserted instant American exceptionalism and the second, even more troubling, that God’s inevitably on our side. Not much has changed, per Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers. Consider Arthur Schopenhauer’s grimmer judgment: “The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America and the introduction of African slaves in their place.”

Filed under: Religion

Rick Warren’s ‘magic number’

Religious Connections’ gently oblique approach to pastor Rick Warren’s tweeted attempt to create an evangelistic urban legend, demonstrates the falsehood of Warren’s every word. Without ever slapping the goateed Baptist across the face.

So polite, don’t you think?

First, Religious Connections refutes Warren’s fundamentally vacant claim that Christians were put to death for their faith and “No one, except Christians, said anything:”

Unless you count Amnesty International (not a Christian organization) and Human Rights Watch — and others.

Then he deals with the asserted 146,00 number. Like this:

The number 146,000 is almost as startling as Warren’s willingness to encourage, without just cause, self-isolating Christian self-pity. In the lengthy process of attempting to find a valid source for Warren’s claim, we learned that 146,000 is a number which turns up frequently. Almost as if it were a magic number: . . . .

If you’re a software geek, or pause to read the magic number Wikipedia reference, you know the author is suggesting that Warren’s number isn’t documented because it has no underlying reality. Moreover, by belaboring the point with a series of illustrations, Religious Connections suggests that Warren knew there was no underlying reality. So he deliberately chose a number that would have about it an aura of believability. The better to delude us with, you see.

All said without frontal assault, and at close leaving for Warren an opportunity to redeem himself. If Warren condescends to try.

Filed under: Politics , 140000, magic number, Rick Warren, tweet

Tea Party Confederate flag-waving

Tea Party Confederate flags aren’t emblems of small government and freedom. Historically, they’re the opposite. From John Majewski’s book Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation:

Although southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own. Scholars have classified the Confederate central government as a form of “war socialism.” The Confederacy owned key industries, regulated prices and wages, and instituted the most far-reaching draft in North American history. The Confederacy employed some 70,000 civilians in a massive (if poorly coordinated) bureaucracy that included thousands of tax assessors, tax collectors, and conscription agents. The police power of the Confederate state was sometimes staggering. To ride a train, for example, every passenger needed a special government pass…Political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel writes that “a central state as well organized and powerful as the Confederacy did not emerge until the New Deal and subsequent mobilization for World War II.”

[H/T: Marginal Revolution

Tea Party Confederate flag

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Filed under: Politics , bureaucracy, Confederacy, Confederate flag, socialism

Exit laughing? O’Reilly pardons Huckabee

Don’t laugh, yet. Bill O’Reilly has had an epiphany and pardoned former Arkansas governor and fellow Fox commentator Mike Huckabee, absolving the Huckster of all blame regarding Maurice Clemmons.

Clemmons, who was granted clemency from what amounted to a life sentence by then Arkansas Gov. Huckabee in 2000, was fatally shot by Seattle police while being taken into custody Tuesday in connection with the Sunday slaying of four Lakewood, Washington, police officers.

Huckabee’s self-exculpatory remarks and O’Reilly’s stained-glass pardon recall to mind the era when Huckabee was granting commutations & such at a record-setting pace.

Angry, puzzled Arkansas prosecutors often wrote to ask why he took specific actions.

Huckabee’s responses, according a letter written to a prosecutor on Huckabee’s behalf, included laughing aloud.

O’Reilly’s defense of Huckabee didn’t leave me laughing:

As for Bill O’Reilly’s epiphany, compare the Huckabee interview with O’Reilly’s elaborately offended reaction to Paris Hilton’s early release [H/T: Gawker]:

Somehow O’Reilly finds time to explore what passes for the legal details of Hilton’s release,

Yet O’Reilly has since become so forgiving of foibles that he fails to review even in passing Huckabee’s commutations and pardons history, covered in a remarkable series by The [Arkansas] Leader, as governor in Arkansas.

If you have not suffered a similar epiphany, or a stroke, please visit Baptist Planet and follow the wealth of links to review that in detail.

IMHO, four police officers and a man who should not have been on the street at all are dead today, with a trail of devastation leading to that nightmare, because of Huckabee’s confusion about who should and who should not be granted clemency.

Filed under: Politics

Happy holidays, unless you’re depressed

"Happy Thanksgiving," soon to be "Joy to the world,", unless you have the holiday blues — a sometimes debilitating and dangerous if commonplace disease.

Holiday depression is so commonplace and so hard to recognize that the Mayo Clinic has a Web page devoted to it, and depression support Web sites have whole archives devoted to the problem.

Vincent van Gogh: On the Threshold of Eternity

Almost anyone given to genuine, positive celebration of the holidays can help, since good fellowship and persistent friendly support help.

Thoughtful support is, after all, the reverse of the pervasive prejudice against mental illness which continuously afflicts the afflicted among us.

There may be few effective alternatives. Despite the abundance of ads for pharmaceutical "cures," there apparently is no magic bullet. There is instead evidence that a great many widely prescribed medications do not work as advertised, if at all.

Inevitably, some form of professional help will be required if some who face the holidays with year-round, acute, clinical depression are to get through the season alive.

Even if they refuse help, the beleaguered need us and many need us most, now.

If turned away, we should in most cases gently persist in holding out the hand of friendship. For some who are clinically depressed during the holidays and unwilling or unable to even acknowledge their plight, a helping hand is a matter of life and death.

Remember too that most will still need us long after the seasonal frenzy is quiet.

No one can follow the cruel injunction, "just snap out of it." People are often catapulted into the pit, altogether against their will. The path out of the pit is often steep and so very, very long.

At the spiritual core of the season is love for one another and freely given help for those in need — almost a prescription for survival/ of the clinically depressed, if those of us who can help, will.

Filed under: Health , Christmas, depression, holiday blues, mental illness, Thanksgiving

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Filed under: Uncategorized

Lisa’s farewell

One need not believe in visions to have them.

I don’t, and yet ever so rarely, I do. We may all be wired for visions, after all.

This one was a red-blonde girl in her early teens, a few stray wisps of hair flying out as though her head had been on a pillow. She looked in through my kitchen door as I drifted up from sleep on the living room couch. She was similing. Her smile was full of unaffected love and her expression was certain everything was and would be somehow alright for both of us.

I had never seen that girl before, or the rumpled dress she wore. I have seen enough MacIlwinen family pictures to know she was Lisa in her teens, happy as in her last year she told me she would never be again [And each time she told me that, I would dissuade her/make her laugh.]. She had come to tell me farewell. She had been enjoying the sight of me asleep and had pushed gently into my consciousness to keep a promise she made – a promise to come back if she could, even if only for a moment, and touch me with her after-knowledge if it would be good and right for me to know.

The afternoon she made that promise, we were talking on the phone. I recall saying, “You don’t have to do that, Lisa. You may have other concerns, you know.”

We laughed hard together at that and then she said, “I know, George. But if there is any possible way I can, I will. Be sure you remember that. Don’t you dare forget.”

I remember. I remember she also said her passing by would not presage anything bad, and now I shall remember that she kept every promise she ever made to me.

Because somehow Lisa MacIlwinen stopped by to share her joy at what was, what is and what will be – before she stepped forever through the unseen door on Nov. 24, 2009.

The world is a far poorer place without her loving/forgiving heart, smile, glad voice, insightful mind, sustaining love and gentle laugh. She loved and was loved by her sister Dianne, Cathy, nephews Jack (to whom she was, long ago now, Aunt Lisa Beesa) and George Rankin, their father George, others … .

She was during her final years one of just three living people who had loved my sons, Jack and George Rankin, continuously since before they were born. She rejoiced in the knowledge that they would be born, in their birth and in every moment of their lives for as long as there were moments in hers.

Now there are just we two, grieving.

Filed under: Farewell , death, Farewell, Lisa MacIlwinen, spirit, visions

Last-minute, life-saving gifts for the hard-to-please geek

Jesus and Mary: Black Madonna of Czestochowa

From Buster:

Tony Cartledge reminded me this Christmas Eve morning of a few lasting, last-minute, life-saving gifts for those in greatest need:

If you’re trying to think of something for me, please visit Heifer International’s website.

I’m sure you can find something there.

Take it from the old farm boy.

Breeding pairs are best, if you can afford them.

That kind of Christmas gift may be in part what He had in mind with the example of the loaves and fishes.

Read the entire post –>.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Thanksgiving Turkey Beard

G.W. Frink writes about something lovely:

Turkey Beard sans gobble, this one bloomed, sweet-smelling, almost three decades ago in a burned-over Cumberland County, N.C., glade near Methodist College.

Claude W. Rankin.com, named for the late photographer who made the image, explains:

Read the rest and view the delicate image HERE.

Filed under: Wildflower , Cumberland County, N.C., Thanksgiving, Turkey Beard, Wildflower

Spring is in eclipse

This may be our last Thanksgiving with blind Steve, to whom I showed February’s lunar eclipse.

Read the rest here.

Filed under: Farewell , blind Steve, lunar eclipse, spring