Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Religious Intolerance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religious Intolerance. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Rebecca Trotter - A New Fundamentalism





A New Fundamentalism
http://theupsidedownworld.com/2011/10/20/a-new-fundamentalism/

by Rebecca Trotter
Oct 20, 2011

I, Rebecca Trotter, hereby declare that the time has come for a new form of Christian fundamentalism. It is my belief that this new fundamentalism is needed in order to preserve what is most sacred and true to Christianity against assaults from without and within the Christian church. Although there is freedom in Christ which allows for a variety of ideas and understandings to be held by those who follow Jesus, there are certain fundamentals which all believers must adhere to according to scriptures. As such, I nominate the following bible verses to be considered literally true by all believers and defended against all challengers:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatestcommandment.And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” -Matthew 22:37-40

If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. – 1 John 4:20-21

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is notproud.It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with thetruth.It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. – 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. – Matthew 5:43-48

the LORD said to Samuel, “. . . The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” – 1 Samuel 16:7

Do not be afraid of any man, for judgment belongs to God. – Deuteronomy 1:17

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 1 John 4:16-17

And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. – Micah 6:8

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.You are my friends if you do what I command.I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.This is my command: Love each other. – John 15:12-17

“‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” – Matthew 25:34-40

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. – 1 Peter 3:15

“By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” – John 13:35

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8

If you agree with this (admittedly partial) list of fundamentals for Christian life, please join me in promoting a New Fundamentalism. Pass this list around. Link to this post. Tweet it. Put it up on your facebook page. Email it. Let’s take a stand for our faith and the fundamental, unchanging truths that must be preserved and acted out if we are to call ourselves people of God!


Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Frank Schaeffer - A Political Plea for Awareness, Homeschooling Abuse, and Other Issues


By way of a disclaimer, though I do pay attention to Frank and his writings, I do not necessarily subscribe to demonizing organizations, political parties, church associations and denominations, nor people by label and name. That is not my nature. However I do accept Frank's vim-and-victim that he carries within his own breast as he writes of subjects near-and-dear to his heart.

Moreover I wish to subscribe to a more peaceful means of political cooperation between the citizen and state upon which American government has always been bourne. Hence, my view is one of working honestly and upfront within-and-without established structures without scheme, plot, or twist of fatalism or conspiracy theory.

Nor do I wish to start fashioning panic-laden attacks like so many critical social obliques that I read of everything-and-everyone around me just because someone disagrees with some unspecified fear or anxiety that they think they see or understand more than most.

Generally I subscribe to a kind of social behavior that requires a basic trust in people, the innate ability to speak to concerns with one another in a meaningful way, and to the process of listening patiently with one another. The goal would be one of seeking how a citizen might work with his or her government and private corporations in a manner that gives the greatest voice, liberty, and civil rights to all men and women everywhere.

Along this effort comes Frank's past religious experiences in all the black-and-whiteness that burdens his heart as one in love with Jesus and for any form of government or organization that uplifts liberty in all its many aspects. Frank is very much concerned with religious movements and groups that would make any form of government unjust in the name of its religious preferences - even that of the Christian faith when misunderstanding its center in Jesus and what that focus means for society at large in both a public and communal setting.

Yet, it is true that all forms of government hang in the balances between oppression and true freedom as fed in equal amounts by religious or political ideologies in conjunction with the people that support those organizations. Having as a nation historically witnessed Europe's past 1000 years of theocratic governmental oppression upon dissenting religious minorities it has not been the wish of the American Constitution - nor of this present American government - to return to the bad old days of Protestant or Catholic theocracy where religion rules with an injudicious iron fist. Thus the Magna Carta that preceded the United States Constitution of life, liberty, and equality for all.

As such, these new days demand a more democratic organ that is more pluralistic in legislature, more tolerant of all forms of belief, and more supportive of judicious civil rights set within communal cooperation. To that end let us listen to Mr. Schaeffer's historical review of America's more recent politico-religious past and try to discern how we might better contribute to a more gracious form of governance that respects all people while seeking as it can to right any oversights present in our corruptible systems.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
January 28, 2015



Credit: ehrlif via Shutterstock

I helped start the religious right. This is how we sought to
undermine  secular America -- and build a theocracy

- Frank Schaeffer
January 20, 2015


As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means.

The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“ – believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.

This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation” from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising” with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents.

My account here of the rise of the home school movement
is not aimed at home-schooling, per se, but at parents who
want to indoctrinate, rather than educate.

The Evangelical home school movement was really founded by two people: Rousas Rushdoony, the extremist theologian, and Mary Pride, the “mother” of fundamentalist home-schoolers. I knew them both well.

Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were “New Testament Christians.” In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the “New Covenant” of Jesus’ “Law of Love.”

By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings—on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child beating—were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. [Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers. This theology was the American version of the attempt in some Muslim countries to impose Shariah (Islamic law) on all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.]

I was [Mary] Pride’s agent and sold her first huge seller “The Way Home.” What, Pride asked, was the point of having all those children and then turning them over to secular public schools to be made into secular humanists and Jesus-hating pagans? The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your man philosophy for other women while turning her lucrative home-schooling empire into a one-woman industry. And Pride’s successor in the Patriarchy Movement, the wealthy author/guru Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss happened to be the daughter of a former friend of my mother’s, Nancy DeMoss, who was instrumental in my parents’ rise to Evangelical superstardom. Nancy DeMoss was also pivotal in the role of facilitator and financier when it came to seamlessly merging Reconstructionist ideology with the “respectable” mainstream Evangelical community. I worked closely with Nancy on several projects. She generously supported my various Schaeffer-related anti-abortion movies, books and seminar tours. She also took “our” message much further on her own by underwriting a massive multimillion-dollar well-produced anti-abortion TV and print media ad campaign inspired by our work.

Soon after the death of her wealthy husband, Arthur DeMoss, Nancy DeMoss had become my mother’s friend and an ardent Schaeffer follower. She also took over her late husband’s foundation as CEO. Besides underwriting several Schaeffer projects, Nancy contributed millions to Republican and other far right causes (including $70,000 to start Newt Gingrich’s political action committee, GOPAC). She also helped the Plymouth Rock Foundation, a Reconstructionist-aligned group.

When Nancy’s daughter (the aforementioned Nancy Leigh DeMoss) took Pride’s ideas to a bigger audience than Pride could have imagined, she was just taking the next logical step begun by her mother. Like my sisters and I, the DeMoss siblings found themselves in their parents’ orbit. The DeMoss children became co-workers in the “cause,” much as I filled that role in my family. Nancy’s other daughter, Deborah, worked for Sen. Jesse Helms. Nancy’s son Mark worked for Jerry Falwell before founding the DeMoss Group, a P.R. firm used by the likes of Billy Graham’s son Franklin. But unlike the Schaeffers, the DeMoss clan had tens of millions of dollars with which to back its pet far-right schemes, one of which would be the Quiverfull Movement– a group dedicated to early marriage and huge families.

To plumb the depths of the tortured “reasoning” behind the Roman Catholic version of the anti-contraceptive Quiverfull Movement (they preach young marriage and huge families and wives’ obedience to husbands), consider the writing of Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She’s a hero to today’s leading conservative Roman Catholics. She wrote passionately in defense of the papal prohibition of contraception:

In considering an action, we need always to judge several things about ourselves. First: is the sort of act we contemplate doing something that it’s all right to do? Second: are our further or surrounding intentions all right? Third: is the spirit in which we do it all right? Contraceptive intercourse fails on the first count; and to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act at all, whether or no we’re married. An act of ordinary intercourse in marriage at an infertile time, though, is a perfectly ordinary act of married intercourse, and it will be bad, if it is bad, only on the second or third counts. If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference!

But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. If you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition. It’s this that makes the division between straightforward fornication or adultery and the wickedness of the sins against nature and of contraceptive intercourse. Hence contraceptive intercourse within marriage is a graver offence against chastity than is straightforward fornication or adultery.

Here is how far right instigator and personal best friend of Antonin Scalia Robert George of Princeton (described by the New York Times as one of the most powerful ultra-conservative instigators in America) lauded this insane “argument” in his gushing Anscombe obituary:

In 1968, when much of the rest of the Catholic intellectual world reacted with shock and anger to Pope Paul VI’s reaffirmation of Catholic teaching regarding the immorality of contraception, the Geach-Anscombe family toasted the announcement with champagne. Her defense of the teaching in the essay “Contraception and Chastity” is an all-too-rare example of rigorous philosophical argumentation on matters of sexual ethics. Catholics who demand the liberalization of their Church’s teachings have yet to come to terms with Anscombe’s arguments.

Another far-right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In “Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War” a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for “ecumenical jihad.” ”Ecumenical Jihad” was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to the late Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the “Manhattan Declaration”). Neuhaus and I often talked on the phone when he was about to launch his far-fight First Things journal. Neuhaus asked me to contribute articles, which I did. According to what Neuhaus told me, First Things was supposed to be the pro-life version of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. “To fill a gap,” as Neuhaus put it to me.

Podhoretz, who at first was friendly with Neuhaus, told me he broke with him over his “extremist anti-American views,” as Podhoretz put it. This was just after Neuhaus had started describing the U.S. government as an illegitimate “regime.” As the Washington Post noted:

In an essay he wrote for First Things, [Neuhaus] likened the legal right to abortion to state-sponsored murder under the Nazi regime. “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” he wrote. “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.” The polemical rhetoric offended many Jewish conservatives in particular and threatened to shatter the bonds that had united them.Father Neuhaus played a central role in forging an alliance between evangelicalProtestants and Catholics and in bringing conservative Christians into the Republican conservative coalition in the 1980s and 1990s.

The groups Kreeft, Colson and Neuhaus had in mind to “bring together” in an ecumenical jihad were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews and conservative Roman Catholics, to which Kreeft added Muslims (not that any actually signed on to his program as far as I know). These groups did not share each other’s theology, but had a deeper link: anger at the “victimhood” imposed on them by modernity.

Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father’s, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a “regime,” even a “counterfeit state,” that needed to be overthrown. George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the “Manhattan Declaration” (like Kreeft) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from doing its worst—in other words, to pass laws that did not comply with their religious “values.”

So if the U.S. government legalizes gay marriage and thus “compels” all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women’s civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affect religious people who disagree with them. The “Manhattan Declaration” called believers to “not comply.” And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a “regime”—and my father did the same when saying the government was a “counterfeit state”—George and his co-signers also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

The “Manhattan Declaration” called laws with which its signers disagreed “edicts,” thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the right loses in the democratic process, “other means,” like civil disobedience, are encouraged. In fact, George, who authored the “declaration,” then headed up the group that successfully won on the Hobby Lobby case and also won the Evangelical Wheaton College suit to allow them to not cover contraception for women.

Neoconservative intellectuals like Neuhaus helped set the stage for the Quiverfull and Patriarchy movements. They gave a gloss of intellectual respectability to what was nothing more than a theocratic, far right wish list. “Thinkers” like Neuhaus contributed to what I’ll call the ideological background noise accompanying the rise of post-Roe demagogy.

Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad, Mary Pride and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and home-school them.

The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders. For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit and egalitarian good citizenship.

The Evangelical’s abandonment of the country they called home (while simultaneously demanding change in that society) went far beyond alternative schools or home-schooling. In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Christian bookstores opened, countless new Evangelical radio programs flourished, and new TV stations went on the air. Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christ-centered plumbers,” accountants, and the like who “honor Jesus.”

New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight, with a clearly defined mission to “take back” each and every profession—including law and politics—”for Christ.” For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was a dream come true for my old friend Jerry Falwell, who (when I was speaking at his school in 1983 to the entire student body for the second time) gleefully told me of his vision for Liberty’s programs: “Frank, we’re going to train a new generation of judges to change America!” This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in “America Can Be Saved,” “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.”

Recently, Gordon College asked President Obama to exempt them from laws protecting gay civil rights. To understand why the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,” the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic co-belligerents) added, “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

In the minds of Evangelicals, they were re-creating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

In the first decade of the 21st century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed-of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated, angry, white lower-middle-class men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them.

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Sen. John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for at least one big reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop and I had foisted on our country more than 30 years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune.

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self-banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of “success” by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites.

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing liberals and claiming that she would help the good God-fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise!

So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “healthcare reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, healthcare, public transport and all the rest.

The religious right/far right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges and trains.

In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price for the religious right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical political party “owned” by billionaires. It only remained for a far right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns—anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the super wealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the 21st century, people were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion Is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in a mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corp., Exxon and Halliburton who were laughing. As for the likes of the Quiverfull people — the Koch brothers weren’t having babies or not educating their daughters … but they found the religious right useful.

And that is what the Koch brothers know and most Americans don’t: the religious right have been useful pawns. And that is why there is a Republican majority in both houses of government: They have tapped into the energy of the religious right and their hatred of “sinful” America exemplified by the paranoia of the home-schoolers. Taken together the GOP and the religious right are still fighting a religious war against their own country.


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Related Article -


The Right's Home School Conspiracy



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CRHE Fundraising Appeal



Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) shines a light on the dark side of homeschooling, where a lack of outside protections for homeschooled children has led to some horrifying consequences. Homeschooling can be a useful educational tool in the hands of the right parents, but when it falls into the hands of the wrong parents the results can be disastrous, and it is the children who suffer.

HIC documents and archives cases where homeschooling was not in the best interest of the child and was instead used as a means to isolate, abuse, and neglect, resulting in exceedingly harmful or fatal outcomes. This is for Lydia, Hana, Nubia, the children of the Gravelles and Kluths, and those whose stories we may never hear.

HIC operates under the oversight of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE). The two organizations support a common goal, that of safeguarding and protecting the wellbeing of homeschooled children. CRHE works to educate the public, policymakers, and other constituencies, and to promote the need for adequate safeguards for at-risk children who are homeschooled.


Warning: This site’s content includes mention of severe child abuse, torture,
and untimely death and contains pictures of children who died under such conditions.



Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Lesson on Civics: "How Not to Tear Your Country in Two"

If communities can no longer live in peace with one another than
sadly its time to move away and begin again. - R.E. Slater

As an introduction to today's article I would like to express the deep responsibility we should feel in helping our Muslim neighbors to resolve their religious differences rather than compounding their misery, loss, and discord by heaping our dark satisfactions to their civil wars with one another.

America was founded as a country searching for religious tolerance and the freedom to worship as an individual or community saw fit. The toll this mere idea took upon the centuries and generations of Christianity was infinitely sad as parish fought against parish for its ideals and principles.

No less are the Sunnis and Shias doing to one another as we had done earlier as Protestants and Catholics (or even as Protestants to other Protestants). Factually, it may be better for whole communities in the Mid-East to remove themselves from one another in an attempt to live in regional enclaves more conducive to the majority's sentiments and passions.

Perhaps a time of amnesty and moratorium be set aside so that the lives and possessions of families might re-constitute themselves across sectarian borders over a space of six to 12 months. And in the re-settling process determine to live in toleration with one another's Muslim brother or sister's religious differences regardless of persuasion.

If communities can no longer live in peace with one another than sadly its time to move away and begin again.

Here in America we have blindly traded our religious pride for civil nationalism, which is an order of factor higher in horror and effort than sectarian warfare can provide in terms of human bodies, effort, and financing. Instead of the might and power of a regional parish to inflict personal harm and injustice upon others, now an entire nation's efforts is pitted against a region of dislike, disinterest, and fostered stereotypes. Which, in this case, is America's view of the Muslim Mid-East, even as it is the Mid-East's view of Christian America.

This is no way to live. Life is precious and the differences amongst us is an important difference to maintain. If we all thought alike, ate alike, prayed alike, and worked alike, there would be a life of continual blandness and unending emptiness (existentially speaking).

To love and appreciate the differences that divide us is to love our fellow man and share in the larger idea of community that I think our Lord and our God had in mind for us. It is the crookedness of the devil who has set us against ourselves and it is the devil we fight, not ourselves. It is not enough to sit back and wait for the killing and injustice to end. It is important that we learn to become peacemakers in a world set aflame on the sins of our own vengeance and hatred.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
November 12, 2014

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How Will the Mideast War End?
Christian History May Provide a Clue
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-miles/mideast-war-christian-history_b_6091160.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000051&ir=Religion

Jack MilesGeneral Editor, The Norton Anthology of World Religions
Posted: 11/10/2014 11:34 am EST Updated: 11/11/2014 12:59 am EST

A war within Islam, among radical Islamists and Muslim sects Sunni and Shia, isleaving thousands dead and millions displaced.

The spectacle of so many Muslims prepared to make bloody, protracted war over their slight religious differences strikes Americans as not merely horrifying but also simply baffling. Why do they do that?, we find ourselves asking, and, perhaps more urgently,Where will this end?

One good way to engage these questions is to ask why we don't do that. That we do not ought rightfully to surprise us because as a people we care intensely about religion, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, we do not in the least shrink from violence. The U.S. is both the most religious of highly developed states, given our high rate of religious affiliation and participation, and the most violent, given our astronomicallyhigh rate of death by armed violence. Why is it then that we, who are statistically so ready to gun each other down for other reasons, do not do so for religious reasons?

THEN: CATHOLIC VS. PROTESTANT. NOW: SUNNI VS. SHIA

The answer is rooted in our origin as a state descended from a group of Christian colonies founded when the Protestants and Catholics of Western Europe, emphatically including the British Isles, were tearing themselves apart over religion and wrecking the infrastructures of their own countries in the process, just as the Sunni and Shia are doing in Iraq and Syria today.

We are appalled at the spectacle of a beheaded American reporter. Imagine how appalled we would be at the spectacle of a beheaded American president. But just that was the spectacle that the Calvinists (Puritans) of Britain mounted for the edification of their country when they beheaded the Anglican King Charles I in 1649. That execution came midway in a religious civil war that lasted fully nine years (1642-1651) and cost Ireland (which suffered a reign of terror comparable to that of ISIS) and Britain more lives, proportionately, than the two islands would lose in World War I.

Devastating as the English Civil War was, its violence is dwarfed by that of the contemporary Thirty Years War (1618-1648) on the European continent. That war began as a regional struggle in Bohemia, quite like the localized Sunni-Alawite conflict in Syria, but it ended with Europe in flames from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. If Turkey and Iran are both drawn into the current Middle East conflict, that conflict will have spread similarly from the Aegean Sea to the Persian Gulf. The near-total collapse of civil society in the worst-affected parts of Europe during the early seventeenth century led to plague as well as famine, just as the spreading conflict in the Middle East and Pakistan has brought about a recurrence of polio.

"Just as Catholics and Protestants concluded in their Wars of Religion,
Sunni and Shia have to exhaust one another before concluding that
neither side can determine what their religion is to be."

Today, the confusing official and unofficial Sunni and Shia alliances of the U.S. leave many in the Middle East asking, "Which side are you on?"

Because Shia Iraq supports semi-Shia Syria, which the U.S. opposes, many Iraqi Shia believe that the U.S. has created the Sunni "Islamic State" (ISIS) so as to undo semi-Shia rule in Syria, even at the price of undermining Shia dominance in Iraq. Meanwhile, many Sunni -- observing that in Iraq the U.S. has installed and still supports the first Shia Arab regime in centuries and has been actively seeking to improve relations with Shia Iran -- conclude that the Americans have declared war on "Islam" itself inasmuch as the only true Islam for them is the Sunni version. At cross-purposes like these, the U.S. is, to say the least, ill positioned to rally a nonsectarian, Sunni-Shia coalition against ISIS. And yet President Obama's core assumption -- that only Sunni and Shia can resolve their own war with one another -- is surely correct.

But will they? Intra-Christian violence was no less bewildering than intra-Muslim violence is today. Catholic monarchs sometimes ended up supporting Protestants against other Catholics, and vice versa, as the originating religious issues disappeared in the melee of attack and counter-attack and the standard agendas of power politics surged to the fore. When Catholic France turned against Catholic Austria, the tie-breaking outsider -- corresponding to the tie-breaking U.S. in the Mideast conflict -- was the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps most important, just as Sunni and Shia today refuse to recognize one another as equally Muslim, so Protestants and Catholics back then refused to honor one another as equally Christian. Then as now, polemical rhetoric was blood curdling, and public executions were a theatrical part of the mutually intimidating propaganda. Then as now, each side saw its own killers as saints, and its own casualties as martyrs, while denying any such dignity to the pagans or heretics of the other side. Just as Sunni flee Shia-held areas in today's Iraq and Syria while Shia flee Sunni-held areas, so did Catholics and Protestant civilians flee one another en masse during (and after) the Thirty Years War.

Before it was all over, the population of Greater Germany -- then a central European region substantially larger than the relatively compact Germany of today -- had declined by more than one third. Other regions suffered only somewhat smaller losses. Not until the twentieth century would Western Europe experience violence greater than that inflicted by what later historians have called Europe's Wars of Religion.

HOW EUROPE'S WARS OF RELIGION ENDED

How did it all end? It ended when the major European powers realized that their conflicting dreams of an all-Protestant or an all-Catholic Europe had merged into a single nightmare from which the continent had either to awaken or die. The awakening began with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia whose famous formula for religious peace in Europe was, in Latin, Cuius regio, eius religio: "Whose the rule, his the religion." The sovereign in any state, whether the sovereign was a king or a parliament, would have the right to determine the religion of that country, and he or it would not have the right to determine the religion of any other country.

The formula of the Peace of Westphalia was by no means a proclamation of full, individual religious freedom. The subjects or citizens of any given state were religiously under the authority of that state's government, and it was assumed that no state would fail to establish a state religion. By no means did each subject or citizen have the right to his (much less her) own religion. Yet limited as it was, the Peace of Westphalia did mark the end of religious warfare in Europe. Moreover, it brought into existence what political scientists still call the "Westphalian System" by which states -- and even alliances or entities like the United Nations -- generally abstain from intervening in any of the internal affairs of a duly recognized fellow state. On that occasion, an argument about religion had massive and long-lasting consequences.

"The Peace of Westphalia" re-drew parts of the map of Europe. Peace in the Middle East may yet do the same."

The profoundly cautionary experience of the Christian Wars of Religion and the instructive example of the Peace of Westphalia deeply marked Britain's American colonies, some of which were founded in explicit fealty to some form of Christianity, yet none of which ever attempted to impose its form on a neighboring colony by military force. When the colonies declared and successively defended their independence from Britain, the framers of the Constitution dealt with religion in a manner closely analogous to that of the drafters of the Peace of Westphalia.

Just as the Peace of Westphalia did not seek religious peace in Europe by imposing some sort of compromise generic Christianity upon the continent, the U.S. Constitution framers did not establish a state religion. Instead, they allowed states to continue their respective religious establishments if they had them and so chose. Over time, the states progressively disestablished their established forms of Christianity, and thus the once-unprecedented phenomenon of a Western, culturally European state without an established state religion came into being in the U.S.

This happened in part because of the prestige of the Constitution but in part because, as a mood of "never again" took hold in Europe and the dawning Enlightenment explicitly fostered religious toleration, nationalism began to replace religion as that for which one might still sacrifice life itself. The patriot began to replace the saint. Dying for one's country began to replace dying for one's religion. Killing for one's country began to become excusable, even virtuous, just as killing for one's religion had been.

And it may be at just this point that Americans can begin to answer the question, Why do they do it? Americans have been appalled at the matter-of-fact manner in which ISIS beheadings have been conducted, and at the lighthearted manner observed online among ISIS bystanders. But we are accustomed to hear our armed forces characterize even their most violent war making in matter-of-fact statements like, "We had a job to do, and we did it." Humor or light-heartedness is, you might say, as American as M.A.S.H.

This is not, I hasten to add, to make any simple equation of ISIS with the American armed forces. Far from it! But it is to note that violence and Muslim piety are linked in ISIS the way that violence and American patriotism are linked in the U.S.

And, finally, it is to note -- very sadly indeed -- that an intra-Muslim conflict with roots in the seventh century may have come to a belated climax and may have to run its course slowly and brutally. Between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, Sunni and Shia numbers are so nearly equal that neither is in a position to establish a quick, clear total victory over the other. Just as Protestants and Catholics concluded in their Wars of Religion, Sunni and Shia have to exhaust one another before concluding that neither side can determine what their religion is to be in the future. And they must come to this conclusion on their own -- not through any American intervention or clever coalition-formation.

SHIA-SUNNI SORTING MAY BE NECESSARY

The past fifty years have been a period of enormous demographic diversification in the West. A Pakistan-born Muslim friend of mine recently noted happily that in 1970, there were just 35,000 Muslims in Canada and one mosque in Toronto, while today there are over one million Muslims in Canada and 35 mosques in Toronto. Yet in the Middle East, this half-century (and earlier) has been one of progressive demographic simplification. Before World War I, Jews accounted for one third of the population of Baghdad, and as late as 1948 there were still 150,000 Jews in Iraq. Today, there are effectively none.

True, the founding of the State of Israel led to a vast evacuation/expulsion of Jews from all the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East. But no such single crisis explains the fact that at the start of the twentieth century, Christians constituted twenty percent of the population of the region, while today they constitute just four percent, and emigration is steadily accelerating. The Copts are leaving Egypt. The Greeks and Armenians are gone from Turkey. Christianity may soon be virtually extinct even in Bethlehem. Demographic simplification in the Middle East is undeniable.

"Traumatic mass migration seems already under way and may be
the only practically available formula for peace."

But there is no guarantee that this process of religious and ethnic simplification should stop at Jews and Christians and not engulf Shia and Sunni as well. The Peace of Westphalia re-drew parts of the map of Europe. Peace in the Middle East may yet do the same. After the Peace of Westphalia, continuing intra-Christian religious discrimination within states where either Protestantism or Catholicism was established led to the expulsion or motivated migration of thousands of Catholics and Protestants to states where their respective forms of Christianity suffered no discrimination. The result was a Europe divided into virtually homogeneous religious enclaves, some large, others quite small. Division of the Mideast into religiously and ethnically homogeneous states would be impossible without traumatic mass migration -- but it seems already under way and may be the only practically available formula for peace.

ISIS has slaughtered or expelled Shia and Christians from Mosul, but official Iraq has countenanced a progressive, often violent expulsion of Sunni from much larger Baghdad. A process of mutual expulsion thus begun may have to continue until combustible human elements are almost entirely separated and the fire finally goes out. Partition has been a last-resort path to peace before (consider India and Pakistan). It may be so again.

If the European model offers any clue, diversity and tolerance may slowly return to the religiously and ethnically "purified" states that emerge -- but slowly may mean very slowly indeed. Sweden, to name one signatory to the Peace of Westphalia, did not finally disestablish the Lutheran Church as the state religion of Sweden until the year 2000.

"If the European model offers any clue, diversity and tolerance may slowly
return to the religiously and ethnically 'purified' states that emerge."

Terrorism expert Jessica Matthews recently envisioned a peace plan in which the Bashar al-Assad regime (plus backer Iran) and the non-ISIS Sunni opposition (plus backer Saudi Arabia) join forces to defeat ISIS. Perhaps some such revised coalition recipe might work. A rapprochement between the major Sunni and the major Shia power in the Middle East (counting Turkey, for the moment, as a secular power) might even portend a Middle East version of the Peace of Westphalia. I submit, however, that such a rapprochement can only succeed if those two powers and their clients truly impose this rapprochement upon themselves and do not merely temporize with an American diplomatic effort to make them do it for American reasons.

Lasting peace will ultimately follow on the defeat of ISIS only if that defeat proves the prelude to something much deeper -- a peace between Sunni and Shia whose true implementation might not be possible without something like the painful sorting of populations that seems already to be under way. Meanwhile, a chastened American diplomacy must finally recognize that there are conflicts for which, with even the best of intentions, there is no American solution.


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Jack Miles is general editor of the just-published The Norton Anthology of World Religions, a magisterial reference work of seven years of work by a team of seven internationally-recognized scholars. Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his bookGod: A Biography and is a former MacArthur "Genius" Fellow (2003-2007).






Friday, May 16, 2014

CNN - The 8 Worst Places in the World to be Religious


Rohingya Muslim children at a refugee camp in Burma, where authorities
have incited violence against them, according to the State Department.

The 8 worst places in the world to be religious
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/15/the-worst-countries-to-be-religious/?sr=fb051514worstreligiouscountry7pStoryLink

By Daniel Burke, CNN Belief Blog Editor
May 15, 2014

(CNN) - Since 1999, the U.S. State Department has tracked the world's worst abusers of religious rights.

As the most recent report notes, it has never lacked for material. Persecutions of people of faith are rising across the globe.

Among the most worrying trends, according to the State Department, are "authoritarian governments that restrict their citizens’ ability to practice their religion."

In typically bland bureaucratic language, the State Department calls these "countries of particular concern." But the designation can come with some teeth.

Sudan, for example, where a Christian woman was sentenced to death this week for leaving Islam, is ineligible for some types of foreign aid.

In addition to Sudan, here are the State Department's "countries of particular concern." You might call them "The Worst Places in the World to Be Religious."

Burma: The Burmese government puts a stranglehold on every religion except Theravada Buddhism, says the State Department.

Some government officials even enticed non-Buddhists to convert, and Muslims in the state of Rakhine, particularly Rohingya Muslims, are subject to discrimination and lethal violence, according to the State Department.

China: "The government harassed, detained, arrested, or sentenced to prison a number of religious adherents for activities reportedly related to their religious beliefs and practice," the State Department says.

That includes jailing Uyghur Muslims, one of whom was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "selling illegal religious material," and Catholic clergy who were arrested for not belonging to the state-run Catholic Patriotic Association.

That pales compared with the persecution of Tibetan Buddhists, according to the State Department, who suffered through "an intense official crackdowns at monasteries and nunneries resulting in the loss of life, arbitrary detentions, and torture."

Eritrea: Just four religious groups are officially allowed to openly practice their faith in this African nation; the rest are out of luck, subject to jailing or worse.

So if you're not an Eritrean Orthodox Christian, a Sunni Muslim, a Roman Catholic or an Evangelical Lutheran, life could be tough for you here. Harsh detentions for religious dissenters are the norm, according to the State Department.

Iran: This Muslim-majority country's respect for religious rights has actually declined in recent years, according to the State Department.

"There were increased reports that the government charged religious and ethnic minorities with moharebeh (enmity against God), 'anti-Islamic propaganda,' or vague national security crimes for their religious activities," says the department's report.

Specifically, the government has imprisoned numerous members of the Baha'i faith and Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American pastor who has been physically and psychologically abused, according to the State Department.


North Korea: Human rights groups provided numerous reports that members of underground churches were arrested, beaten, tortured or killed because of their religious beliefs, the State Department says.

The authoritarian nation has jailed as many as 200,000 political prisoners, according to the State Department, many on religious grounds. The country discourages any religious activity not sanctioned by officially recognized groups.

Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American reportedly accused of spreading Christianity in North Korea, has sentenced in 2013 to 15 years of hard labor.


Saudi Arabia: The oil-rich monarchy doesn't even pretend to respect religious rights for any faith other than Islam.

Sunni Islam is the official religion, and the country's constitution is based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. The public practice of any other religion is prohibited, according to the State Department, and Arabian authorities beheaded a man in 2012 for engaging in "sorcery."

Sudan: This country has been on the State Department's naughty list since its inception in 1999.

Sudan penalizes blasphemy and conversion from Islam, sentencing a Christian woman to death this week. It has also arrested and deported Western Christians suspected of spreading their faith.


The country's "morality police" require strict obedience to its interpretation of Islamic law, beating and stoning women accused of acting "indecently."

Uzbekistan: Technically, this country's laws respect religious rights.

But in practice, the Central Asian nation maintains strict control of its majority-Muslim population, according to the State Department.

"The government continued to imprison individuals based on charges of extremism; raid religious and social gatherings of unregistered and registered religious communities; confiscate and destroy religious literature, including holy books; and discourage minors from practicing their faith," the department said in its 2012 report.

People jailed on charges of "religious extremism" have been beaten, tortured and even killed, according to the State Department.

Daniel Burke - CNN Belief Blog Editor








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Note: The following article below speaks specifically to Christian religious persecution. However, this author here feels it is equally reprehensible to persecuted ANY religious person based upon ANY religious faith held. Whether Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Pagan, or whatever.

Religious freedom must mean that any individual may decide by his/her own conscience and heart what faith or belief to follow without the interference of a sect, cullt, religious body, or state organ of government. Even if it be one of agnosticism or atheism (no religion at all).

To be free is to choose. That is the perogative of every man, woman, and child. And to respect the faith of another - especially if that faith is different from your own. A respect that would cause one to defend and even fight for the respect of another different from ourselves. This is true freedom.

And if we disagree with another than let it be a disagreement bound-and-fraught with tolerance, respect, education, and irenic debate. Not physical or psychological abuse brought on by victum  or hatred, intolerance or disrespect, hatred or anger.

The idea of "tolerance" means love and respect for another - even for someone whom we might disagree with and do not wish to abide with. These are hard words. Words that Jesus most honored in the beatitudes pertaining to one's heart and conscience. And they are hard words percisely because they are the hardest to follow and to practice.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
May 16, 2014

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The Most Widely Persecuted Religion
In The World
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-persecuted-religions-in-the-world-2012-9

by Joshua Berlinger
September 20, 2012

The Pew Forum released its 2012 report, Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion
and ranked which religions were the most persecuted.

And despite the fact that Islamic protests have dominated the news, it's Christians that have been persecuted in the most countries between 2006 and 2010.


Here's how many countries people were harassed in a specific year:


Here's how the harassment breaks down in terms of government harassment and social harassment:


Of course, the data doesn't take into account how severe the harrassment was, or how widespread it was within the countries recorded, but it's certainly surprising.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-persecuted-religions-in-the-world-2012-9#ixzz31sVj5xiv