In a post entitiled "Canada Makes the Baby Jesus Cry," Ed Brayton had this to say about the Canadian Parliament's recent refusal to reconsider last year's approval of gay marriage throughout Canada: Now, of course, Canada's entire culture will collapse, people will stop marrying one another and loving their kids,…
Here's the story. But, of course, it is more important to get rid of gay military translators than to communicate with residents of Iraq.
A couple of summers ago, my husband and I attended a wedding that took place just outside Missoula, Montana, where one of our sons lives. The groom is an incredibly nice man whose family is from India. He and his family are Christian, not Hindu. His uncle, who participated in the wedding ceremony, is a minister in the Pentecostal Church.
During the ceremony, it became obvious there is a philosophical and theological divide in the groom’s family. His generation, born in the United States, has rejected the values and beliefs, though not the religion, of the older generation. The women of the older generation are diffident, speaking only when spoken to, wearing only traditional Indian dress. The women of the younger generation are liberated American females. The “best man” at the wedding, in fact, was actually the groom’s sister. There were covert smiles passed amongst the younger generation, males and females, at the words of their uncle, who preached subservience and obedience for the bride, dominence for the groom. It was clear, while the younger generation respects its elders in that family and holds very closely to its Christian beliefs, it does not accept its old, rigid patriarchal mores.
It wasn’t clear to me until after the wedding just how rigid those patriarchal mores are. Because my father was a pastor in South Africa, and because the Indian preacher had also been a pastor in South Africa, I thought it quite appropriate to talk to him about our connection, but, …
I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”
I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.
What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient. We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance.
Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess. I remember when Abu Ghraib broke. I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.
Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …
Here is a link to a 2006 documentary called "The Root of All Evil? - Part I," narrated by Richard Dawkins. In this elegantly written and presented documentary, Dawkins does not mince words. He explores the seductive beauty of religion, as well as the damage that religion, especially fundamentalist religion,…