Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed. Full Story »

Part 1 of 2.

I tripped across a provocative headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “They Need to be Liberated from Their God.” Turns out the story was about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his spying on Hamas. Which was a little disappointing. There’s no doubt that Palestinian Muslims need to be liberated from their god, but given the recent explosion in documented attacks by US Christians on their fellow Americans (as well as on reason and basic common sense), I thought perhaps the WSJ was going to be the first mainstream “news” outlet to do a story on Jesus Gone Wild!

I keep a running tab of stories that strike my interest. Full Story »

If you’ve visited America anytime during the past couple of centuries, you realize that the nation has something of a church and state problem. You can argue the details all you like, but the bottom line is that the Framers of the Constitution set the stage for controversy by being too damned vague. I mean, “separation of Church and State” – what the hell does that really mean, anyway? We have these problems before us today because Jefferson, Madison and Co. didn’t have the basic good sense to insist on specificity, which is odd, given that all the Founding Fathers were all pretty clearly fundamentalists. As, one assumes, were the Founding Mothers. They just toss terms like “God” and “Church” and “separation” around like we all know what they mean, when clearly we don’t. Full Story »

by Ann Ivins

I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. The issue becomes more annoying the more headspace I give it, and it’s not the prejudice or the public protests or the proclamations of any group on either side. The question that makes my brain twitch is this: why is this even an issue?

I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. Full Story »

My friend Dawn wrote a post worthy of a Sunday; please read it:

On Considering Compassion

Well, as one who can dish out vitriol with the best of them, i can feel a finger pointed at me. I also know better…which obviously doesn’t mean that i act better.

I’m familiar with the Bodhisattva’s vow: self-sacrifice for the sake of compassion towards all living things, to practice until every blade of grass attains enlightenment. (i differ with it there, the grass is already enlightened)

The fear-anger-hatred continuum is the strongest metaphysical force in the universe because it is easy; it does not take self control. It’s dangerous because it is easy and because it is self replicating and communicable.

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There’s a story percolating through the internet that originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and has now made its way to places like The Huffington Post*. I don’t fault Justin Berton, the Chronicle writer, because i realize that he probably didn’t write the headline. None-the-less, “Biblical scholar’s date for rapture: May 21, 2011″ is shite…though it was enough to pique the interest of the fluff chasers at the Huff Po.

Having never heard of Harold Camping before seeing this article, i had to do a little research. My suspicions were confirmed.
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On January 1 most of the world rolled forward into a new decade. The Catholic Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, rolled backward into a former century.

Lawmakers in staunchly Catholic Ireland passed the law in July, but it came into force January 1.

A person breaks the law by saying or publishing anything “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”

Errrm, wait a second. Full Story »

Remember the scene in Spiderman 3 when Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace) goes to church and prays that God will kill Peter Parker? That probably got a laugh out of most viewers because, well, how over-the-top preposterous is it to pray to God to kill someone you don’t like? Jesus us a god of love, isn’t He? But hey, it’s Hollywood, it’s a superhero action flick, and villains in these films have to be, you know, a little over-the-top, right?

Still, if that whole scene set your plausibility alarms to ringing, you might want to brace yourself for this one.

Think Progress makes a great catch on C-SPAN this morning: Someone calls in while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is answering the lines, practically in tears because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) missed this morning’s procedural vote on health care. Full Story »

On Nov. 3, 299,483 citizens of the state of Maine were persuaded to tell women who love women and men who love men that they cannot marry. Those Downeasters who voted “Yes” on Question 1 — to repeal a same-sex marriage law — bashed gays, but with a referendum rather than a fist.

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?
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Every sperm and every egg, fertilized or not, is a living, breathing person, endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights. At least, that’s what the proposed 2010 personhood amendment to the Colorado state constitution implies. No, it doesn’t say that literally, but thanks to the vague wording of the amendment, that’s one possible interpretation.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences. Full Story »

Adam rested contentedly in the Garden. If we take The Book of Genesis at its word, all was perfect and pure. Opposites existed. There was, after all, a female companion for Adam named Eve, but they produced neither concern nor complication for the various named beasts and naked progenitors of human kind. At least not until the serpent came along…

The serpent, “who was more crafty than any of the wild animals the lord God had made,” practiced his deceit with the cunning of Socrates. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” he asked, leading poor Eve towards our collective doom. Only two trees—one mostly ignored—were forbidden with the pain of death. The serpent persuaded Eve that she would not die; instead, he told her, “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

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Progress. Different people have different ideas of what we should be progressing towards, but there’s a general consensus that we can progress, even if one’s idea of progress looks like regression to others. The idea of progress requires that time take the form of a ray, beginning at some point and moving in a single direction. There’s support for the idea in many interpretations of evolution: organisms evolve complexity across time, and complexity is considered higher than simplicity. Political science certainly supports the idea, as the discipline would be pointless without it. But the foundation of the idea rests on the Abrahamic faiths, with their ideal of a true god of justice, chosen people and the eventual conquest of evil by the forces of good. If you were raised in “the West”, then the philosophical ideal is deeply ingrained in your thinking…even if you were raised without religion. This ideal has driven history, the interpretation of history and continues to drive the events becoming history. But is it shared across humanity?

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Modern Conservative is a powerful language, more capable than Greek or Hebrew of expressing the profound new concepts that Christianity introduced into the world. Evidently then, it needs to be applied to the Christian Canon. The perfectly revealed word of God turns out to be not-quite-perfect enough. Just kidding. It’s that liberals, feminists and maybe even Catholics have muddled the good news. You see, The Lord must have spoken Modern Conservative because he made modern conservatives in His image. It says so in the Book nearly ruined by pervasive, liberal influences.

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“And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.” ~Book of Genesis

We all know what happens after that. The wickedness of the world is washed away in a deluge of planetary proportions, and only Noah, his family and the two of each unclean animal along with seven of every clean animal (but oddly, no plants) are saved to repopulate the world. Of all the mythological motifs that circle the Earth and run like a string through human history, none is told with more regularity and consistency than the story of the flood.

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There are many renditions of Siddhartha Gautama’s life story and his becoming “The Buddha”. None of them are contemporary to his life, and all contain the motivations of their various authors as much as they detail Gautama’s path to enlightenment. Joseph Campbell chose the version penned by Ashvaghosha (c. 100 A.D.) for inclusion in The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. I favor this version for the same reasons as Campbell, because it “…also devotes more precise attention than the Pali text to the crises of the intellectual search that preceded the finding of the Middle Way.” It is crisis of the intellect, or psychology, that provokes the mystic to search for answers to life’s great questions. The search, as it happened with Gautama, leads away from society and to the internal where the eternal resides.

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Today we’re putting Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) on the masthead. Chances are that you already know all about his thought and work without realizing it. When George Lucas wrote the first few drafts of Star Wars, it was shaping up to be standard, 70’s sci-fi action schlock. Then he put the screenplay aside to settle and re-read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That changed everything. Sculpting his imaginary galaxy around the skeleton of Campbell’s monomyth thesis produced a set of films that took a generation by storm and still reverberates through popular culture. Full Story »

One of the best facets of studying myth and religion is the amount of weirdness there is to be found. Some of the weirdness involves people interpreting myth and religion in new (or sometimes old) ways and making connections between the seemingly disparate. Some of the weirdness springs from myth itself, in the way that it mirrors itself across time and culture and the layers that pile one atop the other like archeological strata. This week’s installment will feature both. Better yet, it’s a video so you won’t have to follow my mind chasing tangents.

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Perhaps the fundamental catastrophe of religion is what Joseph Campbell called, “mistaking the metaphor for the truth that it describes”. We divide the realm of spirituality into myth and religion. The former being silly tales of bygone eras for unsophisticated barbarian types, while the latter is deadly serious and important. Those silly fools who believed in Zeus flinging thunderbolts were terribly mistaken in their conception of the world, but there is nothing less than literal truth in the bearded white guy on a throne unleashing a world-encompassing deluge. This literal interpretation of myth brings us the great and terrible silliness that is both fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam; both are confusions. Worse, they have led to secularism guilty of infanticide in the course of draining the bath.

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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has conditionally reinstated former Atlanta quarterback Michael Vick, who was convicted of running a dogfighting ring in 2007. Vick served 23 months in federal prison, followed by two months of house arrest.

Last Thursday the Philadelphia Eagles answered the question as to which team would sign a convicted dog-killer (there were 32 possible answers to the question, and “none of the above” wasn’t one of them), and in doing so touched off a long-awaited PR war for the souls of their stunned fans. Full Story »

Conventional wisdom holds that fear of death is epidemic in the Western world. Whatever the truth of that, cultural commentators are all too willing to chalk it up to everything from our materialistic society to our isolation from one another.

What’s missing though is an honest acknowledgment that fear of death can be a rational response. If you break the fear down to its components parts, it suddenly starts to make sense. Prominent among our fears are eternal punishment and non-existence, not to mention the pain of the dying process. A fourth fear — that of the unknown — essentially incorporates the other three. Full Story »