When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, “Oh shut up” I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining. — Glenn Beck
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Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Over at FireDogLake.com, you’d better not post anything too critical of Israel. Moderator and abuser of power Rayne will probably step in to disrupt the thread, issue threats, and order people to cease asking questions she doesn’t like.
Rayne’s latest round of abuse began when truthexcavator posted an entry on what turned out to be a five-year-old news article about an israeli soldier acquitted of murdering a 13-year-old Palestinian by filling her body with enough bullets to drop a charging rhinoceros. Truth made the horrendous mistake of comparing what Israel is doing to palestinians to what the Nazis did to Jews during the Holocaust.
I was shocked when I heard about this story, but I am less shock of the verdict by the Israeli Army. I’m passed the point of getting mad at Israel. I don’t even think of it as a country anymore. I wish it was a country because the Jewish people deserve better. But it’s not a country, just as Nazi Germany wasn’t a country.
I don’t know if you’ve read the Declaration of Independence but you don’t have the power to grant people rights. You don’t create them, you don’t enhance them. They are not yours…In case you missed it “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Who the hell do you think you are Congress? You are not God.
Or put more succinctly, as I just heard Glenn Beck say TODAY on FOX, in re-running of a previous show:
Glenn Beck:
“Government does NOT grant you Rights — God does” …
“If there is No God, that grants you Rights — Who grants you rights?”
False Prophets are a dime a dozen. From the clergy to politicians to flim-flam banksters, charalatans are monkeys in a barrel, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.
The problem is while many are on the lookout for False Prophets, most do not question the Gods behind the religions of these socio-economic-religious shysters.
DOGMA spelled backwards is AM GOD. Dogma is strict adherence to the teachings of the Priest caste. When God is replaced by Religion-as-God, things turn sour.
But further, when you look at the great religions of Western Civilization – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – that, based upon the history of inhumanity practiced by these “great” religions, one must question the veracity of the God behind all these religions. And if one is fearless in the face of billions of believers, the God of the Victors who wrote the History and made the rules is a FALSE God.
Professor Marc Gopin is the Director at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution (CRDC) with the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. You can follow his work by visiting www.MarcGopin.com. He has focused a lot of his work around interfaith conflict resolution, which is why we asked to speak with him about the controversy over the proposed construction of the Cordoba Mosque in lower Manhattan. Right after we scheduled the interview, news broke that peace talks among Israel, Palestine, and the United States would resume in September. This is an issue that Professor Gopin has been deeply involved with for a very long time now, so we included that in our line of questioning.
Highlight clips with partial transcripts and the full 40-minute interview below the fold…
They better not build that mosque down by Ground Zero, we’re being told, not just because it’s insensitive, but because we have no idea what they’ll be up to down there.
I mean, where did the money come from?
Who does this Imam hang out with, anyway?
And, at a time when our Nation faces more threats than ever, why would we let these Muslim madmen situate their “terror command posts” anywhere?
Well, I don’t know about all of that…but I do know a place where lots of these Islamic terrorists go to obtain the equipment and supplies they need to support their particular craft, and I decided to make a bit of an undercover visit to the spot, so that I might “observe and report” on what goes on at this specific location.
So put on your dark glasses…and let’s go see what we can find out.
One wonders, not really very hard, why we readily call others, who have done nothing, ‘terrorist’, just because of where they might be from or their religious beliefs, and we get never ending opinion talk and pure propaganda {lies} about as a whole group and not the extremist using, yet something like this happens and it gets very little news play. You have to search it out rather then hear anyone report on or seriously talk about. A most certainly ‘domestic criminal terrorist’ act seemingly hell bent on taking out as many police or innocent people as possible, all because, apparently, he’s a white guy in Texas. Will he become the new hero of certain groups within our society, much like the Austin Pilot Did or others that seek to be the next McVeighs as Individuals or in Groups!!
Freedom of (and from) religion is a core liberal value. There are good reasons why core liberal values are fundamentally American values embodied in our Constitution deriving directly from Enlightenment philosophy. The following anti-rational, blindly racist and stupidly insular sentiment (emotional outburst?) common to current right wing “thinking” is decidedly anti- or counter-Enlightenment in its expression on so many levels as to be automatically revolting to a modern, liberal mind:
“Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11”
Liberalism defines modernity. The exact specification of liberalism will vary between taxonomists, but some very general themes emerge from a period of time designated as the Enlightenment.
It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California’s Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.
A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they’re able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.
In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here…that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.
This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of “divining rod” to figure out who is immoral and who is not…actually any good at it?
The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
[Note from Kyle de Beausset: Selvin wrote this letter right before he got into a minor car accident on April 9, 2010. He was set to get his high school diploma in June but has been in detention ever since. I have chosen reproduce Selvin’s letter as I found it in his empty room, rather than polish his slight grammatical errors, to allow his character to shine through.]
Dear President Barack Obama,
From the bottom of my heart, I plead to my God that you and your entire family receive blessings from the highest God while you are reading this letter. I admire and thank you for the great labor that you are fulfilling as a president in this big nation. My name is Selvin Ovidio Arevalo. I came to this country when I was 15 years old. I came from Guatemala to this country to fulfill my dreams because I always have believed that this is a country of many opportunities for those whom want to succeed.
Those currently in opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero don’t seem to want to understand the whole picture. They will not even entertain anything other than views stepped in prejudice and fear, seeing an enemy in the face of every person of Middle Eastern descent. While in stuck in this merry-go-round that passes for substantive discourse, they are trusted supporters of a system that sees the sum of its parts as more important than the whole. Today’s believers in preemptive prejudice take stock in reductionism, a theory that justifies bigotry nicely. Indeed, their system of belief relies more on personal bias and illogical rationales rather than outward truth. The spread and growth of this, its own near-religion upsets me more than that of the genuine terrorists themselves.
In this country, a long tradition exists of individuals who have refused to perform a particular duty or task, citing their religious beliefs as justification. The very definition of Civil Disobedience, of course, depends on the person, the situation, and how it is applied. The latest incident has opened up a discussion which has never really subsided, only dipped underneath the radar from time to time. In this circumstance, a Texas bus driver, who is also an ordained conservative Christian minister, claims that he was fired for not taking a women to Planned Parenthood. His decision is in the same vein as those of pharmacists who, stating moral reasons, will not dispense the morning-after pill to women who request it.
