Dear Bryan Fischer:
Sincerely, me.
Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Fischer and the AFA Try To Weasel Out Of Their Latest Outrage | Right Wing Watch
Monday, February 14th, 2011Remembering Archbishop Óscar Romero
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010There are some people who can only be described by the word “saint.”
Archbishop Óscar Romero – assassinated 30 years ago today – is one of them, despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church (under Pope Benedict XVI) is stalling his ascension to full sainthood.
“When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”
Romero was shot by a squad of men who had trained in the United States and were carrying rifles manufactured in the United States, while raising the Eucharistic cup to bless it during the Mass. His blood spilled over the altar as he fell – mixing the blood sacrificed by Christ for our liberation with his own, spilled for his people’s liberation.
He provides an example to us all – of how the radical love of Christ demands that we stand for the poor, for the oppressed, for the hungry and thirsty, of how a person animated by Christ’s sacrifice could make himself a “living sacrifice” for those Christ cared about.
He taught us – as the Liberation theologians did – that the notion that Jesus Christ doesn’t take sides in politics is a falsehood propagated by the greedy and powerful. Romero taught us that Jesus Christ does take sides.
Jesus Christ is on the side of the poor – the single mother working two jobs just to keep food on her kids’ table, the father desperately searching for work, the little girl who goes to school with nothing in her belly in this, the richest nation on earth.
“Do you want to know if your Christianity is genuine? Here is the touchstone: Whom do you get along with? Who are those who criticize you? who are those who do not accept you? Who are those who flatter you?”
Jesus Christ is on the side of the homeless veteran, who was “thanked” for his service to his country by being denied treatment for the PTSD his brave service gave him.
Jesus Christ is on the side of the cancer-stricken child who needs health care but whose parents can’t afford it.
Jesus Christ is on the side of the gay teenager who’s bullied and beaten up at school for nothing more than being who he is.
Jesus Christ is on the side of the undocumented immigrant woman who works 14-hour days cleaning houses or washing clothes or caring for someone else’s children, just so that she can give her own children a better life than the one they faced in the country of their birth.
Archbishop Romero taught us that sometimes standing with Jesus requires that we stand against the principalities and powers, nonviolently resisting them and prophetically calling them to repentance and justice – and being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of Jesus Christ and those with whom Christ stands.
I pray that God give us the discernment, wisdom, peace, faith, and strength to stand with Jesus Christ and Archbishop Romero on this, the thirtieth anniversary of his assassination.
Crossposted at Matthew 25 Network.
Highlights from the Equality March
Monday, October 12th, 2009Yesterday I joined several of my colleagues and tens of thousands of people I don’t know in the Equality March, a march and rally to the Capitol for LGBT rights. It was a great experience – perfect weather (including, as you’ll see, an apropos celestial phenomenon), great folks around me, a really loving environment, and an important cause. Here are some pictures I took:
The aforementioned celestial phenomenon - a rainbow at an equality march. I did a quick-and-dirty punch-up in Photoshop to bring out the foreground since my iPhone, while awesome, isn't a professional-grade camera.
A number of people from the NY marriage equality group had color-coordinated t-shirts and umbrellas. Kinda reminded me of day camp. At the end of the march, they should have played a big game of Red Rover.
I climbed onto a traffic signal in an attempt to get a better shot of the march stretching out in front of us. Note the rainbow sign with van-guy selling sunglasses; one of my companions was sure that he had the red-white-and-blue sign for the Tea Party protests.
Marching down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol building. I love living in DC.
The only bigot we saw all day... and all he was doing was driving around. I was actually quite surprised that the bigots weren't having a counter-protest somewhere.
Jackson, the son of one of the people in our group and by far our youngest protestor, takes a well-deserved nap at the rally.
A Conservative Bible? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Monday, October 5th, 2009Apparently the Bible is too liberal… so the same people who brought us Conservapedia (the right-wing conservative version of Wikipedia, complete with made-up facts) are going to rework the Bible to make it fit into their worldview.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Among their conservative principles for Bible translation:
Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
Their full free-market meaning? Yeah, Jesus was totally thinking about laissez-faire and the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s free market when He told the rich young ruler to sell all he had and give it to the poor. And the whole parable about the farmer casting his seed over the field? Clearly, Jesus is talking there about optimizing crop yields and exploiting laborers in order to maximize agricultural profits.
Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
(For the record, here’s the story in question.)
Yeah, because we wouldn’t want sentiments like “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” to complicate our worldview. We wouldn’t want to contemplate whether or not we’re acting hypocritically before we condemn others.
Of course, given the spotty record of right-wing religious figures who demagogue about family values, maybe they are better off excising that passage…
And finally, the coup de grace…
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”
Why not go the whole way and replace “Lord” with an inarticulate guttural grunt, a thumbs-up, or a “guy nod”? God doesn’t want those boring liberal words mucking up His pristine Bible. Conservative God doesn’t use words, He uses action… so next time you’re in church and they ask you to read a passage aloud, instead of all that boring text with its “high word-to-substance ratio” you should just punch the guy next to you in the jaw. That’s what Conservative Action God wants.
(Cross-posted at the Matthew 25 Network.)
Addendum to the previous post:
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009For those with about 12 hours to kill, the entirety of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is available on Hulu.
Go. Be inspired.
By the way, Ken Burns’s National Parks series is making me want to leave all my possessions behind and go live out my days in Yosemite.
One small step for man…
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Forty years ago tonight, two men from this planet walked on the surface of another heavenly body for the first time.
The enormity of that task still amazes me.
It’s quite literally incredible, it strains the bounds of credulity – the number of technologies they had to invent, the number of things they had to do for the very first time, the number of things that could have gone wrong – and it happened almost flawlessly.
I can think of no greater testimony to human ingenuity, human drive, and human effort than that.
The thing that astounds me is that they did it all with 1969 technology. I currently have on my lap a computer with 1000x more processing power and a million times more storage space than the computers they had aboard Apollo 11. They couldn’t run the LEM through a thousand computer simulations to see how it would handle on the moon’s surface – it was all pencils, papers, slide rules, and drawing boards. They strapped three guys onto the top of a Saturn V rocket and said “go” – and they went, and they landed, and they walked, and they took off, and they made it back.
But the first moon landing was 40 years ago; the last was 37 years ago. Since then, no human being has left low-earth orbit. Sure, we’ve launched the Space Shuttle, learned how to live in space for an extended period of time, seen the beginnings of the universe with Hubble, and put robots on or around every planet except Pluto, but we haven’t stretched out our wings. We haven’t gone back to the moon; we haven’t seen Mars. It was like we had that one inspiring moment and then decided that mediocrity was fine just the same.
The problem is, we’ve got problems. An economy in the crapper, 42 million Americans without health insurance, rampant inequality, world poverty, climate change, pollution – a million reasons not to go back. A million reasons to say “let’s fix the problems here first.” And that argument works, for a time.
But when the economy turns around, and when President Obama is reelected in 2012 – I think it’s time for us to take the next step. Not just go back to the moon, but settle there, begin our first halting steps to the obvious next stage in the evolution of our relationship with the universe – finally freeing ourselves from being a one-planet species. First we settle on the moon, then begin the thousand-year project to terraform Mars, then we start mining the asteroid belt… the next step. Progress, expansion, evolution.
We have the technology. We will have the resources. All we need is the will… because we’ve taken a few steps back from that “one giant leap for mankind.”
“Brothers of ethnicity?” Maybe that’s your problem right there.
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009From a Columbus Dispatch article on the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, at which they kicked out a church that actually dared to treat LGBT people as human beings and expressed concern over a report that the SBC could lose 50% of its population by 2050 because they’re seen as old, white, and conservative:
[Johnny] Hunt, who was re-elected to a second one-year term yesterday, said, “One of the reasons — and it is a true reason — is we need to really join with our brothers of ethnicity in this convention.”
Brothers of ethnicity? Really? That phrase is probably the key to the SBC’s problems – and the reason they won’t get fixed.
First, the fact that he ascribes “ethnicity” to non-white people is probably a pretty big part of the reason that people who aren’t old southern racists aren’t too keen on joining a Southern Baptist Church. It’s apparent that to him, white people aren’t “brothers of ethnicity”; only people with darker skin have ethnicity. If there’s a more obvious statement that the SBC considers whiteness the norm and non-whiteness as Other, I’d like to see it.
Second, the fact that he only seems to think that the SBC needs to reach out to “brothers of ethnicity” is also telling. Gen-Xers and Millennials, with a few exceptions like the followers of the abusive Mark Driscoll up in Seattle, seem to have picked up on the obvious fact that women can do anything men can do, including lead churches. Yet the SBC seems trapped in the 1950s, when men were supposed to be the leaders and women the followers. The rest of the Western world has woken up to the basic fact of gender equality, at least in principle; why do conservative churches lag so far behind
Third, unrelated to that phrase – is it possible that there’s a relationship between the SBC kicking out, without any apparent controversy, a church that at least partially acknowledged the humanity of LGBT people, and the report indicating that the SBC is in decline? Is it possible that younger folks like me are realizing that anti-gay attitudes – by which I mean any notion that LGBT individuals aren’t entitled to acceptance and equality at all levels of our society, including in the church – are contrary to the love of Jesus Christ, just as racism and sexism are? Is it possible that churches that still hold such attitudes are going to shrink, while churches whose attitudes are more in line with Christianity are going to grow?
One can only hope.
No surprise, but still disappointing
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009The California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8, the California ballot proposition that denied some of the most basic human rights to LGBT people. Gay or lesbian couples who were married when it was legal will remain married. This ruling isn’t much of a surprise – court-watchers had pretty well predicted this was going to be the outcome – but it still, quite frankly, sucks. Sucks hard.
What sucks for me personally in this, as a Christian, is seeing my brothers and sisters in Christ applauding such decisions and standing in the way of basic human rights. Even if they accept what is, in my opinion, a rather piss-poor Biblical case that same-sex sexual acts are sinful, the fact is that Christianity is not, and should not be, the law in this country. The fact that their narrow interpretation of the Christian text says that homosexuality is wrong should not make it law. The fact that they personally can’t get past bigotry shouldn’t mean that others are denied their rights.
I will say it openly and without hesitation: Anyone claiming to be a Christian who stands against basic human rights for gay men and lesbians is in sin, and needs to repent. Even if they believe (wrongly) that homosexuality is sinful, that is no excuse to deny them equal rights under the law. It’s that simple. There is absolutely no validity to bullcrap arguments about “traditional marriage”; those who use such arguments are hiding their bigotry behind a rhetorical flourish.
So what’s next? I’d bet all the money in my bank account (which admittedly isn’t putting a lot on the line) that proponents of basic human rights are going to put an initiative on the 2010 ballot in CA. I will support that initiative full-throatedly as my top priority in 2010. It is imperative that anyone who calls him- or herself a Christian stand behind such an initiative and support it (as much as is possible) with his or her money, effort, and (if possible) vote. It is also imperative that every Christian put pressure on his or her own state legislature (or, in the case of us second-class citizens of DC, our city council) to bring equal human rights to his or her own state if it isn’t already one of the few that acknowledges such rights.
This is a blow, but not a fatal one. We who support equal rights will prevail in time. The question is: which side of history will you be on? Will you look back on the ’00s with regret, as supporters of racial segregation look back at the ’60s and ’70s, or will you be able to look back and tell yourself that you stood on the right side of history? That is the question before each of us today. God help us that we make the right choice.