Interestingly enough, before the roaring twenties the marriage of divorcees was actually mandatory in the Church of England. Banning it was an attempt to stem the growing tide of divorce after the first world war.
Yes, that’s the 1920s.
While I well know about RC teaching on Divorce, I know that the Orthodox are better about it. I’ll pick my own “oldest church”, thanks. Here’s another example of how our Modern Conservatives have confused life in the 1950s Sitcom, Leave it to Beaver, with what life is all about.
Where is the right-wing conservative preacher who will tell us now…
What sins did the people of Iowa commit that God punished them with flood waters like he did the people of Indonesia and China?
What sins did the Boy Scouts commit that God should have trapped them in a box canyon and killed them? Michael CHertoff blames God: “It seems like the Boy Scouts didn’t have a chance. It’s truly a tragic act of God.”
This reminds me of 15 years ago when the Midwest flooded (I remember scenes of St Louis pretty much filled with water). No one said God must be punishing them. Nor did God punish the people of Oklahoma City. But for the last 800 years we’ve said God punished the people of Constantinople.
Who gets to decide that, clearly, one act is a punishment while another is, clearly, Satan?
Or maybe we need to stop imagining God functions like that? Or if he does, maybe we need to give up on the idea that we understand it?
It was predictable. When I read of the Supreme Court’s recognistion of the legal rights of our illegal prisoners, I needed only to click into the Right Wing side of my RSS feeds to find a blogger (two, actually) who says the court should be ignored by Bush. Ah yes, no rights for anyone, thanks, unless we like you.
The rights of Americans are based on the odd idea (from the founders) that these rights define justice and are from Our Creator - not from the state. It’s not within the State’s powers to take them away.
I see that some on the right are appealing to some mythical “absolute power” of the president “in wartime”. Just Freakin’ Great. Like I’ve said: there’s a reason I don’t think there will be an election this year - and I imagine it will be people who believe in Bush’s “Absolute Power” (and who delude themselves that we are “in wartime”) that will most support that action.
You can agree or disagree with the Founders if you wish: but you need to rewrite the entirety of US constitutional law if you wish to “so deem a class of persons a stranger to [our] laws”. That is because, as I said, our rights are not imagined to come from the state, but from a higher source - not the Christian God, per se, but an agnostically defined “Creator” and “Nature’s God”.
That’s why we had to wrestle with the personhood of the slaves: if they were human persons, they were not to be chattel. We had to deny their personhood to remove their rights. And we have to do the same to Muslims in Cuba.
I’ll be the first to admit that many of the more liberal sort of Christian ignores certain passages in the Bible. The whole second ending to Mark gets left out a lot: the result being a story of an empty tomb and a whole lot of confusion. The Higher Criticism folks don’t like miracles. The Jesus seminar only likes certain lines. Thomas Jefferson only liked the “moral teachings”. You know what I mean.
Well, what happens if the story presents a Jesus that doesn’t jive with the right?
Politicians must be “put in their place” and not be allowed to legislate whatever they want.
Let me say that another way - Those persons freely elected by a majority of the people must not be allowed to legislate the majority will - but must be stopped by Conservative Catholics.
Watch out Spain: the inquisition started that way.
So this AM on NPR, I heard the first twitters of a rumour I’ve been waiting to hear shouted from the housetops: Condi Rice as Vice President!!!! What a perfect balance! Punk and Condi! Now, I admit that I can’t imagine Republicans voting en mass for an African American Lesbian. But I do think it would make a STUNNING choice: and it would make the home stretch of this election cycle interesting, at least.
Mc Nasty and Miss Fierce in 2008!
Regarding reports to the contrary, I can only refer to the BBC’s Jim Hacker, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite (TV) Prime Minister. “One does not seek such an office: one only wishes to serve the public good. But if one’s friends were to prevail upon one that, in the nation’s best interest, the heavy burden of such a lofty estate must be borne, then one would have to bend one’s own desires to the better good…”
This member of the Oklahoma State Legislature thought that only 50 people heard her speak… This is what “They say” when “they” think “we’re” not listening:
Gays are infiltrating city councils!… They are winning elections. They are worst than terrorists!
I’m torn… It’s believable - having heard such speeches in the past. But it would have helped if the Victory Fund had said her name instead of “this member of the legislature…”
I want to blog it, but without names or dates “we” don’t even if this person is still in office. (This sounds like one of the loonies that got elected in the “Contract With America” election in 1994.)
In the same way that the speaker was citing baseless facts in order to stir up support from her constituency, the Victory Fund is, by not using her name, dates or pictures, using the same tactic.
Left and Right mirror each other. It’s scary.
Update: the Victory Fund does have reasons why. Not good. But reasons.
This is the self-ruled blog of an Christian attempting to follow God in the Way of Jesus... sometimes. I most identify with the Anglican and Liberal Catholic flavours.
«Christ came to separate the genuine and the valuable in the world from the false and the worthless, the Divine from the diabolic. Christ -- is the Saviour of the genuine world, that which is authentic and of the fullness of being, the Divine cosmos, wounded by sin, and not the inauthentic world, not the chaos, not the kingdom of the prince of this world, not the non-being.» Nicolas Berdyaev,Christ and the World
I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men. (Closing lines of the Táin Bó Cúalnge)
