Faith

Last night was the third episode of the second season of 30 Days. The first of the season featured a legal immigrant from Cuba (who is now a minuteman) living 30 days with an illegal immigrant family. In the second episode, an out-of-work computer programmer travelled to India to train for and re-take his outsourced job. In last night's episode, an atheist lives 30 days with a Christian family. These shows are pretty interesting. Of course, nobody changes their point of view over night. It's nice, though, to see people with opposing points of view spend some time together, walk in someone elses shoes, communicate instead of talk AT each other, and find some common ground. Set your Tivo for the 30 Days marathon (7 episodes) this Saturday on FX (starting at noon eastern).

From an article titled "'End Times' Religious Groups Want Apocalypse Soon" by Louis Sahagun in the LA Times:

For thousands of years, prophets have predicted the end of the world. Today, various religious groups, using the latest technology, are trying to hasten it. Their endgame is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah. For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon. With that goal in mind, mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of Jesus' message. Doing so, they believe, will bring about the end, perhaps within two decades. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a far different vision. As mayor of Tehran in 2004, he spent millions on improvements to make the city more welcoming for the return of a Muslim messiah known as the Mahdi, according to a recent report by the American Foreign Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. To the majority of Shiites, the Mahdi was the last of the prophet Muhammad's true heirs, his 12 righteous descendants chosen by God to lead the faithful. Ahmadinejad hopes to welcome the Mahdi to Tehran within two years. Conversely, some Jewish groups in Jerusalem hope to clear the path for their own messiah by rebuilding a temple on a site now occupied by one of Islam's holiest shrines. Artisans have re-created priestly robes of white linen, gem-studded breastplates, silver trumpets and solid-gold menorahs to be used in the Holy Temple - along with two 6½-ton marble cornerstones for the building's foundation. Then there is Clyde Lott, a Mississippi revivalist preacher and cattle rancher. He is trying to raise a unique herd of red heifers to satisfy an obscure injunction in the Book of Numbers: the sacrifice of a blemish-free red heifer for purification rituals needed to pave the way for the messiah. So far, only one of his cows has been verified by rabbis as worthy, meaning they failed to turn up even three white or black hairs on the animal's body. Linking these efforts is a belief that modern technologies and global communications have made it possible to induce completion of God's plan within this generation... According to various polls, an estimated 40% of Americans believe that a sequence of events presaging the end times is already underway. Among the believers are pastors of some of the largest evangelical churches in America, who converged at Faith Central Bible Church in Inglewood in February to finalize plans to start 5 million new churches worldwide in 10 years... "As we advance around the world," Davis said, "we'll be shortening the time needed to fulfill that Great Commission. Then, the Bible says, the end will come."... A growing number of fundamentalist Christians in mostly Southern states are adopting Jewish religious practices to align themselves with prophecies saying that Gentiles will stand as one with Jews when the end is near. Evangelist John C. Hagee of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio has helped 12,000 Russian Jews move to Israel, and donated several million dollars to Israeli hospitals and orphanages. ...Bill McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach and co-founder of the evangelical Promise Keepers movement for men, which became huge in the 1990s, has had a devil of a time getting his own apocalyptic campaign off the ground. It's called The Road to Jerusalem, and its mission is to convert Jews to Christianity - while there is still time. "Our whole purpose is to hasten the end times," he said. "The Bible says Jews will be brought to jealousy when they see Christians and Jewish believers together as one - they'll want to be a part of that. That's going to signal Jesus' return." Jews and others who don't accept Jesus, he added matter-of-factly, "are toast."... Some Christians, such as Roman Catholics and some Protestant denominations, believe in the Second Coming but don't try to advance it. It's important to be ready for the Second Coming, they say, though its timetable cannot be manipulated.

From a Reuters article of the same title by Lesley Wroughton on Yahoo News:

The world's richest countries are falling short on pledges made last year to provide Africa with life-saving AIDS drugs, expanded trade and increased aid, said rocker-activist Bono… "They started out to climb an Everest but over the past year they got lost at base camp," Bono told Reuters in an interview after the release of a report by his lobby group Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa group, or DATA… The report said wealthy countries had delivered on their promise to cancel the debts of 19 poor countries, most of them in Africa, with 44 countries eligible under World Bank and International Monetary Fund programs… The report said relief from burdensome debt payments in Cameroon, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia has already swelled spending on education, health and AIDS… The report said much more was needed to provide access to drug therapy to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Globally, AIDS funding has grown to $8.3 billion in 2005 from $300 million in the late 1990's. In Africa, the number of people being treated rose to 800,000 last year from 100,000 in 2003. DATA said, however, that donors were spending half of what was needed to meet the goal of getting AIDS treatment to at least four million Africans by 2010. The report commended the United States for leadership on AIDS programs in Africa, and Britain and France for their contributions to a Geneva-based global fund for AIDS. Canada, Italy, Japan and Germany were laggards, it said. "Breaking your promise is always bad but breaking a promise to people whose life depends on it is unforgivable," said Bono, who recently traveled to Africa. The report castigated the G8 for failure to reach a trade deal that would open markets for African products

From an article titled "Obama: Democrats Must Court Evangelicals" by David Espo of the AP in The Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty. "It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'" he said. "Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats." …His speech included unusually personal references to religion, the type of remarks that usually come more readily from Republicans than Democrats. "Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me," he said of his walk down the aisle of the Trinity United Church of Christ. "I submitted myself to his will and dedicated myself to discovering his truth." …Obama coupled his advice with a warning. "Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith: the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps _ off rhythm _ to the gospel choir." At the same time, he said, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square."

Via Scott Freeman's blog, an excerpt from Michael Lerner's book, The Left Hand of God:

When Jews were enslaved by Egyptian imperial power, they were subjected to genocidal measures on the part of Pharoah (who sought to kill all the male children), constant physical oppression, material deprivation, and religious repression. It was in this context that they responded to the death of the Egyptian army sinking into the waters of the sea by celebrating God as a man of war: and proclaiming, "Your Right Hand O Lord, is Mighty in Power" (Exodus 15:3-6) Yet history often shows that this is a difficult balance to maintain, because once one justifies using violence and domination over others in some circumstances to overthrow oppressive rule, one can develop a psychological proclivity for using violence to solve one's pressing problems. What the prophets saw, and what has happened once again in contemporary Israel, is that the Torah tradition could be used to justify a social order that was in many respects the exact opposite of the loving message of God. When the message of the Right Hand of God, developed for the powerless, is adopted instead by the powerful, existing inequalities and systems of oppression are ignored and calls for social justice, peace and nonviolence are dismissed as pretty thoughts about some future messianic era (for Jews) or a Second Coming (for Christians). Arguing that the "real world" is too dangerous for the demands of the Torah, the Prophets, and Jesus to be taken seriously, the powerful insist that the only path to peace and social justice is to impose their own religous vision on the whole world, and to accept cruelty and injustice as inevitable until that apocalyptic transformation has taken place. The purveyors of this distortion can always refer, as they always have, to external threats as evidence that the world is not yet ready for the transformative call of the Left Hand of God. Jesus railed against the Jewish establishment of his day, like other prophets had done in their own time, and once again highlighted a commitment to the poor and the oppressed. Jesus insisted that people not duplicate Rome's oppressive rule in the way that they treated each other. His followers and many early Christians understood this message clearly "understood, as did the powerful in Rome, that it was a revolutionary message calling upon the faithful to reject the power of tyrants and embrace the power of love, which would ultimately be more forceful than anything Rome could deliver. Just as the message of Torah was tragically turned into its opposite by "the religious" and their establishment, so Christianity, taken over by Constantine, became its opposite, a system that provided justification for the powerful while ignoring or even actively subverting the needs of the poor and the powerless" These perversions of Judaism and Christianity took place in the name of the original vision, drawing on the texts and the justifications that could be found there because at one point those triumphalist texts had provided needed empowerment for the poor and the downtrodden, and had been a psychologically necessary buttress against despair. In the United States, the powerful have appropriated God and religion to justify imperial rule around the globe. They are not intent on using power to rectify the situation of the powerless. On the contrary, as their domestic moves make clear, they redistribute wealth upward from the poor to the rich. The global system of capital that they have created has had that same impact, increasing the suffering of the powerless while empowering a small class within each society to act as the guardian of the interests of Western capital in third-world countries. The Religious Right allies with and provides much of the ideological cover for this development. It allows the powerful to worship their own power and then, taking the work of their own hands, declare it the God to be worshipped by all. This is pure idolatry. It allows America, the most powerful and arrogant of all the arrogant and powerful nations that exist today, to identify itself in its own mind with the oppressed children of Israel and thus to imagine that its use of force is divinely sanctioned.