Religious Follies

Wacky

Pope Against Gay Marriage, Big Surprise
So Pope Sideous made some remarks prior to his latest America tour. He's against abortion, in favor of nuclear disarmament, and oh yeah, opposed to gay marriage. Yeah. No big shockers here.

He just says that about gay marriage so that his male companion and longtime secretary doesn't get any ideas about popping the question, though.

Alternately: POPE SIDEOUS IS COMING! HIDE THE YOUNGLINGS

Source: Page One Q

Witches
The Scottish parliament is the target of a very small campaign to pardon all the 'witches' that were convicted of witching back when it was a crime to be a witcher.

Witch.

Lawmakers in Scotland are being asked to push for a posthumous pardon of everyone found guilty under ancient witchcraft laws, including a spiritualist who was convicted during World War II.

One petition, signed online by 206 people, calls for members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) to urge the executive in Edinburgh to appeal to Britain's interior minister to reconsider a previous refusal to pardon Helen Duncan.

The spiritualist was convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1735 and jailed for nine months in 1944, after a seance in which a dead sailor was said to have disclosed the loss of a British battleship and most of her crew.

The British authorities had kept secret the sinking to maintain morale during World War II and it was not disclosed for several months.

...

The second petition, signed on the Scottish Parliament's website by 69 people, urges lawmakers to push the executive to posthumously pardon everyone convicted in Scotland under witchcraft laws between 1565 and 1736.

Supporting research to the petition said about 4,000 people, most of them women, were accused of being witches, with witch-hunting rife particularly in the region south of Edinburgh.

I for one am curious how she actually found out about the battleship thing. Also, on the second petition, why stop at 1736? Was it ok to persecute people for witchcraft after that?

Source: Raw Story

Hagee
So St. John McCain got a big religious endorsement this week from John Hagee, a lunatic fringe Protestant bible thump in the Deep South. McCain for one says he's 'honored' and 'pleased'.

The problem is, Hagee isn't just your average lunatic. He's a virulent anti-catholic one.

But Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement Thursday that Hagee has written extensively in negative ways about the Catholic Church, "calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system.' "

Yes, that's right, grandstander in chief Bill Donohue is on the case!

It's hilarious when these right-wingers eat their own.

Of course, Hagee has other controversial positions.

JH: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.

The newspaper carried the story in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride parades.

So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

God wiped out New Orleans because of teh gay. Good to know. Here I thought hurricanes were caused by seasonal increases in water temperature.

All Muslims are killers, according to Hagee

JH: There is really no room for compromise between radical Islam --

TG: I'm not talking about radical Islam. I'm just talking about Islam in general.

JH: Well Islam in general -- those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.

He's also ranted about Harry Potter being either Satan or the tool of Satan, it's hard to tell which.

Hagee's biggest 'policy' position is conditional support for Isreal because he believes it's necessary to jumpstart the Rapture.

A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. . . . [Rev.] Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West.

Great job, St. John McCain! You're in bed with a loon!

Sources: Salon.com
Firedoglake

Jamaica Hates Teh Gay Too
Jamaica likes to bill itself as a tourist paradise, but don't go if you're one of them there limp-wristed nancy-boys.

MANDEVILLE, Jamaica: One night in January, Andre and some friends were finishing dinner when a mob showed up at the front gate. Yelling anti-gay slurs and waving machetes, sticks and knives, 15 to 20 men kicked in the front door of the home he and his friends had rented and set upon them.

"I thought I was dead," Andre, a 20-year-old student, recounted in a faint voice, still scared enough that he was in hiding and did not want his full name to be used.

The mob pummeled him senseless. His right hand, the one he used to shield himself from the blows, is covered with bandages. His skull has deep cut marks and his ear was sliced in half, horizontally. Doctors managed to sew it back together, and he can hear out of it again.

Being gay in Jamaica is not easy. For years, human rights groups have denounced the harassment, beating and even killing of gays here, to little effect. No official statistic has been compiled on the number of attacks. But a recent string of especially violent, high-profile assaults has brought fresh condemnation to an island otherwise known as an easygoing tourist haven.

Naturally, the Jamaicans have a good reason for this savage behavior.

God tells them it's right.

Disapproval of gays is an entrenched part of island life, rooted, Jamaicans say, in the country's Christian tradition. The Bible condemns homosexuality, they say. But critics say islanders are selective in the verses they cite, and the rage at gay sex contrasts sharply with Jamaicans' embrace of casual sex among heterosexuals, which is considered part of the Caribbean way.

While some other Caribbean tourist destinations have made a point of marketing to gay travelers, Jamaica has not joined the trend.

The double standard on the island is reflected in the anti-gay lyrics of Jamaican dance hall music, the headlines of some hyperventilating tabloids - "homo" is the term most often used - and the fact that homosexuality remains illegal here, with the specific crime called "buggery."

...

No place has shown that hostility recently more than Mandeville, a prosperous and quiet town in Jamaica's South Coast area. A couple of weeks back, a local tabloid, The Jamaica Star, printed a screaming headline when a local policeman, disturbed by the attack on the dinner party guests, decided to disclose his sexual orientation to the paper. He said that he had been harassed regularly by his colleagues because he is gay and that the police did not take violence against gays seriously.

"Jamaica's motto is 'Out of Many, One People,' and I say, 'What about us?' " said the policeman, Michael Hayden. Hayden, who has since taken leave from the force, is now in hiding out of fear that his colleagues might kill him.

...


Not even funerals are safe for gays. A year ago, just down the road from the disrupted dinner party, a gay businessman's funeral was interrupted by a mob outside the church. The mob, outraged that effeminate mourners wearing tight pants and shirts had dared to show up, threw bottles and rocks through the windows, then barged inside and ordered that the service be stopped.

The pastor, who had not known the dead man was gay, pressed on, furious at the protesters for what he considered a defiling of his church.

"The same religion they use to justify these attacks, I use to show what they do is wrong," said the pastor, the Reverend Amos Campbell, of True Vine True Holiness Church. No one was prosecuted in the episode.

...

The commander of the Mandeville police station, Inspector Claude Smith, while making it clear that his religious beliefs firmly oppose homosexuality, rejected the notion that the police condone violence against gays. Enforcement of the law against homosexuality, he said, should be up to the police, not angry mobs.

Wowsers, huh? Machete wielding mobs, cops in on the deal, even gay policemen driven into hiding, fearing for their lives.

What a country.

Source: The International Herald Tribune

Nigeria: Still a Craphole
A big article in The Atlantic about the low level religious war in Nigeria between Muslims and Christians, Christians and other Christians, Muslims and other Muslims... you get the idea.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with 140 million people (one-seventh of all Africans), and it’s one of the few nations divided almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. Blessed with the world’s 10th-largest oil reserves, it is also one of the continent’s richest and most influential powers—as well as one of its most corrupt democracies. Last year’s presidential election in particular—in which President Olusegun Obasanjo, an evangelical Christian, handed power to a northern Muslim, President Umaru Yar’Adua—was a farce. Ballot boxes were stuffed by thugs or carted off empty by armed heavies in the pay of political candidates. Across the country, political power is a passport to wealth: according to Human Rights Watch, anywhere from $4 billion to $8 billion in government money has been embezzled annually for the last eight years. The state has all but abdicated its responsibility for the welfare of its people, roughly half of whom live on less than $1 a day.

In this vacuum, religion has become a powerful source of identity. Northern Nigeria has one of Africa’s oldest and most devout Islamic communities, which was galvanized, like many others, in the 1980s by the global Islamic reawakening that followed the Iranian revolution. For Christians, too, in Nigeria, there’s been a revolution: high birthrates and aggressive evangelization over the past century have increased the number of believers from 176,000, or 1.1 percent of the early-20th-century population, to more than 51 million, or more than a third now. Thanks to this explosive growth, the demographic and geographic center of global Christianity will have moved, by 2050, to northern Nigeria, within the Muslim world.

...

While religion became a source of friction in Nigeria during the Biafran civil war in the late 1960s, the trouble between Christians and Muslims intensified in the 1980s, when the first oil boom fizzled and the ensuing economic downturn led to violence. Since then, thousands have been killed in riots between the two groups sparked by various events: aggressive campaigns by foreign evangelists; the implementation in 1999 and 2000 of sharia, or Islamic law, in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states; the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001; and the 2002 Miss World pageant, when a local Christian reporter, Isioma Daniel, outraged Muslims by writing in one of Nigeria’s national papers, This Day, that the Prophet Muhammad would have chosen a wife from among the contestants. Most recently, in 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.

“These conflicts are a result of secular processes,” said Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, one of Nigeria’s leading intellectuals and a top executive of one of the country’s oldest banks, FirstBank. “It’s about bad government, economic inequality, and poverty—a struggle for resources.” When a government fails its people, they turn elsewhere to safeguard themselves and their futures, and in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, they have turned first to religion. Here, then, is the truth behind what Samuel Huntington famously calls religion’s “bloody” geographic borders: outbreaks of violence result not simply from a clash between two powerful religious monoliths, but from tensions at the most vulnerable edges where they meet—zones of desperation and official neglect where faith becomes a rallying cry in the struggle for land, water, and work.

So a lack of government turns people to religion to solve their problems.

How's that working out?

A few hundred yards down the road from the church, there’s a cornfield. In it, a row of mounds: more mass graves. White signs tally the dead below in green paint: 110, 50, 65, 100, 55, 25, 60, 20, 40, 105. Two months after the church was razed, Christian men and boys surrounded Yelwa. Many were bare-chested; others wore shirts on which they’d reportedly pinned white name tags identifying them as members of the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organization founded in the 1970s to give Christians a collective and unified voice as strong as that of Muslims. Each tag had a number instead of a name: a code, it seemed, for identification. They attacked the town. According to Human Rights Watch, 660 Muslims were massacred over the course of the next two days, including the patients in the Al-Amin clinic. Twelve mosques and 300 houses went up in flames. Young girls were marched to a nearby Christian town and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many were raped, and 50 were killed.

So, about how you'd expect.

Are outside religious authorities any help?

At the time of the massacre, Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings. He has since lost his bid for another term but, as primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of 18 million Anglicans. He is a colleague of my father, who was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America from 1997 to 2006. But the American Episcopals’ election of an openly homosexual bishop in 2003, which Archbishop Akinola denounced as “satanic,” created distance between them.

...

When asked if those wearing name tags that read “Christian Association of Nigeria” had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,” he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on, “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”

Not so much, no.

But they've got new, American-style Megachurches now! That working any better?

Democracy, Nigerians told me repeatedly, is a numbers game. That’s why whoever has more believers is on top. In that competition, Christianity has a recruiting tool beyond the frontline gospel preached by those such as Archbishop Akinola: Pentecostalism, one of the world’s most diverse and fastest-growing religious movements. In Nigeria, the oil boom of the 1970s brought a massive movement of people into cities looking for work. That boom’s collapse spurred the growth of the Pentecostal Gospel of Prosperity, with its emphasis on good health and getting rich; and of the African Initiated Churches, or AICs, which began about 100 years ago, when several charismatic African prophets successfully converted millions to Christianity. Today, AIC members account for one-quarter of Africa’s 417 million Christians.

One bustling Pentecostal hub, Canaanland, the 565-acre headquarters of the Living Faith Church, has three banks, a bakery, and its own university, Covenant, which is the sister school of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Canaanland is about an hour and a half north of Lagos, which has an estimated population of 12 million and is projected to become the world’s 12th-largest city by 2020. With 300,000 people worshipping at a single service at the Canaanland headquarters alone and 300 branches across the country, Living Faith is one of Nigeria’s megachurches, and the dapper Bishop David Oyedepo is its prophet. The bishop, whose bald pate glistens above deep-set eyes and dazzling teeth, never wanted to be pastor: he had no interest in being poor, he told me. “When God made me a pastor, I wept. I hated poverty in the Church—how can the children of God live as rats?”

Bishop Oyedepo built Canaanland to preach the Gospel of Prosperity. As he said, “If God is truly a father, there is no father that wants his children to be beggars. He wants them to prosper.” In the parking lot at Canaanland, beyond the massive complex of unusually clean toilets, flapping banners promise: Whatsoever you ask in my name, he shall give you, and By his stripes he gives us blessings.

Oh yeah, that sounds promising. God will give you money.

Muslims? Want to get in on the crass, brazen hucksterism?

The Christian Gospel of Prosperity is so powerful that it has spawned a unique Nigerian phenomenon: an Islamic organization called Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi (NASFAT). The name is drawn from a verse in the eighth chapter of the Koran: “There is no help except from Allah.” This is the same chapter, “The Spoils of War,” or Al-Anfal, that Saddam Hussein cited to justify his genocide against the Kurds. But NASFAT has no interest in violence. Instead, the organization is based on economic empowerment and prosperity with an Islamic spin. Started with about a dozen members in the 1990s, NASFAT now has 1.2 million members in Nigeria and branches in 25 other countries. The organization has an entrepreneurship program, a clinic, a prison-outreach program, a task force to address HIV/AIDS, a travel agency, and a soft-drink company called Nasmalt, whose profits go to the poor. It even offers matchmaking. Although many conservatives believe that this engagement with the secular world is haram, forbidden, and distinctly un-Islamic, NASFAT argues that it is the only way to survive in the marketplace.

“We are competing for faithfuls,” NASFAT’s executive secretary, Zikrullah Kunle Hassan, said one blistering Sunday last August in Lagos. “Many people now want God. This is happening especially among the youth, that they feel they need to be committed to faith.” Gesturing to the streets choked with more than 100,000 men and women clad in shining white as they came from a prayer service at the Lagos Secretariat Mosque, he explained that NASFAT meets on Sundays so that Muslims have something to do while Christians attend church. “The space on Sunday is usually not dominated by Islam, but other faiths and other values. But when our people come here, they come and drink from the fountain of Islam.”

The prayer ground looked like a fair. Hawkers sold lemons from a wheelbarrow. Small booths offered pretty, scalloped hijabs, embroidered with “NASFAT” in blue. Men sat on prayer mats eating rice, while women attended a lecture on ways to make money that are in keeping with Islam.

I'll take that as a yes.

Are there any religious figures trying to help stop the fighting? Sort of. The article goes in depth discussing an interfaith group founded by two former rival militia leaders, one Christian, one Muslim.

For more than a decade now, James and Ashafa have traveled to Nigerian cities and to other countries where Christians and Muslims are fighting. They tell their stories of how they manipulated religious texts to get young people into the streets to shed blood. Both still adhere strictly to the scripture; they just read it more deeply and emphasize different verses.

Ahh, isn't that nice. Maybe there's hope for tolerance and understanding after all?

On one closed door, a bumper sticker read Combat AIDS with Shari’a. The method was clear: abstinence. The imam and the pastor share the same conservative moral values, which has also helped them to find common ground.

...

He identifies himself very much as a fundamentalist and sees himself as one who emulates Muhammad. Although he and Pastor James don’t discuss it, he also proselytizes among Christians. “I want James to die as a Muslim, and he wants me to die as a Christian. My Islam is proselytizing. It’s about bringing the whole world to Islam,” he told me that day.

Such missionary zeal drives both men, infusing their struggle to rise above their history of conflict with the same undercurrent of competitive tension that runs across the Middle Belt and the continent. As Pastor James told me at his office, Peace Hall, in Kaduna, he still believes strongly in absolute and exclusive salvation mandated by the gospel: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’” He still challenges Christians to rely on the strict and literal word, and he’s still uncompromising on fundamental issues of Christianity. “We see same-sex marriages in the United States as signs of end times: it’s Sodom and Gomorrah,” he told me. “But I also want to say you can believe what you want to believe. We have to find a space for coexistence.”

Not so much on the tolerance and compassion, I guess. But hey, this sounds like it's going to work out just fine!

*rolls eyes*

Honestly. I just cannot fathom this kind of insanity. It makes my head hurt.

Finally, the article managed to ask a seemingly 'deep' philosophical question that, in fact, has a remarkably simple answer:

So if religion has proven not to safeguard the car, not to cure malaria, not even to stop politicians from stuffing ballot boxes, is it worth fighting and dying for?

No.

This has been, as Atrios frequently says, another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

Source: The Atlantic