jimrigby.org

And finally from the Department of Obscenities, Rush Limgaugh has protected his status as bottom feeder in the journalistic aquarium.

 “There’s a movement to normalize pedophilia,” Limbaugh said. “Don’t pooh-pooh it”

See if you can follow Rush’s logic here. The left moved to legalize marriage for two loving respectual people of the same sex. Rush doesn’t approve of gay marriage, and since all of Rush’s opponents have hidden motives, we need only board the “Slippery Slope Express” to find the true motives of these liberal beasts.

“There is a movement on to normalize pedophilia, and I guarantee you your reaction to that is probably much the same as your reaction when you first heard about gay marriage. What has happened to gay marriage? It’s become normal — and in fact, with certain people in certain demographics it’s the most important issue in terms of who they vote for. So don’t pooh-pooh. There’s a movement to normalize pedophilia. Don’t pooh-pooh it. The people behind it are serious, and you know the left as well as I do. They glom onto something and they don’t let go.”

Rush forgot to use the “frogs in boiling water” analogy, but you get his point. Any effort to treat gay people fairly is a Trojan Horse for the left’s real purpose which is to “normalize” love between men and boys, donkeys and poodles, and fish and birds. Thank God there is a man like Rush who understands so perfectly how perverts really think. Don’t ask how.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/08/rush_limbaugh_left_will_normalize_pedophilia_like_it_did_gay_marriage/

An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor describes a growing movement among evangelical churches to advocate for the rights of immigrant people. People who have never really read the Bible do not realize that its central story is of a nation of immigrants that were brought together as a nation to be a light to the world. The very covenant and promised land was contingent on God’s “loving mercy” to those immigrants and Israel’s promise not to exploit other helpless people the way they had been exploited. The prophets who predicted that fall of that nation continually referenced an absence of justice as the reason for Israel’s fall.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that evangelical Christians would move from the marginal moralistic concerns of the Bible to it’s ethical heart of justice. There are also other, more practical reasons for the change. Amy E. Black writes:

Much like the nation, evangelicalism is becoming more ethnically diverse. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 13 percent of Hispanic Americans describe themselves as evangelical Protestants. Immigrant churches are growing rapidly, and many denominations have created new structures and leadership posts designed to serve Hispanic congregants. Immigration – including illegal immigration – touches the lives of many in the pews, and church leaders want to help.

Also, greater numbers of Evangelicals are worshiping alongside documented and undocumented immigrants, getting to know them and listening to their stories.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0108/Why-Evangelicals-are-the-new-partners-for-immigration-reform

 

“Aravosis—a journalist and activist who defended a US Navy sailor for challenging DADT in 1998—learned from a military contact that his website was blocked on the Pentagon’s official computer system. He then had several other contacts take screenshots of websites that were blocked on Pentagon computers. Aravosis discovered that LGBT websites like the Human Rights Campaign blog and OutServe-SLDN, a website co-founded by Air Force officer Josh Seefried that supports gay members of the military, were blocked. Progressive sites like Daily Kos made the blocked list as well. But the conservative websites of Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, as well as anti-gay rights groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, were accessible” -Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones

The Department of Defense has issued a statement saying that it does not block LGBT websites on purpose. It claimed that software filters screened certain blog and personal page categories. Insisting that the blocks were accidental, they promised to look into the matter. They did not explain why anti-gay sites with the same features were not blocked, nor why they have not dealt with the issue after over a year of complaints by gay activists.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/pentagon-blocks-lgbt-websites

It is no virtue to be color blind in a racist culture. To call for a level playing field is no call for justice so long as some of the contestants are born on third base and others in the bleachers.

(Originally posted February 2012)

I believe it was Aristotle who said that wonder is the beginning of philosophy and Emerson who contended that stars are the daily bread of the soul. Great minds seem to make time for musing on life’s mystery.

As I write these words, beams from the sunrise are streaming from behind my shoulder.  There were ages when the entire village would have risen to greet this miracle, but on this morning, the entire village seems to be dutifully entering the ramp of the nearby interstate highway.  I can see people move their visors to block the irritating rays of the morning sun.  I can imagine them mindlessly turning on the car radio, and moving like granules of an amoebae into the heart of the city.

This absence of wonder produces an enormous poverty in our lives.  Nothing else in life quite fills that void.  For many, the world seems to have lost its luster, but it is our own eyes that have grown dull.  “The one who cannot wonder,” Carlyle claimed, “is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no eye.”

It is not enough to console ourselves with miraculous stories of how some religious hero calmed the storm or was lifted to the sky.  Our souls hunger to experience miracles of our own.  And, in fact, miracle stories were intended to meet just that need.  It is not that Jesus was physically lifted into the sky, but that the minds of the disciples were lifted to see Christ everywhere.  It’s not that Jesus changed the weather pattern, but that the disciples learned to see the peace of God in the middle of their storms. The stories of scripture were not written to teach use about magical people and places somewhere else. They are intended to inspire us so we can move to greet this day with reverence and awe.

It is a poor imagination which can only see the miraculous in violations of nature. If we go out to the nearest woods and really listen, we will soon be overwhelmed by the intelligence expressed in that spot.  Looking in the eyes of a beloved pet, we soon feel an eerie sense of intelligence that transcends our ordinary perspective.  To wonder at such things is the very food of our souls.

Do you remember what it was like during the Bush years trying to talk with your conservative friends about what the President was doing? Do you remember that glassy look in their eyes, and their evasive answers when you asked about the evils of Bush’s undeclared wars and torture of prisoners without due process?

And do you remember when Obama was running for office and spoke of transparency in government, the evils of torture and the importance of due process? Do you remember that sense of smug superiority you felt to your conservative friends? Do you remember watching the Daily Show’s revelations of Bush’s crimes and thinking, “this is why I call myself a liberal?”

Now take a deep breath and swig of coffee before you read the next paragraph.

Now let us move the clock forward to January 8, 2013. Today we read that President Obama has just named John Brenner a Bush era figure to head up the CIA. Brenner is perhaps best known for defending Bush era torture and domestic spying, and is remembered as the architect of Obama’s kill list. Why does a nice person like President Obama need to surround himself with assassins? Why would someone who wants to end war crimes punish the whistle blowers, but not the torturers?

Glenn Greenwald, now of the Guardian UK, notes:

…this is worth commenting on because the drastic change between the reaction to Brennan in 2008 and now is revealing. The New York Times article this morning on the appointment claims that “it is uncertain whether the torture issue will now cause any problems for Mr. Brennan.” Of course, there is nothing at all uncertain about that: “the torture issue” won’t cause any problems for Brennan, as it did in 2008, because Obama has buried that issue with his “Look Forward, not Backward” decrees; because most people who claimed concern over such issues back in 2008 have resigned themselves to Obama’s posture in this area; and because, with very rare exception, there are no more serious campaigns mounted against Obama’s decisions except from the American Right.

Beth Brogan, a staff writer for Common Dreams reports the following warning from Michael Boyle, a former adviser to the President:

“Obama has “been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor” says Michael Boyle, former adviser to the president,

Boyle argues that the administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” because it has reportedly begun counting all military-age men in the strike zone as militants unless the administration has clear evidence to the contrary, the Guardian reports. As a result, the standards the US uses to select targets has been “gradual(ly) loosening.”

I am writing this open letter to my liberal friends knowing it may fall on the same numbness that overcame my conservative friends. But we, as human beings, have a duty to be bigger than our nation, much less our political party. We have a duty to stand up for all people everywhere. Glenn Greenwald is one of the few voices willing to weigh his liberal friends on the same scale he used to weight his friends on the right:

It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush’s most radical policies is not only Obama’s choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan’s eagerness to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama’s calculus.

Not a pleasant topic I realize, but a critically important one. I am asking you, my liberal friend, when human rights activists point that Bush and Obama’s foreign policies amount to much the same thing for the wretched of the earth, will your eyes glass over? Will you defend your candidate no matter what? Or will you take up the painful task of being truly ethical, which means weighing the claims of friend and foe alike on the same scale?

As I have gotten older I have not lost the ability to ask life’s great questions, but those questions have gotten fewer and deeper. At this point of my life, if I want to discern the fulcrum of another person’s very soul, there is only one question of importance. I no longer have any interest in asking whether or not people believe in God but seek, instead, to discover whether or not they believe in love.

Are you liberal or conservative? Do you believe in God or not? Whenever we reduce reality to such either/or categories we are in trouble regardless of which half we choose. The atheist Ingersoll and the believer Gandhi would have more in common with one another than either would have with the majority of their own group. Great souls stand like Colossus spanning the polarities of ordinary thought.

Susan Jacoby has an article in the New York Times called “The Blessings of Atheism” lamenting the unfair perception that atheists believe nothing.

This widespread misapprehension that atheists believe in nothing positive is one of the main reasons secularly inclined Americans — roughly 20 percent of the population — do not wield public influence commensurate with their numbers. One major problem is the dearth of secular community institutions. But the most powerful force holding us back is our own reluctance to speak, particularly at moments of high national drama and emotion, with the combination of reason and passion needed to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual robot.

Jacoby rightly points out that a non-theist does not have to go through the useless quest to explain why God lets bad things happen to good people.

 It is primarily in the face of suffering, whether the tragedy is individual or collective, that I am forcefully reminded of what atheism has to offer. When I try to help a loved one losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.

….The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next. Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

That is all fair enough, but I think Jacoby is missing the point about why atheists are so easily misheard. She says modern atheists must emulate the great non-theists of the past like Robert Ingersoll. But I think Ingersoll was different than many atheists today, in that the core of his life did not consist in ridiculing religion, but in trying to give people something better.

Ingersoll called himself a “freethinker.’ While his attacks on superstition were un-withering, he did not forge his whole identity around refuting mistakes he thought other people were making, which is why I think non-theists should ditch the name “atheist” and identify themselves with their positive traits like “freethinkers,” “Humanists, “Secularists,” and so forth. I realize that refuting superstition is part of the calling of being a freethinker, but the very word “atheist” sounds like a rebuttal rather than a proposition.

If we went back in time to ancient Greece and wanted to teach an enlightened world view, it would be extremely short sighted to call ourselves “The Anti-Zeus League.”  We would get more attention to be sure, and we would have the sick pleasure of rocking other people’s boats, but if we cared about the people and wanted to lift them out of superstition, we would need to give them a new paradigm that wasn’t centered on believing or disbelieving in Zeus at all.

Even thought I am a religious person, I agree with Jacoby’s point. It is extremely unfair to say that atheists are less positive than theists. Still, if a person is consistently being misunderstood, it might be time to come up with some other words that will be more easily heard. “Atheism” is a word that defines the speaker relative to someone else’s belief, and so makes it hard to de-center the conversation from its theological underpinnings. My suggestion would be for non-theists not merely to copy compassionate freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll, but actually to join their ranks by ditching the word “atheist” and coming up with names that describe their own compassionate and rational center.