my latest blog over at goldcoast.com.au … Lying in the name of God …

you can read it here or you can read it here.

IT’S been fascinating in the last 24 hours to watch the comments accumulating on the story we published yesterday about religion and the Census.

One commenter — ‘Tim’ — managed to express his opinion very succinctly: ”No funding for imaginary friend.”

Five words that sum up what a lot of people feel … that government funding for organisations which support one particular belief system says plenty about that government’s judgement of other belief systems. And it says nothing positive, and certainly nothing about tolerance.

The fact that quite large proportions of that government’s constituents may not be members of the country’s supposedly predominant belief system is precisely why we have a Census, of course.

For those who haven’t read the latest brouhaha over the ‘what religion are you’ part of the Census — here’s a brief summary: The Christians want us to mark ourselves as Christian on the Census, even if we’re not. That way the ‘undesirables’, that is the non-Christians among us, won’t get any government funding.

That’s a gross over-simplification of course, but then so is the hysterical flapping going on about what is essentially housekeeping.

The Census is about finding out who actually lives here. It’s a collection of facts.

Wow. There’s a concept.

Fancy gathering facts so that we can have rational debate in this country instead of the usual blowhard, fear-mongering and obfuscation that usually passes for public discourse.

Really, Christians? Really?

You’re so insecure about your place in Australian society that you want us to LIE — how very Christian — about our beliefs just to make sure your church schools get the funding you think they deserve?

I say again … Wow.

Of course, as usual, this all boils down to racism, xenophobia and intolerance.

What the so-called Christians are saying is ‘be careful, Australia, because if we don’t all pretend to be good Christians and all the Muslims tick the box marked ‘Muslim’, the government might be forced to give the nasty foreigners somewhere to worship … oooooo’.

Boogaboogabooga.

Please.

One day the extremists in the Christian faith (and in Islam) will realise that it is possible to be a good, caring, moral, productive, non-threatening, generous person even without believing in their God. Or any God, for that matter.

When that day comes we’ll all have to find another reason for hating each other enough to kill in the name of a belief system.

We will find another reason, of course, because humans wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t arguing with someone about something, but at least we won’t be pretending it’s all in the name of ‘God’.

Hypocrisy, thy name is ‘organised religion’.

one is amused

religion … yesss …

found at The Designer Drug.

pope benedict confirms his spot at the top of the shitpile

no big surprises here, but it’s always good to know who the complete arseclowns are.

POPE Benedict XVI has called laws ignoring the difference between the sexes an “attack” on creation just days after Portugal moved to legalise gay marriage.

Creatures, including humans, “can be protected or endangered”, the pope, 82, told the Vatican diplomatic corps in a traditional January address focusing mainly on environmental issues.

“One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes,” he said, citing “certain countries in Europe or North and South America”.

Portugal’s parliament last Friday approved plans to legalise gay marriage, and a final vote could occur before a visit by the pope in May.

Also last week, two men became the first homosexual couple to legally marry in Latin America, in the southern Argentine province of Ushuaia.

“Freedom cannot be absolute,” the pontiff said.

“For man, the path to be taken cannot be determined by caprice or willfulness, but must rather correspond to the structure willed by the Creator,” he said.

with all due respect to all the catholics out there – you don’t really take this twat seriously do you? here’s a guy in drag, in charge of a priesthood more famous for child sexual abuse and keeping the poor and oppressed of the world fearful, poor and oppressed, than for any kind of sensible pastoral care, telling us how to live our lives.

queen, please.

get yourself a decent tailor Benny, and give a few priestly boy-diddlers up to the cops and then maybe we’ll talk.

(link)

paul haggis quits scientology … my hero

i loathe scientology. i think it’s evil. if the so-called church of scientology ceased to exist tomorrow i’d be a very happy woman.

i love what paul haggis does with film, whether he’s directing it or writing for it. he wrote and directed crash, and in the valley of elah. he wrote million dollar baby, flags of our fathers, casino royale, letters from iwo jima, quantum of solace. the guy’s good.

finding out he was a scientologist was disappointing. waking up to find he’s told ‘em to go fuck themselves because of their attitude to gays … AWESOME.

The Canadian-born director, who scooped Oscars for the hit films Crash and Million Dollar Baby, resigned from the organisation in a letter to church spokesman Tommy Davis.

The letter, which surfaced on the blog of former Scientologist Marty Rathbun, was dated August 19.

Blasting the highly secretive organisation as “morally reprehensible”, Haggis took Davis to task for not denouncing statements by the church’s San Diego branch supporting Proposition 8, a controversial ban on gay marriage in California.

“The church’s refusal to denounce the actions of these bigots, hypocrites and homophobes is cowardly. I can think of no other word,” Haggis wrote in the August 19 letter that was later published on the blog of former Scientologist Marty Rathbun.

“Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.”

Haggis, 56, said he had urged Davis to speak out against the ballot measure but received no reply.

He also criticised the church for its alleged policy of “disconnection” in which members must cut ties with anyone deemed critical of the organisation that counts Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Fatal Attraction star Anne Archer – Davis’s mother – among its followers.

Haggis said his wife, Deborah Rennard, had been forced to “disconnect” from her parents after they resigned from the church, and did not speak to them for a year and a half.

“Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them,” Haggis wrote.

“I refused to do so. I’ve never been good at following orders, especially when I find them morally reprehensible.”

He repeated accusations by other former Scientologists that church leader David Miscavige routinely abused staff mentally and physically, and that the group denigrates former members by leaking details of their private lives to the media.

arseclowns. good on you, paul. read the whole thing at news.com.au

three brilliant articles that were tweeted today

forgive me, i’ve lost track of who tweeted what. but these are crackers.

1. an interview with melissa lacewell-harris, a regular guest on the rachel maddow shadow and as about a smart a woman as walks the planet. this appeared on feministing.com.

Q: In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge facing feminism today?

A: The lack of a left in US discourse and electoral politics. It’s the same challenge that’s facing labor organizing and progressive issues on a bigger scale. Our entire political spectrum has moved so far to the right that most of what the left does is spend its time defending centrist positions that are really quite right of where we would like to be, but which are really the only tenable possibilities given the public discourse.

For example, last night, I loved Barack’s speech, it was great, but did he really have to spend that time saying that he would ensure that there would be no federal money spent for the provision of the termination of pregnancies? That’s preposterous. It’s stupid, and it’s also bad environmental policy and bad global policy.

The State has an interest in poor women being able to have full access to the best medical care and reproductive options that are legal and available to them. And it’s always only poor women: wealthy women have always been able to seek out secure termination services from private physicians, always. So this is always a question about women without that kind of access. But there was no space for us, as feminists, to say “What the fuck?!” because what we have to do is nod, and keep moving, to at least get coverage so we can go get our colds and our cancer taken care of. But meanwhile, these fundamental issues of reproductive rights are still used in the batting cage of partisan politics.

you can read the whole thing here.

2. a blog post from Dan Gillmor over at Mediactive, entitled, Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran A News Organization:

2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labor — and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back — but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.

3. To that end, transparency would be a core element of our journalism. One example of many: Every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know” — a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organization’s website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes, which exist in every story.

read all 11 ideas here.

3. the more i read of The Nation, the more i love it. this is an extract from max blumenthal’s latest book, republican gomorrah:

This sort of reasoning had been seen before, from figures ranging from Ted Bundy to Tom DeLay to Ted Haggard. When confronted with their own crimes and sins, these movement icons found that faulting the prince of darkness was far easier than accepting personal responsibility.

By the time Colorado Springs completed its mourning period, the Republican primary had begun in earnest. The primary field was a cast of deeply flawed figures, each one less attractive to the conservative movement than the last. Almost none of them boasted culture war bonafides, yet all campaigned as though their ambitions depended on “value voters.” Ironically, the Republican politician most despised by the Christian right, Senator John McCain, a sworn enemy of conservative icons from Tom DeLay to Jerry Falwell, secured the nomination. McCain immediately lurched to the right, embarking on a doomed strategy that would ratify the self-destruction of his party.

read the whole extract here.

dear freckled boo

here’s what you said:

That’s sort of a funny statement, considering the majority of the media is ran by and has been ran by liberal/left wingers for years. That’s not an opinion, that’s fact. And you thinking that that statement you wrote is true, amongst many of your other ones, proves that you feed into what American liberal media has to tell you.

I’m a bisexual Christian, I’m too liberal to please conservatives and too conservative to please liberals. I would think you and I would have more in common…but in all actuality, you’re quite offensive and close minded in most everything you write about, especially when it comes to politics and religion.

It’s sad really.
Here’s to wishing you a happier heart and a more welcoming one as well.

it’s always the conservatives who believe the left runs the media, and it’s always the liberals who think the right does … *shrugs* … twas ever so, and will ever be … and actually i wasn’t talking about who runs the media. i actually think who owns what balances out in the end.

what i WAS saying was that the mainstream media (everywhere in the main, but particularly in the US where one of the worst presidents in history was given a free ride for eight years, or almost eight years) isn’t actually very good. are in fact, just a tad cowardly, conservative in their approach to stories, if not politically, and, in the main, swimming in the shallow end of just about everything.

my point was just the maddow, maher and stewart have the balls to go straight to the heart of matters – maddow’s brilliant handling of the farce that is health-care reform in the US is a perfect example of this.

that’s all. what you’re being bisexual and christian has to do with it, well, that’s a little mystery for you to keep close, i suspect.

as for whether i’m ‘offensive and close-minded in most everything i write about’ … well, there’s the door. i don’t see anyone twisting your arm to make you read what i write here.

thanks for the feedback – always appreciated.

lutherans see the light

while it’s fair to say that i loathe organised religion – any organised religion – with a passion, i am prepared to give credit where it’s due. the lutherans have shifted somewhat in the direction of the 21st century …

MINNEAPOLIS: The nation’s largest Lutheran denomination took openly gay clergy more fully into its fold Friday, as leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to lift a ban that prohibited sexually active gays and lesbians from serving as ministers.

Under the new policy, individual ELCA congregations will be allowed to hire homosexuals as clergy as long as they are in a committed relationships. Until now, gays and lesbians had to remain celibate to serve as clergy.

The change passed with the support of 68 percent of about 1,000 delegates at the ELCA’s national assembly. It makes the group, with about 4.7 million members in the U.S., one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations yet to take a more gay-friendly stance.

”I have seen these same-gender relationships function in the same way as heterosexual relationships — bringing joy and blessings as well as trials and hardships,” the Rev. Leslie Williamson, associate pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Des Plaines, Ill., said during the hours of debate. ”The same-gender couples I know live in love and faithfulness and are called to proclaim the word of God as are all of us.”

Conservative congregations will not be forced to hire gay clergy. Nevertheless, opponents of the shift decried what they saw as straying from clear Scriptural direction, and warned it could lead some congregations and individual churchgoers to split off from the ELCA.

”This will cause an ever greater loss in members and finances. I can’t believe the church I loved and served for 40 years can condone what God condemns,” said the Rev. Richard Mahan, pastor at St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Charleston, W.Va. ”Nowhere in Scripture does it say homosexuality and same-sex marriage is acceptable to God. Instead, it says it is immoral and perverted.”

David Keck, a delegate from the Southern Ohio Synod, said he feared that by embracing partnered gays as clergy that the ELCA was heading down a road that would ultimately lead to ”the blessing of same-sex unions as the policy of this church,” he said.

Mahan said he believed a majority of his congregation would want to now break off from the ELCA.

you can read the rest at the new york times.

christopher hitchens on intelligent design

i love this man’s mind and his ability to express it.

sarkozy: burka ban about equality not religion

can’t believe i’m agreeing with bloody nicolas sarkozy, for crying out loud, but bless him, because he’s got the balls to say what every non-muslim woman knows in her ovaries: the burka is nothing to do with divine will, and everything to do with the oppression, punishment and degradation of women by men.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the wearing of burkas on Monday, saying the traditional Muslim garment that covers women from head to toe was a “sign of subservience” and was not “welcome in France.”

In a speech before a joint session of parliament, Sarkozy said, “The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is an issue of a woman’s freedom and dignity. This is not a religious symbol. It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France.”

Sarkozy’s statement comes as debate rages in France about Muslim women wearing the covering, with some French lawmakers calling for a ban on them.

“We cannot accept in our country women trapped behind a fence, cut off from social life, deprived of any identity. This is not the idea that we have of a woman’s dignity,” the president said.

He urged parliament to further debate the issue.

for more see cnn.com and/or the sydney morning herald.