Waving signs with slogans like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags,” the group from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has appeared at funerals for slain soldiers in Missouri and Illinois recently, spouting their homophobic bile and disrupting what should be a solemn moment for a grieving family.
Led by the Rev. Fred Phelps, a hate-spouting firebrand, the group has protested funerals of homosexuals for the past 15 years but have expanded their activities in recent months to the services of fallen shoulders, appearing at some 70 ceremonies in recent months even though there is no indication the soldiers being buried are gay.
“Our view of this situation is that God Almighty blew these kids to
smithereens and sent them to hell,” claims the 76-year-old Phelps, who
says God is punishing “a fag army - don't ask, don't tell - for a fag-loving
agenda of a fag-loving nation,”
By DOUG THOMPSON, Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue, Jan 3, 2006
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7939.shtml
Separation of Church and State, regardless of how it is worded in the constitution is a reasonable way to run a country. When the politics of an idea become the standard for governmental rule that nation is headed into a really bad place.
Back in the middle ages the most of Europe's rulers pledged loyalty and obedience to the Catholic Church. The Pope as the leader of the Church was given power over the Kings of Europe. In essence the Church became the state. This began a reign of terror throughout Europe.
Catholic leaders manipulating biblical verses to serve their own needs perpetrated
acts of educational genocide against any idea that conflicted with their teachings.
They went so far as to withhold access to books like the bible so nobody could
challenge their interpretation of it. Those who held different religious beliefs
or even felt that the Catholics interpretation of the bible was flawed were
subject to the Inquisitors. Brian Cherry June 8, 2004
http://www.therant.us/staff/cherry/the_new_inquisition.htm
Until now, psychiatrists have remained within the bounds of their medical profession. Whether we have believed them or not, they have interpreted criminal behaviour in terms of health and disease. Sometimes the illnesses, such as multiple personality disorder or temporary insanity, were considered curable. At other times, when diagnoses such as psychopathy and pedophilia were used, the conditions were deemed less amenable to treatment. However, whatever they did, like it or not, they stayed within the domain of medicine.
In identifying evil, they are crossing the line into the practice of religion, for "evil" is not an illness but rather a moral state. Determining who is evil is a religious, not a medical, act. By performing it, psychiatrists will become the inquisitors of the 21st century.
In Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, and later in North America, inquisitors traveled the country hunting out evil using the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous manual for witch-hunters, as their guide. Serving as the expert witnesses at the witch trials, they distinguished diseases due to natural causes from those caused by demons.
If Welner's idea takes hold, these inquisitors could rise again,
disguised as psychiatrists and using the Depravity Scale as their guide. ©Dr.Tana
Dineen
http://tanadineen.com/COLUMNIST/Columns/NewInquisitors.htm
Only this time they want to seek out and destroy Christianity itself instead of any particular sect thereof. I can say this because they have admitted as much in a recent column; The New Blacklist. More on that later.
This June 10th column has identified Christians as "Christers," the kitschy new hate word created by anti-religionists in the U.S.A. to describe their foe; you and me. The Weekly uses this pseudo word some 16 times in the Op Ed even going so far as to make it appear as if the word was used in a Wall Street Journal article. (I guess that makes these religion haters the "Anti-Christers"?)
Apparently, these "Christers" have the gall to arrange boycotts against things in the entertainment and other industries that do not meet their standards and this little article spews several hundred words to excoriate them for it.
Yes, the gall of these people imagining that they should gather together
and take advantage of democracy like that to urge people from whom they buy
their products to listen to them as customers. The NERVE!... Warner
Todd Huston, June 15, 2005
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/huston/050615
is the list of questions that will be addressed not only to every (Roman Catholic) seminarian in the United States, but to recent graduates as well.
The document took my breath away. If the Devil were designing a document with the direct intent and purpose of furthering the decline of the priesthood, he couldn't have done a better job. This is the Inquisition come back to haunt us. And I am not referring to those questions in the document -- and there are several -- designed to focus upon what church leaders apparently fear most, namely, a tendency for the priesthood to become a refuge for homosexuals. God knows how problematic and wrong headed it would be to "cleanse" the church of homosexuality. If a person has the capacity for honoring vows of celibacy, while offering the skilled and faithful leadership that today's church urgently needs, such a person should make an excellent priest, whether gay or straight.
More troublesome still is the document's emphasis upon conformity, orthodoxy,
and unqualified agreement with the traditional doctrines and teachings of
the church... Charles Henderson
http://www.godweb.org/inquisition.htm
The gift paradigm has the advantage of restoring mothering
to its rightful place in the constitution of the human. What has been
wrongly proposed in the construction of gender, with devastating
effects such as the promotion of the values of dominance, competition and
hierarchy (which are non nurturing values), can be countered by re introducing
gift giving as a social value and interpretative key. Both male and female
human beings are basically nurturers. One gender is not the binary opposite
of the other. If we reintroduce the gift paradigm into our interpretation
of the world, we will find our 'gift giver within' which will then be validated.
Women, as those who have been socially designated as the nurturers, will be
rightfully restored to their place as the norm, and men can be reinterpreted
in this light as those who have been socially dispossessed of that normal
behavior but who can reacquire it by espousing nurturing values. Institutions
are usually organized around the exchange and dominance paradigm, but they
can be reorganized to satisfy needs. The rewards which accompany dominance
can be eliminated and gift giving can be affirmed and promoted. - Theory of
the Gift Economy, Genevieve Vaughan
http://www.gift-economy.com/theory.html