The New Religious landscape

I've been reading this at Pew Research: The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey Reveals a Fluid and Diverse Pattern of Faith. They surveyed 35,000 people 18 and over. I think many of you would find it interesting.

A few quick tidbits of note from Summary of Key Findings:

16% are not affiliated with any denomination. That's more than double the number who said that they were unaffiliated when they were children.
Protestants will soon be in the minority. They make up currently 51% of the population and that is broken up into hundreds of denominations. The largest group of denominations are evangelicals which make up 26.3% of all protestants.
While American born and raised Catholics are changing affiliations in larger numbers than any other religion, the influx of Catholic immigrants makes up for it.

There are interactive charts and graphs breaking down the whole study at this link. Have fun. Come to you own conclusions.

Excommunication for Politicians

Sparked by Mexico's recent legalization of abortion, the Pope sided with Mexican Catholic Church leaders that Catholic politicians who back abortion, even if they are just pro-choice, must be excommunicated:

"Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon (church) law which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the body of Christ," he said.

"They (Mexican Church leaders) did nothing new, surprising or arbitrary. They simply announced publicly what is contained in the law of the Church... which expresses our appreciation for life and that human individuality, human personality is present from the first moment (of life)."

Under Church law, someone who knowingly does or backs something which the Church considers a grave sin, such as abortion, inflicts what is known as "automatic excommunication" on themselves." Reuters

Indeed it is in keeping with the laws of the Catholic Church, which are very black and white, and allows no gray areas, especially not for politicians. Since the RCC values human life so much, I'd like to hear the Pope order excommunication for Catholic politicians who condone the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, who back oppressive laws, who condone Gitmo, who support the death penalty, who make it hard for poor women to get healthcare and raise a healthy child. I'd really like to see the RCC take an active pro-life stance as it pertains to all human life, especially after they are born.

There's not a chance that I would ever join up with the RCC again, but I'd at least like to see that they remain consistently pro-life or just drop it altogether for their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Blogs Against Theocracy

The blogswarm against theocracy this weekend is not just for atheists. It's about sensible people of all faiths or no faith who understand just how thin the line is getting between separation of church and state in our republic. There is a strong danger of fascism rising when religion rears its ugly head in public discourse and influences public policy. One simply has to open a history book to see what could happen here.

Often it's the worst version of a religion that influences a country's public policy. In our country today, a bastardized version of Christianity that flies in the face of Jesus or the Gospels, has been making inroads in our government merely so they can get votes. This version of "christianity" has no compassion and has nothing to do with the Christ of the New Testament. It threatens our very democracy and all we hold dear. It would take away our freedom and turn us into a police state.

The separation of church and state is one of the most important aspects of what it is to be an American. I've never felt that our personal religious beliefs were threatened before in my lifetime, until now. The so-called "christians" that you see on television who've allied themselves with the fascist leaning neo-cons could spark religious wars in this country- and perhaps that is their agenda (the old "divide and conquer"). We must stay alert.

Find out more at First Freedom First. Click on 'Resources' for even more information.

Easter Weekend News

The pope has written his first book. I detect some irony here.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) ... In the 400-page book, called "Jesus of Nazareth," the Pope offers a modern application of Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man who had been robbed by thieves when others, including a priest, had not.

"The current relevance of the parable is obvious," the Pope writes.

"If we apply it to the dimensions of globalised society today, we see how the populations of Africa have been plundered and sacked and this concerns us intimately," the Pope says in his book, which comes out on April 16, his 80th birthday.

He drew a link between the lifestyle of people in the developed world and the dire conditions of people in Africa.

"We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked," he writes.

The German Pope, who has condemned the effects of colonialism before, said rich countries had also hurt poor countries spiritually by belittling or trying to wipe out their own cultural and spiritual traditions.

"Instead of giving them God, the God close to us in Christ, and welcoming in their traditions all that is precious and great ... we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, where only power and profit count...," he writes.

The Pope says his comments were valid for other regions apart from Africa."

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Blonde Easter Weekend Editorial:

The parable of the Good Samaritan.
What it really meant then and what it means now.

Speaking of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, did you know that what made this parable so shocking in its time, was that Samaritans were reviled by the Jews at the time of Jesus. They were looked down upon and were considered "half-breeds" because of their mixed blood and also spiritual half-breeds because their bible only consisted of the Pentateuch. To Jews at that time, only full blooded Jews were considered worthy of being treated as "neighbors" that were worth loving as one's self. Jesus' point in the story is that everyone is to be treated as one's neighbor.

Today, people seem to have lost the point of the 'Good Samaritan' parable and just about anyone can be called a 'Good Samaritan' if they help someone else. That's really beside the point of the parable. If I help my next door neighbor in a crisis, I am not a 'Good Samaritan' unless I am a Hatfield and my neighbor is a McCoy. Being a 'Good Samaritan' means that you overlook your prejudices and biases and reach out to someone else even if that person is your enemy. A good example today would be a Palestinian man helping a wounded Israeli soldier lying by the side of the road or vice versa.

Since stories were passed down through oral tradition at the time of Jesus, often they were delivered in very stark contrast, in black and white terms, to make them memorable. You were not to take the words literally- you were just supposed to get the point. A "Good Samaritan" was an oxymoron and that was why it was remembered.

The lesson to be learned from the "Good Samaritan" is about having compassion- the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. If we are caught up in laws and rules and traditions, people often lose their compassion. Often priests would take biblical traditions literally (the tradition at that time being that your "neighbor" was only your fellow full blooded Jew) and they ended up being quite unkind, un-compassionate, and unforgiving to not only their own people, but especially to those of different cultures and beliefs (kind of like religious leaders today and throughout the history of religion).

Jesus railed against the religious hypocrites as seen in his exhortations against the Pharisees when he challenged them for sticking to tradition over having compassion (and even common sense in many instances). Some examples from the many many passsages relating to this topic:
Matthew 15:1-20
John 8:4-9
Matthew 12:1-14 (my favorite example)

You can understand why they didn't take to his teachings so well and plotted to kill Jesus. (Matthew 12:14)

Waaaah

The "christian" "right" is very upset with the National Association of Evangelicals because they seem to have jumped the "liberal" climate change and global warming band-wagon. The so called "christian right" should not be confused with actual Christians- these are fascist political operatives.
According to the NY Times:

The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.

The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement’s agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.

“We have observed,” the letter says, “that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”

Wow Human Rights! A moral issue? Score one for the evangelicals. Who are these conservative fruitcakes?

The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.

Well no wonder. These guys bask in the profits made from the deliberately oppressed and downtrodden in America today, "Give us your money and Jesus will save you."

Personally, I am happy to read that evangelicals are separating themselves from the xtian wrong.