tagged w/ Religious Right
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A devout Muslim who was found guilty of child cruelty after forcing two boys to beat themselves during a religious ceremony is due to be sentenced today.
Syed Mustafa Zaidi, 44, was found guilty of two counts of child cruelty in a British legal first last month.
The boys, aged 13 and 15, were forced to beat themselves with a zanjeer zani, an implement containing five curved blades, during a ceremony to commemorate the death of a Shia Muslim spiritual leader.
The boys both received multiple lacerations to their backs, mainly superficial, with several deeper cuts.
Zaidi, of Station Road, Eccles, Salford, also flogged himself during the ceremony at a community centre in Levenshulme, Manchester, on January 19.
The boys, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted they wanted to beat themselves, but not under duress and not using Zaidi's zanjeer zani.
Both boys also admitted they had flogged themselves with a smaller zanjeer zani from the age of six in Pakistan.
A 14-year-old boy, who was 13 at the time, said Zaidi told them both: "Start doing it, start doing it."
He told the jury: "We said 'we don't want to do it'."
The boy said he saw Zaidi flogging himself with the zanjeer zani before washing his blood from it and handing it to the 15-year-old boy.
He said Zaidi "kept pressuring him" and "make him do the knife thing".
A 20-minute film of the traditional Ashura ceremony, broadcast on satellite television, showed Zaidi flagellating himself until his back was bloody and cut.
Participants at the men-only event flogged themselves, while others chanted the name Husayn and beat their chests. Many cried openly.
The Ashura ceremony takes place during Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, and commemorates the death of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed and a central figure in the Shia faith.
Zaidi, a warehouse supervisor, admitted he asked the boys if they wanted to beat themselves and that he allowed them to use his zanjeer zani.
The jury heard Zaidi attended a meeting two days before the ceremony, where it was made clear that under-16s were not permitted to flog themselves.
He will be sentenced at Manchester Crown Court at 3pm today.
A devout Muslim who was found guilty of child cruelty after forcing two boys to beat... more
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Even with pleas to skip the parties out of respect for the hurricane victims, and rules prohibiting forks and knives, the parties roll on...including rudely named bands. Where are the "values voters" now?Even with pleas to skip the parties out of respect for the hurricane victims, and... more
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A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.
Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.
Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.
"We don't have anybody else to turn to but God," Mr Twyman told the BBC. "We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man."
His first pilgrimage to the pump was prompted by fellow volunteers at the First Seventh Day Adventist Church in Petworth, a working-class neighbourhood of the US capital, who were struggling with higher gasoline prices.
He led them down the block to the local Shell gas station to pray. And over the months since then, he has held similar prayer meetings at pumps all over the US.
Prayer warriors
"We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying," Mr Twyman said. "Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri."
This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing "We shall overcome," they changed the words of the well-known hymn to "We'll have lower gas prices".
Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might be responsible for the lower prices. But he and his prayer warriors have changed their motoring habits.
"We believe not just in prayer - because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it's a combination of faith with these other factors."
Pray At The Pump plans to build on its success and drive gasoline prices even lower. In the words of Rocky Twyman: "We just thank God for blessing us with small victories and we expect greater things to come."
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If God is controlling it, why is he allowing the money to go to all the greedy oil companies? I hope that God isnt a greed-driven capitalist...A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in... more
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If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Bush's Praetorian Guard could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy.
GUNNING FOR JESUS : As long as people believe that our so-called leaders are well-intentioned, they can, and do, get away with murder. Literally. On top of "remote control warfare", "proxy wars" and "pre-emptive war", we now have "privatised war", or war fought or supported by forces and personnel subcontracted from private military firms and who are not subordinate to the official military hierarchy.
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side" - Aristotle
* WHAT GOD WANTS, GOD GETS, GOD HELP US ALL ! * - Roger WatersIf the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous.... more
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"Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but it's segregation as usual in U.S. churches, according to the scholars. Only about 5 percent of the nation's churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white, says Curtiss Paul DeYoung, co-author of "United by Faith," a book that examines interracial churches in the United States.
DeYoung's numbers are backed by other scholars who've done similar research. They say integrated churches are rare because attending one is like tiptoeing through a racial minefield. Just like in society, racial tensions in the church can erupt over everything from sharing power to interracial dating.
DeYoung, who is also an ordained minister, once led an interracial congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that eventually went all-black. He defines an interracial church as one in which at least 20 percent its membership belongs to a racial group other than that church's largest racial group.
The men and women who remain and lead interracial churches often operate like presidential candidates. They say they live with the constant anxiety of knowing that an innocuous comment or gesture can easily mushroom into a crisis that threatens their support.
"It's not all 'Kumbaya' and 'We are the World,' " says Sheppard, the pastor of the Northern California church, who was raised by his father, a Baptist preacher, in the black church. "There are plenty of skirmishes."
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"They'd say, 'Can't we just get along without talking about race all the time? Can't we just be Christians?'"
Not really, say advocates for interracial churches. They argue that churches should be interracial whenever possible because their success could ultimately reduce racial friction in America.
American churches haven't traditionally done a good job at being racially inclusive, scholars say. Slavery and Jim Crow kept blacks and whites apart in the pews in the nation's early history. Some large contemporary black denominations, like the African Methodist Episcopal church, were formed because blacks couldn't find acceptance in white churches.
Large denominations like the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians split over race in the 19th century when their members clashed over the issue of slavery, Michael Emerson, a scholar on interracial churches, recounted in his book, "Divided by Faith."
But interracial church advocates say the church was never meant to be segregated. They point to the New Testament description of the first Christian church as an ethnic stew -- it deliberately broke social divisions by uniting groups that were traditionally hostile to one another, they say.
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The people in the pews must also do their share of adapting, scholars and ministers say. Only when ethnic groups no longer feel compelled to abandon their entire culture on Sunday morning can a church claim to be interracial, Brelsford says.
An interracial church isn't one in which all the black members act, dress and worship like the church's majority white members to make them feel comfortable, he says.
Interracial churches resist "taking one dominant identity and forcing everyone to fit into it," Brelsford says."
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Please read the full article. I found this to be quite interesting, in addition this hits quite close to home. I notice in my community that smaller churches are mostly divided by race while there might be a few larger churches that are interracial. I would like to here your comments. What are your views on interracial churches? Do you think they should be segregated? Share your thoughts.
"Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but... more
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We have been told often that a quarter of all Americans are evangelicals, and that the support of this enormous number of ultra conservatives has kept George Bush in office. A book recently published in the US casts doubt on both claims.
Christine Wicker is a former religious reporter for the Dallas Morning News. She was "saved" at the age of nine in an Oklahoma City Southern Baptist Church, and these days she's a Christian, but not an evangelical. In "The Fall Of The Evangelical Nation" (HarperOne), she set out to count America's evangelicals. What she found surprised even her.
The standard story is that there are 54million adult and 21million child evangelicals. In political terms they are sometimes known as "the religious right" or "value voters". Their leaders have the capacity and the will to tell them how to vote and get them to the polling booths (important in a country with voluntary voting). The leaders have used this influence to affect government policy on matters such as abortion, gay marriage and the teaching of creationism in schools.
There is some truth in this picture, but not nearly as much as has been claimed. First, the numbers. The figure of 25 per cent comes from people identifying themselves as evangelicals in opinion polls.
But once you dig further you find the figure has little significance, either religiously or politically. The respected pollster George Barna found that when you start to ask these people if they agree with specific evangelical beliefs (such as the literal accuracy of the Bible), the numbers drop away. A large proportion of evangelicals are not conservative or fundamentalist. They're so-called "progressive" evangelicals such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
When you look at behaviour, you find the average member of a congregation is far more typical of the average American than of any fundamentalist bogy figure. Going through the data systematically, she concludes that the actual number makes up just 7 per cent of Americans.
A big part of the myth has been that the number of evangelicals has been growing. In fact, the movement is in decline. That figure of 7 per cent is down from 12 per cent in 1991.
In truth, Wicker points out, the fastest-growing belief category in America is not evangelicalism, but the group to which so many on the left belong: non-believers. From 1990 to 2001 in America, their numbers increased from 14 million to 29 million.
I posted a link to a Sydney Morning Herald article for more details ... really interesting stuff. I heard the author interviewed on Radio National in Australia but see also website www.christinewicker.com which has other interviews she's given, as well as reviews of the book.
There's also a really good article in Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/05/the-myth-of-the-moral-majority.html
We have been told often that a quarter of all Americans are evangelicals, and that the... more
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In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion.In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health... more
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Of interest to conservative mainline Christians who think the Institute for Religion and Democracy represents their values. This video suggests that it is actually an organization aimed at the destruction and perpetual bad-mouthing of these churches. Is it a conspiracy? (publisher of UMAction and others)Of interest to conservative mainline Christians who think the Institute for Religion... more
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The Chimp is getting his come-uppins...
Oh yeah, and he did that jock ass chest bump thing to some air force frat boy too...
The Chimp is getting his come-uppins...
Oh yeah, and he did that jock ass chest... more
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Scary, and for some, true.
Watch a learn just how brainwashed some people are...
The same people that happen to be RUNNING this country (into the ground)...
Scary, and for some, true.
Watch a learn just how brainwashed some people are...... more
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Max Blumenthal's documentary of John Hagee's Christian's United For Israel (CUFI), reveals the true hopes and ambitions of his followers.Max Blumenthal's documentary of John Hagee's Christian's United For... more
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beedee
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added this
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4 years ago
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The silver lining in the media's ridiculous amount of coverage of Reverend Wright is that we can now demand that John McCain be held to the same standard. Aside from the AIDs conspiracy stuff, not much of Wright said was outside the realm of reasonable debate--not so much with Hagee. Check out the video at the bottom of the article.The silver lining in the media's ridiculous amount of coverage of Reverend Wright... more
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beedee
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added this
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4 years ago
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Me expressing what I think should be the government, and what's wrong about having a certain belief control a country. Me expressing what I think should be the government, and what's wrong about... more
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Main trailer for the film, "For the Bible Tells Me So," an important and sensitive portrait of real Christians and their families struggling with what it means to have / be a gay son or daughter.
Also responds, Biblically, to some of the misuse of scripture by the religious right.Main trailer for the film, "For the Bible Tells Me So," an important and... more
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ABC News clip about the values of young evangelical Christians.
Interviews are not the greatest, but the story is still important -- young evangelicals are concerned about markedly different issues than their parents, with gay marriage and abortion not even making the top ten.
Text-based link: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4269824&page=1
ABC News clip about the values of young evangelical Christians.
Interviews are not... more
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What goes on in the mind of the most ridiculous leader of what used to be the free world?
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