This for all intents and purposes should be a headline from The Onion, but alas, I am afraid to report that it is all too real. Fitting from a country that once filed an official complaint concerning supposedly ‘hostile’ and negative press in the U.S., when the offending media outlet was actually The Onion, which they mistook for ‘real’ press. The parody must have struck a real nerve. Here they show how beyond parody such paranoid autocrats really are.

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country.

Read The Full Article from Newsweek

In this video, much of which was filmed inside the Pentagon, four generals and three colonels praise the Christian Embassy, a group that evangelizes among military leaders, politicians and diplomats in Washington. Some of the officers describe their efforts to spread their faith within the military.

Click To View (Windows Media)

Chris Hedges has more on this rather disturbing trend with his recent expose on America’s Holy Warriors

Looks like the Right are starting to eat their own. This letter from former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey might be the rhetorical equivalent of a Ft. Sumter between the different factions of the Talibanker alliance. He is obviously upset that the Christian Coalition has ‘betrayed’ him by openly supporting Network Neutrality. How is his PR firm going to stay in business if he can’t deliver the Christian Vote to corporate interests that pay him Big Bucks?

Christians and Big Government

Dear [FreedomWorks Supporter],

There was a day when social conservatives were united with economic conservatives in the belief that small, limited government was not only good for our economy and the prosperity of American families, but essential to protect traditional family values. We all fought for a limited federal government — a government that had the decency to respect the American people by staying out of their lives. Small government meant that all Christians could practice their faith as they saw fit. Big government violates those rights by meddling in our lives, misusing our hard-earned money, and dictating cultural norms to us. We were and are rightly outraged when government imposes wrong-headed values through its monopoly of schools, government-funded “art,” and taxpayer funded “family planning.”

As a united conservative movement, we win when we defend traditional values against big government pretensions to impose its brand of “morality” on the American people. We lose when we attempt to use government power to impose our values on others. I am a devout Christian. I am a so-called “values voter.”

As a member of Congress and as Majority Leader, I believe I faithfully served our values. One of my proudest moments in Congress was beating the Democrats attempts to meddle in the affairs of families that had chosen to opt out of secular government education by home-schooling their children. I took on the entire political establishment, but we only won because thousands of Christian home-schoolers demanded that Congress keep its nose out of their decision to raise and educate their children as they saw fit.

I am also a free market economist by training, and I believe that economic freedom is vitally important in the defense of the American family. Big issues like retirement security, tax reform, school choice and spending restraint will determine whether or not families will be dependent and subservient to government. Who owns your retirement? Who decides how you provide for your family s future. Can you leave your estate to your grandchildren, or is it the government’s? Will the government socially engineer your life through the tax code? Will liberal education bureaucrats determine your child s education? These are all issues that used to matter to the political leadership of Christian conservative voters.

And while for most in the Christian conservative movement these issues still resonate, the same cannot be said for some of our Washington, D.C.-based religious leaders. Right after I had left Congress and joined FreedomWorks, we found ourselves embroiled in a major tax fight in Alabama. Oddly, an old friend, Bob Riley, had been elected governor only to immediately reverse course, cut a deal with the teachers union, and advocate a massive tax increase to prop up the failing government school system. It was “what Jesus would do,” he said. I took personal offense to that, as did many of the voters who had just worked so hard to elect him Governor. Our activists had joined forces with local Christian conservatives, including the Alabama Christian Coalition, to fight both bad policy and a sense of personal betrayal. We were blindsided when the national leadership of the Christian Coalition endorsed the Governor s proposed tax increase, joining forces with liberal interests in the state that had actively worked against our values for a generation. In the end we won, thanks in no small part to the fact that members of the local Christian Coalition chapter parted ways with the national organization and stood with Alabama FreedomWorks, the Alabama Policy Institute, local taxpayer organizations, and a host of other small government advocates all united in the effort to stop a big government tax-hike scheme.

Today, the national Christian Coalition has joined forces with MoveOn.org in another government grab of private property dealing specifically with ownership of the Internet. They are wrong on the specifics of the issue, and they are wrong to associate with and comfort radical liberals who have demonstrated nothing but disdain for conservative values. Armey s Axiom: Make a deal with the Devil, and you are the junior partner. Another Armey’s Axiom says that if it is about power, you lose. And unfortunately when it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power.

And just who is the ‘Devil’ that Mr. Armey is so distraught over dealing with here? ‘Radical liberals’ (for which one can easily include a number of the founders of this country he states he so dearly loves), or the Christian Coalition? And as far as I remember, James Dobson isn’t officially affiliated with the Christian Coalition at all. That is Robertson’s gang (with some help from such outstanding moral guides as Ralph Reed). Dobson is with the so-called Focus on The Family group. Armey must be getting desperate, wailing away at the wrong target in his angst over his, for-the-moment at least, failing effort. (And now with Congress reverting into the hands of the Democrats, quite likely a doomed effort, fortunately).

As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to “deliver” for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so. In a later meeting Dobson and a colleague came into my office to lobby against a trade bill, asking me to stop the legislation from going to the House floor. They were wrong on the issue, and I told them no. Would you at least postpone the vote, they asked? We have a direct mail fundraising letter about to go out to our membership, they said. I wondered then if their opposition to the bill was driven less by their moral compass and more by the need to rile their membership and increase revenue. I wondered then, if these self-appointed Christian leaders, like many politicians, had come to Washington to do good, but had instead done well for themselves.

Dobson later ran an orchestrated campaign against me in my race to retain the Majority Leader post, telling my colleagues that I was not a good Christian. I prefer to leave that decision to Lord God Almighty on Judgment Day. Maybe you can understand why I have recently been quoted referring to this person as a “bully.” And it continues today, as Focus on the Family deliberately perpetuates the lie that I am a consultant to the ACLU. I have never had any relationship with the ACLU and oppose most of that organization s work. The ACLU has twisted “civil liberty” to mean something quite the opposite. Nowhere was it more wrong, with more disastrous policy ends, than in the Terri Schiavo intervention. While her case was heartbreaking, our Founders created a government built on checks and balances, not a nation run by an arbitrary and imperial Congress. Congress cannot simply override our entire state and federal legal system to intervene in one person s situation. It was truly a chilling act. Imagine the precedent-setting nature of such an action when a different House of Representatives, one with “Speaker Nancy Pelosi” wielding the gavel, holds power.

Freedom works. Freedom is a gift from God Almighty, and we have a responsibility to protect it. Christians face a temptation to power when we are fortunate enough to have a majority of support in Congress. But government can never advance a faith that is freely given, and it is corrosive to even try. Just look at Europe, where decades of nanny-state activism including taxpayer support for churches and for religious political parties have severely eroded the faith.

In America today, too many of our Christian leaders fail to recognize the temptation to power and the danger it holds for our society and our faith. And so America s Christian conservative movement is confronted with this divide: small government advocates who want to practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government versus big government sympathizers who want to impose their version of “righteousness” on others through the hammer of law. We must avoid the temptation to use the power of government to perfect our society and its citizens. That is the same urge that drives the Left and the socialists, and I can assure you that every program or power we give government today in the name of our values can be turned against us when the day comes where a majority of Congress is hostile to us.

Instead, we need to limit the sphere of government and create civil space where private institutions, individual responsibility and religious faith can flourish. By reducing the size of the welfare state, we increase the importance of the works of Christian charities and our church communities. By reducing the tax burden on families, we make it easier for Christian households to tithe or for young mothers to stay home to raise their children. The same is true for retirement security based on ownership. Reducing the ever-growing reach of the federal government means local communities, and more important, parents, are free to establish the standards and values for the education of their children. Consider the welfare reform we passed in 1996. By reducing bureaucracy and dependency and emphasizing work and responsibility, we changed conditions for an entire segment of our society. Since welfare reform passed, teen pregnancy, welfare caseloads, and the number of abortions in America have all declined. That is the kind of policy change that values voters need to support, and it is the result of limiting government’s power over our lives.

Our movement must avoid the temptations of power and those who would twist the good intentions of Christian voters to support policies that undermine freedom and grow government. Freedom is what gives America its unique place in the world, and protecting and expanding our freedom is what creates the space necessary to keep our faith strong and growing.

Sincerely,
Dick Armey
Chairman, FreedomWorks

Looks like the coalition of corporate christianists (or “Talibankers” as we’ve referred to them), is beginning to seriously crumble. I always wondered how long it would take for the untenable physics of that unholy alliance to finally reach critical mass and break apart. The Foley thing is not helping the situation either. But when one group in the marriage of political convenience wants to push America back 100 years (which they have just about successfully accomplished), and the other group by 400 years, it was only a matter of time before tensions hit the boiling point.

Oh my Lord. This is astounding. The Founders are probably vomiting in their graves. Gotta love it how the self-described Christians take a pagan symbol and use it to promote Dominionism. But then the Christian religion has been co-opting other popular religious beliefs and iconography since its inception as an ‘official religion’ in the days of Constantine.

On Independence Day, Lady Liberty was born again.

Born again? More like molested and impressed into servitude.

As the congregation of the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church looked on and its pastor, Apostle Alton R. Williams, presided, a brown shroud much like a burqa was pulled away to reveal a giant statue of the Lady, but with the Ten Commandments under one arm and “Jehovah” inscribed on her crown…

…The Statue of Liberation Through Christ, as she is called, stands 72 feet tall from the base of her pedestal to the tip of her cross. She was the idea of Mr. Williams, a very successful pastor whose church, World Overcomers, qualifies as mega: it has a school, a bowling alley, a roller rink, a bookstore and, he said, 12,000 members.

This is almost beyond descriptive response. Some of the comments posted by people on The Huffington Post do a pretty good job, though.

In actuality it looks like something out of a minature golf course. The arm swings down and knocks the golf ball out of the way.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Unless, of course, they don’t belong to OUR church in which case, let ‘em die.

Read The Complete Post & Commentary

Tony Hendra hits the nail with this essay published on The Huffington Post. Good points about even after getting rid of the criminal cabal currently in power in our government, our nation will still have to deal with the bigger, more widespread problem of this psuedo-Christian death cult attempting to overthrow the republic and establish a Dominionist theocratic state. Some of the comments posted by readers makes for interesting reading as well.

Check it out here

And there is also this follow up post from The Daily Kos on the absurd disconnect amongst the pseudo-Christians with their proclaimed savior, appropriately entitled “Hating Jesus”.

Group Trains Air Force Cadets To Proselytize
By Alan Cooperman
The Washington Post

    A private missionary group has assigned a pair of full-time Christian ministers to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where they are training cadets to evangelize among their peers, according to a confidential letter to supporters.

    The letter makes clear that the organized evangelization effort has continued this year despite an outcry over alleged proselytizing at the academy that has prompted a Pentagon investigation, congressional hearings, a civil lawsuit and new Air Force guidelines on religion.

    ”Praise God that we have been allowed access by the Academy into the cadet areas to minister among the cadets. We have recently been given an unused classroom to meet with cadets at any time during the day,” the husband-and-wife team of Darren and Gina Lindblom said in the Oct. 11 letter to their donors.

    Following allegations of religious intolerance at the academy, the Air Force issued interim guidelines in late August that caution senior officers against discussing their faith with subordinates. But the guidelines do not limit “voluntary, peer to peer discussions,” and they do not say whether Air Force officials can provide office space or other assistance to professional missionaries who train cadets to evangelize among their peers.

Read The Full Article

From an email that is going around on the role of religion and the Ten Commandments in public life which just cannot be allowed to continue to propagate around the internet without reply. The “Did You Know” stuff is all part of the email being passed around, with my replies in bold in response to the promoters of this rather shallow missive.

DID YOU KNOW?
James Madison, the fourth president, known as “The Father of Our Constitution” made the following statement:
“We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

AND DID YOU KNOW?
James Madison believed that “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.” He spoke of the “almost fifteen centuries” during which Christianity had been on trial: “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

ALSO….
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist Papers, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the “only Heaven knows” sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the famous line about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: “In God We Trust” did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, “The Battle Over the Pledge,” April 5, 2004].

DID YOU KNOW ALL THIS?
As you walk up the steps to the building which houses the U.S. Supreme Court you can see near the top of the building a row of the world’s law givers and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view … it is Moses and he is holding the Ten Commandments!

AND DID YOU KNOW THIS?
The Supreme Court Building was designed after the Parthenon, a religious Greek temple dedicated to the Goddess Athena

DID YOU KNOW?
As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on each lower portion of each door.

AND DID YOU KNOW?
That the Ten Commandments do not form the basis of our laws, but that English common law provides the foundation of our legal system, and - as Thomas Jefferson pointed out to a friend in 1814 - the common law began in England well before Christianity took hold. In Jefferson’s word, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”

DID YOU KNOW?
As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments!

AND DID YOU KNOW?
Justitia, a Roman goddess of justice symbolizes the fair and equal administration of the law, without corruption, avarice, prejudice, or favor; goddess of divine justice. She is often portrayed as evenly balancing both scales and a sword and wearing a blindfold (but often times without one). She sometimes holds the fasces (a bundle of rods around an ax symbolizing judicial authority and a flame in the other (symbolizing truth). The ancient Egyptians also had a goddess of Justice referred to as Ma’at and often depicted as carrying a sword with an ostrich feather in her hair (but no scales) to symbolize truth and justice. The term magistrate derived from Ma’at because she assisted Osiris in the judgment of the dead by weighing their hearts.

DID YOU KNOW?
There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, DC.

AND DID YOU KNOW?
The large majority of United States government buildings, such as the United States Capitol building, state capitol buildings, court buildings, libraries, and national banks throughout America are modeled after Pagan Greek and Roman architecture? In fact the word “Capitol” comes from the name of an ancient temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

AND….
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr on August 10th, 1787…
“Fix reason firmly to her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfold fear. You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus… Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you ar answerable, not for the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision.”

DID YOU KNOW?
Fifty-two of the 55 founders of the Constitution were members of the established orthodox churches in the colonies.

AND DID YOU KNOW?
There is no mention of the word “God” anywhere in the United States Constitution?

DID YOU KNOW?
Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

AND DID YOU KNOW?
That our nation was not founded on Christian principles, but Enlightenment ones?

AND…….
These assertions that America was founded as a ‘Christian nation’ is directly contradicted by the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, whose Article 11 contained these words:…

“As the Government of the United States…is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion–as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams (who was a professed liberal Unitarian, but in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian). It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate’s history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

DID YOU KNOW?
Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777.

AND DID YOU KNOW?
Article VI of the United States Constitution states “that no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

DID YOU KNOW?
Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law would begin making law the rule of few over many.

AND DID YOU KNOW?
Thomas Jefferson believed that it was proper for the state to concern itself with injuries that one person caused to another, but an affront to God was a matter between the offender and the deity. Quote “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God” he remarked. He believed, as did many of the founders, that each individual should have the right of “free inquiry” in matters of religion, and he introduced in 1779 Bill No.82 in the legal code which provided that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry”, and that no person could be made to “suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief”.

One of the things Jefferson was most proud of was his authoring the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the US Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally “freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination”

DID YOU KNOW?
The very first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said: “Americans should select and prefer Christians as their rulers.”

AND DID YOU KNOW?
Benjamin Franklin spoke on the dangers of religion in politics by pointing out that “A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law”

AND…
Jefferson lamented the corruptions the teachings of Jesus had undergone. “The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and incomprehensibilities” that it was almost impossible to recapture “its native simplicity and purity.”

How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional? Please forward this to everyone you can. Lets put it around the world and let the world see and remember what this great country was built on.
Thank you!!

It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having the 10 commandments on display or “In God We Trust” on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

(Correction: “In God We Trust” and God in the Pledge have not been there for 220 years, but were added in the 1950s during the Red Scare years and the slogan was from the Civil War)

Why don’t we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!! or go back to their country to live.

(Or perhaps we should ask those that wish to live in theocracies to go elsewhere to live in them. There are plenty to choose from).

If you agree, pass this on, if not simply delete

Or respond to this silliness as I shall do here. You aren’t off the hook that easily for spreading this kind of ignorance.

I’m all for having the Ten Commandments posted in public buildings.

How about “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in the halls of the Pentagon?
How about “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness” on the walls of the White House?
How about “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” in the offices of all those ‘family values’ representatives and senators who parade around espousing ‘morality’ while on their third wives, countless mistresses and aborted children (hello Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, Newt Gingrich and on and on and on…)

In the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush proposed that a “standard version” of the Ten Commandments be posted in schools and other public places. “I have no problem with the Ten Commandments posted on the wall of every public place,” he said.

So if you want to post them, which version are you going to post?

The Old Testament itself includes three different versions of the Decalogue - two in the book of Exodus at Chapters 20 and 34, another in Deuteronomy. All together, they offer many more commandments than the ten we see in most representations.

Different religious groups use different combinations. Most Protestant denominations include “Thou Shalt Not Make Graven Images.” Catholics and Lutherans never mention graven images, which has fueled a long history of bitter anti-Catholic attacks from many Christian evangelicals.

Jews have a different set, with an entirely different first commandment, which is more an affirmation of belief: “I am the Lord thy God, Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage.”

In his monument, Judge Moore attempted to produce a Judeo-Protestant version, which has given him eleven commandments rather than just ten.

Depending on the version, several of the commandments are undeniably religious:

I Am the Lord Thy God . (an affirmation of a deity)
Thou Shalt Not Have Any Gods Before Me (a step toward monotheism)
Thou Shalt Not Make Graven Images
Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
Remember the Sabbath, Keep It Holy

Even the ban on adultery, which might include homosexual relations, has different meanings to different religious groups. Some, on the fringe, have called for making adultery and other transgressions capital offenses.

In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers foresaw the conflicts that government involvement in such questions would bring. Which is why, despite their personal religious convictions, they set out to keep God and government out of each other’s way.

America was founded as a secular constitutional republic. Not as a theocracy.

Lets keep it that way, folks.

From one of the really good political writers in America these days. No left wing wacko, Kevin Phillips was a stalwart movement conservative from the 60s and 70s (and key architect in Nixon’s rise to power). He drifted out of the GOP in the 80s with the ascendency of the Bush family syndicate, whom he very accurately saw as a threat to traditional GOP principles, and to American democracy itself. His cautionary concerns have been more than borne out. Highly recommend are his works such as “An American Dynasty” about the Bush family, and “Wealth and Democracy”.

Here, Kevin Phillips posts on Talking Points Memo about his latest book “American Theocracy”.

Read The Post

If there is anything we are certain of, its that every culture has more than its unfair share of religious zealots.

Marluddin Jalil, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: “The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh.” Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: “The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good.”

Read The Asia Times Report

Silja J.A. Talvi writes on how the “secular” Character Training Institute is working to build evangelist Bill Gothard’s vision of a First-Century Kingdom of God - one city, one state, one school board, one police force and one mind at a time.

Here’s a money shot line…

“God gives direction, protection, and provision through human authorities. If we rebel against them, we expose ourselves to the destruction of evil principalities…. This is why ‘rebellion is the sin of witchcraft.’ ”

Wow. Good thing Thomas Paine and the revolutionaries who founded our nation (on what were then and to these theocratic autobots apparently still are radical notions of a political embodiment of concepts of the Age of the Enlightenment and reason), weren’t paying much attention to these ‘Christians’.

Anyway, I thought the truly American principle was to have representatives, not leaders.

Read the full piece from In These Times