Posts Tagged ‘
FTB ’
Oct 9th, 2011 6:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
More on Jim Wallis and Mark Pinsky, at Talk2Action, which was the object of much of their criticism/bullying.
It was bad enough when Mark I. Pinsky recently took to the op-ed page of USA Today to smear four Jewish writers who have had the temerity to write critically and well about dominionism and related matters — comparingtheir work to historic anti-Semitic smears including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Then Jim Wallis chimed in last week, accusing unnamed liberal writers of engaging in thought crimes against evangelicals. His charges were as unsubstantiated as Pinsky’s, whose essay he praised and linked to.
Some of us who figured to be among the unnamed decided it was time to speak,
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Dominionists, FTB, Jim Wallis, Mark Pinsky, Talk2Action
Oct 9th, 2011 11:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
It’s starting already.
Hundreds of people are expected to gather tonight on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard to declare themselves “without religion.” The move follows the recent District Court ruling granting author Yoram Kaniuk recognition as “without religion” by the Interior Ministry.
The meeting, to be held in the abandoned building on Rothschild Boulevard which has become an ad-hoc community center for protesters, is being organized on Facebook by Tel Aviv poet Oded Carmeli. So far, about 600 people have confirmed they will be attending.
Participants will be signing affidavits in the presence of attorneys, informing the Interior Ministry of their change of status to “without religion.”
Mazel tov!
… Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: 'Without religion' in Israel, FTB
Oct 9th, 2011 10:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oxford Christians tell Dawkins where to get off.
In 2009, atheists in London paid for 200 adverts on the city’s buses, declaring: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Now Premier Christian Radio has paid for its own version on Oxford buses, after the distinguished evolutionary biologist turned down the chance to debate with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig when he visits the city later in the month.
The new advert reads: “There’s probably no Dawkins. Now stop worrying and enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.”
The trouble with that as a witticism is that it isn’t true. It’s as if X taunts Y by saying “You flunked out of high school!” and Y … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, The backlash
Oct 8th, 2011 4:06 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Richard Bartholomew signs an open letter to Jim Wallis from writers about US religion and politics. The letter says
Dear Jim Wallis,
We are writing in response to your e-mail to the Sojourners list on September 29th, and your similar piece on The Huffington Post, in which you claim that “some liberal writers” — whom you do not name — are broad brushing evangelical Christians as “intellectually-flawed right-wing crazies with dangerous plans for the country.” You characterize unnamed writers — writers like us — as people who are “all too eager to discredit religion as part of their perennial habit and practice.” This charge is as unfair as it is unsubstantiated.
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we are concerned that you have endorsed
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Jim Wallis
Oct 8th, 2011 9:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The pope talked to the Bundestag a couple of weeks ago, and according to the Iona Institute, his remarks went down a treat. The II says they gave him a two-minute standing ovation, as if he’d sung an aria or acted Hamlet.
(Why, one wonders? German boy made good? Big famous holy guy in gleaming white outfit? Name recognition? Why?)
His talk was the usual bullshit – the Catholic church had a great deal to do with the wonderful flawless perfect morality we have today, even though the morality we have today is quite different from the morality we had when the Catholic church had real power and didn’t hesitate to use it, and even though the pope spends … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Ratzinger, The pope
Oct 7th, 2011 6:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I learned of True Woman and Nancy Leigh DeMoss from Frank Schaeffer’s AlterNet article on Bachmann.
The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your-man philosophy for other women while turning her lucrative homeschooling empire into a one-woman industry. So Pride may be added to the list of powerful women — like Michele Bachmann — who just love those “traditional roles” for other women. And Pride’s successor in the patriarchy movement, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.
Here is DeMoss at True Woman with a call to Biblical Womanhood.
Due to the modern feminist revolution,
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Frank Schaeffer, FTB, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Patriarchy, True Woman
Oct 7th, 2011 12:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Via Libby Anne -
Couple pleads not guilty in homicide of adopted daughter
According to court documents, the couple’s adopted daughter, Hana Williams, 13, was systematically starved, beaten, forced to use an outdoor toilet and
sometimes locked in a dark closet for days by the Williams.
Hana Williams was found dead in May – naked, face-down in the mud in her own backyard – after she had spent much of a cold, rainy day outside as a punishment, according to court documents.
Although she died of hypothermia, there were other contributing causes to her death, including severe malnutrition and chronic gastritis, doctors said.
The Williams had adopted Hana from Ethiopia in 2008 as a diseased little girl to begin a
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Christian discipline, Cruelty, FTB, Michael Pearl
Oct 7th, 2011 11:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Here’s a fun new thing to explore: True Woman.
It haz a manifesto.
We believe that the creation of humanity as male and female was a purposeful and magnificent part of God’s wise plan, and that men and women were designed to reflect the image of God in complementary and distinct ways.
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We realize that we live in a culture that does not recognize God’s right to rule, does not accept Scripture as the pattern for life, and is experiencing the consequences of abandoning God’s design for men and women.
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Scripture is God’s authoritative means of instructing us in His ways and it reveals His holy pattern for our womanhood, our character, our priorities, and our
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Patriarchy, True Woman
Oct 6th, 2011 5:34 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Iona Institute tells us that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has set up a Committee for Religious Liberty. That’s very funny, in a sick kind of way. Here’s why: Catholic bishops don’t really give two shits about religious liberty as such; they care only about religious liberty for them.
The Catholic church is not a Millian kind of organization. It’s not a liberal organization. It’s not dedicated to or interested in liberty. It’s a ferociously authoritarian hierarchical organization with a body of “teachings” that it does its best to impose on as many people as it can reach.
The Catholic church has nothing to do with ideas about liberty and freedom, autonomy and independence, self-fashioning and … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB
Oct 6th, 2011 10:44 am |
By Ophelia Benson
As long as we’re on the subject of Brendan O’Neill…let’s stay on it a little longer. I neglected him last year when he was making contorted attacks on critics of the pope and the Vatican. Allow me to make amends now.
He made a heavy-breathing correction to claims of how many priestly rapes there had been, then he explained why he did that.
Why point out these basic facts? Not to defend the Catholic Church, which clearly has a sexual abuse problem, or to minimise the suffering of those individuals who ”only” suffered being verbally abused, shown dirty photos or fondled over their clothing by priests – all of those acts are abhorrent and potentially punishable by law.
No,
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Brendan O'Neill, FTB
Oct 6th, 2011 8:55 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Burak Bekdil explains why Turkish secularism isn’t.
A majority of Turks, Sunni Muslims, overtly or covertly believe that they should be “more equal” than the others because they constitute the majority. They think that it is their natural right to enjoy preferential treatment in terms of governance and law enforcement. Remember how the crowds in Istanbul last year, trying to attack the Israeli consulate, shouted at the police who were trying to prevent bloodshed? “Leave the Jews to us! What kind of Muslims are you?” A simple search will produce thousands of examples of this nature unveiling the conscious or subconscious desire of the Sunni Turk for preferential treatment in public administration.
It’s not unlike the US that way. … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Religious censorship, Secularism, Turkey
Oct 6th, 2011 8:14 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh noes, a cartoonist did a cartoon. Call the cops!
A Turkish cartoonist will be put on trial for a caricature he drew in which he renounced god, daily Habertürk reported on its website Wednesday.
The Istanbul chief public prosecutor’s office charged cartoonist Bahadır Baruter with “insulting the religious values adopted by a part of the population” and requested his imprisonment for up to one year.
A mild and liberal response.
Baruter’s caricature depicted an imam and believers praying in a mosque. One of the characters is talking to God on his cellphone and asking to be pardoned from the last part of the prayer because he has errands to run.
Within the wall decorations of the mosque, Baruter hid
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Bahadir Baruter, Cartoons, FTB, Religious censorship, Turkey
Oct 5th, 2011 5:41 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Frequent commenter Sigmund alerted me to another entity crying out for scrutiny and derision: the Iona Institute, an Irish “institute” (can any old thing call itself an institute? The Faraday Institute, the Tobacco Institute, the Iona Institute – are there any gates, any gatekeepers? is it just anarchy around here?) dedicated to saying how great the Catholic church is.
The amusing thing (amusing in a rebarbative kind of way) is that the Iona Institute invited dear auld Brendan O’Neill to give a talk, and he obliged. From Trotskyist splinter group to libertarian “contrarian” faitheist pope-cheering what-the-hell-is-that – that’s Spiked and its editor Brendan O’Neill. So the Trotskyist libertarian pope-fan told the Iona Institute…you’ll never guess what. … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Spiked, The Catholic church
Oct 5th, 2011 12:23 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Frederick Crews has a fascinating pair of articles in the New York Review of Books on Freud’s cocaine addiction and its connection to his work.
According to the official version of Freud’s career, sexuality scarcely entered his mind as a topic of interest until, to his shock and embarrassment, it was forced upon him by his patients’ indecent confessions. His early psychological papers and his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, however, show just the opposite: it was a sex-obsessed Freud who tried to harangue those patients into admitting that they harbored the perverse desires and guilty secrets that were already on his mind. But when and why had sexual issues become paramount for him? His surviving letters from adolescence are
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Frederick Crews, Freud, FTB
Oct 5th, 2011 11:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Is secularism really winning in the US?
The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. “It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF.
Well, it depends on what you mean by “in thrall” and “fast becoming” and the like. It also depends on what you mean by ”a … Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Secularism
Oct 4th, 2011 5:42 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Narendra Nayak has an article in Nirmukta about his experiences at the Humanist Congress in Oslo – which included getting - to his great surprise – an award for distinguished service to humanism, and getting his picture taken with one of Freethought Blogs’ overlords (who also got such an award, also to his surprise).
… Read the rest
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB
Oct 4th, 2011 12:03 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Despite profound disagreements about elevatorism and its fallout, I can’t ignore useful investigations of the Templeton Foundation and similar at Why Evolution is True, like today’s post on Templeton’s ridiculous stealth “Faraday Institute” and its hot new “Test of Faith” project.
The “Test of Faith” project has a Study Guide. The study guide has an introduction. The introduction explains things.
The challenge that has been put forward so many times recently is that God is a delusion and science has removed the need for faith in anything. But there are many practising scientists who have a sincere Christian faith, even at the highest levels of academia. They have all been trained to think and test ideas to the limit.
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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB
