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1. The Truth Commission : By Nicholas D. Kristof : The NYT

2. War on Iran: The Perfect Storm From Hell‏ : By Timothy Alexander, Rense.com

3. Anxious in America : By Thomas L. Friedman : The NYT

4. America, its Time for some Serious Wakeup Calls : By D.L. Dewey, Dewey’s World

5. Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State : By Walter Russell Mead, Martinfrost.ws



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Christian fundamentalists fighting spiritual battle in Parliament

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By David Modell

religion.jpg They think society should be built on their beliefs. They claim non-believers are damned. But these radical Christian groups are not in America - they are here and are aiming to change the laws of our land, discovers the Bafta-winning film-maker David Modell

It’s Tuesday morning and the infants’ classroom in Carmel School is filled with the sound of children’s voices reciting a rhyme. “The Lord has not dealt with us according to our sins nor punished us according to our iniquities.” These are not easy words to remember if you’re six. Melony, the teacher, goes on to explain: “Before Jesus came, people who disobeyed God got turned to a pillar of salt. So thank God for Jesus because we can say ‘Jesus, I’m sorry’ and we don’t have to fear getting turned into a pillar of salt, which really happened in the Old Testament.” One little girl has to do a science test. A classroom assistant kneels next to her, takes her hand and says: “We pray, Father, that you’ll help her check all her spellings. In Jesus’s name, Amen.” The test is multiple choice. Question five is: “God made the world in [BLANK] days.” The options are “five, six or seven”. The six-year-old carefully writes “six”. The right answer.

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Jesus knows a camel when he sees one: We are NOT passing through the eye of that needle, America….

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By Jason Miller

Dedicated to Bobbie L.

jesus-christ-son-of-god-salvation-eternal-life-heaven-01lg.gifIn the sermon just minutes before his death, Archbishop Oscar Romero (a man who truly practiced the teachings of Christ) reminded his congregation of the parable of the wheat. “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us. I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me.”

These words appeared in a newspaper just two weeks before Archbishop Romero was shot (by a filthy Right Wing Death Squad supported by the US) while celebrating Holy Communion in the hospital which had been his home since his enthronement in 1977.

“You could piss off Jesus Christ himself!”

—Russ Miller

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Christianity v Islam

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The Pope’s remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic

By Karen Armstrong

koran-bible_large.jpg In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. “I approach you not with arms, but with words,” he wrote to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, “not with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with love.” Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and segued repeatedly into spluttering intransigence. Words failed Peter when he contemplated the “bestial cruelty” of Islam, which, he claimed, had established itself by the sword. Was Muhammad a true prophet? “I shall be worse than a donkey if I agree,” he expostulated, “worse than cattle if I assent!”

Peter was writing at the time of the Crusades. Even when Christians were trying to be fair, their entrenched loathing of Islam made it impossible for them to approach it objectively. For Peter, Islam was so self-evidently evil that it did not seem to occur to him that the Muslims he approached with such “love” might be offended by his remarks. This medieval cast of mind is still alive and well.

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Full Circle at Yale

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By Anwaar Hussain

blairstencilYale University is an awesome institution. For the academic year 2006-2007 for example, Yale was having on its campus over 13000 undergraduate, graduate and international students. Yale has 275 Campus buildings and its library holds 12.5 million volumes. With an endowment of $22.5 billion, its operating budget of $1.96 billion for the last academic year surpassed that of many small African countries. The university boasts of a faculty of 3,384 members and 1874 international scholars.

About to join this august assemblage is a man much involved in global events of the recent past. He will be teaching a course on faith and globalization at the schools of management and divinity at Yale. His name is Tony Blair, the ex- Prime Minister of United Kingdom. The university was ‘pleased’ to appoint him as the Howland Distinguished Fellow for the next academic year.

While the university was ‘pleased’ to make this announcement, it failed to tell us that this future Howland Distinguished Fellow is also a confirmed liar, an abettor of mass murder, torture and rape and is a prosecutable war criminal.

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The Myths Of Christian Fundamentalism

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By Ken Adachi, Editor - Educate-Yourself.org

A must-read. Ken Adachi took the words right out of my mouth

Anwaar

burqua.jpgNormally, I would not expound on this subject. I don’t believe in wearing your religious beliefs on your sleeve and I don’t approve of trying to push your convictions upon others, however, I feel it’s necessary to expose teachings -delivered within the framework of religious instruction or Biblical instruction- which are untrue and ultimately lead to harm for those who subscribe to them. I’m referring to the myths of Christian fundamentalism.

A belief is not the same thing as knowledge. A belief is an idea that we are conditioned to believe is true, yet we possess no concrete way to know or prove to ourselves (or to others) that it is true. In order to accept a belief as true, you must first possess faith we are told. But all faith is blind faith by definition and that’s the rub. All victims of belief manipulation are first convinced that they must possess faith in order to be ’saved’. But faith in what? Faith in whatever the preacher says is the “Word of God” while holding up one of the 650 different versions of the “Holy” Bible and declaring it to be the unchallenged written Word of God. I can get you to believe in anything, if you will first surrender your intellect and common sense and allow me to supplant them with a firm conviction in the notion of “faith.” That’s why preacher-propagandists spend so much effort touting the supposed virtue and desirability of possessing “faith” and will repeat well-worn Biblical mantras like “Oh ye of little faith” or “doubting Thomas” to reinforce the idea that blind acceptance-based on faith- is a good thing , while entertaining any sort of doubt (meaning questioning the validity of what’s being shoved down your throat) is a bad thing .

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In manga Bible, the tough guy is Jesus

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By Neela Banerjee

manga_bible_01.jpgAjinbayo Akinsiku wants the world to know Jesus Christ - just not the gentle, blue-eyed Christ of old Hollywood movies and many illustrated Bibles.

Akinsiku says his Son of God is “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette,” here to shake things up in a new, much-abridged version of the Bible rooted in manga, the Japanese form of graphic novels.”We present things in a very brazen way,” said Akinsiku, who hopes to become an Anglican priest and who is the author of “The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation.” “Christ is a hard guy, seeking revolution and revolt, a tough guy.”

Publishers with an eye for evangelism and for markets have long profited by directing Bibles at niche markets: just-married couples, teenage boys, teenage girls, recovering addicts. Often the lure is cosmetic, like a jazzy new cover.

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Battle for God; Battleground Pakistan

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It is a battle for God and the battleground is Pakistan.

By Anwaar Hussain

 

terrorist.jpgThe killing frenzy in Pakistan has reached a feverish pitch. In a rapidly darkening scarlet hue, the extremists are marching on suicide-bombing, beheading and maiming innocent citizens on their bloody path to their murky goal. The naive victims, out of their love for their religion and lack of knowledge of the same, not only cannot tell the difference between the killers and the messiahs, sometimes they indeed sympathize with their executioners. It is a battle for God and the battleground is Pakistan.

Perhaps a time has finally come to call a spade a spade.

By their terror strikes the extremists aim to inspire horror in Pakistan so that she bows her head meekly beneath the brutal yoke of the radicals. It is high time to take cognizance of the fearsome conditions upon which their tyrannical power wants to raise and maintain itself. It is time to see that it is in the name of religion that all oppressors act, only in name. They invoke it, yet they violate it. These extremists are no different.

It is time to tell the killers that they will never succeed because we know who they are and what they stand for. It is time we unmask for all who are watching, the hideous contours of their ghoulish facades.

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The right way to “do God”

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By Ziauddin Sardar

kpt-lightning11.jpgWe need a more challenging idea of religion.

How should we “do God”? The question occurs to me as I watch the run-up to the presidential elections across the pond. A Mormon (Mitt Romney), an evangelical Christian (Mike Huckabee) and a devout Christian in the American black church tradition (Barack Obama) are hoping to become the next president of the United States. What will their religion bring to the table?

Religion, I fear, has been turned into a farce. This was well illustrated by Channel 4’s Make Me a Muslim, broadcast in December. Seven ordinary people from Harrogate, as randomly selected as any Big Brother contestants, were invited to live as Muslims for three weeks. The series came wrapped in the provocative question “Can Islam help repair the moral fabric of British society?” - intended to imply that religion has a positive contribution to make to our multicultural future.

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The new Muslim anti-Semitism

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By Mark R. Cohen

TS admin: Mark Cohen is an Ashkenazo-Zionist and this article looks like another routine “damage control” propaganda piece due to the constant surge of anti Ashkenazo-Zionists feelings in Israel among the real Jews (Mizrahis). It aims also, by misleading, misrepresenting and other manipulations, sometimes of real facts, to maintain and deepen the decades-old divide-and-conquer violent policy of the Ashkenazo-Zionist regime towards the real Jews and all Muslims in Israel and around the world.

rel-31.gifJewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethren in Christian Europe - victims of anti-Semitism - never thought possible.

Today, Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They appropriate an old Jewish myth about an “interfaith utopia” in the Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the two peoples.

In response, there is a new Jewish “counter-myth” that claims that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding fathers of Israel have granted them.

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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