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Mar. 25th, 2008
Dear Sen. Hilary Clinton,
I reject and denounce you, permanently. If I could, I would banish and exile you and your entire bank of supporters from the Democratic party, forever and ever, world without end, amen. Really, Sen. Clinton? You would go so far as to permanently damage another Democratic candidate because he is currently beating you? Really? Fuck you,Sen Clinton. Fuck you to the gates of hell and beyond. FUCK. YOU.
A volcanically enraged Democratic Supporter.
*i need an *enraged!* icon*
I reject and denounce you, permanently. If I could, I would banish and exile you and your entire bank of supporters from the Democratic party, forever and ever, world without end, amen. Really, Sen. Clinton? You would go so far as to permanently damage another Democratic candidate because he is currently beating you? Really? Fuck you,Sen Clinton. Fuck you to the gates of hell and beyond. FUCK. YOU.
A volcanically enraged Democratic Supporter.
*i need an *enraged!* icon*
CAUTION: This stuff is disturbing.
Via Pandagon
Southern medical schools in the 19th century openly advertised for slaves or other black patients for students to practice on, and blacks were also often the source of cadavers for medical school dissections, and the subjects of medical experimentation, often against their will. Long before rumors of AIDS or other forms of medical mistreatment, there were long-standing fears in the black community of body-snatching and even vivisection in white medical schools. In some cases, ambitious doctors ”borrowed” sickly slaves from white slaveholders, or or purchased them outright, for the purpose of performing experiments, usually (in keeping with the standards of the day) crude, unscientific, and painful or dangerous. James Marion Sims and his protege, Nathan Bozeman, perfected the surgical repair of vaginal fistula by performing a harrowing series of operations on black female slaves before the Civil War; some women underwent up to 30 operations before being cured. After developing a workable procedure on these slave women, Sims turned to operating on white women for profit for the rest of his career. (Ironically, today the procedure is used almost entirely on women of color, usually in the 3rd world, where the cause of these fistulas - tearing of the vagina in childbirth by teenage mothers - is concentrated.) Sims is today honored as “the father of gynecological surgery” with not one but two statues in New York City alone.
These practices continued into the 20th century. It is increasingly-widely known that many medical treatments, having been optimized on white male research populations, do not work as effectively on women and blacks. Again and again it has been shown that aggressive interventions - including basic procedures such as an immediate aspiring for suspected heart attack - are overlooked or under-prescribed for black patients (among other sub-groups). Blacks are vastly less likely to have health insurance in America, less likely to have insurance that covers their actual needs, and more likely to be denied coverage for recommended procedures. They are consistently more likely to remain undiagnosed for life-threatening illnesses, to remain untreated or undertreated for them, and to die of them, than white patients. And those are merely the everyday, systematic injustices that occur. The real scandals are even more shocking.
It has only recently been revealed that, after WWII, the US government conducted extensive experiments involving exposure of human subjects to dangerous levels of radiation, sometimes without their knowledge; almost all of the subjects were black. There have been many publicized scandals involving research on prison inmantes; what is often overlooked is that the subjects of those studies are not just prisoners but most often entirely or mainly black prisoners. Many white people today have heard of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study; almost all adult blacks have heard (at least some form of) the story. To whites, the story seems disorienting, unbelievable - to blacks it is all too familiar. That story is illustrative here, in another way: among the black community, the already-horrible facts about the Syphilis Study are often exaggerated to make the story worse than was actually true. Instead of a program to monitor untreated syphilis among already-infected patients, it is widely believed by black Americans to have involved actually infecting healthy patients with the disease. Instead of a limited program that grew out of a well-intended public health effort (scaled back to passive monitoring when the Depression hit and funding dried up), it is often believed to have been a calculated and planned program of genocide. But the actual facts are staggering enough - and these exaggerations are logical extensions of what did in fact occur; in principle and in effect (if not in literal fact) they are not even exaggerations.
Rest here
See also "Medical Apartheid", Race, Poverty and Reproductive Rights (Hint:forced sterilization of Black American women) , to say nothing of The US gov't forcibly sterilizing Puerto Rican Women and Killing the Black Body
One might also note that the idiot Mbeki got his crackpot ideas about AIDS and how it works, from...wait for it...white people. (See the top article.) And, having read all that, please read the article Two types of Woo Contrasted
Via Pandagon
Southern medical schools in the 19th century openly advertised for slaves or other black patients for students to practice on, and blacks were also often the source of cadavers for medical school dissections, and the subjects of medical experimentation, often against their will. Long before rumors of AIDS or other forms of medical mistreatment, there were long-standing fears in the black community of body-snatching and even vivisection in white medical schools. In some cases, ambitious doctors ”borrowed” sickly slaves from white slaveholders, or or purchased them outright, for the purpose of performing experiments, usually (in keeping with the standards of the day) crude, unscientific, and painful or dangerous. James Marion Sims and his protege, Nathan Bozeman, perfected the surgical repair of vaginal fistula by performing a harrowing series of operations on black female slaves before the Civil War; some women underwent up to 30 operations before being cured. After developing a workable procedure on these slave women, Sims turned to operating on white women for profit for the rest of his career. (Ironically, today the procedure is used almost entirely on women of color, usually in the 3rd world, where the cause of these fistulas - tearing of the vagina in childbirth by teenage mothers - is concentrated.) Sims is today honored as “the father of gynecological surgery” with not one but two statues in New York City alone.
These practices continued into the 20th century. It is increasingly-widely known that many medical treatments, having been optimized on white male research populations, do not work as effectively on women and blacks. Again and again it has been shown that aggressive interventions - including basic procedures such as an immediate aspiring for suspected heart attack - are overlooked or under-prescribed for black patients (among other sub-groups). Blacks are vastly less likely to have health insurance in America, less likely to have insurance that covers their actual needs, and more likely to be denied coverage for recommended procedures. They are consistently more likely to remain undiagnosed for life-threatening illnesses, to remain untreated or undertreated for them, and to die of them, than white patients. And those are merely the everyday, systematic injustices that occur. The real scandals are even more shocking.
It has only recently been revealed that, after WWII, the US government conducted extensive experiments involving exposure of human subjects to dangerous levels of radiation, sometimes without their knowledge; almost all of the subjects were black. There have been many publicized scandals involving research on prison inmantes; what is often overlooked is that the subjects of those studies are not just prisoners but most often entirely or mainly black prisoners. Many white people today have heard of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study; almost all adult blacks have heard (at least some form of) the story. To whites, the story seems disorienting, unbelievable - to blacks it is all too familiar. That story is illustrative here, in another way: among the black community, the already-horrible facts about the Syphilis Study are often exaggerated to make the story worse than was actually true. Instead of a program to monitor untreated syphilis among already-infected patients, it is widely believed by black Americans to have involved actually infecting healthy patients with the disease. Instead of a limited program that grew out of a well-intended public health effort (scaled back to passive monitoring when the Depression hit and funding dried up), it is often believed to have been a calculated and planned program of genocide. But the actual facts are staggering enough - and these exaggerations are logical extensions of what did in fact occur; in principle and in effect (if not in literal fact) they are not even exaggerations.
Rest here
See also "Medical Apartheid", Race, Poverty and Reproductive Rights (Hint:forced sterilization of Black American women) , to say nothing of The US gov't forcibly sterilizing Puerto Rican Women and Killing the Black Body
One might also note that the idiot Mbeki got his crackpot ideas about AIDS and how it works, from...wait for it...white people. (See the top article.) And, having read all that, please read the article Two types of Woo Contrasted
Via Promethus 6 blog
Mar. 25th, 2008 07:20 pmFrom the Guardian
The naive armchair warriors are fighting a delusional war
Calls for the west to use force to restore its values in the face of radical Islam reveal a profound detachment from reality
* Alastair Crooke
* The Guardian,
* Monday March 24 2008
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday March 24 2008 on p33 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:02 on March 24 2008.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that in all societies discourse is controlled - imperceptibly constrained, perhaps, but constrained nonetheless. We are not free to say exactly what we like. The norms set by institutions, convention and our need to keep within the boundaries of accepted behaviour and thought limit what may be touched upon. The Archbishop of Canterbury experienced the backlash from stepping outside these conventions when he spoke about aspects of Islamic law that might be imported into British life.
Once, a man was held to be mad if he strayed from this discourse - even if his utterings were credited with revealing some hidden truth. Today, he is called "naive", or accused of having gone "native". Recently, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) marshalled former senior military and intelligence experts in order to assert such limits to expression by warning us that "deference" to multiculturalism was undermining the fight against Islamic "extremism" and threatening security.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview with a German magazine, embellished Rusi's complaints of naivety and "flabby thinking". Radical Islam won't stop, he warned, and the "virus" would only become more virulent if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.
The charge of naivety is not limited to failing to understand the concealed and duplicitous nature of Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran and Syria; it extends to not grasping the true nature of the wider "enemy" the west is facing. "I don't like the term 'war on terror' because terror is a method, not a political movement; we are in a war against radical Islam," says Kissinger. But who or what is radical Islam? It is those who are not "moderates", he explains. Certainly, a small minority of Muslims believe that only by "burning the system" can a fresh stab at a just society be made. But Kissinger's definition of "moderate" Islam sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organisational principle for society.
If radical Islam, with which these experts tell us we should be at war, encompasses all those who are not enamoured of secular society, and who espouse a vision of their societies grounded in the values of Islam, then these experts are advocating a war with Islam - because Islam is the vision for their future favoured by many Muslims.
Mainstream Islamists are indeed challenging western secular and materialist values, and many do believe that western thinking is flawed - that the desires and appetites of man have been reified into representing man himself. It is time to re-establish values that go beyond "desires and wants", they argue.
Many Islamists also reject the western narrative of history and its projection of inevitable "progress" towards a secular modernity; they reject the western view of power-relationships within societies and between societies; they reject individualism as the litmus of progress in society; and, above all, they reject the west's assumption that its empirical approach lends unassailability and objective rationality to its thinking - and universality to its social models.
People may, or may not, agree, but the point is that this is a dispute about ideas, about the nature of society, and about equity in an emerging global order. If western discourse cannot step beyond the enemy that it has created, these ideas cannot be heard - or addressed. This is the argument that Jonathan Powell made last week when he argued that Britain should understand the lessons of Northern Ireland: we should talk to Islamist movements, including al-Qaida. It has to be done, because the west needs to break through the fears and constraints of an over-imagined "enemy".
Camouflaged behind a language dwelling exclusively on "their" violence and "their" disdain for rationality, these "realists" propose not a war on terror, nor a war to preserve "our values" - for we are not about to be culturally overwhelmed. No Islamist seriously expects that a "defeated" west would hasten to adopt the spirit of the Islamic revolution.
No, the west's war is a military response to ideas that question western supremacy and power. The nature of this war on "extremism" became evident when five former chiefs of defence staff of Nato states gathered at a think-tank in Washington earlier this year. Their aim was not to query the realism of a war on ideas, but to empower Nato for an "uncertain world".
"We cannot survive ... confronted with people who do not share our values, who unfortunately are in the majority in terms of numbers, and who are extremely hungry for success," Germany's former chief of defence staff warned. Their conclusion was that the security of the west rests on a "restoration of its certainties", and on a new form of deterrence in which enemies will find there is not, and never will be, a place in which they feel safe.
The generals concluded that Nato should adopt an asymmetrical and relentless pursuit of its targets regardless of others' sovereignty; to surprise; to seize the initiative; and to use all means, including the nuclear option, against its enemies.
In Foucault's discourse, he identified a further group of rules serving to control language: none may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he or she is deemed qualified to do so. Those, like the archbishop, who penetrate this forbidden territory - reserved to security expertise - to ask that we see the west for what it has become in the eyes of others, are liable to be labelled as naively weakening "our certainties" and undermining national resolve.
But do we, who are brushed out of this discourse by the blackmail of presumed expertise, really believe them? Do we really believe, after so much failure, that Islamist alternative ideas will be suppressed by a Nato plunged into an asymmetrical warfare of assassinations and killings? The west's vision for society holds power only so long as people believe it holds power. Do we really think that if force has not succeeded, that only more and greater force can restore belief in the western vision? If that is the limit to western thinking, then it is these "realists", these armchair warriors fighting a delusional war against a majority who "do not share our values", who are truly naive.
· Alastair Crooke is a former security adviser to the EU and founder and direct or of the Conflicts Forum conflictsforum.org
The naive armchair warriors are fighting a delusional war
Calls for the west to use force to restore its values in the face of radical Islam reveal a profound detachment from reality
* Alastair Crooke
* The Guardian,
* Monday March 24 2008
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday March 24 2008 on p33 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:02 on March 24 2008.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that in all societies discourse is controlled - imperceptibly constrained, perhaps, but constrained nonetheless. We are not free to say exactly what we like. The norms set by institutions, convention and our need to keep within the boundaries of accepted behaviour and thought limit what may be touched upon. The Archbishop of Canterbury experienced the backlash from stepping outside these conventions when he spoke about aspects of Islamic law that might be imported into British life.
Once, a man was held to be mad if he strayed from this discourse - even if his utterings were credited with revealing some hidden truth. Today, he is called "naive", or accused of having gone "native". Recently, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) marshalled former senior military and intelligence experts in order to assert such limits to expression by warning us that "deference" to multiculturalism was undermining the fight against Islamic "extremism" and threatening security.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview with a German magazine, embellished Rusi's complaints of naivety and "flabby thinking". Radical Islam won't stop, he warned, and the "virus" would only become more virulent if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.
The charge of naivety is not limited to failing to understand the concealed and duplicitous nature of Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran and Syria; it extends to not grasping the true nature of the wider "enemy" the west is facing. "I don't like the term 'war on terror' because terror is a method, not a political movement; we are in a war against radical Islam," says Kissinger. But who or what is radical Islam? It is those who are not "moderates", he explains. Certainly, a small minority of Muslims believe that only by "burning the system" can a fresh stab at a just society be made. But Kissinger's definition of "moderate" Islam sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organisational principle for society.
Mainstream Islamists are indeed challenging western secular and materialist values, and many do believe that western thinking is flawed - that the desires and appetites of man have been reified into representing man himself. It is time to re-establish values that go beyond "desires and wants", they argue.
Many Islamists also reject the western narrative of history and its projection of inevitable "progress" towards a secular modernity; they reject the western view of power-relationships within societies and between societies; they reject individualism as the litmus of progress in society; and, above all, they reject the west's assumption that its empirical approach lends unassailability and objective rationality to its thinking - and universality to its social models.
People may, or may not, agree, but the point is that this is a dispute about ideas, about the nature of society, and about equity in an emerging global order. If western discourse cannot step beyond the enemy that it has created, these ideas cannot be heard - or addressed. This is the argument that Jonathan Powell made last week when he argued that Britain should understand the lessons of Northern Ireland: we should talk to Islamist movements, including al-Qaida. It has to be done, because the west needs to break through the fears and constraints of an over-imagined "enemy".
Camouflaged behind a language dwelling exclusively on "their" violence and "their" disdain for rationality, these "realists" propose not a war on terror, nor a war to preserve "our values" - for we are not about to be culturally overwhelmed. No Islamist seriously expects that a "defeated" west would hasten to adopt the spirit of the Islamic revolution.
No, the west's war is a military response to ideas that question western supremacy and power. The nature of this war on "extremism" became evident when five former chiefs of defence staff of Nato states gathered at a think-tank in Washington earlier this year. Their aim was not to query the realism of a war on ideas, but to empower Nato for an "uncertain world".
"We cannot survive ... confronted with people who do not share our values, who unfortunately are in the majority in terms of numbers, and who are extremely hungry for success," Germany's former chief of defence staff warned. Their conclusion was that the security of the west rests on a "restoration of its certainties", and on a new form of deterrence in which enemies will find there is not, and never will be, a place in which they feel safe.
The generals concluded that Nato should adopt an asymmetrical and relentless pursuit of its targets regardless of others' sovereignty; to surprise; to seize the initiative; and to use all means, including the nuclear option, against its enemies.
In Foucault's discourse, he identified a further group of rules serving to control language: none may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he or she is deemed qualified to do so. Those, like the archbishop, who penetrate this forbidden territory - reserved to security expertise - to ask that we see the west for what it has become in the eyes of others, are liable to be labelled as naively weakening "our certainties" and undermining national resolve.
But do we, who are brushed out of this discourse by the blackmail of presumed expertise, really believe them? Do we really believe, after so much failure, that Islamist alternative ideas will be suppressed by a Nato plunged into an asymmetrical warfare of assassinations and killings? The west's vision for society holds power only so long as people believe it holds power. Do we really think that if force has not succeeded, that only more and greater force can restore belief in the western vision? If that is the limit to western thinking, then it is these "realists", these armchair warriors fighting a delusional war against a majority who "do not share our values", who are truly naive.
· Alastair Crooke is a former security adviser to the EU and founder and direct or of the Conflicts Forum conflictsforum.org
What the Fuck? Entrapment much?
Mar. 25th, 2008 11:00 pmVia You made me say it
Full story here
FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
Posted by Declan McCullagh
The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.
Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.
A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who's using an open wireless connection--and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.
Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI's hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.
...
The implications of the FBI's hyperlink-enticement technique are sweeping. Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography--and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages. The bureau could register the "unlawfulimages.com" domain name and prosecute intentional visitors.
...
While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant.
The defendant in that case, Travis Carter, suggested that any of the neighbors could be using his wireless network. (The public defender's office even sent out an investigator who confirmed that dozens of homes were within Wi-Fi range.)
But the magistrate judge ruled that even the possibilities of spoofing or other users of an open Wi-Fi connection "would not have negated a substantial basis for concluding that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of child pornography would be found on the premises to be searched." Translated, that means the search warrant was valid.
...
Civil libertarians warn that anyone who clicks on a hyperlink advertising something illegal--perhaps found while Web browsing or received through e-mail--could face the same fate.
When asked what would stop the FBI from expanding its hyperlink sting operation, Harvey Silverglate, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge, Mass. and author of a forthcoming book on the Justice Department, replied: "Because the courts have been so narrow in their definition of 'entrapment,' and so expansive in their definition of 'probable cause,' there is nothing to stop the Feds from acting as you posit."
Full story here
FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
Posted by Declan McCullagh
The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.
Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.
A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who's using an open wireless connection--and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.
Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI's hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.
...
The implications of the FBI's hyperlink-enticement technique are sweeping. Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography--and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages. The bureau could register the "unlawfulimages.com" domain name and prosecute intentional visitors.
...
While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant.
The defendant in that case, Travis Carter, suggested that any of the neighbors could be using his wireless network. (The public defender's office even sent out an investigator who confirmed that dozens of homes were within Wi-Fi range.)
But the magistrate judge ruled that even the possibilities of spoofing or other users of an open Wi-Fi connection "would not have negated a substantial basis for concluding that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of child pornography would be found on the premises to be searched." Translated, that means the search warrant was valid.
...
Civil libertarians warn that anyone who clicks on a hyperlink advertising something illegal--perhaps found while Web browsing or received through e-mail--could face the same fate.
When asked what would stop the FBI from expanding its hyperlink sting operation, Harvey Silverglate, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge, Mass. and author of a forthcoming book on the Justice Department, replied: "Because the courts have been so narrow in their definition of 'entrapment,' and so expansive in their definition of 'probable cause,' there is nothing to stop the Feds from acting as you posit."
From the Globe and Mail
Taking Christ out of Christianity
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
March 22, 2008 at 12:38 AM EDT
That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.
But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.
Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.
There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.
Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.
Taking Christ out of Christianity
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
March 22, 2008 at 12:38 AM EDT
That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.
But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.
Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.
There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.
Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.
( Read more... )