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Some of you might think that Jesus couldn’t run for President of the United States because he did not live to be old enough to meet the minimum age requirement (35 years of age). But according to John McCain’s views, that is not the only thing that would keep Jesus from becoming U.S. President. You see, Jesus was Jewish and Mr. McCain thinks you need to be Christian to be President.
I have just spent the last few days in New Orleans helping to rebuild a battered women’s shelter that was destroyed by the massive amounts of water that flowed over St. Bernard Parish, and many other parts of the city, when the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina.
The Dalai Lama is right. All religious traditions do have messages of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, all religions also have messages of hate, cruelty and condemnation. The conundrum of religion, as we saw illustrated in the On Faith discussions with author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, is that for every claim that religion does good in the world, there are also the well-documented examples of religious messages of intolerance, moral callousness and judgmentalism, and the harm that they have caused.
Fire is a multivalent biblical symbol. Fire scourges the earth as the end of days approaches; fire also means the inspiration of the spirit.
The fires now burning in California are unprecedented in their scope and danger. Thirteen major fires are raging in the southern part of the state even as I write this. The instability in our weather cycles caused by global warming has not only heated the desert where the Santa Ana winds are baked and so increased the temperature difference that when the night’s cooler air comes down, it works like a giant bellows and they are blasted toward California, but has also increased the rainfall in that part of the country. That means that more vegetation grows, dries out and then becomes the fuel in this dangerous and accelerating cycle of heat and rain. This is a global warming catastrophe that portends more such to come.
Halloween is no fun for me anymore. I just can’t bring myself to make fun of ghosts and goblins and devils when there is so much real horror around us. To quote the kid from movie The Sixth Sense, “I see dead people” and I can’t seem to stop.
I started thinking in very literal terms especially about ghosts when all those nooses started appearing post the Jena 6 protests. First, of course, there were the three nooses (in the school colors!) found hanging from the “white student’s tree” in Jena, La., and then a noose on the campus of the University of Maryland, a police locker room in Long Island, NY, a Pittsburgh bus maintenance garage, and other high schools. These twisted ropes are the ghosts of an unburied past in America that is coming back to haunt us.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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