LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY thedemonprist)

Was randomly surfing around and found this link. ( Text of article inside )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Salon (day pass or subscription required) article talks about the Christian Right's interference in what should be a private affair:

"This has nothing to do with the sanctity of life"

The Rev. John Paris, professor of bioethics, says Terri Schiavo has the moral and legal right to die, and only the Christian right is keeping her alive.

***

So what do you think this case is really about?

The power of the Christian right. This case has nothing to do with the legal issues involving a feeding tube. The feeding tube issue was definitively resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990 in Cruzan vs. Director. The United States Supreme Court ruled that competent patients have the right to decline any and all unwanted treatment, and unconscious patients have the same right, depending upon the evidentiary standard established by the state. And Florida law says that Terri Schiavo has more than met the standard in this state. So there is no legal issue. ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Some enterprising Christians have been selling a candle called "His Essence", which is said to smell like Chirist was prophesized to smell like. I was tempted to make a lot of fun of this latest exercise in what I call 'consumer Christianity' until I took a closer look at the components of this scent, and what their real effect on people would be.

The scent, they say, is composed of Myrrh, Aloe, and Cassia. Here are the aromatheraputic and spiritual properties of these scents:

Myrrh: cleansing antibacterial, promotes spiritual growth, resin from a bush- woody, resiny smell.

Aloe (Lign Aloe)is an Asian heartwood, not the common aloe vera plant. The wood aloe is very rare today. It has an incredible scent. (Morining Star's Aloewood is a great example in Japanese incense.)It is used extensively in Japan, China and Tibet in Buddhist and Shinto rites.

Cassia is a member of the cinnamon family. You can tell cassia bark from regular cinnamon because it rolls up like a scroll, rather than like a carpet. Cassia is more commonly used as the spice. The scent also raises spiritual awareness.

So, "His Essence" is already in wide use among folks who seek spiritual growth, enlightenment, peace, and insight. Who knows, maybe it'll do the same for True Believers™, too. One could hope...

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY swisscelt)

If we were to institute "required reading" on dark_christian, then slacktivist would certainly be on the list. Here's Tuesday's edition:

It is sometimes said, in rants like this against the plague of he-said/she-said journalism, that news reporters behave like they're covering a tennis match. But the real problem is that he-said/she-said journalists are nowhere near as responsible as sports writers. Sports reporters, first and foremost, have a duty as indifferent arbiters of the facts. That's a duty that hard news journalists have long since abandoned.

The paper I work for today is running a Q&A from the Associated Press about "the facts" of the Terry Schiavo case. One of the questions asks if Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state. The Q&A does not provide an answer -- it provides instead two, mutually exclusive answers: Some doctors say she is, but her parents' doctors say she isn't. That's not a Q&A, that's a Q&Q. "Who are we too say?" is not an answer.

The Schiavo case demonstrates the problem of partisan epistemology. We now have "red facts" and "blue facts." Newspapers -- hoping not to upset either faction of their potential circulation -- have no intention in taking sides in such disputes. Thus two competing sets of claims, two very different sets of facts, two opposing narratives, are treated as equally valid. News reporters, unlike sports reporters, feel no responsibility to check the scoreboard, or even to acknowledge that there is a scoreboard. They tend to deny the possibility that a scoreboard might even exist.

In the case of Terry Schiavo there is such a scoreboard, and what it tells us is nowhere near as murky and ambiguous as the AP's Q&Q or CNN's vapid, incurious coverage would suggest. The facts of the matter have been hashed out, again and again and again, in court.

Congress and President Bush, like the absurd hypothetical Gonzaga fans above, would prefer that the facts were other than they are. They have, therefore, declared by legislative fiat that the scoreboard be reset to zero and that the game be replayed. Here, however, the sporting analogy breaks down. If the Red Raiders and Bulldogs were to replay their game, the result might be different. But the facts of the Schiavo case will not change, no matter how many times these facts are replayed and reviewed.

Read the rest of the article here: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/03/whats_the_score.html

This is interesting, in that Christians in general and Dominionists in particular are fond of saying that there is an objective truth. While I don't disagree with their thesis, it's noteworthy that in this case and many others the "truth" of the Christian Right is relative. Don't like the findings of a state court? Legislate against it in the state legislature. Are you thwarted on that attempt? Then merrily feed the Tenth Amendment in the shredder as you press Congress and the Federal courts to allow you a massive "do-over". The political and governmental-- indeed, the legal-- truth that the case has been brought to its constitutionally prescribed conclusion doesn't matter, because that truth is relative to the reported will of a caliginous god.