LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

Results of an ABC News poll make it quite clear that yes, evangelicals do have a tendency to think differently from the rest of Americans:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=599622&page=1

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

Note the good doctor's association with a "Christian" bioethics group....

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/23/schiavo.jeb.bush/index.html


xposted to my journal

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Katherine Yurica, author of "The Yurica Report" sent me this in an email:

First, we want you to know about the conference being held in New York City on April 29th and 30th. Titled: "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right." It is drawing a lot of media attention and people are signing up from as far away as California! If you live near NYC--don't miss this opportunity!

Co-sponsored by the New York Open Center
and CUNY Graduate Center Public Programs
(At Fifth Ave & 34th St. Manhattan)

Friday Evening, April 29, 7:30-10 pm and
Saturday, April 30, 10 am-5:30 pm

I cannot afford to go (although I would love to, and Session would be over by then!), but I would like someone to make it and report on it. Please! Here's the information page about this conference- it sounds like it's going to be very interesting. If I could make it to this conference, I'd do my 'blogger' thing and post about it. And I am sure that I would have material for weeks of discussion.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article talks about the very serious consequences of Dominionist rule of the government:

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News,

the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.

The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's newsletter, calls "political religion"—religion as an instrument of political combat. On gay marriage and abortion— the most conspicuous of the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's guide—no one should be surprised what this political religion portends. The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote, "there are landmines."

Welcome to the Rapture!

This may be a repeat of an earlier Moyer essay- but it is worth reading again.