LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

BusinessWeek reports on how the GOP's aggressive social agenda is alienating independents:

Independents Are Having Buyer's Remorse

Just nine months after giving George W. Bush the crucial swing votes he needed to best John Kerry, political independents are bolting out of the Republican Big Tent. Angered by GOP meddling in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, reeling from record gasoline prices, and depressed by the escalating cycle of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, unaligned voters are suddenly lining up with Democrats to give Bush the lowest ratings of his Presidency...

Nearly 30% of the electorate describes itself as independent, though about half of those voters remain registered with a party. So while Republicans have signed up more than 4 million unregistered Christian conservatives in two years, a sizable decline in independent support in the 2006 midterm elections could leave the GOP a net loser outside the South...

The swing-voter stampede started after the extraordinary intervention by Bush and the GOP Congress in the Schiavo case. Now socially moderate independents -- who strongly favor expanded stem cell research and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade -- fear that the majority party is in thrall to the Religious Right. "These people lean more Republican because of fiscal issues, but they're much more liberal on social issues," says independent pollster Dick Bennett of American Research Group. "After Schiavo, they said, 'Wait a minute. We didn't buy in for that.'"

...The indie revolt worries some GOP veterans, but the White House seems unconcerned. Some insiders say Bush über-strategist Karl Rove believes Republicans can afford to lose socially liberal swing voters if they succeed in wooing indie and Democratic "values voters" and increasing turnout on the Christian Right. "They obviously have a strategy to change the electorate, and they're willing to give up independents and moderates," says Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.

Full Story

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

Here are some items from solarbird's latest Cultural Warfare Update that may be of particular interest to members of this community:

* Virginia United Church of Christ church hit by arson, anti-gay graffiti
* Focus on the Family (FotF) and other fundamentalist [religious supremacist?] groups oppose an effort to ban Federal Government workplace discrimination against gays
* FotF action item urges letters against a Johnson & Johnson ad targeting gay consumers
* FotF whines about news coverage not being positive enough towards President Bush
* FotF newsbrief supportive of Kenneth Tomlinson's political interference at PBS
* FotF newsbrief on the Supreme Court nomination fight
* FotF newsbrief - New Jersey senators won't support anti-abortion nominee
* FotF newsbrief - "Angry" Arlen Specter behind push to open more lines of stem cells for research
* Concerned Women for America (CWFA) doesn't want Gonzales to be nominee to replace O'Connor
* CWFA condemns bill that would project Federal employees from on-the-job discrimination based on sexual orientation
* Washington Times on Senator Santorum's new book, which claims that women not working outside of the home would solve many of society's ills [The Washington Times is owned by the leader of the Moonies cult, BTW.]
* Family Research Council demands USAID dismiss all groups which support birth control in international family planning [Huh???]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Church's gay marriage decision proves faiths change with time

BY RON GROSSMAN
Chicago Tribune

(KRT) - With faith-based conservatives on a seemingly endless roll, this hasn't been a fun season for the liberally inclined. The religious right styles itself as a divinely installed power behind the throne. Fundamentalists are so convinced that the road to heaven runs through their church's door, and they issued such finely detailed specs for a Supreme Court nominee, that even President Bush was taken aback.

Yet while the era now seems as distant as Noah and the flood, a respect for human diversity and a sense that no creed has a monopoly on truth once were in the mainstream of American religious thought. Now, though, it virtually requires what the Bible calls "signs and wonders" to believe that the spirit of toleration might someday return.

So here is a sign - and, even more so, a wonder - for the progressive and perplexed to contemplate. On July 4, the general synod of the United Church of Christ endorsed same-sex marriage.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Slactivist talks about the error of taking the Bible literally:

The story of the Good Samaritan is a good story, a beautiful and well-crafted story. It is a story that conveys important truths. But it is not a true story. Jesus never claims to be retelling an actual event that actually happened.

It's not the kind of story that anyone could tell as a "true story." There was no journalist present to offer such a report. No one was present to witness all the elements in this story, which is told from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person narrator and not from the perspective of an eyewitness.

If your response to the tenth chapter of Luke is to set out on an archaeological expedition in search of the actual site of the actual Good Samaritan's Inn, then you've completely misunderstood the story. Not only would you have utterly missed the point, but you'd be inflicting other, different meaning on the passage. This is a refined and elaborate form of illiteracy, but it is still illiteracy.

Many Christians insist on this same illiterate approach to the first chapter of Genesis. They insist on reading it "literally," by which they mean taking a story that is not a journalistic eyewitness account and pretending that it is one.

A commenter put it in succinct words:

Huston Smith has some very valuable things to say about Logos and Mythos. They are the two categories of knowledge, and have been since the beginnings of human civilization.

Logos is the knowledge of number and fact.

Mythos is the knowledge of symbol and metaphor.

Both exist side-by-side, or hand-in hand. Or they did, until Reneé Descartes. Mythos got thrown out with the bathwater, because you coudn't "prove" such knowledge.

Logos is deductive. Mythos is inductive,

Logos is…logical. Mythos is intuitive.

The Bible is Mythos. We treat it as Logos at our peril. And it doesen't help that John uses Logos, "the Word" to describe Jesus.

It's too bad that the Biblical literalists do not understand this. I believe that understanding this would bring about a lot of peace, if minds could be changed.