LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I found this very insightful essay at CounterPunch. Warning: it gets pretty wicked.

"Those Looters Should be Shot, Praise the Lord, and Pass the Guacamole!"
A God with Whom I am not Familiar

By TIM WISE

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:

You don't know me. But I know you.

I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.

You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal--and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word--morally scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you attacked them--all of them, without distinction it seemed--for the behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like guns, or big screen TVs.

I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues "Amens," why it was that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the people of New Orleans instead--again, all of them in your mind--chose to steal and shoot at relief helicopters.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

In this speech repeated on Salon.com, Bill Moyers talks about the religious bullies that threaten America's religious freedom. Here are some excerpts:

Hostages to fear

The bullies using Sept. 11 to threaten America's religious and moral freedom must be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own.

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from Bill Moyer's address at the Union Theological Seminary in New York on Sept. 7.

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By Bill Moyers

Sept. 11, 2005 | At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do. My spiritual forebears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils," thundered dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a "pitiful negligible minority," but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as "incendiaries of the commonwealth" for holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith -- the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined flogged, and exiled.

In 1651 Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden Communion with another Baptist in Lynn, Mass. His friends offered to pay his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said, "that must free the soul."

Such revolutionary ideas made the new nation with its Constitution and Bill of Rights "a haven for the cause of conscience." No longer could magistrates order citizens to support churches they did not attend and recite creeds that they did not believe. No longer would "the loathsome combination of church and state" -- as Thomas Jefferson described it -- be the settled order. Unlike the Old World that had been racked with religious wars and persecution, the government of America would take no sides in the religious free-for-all that liberty would make possible and politics would make inevitable.( This is a must-read! )