Entries Tagged 'Religions' ↓

The Quakers are finding a new strategy for church growth: Merge with paganism! From “Pagans find a sometimes uneasy home among Quakers”, referring to “a small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan — a trend that may or may not exist in other Christian traditions, but certainly not in such an organized, public fashion”:

Across the board, the number of Quakers is dwindling, to roughly 100,000 in the U.S. But if Quakerism continues to catch on among the estimated half million pagans in the U.S., those who embrace both traditions predict that could reverse the Quakers’ downward trend. Still, some Quakers worry about losing their own traditions through the process of accepting new ones.

In the last decade, this dual faith has sprung up around the country, including Quaker-pagan gatherings, seminars, an extensive presence on the Internet, and even explicitly Quaker-pagan congregations. There may be only several hundred Quaker pagans, but among American Quakers, their presence can be distinctly felt.

“It seems that now, in most liberal meetings at least, you can always find a few members that identify as pagan,” says Stasa Morgan-Appel of Ann Arbor, Mich., who has facilitated a Quaker pagan interest group since 2002.

Quakers — officially the Religious Society of Friends — are divided into four main branches, three of which are explicitly Christian. Pagans have been generally joining the liberal fourth branch, the Friends General Conference, which counts 30,000 members in North America, including Morgan-Appel.

The young girl, named Sarah Barlow, who called authorities from that Texas polygamist compound claiming that she being abused, leading to a raid and the taking of 400 children away from their mothers? Evidence has come in that indicates she was a 33-year-old African-American woman from Colorado with a history of phoning in false accusations of sex abuse. But Texas authorities still vow to “press on.” FromTexas 911 Calls Linked To 33-Year-Old in Colo. - washingtonpost.com:

SAN ANGELO, Tex., April 23 — The phone calls that triggered a massive raid on a polygamist compound in west Texas — in which a quavering girl’s voice described being forcibly married at 15 — have been linked to a Colorado woman with a history of making false claims of sexual abuse, according to an affidavit filed in Colorado Springs.

The affidavit says calls that allegedly came from “Sarah Barlow” — a teenage girl at the Yearning for Zion Ranch outside Eldorado, Tex. — actually came from numbers connected to Rozita Swinton, 33, of Colorado Springs. The affidavit also notes Swinton’s possible involvement in a series of separate but similar reports in which the young caller described being abused by a pastor, an uncle or her father.

Texas authorities yesterday said they have not determined whether the calls about the Yearning for Zion Ranch were a hoax and that they plan to press on with their investigation of possible sexual abuse there. More than 400 children are now in state custody, as authorities try to sort out what happened at the ranch run by a polygamist group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The raid of that compound in Texas with the Fundamentalist Mormons has to make us squirm. Taking over 400 children away from their mothers? Surely they weren’t guilty of anything. And even if there were abuse, their mothers surely weren’t to blame. Here is the latest.

Don’t the investigators need to be more respecting of parental rights, even in a case like this?

The raid of that fundamentalist Mormon sect went into the inner sanctums of the Temple in the compound and found a bed. Reportedly, worshippers used it to have sex with underaged girls. Notice that this is a throwback practice to the ancient fertility religions that the Hebrews were always tempted by. Sex as a means of worship in pagan temples was commonplace, and when the practice was carried out in God’s own Temple in Jerusalem, His judgment was fierce.

What are we to think about that action against the Mormon polygamists in Texas, surrounded in their compound by government agents worried about child abuse? From 400+ Kids Taken From Polygamist Compound:

More than 400 children, mostly girls in pioneer dresses, were swept into state custody from a polygamist sect in what authorities described Monday as the largest child-welfare operation in Texas history.

The dayslong raid on the sprawling compound built by now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sparked by a 16-year-old girl’s call to authorities that she was being abused and that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being forced into marriages with much older men.
Dressed in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses with their hair pinned up in braids, some 133 women left the Yearning for Zion Ranch of their own volition along with the children.

I’m thankful there was no Waco-type bloodletting. I believe the secular arm should indeed be used against religious groups that violate the moral and natural law, as seems to be the case here. And yet, is taking all of these children away from their mothers and father a violation of parental rights and religious liberty?

Thanks to Ned for giving the definitive answer to the great prophet Corky who is suing to erect a monument giving the principles of the religion he invented, that being only fair since a Utah town has a monument of the Ten Commandments. (See the post below). Ned’s handles it by taking the religion seriously, which is a great way of refuting bad ideas. His comment:

Well, if Summum is mind and the universe is a mental creation, why not enshrine that in a mental monument?

Plus if everything according to the Summum worldview is in motion, where would we put such a monument and where would we later go to find it?

Also, everything has its opposites. Sounds to me like this monument would be the opposite of the Ten Commandments monument. But wait, opposites are identical in nature, so why have two monuments of the same nature just differing in degrees?!?!?

If these thoughts don’t make sense at the moment, just wait. All paradoxes may be reconciled!

Can you think of other beliefs that can be exposed by taking them seriously?

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, has a monument of the Ten Commandments in a local park. Therefore, a religion named Summum, whose Moses is named Corky Ra, is suing for the right to display ITS sacred list. Here are The Seven Aphorisms of Summum:

1. SUMMUM is MIND, thought; the universe is a mental creation.

2. As above, so below; as below, so above.

3. Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

4. Everything is dual; everything has an opposing point; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes bond; all truths are but partial truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.

5. Everything flows out and in; everything has its season; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing expresses itself in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

6. Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is just a name for Law not recognized; there are many fields of causation, but nothing escapes the Law of Destiny.

7. Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all levels.

I invite comments are two subjects: (1) How about this as a culturally-relevant religion? (2) On what basis can the Summums be denied having their Seven Aphorisms posted next to the Ten Commandments?

Yes, we decry the way Communist China (at least I’m not saying “Red China,” tODD) is oppressing the Tibetans, as well as Christians and just about everybody else. But that does not excuse the Tibetan Buddhists who murdered at least 19 innocent people just because they were Chinese. From Eyewitnesses Recount Terrifying Day in Tibet - washingtonpost.com:

It was a heady feeling, being part of a howling pack that had forced police to turn tail and run, some dropping their shields as they fled a barrage of rocks. Then the Tibetans in the crowd slowed and began turning back, grinning and patting one another on the back.

The ebullient mood did not last long. The pack broke into smaller groups, gathering rocks and pulling out knives, looking for the next target.

“There was no more crowd to be part of. It looked like they were turning on everybody,” said Kenwood, 19, describing the scene to reporters last week when he arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, after 10 days in the Tibetan capital. “It wasn’t about Tibet freedom anymore.”

What he witnessed next was a violent rampage unlike any in decades in Lhasa, a city where Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered temples sit among office buildings and concrete markets built by Chinese bent on developing the remote Himalayan region. Hundreds of mostly young Tibetans broke up into roaming gangs and attacked Chinese passersby and vandalized shops, killing 19 people and injuring more than 600 over two days.

During the riots, looters set fire to a clothing store, burning to death five young employees who were huddled on the second floor. Most police officers kept their distance while the center of Lhasa descended into chaos.

Here is an interesting story about the revival in contemporary Judaism of the Mikveh, the ritual bath that goes back to Biblical times. Even today someone converting to Judaism must be immersed in the water. It was also used to deal with various kinds of “uncleanness.” Today, Jews are using it more therapeutically, to deal with times of transition, to symbolize new beginnings, etc.

For a Christian, of course, the Mikveh speaks to us of Baptism. I’d like to see some scholarship relating the ordinary Mikveh–and apparently most houses of that time had a pool for this–and the Baptism of John and then of the Church.

Several observers have noted that in both his rhetoric and in the zeal he inspires in his supporters, Barack Obama is being presented as a  Messiah. Consider these lines from his speeches:

“We are the hope of the future.” We can “remake this world as it should be.”      

We can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

  ”We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Similarly, people are putting their “hope” in him.  They are “inspired” by him.  He is “charismatic.”  Notice the religious terminology.I like Obama and far prefer him to Hillary Clinton.  But in a secularist culture–something rare and unnatural in the history of humanity–religious impulses, long suppressed, can lie just under the surface and, with the right catalyst can come roaring back into the void. The old pagan model–revived under Fascism– of a divinized ruler in a divinized state may be the default position in human governments.I guess people who think all religions are essentially the same and equally valid  might see this messianic outbreak as a good thing, but Christians cannot.  (Contemplate again the skull of Valentine, who refused to accept the Roman pantheon and Caesar as god at the cost of his life.)    

UPDATE:  And now people at Obama rallies are getting  slain in the spirit.

Here is a fascinating article on how some poor black families inCairo, IL, have converted to Judaism. Strangely missing, though, are interviews from the converts about why they did so. This is an example too of the clash between two views of religion: is it a matter of identity or belief? Most of these new Jews were formerly Baptists, who seem to be bringing that conversion mentality to a religion that is normally understood by its adherents as an ethnic identity. (The reporters don’t delve into that either, with no interviews of the rabbis who brought them into the religion. Nor is there much on HOW one converts to Judaism–a membership class? subscription to a set of beliefs? how about circumcision?–beyond a ritual bath, which probably has historic ties, unremarked on, to Christian baptism.)

Unlike the “new atheists,” the old atheists, such as Nietzsche and Camus, were at least honest in facing up to the implications of their non-belief. Consider what Walter Burns says about Camus’ “The Stranger”:

Meursault, its hero (actually, its antihero), is a murderer, but a different kind of murderer. What is different about him is that he murdered for no reason–he did it because the sun got in his eyes, à cause du soleil–and because he neither loves nor hates, and unlike the other people who inhabit his world, does not pretend to love or hate. He has no friends; indeed, he lives in a world in which there is no basis for friendship and no moral law; therefore, no one, not even a murderer, can violate the terms of friendship or break that law. As he said, the universe “is benignly indifferent” to how he lives.It is a bleak picture, and Camus was criticized for painting it, but as he wrote in reply, “there is no other life possible for a man deprived of God, and all men are [now] in that position.” But Camus was not the first European to draw this picture; he was preceded by Nietzsche who (see Zarathustra’s “Prologue”) provided us with an account of human life in that godless and “brave new world.” It will be a comfortable world–rather like that promised by the European Union–where men will “have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night,” but no love, no longing, no striving, no hope, no gods or ideals, no politics (”too burdensome”), no passions (especially no anger), only “a regard for health.”

Sound familiar? This describes our postmodern lives perfectly! Notice that our culture’s “practical atheism,” believing in God and yet assuming that He doesn’t matter, has the same effect as actual atheism. And that we are already there!