The Serpent's Wisdom

I'm tired of politics.

Well... let me be more precise. I'm bone weary, exhausted to the core, by the antagonism and infighting and sniping and hatchet-jobs. I have no idea how we, as a society, are supposed to comprehend what is going on in the world, and what needs to happen and how we're going to accomplish it, when social discourse has become so bitterly acrimonious it becomes a political issue in itself.

Slowly, but steadily, I've been taking blogs off my reading list. First it was queer and feminist blogs. General lefty blogs have followed, starting with FireDogLake, which I got so fed up with I even removed from my bookmarks. There aren't any blogs anymore that I regularly read. I still read them from time to time, but I feel like I have to steel myself in preparation.

It's not that the topics depress me. They do, they always have. It's not that I don't agree with their views on what's right and wrong -- I do, most of the time. It's the overwhelming acrimony. There's no sense of community, no sense of coalition, just an overwhelmingly consistent approach of, "I'm right and this is why someone else is wrong." Anyone at any time can go from being an ally to being a target, and it's unnerving. The acrimony gets into my blood and then the anger sits in my brain like battery acid, eating away at my insides since it has nowhere to go. John Stewart's plea to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on their show "Crossfire" comes to mind.

Do I still care about social issues & economic policy? Of course I do. But the fact that I even have to assert that shows that we've gotten to where this is the game you have to play if you have political opinions. Well, I have political opinions, but I am convinced there must be other ways to disagree, other ways to call someone out.

I'm beginning to see this as part of the work of the revolution. I've written before about affinity politics vs. identity politics, and when I say there's no easy-mode radicalism I mean that we're called to examine our own attitudes and behaviors on a very deep level, so deep that to subscribe to an "-ism" is to duck the issue. The ways out and through are likely to be shown in art, music, fiction, poetry; to be expressed in community gatherings and perhaps religious expression as well (though I feel the need to add a few caveats to that since so much of the current acrimony is expressed in religious terminology). I was toying with the idea of this as a kind of "para-politics:" an accompaniment to the political process that forces everyone involved to be mindful of their opponent's humanity and common cause. I don't expect that the adversarial mode of politics will ever go away -- nor do I think this would necessarily be a good thing -- but I believe in the necessity of tempering it with mindfulness.

This is the second part of my first entry a couple of weeks ago on the decay of meaning over time as reflected in scripture. It ties together a number of things i've written over the last year or so on my ever-evolving relationship to religion, belief, faith, meaning, discourse, scripture, doctrine, and compassion.

A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."

And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.

I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.

And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.

To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.

I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.

So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.

For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.

Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.

[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]

So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.

Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.

Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, feminist blogger, has chosen to resign from the presidential campaign of John Edwards after being embattled (by certain right-wing zealots) for several weeks. The final straw, in the eyes of the Catholic League's head, Bill Donohue, was this comment in her review of the movie Children of Men:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

This apparently qualifies as a "vulgar" and "intolerant" anti-Christian comment. To say that critique is intolerant shows an utter misunderstanding of the concept of intolerance, which seems, from the perspective of people like Bill Donohue, to mean, "any act or utterance which offends our oh-so-delicate sensibilities."

The right has tirelessly labored to misappropriate the idea of intolerance, so that people think it refers not to efforts to counter structural power imbalance in our society, but to improve the niceness of language. By focusing on language they hope to take the focus off of actual oppression.

There is absolutely no measure whatsoever by which Christians are oppressed in this country. Keep that in mind. Christians run this country; they utterly dominate the public discourse, the cultural institutions, the laws, the mores, the standards of decency. Isolated instances of anti-Christian discrimination (which do occur) do not constitute institutional or state-sponsored oppression, exploitation, or disenfranchisement of Christians.

So, in order to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of misappropriating the idea of intolerance, they have to make people think that saying mean things (or things you claim are mean) in your blog is the equivalent of a pogrom, or a gay-bashing, or a clinic-bombing.  It is insulting to anyone who is working to end real intolerance in the face of violence and numerous other obstacles.

All that said, i also happen to think Amanda is absolutely right about the Christian idea of the virgin birth.

The gospels' authors must have felt some pressure to distance themselves from Pagans, who depicted divine impregnation of mortal women in a sexual way. In fact, Mary herself had to have been immaculately conceived, so that she would not bear the stain of Adam's sin -- because, apparently, sex itself befouls and stains your soul.

Amanda's comment about women only being a vessel applies too, because this was a widely-held belief about pregnancy in the ancient world: women were only a vessel through which men brought children into existence. This desire to cut women out of the picture is the very essence of misogyny. This view is most obvious in the account of the Gospel of John, whose author claimed that Jesus existed long before Mary did, making Mary's womb nothing more than a tunnel through which he passed into this world.

For a couple of weeks now, i've been thinking about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. This is one of the more bizarre parables, and that's saying quite a lot as many of them are quite odd.

( the parable )

Those who say the primary or sole focus of Jesus' message was "saving souls" say this teaches us about getting into heaven. If you are born again while young and do good your whole life, you'll get the same reward as someone who converts on their deathbed after a life of wickedness and iniquity. This is because God is "merciful." Don't forget that the twisted assumption behind this is that God doesn't care about how good we might or might not be, just whether or not we have "accepted Jesus" (whatever that actually means).

Let us say that the above interpretation is correct. Even if so, this parable is hardly a ringing endorsement of the doctrine, because in that case at least a third of the parable is given to considering that maybe it's not fair for someone to "toil" all their lives (as if living an ethical life is necessarily drudgery) and get the same heavenly reward as someone who comes along at the last minute and converts right before they die.

Essentially, we are supposed to accept that god tells do-gooders, "Suckers! Gotcha!"

But all of this strikes me as an excuse to overlook the parable for what it is on its face: an examination of the way wage labor works. What we see here is that the person who pays the wage has the opportunity to set the terms, to give favor or not as they see fit; and that those who are forced to work for wages have very little input into the way they are paid -- creating opportunities for exploitation. The landowner is hiding behind "the tyranny of the contract" to exploit the day laborers who worked for him all day, under the guise of generosity towards the later laborers.

Labor for wage is a good thing to question, because in an empire, jobs which relate directly to the business of empire tend to earn the highest wages. Look at our present-day American empire and see how many positions of prestige and wealth are ethically bankrupt and involve directly increasing American power or profiting from disparity with developing nations. Note, too, that many of the most important jobs in human society -- bearing and caring for children, teaching, maintaining house, day-to-day caretaking of sick relatives -- pay almost no wages at all. Wage labor is a system designed to push people into working for the perpetuation of empire.

If the hypothesis i've offered in the past is correct, and Jesus wanted his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the monstrous imperial machine, then the second view of the parable makes a lot of sense. Jesus would have wanted his followers to examine the true nature of wage labor.

John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his complex anthropological investigation of Galilee at the time of Jesus (detailed in The Birth of Christianity) that a considerable upheaval was going on in which many peasants were driven from their land so that rich Roman developers could build large villas and other pet projects. Displaced peasants have a much lowered standard of living and are forced to take up crafting or day labor -- which Crossan pointed out added a dimension of significance to the fact of Jesus' career as a carpenter: he was a displaced peasant.

Property ownership is the key to power in a human society. Any class of unpropertied renters are kept in a state of perpetual debt to them. This is particularly hard to swallow when many of the unpropertied renters once owned their own land.

This is why throughout human history, mass displacement of peasants -- usually from families which had owned their land for generations -- is one of the primary causes of armed rebellion.

Christianity, which may have had its roots as a pacifist and egalitarian response to lower-class unrest, was over the generations misappropriated by the Roman upper-class and became a primarily "spiritual" movement, with all vestiges of its former radicalism painted over and spliced out. It became dominated by the heirarchical edifice of the church and became eventually a gear in the imperial machine. The "spiritual" interpretation of this parable, as an instruction on god's endorsement of the moral unfairness of deathbed conversions leading to eternal reward in heaven, is revealed as not simply being nonsense, but a deliberate burial of radicalism beneath a memetic morass.

Sometimes i'm just absolutely stunned by the depths to which hatred of women can sink. And i'm dismayed when i see how often the primary excuse is "defending our religious traditions."

Maybe it's the peace, love, and compassion speaking, but no principle is worth defending if it creates injustice.

Lawmakers from a coalition of six Islamic groups threatened on Tuesday to vacate their parliamentary seats if Pakistan's government changes a rape law criticized by human rights activists.

... Under the current law, approved by a former military dictator in 1979, prosecuting a rape case requires testimony from four witnesses, making punishment almost impossible because such attacks are rarely public. A woman who claims she was raped but fails to prove her case can be convicted of adultery, punishable by death.

Maulana Fazalur Rahman, a leader of the Islamic coalition, said Tuesday that lawmakers in his group would vacate their seats in the National Assembly if the government tries to get the assembly's approval to change the law.

"We will render every sacrifice for the protection of the Shariah (traditional Islamic) laws," he said at a news conference.

However, the ruling Pakistan Muslim Party — which has a majority in the assembly — has praised Musharraf for taking steps to amend the law and end the four-witness requirement.

from Rape law rankles some Pakistan lawmakers

The Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal is beautiful. I mean, breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

It is dark as night inside. The neo-gothic ceiling is decorated in dark blue with gold stars and large rose windows. The balconies and columns are made of dark, rich wood intricately carved and decorated with gold leaf. If one turns around and peeks up, one can see a 7000-pipe organ over the back balcony. Despite all of this complex ornamentation the eye is drawn forward to the chancel and altar, which stands out of the darkness, shining and bright.

cowgrrl and i first arrived at the Basilica at 11:30 on Sunday -- so a morning Mass was underway. We were able to peek in for a few moments, and could hear the organ and accompanying choir. In those few moments i felt an immense sense of peace, of centeredness; i remembered a few things about religion and worship that, in my cynicism, i had forgotten.

cowgrrl described her reaction as "religion envy," since she was brought up without exposure to devout religious practices. And i began to feel like a refugee again, because this is a place to which i can never return.

I just can't set aside awareness of the many people i've known, including myself, who have been deeply damaged by people acting in the name of god and church. I cannot overlook the role of religious institutions in the stealth genocide.

For me the damage runs deeply enough that i doubt i will be able to sit peacefully in any sort of church ever again, feeling welcome and valued and loved. The closest i came was during my years of involvement with the UU church. And while during those years i encountered a number of people i feel very fondly towards even now, i am just too disillusioned by organized religion these days.

A friend who was raised by extremely abusive Christian parents told me once of the theory she developed while coming to awareness of the depth of the mistreatment she had received, of Christianity as a religion based on child abuse. It starts with Abraham and Isaac, she said, before she pointed out that there many rules given in the Bible allowing or even commanding physical punishment of children. Finally, she said, you have God the Father punishing his own son for misdeeds he did not commit. In fact, the more Jesus suffered, the better for us.

I wasn't really sure what to think of this. But it was one of many thoughts that prodded me to think about power dynamics in the Bible. The Bible was, after all, written by and for men of prominence and power; it is reasonable to inquire into whether it promotes a social scheme which preserves their power and prestige. Who, after all, does not consciously or unconsciously give preference to ideologies that leave one better off?

Even having been exposed to the idea before, i was still astonished to see an idea very much like this promoted by a Bishop of the Episcopal Church. This is more or less the reasoning John Shelby Spong gives in his chapters in The Sins of Scripture on Christianity and corporal punishment: God is a parent who demands obedience under threat of violence and who acted this violence out on his own son. The only remaining major proponents of corporal punishment in America cite Christian doctrine, and many conservative preachers (including virtually all of the televangelists) speak approvingly of physical punishment they received regularly as children.

Spong finds within Christianity a strand of thought promoting violence, and its subtler forms guilt and shame, as acceptable for maintaining structures of dominance. He touches on dystheism (the idea that God is wrathful and will punish us if we do not appease him) as a theology that Christians adopted not just in response to their persecution in the early centuries or disasters like the Bubonic Plague, but also in response to the widespread approval of the physical punishment of children, and adults considered to be childlike such as slaves or women.

He pulls on this thread and finds that the central themes and myths of Christianity itself unravel when we reject violence. He even refers to Christianity as fundamentally sadomasochistic. His solution is a radical re-invisioning of Christology and Christian belief, which he says must change or die.

The deconstruction begins with the dismissal of [the story of Adam and Eve]. It has already moved from being thought of as literal history to being viewed as interpretive myth. The next step is to dismiss it as not even an accurate interpreter of life. There never was a time, either literally or metaphorically, when there was a perfect and finished creation. That biblical idea is simply wrong. It is not even symbolically valid.

... Since there was no perfect beginning... there can also be no fall into sin and thus no act of disobedience that destroyed the perfection of God's world. These details cannot be true even as symbols.

... There is a vast contrast between the definition of being fallen creatures and that of being incomplete creatures. Our humanity is not flawed by some real or mythical act of disobedience... it is rather distorted by the unfinished nature of our humanity.

... [Our critical examination of this issue] is like an unstoppable waterfall. Baptism, understood as the sacramental act designed to wash from the newborn baby the stain of that original fall into sin, becomes inoperative. The Eucharist, developed as a liturgical attempt to reenact the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross that paid the price for our sinfulness, becomes empty of meaning. Various disciplinary tactics, from not sparing the rod with our children to the use of shame, guilt and fear to control the behavior of 'childlike' adults, become violations of life based on an inadequate knowledge of the nature of our humanity. They are the application of the wrong therapy designed to overcome a faulty diagnosis. Even the afterlife symbols of heaven and hell, designed to motivate behavior by promising either eternal reward or eternal punishment, now lose their credibility. A system of rewards and punishments, either in this life or beyond it, does not produce wholeness, nor does it issue in loving acts of a self-giving person. It produces rather a self-centered attempt at survival. It leads to behavior designed not to do good for good's sake, but to do good in order to win favor or to avoid punishment.

The Sins of Scripture pp. 176-178

It is hard to overstate the gravity of what he is saying here. His meaning is this: humans cannot possibly be born into a state of original sin. He states the implication of that explicitly: Jesus did not die for your sins.

Of course, any of us non-Christians could'a told ya that... but to see someone so deeply embedded in the edifice of the church admit that this is evident gives me hope that change is possible.

I don't know if any of you out there have the same automatic internal reaction as i do when i see articles or essays that talk about a scientist's funding or other potential biases. My immediate reaction is to want to reject any such concern as "ad hominem" and therefore irrelevant to discourse about whatever matter is at hand. So, this may really only be targeted at an audience of one (me).

A while back lady_babalon linked to this news story about a researcher who examined the funding sources of scholars and clinicians who developed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).

( Read more... )

Here's a study describing some of the ways researchers finagle the bounds and methods of their research in order to tweak results so that they are favorable to the pharmaceutical companies funding their research.

Objective To investigate whether funding of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry is associated with outcomes that are favourable to the funder and whether the methods of trials funded by pharmaceutical companies differ from the methods in trials with other sources of support.

... Conclusion Systematic bias favours products which are made by the company funding the research. Explanations include the selection of an inappropriate comparator to the product being investigated and publication bias.

Add to this a study which "reveals" (as if none of us could have possibly known) that FDA panelists who have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to vote to approve drugs:

( Read more... )

As an interesting aside, see an article here which tries to slant this to show that there is no conflict-of-interest in FDA drug-approval votes: "The study finds that the removal of all of those advisory committee members [with dubious funding] would not have reversed the results of any of the votes at meetings between 2001 and 2004, although their removal could have made some decisions less favorable."

One is inclined to wonder how we might correct for the warping effect of big pharma as an 800-lb gorilla in the medical field. Something that big and influential is bound to force people consider their careers and personal well-being when making decisions like this, even if they do not receive direct funding from the pharma companies.

When contemplating things like this a piece of my brain shouts, "That's an ad hominem argument!" I've been trained to overlook, as much as possible, any personal information about a person making an argument and look at the merits of the argument itself. And according to the survey linked above, the merits of the research papers themselves do reveal, upon close examination, the obvious favorable tweakings in methodology.

But the public doesn't get to examine the methodology of any given study. Usually results are just presented in the media as holy proclamations. "Scientists say blah-de-blah-blah in a new report to be published today in the Journal of Very Respectable We Assure You Science." The average American may be vaguely aware of the steps in the scientific method, but unless she has been a scholar of science she is generally not hip to the subtle ways in which methodology can be tweaked to bring results in line with expectations.

And let's take this a step further and see who it is who is alleging bias in pharmaceutical research -- mostly it is people with the organization Public Citizen, who themselves can be justifiably accused of potential bias! It never ends.

Allegations of bias in science become even more explosive when you consider various research offered to support fundamentalist agenda items. The tone of sciencific speech can be adopted even by people as thoroughly discredited as anti-gay "researcher" Paul Cameron, and the media will play along, especially if it is operated by people favorable to the agenda at hand.

The idea of personal bias in researchers is like scientific kryptonite. Science is understood as a form of inquiry that allows people to pursue knowledge removed from economic, institutional, and ideological pressures. Supposedly bias is detected during the peer review process. Therefore, people are supposedly taken out of the equation, and results stand on their own as proclamations which have the blessing of an entire community, therefore carrying more weight than the simple assertions of a few individuals.

But if the reviewing peers are biased too, what then? What if "common sense" itself is biased?

We want to pretend that bias does not exist in science, or if it does, that it is rare. If bias can be sneaked into the proclamations of science, the "scientific mystique" might be undermined. Therefore it's easier to just dismiss any kind of talk about a researcher's funding or background as trivial and over-personal. Doing so belies the reality that science falls into ruts called paradigms, which in large part reflect the biases of culture and "common sense," which in turn is shaped by oppression.

So, about a third of the way into Spong's Sins of Scripture, i am starting to have... i don't know if misgivings is exactly the right word. I don't have disagreements with him and i can't really fault what he has to say. I'm just not sure how relevant his message is.

Spong's heart and mind are in the right place. He has a zeal for honestly and forthrightly addressing the misdeeds of Christianity in the past and present, and demonstrating that they are the result of error. He has a particular talent for illuminating new ways to see familiar passages of scripture, as well as calling our attention to lesser known gems.

But i wonder how relevant this kind of theology is. He sees the Bible with a sense of wonder, even while criticizing the fundamentalists for worshipping it. His hope is that people who have come to doubt or hate it will come to think of it as a misunderstood treasure from a previous age, and not a horrible instrument of evil.

It is hard, having stepped back from my own fascination with that style of theology, to think of it as something that will save the world. Doesn't any scripture-centered approach carry within it the seeds of fundamentalism? Not everyone possesses the skill to read texts in a nuanced way; and so long as there are power imbalances in human society, authoritarian structures will always tend to favor literalistic text-centered theology. Also, haven't we had enough of looking in books for answers to flesh-and-blood questions?

...but i'd rather see Christianity eradicated entirely than watch it continue to be hijacked in the name of bigotry, greed, and sexism:

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods "Made in the USA") in the Pacific being used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere and paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum wage bill (mandating a level higher than the island's standard $3.05 per hour) from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.

Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

"Stand firm," he added. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator." He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay's professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.

from Molly Ivins: DeLay's sins

Speaking of Tom DeLay's profession of being a Christian, let's see some notes from a conference he attended recently in DC, alongside Senator John Cornyn, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, Phyllis Schafly, and others:

Beginning with the premise that there is a war on Christianity, conference organizers and participants were eager to issue calls to arms in response. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.” Meanwhile, Laurence Wright, a Lutheran pastor and co-president of Vision America, announced that the time of a peaceful and contemplative Christianity is over; that Christians have been AWOL (“absent without Lord”) in the battle; and that “We must attack the evil now where it is strongest” in order to restore America, the city high on a hill.

... Perhaps the most explicit call to arms came from Ron Luce, the president and founder of Teen Mania, a Christian revivalist youth ministry, and the author of Battle Cry for a Generation, a multimedia campaign that deploys military images and language to recruit soldiers in Christ’s army. Toward the end of his speech, Luce invoked the biblical story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. (In the story, the Levite’s concubine is gang-raped by men who wanted to do sexual violence to the Levite. When the Levite’s host refuses to deliver the Levite to the assailants, he offers them his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. When the assailants reject such an exchange, the Levite simply expels the concubine from his host's house, leaving her to be raped repeatedly throughout the night. The following morning, upon finding the concubine’s dead body on his host’s doorstep, the Levite dismembers her and sends her body parts out to the twelve tribes of Israel as a provocation to revenge.) “I kind of feel like the Levite,” Ron Luce confessed. And then he uttered a battle cry of his own: “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!”

from Notes from the War Room (thanks to _raven_ for the link)