Embarrassing Adventures with Food

( Move along. Nothing to see here. )

One of those themed weeks

...in this case, not a very pleasant theme.

Via ginmar and crankygrrl:

"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost," Kennedy says. "As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."

From "The Crusaders", RollingStone.com, 7.04.2005

Via Bookslut, a response to Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven:

We now live in times when our society’s highest symbols are being demeaned and degraded by those who claim to have personal revelations about them, and most of our people act as though we have no power and no role to play in the local, national and international dramas that continue to unfold.

But if religion is reduced to ignorant and disingenuous censorship of textbooks and if God is reduced to a subordinate local deity whose role is simply to bless America, then religion is being reduced to an instrument of cynical control rather than empowerment, and the chorus must respond.

From a sermon at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

I had a third thing, but dammit, I can't remember what it was. So much background noise out there that it's nearly impossible to sort through, anyway, even using my patented "What would most piss off crankygrrl?" filter. Aha!

The doctrine of separation of church and state was originally instituted to protect the church, or churches. The original tourists of the Northeast had come from a Europe that had been divided for a hundred years by an appalling series of state-sponsored religious wars, pogroms, slaughters, torture festivals, stake-burnings and mass banishments.

It is a little ironic that the phrase "whatever happened to the separation of church and state" is now being uttered, not by persecuted ecclesiastics, but by angry citizens, believers and nonbelievers both, who had assumed that the government would not suddenly become the mighty fist of the evangelical Christian movement.

From a column by Jon Carroll