Ground Zero Sum

An Old Old Story: Ground Zero Sum by An Old Old Story

[soundcloud link; via An Old Old Story; HT: Experimental Theology]

Good Ideas, Good Books



[via Dwindling in Unbelief, in this post]

Giving the Message

[via Graceworks.ca {formerly TheHeresy.com}]

Not Just "Surrection"

Passover and Easter have brought forth a miracle: Uncle Jay explaining the news without once mentioning Sandra Bullock, 24, the iPad, or trained dragons playing hoops. The rest is the good stuff. Haha, April Fool!



[via UncleJayExplains]

Their Identities Among Many

Perhaps precisely because Evangelicals have had the experience of acquiring massive political power and squandering it, they are singularly qualified to provide a lesson to American Muslims, who have virtually no power as a religious community. When religion becomes inextricably tied to partisan politics, it can be bought and sold like stocks, simultaneously cheapening the faith and corrupting the secular principles of liberal government. Addressed to every faith community in the US, the Evangelical Manifesto is a warning American Muslims should heed. To be accepted as full members of a liberal polity, they have to be prepared to accept that their profession of faith is just one feature of their identities among many, and not the one that should dictate their engagement with politics.

[via Jewcy, HT: The View From Her]

An Islamless World by Martin E. Marty

[HT: Ponderings on a Faith Journey]

Schism and Fitna

A Saudi blogger has made a short video featuring alleged Christian extremists preaching violence and a Bible passage calling for war, in response to an anti-Quran film that sparked protests across the Muslim world.

Raed al-Saeed told The Associated Press on Thursday that the purpose of his six-minute video is to show Islam should not be judged by watching Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders' movie "Fitna," which links terror attacks by Muslim extremists with texts from the Quran.

"It is easy to take parts of any holy book that are out of (context) and make it sound like the most inhumane book ever written," al-Saeed said in a statement posted at the end of his video. "This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism." {continue...}

[via The Raw Story, HT: Mainstream Baptist]

Persecutor or Rescuer?

When the white knight knows so little about his damsel in distress, how does he expect to rescue her? When she turns around and tells him to call her "Ms." and to stop telling her what to do, will he be outraged at her ingratitude? When she says she's quite happy wearing a traditional outfit, thank you, but could she please get maternity leave, will he snort in disgust at his charge? When she wraps her head in a veil and stands up for her Islamic prayer, will he throw up his hands at her inability to throw off Islamic slavery? When she says why thank you for your help, but I need my husband out of Guantanamo and my son out of your Musharraf's jail, and then I'd like to open a Qur'an school for girls -- what will he say then? When she says she's got her own ways of effecting the revolution, and it doesn't involve selling out brown men to America, will he decide against trying to rescue her after all?

Muslim women are done being rescued. Muslim women are done being defined. Muslim women are done being told what they need. Muslim women could use help, doing what they think they should do.

[via Religion Dispatches]

And If It Was The Other Way?

A director who shares the ideas of Iran's hardline president has produced what he says is the first film giving an Islamic view of Jesus Christ, in a bid to show the "common ground" between Muslims and Christians.

Nader Talebzadeh sees his movie, "Jesus, the Spirit of God," as an Islamic answer to Western productions like Mel Gibson's 2004 blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," which he praised as admirable but quite simply "wrong". {continue...}

[HT: The Wittenburg Door]

Not Kosher During Hannukah?

In the wake of the British teacher jailed in Sudan for allowing a teddy bear to be named "Muhammad," an American evangelist, Bill Keller, has launched a deliberately offensive attack on Islam. He filmed a video where he named a toy pig after the Muslim leader. In his very low-tech video, he provided the voice for the pig and explained why the toy pig converted from Islam to Christianity. Although I am a fan of parodies, I am afraid that this piece is problematic for a couple of reasons...{continue...}

[via For God's Sake, Shut Up!]

Open Discussion

Muslim leaders around the world have addressed an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian religious leaders -- including David Coffey, President of the Baptist World Alliance. The first of its kind letter, entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You," is designed to promote understanding between Muslims and Christians. {more}

[via Mainstream Baptist]

Moreover,

The question for Catholics is how the pope will respond. There is another significant anniversary coming up, that of B16's Regensburg speech that deeply offended many Muslims because of his association of Islam with violence. This letter is an olive branch, and the Holy Father would do well to hang on. And it is significant for the number of its Muslim signatories: Islam has no centralized authority, but the dozens of scholars and muftis have tens of millions of followers.

[via The Examined Life]

[HT: Ponderings On A Faith's Journey in this post]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flinty populist in a zip-up jacket whose scathing rhetoric and defiance of Washington are often caricatured in the Western media, has transcended national and religious divides to become a folk hero across the Middle East.

The diminutive, at times inscrutable, president is a wellspring of stinging sound-bites and swagger for Muslims who complain that their leaders are too beholden to or frightened of the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, is an easily marketable commodity:a streetwise politician with nuclear ambitions and an open microphone. {continue...}

[via The LA Times]

Toleration's Apparent Fall

"Multiculturalism" has become a suspect term almost everywhere in the world nowadays, and particularly in Europe. People say things like: "I used to be for openness and toleration of difference, but now I see where it's leading." But where is it leading?

Almost every reason for toleration's apparent fall into disrepute concerns Islam. Even simple requests, like that of schoolgirls to wear headscarves in class, are suddenly freighted with immense political significance and treated as issues that must be resolved at the highest level of government. People - and their elected leaders as well - often have the feeling that such seemingly innocent proposals are in fact part of an ominous "hidden agenda". {continue...}

[via commentisfree, HT: Prolegomena]

Actually Protecting Women

Maybe the problem is that the American PEOPLE, not only American feminists, are playing ostrich about the horrendous denial of basic human rights to billions of people around the world, including some Muslim women....it’s an issue of basic justice that all civilized human beings OUGHT to be concerned about.

I find it more than a little ironic that patriarchy, so smugly touted in some Christian circles as a means of extending protection to women, essentially does nothing when it comes to actually protecting women, especially non-Western, non-Christian women. And I find it especially tragic when a woman becomes a mouthpiece for the ages-old blame game, this time with a new twist: it’s the Western feminists’ fault that non-Western Muslim women are oppressed.

No, we’re all our sisters’ (and brothers’) keepers, at least if we claim to follow the One who gave his life in order to save our sisters and brothers–and us, too.

[from this comment in this post at The CBE Scroll]

Apocalyptic in the Truest Sense

The new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, comes out on Tuesday. It's a science-fictional concept album (probably the first such thing since David Bowie's Outside, though I may be wrong about that), and the story are of particularly interest for both its critique of conservative religion and its broader eschatological themes.

The nonlinear story has been unfolding in a viral marketing campaign (or "alternate reality game," or "interactive experience") made up of websites, mp3s, and toll-free phone numbers starting earlier this year, establishing the history and atmosphere of the dystopia in which Year Zero takes place. In a nutshell: 15 years from now, the United States has become both a police state and a theocracy. This government has used nuclear weapons on Iran, required all Muslims to register or face execution, and drugged the populace into submission with tranquilizers in the water supply. The Year Zero backstory takes a bleak view of the future of American religion, summed up by the logo of the "Faithful Civil Patrol" organized by the First Evangelical Church of Plano: a crucifix emerging from the barrel of a gun.

This type of dystopia is not the most original—it's reminiscent of the worlds of Katherine Kerr's story "Asylum" and the film Children of Men, just to name two. The medium in which it has been revealed is a novelty, though, and there's a definite thrill to be gained from exploring the sites, a sense of uncovering a mystery. This is especially true in the case of Year Zero's most interesting concept: "The Presence," a mysterious vision/hallucination of an enormous, ghostly hand descending from the sky.....

The Presence is a warning against our tribalism and selfishness. Year Zero is apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word: if we don't get our act together, it warns us, God will end the world for us. In this regard, there's something remarkably traditional about the eschatology of Year Zero. Though its political origins are the opposite of, say, Left Behind, its attitude towards the relation between God and sinful humanity is the same. We have strayed from the path of righteousness, it tells us, and we are blundering into divine retribution.

{the full post}

[via SF Gospel]

A Different Kind of Easter Message

[via Ryan Dueck]

The importance of three days

[via Get Religion]

Code of Confusion?

In his annual State of the Union address last night, President Bush did not let the absence of former chief speechwriter and Wheaton College graduate Michael Gerson keep him from talking about religion. Bush has been accused of allowing Gerson to slip in “code words” and phrases that allow him to secretly pander to America’s religious right, but this time Bush’s religiously oriented words caught the attention of a different audience.

In the 5,700-word speech, Bush refers to Shia and Sunni Islam ten times. It made up a substantial port of the speech’s foreign policy section and further outlined his administration’s view of Islam extremism. In other words, it was a rather significant policy statement at one of the highest-profile events of the year.

[via GetReligion]

Bibliolatry?

Why would anyone want to force someone to make a statement of belief in the Bible? Such an act would not only be distasteful for the individual who has been coerced, but it would also degrade the Bible by making it a weapon instead of a book about God’s love. Well, that is exactly what Dennis Prager seems to want in a Human Events column entitled “America, Not Keith Ellison, Decides What Book a Congressman Takes His Oath On.”

Prager is upset that Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has decided to be sworn in with his hand on a Koran instead of a Bible....

Maybe instead of worrying so much about making a Muslim swear on the Bible, we should look at the plank in our own eye and consider if Christians should even do so.

[via For God's Sake Shut Up!]

we are one charismatic leader away from creating a holocaust of our own.

[via The Bush League Theologian]