Interesting video to an old Waterboys tune.
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Monthly Archives: February 2009
Racism is not a joke
Join me in letting the New York Post know that you think racism is not a joke; that you feel murder is not a joke, and you would like to see an apology for editorial cartoon by Sean Delonas that shows, in the words of ColorofChange.org:
a bullet-riddled chimpanzee, killed by police and thus unable “to write the next stimulus bill.” The image evoked a long history of racially-charged comparisons of Black people to monkeys and pandered — intentionally or not — to a fringe element that fantasizes about violence against President Obama.
View the cartoon and take action here.
Born Again Americans
This is interesting. Check out Born Again American. It’s not about being a born again Christian American, although there is some slight of hand in the editing that leads you to believe so and I hope it gets corrected.
If you look through the Web Site, the lyrics read “My Bible is the The Bill of Rights,” but the sung version is “The Bible AND the Bill of Rights” which is makes the whole thing much more exclusive of non-Christian Americans, agnostic and atheist Americans, and that is very unfortunate because the other sentiments of the song and the effort are laudable. It’s all about taking control of America back from the special interests, the privileged, and getting engaged in public life – reminiscent of the Obama campaign and transition team’s efforts to keep the electorate engaged. Until the line about the The Bible AND the Bill of Rights gets fixed, though, it’s hard to jump enthusiastically on the band wagon, because right in the Bill of Rights, there’s this statement about Congress making no laws about religion. It’s called Article I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Yet, when you start mentioning the Bible with the Bill of Rights its as if the whole thing – America, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, etc is a Christian endeavor – and IT IS NOT. So I like the printed lyric you find on Born Again American much better, My bible IS the Bill of Rights. Sad, they couldn’t have recorded that version.
Note the involvement and presence in the video of Unitarian Universalist minister, and no small critic of the Bible (he’s been a member of the Jesus Seminar) the Rev. Davidson Loehr of First Unitarian Universalist in Austin, TX, author of America, Fascism and God. Now, I’m going to guess, Loehrs was shown the lyric that said the My Bible is the Bill of Rights. (Listen to my interview with Rev. Loehr here – it’s episode #9).
The Born Again American project has also been featured on Bill Moyer’s Journal. There I learned that the project originated with Norman Lear’s Declaration of Independence Road Trip, an effort to refamliarize Americans with our founding documents and recommit them to the ideals contained therein.
Humanists question Baylor University study on American belief
In a major “gloves off” press release this week the Council for Secular Humanism gave a scathing critique of last year’s Baylor University Religion Survey of 2008, recently published in a book What Americans Really Believe (Baylor University Press, 2008). The Council for Secular Humanism argues that the Baylor study chose to neglect or creatively interpret date from Gallup, Harris, and Pew other sources that point to belief in a personal God declining in America and the rise of secularism:
* Numerous Gallup studies show that firm disbelief in God or a universal spirit has risen fourfold since the 1940s. Baylor researchers misinterpreted data from just two early Gallup polls, then combined them with data from a handful of other studies, creating an inaccurate impression that unbelief has held steady for more than 60 years.
* Respected studies from Gallup, Pew, CBS, the BBC, and others find that between 10 and 13 percent of Americans either reject or doubt God’s existence. Two recent Harris Poll studies that used special methods to help unbelievers identify themselves found an unprecedented 21 percent of Americans at least doubting God’s existence. The Baylor team makes no mention of this data and relies on significantly lower figures.
* Data from the Pew Center, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and the Harris Poll now show that America is entering into the same process of secularization that previously occurred in other Western countries. Baylor researchers disregard this data and continue to maintain — inaccurately — that “faith American style” is holding its own.
