Friday 26th of April 2024
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catholics versus catholics and other religious loonies...

religious freedom

In a New York Times article about Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's choice to replace RBG, ELIZABETH BRUENIG tells us:


The United States is unusual among nations: We are a country founded along the contours of a philosophy. That philosophy, liberalism, is the logic that underlies our founding documents and our national ethos of individualism, self-reliance, liberty, equality and tolerance. Whether we live up to those values is another matter; they are our reason for being, and the principles that bind us together.

Gus: America may have been founded “along the contours of a (liberal) philosophy” but it was prominently built on opportunism, gunslinging, racism, competition, slavery, victimisation, soft and hard conquests, corruption, deceit, robbery, wars… and selfishness.



ELIZABETH BRUENIG tells us that:

But liberalism, like any storied philosophy, has its difficulties and points of contention. While liberal societies seek to build legal and cultural climates of toleration for expression and religion (among other things), liberal theorists have long recognized that it’s risky to tolerate notions and movements that could undermine liberal democracy itself. In the case of religious tolerance, liberals have historically grappled with the matter of Roman Catholicism.


Roman Catholicism does not readily distinguish between public and private moral obligations. In the thought of John Locke, one of liberalism’s earliest architects, willingness to make that distinction was critical to participation in a tolerant society. “Basically,” the political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote in a 1999 essay, “Locke drew up a strong civic map with religion within one sphere and government in another. A person could be a citizen of each so long as that citizen never attempted to merge and blend the two.” Locke notably excluded Catholics from the religions meriting toleration because he suspected they could not be trusted to leave their faith in the appropriate sphere.


Here, ELIZABETH BRUENIG, who seems to be one of the “religion” writers for the NYT, is explaining how critics of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee can argue that "pious Catholics are a problem for liberalism and that they have a point". Amy Coney Barrett — as a member of People of Praise, a mostly Catholic ecumenical organization — is overtly "Old Catholicism” 

In another article about Biden, ELIZABETH BRUENIG glosses over the fact that “Catholic Joe”, has been in favour of illegal wars, etc... but mentions that Joe is against “Medicare for all”… 

ELIZABETH BRUENIG continues:
Locke’s concern was not entirely baseless. Even the most modern and liberal-friendly popes have noted without special fanfare that the teachings of the church pertain to the decisions Catholics make about politics. “The social doctrine of the Church has once more demonstrated its character as an application of the word of God to people’s lives and the life of society, as well as to the earthly realities connected with them,” Pope John Paul II wrote in one exemplary 1987 encyclical.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-catholic-su...

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About Joe Biden, ELIZABETH BRUENIG also tells us:

Mr. Biden could look to the example of Pope Francis as a model for a kind of Catholicity that is both pious and challenging to the powers that be — if he, or anyone else, were interested in that sort of thing. “Biden has the opportunity to really capture what a post-Vatican II Catholic identity looks like,” Dr. Mazzenga observed. “He has an opportunity to talk to liberal Catholic groups fired up by anti-racism activism, anti-gun activism, environmental activism. But he’s not doing it.” Dr. Cajka agreed: “A good, Pope Francis Catholic should be posing a threat to the American ruling class,” he said. But Mr. Biden’s track record is anything but radical, even where it comes to labor unions, war and Social Security.

Which is to say that he is an ordinary Democrat — more or less his explicit pitch. Perhaps Catholics have earned the right to no distinction, the privilege of blending seamlessly into the social and political landscape of the United States, the freedom of having no special moral obligations. And what a wide, barren, featureless liberty it is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/opinion/biden-catholic-president-2020...

And what a wide, barren, featureless this conclusion by ELIZABETH BRUENIG is — a bit like "we’ll go with Joe because he is the lesser of two religious evils" or "that Joe is a progressive", meaning that he is a hypocrite in regard to his faith, even if he does not think so…

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So by choosing Amy Coney Barrett, Trump has snookered the Catholics, having to choose between proper conservative Christianism or footloose beliefs with liberalism on the dancing shoes… Hell is like that.


Meanwhile we are told that:

The selection of Kamala Harris as running mate for Joe Biden, the Democratic Party presumptive nominee for President of the United States, will excite Christians – but in opposite directions.

Harris, the junior Senator from California, often uses religious, Christian language and identifies as black Baptist. Born of a Jamaican father and a mother from Chennai in India, her parents divorce at age seven meant that she grew up around black churches – according to a Yonat Shimron profile by the Religion News Service. “Her downstairs neighbour, Regina Shelton, often took Kamala and her sister Maya to Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.”

That San Francisco church is a member of a denomination of about 230,000 members with “no creed but the Bible”. It shares the “Church of God” name, but not the beliefs of several pentecostal denominations.
https://www.eternitynews.com.au/world/why-some-christians-adore-kamala-h...

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Liberation theology was a radical movement that grew up in South America as a response to the poverty and the ill-treatment of ordinary people. The movement was caricatured in the phrase If Jesus Christ were on Earth today, he would be a Marxist revolutionary, but it's more accurately encapsulated in this paragraph from Leonardo and Clodovis Boff:


Q: How are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and injustice?

A: There can be only one answer: we can be followers of Jesus and true Christians only by making common cause with the poor and working out the gospel of liberation.

So, has Trump thrown a hand grenade under Joe’s devotion, and is Kamala Harris holding Joe-the-Forgetful rightwing Democrat, by the balls with a Socialistic commitment to the poor? It’s going to be a battle to the death, where the idea of abortion will be the decider...


Gus Leonisky

Atheist in the rabid spectrum...



See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0B-X9LJjs



Note: the globe at top is decidedly ambiguous. The fitting at the bottom has both bayonet and screw fits.

adopting kids...

GOP fights back against attacks on Amy Coney Barrett’s adopted children


So much for keeping kids out of politics.

Liberals on social media are questioning whether two children adopted by President Trump’s expected Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, were adopted legitimately — as Senate Republicans leaped to defend her.

“Some adoptions from Haiti were legit. Many were sketchy as hell,” wrote a Democratic activist and former Capitol Hill staffer, Dana Houle, in a since-deleted tweet on Friday. “Would it matter if her kids were scooped up by ultra-religious Americans, or … when there was family in Haiti?”

Another left-wing activist, John Lee Brougher of the NextGen America PAC, added fuel to the fire.

“As an adoptee, I need to know more about the circumstances of how Amy Coney Barrett came to adopt her children, and the treatment of them since,” Brougher wrote, according to Breitbart News. “Transracial adoption is fraught with trauma and potential for harm.” Brougher’s tweet has also been removed.

Houle’s tweet served as cannon fodder for Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has set up a campaign-style online “war room” to combat Democrats’ attacks.

“Disgusting,” Cotton responded in a tweet that was amplified on his Supreme Court War Room website. “The left now smearing Amy Coney Barrett for adopting children.”

“It was the most predictable thing in the world ....

 

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/09/26/gop-defends-amy-coney-barrett-agaisnt-atta...

and now, racism...


By Micah Curtis

It was inevitable that there would be criticism of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who was recently nominated to the US Supreme Court. But claiming her adopted children are shields against racism is truly abhorrent.

Back in 1985, I was adopted by a middle class family in Illinois. Four years later, that same family adopted a little girl who is biracial. One thing that I can say with absolute confidence is that there are zero things wrong with adoption. 

In fact, statistics say that children who are adopted are much happier than they would have been if stuck in the original situation that they were born into. It’s a wonderful thing, and there’s a reason why so many communities get so excited for families who do adopt, because it is a blessing from God to be able to raise a child.

Last week, I predicted that Judge Coney Barrett would likely face a character smearing from the political Left on the announcement of her nomination to the US Supreme Court. I had a feeling that it would be dirty, and that it would be likely based around her religion (she’s a devout Catholic). 

It seems that I gave the Left a bit too much credit, because some have gone after her children – specifically, the two children she adopted who were originally from Haiti. Ibram X Kendi (author of ‘How to be an Anti-Racist’) called Judge Coney Barrett a colonizer and accused her and her family of adopting these children to somehow prove that they are not racist. 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/501922-adopted-amy-coney-barrett/

 

 

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