- Increase your word power: Hydra-headed.
- Occupy Wall Street runs an agenda up the flagpole.
- What’s in a name?
- Atheist/Fundamentalist symbiosis.
- Slippery slope report on marriage.
- Coverdale Psalms.
- Thanks! I needed that.
- And I need this, too.
Religious Freedom threat level raised. The good folks at Mercator.net spend additional time explaining the present (not just threatened) conflict between Obama Administration policies and religious freedom.
This is big. We have so many big problems that hydra-headed seems apt. See here, too.
Occupy Wall Street has posted “proposed” demands:
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Demand four: Free college education.
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.
Demand fourteen: Everyone gets a free pony. And a free case of Cristal.
These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.
I did not make up #14. I stole it from a snarky friend on Facebook, Toma Mallett. But it’s the only one I altered.
This morning’s paper brings an image of an angry person, whose hair assuredly is not that color if untreated, bearing a sign that says “We Want Democracy, not Corporatocracy.”
I have several blog categories including “State Capitalism” and “Crony Capitalism.” But OWS’s demands, combined with that sign, remind me how much of our mess is rooted in the desire of voters, not just corporations, for free stuff, for (as Alan Simpson put it) the government teat.
Silouan Thompson’s blog this morning, tagged “I’m in my happy place,” seems apropos.
4S? 5? Whatever. My 3-something is still old and lame, and I’m likely to bite.
Rod Dreher reacts to Ross Douthat who’s reacting to audacious atheist Jerry Coyne. Coyne’s atheist audacity is to instruct believers what they must believe (basically, a fundamentalist straw man) because it’s so easy for him to lampoon.
Douthat refers to the “interesting symbiosis that exists between militant atheism and religious fundamentalism.”
Dreher reminsces:
I remember having an argument once with a fundamentalist Christian who was trying to talk me out of my Catholicism. I told him that he had gotten some doctrine or another all wrong, that the Catholic Church did not teach what he claimed it taught. He told me I was wrong. I realized then that this man wasn’t interested in learning anything that might change his mind about this cartoon idea of Catholicism he carried in his head. It was an odd thing. I didn’t expect the man to come around to my way of thinking, but I was simply trying to tell him that he’d arrived at his conclusion based on objectively false premises. But he was far too wedded to his Christian fundamentalism to let anything like the facts change his opinion.
In the comboxes, reader “Bluegrass Up” nails it:
As I was thinking to myself just the other day, I ceased to take atheism seriously when I realized that atheism (a certain not uncommon kind of atheism, at least) has nothing to say to anyone who isn’t already a fundamentalist.
As a lifelong traditionally oriented mainline/oldline Protestant, I’ve never been a fundamentalist, and am in no danger of ever becoming one. So why bother to engage in discussion with a nonbeliever who feels he has to talk me intofundamentalism so he can then talk me back out of fundamentalism again?!
How many times do traditionalists have to be right about the eventuality of some innovation, and listen to people say “That’s absurd! That’s a scare tactic!”, and then watch it come to pass exactly as predicted, and then listen to progressives say “So what? Of course! It’s perfectly logical”, before and handfull of progressives blush with shame at their own obtuseness?
Yes, folks, the arguments that work for same-sex marriage work pretty darned well for polygamy, too, and the propaganda has started.
On [October 4] in 1535, the first complete modern English translation of the Bible was printed. It’s known as the Coverdale Bible because it was compiled and printed by Myles Coverdale, an English priest who was living on the Continent at the time; he would later go on to become Bishop of Exeter. He didn’t speak Greek or Hebrew, so he used a variety of sources, including William Tyndale’s New Testament and several of his Old Testament books, as well as the Latin Vulgate and German translations by Martin Luther. Coverdale dedicated the translation to England’s King Henry VIII — whom he called “a better defender of the faith than the pope himself,” and his “dearest just wyfe and most vertuous Pryncesse, Queen Anne [Boleyn].”
If the Psalms of the Coverdale Bible are any indication, this accomplishment should be more widely known. I’ve been praying the Psalms from A Psalter for Prayer from Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, NY – a big book probably meant for “pulpit” use – and highly recommend it.
Ouch! Self-recognition! Forgive me for past insisting on someone being wrong so I can be right.
This beautiful temple and haunting small choir add to the Sunday morning feeling of stepping out of time and into the presence of the Holy Trinity.
(HT Father Stephen Freeman)
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Bon appetit!
(To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
Re: Occupy Wall Street. These are the POTUS; people. Now, how can we make them his albatross? 😉