Wednesday, December 26, 2012 7:06:54 AM
The Fed and Interest Rates
By Paul Krugman
December 24, 2012, 3:40 pm
In response to today’s column [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/krugman-when-prophecy-fails.html (first item in the post to which this is a reply)], I’m getting a lot of the usual: namely, the claim that low interest rates don’t prove anything, because the Fed has been buying up all the federal government’s debt issue. This is always said with an air of great wisdom; in fact, it’s remarkably foolish, managing to be wrong in three distinct ways.
First of all, it isn’t true that the Fed has consistently been buying a lot of Federal debt issue. Sometimes it has, sometimes it hasn’t; when QE2 stopped, there were widespread predictions that interest rates would spike, but they didn’t [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/the-fed-purchase-test/ ] — as those of us who have been getting it right predicted.
Second, the idea is conceptually wrong. Asset prices should be determined mainly by the stocks of assets, not the changes in these stocks over short periods. If bond investors lose confidence in federal debt, there’s a huge outstanding stock of that debt for them to try to sell, driving rates up, no matter how much of the new issue the Fed might be buying.
But maybe the killer is this: since when do the kinds of people who worry all the time about deficits believe that the Fed can monetize a substantial part of a large deficit, for four whole years, without any negative consequences? If you believed in the framework these people have, all that expansion of the monetary base should have produced runaway inflation by now, as many of them did in fact predict early in the game. It hasn’t — and no, don’t give me the bit about the government hiding the true rate of inflation. Independent estimates [ http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ ] are not significantly different from the official gauges.
Now, back in late 2008, contemplating the situation we were in, those of us who saw it in terms of basic IS-LM macro [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/is-lmentary/ ] made a twofold prediction: as long as the economy stayed depressed, interest rates and inflation would both stay subdued despite both large deficits and a huge expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. There was much scorn for that prediction at the time; how do you think it has looked since?
I have to say, the persistence of the inflationista, eek! deficits! view despite year after year of failure — and the amazing effort put into making excuses for year after year of failure — are a wonder to behold. But then, the point of today’s column was precisely that this is what happens when true believers confront uncooperative reality.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/the-fed-and-interest-rates/ [with comments]
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Christianity Before Paul
By James D. Tabor
Author, 'Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity [ http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123314 ]'
Posted: 11/29/2012 8:33 am
Over the span of my academic career I have taught a course simply titled "Paul," and I half-jokingly tell the students the first day that Paul is one of those people for whom a last name is not necessary, much like Elvis or Madonna. I have begun the course with what I intend to be a startling assertion: Paul is the most influential person in human history. I have in mind, of course, the West in particular. The foundations of Western civilization, from our assumptions about reality to our societal and personal ethics, rest upon the heavenly visions and apparitions of a single man -- the apostle Paul. We are all cultural heirs of Paul. In contrast, Jesus as a historical figure -- that is, a Jewish Messiah of his own time who sought to see the kingdom of God established on earth -- has been largely lost to our culture. In this holiday season, it is worth taking pause and thinking a bit about the historical origins of the Christian faith, and how much it depends on St. Paul.
Visit any church service, Roman Catholic, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, and it is the apostle Paul and his ideas that are central -- in the hymns, the creeds, the sermons, the invocation and benediction, and of course, the rituals of baptism and the Holy Communion or Mass. Whether birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage or death, it is predominantly Paul who is evoked to express meaning and significance.
The fundamental doctrinal tenets of Christianity, namely that Christ is God "born in the flesh," that his sacrificial death atones for the sins of humankind, and that his resurrection from the dead guarantees eternal life to all who believe, can be traced back to Paul -- not to Jesus. Indeed, the spiritual union with Christ through baptism, as well as the "communion" with his body and blood through the sacred meal of bread and wine, also trace back to Paul. This is the Christianity most familiar to us, with the creeds and confessions that separated it from Judaism and put it on the road to becoming a new religion.
Paul never met Jesus. The chronological facts are undisputed. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or prefect of Judea, in April, A.D. 30. As best we can determine it was not until seven years after Jesus' death, around A.D. 37, that Paul reports his initial apparition of "Christ," whom he identifies with Jesus raised from the dead. He asks his followers when challenged for his credentials: "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" equating his visionary experience with that of those who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 9:1). Paul's claim to have "seen" Jesus, as well as the teachings he says he received directly from Jesus, came after Jesus' lifetime, and can be categorized as subjective clairvoyant experiences (Galatians 1:12, 18; 2:1; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10). These "revelations" were not a one-time experience of "conversion," but a phenomenon that continued over the course of Paul's life. Paul confesses that he does not comprehend the nature of these ecstatic spiritual experiences, whether they were "in the body, or out of the body" but he believed that the voice he heard, the figure he saw and the messages he received were encounters with the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2-3).
It was a full decade after Jesus' death that Paul first met Peter in Jerusalem (whom he calls Cephas, his Aramaic name), and had a brief audience with James, the brother of Jesus, and leader of the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:18-23). Paul subsequently operated independently of the original apostles, preaching and teaching what he calls his "Gospel," in Asia Minor for another 10 years before making a return trip to Jerusalem around A.D. 50. It was only then, 20 years after Jesus' death, that he encountered James and Peter again in Jerusalem and met for the first time the rest of the original apostles of Jesus (Galatians 2:1). This rather extraordinary chronological gap is a surprise to many. It is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message.
What this means is that we must imagine a "Christianity before Paul" that existed independently of his influence or ideas for more than 20 years, as well as a Christianity preached by Paul, which developed independently of Jesus' original apostles and followers.
I have spent my 30-year career as a scholar of Christian Origins investigating the silence between two back-to-back statements of the Apostles' Creed, namely that Jesus was: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary," and that he "Was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day He rose again from the dead."
Is it not striking that this oldest and most foundational Christian creed jumps from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection, entirely skipping over his life?
How did it happen that the way Jesus came into the world, and how he left -- Christmas and Easter -- came to define Christianity itself? Here Catholics, mainstream Protestants and evangelicals all agree. To be a Christian is to believe in the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, and thus to participate in the salvation Christ brought to the world as God-in-the-flesh.
In contrast, the original Christianity before Paul is somewhat difficult to find in the New Testament, since Paul's 13 letters predominate and Paul heavily influences even our four Gospels. Fortunately, in the letter of James, attributed to the brother of Jesus, as well as in a collection of the sayings of Jesus now embedded in the Gospel of Luke (the source scholars call Q), we can still get a glimpse of the original teachings of Jesus.
What we get in the letter of James is the most direct possible link to the Jewish teachings of Jesus himself. James is quite sure that the "Judge" is standing at the door, and that the kingdom of God has drawn very near (James 5:7). He warns the rich and those who oppress the weak that very soon the judgment of God will strike. James seems to be directly echoing and affirming what he had learned and passed on from his brother Jesus. It is important to note that James did not directly quote Jesus or attribute any of these teachings to Jesus by name -- even though they are teaching of Jesus.
For James the Christian message is not the person of Jesus but the message that Jesus proclaimed. James' letter lacks a single teaching that is characteristic of the apostle Paul and it draws nothing at all from the Gospel narratives. What we have preserved in this precious document is a reflection of the original apocalyptic proclamation of Jesus: the "Gospel of the kingdom of God" with its political and social implications.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-tabor/christianity-before-paul_b_2200409.html [with comments]
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Did Paul Invent the Virgin Birth?
By James D. Tabor
Posted: 12/23/2012 8:18 am
Christians regularly affirm that Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary." This faith is embedded as a cornerstone of all the major Christian creeds and is central to the Christmas story, read and re-told countless times at this season in both word and song. Surprisingly, the gospel of Mark has no account of the birth of Jesus. It opens with Jesus as an adult, traveling from Nazareth down to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. Since Mark is our earliest gospel the question arises--what is the origin of the idea of Jesus' virgin birth? When and where did it originate?
In contrast to Mark both Matthew and Luke give us different versions of the "Christmas story," but they both agree on the source of Mary's pregnancy. In Matthew's account Joseph had a dream shortly after finding out about the pregnancy. In this dream an angel told him that her pregnancy was "by a holy spirit" and that he was to go ahead with the marriage regardless. He was to name her child Jesus. By marrying a pregnant woman who carried a child that was not his, and legally naming that child, he was in effect "adopting" Jesus as his legal son. The phrase "by a holy spirit" implies that the pregnancy came from the agency of God's spirit but falls short of saying, outright, that God was the father of Jesus in the sense that, say, Zeus was said to be the father of Hercules by his seduction of his mother, Alkmene. In that sense the account is different from those miraculous birth stories so common in Greco-Roman mythology.
Nonetheless, scholars who question the literal truth of Matthew and Luke's birth stories have suggested that they are a way of affirming the divine nature of Jesus as "Son of God" by giving him an extraordinary supernatural birth. This idea of humans being fathered by gods is quite common in Greco-Roman culture. There was a whole host of heroes who were said to be the product of a union between their mother and a god--Plato, Empedocles, Hercules, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great and even Caesar Augustus. In text after text we find the idea of the divine man (theios aner) whose supernatural birth, ability to perform miracles, and extraordinary death separate him from the ordinary world of mortals. These heroes are not "eternal" gods, like Zeus or Jupiter. They are mortal human beings who have been exalted to a heavenly state of immortal life. In the time of Jesus their temples and shrines filled every city and province of the Roman Empire. It is easy to imagine that early Christians who believed Jesus was every bit as exalted and heavenly as any of the Greek and Roman heroes and gods would appropriate this way of relating the story of his birth. It was a way of affirming that Jesus was both human and divine. Modern interpreters who view the stories in this way usually maintain that Joseph was likely the father and that these supernatural accounts were invented later by Jesus' followers to honor Jesus and to promote his exalted status in a manner common to that culture.
These legendary stories from Greco-Roman culture may well have contributed to accounts of Jesus' miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke but I would suggest an alternative. I am convinced that the idea of Jesus' birth from a virgin--without a human father--implicitly goes back to the apostle Paul. Paul's letters date several decades before our New Testament gospels and it is Paul's understanding of Jesus as the pre-existent, divine, Son of God, that lays the conceptual groundwork for our Christmas stories.
Paul never explicitly refers to Jesus' virgin birth nor does he ever name either Mary or Joseph. What he does affirm is that Jesus pre-existed before his human birth and subsequently gave up his divine glory through his birth as a human being. He writes that Jesus "though existing in the form of God" emptied himself and took on human form, "being made in the likeness of humankind" (Philippians 2:6-7). He says further "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9). He has to be referring here, metaphorically, to the "riches" of Jesus' pre-existence with God, since all our sources have Jesus born of a poor peasant family. Paul also writes "In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son, made of a woman . . ." (Galatians 4:4). The implication of these texts is that Jesus' mother was merely the human receptacle for bringing Jesus into the world. It is not a far step from these ideas about Jesus' pre-existence to the notion of Jesus as the first-begotten Son of God--eliminating any necessity for a human father. Paul's entire message centers on a divine not a human Jesus--both before his birth and after his death. For Paul he is the pre-existent Son of God, crucified, but now raised to sit at the right hand of God. Like the Christian creeds that jump from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection in single phrase, entirely skipping over his life, Paul paves the way for a confessional understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
An alternative way of thinking about being a Christian is preserved in the gospel of Mark--our earliest narrative account of the career of Jesus. Mark mentions neither Jesus' birth, nor any resurrection appearances on Easter morning (according to our earliest manuscripts that end with chapter 16:8). When a would-be follower addresses Jesus as "Good Teacher," Jesus sharply rebukes him with the retort: "Why do you call me good, there is One who is good, God" (Mark 10:17-18). Mark emphasizes the suffering of Jesus on the cross, but only as a call to others to also "take up a cross" and thus give their lives as servants to others. In Mark Jesus defines true religion as loving God and loving ones neighbor, in contrast to all systems of religion. Mark sees being a Christian as a call to a certain way of life more than an adherence to a set of creedal statements. I am not sure how Mark would have celebrated Christmas but his version of the Jesus story is surely one that should not be forgotten this season.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-tabor/did-paul-invent-the-virgin-birth_b_2355278.html [with comments]
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Family Guy - Joseph's wedding night
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One Nation Under God?
Valero Doval
By MOLLY WORTHEN
Published: December 22, 2012
THIS week millions of “Chreasters” — Americans who attend church only on Christmas and Easter — will crowd into pews to sing carols and renew their vague relationship with the Christian God. This year, there may be fewer Chreasters than ever. A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in 2008.
Avoiding church does not excuse Americans from marking the birth of Jesus, however. Most of us have no choice but to stay home from work or school — and if you complain about this glaring exception to the separation between church and state, you must be a scrooge with no heart for tradition. Christmas has been a federal holiday for 142 years [ http://books.google.com/books?id=qS3Dd92vxxUC&pg=PA104&dq=christmas+federal+holiday+1870&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OR7SUIvfNIXC9QSc_YHoBQ&ved=0CD8QuwUwAQ ].
Yet Christianity’s preferential place in our culture and civil law came under fire this year, and not simply because more Americans reject institutional religion. The Obama administration subtly worked to expand the scope of protected civil rights to include access to legal marriage and birth control. Catholic bishops and evangelical activists declared that Washington was running roughshod over religious liberty and abandoning the country’s founding values, while their opponents accused them of imposing one set of religious prejudices on an increasingly pluralistic population. The Christian consensus that long governed our public square is disintegrating. American secularism is at a crossroads.
The narrative on the right is this: Once upon a time, Americans honored the Lord, and he commissioned their nation to welcome all faiths while commanding them to uphold Christian values. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion, while politicians declared “war on Christmas” and kowtowed to the “homosexual lobby.” Conservative activists insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition.
The controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this “forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. Mr. Barton insists [ http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=23909 ] that “biblical Christianity in America produced many of the cherished traditions still enjoyed today,” including “protection for religious toleration and the rights of conscience.”
Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the “nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.” The Pew poll, he said, “is one of the signs.” A couple of weeks after we spoke, he told [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/bryan-fischer-god-did-not-protect-connecticut-shooting-victims-prayer-banned_n_2303903.html ] a radio audience that God did not protect the children killed in the Newtown, Conn., massacre because of the Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible reading in public schools. “God is not going to go where he is not wanted,” Mr. Fischer said.
How accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering religious liberty?
The truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human society since Neanderthal [ http://news.discovery.com/history/neanderthal-burial-ground-afterlife-110420.html ] times, but so has religious indifference. Our illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests.
Historians have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all. Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor markets or granaries. Lest Protestants blame this irreverence on Catholic corruption, the evidence suggests that it continued after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door. In 1584, census takers in Antwerp discovered that the city had a larger proportion [ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dutch_Revolt.html?id=Kf_QAAAACAAJ ] of “nones” than 21st-century America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.
When conservative activists claim that America stands apart from godless Europe, they are not entirely wrong. The colonies were relatively unchurched, but European visitors to the early republic marveled at Americans’ fervent piety. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote [ http://books.google.com/books?id=gp8CAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6&dq=tocqueville+america+%22Christian+sects+are+infinitely+%22&hl=en ] in 1840 that the absence of an established state church nurtured a society in which “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”
De Tocqueville visited during a wave of religious revival, but he underestimated the degree to which some Americans held Christianity at arm’s length: the “infidel [ http://books.google.com/books?id=rXBjMZQaNU0C&pg=PA494&dq=infidel+abraham+lincoln&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oWDTUPKPH4S-8ASPy4CoCQ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBg ]” Abraham Lincoln declined to join a church, and his wife invited [ http://books.google.com/books?id=0KN9-Y8MyUYC&pg=PA203&dq=mary+todd+lincoln+spiritualism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jOnRUNG4IYuw8ATtr4DgAw&ved=0CDoQuwUwAQ ] spiritualists to hold séances in the White House.
Nevertheless, America’s rates of church affiliation have long been higher than those of Europe — perhaps because of the First Amendment, which permitted a religious “free market” that encouraged innovation and competition between spiritual entrepreneurs. Yet membership, as every exasperated parson knows, is not the same as showing up on Sunday morning. Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/159050/seven-americans-moderately-religious.aspx ] survey.
We know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is their increasing visibility. “I like the fact that we’re getting more ‘nones’ because it helps Christians realize that they’re different,” Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant theologian at Duke Divinity School, said when I asked for his thoughts on the Pew poll. “That’s a crucial development. America produces people that say, ‘I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.’ ”
The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.
THIS trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone [ http://bowlingalone.com/ ; http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 ],” has encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are “spiritual, not religious” as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize both ends of the political spectrum. “It seems like we live in a Manichaean universe, with vitriolic extremes,” said Kathryn Lofton, associate professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale. “That’s not unrelated to the lack of tempering authority. ‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”
For a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long.
The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.
Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.
The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience, you’re out of business.”
Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (an organization that until 1972 was named, tellingly, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State), sees things differently. He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their pleas for exemptions [ https://www.au.org/church-state/julyaugust-2012-church-state/people-events/au-allied-groups-battle-faith-based-job-bias ] for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,” Mr. Lynn, a lawyer and an ordained minister, told me. “These cases could become as significant for the redefinition of religious liberty as Roe v. Wade was a rearticulation of the right to privacy.”
These legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans — including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.
Molly Worthen is an assistant professor [ http://history.unc.edu/people/faculty/molly-worthen/ ] of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=all ]
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There really is a war on Christmas!
(Credit: Africa Studio [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-137002p1.html ]/andrea crisante [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-562921p1.html ] via Shutterstock/Salon)
And it's being fought by some of the bravest atheists in the country, nonbelievers in rural areas and the heartland
By Daniel Denvir
Sunday, Dec 23, 2012 07:00 AM CST
The Times Square billboard is not shy about its war on Christmas: “Keep the merry, dump the myth,” it reads, juxtaposing an image of jolly St. Nick with one of Christ’s agony on the cross. Sponsored by Cranford, N.J.-based American Atheists, the sign is funded in significant part by small-town nonbelievers nationwide.
“In New Jersey and the New York area, you don’t have as much of a feeling of oppression. We have a very diverse population,” says American Atheists managing director Amanda Knief, explaining the group’s backing in rural and small-town America. She points out that their 2010 national convention in Newark, which included an Easter Sunday trip to the American Museum of Natural History, attracted few local participants. By contrast, the 2011 850-person Des Moines gathering drew more than half of its attendees from inside the state. “It was the first opportunity in Iowa for people who were non-religious to come together. And it was the first time where it was safe to do so.”
Forget Hollywood and the Upper West Side. The angriest atheists are from the American heartland, where they live surrounded by the faithful. A 2007 Pew Research Center study found that 50 percent of rural atheists and agnostics see a “natural conflict between being a non-religious person and living in a society where most people are religious.” That’s 10 points higher than among their urban counterparts. Maybe Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly has been looking for the War on Christmas and its “secular progressive” leaders in all the wrong places.
“Here’s the bottom line: Where religion is weak, atheism is weak” in its intensity, says Pitzer sociologist Phil Zuckerman. “Where religion is strong, atheism is strong.” Zuckerman has found that people in Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, among the world’s most profoundly nonreligious, generally eschew the “atheist” label and even marry in Lutheran churches. He labels the dominant attitude “benign indifference.”
“In small-town USA, people are much more likely to be anti-religious because they have religion thrown in their face all the time — prayers at little league, prayers at city council meetings, Nativity scenes and Ten Commandments billboards, preachers on the radio and TV, etc. — and their lack of religion is often associated with being immoral.”
But take out the conservative Christian dominance, he says, and “the natural default position of secularity is a mere indifference to religion.”
Indeed, most American atheists and agnostics are not hostile to religion as such, according to Pew’s October study on the growing number of religiously non-affiliated Americans. Most do disagree with the idea that churches “protect and strengthen morality,” and think that religions are “too focused on rules” and “too involved in politics.” But an overwhelming 73 percent credit churches for strengthening community bonds, and 74 percent say they play an important role in helping the poor.
What’s more, most American nonbelievers are not even atheists: while a fast-growing one-fifth of American adults, including one-third of adults under 30, now say they belong to no religious denomination, full-fledged atheists and agnostics make up just over a quarter of that number. Americans are by and large dropping out of religion, not taking up arms against it.
* * *
This certainly seems true in Pennsylvania, one of the country’s most politically and culturally divided states. Or, as James Carville apocryphally phrased it, “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” While nonreligious Philadelphians casually opt for brunch over church on Sunday mornings, the state’s conservative Christian middle has witnessed fierce battles over Christmas — fought out between neighbors.
A typical conflict unfolded in 2009 in the small and deeply religious city of Chambersburg, a place that would be unknown to most Americans save that it once served as David Brooks’ caricatured icon of red state America in a 2002 Atlantic article. “One can feel the religiosity in Franklin County after a single day’s visit,” wrote Brooks, who stood in awe of a place so unlike Bethesda, Md., with “no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings.”
But the threat to Chambersburg’s Times-less idyll came not from the Beltway but from an organization of central-state atheists called Pennsylvania Non-Believers (PAN), who in 2009 asked to place a tribute to atheist veterans in a downtown traffic circle alongside the creche installed each year by the local garden club. Instead, the Borough Council reluctantly closed the square-shaped lawn, ostensibly a military memorial, to everything but flowers and flags.
“No one had noticed how tattered the poor Christ child was looking,” longtime Public Opinion reporter Vicki Butler joked. But the outcry from the religious right, which angrily decried the meddling of outside agitators, was swift.
Two hundred people protested at the square and threatened a holiday boycott of Main Street shops. One sign read, “Where is the Christ Child?” and there were calls for mass Christian civil disobedience. Legacy Tattoo to J&B Bridals and Formals both offered to host the homeless Nativity scene, which ultimately moved just across the street to the front lawn of the Central Presbyterian Church.
PAN leader Carl Silverman, who the Public Opinion wryly noted had “shaped public policy in [the] Franklin County area before,” was on the receiving end of the most personal invective.
“In these rural areas you find all these problems, and the only way you can deal with these problems is if you are outspoken and you are active,” says Silverman, who has this year battled three Pennsylvania school boards over prayer at meetings and is currently investigating a school where a former professional athlete proselytized to students.
In the 1990s, Silverman discovered that the Gideons were handing out Bibles at local schools and threatened to hand out fliers titled “God Is Just Pretend” if they didn’t stop. He attracted the attention of the New York Times in 1999, which chronicled his fight to take down crosses in a public park and to stop a Church Bulletin Day at the minor league baseball stadium in nearby Hagerstown, Md.
The creche war, however, was bigger than Silverman, and drew village atheists out of the woodwork. In 2010, I met five of them at their third meeting at a Chinese buffet, next to a Hobby Lobby, across the street from a Wal-Mart, off the highway just a few miles outside of town. PAN board member Brian Fields traveled 25 miles from the small town of Newville to offer the fledgling chapter his support.
“People in Chambersburg seemed to think there was such a hoopla for such a small minority,” Fields, now PAN’s president, told me between bites. “We created the group to help them stand up for their rights and get to know other atheists. To make them know they are not alone.”
How, 36-year-old electronics technician Brad asked the group, could freshwater fish have survived the Great Flood? He was genuinely troubled by the discrepancy.
“I was raised very Christian,” said Brad. “I used to teach Sunday school. But about seven years ago, I began to have my doubts, studying the Bible and finding things that didn’t make sense.”
In 2009, he started driving 30 minutes south to attend freethinker meetings in Hagerstown. In small towns, church is often the center of community life. These meetings create a sort of substitute.
“I was very involved, even writing Christian music,” said Brad. “All of a sudden, something started tugging at the rug under my feet, and all of a sudden it was gone. I was looking for a foothold.”
Science provides many new converts to atheism with that foothold, and the celebrities of so-called New Atheism are often combative scientists like Richard Dawkins. And the strident tone fits.
“It is in-your-face explosive,” said a 30-year-old IT director named Josh Trayer, when asked about the area’s religious life. “There’s a church on every corner.”
Andy, a member in his 60s, feels isolated in more ways than one: He is gay.
“I’m still pretty much in the closet as an atheist,” he said. “I really need to do something, because I’m sick of feeling like I’m out in the middle of nowhere … I think some of my straight friends would be more unhappy to find out that I’m an atheist.” This small group accepted him for being both.
Nonbelievers in a large metropolis are likely to take in a diversity of religious expression, including black Protestant ministers, Latino Catholics and liberal rabbis. Jerry Falwell might be on one side of a political debate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson on another.
“Patterns of religiosity are much greater in rural communities,” says Daniel Cox, director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute. And those patterns are much more monolithically Protestant and evangelical. Cities, however, have a “level of diversity [that] leads to greater levels of tolerance for all different faiths, including atheists, agnostics and nonbelievers.”
* * *
PAN experienced a schism later that year. The behavior of a man called “the Saint,” who frequently paraded before churches throughout greater Harrisburg wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding a massive sign picturing Jesus giving the middle finger, was its subject.
When the Saint was a charismatic, faith-healing, tongue speaking, street-preaching Christian minister he walked around with those massive “you will burn in hell” signs. A graduate of Grace Bible College and Rhema Bible Training Center, he named his child “Praise.”
“I’m having a hard time with him,” the Saint told me. “Because we were 250 nights a year in ministry. Now I’m an atheist and he’s had all that his whole life, for five years, and that’s the hardest part: deconverting my kid.”
PAN ultimately expelled the Saint, but he was, at about the same time, named state coordinator of American Atheists — a position he retains.
The public face of atheism has long been a militant one, and just how nice to be toward religious people has been a subject of fierce debate among the minority of nonbelievers who cared to think about it. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists in 1963, embraced the moniker “most hated woman in America” and derided Christians as “Christers.” She served as the lead plaintiff in Murray v. Curlett, the Supreme Court case that ended prayer in public schools. Murray was Phil Donahue’s first guest when the show premiered in 1967.
“Friendly atheists” like Chris Stedman, the young assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the author of “Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground With the Religious,” likely have far more sympathizers among the swelling ranks of secular youth. But most friendly atheists don’t care much about atheism. PAN, meanwhile, has a largely middle-aged membership. It recently held its first statewide conference, and drew a large crowd of 180. Only a dozen came from Philly.
When atheism is no big deal, atheists are less likely to think that religion is one either. Bill O’Reilly will have his War on Christmas for as long as he cares to wage one.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/there_really_is_a_war_on_christmas/ [with comments]
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The Moral Animal
Alain Pilon
By JONATHAN SACKS
Published: December 23, 2012
London
IT is the religious time of the year. Step into any city in America or Britain and you will see the night sky lit by religious symbols, Christmas decorations certainly and probably also a giant menorah. Religion in the West seems alive and well.
But is it really? Or have these symbols been emptied of content, no more than a glittering backdrop to the West’s newest faith, consumerism, and its secular cathedrals, shopping malls?
At first glance, religion is in decline. In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago.
Looked at another way, though, the figures tell a different story. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise. Yet after a series of withering attacks, most recently by the new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, is what is truly surprising.
The irony is that many of the new atheists are followers of Charles Darwin. We are what we are, they say, because it has allowed us to survive and pass on our genes to the next generation. Our biological and cultural makeup constitutes our “adaptive fitness.” Yet religion is the greatest survivor of them all. Superpowers tend to last a century; the great faiths last millenniums. The question is why.
Darwin himself suggested what is almost certainly the correct answer. He was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.
Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.
The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.
A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.
The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.
If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.
No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.
Mr. Putnam’s research showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers were more likely to give money to charity, do volunteer work, help the homeless, donate blood, help a neighbor with housework, spend time with someone who was feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger or help someone find a job. Religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance is, he found, a better predictor of altruism than education, age, income, gender or race.
Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. This may go to show that God has a sense of humor. It certainly shows that the free societies of the West must never lose their sense of God.
Jonathan Sacks [ http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ ] is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/the-moral-animal.html [with comments]
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The Power of Concentration
A drawing of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget from 1891 in The Strand Magazine.
Time Life Pictures/Mansell via Getty Images
By MARIA KONNIKOVA
Published: December 15, 2012
MEDITATION and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.
More often than not, when a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness.
Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.
In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
Participants were instructed to relax with their eyes closed, focus on their breathing, and acknowledge and release any random thoughts that might arise. Then they had the option of receiving nine 30-minute meditation training sessions over the next five weeks. When they were tested a second time, their neural activation patterns had undergone a striking leftward shift in frontal asymmetry — even when their practice and training averaged only 5 to 16 minutes a day.
As little as five minutes a day of intense Holmes-like inactivity, and a happier outlook is yours for the taking — though this particular benefit seems to have been lost on Holmes himself, what with his bouts of melancholy and his flirtations with a certain 7 percent solution. A quick survey will show that the paradox is illusory: Holmes is depressed when there is no target for his mental faculties. Give him a project, and balance is restored.
But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe that our attention is infinite, but it isn’t. Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention. When we are mindful, some of that attentional flightiness disappears as if of its own accord.
In 2012, researchers led by a team from the University of Washington examined the effects of meditation training on multitasking in a real-world setting. They asked a group of human resources professionals to engage in the type of simultaneous planning they did habitually. Each participant was placed in a one-person office, with a laptop and a phone, and asked to complete several typical tasks: schedule meetings for multiple attendees, locate free conference rooms, write a memo that proposed a creative agenda item and the like. The information necessary to complete those tasks? Delivered as it otherwise would be: by e-mail, through instant messages, over the phone and in person. The list was supposed to be completed in 20 minutes or less.
After the multitasking free-for-all, participants were divided into three groups: one was assigned to an eight-week meditation course (two hours of instruction, weekly); another group didn’t take the course at first, but took it later; and the last group took an eight-week course in body relaxation. Everyone was put through a second round of frenzy.
The only participants to show improvement were those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. While the overall time they devoted to the assignment didn’t differ much from that of other groups, they spent it more efficiently. They engaged, on average, in just over 40 discreet “tasks” — test-related behaviors that had a definable start and end time — spending approximately 36 seconds on each, in contrast to the 48 to 50 average tasks attempted by the other groups — with an average of only 30 seconds spent per activity. They also remembered what they did better than the other participants in the study.
The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would.
In a 2012 study at Emory University, increased meditation practice was associated with enhanced connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in attention monitoring and working memory, and the right insula, an area that is associated with how well we can monitor our own feelings and thoughts and that is considered a key waypoint between our two major attention networks, the default and the executive.
Not only could this increased connectivity make us better able to switch between tasks and monitor our own attention, but it is indicative of more effective overall management of our finite attentional resources.
Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.
These effects make sense: the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues. In the time it takes old detective Mac to traipse around all those country towns in search of a missing bicyclist in “The Valley of Fear,” Holmes solves the entire crime without leaving the room where the murder occurred. That’s the thing about mindfulness. It seems to slow you down, but it actually gives you the resources you need to speed up your thinking.
The difference between a Holmes and a Watson is, essentially, one of practice. Attention is finite, it’s true — but it is also trainable. Through modifying our practices of thought toward a more Holmes-like concentration, we can build up neural real estate that is better able to deal with the variegated demands of the endlessly multitasking, infinitely connected modern world. And even if we’ve never attempted mindfulness in the past, we might be surprised at how quickly the benefits become noticeable.
Until recently, our 20s were considered the point when our brain’s wiring was basically complete. But new evidence suggests that not only can we learn into old age, but the structure of our brains can continue to change and develop. In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.
Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity). In 2012, researchers from Ohio State University demonstrated that older adults who scored higher on mindfulness scales had increased connectivity in their default networks, specifically in two of the brain’s major information processing hubs. And while we already know that this kind of increased connectivity is a very good thing, there’s more to these particular results. The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.
The implications are tantalizing. Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.
Maria Konnikova [ http://www.mariakonnikova.com/ ] is the author of “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes [ http://www.amazon.com/Mastermind-Think-Like-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/0670026573 ]” and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Pope Christmas Eve Mass 2012: Find Room For God
By Philip Pullella
Posted: 12/25/2012 12:29 am EST | Updated: 12/25/2012 10:09 am EST
VATICAN CITY, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, leading the world's Roman Catholics into Christmas, on Monday urged people to find room for God in their fast-paced lives filled with the latest technological gadgets.
The 85-year-old pope, marking the eighth Christmas season of his pontificate, celebrated a solemn Christmas Eve mass in St Peter's Basilica, during which he appealed for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and an end to the civil war in Syria.
At the mass for some 10,000 people in the basilica and broadcast to millions of others on television, the pope wove his homily around the theme of God's place in today's modern world.
"Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him," said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments.
"The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full," he said.
The leader of the world's some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said societies had reached the point where many people's thinking processes did not leave any room even for the existence of God.
"Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the 'God hypothesis' becomes superfluous," he said.
"There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so 'full' of ourselves that there is no room left for God."
PEACE CANDLE
Bells inside and outside the basilica chimed when the pope said "Glory to God in the Highest," the words the gospels say the angels sang at the moment of Jesus' birth.
Earlier on Monday the pope appeared at the window of his apartments in the apostolic palace and lit a peace candle, as a larger-than-life nativity scene was unveiled in St Peter's Square below.
Reflecting on the gospel account of Jesus born in a stable because there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn, he said when people find no room for God in their lives, they will soon find no room for others.
"Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing.
"Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognise him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world," he said.
He asked for prayers for the people who "live and suffer" in the Holy Land today.
The pope called for peace among Israelis and Palestinians and for the people of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq and prayed that "Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side-by-side in God's peace."
The Vatican is concerned about the exodus from the Middle East of Christians, many of whom leave because they fear for their safety. Christians now comprise five percent of the population of the region, down from 20 percent a century ago.
According to some estimates, the current population of 12 million Christians in the Middle East could halve by 2020 if security and birth rates continue to decline.
At noon (1100 GMT/6 AM ET) the pope will deliver his twice-yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Myra MacDonald)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/pope-christmas-eve-mass-god_n_2361399.html [with comments]
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Pope pardons butler as 'paternal gesture', expels him from Vatican
Vatican's ex-bulter Paolo Gabriele meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican City prison where the pope pardoned his former butler.
(Osservatore Romano, AFP)
The pope has pardoned his former butler, who was sentenced to 18 months in jail for leaking secret papal memos, but banished him from the Vatican.
22 Dec 2012 15:37
"This morning the Holy Father Benedict XVI visited Paolo Gabriele in prison in order to confirm his forgiveness and to inform him personally of his acceptance of Mr Gabriele's request for pardon," the Vatican said in a statement.
Gabriele's pardon was a "paternal gesture" for a man "with whom the pope shared a relationship of daily familiarity for many years".
However, the ex-butler "cannot resume his previous occupation or continue to live in Vatican City," it said.
Gabriele was found guilty in October of leaking sensitive memos to the press as part of a whistle-blowing campaign against what he said was "evil and corruption" in the Vatican.
Paolo Gabriele was a whistleblower against what he said was "evil and corruption" in the Holy See.
A married father-of-three who lived inside the Vatican as one of the 594 citizens of the world's smallest state, Gabriele was born in Rome and started out as a cleaner in the Secretariat of State – the main administration of the Catholic Church.
Gabriele then worked as part of the domestic staff of late pope John Paul II before being promoted in 2006 to the prestigious post of butler to the pope – a position that gave him unique access for a layman to the pontiff himself.
Aggrevated theft
But he was suspected of using his position to steal secret Vatican papers and was put on trial and convicted in October. He said he acted "out of love for the Church of Christ and of its leader on Earth".
He had told the court he was innocent of the charge but acted because he felt the pontiff was being "manipulated".
"Concerning the accusation of aggravated theft, I declare myself innocent," he said, though he admitted: "I feel guilty for having betrayed the trust that the Holy Father gave me, whom I love like a son" loves his father.
Along with four women from the Memores Domini religious movement who help the 85-year-old pope in his daily life and run the papal household, Gabriele was one of the few lay members of what has been called the "pontifical family".
Gabriele accompanied the pope on his many foreign trips and can be seen in the corners of official photographs, adjusting the pope's cloak, holding his umbrella or escorting him on the "popemobile" through crowds of faithful.
The 46-year-old, nicknamed "Paoletto", served meals for the pope and helped him don his robes every day. His wife and children were well known and liked in the tiny Vatican community.
His co-defendant Claudio Sciarpelletti told investigators he knew about what he called Gabriele's "painful" childhood although no further details were provided in court documents.
"He was very pious. He went to the mass celebrated by the Holy Father every day and prayed a lot," said one of the four Memores Domini housekeepers.
But reports in the Italian press said Gabriele had a reputation for being a bit too talkative, considering the discretion demanded of his post.
Investigators asked two psychologists to analyse Gabriele while he was in detention and concluded that he was "an impressionable subject able to commit a variety of actions that can damage himself and/or others".
Omerta against the truth
Gabriele insists he leaked the documents for the pope's benefit.
"What really shocked me was when I sat down for lunch with the Holy Father and sometimes the pope asked about things that he should have been informed on," he told the court.
"It was then that I became firmly convinced of how easy it was to manipulate a person with such enormous powers."
His lawyer, Cristiana Arru, called on the judge to be lenient on a man who was driven by "a moral motivation" and who had by no means cooked up a "scheme or plot" aimed at damaging the Church or the pope.
His devotion to the pope and the written apology begging for his forgiveness moved the Vatican's presiding judge to cut his sentence from three years to 18 months.
The only recorded interview the butler has given was with Gianluigi Nuzzi, the investigative journalist who published the confidential Vatican documents that Gabriele leaked to him in the book "Your Holiness".
The butler expressed frustration with a culture of secrecy in the Vatican – from the mysterious disappearance of the daughter of a Vatican employee in 1983 to a quickly hushed-up double murder and suicide by a Swiss guard in 1998.
"There is a kind of omerta against the truth, not so much because of a power struggle but because of fear, because of caution," Gabriele said in the interview, using the term for the code of silence of the Sicilian Mafia.
He told Nuzzi he was acting with "around 20 other people" in the Vatican, though he later denied others had been actively involved in helping him.
Gabriele comes across in the interview as a deeply religious man who says he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to reveal intrigues behind the Vatican walls to help the pope rid the heart of the Catholic Church of corruption.
He said he was aware of the consequences of his actions but said the potential to change something in the Vatican was worth the risk.
"Being a witness to truth means being ready to pay the price," he said.
Copyright 2012 AFP
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-22-pope-pardons-butler-as-paternal-gesture-expels-him-from-vatican [with comments]
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Mark Regnerus Claims Viewing Porn Increases Support For Gay Marriage Among Straight Men
Posted: 12/25/2012 8:31 am EST | Updated: 12/25/2012 9:45 am EST
Could watching porn make straight men support marriage equality?
That's what Mark Regnerus [ http://www.markregnerus.com/ ], who became infamous earlier this year when he published a now widely discredited study [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-umberson/texas-professors-gay-research_b_1628988.html ] that supposedly found children of gay parents are worse off than those of straight parents, claimed on the Witherspoon Institute [ http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/ ; http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/about/ ] website late last week [ http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/12/7048/ ].
In his piece Regnerus states that porn "undermines the concept that in the act of sexual intercourse, we share our 'body and whole self ... permanently and exclusively'" and "reinforces the idea that people can share their bodies but not their inmost selves, and that they can do so temporarily and (definitely) not exclusively without harm."
He also notes that porn does not "discriminate" or rank one kind of sex act over another and therefore viewers are treated to a "veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity" (can this guy paint a picture, or what?) and end up believing that sex has nothing to do with "marital meaning."
So what happens when sex is divorced from being purely about marriage? Apparently men begin to think gay marriage is OK.
Regnerus reveals that "of the men who view pornographic material 'every day or almost every day,' 54 percent 'strongly agreed' that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that."
What's more,
The same pattern emerges for the statement, "Gay and lesbian couples do just as good a job raising children as heterosexual couples." Only 26 percent of the lightest porn users concurred, compared to 63 percent of the heaviest consumers. It's a linear association for men: the more porn they consume, the more they affirm this statement. More rigorous statistical tests confirmed that this association too is a very robust one.
What about women you ask? Regnerus avoids the topic of why women support marriage equality all together. He notes that, "women typically aren't as into porn as men are, and yet women in general tend to support same-sex marriage more readily than do men. A recent Gallup poll noted that 56 percent of women favor it, while only 42 percent of men do. No, this theory is not about women..."
Support for marriage equality has continues to increase in America. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in November [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/gay-marriage-support-majority-americans-poll_n_2130371.html ] found that 51 percent of Americans support marriage equality and in December a poll released by POLITICO and George Washington University [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/09/gay-marriage-poll_n_2267594.html ] found that 63 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds backed same-sex marriage.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/mark-regnerus-study-porn-gay-marriage-men_n_2362283.html [with comments]
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Georgia Abortion Law Blocked Temporarily By State Judge
12/24/12 05:23 PM ET EST
ATLANTA -- A state judge has suspended a Georgia law banning abortions for women who are more than 20 weeks pregnant.
The law bans doctors from performing abortions five months after an egg is fertilized, except when doctors decide a fetus has a defect so severe it is unlikely to live. The law also makes an exception to protect the life or health of the mother, though that does not apply to a mother's mental health.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed a lawsuit on behalf of three obstetricians challenging the law's constitutionality. The organization says the law violates the state's privacy protections as provided for in the state constitution.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs suspended the law Friday and it was set to take effect Jan. 1.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/georgia-abortion-law-blocked_n_2360850.html [with comments]
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John Boehner’s Christmas gift to you is a guarantee that the Republican House will destroy the economy
(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)
The failure of "Plan B" puts us on the path to default
By Alex Pareene
Monday, Dec 24, 2012 06:45 AM CST
Last week, we learned that Speaker of the House John Boehner has no control over his majority [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/20/politics/fiscal-cliff/index.html ]. We’ve seen Boehner have trouble with his caucus before, of course — a significant portion of these people are crazy — but the failure of “Plan B” was different. In the past Boehner has had trouble whipping votes to support things that were destined to become law. Boehner couldn’t get his caucus to support TARP because TARP was awful and was also definitely going to happen. Boehner couldn’t get the votes for the 2011 debt deal [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/boehner-other-gop-leaders-ramp-up-pressure-on-republicans-to-pass-debt-plan/2011/07/28/gIQARD5veI_story.html ] because conservatives thought they’d eventually force an even better deal. But this was a totally symbolic gesture that never had any shot at passing the Senate or getting signed by the president. Boehner’s “Plan B” was a stupid pointless empty gesture, and that is why its failure is actually slightly scary, in addition to being hilarious [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/336287/inside-meltdown-robert-costa ].
The point of “Plan B” was to give Republicans a means of blaming Democrats when everyone’s taxes go up next year, while also giving them an opportunity to claim that they supported raising taxes on rich people. The problem was, Republicans really don’t support raising taxes on rich people, and they feel so strongly about this that they didn’t want to pretend to support a tax increase.
What is especially silly about all of this is that in any sort of sensible political system none of it would be happening. A majority of Americans just voted for Democrats to control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, which would seem to indicate that a majority of American voters would just prefer it if Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided all of this for themselves. But that’s not the way our archaic political system works, and instead we will watch this unpopular anthropomorphic Camel 100 carefully negotiate a compromise with the president that his party will refuse to support, until we either extend all tax cuts forever or “go over the cliff” and cause every Sunday show panelist in the country to hyperventilate until losing consciousness.
How did we get here? Keep in mind, your average congressperson is as dumb as your average regular person, and Republican members listen to the same talk radio and read the same right-wing blogs and watch the same Fox News as every other conservative. It’s always been comforting to imagine that canny evil masterminds huddle in backrooms plotting how to use the right-wing media machine to manipulate the rubes into accepting whatever the corporate elites want, but the story now is that the canny masterminds have no control over the media operation they’ve built and the “grownups” cannot convince the true believers to do shit. There’s really no talking sense into Michele Bachmann and Steve King, and every two years gerrymandered ultra-conservative districts send more and more Kings and Bachmanns to the House. And Republicans know that their safe districts are only safe from Democrats, not even-crazier Republicans.
John Boehner will probably be fine. He’ll likely remain speaker even [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/why-john-boehner-will-probably-be-fine ], mostly because no one else wants that horrible job. America might not be fine.
“Going over the fiscal cliff” will be a fun adventure at first, especially because it has been so long since America has had any sort of tax hike or defense budget cut, but shortly after the “cliff” comes the debt ceiling increase vote [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/business/daily-stock-market-activity.html ], and there is really no chance, at all, of the House raising the debt ceiling, under any circumstance. Maybe if the president agrees to block grant Medicare and return America to the gold standard. And promises to personally fire 100 teachers.
The idea that “going over the cliff” would give the president enough leverage to get a halfway decent deal — with some stimulus up front and everything! — depended on a House of Representatives capable of acting rationally. it’s apparent that they are in fact prepared to intentionally tank the entire American economy.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/john_boehners_christmas_gift_to_you_is_a_guarantee_that_the_republican_house_will_destroy_the_economy/ [with comments]
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HSBC Sued By Atlanta-Area Counties Over Predatory Lending Claims
By KATE BRUMBACK
12/24/12 03:39 PM ET EST
ATLANTA -- Three Atlanta-area counties have filed a lawsuit claiming that British bank HSBC cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in extra expenses and damage to their tax bases by aggressively signing minorities to housing loans that were likely to fail.
The Georgia counties' failure or success with the relatively novel strategy could help determine whether other local governments try to hold big banks accountable for losses in tax revenue based on what they claim are discriminatory or predatory lending practices. Similar lawsuits resulted in settlements this year worth millions of dollars for communities in Maryland and Tennessee.
Fulton, DeKalb and Cobb counties say in their lawsuit, which was filed in October, that the housing foreclosure crisis was the "foreseeable and inevitable result" of big banks, such as HSBC and its American subsidiaries, aggressively pushing irresponsible loans or loans that were destined to fail. The counties say that crisis has caused them tremendous damage.
"It's not only the personal damage that was done to people in our communities," said DeKalb County Commissioner Jeff Rader. "That has a ripple effect on our tax digest and the demand for public services in these areas."
The city of Atlanta straddles Fulton and DeKalb counties, while Cobb County is northwest of the city.
The lawsuit says the banks violated the Fair Housing Act, which provides protections against housing or renting policies or practices, including lending, that discriminate on the basis race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status or handicap.
The counties say their tax digests – which represent the value of all property subject to tax – have declined from a high point in 2009. Fulton's tax digest has dropped about 12 percent, from $32.7 billion to $28.7 billion; DeKalb's has dropped about 20 percent, from $22 billion to $17.5 billion; and Cobb's has dropped about 15 percent, from $25.5 billion to $21.3 billion, the lawsuit says. That reduces their ability to provide critical services in their communities, the lawsuit says.
In addition to reducing tax income, vacant or abandoned homes that are in or near foreclosure create additional costs for the counties, the lawsuit says. Their housing code and legal departments have to investigate and respond to code violations, including having to board up, tear down or repair unsafe homes. They have to deal with public health concerns, such as pest infestations, ruptured water pipes, accumulated garbage and unkempt yards. And fire and police departments have to respond to health and safety threats.
The lawsuit says predatory lending practices include: targeting vulnerable borrowers for mortgage loans with unfavorable terms; directing credit-worthy borrowers to more costly loans; putting unreasonable terms, excessive fees or pre-payment penalties into mortgage loans; basing loan values on inflated or fraudulent appraisals; and refinancing a loan without benefit to the borrower.
The counties are asking the court to order the bank to stop its behavior and to take steps to prevent similar predatory lending in the future. They are also seeking financial compensation for the damages they've suffered and punitive damages to punish the bank for its "willful, wanton and reckless conduct." The counties say the financial injury they've suffered is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Andrew Sandler, a lawyer for HSBC and its subsidiaries, said he couldn't comment on the case. A federal judge has given the bank until Jan. 25 to respond to the counties' complaint.
Lawyers for the counties declined interviews on the case, but one of them, Jeffrey Harris, said in an emailed statement that they are continuing to investigate other banks and could file additional complaints.
Similar suits were filed against Wells Fargo by the city of Memphis and surrounding Shelby County in Tennessee in 2009 and by the city of Baltimore in 2008. Those suits were settled earlier this year. Both settlements included $3 million to the local governments for economic development or housing programs and $4.5 million in down payment assistance to homeowners, as well as a lending goal of $425 million for residents over the subsequent five years, according to media accounts.
As in those cases, the lawsuit filed by the Georgia counties says the bank, in this case HSBC, targeted communities with high percentages of Fair Housing Act-protected minority residents, particularly blacks and Hispanics.
"Communities with high concentrations of such potential borrowers, and the potential borrowers themselves, were targeted because of the traditional lack of access to competitive credit choices in these communities and the resulting willingness of FHA protected minority borrowers to accept credit on uncompetitive rates," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says minority borrowers were disproportionately targeted with high-cost loans between 2004 and 2007.
Before the beginning of the subprime lending boom in 2003, annual foreclosure rates in metro Atlanta averaged below 1 percent, but U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data show that the estimated foreclosure rates for each of the three counties now average more than 9 percent and are as high as 18 percent in the communities with the highest percentages of minority borrowers, the lawsuit says.
It is the alleged targeting of minority communities that entitles the counties to seek action against HSBC for loss of tax income and other expenses, the lawsuit says.
"If you can show that you yourself have suffered harm by an illegal act under the Fair Housing Act, even if you are not the target, even if you are not the intended victim, you can still sue to stop the behavior and to recover any damages that you can prove you suffered because of the violation of the Fair Housing Act," said Steve Dane, a lawyer whose firm was involved in the Memphis and Baltimore lawsuits.
The costs incurred by counties because of high rates of foreclosure are reflected in court records and related fees for each home, and police and fire departments can calculate the costs of responding to a given address, Dane said. He said it takes a lot of time and effort to gather the necessary records to prove the harm.
Another discouraging factor could be a lack of political will, said Lisa Rice, vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
"Politicians may not want to go up against the banks," she said, adding that there will likely be other local governments that give this a try but she doubts the number will be high.
But Jaime Dodge, an assistant law professor at the University of Georgia, says she thinks more cases are likely, at least in the short term as municipal governments continue to feel the squeeze of a tight economy and seek ways to refill their coffers. They may try to test federal courts in different parts of the country, she said. Successes in multiple jurisdictions could lead to more attempts, but if courts start knocking the suits down that would likely discourage them, she said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/hsbc-sued-predatory-lending_n_2362436.html [with comments]
===
CNN: After Mass Shootings, Should We Profile White Men?
I appeared on CNN to discuss my recent Salon.com article looking at how America's reaction to mass shootings is shaped by the fact that most of the shooters are white men. Had they been from another demographic, we would likely face calls for racial profiling. But that isn't the case when the demographic in question is white men. Why with only 30% of the population being white men are 70% of the mass shootings being perpetrated by white men? Read the Salon piece here:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/17/would_the_u_s_government_profile_white_men/ [last item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82607484 and preceding and following]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=564YWoXbAIw
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CNN: Why Are Most Mass Shootings Perpetrated By White Men?
In the aftermath of the Newtown shooting, I appeared on CNN to discuss the racial double standard evident in the way America reacts to crimes committed by white men. When white guys commit violent crimes, their transgressions are individualized. But when people of color commit violent crimes, their transgressions are unduly projected onto whole demographic groups. This double standard, I argue, is an expression of white privilege.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phot_KGMJF4
wingbutt/teabugger/bagnut version:
CNN's Don Lemon On 'White Privilege' & Gun Control: Should We Start Profiling White Men?
CNN's Don Lemon On 'White Privilege' & Gun Control: Should We Start Profiling White Men? Wow how ridiculous is that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2PBdx-88dM
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Ron Paul Slams NRA Plan Recommending Armed Officers In Schools
Posted: 12/25/2012 10:40 am EST
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) came out against the National Rifle Association's recommendation [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/wayne-lapierre-schools-armed-guards-crazy_n_2355462.html ] for armed officers in all schools in the wake of the tragic shooting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
"While I certainly agree that more guns equals less crime and that private gun ownership prevents many shootings, I don’t agree that conservatives and libertarians should view government legislation, especially at the federal level, as the solution to violence," Paul wrote in a statement ["Government Security is Just Another Kind of Violence", http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2037 ] posted on his website. "Real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets. We cannot reverse decades of moral and intellectual decline by snapping our fingers and passing laws."
The retiring libertarian lawmaker explained, "Let’s not forget that our own government policies often undermine civil society, cheapen life, and encourage immorality. The president and other government officials denounce school violence, yet still advocate for endless undeclared wars abroad and easy abortion at home. U.S. drone strikes kill thousands, but nobody in America holds vigils or devotes much news coverage to those victims, many of which are children, albeit, of a different color." He added, "Obviously I don’t want to conflate complex issues of foreign policy and war with the Sandy Hook shooting, but it is important to make the broader point that our federal government has zero moral authority to legislate against violence."
Paul also slammed the response to the shooting from the "political left," saying he found "emotional calls for increased gun control" to be "misguided."
During an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, stood by the idea of armed guards in schools.
"If it's crazy to call for armed officers in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," he said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/wayne-lapierre-schools-armed-guards-crazy_n_2355462.html ]. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/ron-paul-nra_n_2362432.html [with comments]
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William Spengler's Note Before Killing Webster Firefighters: 'Do What I Like Doing Best, Killing People'
This image taken from video provided by WHAM13-TV, shows a wide view of homes on fire in an area where a gunman ambushed four volunteer firefighters responding to an intense pre-dawn house fire early Monday, Dec. 24, 2012, in Webster, N.Y., killing two before ending up dead himself, authorities said. Police used an armored vehicle to evacuate more than 30 nearby residents.
(AP Photo/WHAM13-TV via AP video)
By GEORGE M. WALSH and MARY ESCH
12/25/12 06:01 PM ET EST
WEBSTER, N.Y. — An ex-con killed two firefighters with the same caliber and make military-style rifle used in the Connecticut school massacre after typing a note pledging to burn down his neighborhood and "do what I like doing best, killing people," police said Tuesday as another body, believed to be the gunman's missing sister, was found.
William Spengler, 62, who served 17 years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980 hammer slaying of his grandmother, set his house afire before dawn Christmas Eve before taking a revolver, a shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle to a sniper position outside, Police Chief Gerald Pickering said.
The death toll rose to three as police revealed that a body believed to be the killer's 67-year-old sister, Cheryl Spengler, was found in his fire-ravaged home.
Authorities say he sprayed bullets at the first responders, killing two firefighters and injuring two others who remained hospitalized Tuesday in stable condition, awake and alert and expected to survive. He then killed himself as seven houses burned on a sliver of land along Lake Ontario.
Police recovered a military-style .223-caliber semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle with flash suppression, the same make and caliber weapon used in the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26, including 20 young children, Pickering said.
The chief said it was believed the firefighters were hit with shots from the rifle given the distance but the investigation was incomplete.
"He was equipped to go to war, kill innocent people," the chief said.
The two- to three-page typewritten rambling note left by Spengler did not reveal what set off the killer or provide a motive for the shootings, Pickering said. He called the attack a "clear ambush on first responders."
He declined to reveal the note's full content or say where it was found. He read only one chilling line: "I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down, and do what I like doing best, killing people."
Pickering said it was unclear whether the person believed to be Spengler's sister died before or during the fire.
"It was a raging inferno in there," Pickering said.
A next-door neighbor said Spengler hated his sister and they lived on opposite sides of the house.
Roger Vercruysse said Spengler loved his mother, Arline, who died in October after living with her son and daughter in the house in a neighborhood of seasonal and year-round homes across the road from a lakeshore popular with recreational boaters.
As Pickering described it and as emergency radio communications on the scene showed, the heavily armed Spengler took a position behind a small hill by the house as four firefighters arrived after 5:30 a.m. to extinguish the fire: two on a fire truck; two in their own vehicles.
They were immediately greeted by bullets from Spengler, who wore dark clothing. Volunteer firefighter and police Lt. Michael Chiapperini, 43, driving the truck, was killed by gunfire as the windshield before him was shattered. Also killed was Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, who worked as a 911 dispatcher.
Several firefighters went beneath the truck to shield themselves as an off-duty police officer who was passing by pulled his vehicle alongside the truck to try to shield them, authorities said.
The first police officer who arrived chased and exchanged shots with Spengler, recounting it later over his police radio.
"I could see the muzzle blasts comin' at me. ... I fired four shots at him. I thought he went down," the officer said.
At another point, he said: "I don't know if I hit him or not. He's by a tree. ... He was movin' eastbound on the berm when I was firing shots." Pickering portrayed him as a hero who saved many lives.
The audio posted on the website RadioReference.com also has someone reporting "firefighters are down" and saying "got to be rifle or shotgun – high-powered ... semi or fully auto."
Spengler had been charged with murder in his grandmother's death but pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, apparently to spare his family a trial. After he was freed from prison, Spengler – a felon who wasn't allowed to possess weapons – had lived a quiet life on Lake Road on a narrow peninsula where Irondequoit Bay meets Lake Ontario.
That ended when he left his burning home Monday morning, armed with his three weapons and a lot of ammunition.
"I'm not sure we'll ever know what was going through his mind," Pickering said.
Esch reported from Albany. Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York City also contributed to this report.
*
Related
William Spengler, Killer Of 2 New York Firemen, Had Bushmaster Semiautomatic Rifle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/william-spengler-had-semiautomatic-rifle_n_2362646.html
New York Firefighters In Guarded Condition
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/new-york-firefighters-in-_n_2362142.html
*
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/william-spengler-set-trap_n_2362433.html [with comments]
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By Paul Krugman
December 24, 2012, 3:40 pm
In response to today’s column [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/krugman-when-prophecy-fails.html (first item in the post to which this is a reply)], I’m getting a lot of the usual: namely, the claim that low interest rates don’t prove anything, because the Fed has been buying up all the federal government’s debt issue. This is always said with an air of great wisdom; in fact, it’s remarkably foolish, managing to be wrong in three distinct ways.
First of all, it isn’t true that the Fed has consistently been buying a lot of Federal debt issue. Sometimes it has, sometimes it hasn’t; when QE2 stopped, there were widespread predictions that interest rates would spike, but they didn’t [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/the-fed-purchase-test/ ] — as those of us who have been getting it right predicted.
Second, the idea is conceptually wrong. Asset prices should be determined mainly by the stocks of assets, not the changes in these stocks over short periods. If bond investors lose confidence in federal debt, there’s a huge outstanding stock of that debt for them to try to sell, driving rates up, no matter how much of the new issue the Fed might be buying.
But maybe the killer is this: since when do the kinds of people who worry all the time about deficits believe that the Fed can monetize a substantial part of a large deficit, for four whole years, without any negative consequences? If you believed in the framework these people have, all that expansion of the monetary base should have produced runaway inflation by now, as many of them did in fact predict early in the game. It hasn’t — and no, don’t give me the bit about the government hiding the true rate of inflation. Independent estimates [ http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ ] are not significantly different from the official gauges.
Now, back in late 2008, contemplating the situation we were in, those of us who saw it in terms of basic IS-LM macro [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/is-lmentary/ ] made a twofold prediction: as long as the economy stayed depressed, interest rates and inflation would both stay subdued despite both large deficits and a huge expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. There was much scorn for that prediction at the time; how do you think it has looked since?
I have to say, the persistence of the inflationista, eek! deficits! view despite year after year of failure — and the amazing effort put into making excuses for year after year of failure — are a wonder to behold. But then, the point of today’s column was precisely that this is what happens when true believers confront uncooperative reality.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/the-fed-and-interest-rates/ [with comments]
===
Christianity Before Paul
By James D. Tabor
Author, 'Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity [ http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123314 ]'
Posted: 11/29/2012 8:33 am
Over the span of my academic career I have taught a course simply titled "Paul," and I half-jokingly tell the students the first day that Paul is one of those people for whom a last name is not necessary, much like Elvis or Madonna. I have begun the course with what I intend to be a startling assertion: Paul is the most influential person in human history. I have in mind, of course, the West in particular. The foundations of Western civilization, from our assumptions about reality to our societal and personal ethics, rest upon the heavenly visions and apparitions of a single man -- the apostle Paul. We are all cultural heirs of Paul. In contrast, Jesus as a historical figure -- that is, a Jewish Messiah of his own time who sought to see the kingdom of God established on earth -- has been largely lost to our culture. In this holiday season, it is worth taking pause and thinking a bit about the historical origins of the Christian faith, and how much it depends on St. Paul.
Visit any church service, Roman Catholic, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, and it is the apostle Paul and his ideas that are central -- in the hymns, the creeds, the sermons, the invocation and benediction, and of course, the rituals of baptism and the Holy Communion or Mass. Whether birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage or death, it is predominantly Paul who is evoked to express meaning and significance.
The fundamental doctrinal tenets of Christianity, namely that Christ is God "born in the flesh," that his sacrificial death atones for the sins of humankind, and that his resurrection from the dead guarantees eternal life to all who believe, can be traced back to Paul -- not to Jesus. Indeed, the spiritual union with Christ through baptism, as well as the "communion" with his body and blood through the sacred meal of bread and wine, also trace back to Paul. This is the Christianity most familiar to us, with the creeds and confessions that separated it from Judaism and put it on the road to becoming a new religion.
Paul never met Jesus. The chronological facts are undisputed. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or prefect of Judea, in April, A.D. 30. As best we can determine it was not until seven years after Jesus' death, around A.D. 37, that Paul reports his initial apparition of "Christ," whom he identifies with Jesus raised from the dead. He asks his followers when challenged for his credentials: "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" equating his visionary experience with that of those who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 9:1). Paul's claim to have "seen" Jesus, as well as the teachings he says he received directly from Jesus, came after Jesus' lifetime, and can be categorized as subjective clairvoyant experiences (Galatians 1:12, 18; 2:1; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10). These "revelations" were not a one-time experience of "conversion," but a phenomenon that continued over the course of Paul's life. Paul confesses that he does not comprehend the nature of these ecstatic spiritual experiences, whether they were "in the body, or out of the body" but he believed that the voice he heard, the figure he saw and the messages he received were encounters with the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2-3).
It was a full decade after Jesus' death that Paul first met Peter in Jerusalem (whom he calls Cephas, his Aramaic name), and had a brief audience with James, the brother of Jesus, and leader of the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:18-23). Paul subsequently operated independently of the original apostles, preaching and teaching what he calls his "Gospel," in Asia Minor for another 10 years before making a return trip to Jerusalem around A.D. 50. It was only then, 20 years after Jesus' death, that he encountered James and Peter again in Jerusalem and met for the first time the rest of the original apostles of Jesus (Galatians 2:1). This rather extraordinary chronological gap is a surprise to many. It is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message.
What this means is that we must imagine a "Christianity before Paul" that existed independently of his influence or ideas for more than 20 years, as well as a Christianity preached by Paul, which developed independently of Jesus' original apostles and followers.
I have spent my 30-year career as a scholar of Christian Origins investigating the silence between two back-to-back statements of the Apostles' Creed, namely that Jesus was: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary," and that he "Was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day He rose again from the dead."
Is it not striking that this oldest and most foundational Christian creed jumps from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection, entirely skipping over his life?
How did it happen that the way Jesus came into the world, and how he left -- Christmas and Easter -- came to define Christianity itself? Here Catholics, mainstream Protestants and evangelicals all agree. To be a Christian is to believe in the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, and thus to participate in the salvation Christ brought to the world as God-in-the-flesh.
In contrast, the original Christianity before Paul is somewhat difficult to find in the New Testament, since Paul's 13 letters predominate and Paul heavily influences even our four Gospels. Fortunately, in the letter of James, attributed to the brother of Jesus, as well as in a collection of the sayings of Jesus now embedded in the Gospel of Luke (the source scholars call Q), we can still get a glimpse of the original teachings of Jesus.
What we get in the letter of James is the most direct possible link to the Jewish teachings of Jesus himself. James is quite sure that the "Judge" is standing at the door, and that the kingdom of God has drawn very near (James 5:7). He warns the rich and those who oppress the weak that very soon the judgment of God will strike. James seems to be directly echoing and affirming what he had learned and passed on from his brother Jesus. It is important to note that James did not directly quote Jesus or attribute any of these teachings to Jesus by name -- even though they are teaching of Jesus.
For James the Christian message is not the person of Jesus but the message that Jesus proclaimed. James' letter lacks a single teaching that is characteristic of the apostle Paul and it draws nothing at all from the Gospel narratives. What we have preserved in this precious document is a reflection of the original apocalyptic proclamation of Jesus: the "Gospel of the kingdom of God" with its political and social implications.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-tabor/christianity-before-paul_b_2200409.html [with comments]
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Did Paul Invent the Virgin Birth?
By James D. Tabor
Posted: 12/23/2012 8:18 am
Christians regularly affirm that Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary." This faith is embedded as a cornerstone of all the major Christian creeds and is central to the Christmas story, read and re-told countless times at this season in both word and song. Surprisingly, the gospel of Mark has no account of the birth of Jesus. It opens with Jesus as an adult, traveling from Nazareth down to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. Since Mark is our earliest gospel the question arises--what is the origin of the idea of Jesus' virgin birth? When and where did it originate?
In contrast to Mark both Matthew and Luke give us different versions of the "Christmas story," but they both agree on the source of Mary's pregnancy. In Matthew's account Joseph had a dream shortly after finding out about the pregnancy. In this dream an angel told him that her pregnancy was "by a holy spirit" and that he was to go ahead with the marriage regardless. He was to name her child Jesus. By marrying a pregnant woman who carried a child that was not his, and legally naming that child, he was in effect "adopting" Jesus as his legal son. The phrase "by a holy spirit" implies that the pregnancy came from the agency of God's spirit but falls short of saying, outright, that God was the father of Jesus in the sense that, say, Zeus was said to be the father of Hercules by his seduction of his mother, Alkmene. In that sense the account is different from those miraculous birth stories so common in Greco-Roman mythology.
Nonetheless, scholars who question the literal truth of Matthew and Luke's birth stories have suggested that they are a way of affirming the divine nature of Jesus as "Son of God" by giving him an extraordinary supernatural birth. This idea of humans being fathered by gods is quite common in Greco-Roman culture. There was a whole host of heroes who were said to be the product of a union between their mother and a god--Plato, Empedocles, Hercules, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great and even Caesar Augustus. In text after text we find the idea of the divine man (theios aner) whose supernatural birth, ability to perform miracles, and extraordinary death separate him from the ordinary world of mortals. These heroes are not "eternal" gods, like Zeus or Jupiter. They are mortal human beings who have been exalted to a heavenly state of immortal life. In the time of Jesus their temples and shrines filled every city and province of the Roman Empire. It is easy to imagine that early Christians who believed Jesus was every bit as exalted and heavenly as any of the Greek and Roman heroes and gods would appropriate this way of relating the story of his birth. It was a way of affirming that Jesus was both human and divine. Modern interpreters who view the stories in this way usually maintain that Joseph was likely the father and that these supernatural accounts were invented later by Jesus' followers to honor Jesus and to promote his exalted status in a manner common to that culture.
These legendary stories from Greco-Roman culture may well have contributed to accounts of Jesus' miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke but I would suggest an alternative. I am convinced that the idea of Jesus' birth from a virgin--without a human father--implicitly goes back to the apostle Paul. Paul's letters date several decades before our New Testament gospels and it is Paul's understanding of Jesus as the pre-existent, divine, Son of God, that lays the conceptual groundwork for our Christmas stories.
Paul never explicitly refers to Jesus' virgin birth nor does he ever name either Mary or Joseph. What he does affirm is that Jesus pre-existed before his human birth and subsequently gave up his divine glory through his birth as a human being. He writes that Jesus "though existing in the form of God" emptied himself and took on human form, "being made in the likeness of humankind" (Philippians 2:6-7). He says further "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9). He has to be referring here, metaphorically, to the "riches" of Jesus' pre-existence with God, since all our sources have Jesus born of a poor peasant family. Paul also writes "In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son, made of a woman . . ." (Galatians 4:4). The implication of these texts is that Jesus' mother was merely the human receptacle for bringing Jesus into the world. It is not a far step from these ideas about Jesus' pre-existence to the notion of Jesus as the first-begotten Son of God--eliminating any necessity for a human father. Paul's entire message centers on a divine not a human Jesus--both before his birth and after his death. For Paul he is the pre-existent Son of God, crucified, but now raised to sit at the right hand of God. Like the Christian creeds that jump from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection in single phrase, entirely skipping over his life, Paul paves the way for a confessional understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
An alternative way of thinking about being a Christian is preserved in the gospel of Mark--our earliest narrative account of the career of Jesus. Mark mentions neither Jesus' birth, nor any resurrection appearances on Easter morning (according to our earliest manuscripts that end with chapter 16:8). When a would-be follower addresses Jesus as "Good Teacher," Jesus sharply rebukes him with the retort: "Why do you call me good, there is One who is good, God" (Mark 10:17-18). Mark emphasizes the suffering of Jesus on the cross, but only as a call to others to also "take up a cross" and thus give their lives as servants to others. In Mark Jesus defines true religion as loving God and loving ones neighbor, in contrast to all systems of religion. Mark sees being a Christian as a call to a certain way of life more than an adherence to a set of creedal statements. I am not sure how Mark would have celebrated Christmas but his version of the Jesus story is surely one that should not be forgotten this season.
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Family Guy - Joseph's wedding night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsGyv1CqRuQ
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One Nation Under God?
Valero Doval
By MOLLY WORTHEN
Published: December 22, 2012
THIS week millions of “Chreasters” — Americans who attend church only on Christmas and Easter — will crowd into pews to sing carols and renew their vague relationship with the Christian God. This year, there may be fewer Chreasters than ever. A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in 2008.
Avoiding church does not excuse Americans from marking the birth of Jesus, however. Most of us have no choice but to stay home from work or school — and if you complain about this glaring exception to the separation between church and state, you must be a scrooge with no heart for tradition. Christmas has been a federal holiday for 142 years [ http://books.google.com/books?id=qS3Dd92vxxUC&pg=PA104&dq=christmas+federal+holiday+1870&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OR7SUIvfNIXC9QSc_YHoBQ&ved=0CD8QuwUwAQ ].
Yet Christianity’s preferential place in our culture and civil law came under fire this year, and not simply because more Americans reject institutional religion. The Obama administration subtly worked to expand the scope of protected civil rights to include access to legal marriage and birth control. Catholic bishops and evangelical activists declared that Washington was running roughshod over religious liberty and abandoning the country’s founding values, while their opponents accused them of imposing one set of religious prejudices on an increasingly pluralistic population. The Christian consensus that long governed our public square is disintegrating. American secularism is at a crossroads.
The narrative on the right is this: Once upon a time, Americans honored the Lord, and he commissioned their nation to welcome all faiths while commanding them to uphold Christian values. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion, while politicians declared “war on Christmas” and kowtowed to the “homosexual lobby.” Conservative activists insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition.
The controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this “forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. Mr. Barton insists [ http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=23909 ] that “biblical Christianity in America produced many of the cherished traditions still enjoyed today,” including “protection for religious toleration and the rights of conscience.”
Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the “nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.” The Pew poll, he said, “is one of the signs.” A couple of weeks after we spoke, he told [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/bryan-fischer-god-did-not-protect-connecticut-shooting-victims-prayer-banned_n_2303903.html ] a radio audience that God did not protect the children killed in the Newtown, Conn., massacre because of the Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible reading in public schools. “God is not going to go where he is not wanted,” Mr. Fischer said.
How accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering religious liberty?
The truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human society since Neanderthal [ http://news.discovery.com/history/neanderthal-burial-ground-afterlife-110420.html ] times, but so has religious indifference. Our illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests.
Historians have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all. Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor markets or granaries. Lest Protestants blame this irreverence on Catholic corruption, the evidence suggests that it continued after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door. In 1584, census takers in Antwerp discovered that the city had a larger proportion [ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dutch_Revolt.html?id=Kf_QAAAACAAJ ] of “nones” than 21st-century America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.
When conservative activists claim that America stands apart from godless Europe, they are not entirely wrong. The colonies were relatively unchurched, but European visitors to the early republic marveled at Americans’ fervent piety. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote [ http://books.google.com/books?id=gp8CAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6&dq=tocqueville+america+%22Christian+sects+are+infinitely+%22&hl=en ] in 1840 that the absence of an established state church nurtured a society in which “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”
De Tocqueville visited during a wave of religious revival, but he underestimated the degree to which some Americans held Christianity at arm’s length: the “infidel [ http://books.google.com/books?id=rXBjMZQaNU0C&pg=PA494&dq=infidel+abraham+lincoln&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oWDTUPKPH4S-8ASPy4CoCQ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBg ]” Abraham Lincoln declined to join a church, and his wife invited [ http://books.google.com/books?id=0KN9-Y8MyUYC&pg=PA203&dq=mary+todd+lincoln+spiritualism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jOnRUNG4IYuw8ATtr4DgAw&ved=0CDoQuwUwAQ ] spiritualists to hold séances in the White House.
Nevertheless, America’s rates of church affiliation have long been higher than those of Europe — perhaps because of the First Amendment, which permitted a religious “free market” that encouraged innovation and competition between spiritual entrepreneurs. Yet membership, as every exasperated parson knows, is not the same as showing up on Sunday morning. Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/159050/seven-americans-moderately-religious.aspx ] survey.
We know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is their increasing visibility. “I like the fact that we’re getting more ‘nones’ because it helps Christians realize that they’re different,” Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant theologian at Duke Divinity School, said when I asked for his thoughts on the Pew poll. “That’s a crucial development. America produces people that say, ‘I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal opinion.’ ”
The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.
THIS trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone [ http://bowlingalone.com/ ; http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 ],” has encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are “spiritual, not religious” as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize both ends of the political spectrum. “It seems like we live in a Manichaean universe, with vitriolic extremes,” said Kathryn Lofton, associate professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale. “That’s not unrelated to the lack of tempering authority. ‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”
For a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long.
The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.
Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.
The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience, you’re out of business.”
Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (an organization that until 1972 was named, tellingly, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State), sees things differently. He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their pleas for exemptions [ https://www.au.org/church-state/julyaugust-2012-church-state/people-events/au-allied-groups-battle-faith-based-job-bias ] for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,” Mr. Lynn, a lawyer and an ordained minister, told me. “These cases could become as significant for the redefinition of religious liberty as Roe v. Wade was a rearticulation of the right to privacy.”
These legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans — including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.
Molly Worthen is an assistant professor [ http://history.unc.edu/people/faculty/molly-worthen/ ] of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/american-christianity-and-secularism-at-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=all ]
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There really is a war on Christmas!
(Credit: Africa Studio [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-137002p1.html ]/andrea crisante [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-562921p1.html ] via Shutterstock/Salon)
And it's being fought by some of the bravest atheists in the country, nonbelievers in rural areas and the heartland
By Daniel Denvir
Sunday, Dec 23, 2012 07:00 AM CST
The Times Square billboard is not shy about its war on Christmas: “Keep the merry, dump the myth,” it reads, juxtaposing an image of jolly St. Nick with one of Christ’s agony on the cross. Sponsored by Cranford, N.J.-based American Atheists, the sign is funded in significant part by small-town nonbelievers nationwide.
“In New Jersey and the New York area, you don’t have as much of a feeling of oppression. We have a very diverse population,” says American Atheists managing director Amanda Knief, explaining the group’s backing in rural and small-town America. She points out that their 2010 national convention in Newark, which included an Easter Sunday trip to the American Museum of Natural History, attracted few local participants. By contrast, the 2011 850-person Des Moines gathering drew more than half of its attendees from inside the state. “It was the first opportunity in Iowa for people who were non-religious to come together. And it was the first time where it was safe to do so.”
Forget Hollywood and the Upper West Side. The angriest atheists are from the American heartland, where they live surrounded by the faithful. A 2007 Pew Research Center study found that 50 percent of rural atheists and agnostics see a “natural conflict between being a non-religious person and living in a society where most people are religious.” That’s 10 points higher than among their urban counterparts. Maybe Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly has been looking for the War on Christmas and its “secular progressive” leaders in all the wrong places.
“Here’s the bottom line: Where religion is weak, atheism is weak” in its intensity, says Pitzer sociologist Phil Zuckerman. “Where religion is strong, atheism is strong.” Zuckerman has found that people in Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, among the world’s most profoundly nonreligious, generally eschew the “atheist” label and even marry in Lutheran churches. He labels the dominant attitude “benign indifference.”
“In small-town USA, people are much more likely to be anti-religious because they have religion thrown in their face all the time — prayers at little league, prayers at city council meetings, Nativity scenes and Ten Commandments billboards, preachers on the radio and TV, etc. — and their lack of religion is often associated with being immoral.”
But take out the conservative Christian dominance, he says, and “the natural default position of secularity is a mere indifference to religion.”
Indeed, most American atheists and agnostics are not hostile to religion as such, according to Pew’s October study on the growing number of religiously non-affiliated Americans. Most do disagree with the idea that churches “protect and strengthen morality,” and think that religions are “too focused on rules” and “too involved in politics.” But an overwhelming 73 percent credit churches for strengthening community bonds, and 74 percent say they play an important role in helping the poor.
What’s more, most American nonbelievers are not even atheists: while a fast-growing one-fifth of American adults, including one-third of adults under 30, now say they belong to no religious denomination, full-fledged atheists and agnostics make up just over a quarter of that number. Americans are by and large dropping out of religion, not taking up arms against it.
* * *
This certainly seems true in Pennsylvania, one of the country’s most politically and culturally divided states. Or, as James Carville apocryphally phrased it, “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” While nonreligious Philadelphians casually opt for brunch over church on Sunday mornings, the state’s conservative Christian middle has witnessed fierce battles over Christmas — fought out between neighbors.
A typical conflict unfolded in 2009 in the small and deeply religious city of Chambersburg, a place that would be unknown to most Americans save that it once served as David Brooks’ caricatured icon of red state America in a 2002 Atlantic article. “One can feel the religiosity in Franklin County after a single day’s visit,” wrote Brooks, who stood in awe of a place so unlike Bethesda, Md., with “no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble. No blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways on Sunday mornings.”
But the threat to Chambersburg’s Times-less idyll came not from the Beltway but from an organization of central-state atheists called Pennsylvania Non-Believers (PAN), who in 2009 asked to place a tribute to atheist veterans in a downtown traffic circle alongside the creche installed each year by the local garden club. Instead, the Borough Council reluctantly closed the square-shaped lawn, ostensibly a military memorial, to everything but flowers and flags.
“No one had noticed how tattered the poor Christ child was looking,” longtime Public Opinion reporter Vicki Butler joked. But the outcry from the religious right, which angrily decried the meddling of outside agitators, was swift.
Two hundred people protested at the square and threatened a holiday boycott of Main Street shops. One sign read, “Where is the Christ Child?” and there were calls for mass Christian civil disobedience. Legacy Tattoo to J&B Bridals and Formals both offered to host the homeless Nativity scene, which ultimately moved just across the street to the front lawn of the Central Presbyterian Church.
PAN leader Carl Silverman, who the Public Opinion wryly noted had “shaped public policy in [the] Franklin County area before,” was on the receiving end of the most personal invective.
“In these rural areas you find all these problems, and the only way you can deal with these problems is if you are outspoken and you are active,” says Silverman, who has this year battled three Pennsylvania school boards over prayer at meetings and is currently investigating a school where a former professional athlete proselytized to students.
In the 1990s, Silverman discovered that the Gideons were handing out Bibles at local schools and threatened to hand out fliers titled “God Is Just Pretend” if they didn’t stop. He attracted the attention of the New York Times in 1999, which chronicled his fight to take down crosses in a public park and to stop a Church Bulletin Day at the minor league baseball stadium in nearby Hagerstown, Md.
The creche war, however, was bigger than Silverman, and drew village atheists out of the woodwork. In 2010, I met five of them at their third meeting at a Chinese buffet, next to a Hobby Lobby, across the street from a Wal-Mart, off the highway just a few miles outside of town. PAN board member Brian Fields traveled 25 miles from the small town of Newville to offer the fledgling chapter his support.
“People in Chambersburg seemed to think there was such a hoopla for such a small minority,” Fields, now PAN’s president, told me between bites. “We created the group to help them stand up for their rights and get to know other atheists. To make them know they are not alone.”
How, 36-year-old electronics technician Brad asked the group, could freshwater fish have survived the Great Flood? He was genuinely troubled by the discrepancy.
“I was raised very Christian,” said Brad. “I used to teach Sunday school. But about seven years ago, I began to have my doubts, studying the Bible and finding things that didn’t make sense.”
In 2009, he started driving 30 minutes south to attend freethinker meetings in Hagerstown. In small towns, church is often the center of community life. These meetings create a sort of substitute.
“I was very involved, even writing Christian music,” said Brad. “All of a sudden, something started tugging at the rug under my feet, and all of a sudden it was gone. I was looking for a foothold.”
Science provides many new converts to atheism with that foothold, and the celebrities of so-called New Atheism are often combative scientists like Richard Dawkins. And the strident tone fits.
“It is in-your-face explosive,” said a 30-year-old IT director named Josh Trayer, when asked about the area’s religious life. “There’s a church on every corner.”
Andy, a member in his 60s, feels isolated in more ways than one: He is gay.
“I’m still pretty much in the closet as an atheist,” he said. “I really need to do something, because I’m sick of feeling like I’m out in the middle of nowhere … I think some of my straight friends would be more unhappy to find out that I’m an atheist.” This small group accepted him for being both.
Nonbelievers in a large metropolis are likely to take in a diversity of religious expression, including black Protestant ministers, Latino Catholics and liberal rabbis. Jerry Falwell might be on one side of a political debate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson on another.
“Patterns of religiosity are much greater in rural communities,” says Daniel Cox, director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute. And those patterns are much more monolithically Protestant and evangelical. Cities, however, have a “level of diversity [that] leads to greater levels of tolerance for all different faiths, including atheists, agnostics and nonbelievers.”
* * *
PAN experienced a schism later that year. The behavior of a man called “the Saint,” who frequently paraded before churches throughout greater Harrisburg wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding a massive sign picturing Jesus giving the middle finger, was its subject.
When the Saint was a charismatic, faith-healing, tongue speaking, street-preaching Christian minister he walked around with those massive “you will burn in hell” signs. A graduate of Grace Bible College and Rhema Bible Training Center, he named his child “Praise.”
“I’m having a hard time with him,” the Saint told me. “Because we were 250 nights a year in ministry. Now I’m an atheist and he’s had all that his whole life, for five years, and that’s the hardest part: deconverting my kid.”
PAN ultimately expelled the Saint, but he was, at about the same time, named state coordinator of American Atheists — a position he retains.
The public face of atheism has long been a militant one, and just how nice to be toward religious people has been a subject of fierce debate among the minority of nonbelievers who cared to think about it. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists in 1963, embraced the moniker “most hated woman in America” and derided Christians as “Christers.” She served as the lead plaintiff in Murray v. Curlett, the Supreme Court case that ended prayer in public schools. Murray was Phil Donahue’s first guest when the show premiered in 1967.
“Friendly atheists” like Chris Stedman, the young assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the author of “Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground With the Religious,” likely have far more sympathizers among the swelling ranks of secular youth. But most friendly atheists don’t care much about atheism. PAN, meanwhile, has a largely middle-aged membership. It recently held its first statewide conference, and drew a large crowd of 180. Only a dozen came from Philly.
When atheism is no big deal, atheists are less likely to think that religion is one either. Bill O’Reilly will have his War on Christmas for as long as he cares to wage one.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/there_really_is_a_war_on_christmas/ [with comments]
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The Moral Animal
Alain Pilon
By JONATHAN SACKS
Published: December 23, 2012
London
IT is the religious time of the year. Step into any city in America or Britain and you will see the night sky lit by religious symbols, Christmas decorations certainly and probably also a giant menorah. Religion in the West seems alive and well.
But is it really? Or have these symbols been emptied of content, no more than a glittering backdrop to the West’s newest faith, consumerism, and its secular cathedrals, shopping malls?
At first glance, religion is in decline. In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago.
Looked at another way, though, the figures tell a different story. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise. Yet after a series of withering attacks, most recently by the new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, is what is truly surprising.
The irony is that many of the new atheists are followers of Charles Darwin. We are what we are, they say, because it has allowed us to survive and pass on our genes to the next generation. Our biological and cultural makeup constitutes our “adaptive fitness.” Yet religion is the greatest survivor of them all. Superpowers tend to last a century; the great faiths last millenniums. The question is why.
Darwin himself suggested what is almost certainly the correct answer. He was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.
Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.
The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.
A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.
The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.
If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.
No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.
Mr. Putnam’s research showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers were more likely to give money to charity, do volunteer work, help the homeless, donate blood, help a neighbor with housework, spend time with someone who was feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger or help someone find a job. Religiosity as measured by church or synagogue attendance is, he found, a better predictor of altruism than education, age, income, gender or race.
Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. This may go to show that God has a sense of humor. It certainly shows that the free societies of the West must never lose their sense of God.
Jonathan Sacks [ http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ ] is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/the-moral-animal.html [with comments]
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The Power of Concentration
A drawing of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget from 1891 in The Strand Magazine.
Time Life Pictures/Mansell via Getty Images
By MARIA KONNIKOVA
Published: December 15, 2012
MEDITATION and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.
More often than not, when a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness.
Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.
In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
Participants were instructed to relax with their eyes closed, focus on their breathing, and acknowledge and release any random thoughts that might arise. Then they had the option of receiving nine 30-minute meditation training sessions over the next five weeks. When they were tested a second time, their neural activation patterns had undergone a striking leftward shift in frontal asymmetry — even when their practice and training averaged only 5 to 16 minutes a day.
As little as five minutes a day of intense Holmes-like inactivity, and a happier outlook is yours for the taking — though this particular benefit seems to have been lost on Holmes himself, what with his bouts of melancholy and his flirtations with a certain 7 percent solution. A quick survey will show that the paradox is illusory: Holmes is depressed when there is no target for his mental faculties. Give him a project, and balance is restored.
But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe that our attention is infinite, but it isn’t. Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention. When we are mindful, some of that attentional flightiness disappears as if of its own accord.
In 2012, researchers led by a team from the University of Washington examined the effects of meditation training on multitasking in a real-world setting. They asked a group of human resources professionals to engage in the type of simultaneous planning they did habitually. Each participant was placed in a one-person office, with a laptop and a phone, and asked to complete several typical tasks: schedule meetings for multiple attendees, locate free conference rooms, write a memo that proposed a creative agenda item and the like. The information necessary to complete those tasks? Delivered as it otherwise would be: by e-mail, through instant messages, over the phone and in person. The list was supposed to be completed in 20 minutes or less.
After the multitasking free-for-all, participants were divided into three groups: one was assigned to an eight-week meditation course (two hours of instruction, weekly); another group didn’t take the course at first, but took it later; and the last group took an eight-week course in body relaxation. Everyone was put through a second round of frenzy.
The only participants to show improvement were those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. While the overall time they devoted to the assignment didn’t differ much from that of other groups, they spent it more efficiently. They engaged, on average, in just over 40 discreet “tasks” — test-related behaviors that had a definable start and end time — spending approximately 36 seconds on each, in contrast to the 48 to 50 average tasks attempted by the other groups — with an average of only 30 seconds spent per activity. They also remembered what they did better than the other participants in the study.
The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would.
In a 2012 study at Emory University, increased meditation practice was associated with enhanced connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in attention monitoring and working memory, and the right insula, an area that is associated with how well we can monitor our own feelings and thoughts and that is considered a key waypoint between our two major attention networks, the default and the executive.
Not only could this increased connectivity make us better able to switch between tasks and monitor our own attention, but it is indicative of more effective overall management of our finite attentional resources.
Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.
These effects make sense: the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues. In the time it takes old detective Mac to traipse around all those country towns in search of a missing bicyclist in “The Valley of Fear,” Holmes solves the entire crime without leaving the room where the murder occurred. That’s the thing about mindfulness. It seems to slow you down, but it actually gives you the resources you need to speed up your thinking.
The difference between a Holmes and a Watson is, essentially, one of practice. Attention is finite, it’s true — but it is also trainable. Through modifying our practices of thought toward a more Holmes-like concentration, we can build up neural real estate that is better able to deal with the variegated demands of the endlessly multitasking, infinitely connected modern world. And even if we’ve never attempted mindfulness in the past, we might be surprised at how quickly the benefits become noticeable.
Until recently, our 20s were considered the point when our brain’s wiring was basically complete. But new evidence suggests that not only can we learn into old age, but the structure of our brains can continue to change and develop. In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.
Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity). In 2012, researchers from Ohio State University demonstrated that older adults who scored higher on mindfulness scales had increased connectivity in their default networks, specifically in two of the brain’s major information processing hubs. And while we already know that this kind of increased connectivity is a very good thing, there’s more to these particular results. The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.
The implications are tantalizing. Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.
Maria Konnikova [ http://www.mariakonnikova.com/ ] is the author of “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes [ http://www.amazon.com/Mastermind-Think-Like-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/0670026573 ]” and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Pope Christmas Eve Mass 2012: Find Room For God
By Philip Pullella
Posted: 12/25/2012 12:29 am EST | Updated: 12/25/2012 10:09 am EST
VATICAN CITY, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, leading the world's Roman Catholics into Christmas, on Monday urged people to find room for God in their fast-paced lives filled with the latest technological gadgets.
The 85-year-old pope, marking the eighth Christmas season of his pontificate, celebrated a solemn Christmas Eve mass in St Peter's Basilica, during which he appealed for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and an end to the civil war in Syria.
At the mass for some 10,000 people in the basilica and broadcast to millions of others on television, the pope wove his homily around the theme of God's place in today's modern world.
"Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him," said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments.
"The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full," he said.
The leader of the world's some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said societies had reached the point where many people's thinking processes did not leave any room even for the existence of God.
"Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the 'God hypothesis' becomes superfluous," he said.
"There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so 'full' of ourselves that there is no room left for God."
PEACE CANDLE
Bells inside and outside the basilica chimed when the pope said "Glory to God in the Highest," the words the gospels say the angels sang at the moment of Jesus' birth.
Earlier on Monday the pope appeared at the window of his apartments in the apostolic palace and lit a peace candle, as a larger-than-life nativity scene was unveiled in St Peter's Square below.
Reflecting on the gospel account of Jesus born in a stable because there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn, he said when people find no room for God in their lives, they will soon find no room for others.
"Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing.
"Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognise him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world," he said.
He asked for prayers for the people who "live and suffer" in the Holy Land today.
The pope called for peace among Israelis and Palestinians and for the people of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq and prayed that "Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side-by-side in God's peace."
The Vatican is concerned about the exodus from the Middle East of Christians, many of whom leave because they fear for their safety. Christians now comprise five percent of the population of the region, down from 20 percent a century ago.
According to some estimates, the current population of 12 million Christians in the Middle East could halve by 2020 if security and birth rates continue to decline.
At noon (1100 GMT/6 AM ET) the pope will deliver his twice-yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Myra MacDonald)
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/pope-christmas-eve-mass-god_n_2361399.html [with comments]
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Pope pardons butler as 'paternal gesture', expels him from Vatican
Vatican's ex-bulter Paolo Gabriele meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican City prison where the pope pardoned his former butler.
(Osservatore Romano, AFP)
The pope has pardoned his former butler, who was sentenced to 18 months in jail for leaking secret papal memos, but banished him from the Vatican.
22 Dec 2012 15:37
"This morning the Holy Father Benedict XVI visited Paolo Gabriele in prison in order to confirm his forgiveness and to inform him personally of his acceptance of Mr Gabriele's request for pardon," the Vatican said in a statement.
Gabriele's pardon was a "paternal gesture" for a man "with whom the pope shared a relationship of daily familiarity for many years".
However, the ex-butler "cannot resume his previous occupation or continue to live in Vatican City," it said.
Gabriele was found guilty in October of leaking sensitive memos to the press as part of a whistle-blowing campaign against what he said was "evil and corruption" in the Vatican.
Paolo Gabriele was a whistleblower against what he said was "evil and corruption" in the Holy See.
A married father-of-three who lived inside the Vatican as one of the 594 citizens of the world's smallest state, Gabriele was born in Rome and started out as a cleaner in the Secretariat of State – the main administration of the Catholic Church.
Gabriele then worked as part of the domestic staff of late pope John Paul II before being promoted in 2006 to the prestigious post of butler to the pope – a position that gave him unique access for a layman to the pontiff himself.
Aggrevated theft
But he was suspected of using his position to steal secret Vatican papers and was put on trial and convicted in October. He said he acted "out of love for the Church of Christ and of its leader on Earth".
He had told the court he was innocent of the charge but acted because he felt the pontiff was being "manipulated".
"Concerning the accusation of aggravated theft, I declare myself innocent," he said, though he admitted: "I feel guilty for having betrayed the trust that the Holy Father gave me, whom I love like a son" loves his father.
Along with four women from the Memores Domini religious movement who help the 85-year-old pope in his daily life and run the papal household, Gabriele was one of the few lay members of what has been called the "pontifical family".
Gabriele accompanied the pope on his many foreign trips and can be seen in the corners of official photographs, adjusting the pope's cloak, holding his umbrella or escorting him on the "popemobile" through crowds of faithful.
The 46-year-old, nicknamed "Paoletto", served meals for the pope and helped him don his robes every day. His wife and children were well known and liked in the tiny Vatican community.
His co-defendant Claudio Sciarpelletti told investigators he knew about what he called Gabriele's "painful" childhood although no further details were provided in court documents.
"He was very pious. He went to the mass celebrated by the Holy Father every day and prayed a lot," said one of the four Memores Domini housekeepers.
But reports in the Italian press said Gabriele had a reputation for being a bit too talkative, considering the discretion demanded of his post.
Investigators asked two psychologists to analyse Gabriele while he was in detention and concluded that he was "an impressionable subject able to commit a variety of actions that can damage himself and/or others".
Omerta against the truth
Gabriele insists he leaked the documents for the pope's benefit.
"What really shocked me was when I sat down for lunch with the Holy Father and sometimes the pope asked about things that he should have been informed on," he told the court.
"It was then that I became firmly convinced of how easy it was to manipulate a person with such enormous powers."
His lawyer, Cristiana Arru, called on the judge to be lenient on a man who was driven by "a moral motivation" and who had by no means cooked up a "scheme or plot" aimed at damaging the Church or the pope.
His devotion to the pope and the written apology begging for his forgiveness moved the Vatican's presiding judge to cut his sentence from three years to 18 months.
The only recorded interview the butler has given was with Gianluigi Nuzzi, the investigative journalist who published the confidential Vatican documents that Gabriele leaked to him in the book "Your Holiness".
The butler expressed frustration with a culture of secrecy in the Vatican – from the mysterious disappearance of the daughter of a Vatican employee in 1983 to a quickly hushed-up double murder and suicide by a Swiss guard in 1998.
"There is a kind of omerta against the truth, not so much because of a power struggle but because of fear, because of caution," Gabriele said in the interview, using the term for the code of silence of the Sicilian Mafia.
He told Nuzzi he was acting with "around 20 other people" in the Vatican, though he later denied others had been actively involved in helping him.
Gabriele comes across in the interview as a deeply religious man who says he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to reveal intrigues behind the Vatican walls to help the pope rid the heart of the Catholic Church of corruption.
He said he was aware of the consequences of his actions but said the potential to change something in the Vatican was worth the risk.
"Being a witness to truth means being ready to pay the price," he said.
Copyright 2012 AFP
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-22-pope-pardons-butler-as-paternal-gesture-expels-him-from-vatican [with comments]
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Mark Regnerus Claims Viewing Porn Increases Support For Gay Marriage Among Straight Men
Posted: 12/25/2012 8:31 am EST | Updated: 12/25/2012 9:45 am EST
Could watching porn make straight men support marriage equality?
That's what Mark Regnerus [ http://www.markregnerus.com/ ], who became infamous earlier this year when he published a now widely discredited study [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-umberson/texas-professors-gay-research_b_1628988.html ] that supposedly found children of gay parents are worse off than those of straight parents, claimed on the Witherspoon Institute [ http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/ ; http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/about/ ] website late last week [ http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/12/7048/ ].
In his piece Regnerus states that porn "undermines the concept that in the act of sexual intercourse, we share our 'body and whole self ... permanently and exclusively'" and "reinforces the idea that people can share their bodies but not their inmost selves, and that they can do so temporarily and (definitely) not exclusively without harm."
He also notes that porn does not "discriminate" or rank one kind of sex act over another and therefore viewers are treated to a "veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity" (can this guy paint a picture, or what?) and end up believing that sex has nothing to do with "marital meaning."
So what happens when sex is divorced from being purely about marriage? Apparently men begin to think gay marriage is OK.
Regnerus reveals that "of the men who view pornographic material 'every day or almost every day,' 54 percent 'strongly agreed' that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that."
What's more,
The same pattern emerges for the statement, "Gay and lesbian couples do just as good a job raising children as heterosexual couples." Only 26 percent of the lightest porn users concurred, compared to 63 percent of the heaviest consumers. It's a linear association for men: the more porn they consume, the more they affirm this statement. More rigorous statistical tests confirmed that this association too is a very robust one.
What about women you ask? Regnerus avoids the topic of why women support marriage equality all together. He notes that, "women typically aren't as into porn as men are, and yet women in general tend to support same-sex marriage more readily than do men. A recent Gallup poll noted that 56 percent of women favor it, while only 42 percent of men do. No, this theory is not about women..."
Support for marriage equality has continues to increase in America. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in November [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/gay-marriage-support-majority-americans-poll_n_2130371.html ] found that 51 percent of Americans support marriage equality and in December a poll released by POLITICO and George Washington University [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/09/gay-marriage-poll_n_2267594.html ] found that 63 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds backed same-sex marriage.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/mark-regnerus-study-porn-gay-marriage-men_n_2362283.html [with comments]
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Georgia Abortion Law Blocked Temporarily By State Judge
12/24/12 05:23 PM ET EST
ATLANTA -- A state judge has suspended a Georgia law banning abortions for women who are more than 20 weeks pregnant.
The law bans doctors from performing abortions five months after an egg is fertilized, except when doctors decide a fetus has a defect so severe it is unlikely to live. The law also makes an exception to protect the life or health of the mother, though that does not apply to a mother's mental health.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed a lawsuit on behalf of three obstetricians challenging the law's constitutionality. The organization says the law violates the state's privacy protections as provided for in the state constitution.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs suspended the law Friday and it was set to take effect Jan. 1.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/georgia-abortion-law-blocked_n_2360850.html [with comments]
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John Boehner’s Christmas gift to you is a guarantee that the Republican House will destroy the economy
(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)
The failure of "Plan B" puts us on the path to default
By Alex Pareene
Monday, Dec 24, 2012 06:45 AM CST
Last week, we learned that Speaker of the House John Boehner has no control over his majority [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/20/politics/fiscal-cliff/index.html ]. We’ve seen Boehner have trouble with his caucus before, of course — a significant portion of these people are crazy — but the failure of “Plan B” was different. In the past Boehner has had trouble whipping votes to support things that were destined to become law. Boehner couldn’t get his caucus to support TARP because TARP was awful and was also definitely going to happen. Boehner couldn’t get the votes for the 2011 debt deal [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/boehner-other-gop-leaders-ramp-up-pressure-on-republicans-to-pass-debt-plan/2011/07/28/gIQARD5veI_story.html ] because conservatives thought they’d eventually force an even better deal. But this was a totally symbolic gesture that never had any shot at passing the Senate or getting signed by the president. Boehner’s “Plan B” was a stupid pointless empty gesture, and that is why its failure is actually slightly scary, in addition to being hilarious [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/336287/inside-meltdown-robert-costa ].
The point of “Plan B” was to give Republicans a means of blaming Democrats when everyone’s taxes go up next year, while also giving them an opportunity to claim that they supported raising taxes on rich people. The problem was, Republicans really don’t support raising taxes on rich people, and they feel so strongly about this that they didn’t want to pretend to support a tax increase.
What is especially silly about all of this is that in any sort of sensible political system none of it would be happening. A majority of Americans just voted for Democrats to control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, which would seem to indicate that a majority of American voters would just prefer it if Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided all of this for themselves. But that’s not the way our archaic political system works, and instead we will watch this unpopular anthropomorphic Camel 100 carefully negotiate a compromise with the president that his party will refuse to support, until we either extend all tax cuts forever or “go over the cliff” and cause every Sunday show panelist in the country to hyperventilate until losing consciousness.
How did we get here? Keep in mind, your average congressperson is as dumb as your average regular person, and Republican members listen to the same talk radio and read the same right-wing blogs and watch the same Fox News as every other conservative. It’s always been comforting to imagine that canny evil masterminds huddle in backrooms plotting how to use the right-wing media machine to manipulate the rubes into accepting whatever the corporate elites want, but the story now is that the canny masterminds have no control over the media operation they’ve built and the “grownups” cannot convince the true believers to do shit. There’s really no talking sense into Michele Bachmann and Steve King, and every two years gerrymandered ultra-conservative districts send more and more Kings and Bachmanns to the House. And Republicans know that their safe districts are only safe from Democrats, not even-crazier Republicans.
John Boehner will probably be fine. He’ll likely remain speaker even [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/why-john-boehner-will-probably-be-fine ], mostly because no one else wants that horrible job. America might not be fine.
“Going over the fiscal cliff” will be a fun adventure at first, especially because it has been so long since America has had any sort of tax hike or defense budget cut, but shortly after the “cliff” comes the debt ceiling increase vote [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/business/daily-stock-market-activity.html ], and there is really no chance, at all, of the House raising the debt ceiling, under any circumstance. Maybe if the president agrees to block grant Medicare and return America to the gold standard. And promises to personally fire 100 teachers.
The idea that “going over the cliff” would give the president enough leverage to get a halfway decent deal — with some stimulus up front and everything! — depended on a House of Representatives capable of acting rationally. it’s apparent that they are in fact prepared to intentionally tank the entire American economy.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/24/john_boehners_christmas_gift_to_you_is_a_guarantee_that_the_republican_house_will_destroy_the_economy/ [with comments]
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HSBC Sued By Atlanta-Area Counties Over Predatory Lending Claims
By KATE BRUMBACK
12/24/12 03:39 PM ET EST
ATLANTA -- Three Atlanta-area counties have filed a lawsuit claiming that British bank HSBC cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in extra expenses and damage to their tax bases by aggressively signing minorities to housing loans that were likely to fail.
The Georgia counties' failure or success with the relatively novel strategy could help determine whether other local governments try to hold big banks accountable for losses in tax revenue based on what they claim are discriminatory or predatory lending practices. Similar lawsuits resulted in settlements this year worth millions of dollars for communities in Maryland and Tennessee.
Fulton, DeKalb and Cobb counties say in their lawsuit, which was filed in October, that the housing foreclosure crisis was the "foreseeable and inevitable result" of big banks, such as HSBC and its American subsidiaries, aggressively pushing irresponsible loans or loans that were destined to fail. The counties say that crisis has caused them tremendous damage.
"It's not only the personal damage that was done to people in our communities," said DeKalb County Commissioner Jeff Rader. "That has a ripple effect on our tax digest and the demand for public services in these areas."
The city of Atlanta straddles Fulton and DeKalb counties, while Cobb County is northwest of the city.
The lawsuit says the banks violated the Fair Housing Act, which provides protections against housing or renting policies or practices, including lending, that discriminate on the basis race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status or handicap.
The counties say their tax digests – which represent the value of all property subject to tax – have declined from a high point in 2009. Fulton's tax digest has dropped about 12 percent, from $32.7 billion to $28.7 billion; DeKalb's has dropped about 20 percent, from $22 billion to $17.5 billion; and Cobb's has dropped about 15 percent, from $25.5 billion to $21.3 billion, the lawsuit says. That reduces their ability to provide critical services in their communities, the lawsuit says.
In addition to reducing tax income, vacant or abandoned homes that are in or near foreclosure create additional costs for the counties, the lawsuit says. Their housing code and legal departments have to investigate and respond to code violations, including having to board up, tear down or repair unsafe homes. They have to deal with public health concerns, such as pest infestations, ruptured water pipes, accumulated garbage and unkempt yards. And fire and police departments have to respond to health and safety threats.
The lawsuit says predatory lending practices include: targeting vulnerable borrowers for mortgage loans with unfavorable terms; directing credit-worthy borrowers to more costly loans; putting unreasonable terms, excessive fees or pre-payment penalties into mortgage loans; basing loan values on inflated or fraudulent appraisals; and refinancing a loan without benefit to the borrower.
The counties are asking the court to order the bank to stop its behavior and to take steps to prevent similar predatory lending in the future. They are also seeking financial compensation for the damages they've suffered and punitive damages to punish the bank for its "willful, wanton and reckless conduct." The counties say the financial injury they've suffered is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Andrew Sandler, a lawyer for HSBC and its subsidiaries, said he couldn't comment on the case. A federal judge has given the bank until Jan. 25 to respond to the counties' complaint.
Lawyers for the counties declined interviews on the case, but one of them, Jeffrey Harris, said in an emailed statement that they are continuing to investigate other banks and could file additional complaints.
Similar suits were filed against Wells Fargo by the city of Memphis and surrounding Shelby County in Tennessee in 2009 and by the city of Baltimore in 2008. Those suits were settled earlier this year. Both settlements included $3 million to the local governments for economic development or housing programs and $4.5 million in down payment assistance to homeowners, as well as a lending goal of $425 million for residents over the subsequent five years, according to media accounts.
As in those cases, the lawsuit filed by the Georgia counties says the bank, in this case HSBC, targeted communities with high percentages of Fair Housing Act-protected minority residents, particularly blacks and Hispanics.
"Communities with high concentrations of such potential borrowers, and the potential borrowers themselves, were targeted because of the traditional lack of access to competitive credit choices in these communities and the resulting willingness of FHA protected minority borrowers to accept credit on uncompetitive rates," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says minority borrowers were disproportionately targeted with high-cost loans between 2004 and 2007.
Before the beginning of the subprime lending boom in 2003, annual foreclosure rates in metro Atlanta averaged below 1 percent, but U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data show that the estimated foreclosure rates for each of the three counties now average more than 9 percent and are as high as 18 percent in the communities with the highest percentages of minority borrowers, the lawsuit says.
It is the alleged targeting of minority communities that entitles the counties to seek action against HSBC for loss of tax income and other expenses, the lawsuit says.
"If you can show that you yourself have suffered harm by an illegal act under the Fair Housing Act, even if you are not the target, even if you are not the intended victim, you can still sue to stop the behavior and to recover any damages that you can prove you suffered because of the violation of the Fair Housing Act," said Steve Dane, a lawyer whose firm was involved in the Memphis and Baltimore lawsuits.
The costs incurred by counties because of high rates of foreclosure are reflected in court records and related fees for each home, and police and fire departments can calculate the costs of responding to a given address, Dane said. He said it takes a lot of time and effort to gather the necessary records to prove the harm.
Another discouraging factor could be a lack of political will, said Lisa Rice, vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
"Politicians may not want to go up against the banks," she said, adding that there will likely be other local governments that give this a try but she doubts the number will be high.
But Jaime Dodge, an assistant law professor at the University of Georgia, says she thinks more cases are likely, at least in the short term as municipal governments continue to feel the squeeze of a tight economy and seek ways to refill their coffers. They may try to test federal courts in different parts of the country, she said. Successes in multiple jurisdictions could lead to more attempts, but if courts start knocking the suits down that would likely discourage them, she said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/hsbc-sued-predatory-lending_n_2362436.html [with comments]
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CNN: After Mass Shootings, Should We Profile White Men?
Published on Dec 20, 2012 by David Sirota
I appeared on CNN to discuss my recent Salon.com article looking at how America's reaction to mass shootings is shaped by the fact that most of the shooters are white men. Had they been from another demographic, we would likely face calls for racial profiling. But that isn't the case when the demographic in question is white men. Why with only 30% of the population being white men are 70% of the mass shootings being perpetrated by white men? Read the Salon piece here:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/17/would_the_u_s_government_profile_white_men/ [last item at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82607484 and preceding and following]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=564YWoXbAIw
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CNN: Why Are Most Mass Shootings Perpetrated By White Men?
Published on Dec 23, 2012 by David Sirota
In the aftermath of the Newtown shooting, I appeared on CNN to discuss the racial double standard evident in the way America reacts to crimes committed by white men. When white guys commit violent crimes, their transgressions are individualized. But when people of color commit violent crimes, their transgressions are unduly projected onto whole demographic groups. This double standard, I argue, is an expression of white privilege.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phot_KGMJF4
wingbutt/teabugger/bagnut version:
CNN's Don Lemon On 'White Privilege' & Gun Control: Should We Start Profiling White Men?
Published on Dec 23, 2012 by EASurvival2
CNN's Don Lemon On 'White Privilege' & Gun Control: Should We Start Profiling White Men? Wow how ridiculous is that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2PBdx-88dM
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Ron Paul Slams NRA Plan Recommending Armed Officers In Schools
Posted: 12/25/2012 10:40 am EST
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) came out against the National Rifle Association's recommendation [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/wayne-lapierre-schools-armed-guards-crazy_n_2355462.html ] for armed officers in all schools in the wake of the tragic shooting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting_n_2300831.html ] at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
"While I certainly agree that more guns equals less crime and that private gun ownership prevents many shootings, I don’t agree that conservatives and libertarians should view government legislation, especially at the federal level, as the solution to violence," Paul wrote in a statement ["Government Security is Just Another Kind of Violence", http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2037 ] posted on his website. "Real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets. We cannot reverse decades of moral and intellectual decline by snapping our fingers and passing laws."
The retiring libertarian lawmaker explained, "Let’s not forget that our own government policies often undermine civil society, cheapen life, and encourage immorality. The president and other government officials denounce school violence, yet still advocate for endless undeclared wars abroad and easy abortion at home. U.S. drone strikes kill thousands, but nobody in America holds vigils or devotes much news coverage to those victims, many of which are children, albeit, of a different color." He added, "Obviously I don’t want to conflate complex issues of foreign policy and war with the Sandy Hook shooting, but it is important to make the broader point that our federal government has zero moral authority to legislate against violence."
Paul also slammed the response to the shooting from the "political left," saying he found "emotional calls for increased gun control" to be "misguided."
During an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, stood by the idea of armed guards in schools.
"If it's crazy to call for armed officers in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," he said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/wayne-lapierre-schools-armed-guards-crazy_n_2355462.html ]. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/ron-paul-nra_n_2362432.html [with comments]
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William Spengler's Note Before Killing Webster Firefighters: 'Do What I Like Doing Best, Killing People'
This image taken from video provided by WHAM13-TV, shows a wide view of homes on fire in an area where a gunman ambushed four volunteer firefighters responding to an intense pre-dawn house fire early Monday, Dec. 24, 2012, in Webster, N.Y., killing two before ending up dead himself, authorities said. Police used an armored vehicle to evacuate more than 30 nearby residents.
(AP Photo/WHAM13-TV via AP video)
By GEORGE M. WALSH and MARY ESCH
12/25/12 06:01 PM ET EST
WEBSTER, N.Y. — An ex-con killed two firefighters with the same caliber and make military-style rifle used in the Connecticut school massacre after typing a note pledging to burn down his neighborhood and "do what I like doing best, killing people," police said Tuesday as another body, believed to be the gunman's missing sister, was found.
William Spengler, 62, who served 17 years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980 hammer slaying of his grandmother, set his house afire before dawn Christmas Eve before taking a revolver, a shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle to a sniper position outside, Police Chief Gerald Pickering said.
The death toll rose to three as police revealed that a body believed to be the killer's 67-year-old sister, Cheryl Spengler, was found in his fire-ravaged home.
Authorities say he sprayed bullets at the first responders, killing two firefighters and injuring two others who remained hospitalized Tuesday in stable condition, awake and alert and expected to survive. He then killed himself as seven houses burned on a sliver of land along Lake Ontario.
Police recovered a military-style .223-caliber semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle with flash suppression, the same make and caliber weapon used in the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26, including 20 young children, Pickering said.
The chief said it was believed the firefighters were hit with shots from the rifle given the distance but the investigation was incomplete.
"He was equipped to go to war, kill innocent people," the chief said.
The two- to three-page typewritten rambling note left by Spengler did not reveal what set off the killer or provide a motive for the shootings, Pickering said. He called the attack a "clear ambush on first responders."
He declined to reveal the note's full content or say where it was found. He read only one chilling line: "I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down, and do what I like doing best, killing people."
Pickering said it was unclear whether the person believed to be Spengler's sister died before or during the fire.
"It was a raging inferno in there," Pickering said.
A next-door neighbor said Spengler hated his sister and they lived on opposite sides of the house.
Roger Vercruysse said Spengler loved his mother, Arline, who died in October after living with her son and daughter in the house in a neighborhood of seasonal and year-round homes across the road from a lakeshore popular with recreational boaters.
As Pickering described it and as emergency radio communications on the scene showed, the heavily armed Spengler took a position behind a small hill by the house as four firefighters arrived after 5:30 a.m. to extinguish the fire: two on a fire truck; two in their own vehicles.
They were immediately greeted by bullets from Spengler, who wore dark clothing. Volunteer firefighter and police Lt. Michael Chiapperini, 43, driving the truck, was killed by gunfire as the windshield before him was shattered. Also killed was Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, who worked as a 911 dispatcher.
Several firefighters went beneath the truck to shield themselves as an off-duty police officer who was passing by pulled his vehicle alongside the truck to try to shield them, authorities said.
The first police officer who arrived chased and exchanged shots with Spengler, recounting it later over his police radio.
"I could see the muzzle blasts comin' at me. ... I fired four shots at him. I thought he went down," the officer said.
At another point, he said: "I don't know if I hit him or not. He's by a tree. ... He was movin' eastbound on the berm when I was firing shots." Pickering portrayed him as a hero who saved many lives.
The audio posted on the website RadioReference.com also has someone reporting "firefighters are down" and saying "got to be rifle or shotgun – high-powered ... semi or fully auto."
Spengler had been charged with murder in his grandmother's death but pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, apparently to spare his family a trial. After he was freed from prison, Spengler – a felon who wasn't allowed to possess weapons – had lived a quiet life on Lake Road on a narrow peninsula where Irondequoit Bay meets Lake Ontario.
That ended when he left his burning home Monday morning, armed with his three weapons and a lot of ammunition.
"I'm not sure we'll ever know what was going through his mind," Pickering said.
Esch reported from Albany. Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York City also contributed to this report.
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Related
William Spengler, Killer Of 2 New York Firemen, Had Bushmaster Semiautomatic Rifle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/william-spengler-had-semiautomatic-rifle_n_2362646.html
New York Firefighters In Guarded Condition
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/new-york-firefighters-in-_n_2362142.html
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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/25/william-spengler-set-trap_n_2362433.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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