And if anyone is up in the air about this: as a Jew who grew up in the Bible Belt and experienced all sorts of attempted conversions, Jews for Jesus go way beyond the usual, “By the way, have you thought about accepting Jesus?” It is downright coercive and scary.

gah. can we please stop waving this stick around? the incremental attacks at the state level have already rendered this law mostly irrelevant. having rights on paper means nothing if there is no infrastructure supporting those rights.

Do you really think that Roe is “mostly irrelevant”? State laws have done lots of damage to be sure, but something like 1.3 million women in the United States still manage to have abortions every year. They don’t have an easy time at it, and there are many more women who aren’t able to terminate their pregnancies, but the guarantees Roe provides remain crucial. Dismantle Roe — or do what the GOP platform wants to do and outlaw abortion — and a whole lot of those 1.3 million women are going to be facing some very dire circumstances.

Railing against state laws that limit abortion rights is certainly merited, but not at the expense of reality.

gah. can we please stop waving this stick around? the incremental attacks at the state level have already rendered this law mostly irrelevant. having rights on paper means nothing if there is no infrastructure supporting those rights.

“a club for people of any or no religious identity”

what? please to be cutting out the derision for other people’s belief systems. the UU is responsible for some pretty amazing interfaith initiatives, and many other *coff* “Real” religions could learn a few things from how they operate.

I wouldn’t say that it’s a matter of naivete. I have an Israeli friend to whom I talk frequently, as I mentioned above. In her view, it doesn’t matter why someone supports Israel. The fact that they do is what is important. She is as angered by anti-Semitism as anyone, but her attitude is that Israel has so few friends that anyone who genuinely supports it is welcome regardless of motives. Many of the ‘people on the street’ in Israel have a bunker mentality about life. This is why Likud consistently does well, and why parties even further to the right than Likud pick up delegates in the Knesset. Likud wants to protect them from the people trying to kill them.

We’ve seen this in the US since 9/11. The Republicans want to protect us from the people who kill us, so we vote for them even though we realize they are screwing us the whole time. And that’s just the people intelligent enough to see the Republicans ARE screwing us. Don’t get me started on Mr. Numbnuts.

Annaliegh:

My concern is that the majority of those who don’t want to live under a fundamentalist theocracy don’t really see the danger. They either really don’t think it will happen or buy into the O’Reilly Factor war against Christmas BS.

Yes, I think you’re right about this one. Unfortunately most people have no idea about the scope of the religious-wrong’s insanity. I make it a point of educating myself about it and then talking to people who might not necesary know about it as much as possible!

Did anyone else notice that Palin was wearing an Israeli flag pin on her lapel during the acceptance speech?

Looks like she didn’t really wrote off the teachings of her church, but embraced them.

even if it had been an israeli flag (she allegedly had one in her office) it is not a sign she wrote off her churches teachings about Jews. It is dangerous to conflate support for israel as some sort of support or acceptance of us Jews. Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christians support Israel (and Israeli control of Jerusalem) for the sole purpose of fulfilling their requirements for Armageddon. Jews on the other hand are bad and must repent for their sin of rejecting Christ by being saved (converting to Christianity). Most Jews understand this but some are naive enough to believe fundamentalist support of Israel means they respect the right of Jews not to have to live as Christians (the right also likes to use the phrase Judeo-Christian values to make it appear as though they’re not trying to establish a governance based on Christianity).

I for one think that since the addition of Palin to the McCain ticket will once again drag conservative Christianity into the spotlight, everyone who does not want to see this country have a theocracy at any point needs to watch out to see how and where Palin’s religious-wrong ties go and expose them!

Annaliegh:

My concern is that the majority of those who don’t want to live under a fundamentalist theocracy don’t really see the danger. They either really don’t think it will happen or buy into the O’Reilly Factor war against Christmas BS.

Evangelism is the process of seeking new practitioners, of selling your religion to the potential customer. ‘Educational’ material marketed for the non-practitioner with the purpose of building an interest in a particular direction of religious or philosophical thought is most definitely evangelism, even when not called such. Admittedly, many of the ‘evangelists’ of major religions not concerned with Jesus or Muhammad are not the intellectual cream of their faith and many of them do not have the grasp on their own tenets they believe they do. Many of them appear more interested in money than enlightenment. That said, they exist and in significant numbers. Nor is their profit motive all that removed from the desire of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians for more, more, and more money. Arm yourself with lots of Pepto-Bismol for your nausea and force yourself to listen to the Kenneth Copelands and Rod Parsleys sometime. They want money, just as the hack ‘educators’ selling Eastern philosophy want money, and their grasp of the central tenets of their faith is every bit as flimsy.

The major difference is that the people selling pseudo-Zen, pseudo-Taoism and pseudo-Qaballah to the American upper-middle class don’t have their own political party in the United States. The people selling pseudo-Christianity to the American working class do.