U.S. Navy Hymn- Eternal Father
To all our service members ...
Our gratitude and prayers.
Gratitude for keeping us safe,
Prayers for your safety.
You are American hero’s,
We are humbled!
May 19, 2013
Ragbag Headliners
Shortt, “Christianophobia”
“Christianophobia” is a relatively new word that refers to two fairly old, and distinct, phenomena. The first is the antipathy for traditional Christianity among cultural leaders in the West, especially Europe. This antipathy dates from the Enlightenment, but has gained strength in the last few decades. The second, and far more pressing, matter is the outright persecution of Christians in many other parts of the world. Later this month, Eerdmans will release Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack, by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Shortt’s book focuses on the latter problem. Here’s the publisher’s description:
On October 29, 2005, three Indonesian schoolgirls were beheaded as they walked to school — targeted because they were Christian. Like them, many Christians around the world suffer violence or discrimination for their faith. In fact, more Christians than people of any other faith group now live under threat. Why is this religious persecution so widely ignored?
In Christianophobia Rupert Shortt investigates the shocking treatment of Christians on several continents and exposes the extent of official collusion. Christian believers generally don’t become radicalized but tend to resist nonviolently and keep a low profile, which has enabled politicians and the media to play down a problem of huge dimensions. The book is replete with relevant historical background to place events within their appropriate political and social context.
Shortt demonstrates how freedom of belief is the canary in the mine for freedom in general. Published at a time when the fundamental importance of faith on the world stage is being recognized more than ever, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in people’s right to religious freedom, no matter where, or among whom, they live. –By Mark L. Movsesian/Center for Law and Religion Forum/May 7, 2013
“Christianophobia” is a relatively new word that refers to two fairly old, and distinct, phenomena. The first is the antipathy for traditional Christianity among cultural leaders in the West, especially Europe. This antipathy dates from the Enlightenment, but has gained strength in the last few decades. The second, and far more pressing, matter is the outright persecution of Christians in many other parts of the world. Later this month, Eerdmans will release Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack, by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Shortt’s book focuses on the latter problem. Here’s the publisher’s description:
On October 29, 2005, three Indonesian schoolgirls were beheaded as they walked to school — targeted because they were Christian. Like them, many Christians around the world suffer violence or discrimination for their faith. In fact, more Christians than people of any other faith group now live under threat. Why is this religious persecution so widely ignored?
In Christianophobia Rupert Shortt investigates the shocking treatment of Christians on several continents and exposes the extent of official collusion. Christian believers generally don’t become radicalized but tend to resist nonviolently and keep a low profile, which has enabled politicians and the media to play down a problem of huge dimensions. The book is replete with relevant historical background to place events within their appropriate political and social context.
Shortt demonstrates how freedom of belief is the canary in the mine for freedom in general. Published at a time when the fundamental importance of faith on the world stage is being recognized more than ever, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in people’s right to religious freedom, no matter where, or among whom, they live. –By Mark L. Movsesian/Center for Law and Religion Forum/May 7, 2013
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Church Threatens To Defund Scouts If Gay Ban Lifted
A California church says it will no longer sponsor a Boy Scout troop in its facilities if the national organization lifts its ban on openly gay scouts.
Pastor Robert Hall of Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho said he knows other pastors who will do the same.
The Boy Scouts of America has submitted a plan to allow gay scouts but not gay scout leaders.
Hall took part in a webcast hosted by the Family Research Council Sunday to rally opposition to a vote on that plan slated for May 23.
The Morman Church has approved the plan. –CBN/May 6, 2013
A California church says it will no longer sponsor a Boy Scout troop in its facilities if the national organization lifts its ban on openly gay scouts.
Pastor Robert Hall of Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho said he knows other pastors who will do the same.
The Boy Scouts of America has submitted a plan to allow gay scouts but not gay scout leaders.
Hall took part in a webcast hosted by the Family Research Council Sunday to rally opposition to a vote on that plan slated for May 23.
The Morman Church has approved the plan. –CBN/May 6, 2013
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Church Cancels Speech By NFL Star Over Support for Jason Collins
Former Green Bay Packer Leroy Butler was told to ask God for forgiveness after tweeting his congratulations to Jason Collins on coming out.
After publicly congratulating Jason Collins for coming out, former NFL star Leroy Butler had his speech at a church canceled, he said on Twitter.
Butler is a former star safety for the Green Bay Packers. He's played for a Super Bowl champion team. He even invented the "Lambeau Leap," when players jump into arms of fans in the stands after a touchdown.
After Collins came out as gay, the first active player in the NBA to do that, Butler tweeted, "Congrats to Jason Collins." And that was all, as first reported by Raw Story.
But for that, he lost a $8,500 speaking engagement at a local church, he said.
"Wow, I was schedule to speak at a church in WI, and a member said that the pastor wants to cancel my event, I said ok why?," he wrote. "Then I was told, because I said congrats to Jason Collins on twitter, I said really? we have a contract, he said check the moral cause."
The moral clause, though, apparently came with a way around it.
"I was told if i removed the tweet, and apologize and ask god forgiveness, I can have the event, I said no," Butler wrote. "Only god can judge." -By Lucas Grindley/Advocate/May 1 2013
Former Green Bay Packer Leroy Butler was told to ask God for forgiveness after tweeting his congratulations to Jason Collins on coming out.
After publicly congratulating Jason Collins for coming out, former NFL star Leroy Butler had his speech at a church canceled, he said on Twitter.
Butler is a former star safety for the Green Bay Packers. He's played for a Super Bowl champion team. He even invented the "Lambeau Leap," when players jump into arms of fans in the stands after a touchdown.
After Collins came out as gay, the first active player in the NBA to do that, Butler tweeted, "Congrats to Jason Collins." And that was all, as first reported by Raw Story.
But for that, he lost a $8,500 speaking engagement at a local church, he said.
"Wow, I was schedule to speak at a church in WI, and a member said that the pastor wants to cancel my event, I said ok why?," he wrote. "Then I was told, because I said congrats to Jason Collins on twitter, I said really? we have a contract, he said check the moral cause."
The moral clause, though, apparently came with a way around it.
"I was told if i removed the tweet, and apologize and ask god forgiveness, I can have the event, I said no," Butler wrote. "Only god can judge." -By Lucas Grindley/Advocate/May 1 2013
Caught In Methodism’s Split Over Same-Sex Marriage
It started out as a deeply personal act, that of a father officiating at the wedding of his son.
But it was soon condemned as a public display of ecclesiastical disobedience, because the father, the Rev. Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree, is a minister in the United Methodist Church, which does not allow its clergy to perform same-sex weddings.
Dr. Ogletree, 79, is now facing a possible canonical trial for his action, accused by several New York United Methodist ministers of violating church rules. While he would not be the first United Methodist minister to face discipline for performing a same-sex wedding, he could well be the one with the highest profile. He is a retired dean of Yale Divinity School, a veteran of the nation’s civil rights struggles and a scholar of the very type of ethical issues he is now confronting.
“Sometimes, when what is officially the law is wrong, you try to get the law changed,” Dr. Ogletree, a native of Birmingham, Ala., said in a courtly Southern drawl over a recent lunch at Yale, where he remains an emeritus professor of theological ethics. “But if you can’t, you break it.”
For Dr. Ogletree, the issues are not just academic. He has fully accepted, he said, that two of his five children are gay. His daughter married her partner in Massachusetts, in a non-Methodist ceremony. So when his son asked him last year to officiate at the wedding, he said yes.
“I was inspired,” Dr. Ogletree said. “I actually wasn’t thinking of this as an act of civil disobedience or church disobedience. I was thinking of it as a response to my son.”
The wedding of Thomas Rimbey Ogletree and Nicholas W. Haddad, held on Oct. 20, 2012, at the Yale Club in New York, incorporated readings from Scripture and the Massachusetts court decision legalizing same-sex marriages. A wedding announcement in The New York Times prompted several conservative Methodist ministers to file a complaint against Dr. Ogletree with the local bishop.
“This ceremony is a chargeable offense” under the rules of the church, wrote the ministers, led by the Rev. Randall C. Paige, pastor of Christ Church in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y.
In late January, Mr. Paige and Dr. Ogletree, accuser and accused, met face-to-face in an effort to resolve the dispute without a church trial. Mr. Paige, who declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the confidentiality of the proceedings, asked that Dr. Ogletree apologize and promise never to perform such a ceremony again. He refused.
“I said, this is an unjust law,” he recalled telling Mr. Paige. “Dr. King broke the law. Jesus of Nazareth broke the law; he drove the money changers out of the temple. So you mean you should never break any law, no matter how unjust it is?”
But ministers like Mr. Paige believe breaking church law is not the right way to bring about change, said the Rev. Thomas A. Lambrecht, the vice-president of Good News, a traditionalist Methodist group. “Reverend Ogletree is acting in a way that is injurious to the church, because it fosters confusion in the church about what we stand for,” he said. “And it undermines the whole covenant of accountability that we share with each other as pastors.”
The United Methodist Church is the third-largest Christian denomination in the country. Its clergy members pledge to follow the church’s laws as contained in its rule book, the Book of Discipline. The rules can only be amended via votes by clergy and laity that take place every four years.
Like many Christian denominations, the United Methodist Church has struggled over issues of gay rights. In 1972, the denomination added a line to its rule book declaring the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” It bars the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” as clergy, and prohibits clergy from officiating at same-sex unions. But it also calls homosexuals “persons of sacred worth,” and welcomes them as members. “We try to be nuanced about it,” Mr. Lambrecht said. “Although we disapprove of the practice of homosexuality, we believe that people who are gay or lesbian are loved and valued by God and worthy of the church’s ministry and welcome to participate in churches.”
The result is contradictory, Dr. Ogletree said. “The church’s official motto is open minds, open hearts, open doors, even though our rules on same-sex marriage contradict that claim,” he said.
Professor Ogletree is now working with Methodists in New Directions, a New York group that is part of a growing movement to change the church’s rules. More than 1,100 United Methodist clergy members — of about 45,000 in the nation — have expressed a willingness to perform same-sex ceremonies, even if it means they may face suspension or censure. But the issue is creating a deep rift with the church’s evangelical, conservative wing, which is being bolstered by the spread of the 12-million-member denomination internationally into Africa and Asia.
At the Methodists’ general conference last May, tensions reached a boiling point after an attempt to modify the church’s stance on homosexuality failed by a vote of 61 percent to 39 percent.
“The time for talking is over,” one retired bishop, Melvin Talbert, declared in protest. “It is time for us to act in defiance of unjust words of immoral and derogatory discrimination.”
Five months later, Dr. Ogletree presided at his son’s wedding.
“He does the right thing because he believes in doing the right thing,” Mr. Ogletree said of his father. “And then, if there is any question about that, he is willing to stand up and place a claim for that in a public way.”
New York’s Methodists have passed resolutions supporting same-sex marriage, but the region’s bishop, Martin D. McLee, said he had no choice, once mediation failed, but to refer the matter to the equivalent of a prosecuting lawyer for the church, who will decide whether to hold a trial.
Bishop McLee noted that many United Methodist congregations have ministries that focus on welcoming gays and lesbians, and said that, “As is the case with most mainline Protestant denominations,” he said, “matters regarding human sexuality continue to evolve.”
However, he said in an interview, “If everyone can pick and choose the laws that they don’t particularly like, and choose to violate them, then you have a situation of pandemonium.”
Bishop McLee said the complaint against Dr. Ogletree was the first he had received since becoming the regional bishop nearly a year ago, even though there is anecdotal evidence that such ceremonies occur with some regularity.
In the New York area, 208 Methodist ministers have said they are willing to perform same-sex weddings. The Rev. Vicki Flippin, associate pastor at the Church of the Village in Manhattan, said she had performed two such ceremonies in recent years, and the Rev. Scott Summerville, pastor of Asbury United Methodist Church in Yonkers, said he had officiated at two.
In the past, the Methodist denomination has punished pastors for officiating at same-sex weddings. When the Rev. Jimmy Creech, a Nebraska pastor, was found guilty in a 1999 church trial of performing at gay weddings, he was defrocked. In 2011, the Rev. Amy DeLong received a 20-day suspension for marrying a lesbian couple.
Dr. Ogletree said he was prepared for judgment by his fellow ministers. The stakes for him are largely symbolic, because he is already retired. He also has some standing among his peers as a theologian; he drafted a section of the Book of Discipline that explains how Scripture must be understood through tradition, reason and experience.
“That’s why I feel I have an advantage, because I have read the Scriptures so carefully,” he said. “Context matters.” -By Sharon Otterman/New York Times/May 5, 2013
But it was soon condemned as a public display of ecclesiastical disobedience, because the father, the Rev. Dr. Thomas W. Ogletree, is a minister in the United Methodist Church, which does not allow its clergy to perform same-sex weddings.
Dr. Ogletree, 79, is now facing a possible canonical trial for his action, accused by several New York United Methodist ministers of violating church rules. While he would not be the first United Methodist minister to face discipline for performing a same-sex wedding, he could well be the one with the highest profile. He is a retired dean of Yale Divinity School, a veteran of the nation’s civil rights struggles and a scholar of the very type of ethical issues he is now confronting.
“Sometimes, when what is officially the law is wrong, you try to get the law changed,” Dr. Ogletree, a native of Birmingham, Ala., said in a courtly Southern drawl over a recent lunch at Yale, where he remains an emeritus professor of theological ethics. “But if you can’t, you break it.”
For Dr. Ogletree, the issues are not just academic. He has fully accepted, he said, that two of his five children are gay. His daughter married her partner in Massachusetts, in a non-Methodist ceremony. So when his son asked him last year to officiate at the wedding, he said yes.
“I was inspired,” Dr. Ogletree said. “I actually wasn’t thinking of this as an act of civil disobedience or church disobedience. I was thinking of it as a response to my son.”
The wedding of Thomas Rimbey Ogletree and Nicholas W. Haddad, held on Oct. 20, 2012, at the Yale Club in New York, incorporated readings from Scripture and the Massachusetts court decision legalizing same-sex marriages. A wedding announcement in The New York Times prompted several conservative Methodist ministers to file a complaint against Dr. Ogletree with the local bishop.
“This ceremony is a chargeable offense” under the rules of the church, wrote the ministers, led by the Rev. Randall C. Paige, pastor of Christ Church in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y.
In late January, Mr. Paige and Dr. Ogletree, accuser and accused, met face-to-face in an effort to resolve the dispute without a church trial. Mr. Paige, who declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the confidentiality of the proceedings, asked that Dr. Ogletree apologize and promise never to perform such a ceremony again. He refused.
“I said, this is an unjust law,” he recalled telling Mr. Paige. “Dr. King broke the law. Jesus of Nazareth broke the law; he drove the money changers out of the temple. So you mean you should never break any law, no matter how unjust it is?”
But ministers like Mr. Paige believe breaking church law is not the right way to bring about change, said the Rev. Thomas A. Lambrecht, the vice-president of Good News, a traditionalist Methodist group. “Reverend Ogletree is acting in a way that is injurious to the church, because it fosters confusion in the church about what we stand for,” he said. “And it undermines the whole covenant of accountability that we share with each other as pastors.”
The United Methodist Church is the third-largest Christian denomination in the country. Its clergy members pledge to follow the church’s laws as contained in its rule book, the Book of Discipline. The rules can only be amended via votes by clergy and laity that take place every four years.
Like many Christian denominations, the United Methodist Church has struggled over issues of gay rights. In 1972, the denomination added a line to its rule book declaring the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” It bars the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” as clergy, and prohibits clergy from officiating at same-sex unions. But it also calls homosexuals “persons of sacred worth,” and welcomes them as members. “We try to be nuanced about it,” Mr. Lambrecht said. “Although we disapprove of the practice of homosexuality, we believe that people who are gay or lesbian are loved and valued by God and worthy of the church’s ministry and welcome to participate in churches.”
The result is contradictory, Dr. Ogletree said. “The church’s official motto is open minds, open hearts, open doors, even though our rules on same-sex marriage contradict that claim,” he said.
Professor Ogletree is now working with Methodists in New Directions, a New York group that is part of a growing movement to change the church’s rules. More than 1,100 United Methodist clergy members — of about 45,000 in the nation — have expressed a willingness to perform same-sex ceremonies, even if it means they may face suspension or censure. But the issue is creating a deep rift with the church’s evangelical, conservative wing, which is being bolstered by the spread of the 12-million-member denomination internationally into Africa and Asia.
At the Methodists’ general conference last May, tensions reached a boiling point after an attempt to modify the church’s stance on homosexuality failed by a vote of 61 percent to 39 percent.
“The time for talking is over,” one retired bishop, Melvin Talbert, declared in protest. “It is time for us to act in defiance of unjust words of immoral and derogatory discrimination.”
Five months later, Dr. Ogletree presided at his son’s wedding.
“He does the right thing because he believes in doing the right thing,” Mr. Ogletree said of his father. “And then, if there is any question about that, he is willing to stand up and place a claim for that in a public way.”
New York’s Methodists have passed resolutions supporting same-sex marriage, but the region’s bishop, Martin D. McLee, said he had no choice, once mediation failed, but to refer the matter to the equivalent of a prosecuting lawyer for the church, who will decide whether to hold a trial.
Bishop McLee noted that many United Methodist congregations have ministries that focus on welcoming gays and lesbians, and said that, “As is the case with most mainline Protestant denominations,” he said, “matters regarding human sexuality continue to evolve.”
However, he said in an interview, “If everyone can pick and choose the laws that they don’t particularly like, and choose to violate them, then you have a situation of pandemonium.”
Bishop McLee said the complaint against Dr. Ogletree was the first he had received since becoming the regional bishop nearly a year ago, even though there is anecdotal evidence that such ceremonies occur with some regularity.
In the New York area, 208 Methodist ministers have said they are willing to perform same-sex weddings. The Rev. Vicki Flippin, associate pastor at the Church of the Village in Manhattan, said she had performed two such ceremonies in recent years, and the Rev. Scott Summerville, pastor of Asbury United Methodist Church in Yonkers, said he had officiated at two.
In the past, the Methodist denomination has punished pastors for officiating at same-sex weddings. When the Rev. Jimmy Creech, a Nebraska pastor, was found guilty in a 1999 church trial of performing at gay weddings, he was defrocked. In 2011, the Rev. Amy DeLong received a 20-day suspension for marrying a lesbian couple.
Dr. Ogletree said he was prepared for judgment by his fellow ministers. The stakes for him are largely symbolic, because he is already retired. He also has some standing among his peers as a theologian; he drafted a section of the Book of Discipline that explains how Scripture must be understood through tradition, reason and experience.
“That’s why I feel I have an advantage, because I have read the Scriptures so carefully,” he said. “Context matters.” -By Sharon Otterman/New York Times/May 5, 2013
The Secret Sex Lives Of Conservative Christian Women
There’s something sexual about the way that some churches present the idea of God to young Christians, particularly women.Sex and evangelical American religion have a lot in common: Both are weird and personal; both inspire prescriptive, reductive public dialogue; and both are used as conduits for ecstasy, punishment, comfort, self-satisfaction, and pain that can turn into pleasure. When I was a teenager going to music festivals for the first time, I’d watch crowds of people throwing their hands up and feel like I was back in the mega-church where I grew up, a congregation in the tens of thousands that boasted a decent house band and a massive worship center I called the Repentagon. Recently, I disturbed myself by realizing that the name I’ve said more than any other during sex is probably “Jesus.”
Because we rarely see sex and religion intersecting in non-troubling ways, and because it’s unfortunate that “virgin” is a social punch line in a country where Plan B isn't available over the counter, I called up a half-dozen Christian women this year and talked to them about sex.
“He pursued us, and now we belong to Him.”
There’s something Byronic about the way that some churches present the idea of God to young Christians, particularly women. A divine creator romancing fallen humanity through a display of sacrificial devotion far more intense and visceral than anything you’d find in a rom-com — once desired like this, how can we not live in obedient submission? “We are Christ's bride,” one woman told me, fairly breathlessly. “He came and pursued us to be with him, and now we belong to Him, and I think that's really beautiful.”
One woman I interviewed talked about a Bible study she’d gone to in high school: "It was called Sacred Romance. God was the Great Romancer. I was in the middle of a breakup and I just kept telling myself, 'Don’t ever forget that He loves you more than your ex-boyfriend ever did.’"
As for me, I remember a girls-only Bible study session at a middle school church retreat, during which a chirpy blonde woman with glossy pink lips put wedding veils on all our heads, turned onMoulin Rouge, and fast-forwarded to the “Roxanne” scene, the slow grimy drag of that tango. “Remember this feeling,” she told us. “This is what you have to look forward to on your wedding day.”
“There had been fondling, you know, I’m human.”
It was hard to find someone who’d actually waited until marriage to lose her virginity. I only talked to one woman who did it by the book; to alleviate wedding-night pressure, she and her husband had waited not just until after the wedding but until the morning after. She told me, "I felt so liberated by the fact that I'd never had sex before, not even oral sex. There had been fondling, you know, I’m human. But I felt so protected in that moment, with all expectations stripped away. It was so freeing, so exhilarating."
In many of the stories that felt more familiar, there was still a religious component; one woman had lost her virginity at 14, to a boy she’d met as her mom was dying. “We were just young kids trying to process this thing,” she said. “We cried together almost every day. We were going to church together. We were spiritually close, and it felt right to be physically close. So we started to have sex, a lot of it, all the time.”
Another woman had simply compartmentalized the anti-sex parts of Christianity and decided to trust her instincts: “I have my body image issues — I don't like sitting in my swimsuit next to someone skinny, stuff like that — but with a guy, naked, I feel really comfortable. I’ve always just known what to do.”
For most of these women, their physical convictions were just as important as their spiritual convictions; if the two came into alignment, all the better. One woman, mentally flirting with the idea of sex, experienced clarity one night in Vegas.
"I met this hot cop,” she told me, “like an actual cop who was hot, not a Chippendale. We started making out in the casino — really going at it, it was amazing — and he persuaded me to come up to his room, where we fell onto his bed. He pulled up my dress and got naked all of a sudden and asked, ‘Can I put it in?’ I was totally horrified. I said absolutely not. Then he just sort of put it on top of me. I pretended I heard my phone ringing and basically ran away.”
“It’s a rule to protect you.”
I asked these women the same question over and over. Why is sex before marriage considered wrong? Essentially, everyone answered the same way: “I believe in the Bible, and the Bible says so.” Most added, “But I’m not going to judge anyone who does it.” Most, of course, were also doing it.
“It has more to do with your identity as a Christian,” one woman said. “How you see yourself, how you want to feel, how you want to be treated. This is hard for me to articulate, but I think that any sin that we commit comes from an internal issue that we have with ourselves — something we’re born with, like pride or greed. With sex, it could maybe be a problem with self-control, or wanting to receive a certain type of attention or feel a certain way.”
“I think it’s a rule to protect you,” another woman said. “To keep you from opening yourself up emotionally to the wrong people, to heartbreak and hurt.”
I remember when I came home from school in fourth grade wearing my very first purity ring. I waved my hand in the air proudly. “Oh Lord,” said my mom, who is an evangelical Christian. “Take it off, take it off now.”
“I was never acting out of an urge that was pure."
Guilt, bargaining, and confusion all played at least minor roles in each woman's story. One talked about a high school boyfriend, saying, "I believed that God wanted the two of us to be together, but that we'd cursed our relationship forever because we'd had sex. There was an inner voice just screaming at me about what I’d done, much louder than the voices that told me not to lie and cheat and steal. I would read books and identify with characters who were prostitutes, that’s how low I felt."
Another brought up middle-school masturbation: "I knew what I was doing, even though I didn’t know the word for it, and I knew it was sinful. I knew even then that I wasn’t taking care of my body in a holy way. I wasn’t acting out of an urge that was pure."
My friend Maya, after her assault: “I was furious at God. I couldn’t understand how I was the only one of our friends who made the decision to stay a virgin, and I loved the decision and defended it, and then He let this happen.”
Purity, this tightly conditioned idea, with so much more to give! In my own life, the times I've felt the purest have involved another trinity — sex, drugs, etc. — and the God that I came to know as a kid, that vague metaphysical presence, was always there in my bones to bless me.
“I have a huge sex drive – it’s how God made me.”
All the women I talked to readily admitted that the evangelical church doesn’t handle sexuality well. From the woman who’d waited until marriage: “It's a big institutional and doctrinal flaw, this idea that sex is bad, sex is wrong. When you're told that your whole life, how are you supposed to just flip that switch when you finally get around to doing it?"
I asked her how long it took to hit her stride with her husband, to feel comfortable having sex. “A while!” she said. “Two or three months, because he was studying for the bar nonstop and we could only really try on weekends. We laughed about it, like, thank goodness we didn’t have anyone else to compare this to.” She added, “But now it’s wonderful. And you know, sex is all over the Bible. God commands us to have communion with each other.”
They all told me that they hoped there would be a generational change in the church, a shifting of priorities. “It’s not our job to grade,” one woman said forcefully. “The emphasis we put on sin is out of proportion. That’s the biggest problem I have with the church.”
Another said, “We should change the conversation. It should be understood that sex is beautiful. It should be more about what you might want to protect yourself against, and how. It should be more about not doing things that could harm you.”
“If I’m truly a Christian, I should be able to understand what grace is. And feeling terrible is not grace,” said another woman, who’d described herself as having “a huge sex drive — it’s how God made me.”
She added, “I went to a bachelorette party where they were asking all the married girls for sex advice for the bride-to-be. I just sat there, listening to them talk about fussy lingerie and complicated games and weird sex menus, and I didn’t say anything, even though I wanted to be like, ‘Girl, just buy a vibrator.’ You know, I have a lot of friends that are waiting, or have waited, and it was great for them. But that’s just not how it’s going to be for me.” -By Jia Tolentino/AlterNet/January 7, 2013
Did Constantine Invent the Christian Doctrine of Jesus’ Divinity?
In the centuries prior to Constantine’s reign over the Roman Empire, Christians had been severely persecuted. But then, while entrenched in warfare, Constantine reported to have seen a bright image of a cross in the sky inscribed with the words “Conquer by this.” He marched into battle under the sign of the cross and took control of the empire.
Constantine’s apparent conversion to Christianity was a watershed in church history. Rome became a Christian empire. For the first time in nearly 300 years it was relatively safe, and even cool, to be a Christian.
No longer were Christians persecuted for their faith. Constantine then sought to unify his Eastern and Western Empires, which had been badly divided by schisms, sects, and cults, centering mostly around the issue of Jesus Christ’s identity.
These are some of the kernels of truth author Dan Brown uses in The Da Vinci Code, and kernels of truth are a prerequisite for any successful conspiracy theory. But the book’s plot turns Constantine into a conspirator. So let’s address a key question raised by Brown’s theory: did Constantine invent the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity?
Deifying Jesus
To answer Brown’s accusation, we must first determine what Christians in general believed before Constantine ever convened the council at Nicaea.
Christians had been worshiping Jesus as God since the first century. But in the fourth century, a church leader from the east, Arius, launched a campaign to defend God’s oneness. He taught that Jesus was a specially created being, higher than the angels, but not God. Athanasius and most church leaders, on the other hand, were convinced that Jesus was God in the flesh.
Constantine wanted to settle the dispute, hoping to bring peace to his empire, uniting the east and west divisions. Thus, in 325 A.D., he convened more than 300 bishops at Nicaea (now part of Turkey) from throughout the Christian world. The crucial question is, did the early church think Jesus was the Creator or merely a creation—Son of God or son of a carpenter? So, what did the apostles teach about Jesus? From their very first recorded statements, they regarded him as God. About 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul wrote the Philippians that Jesus was God in human form (Philippians 2:6-7, NLT). And John, a close eye-witness, confirms Jesus’ divinity in the following passage:
In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God. He created everything there is. Nothing exists that he didn’t make. Life itself was in him..So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us (John 1: 1-4, 14, NLT).
This passage from John 1, has been discovered in an ancient manuscript, and it is carbon-dated at 175-225 A.D. Thus Jesus was clearly spoken of as God over a hundred years before Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea. We now see that forensic manuscript evidence contradicts The Da Vinci Code’s claim that Jesus’ divinity was a fourth century invention. But what does history tell us about the Council of Nicaea? Brown asserts in his book that the majority of bishops at Nicaea overruled Arius’s belief that Jesus was a “mortal prophet” and adopted the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity by a “relatively close vote.” True or false?
In reality, the vote was a landslide: only two of the 318 bishops dissented. Whereas Arius believed that the Father alone was God, and that Jesus was His supreme creation, the council concluded that Jesus and the Father were of the same divine essence.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were deemed to be distinct, coexistent, coeternal Persons, but one God. This doctrine of one God in three Persons became known as the Nicene Creed, and is the central core of the Christian Faith. Now, it is true that Arius was persuasive and had considerable influence. The landslide vote came after considerable debate. But in the end the council overwhelmingly declared Arius to be a heretic, since his teaching contradicted what the apostles had taught about Jesus’ divinity.
History also confirms that Jesus had publicly condoned the worship he received from his disciples. And, as we have seen, Paul and other apostles clearly taught that Jesus is God and is worthy of worship.
From the first days of the Christian church, Jesus was regarded as far more than a mere man, and most of his followers worshiped him as Lord–the Creator of the universe. So, how could Constantine have invented the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity if the church had regarded Jesus as God for more than 200 years? Of course, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t address this question. –Y-Jesus
Constantine’s apparent conversion to Christianity was a watershed in church history. Rome became a Christian empire. For the first time in nearly 300 years it was relatively safe, and even cool, to be a Christian.
No longer were Christians persecuted for their faith. Constantine then sought to unify his Eastern and Western Empires, which had been badly divided by schisms, sects, and cults, centering mostly around the issue of Jesus Christ’s identity.
These are some of the kernels of truth author Dan Brown uses in The Da Vinci Code, and kernels of truth are a prerequisite for any successful conspiracy theory. But the book’s plot turns Constantine into a conspirator. So let’s address a key question raised by Brown’s theory: did Constantine invent the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divinity?
Deifying Jesus
To answer Brown’s accusation, we must first determine what Christians in general believed before Constantine ever convened the council at Nicaea.
Christians had been worshiping Jesus as God since the first century. But in the fourth century, a church leader from the east, Arius, launched a campaign to defend God’s oneness. He taught that Jesus was a specially created being, higher than the angels, but not God. Athanasius and most church leaders, on the other hand, were convinced that Jesus was God in the flesh.
Constantine wanted to settle the dispute, hoping to bring peace to his empire, uniting the east and west divisions. Thus, in 325 A.D., he convened more than 300 bishops at Nicaea (now part of Turkey) from throughout the Christian world. The crucial question is, did the early church think Jesus was the Creator or merely a creation—Son of God or son of a carpenter? So, what did the apostles teach about Jesus? From their very first recorded statements, they regarded him as God. About 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul wrote the Philippians that Jesus was God in human form (Philippians 2:6-7, NLT). And John, a close eye-witness, confirms Jesus’ divinity in the following passage:
In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God. He created everything there is. Nothing exists that he didn’t make. Life itself was in him..So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us (John 1: 1-4, 14, NLT).
This passage from John 1, has been discovered in an ancient manuscript, and it is carbon-dated at 175-225 A.D. Thus Jesus was clearly spoken of as God over a hundred years before Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea. We now see that forensic manuscript evidence contradicts The Da Vinci Code’s claim that Jesus’ divinity was a fourth century invention. But what does history tell us about the Council of Nicaea? Brown asserts in his book that the majority of bishops at Nicaea overruled Arius’s belief that Jesus was a “mortal prophet” and adopted the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity by a “relatively close vote.” True or false?
In reality, the vote was a landslide: only two of the 318 bishops dissented. Whereas Arius believed that the Father alone was God, and that Jesus was His supreme creation, the council concluded that Jesus and the Father were of the same divine essence.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were deemed to be distinct, coexistent, coeternal Persons, but one God. This doctrine of one God in three Persons became known as the Nicene Creed, and is the central core of the Christian Faith. Now, it is true that Arius was persuasive and had considerable influence. The landslide vote came after considerable debate. But in the end the council overwhelmingly declared Arius to be a heretic, since his teaching contradicted what the apostles had taught about Jesus’ divinity.
History also confirms that Jesus had publicly condoned the worship he received from his disciples. And, as we have seen, Paul and other apostles clearly taught that Jesus is God and is worthy of worship.
From the first days of the Christian church, Jesus was regarded as far more than a mere man, and most of his followers worshiped him as Lord–the Creator of the universe. So, how could Constantine have invented the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity if the church had regarded Jesus as God for more than 200 years? Of course, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t address this question. –Y-Jesus
Lifted, Steadied, And Readied …
"He lifted me out of the pit of destruction, out of the sticky mud. He stood me on a rock and made my feet steady." -Psalm 40:2, NCV
Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
Though God is all-powerful, he uses our efforts, our skills, our knowledge to help ourselves and others to move up in life...toward solid lives of purpose and promise. When we're down and stuck in negative circumstances, he uses friends and family members to lift us up. Sometimes, he uses our own discomfort to motivate us toward new opportunities for success. And he uses our broken and empathetic hearts to encourage us to help others do the same.
God lifts us, steadies us, and readies us for lives filled with possibilities!
Prayer: Lord, you are the source that provides each lift in my life. Today, I surrender my will to your strength and power. Show me how to help myself and to help others, today. Amen.
Reflection: Whom has God used to help lift you out of a negative situation? Whom has he inspired you to help today? -Hour of Power
Joel Osteen Tackles Sin, His Rise To Fame, Being ‘Saved’ & What It Takes To Get Into Heaven
Televangelist and author Joel Osteen has millions of adoring fans. The popular preacher, who is known the world over for his inspirational messages, best-selling books and charismatic demeanor, is widely revered as one of America’s most popular faith leaders. His house of worship, Lakewood Church located in Houston, Texas, attracts more than 40,000 congregants each week, making it the largest church in America.Last Sunday, TheBlaze visited Lakewood to speak with Osteen about his career path, stereotypes surrounding televangelists and the rewards and challenges he so regularly faces. Among the most intriguing discussion points was Osteen’s rise to fame — a story that may not be known by many.
OSTEEN’S PATH TO PROMINENCE
Osteen’s father, John, founded Lakewood in 1959 and substantially built up the church over the following decades. Unexpectedly, the elder Osteen passed away in 1999, leaving a vacuum and an obvious need for a preacher to fill the void.
Up until that point, Joel had been working in media and production for his father, helping him produce a show and traveling with him regularly. Until John’s death, the pastor’s son assumed working in this behind-the-scenes capacity would be his life’s path; considering that he enjoyed the production role, it seemed like a good fit. But there were obviously other plans in store for Joel.
Little did he know that in 13 short years he would become one of America’s most powerful preachers. The path he took was a fascinating one, based on a calling to the pulpit that emerged immediately following his father’s death.
“When my father died in 1999, I had never ministered before except one time and that was the week of,” Osteen explained. “I don’t know how to describe it. I knew I was supposed to step up and pastor the church.”
Osteen recalls feeling that the emotion and urge didn’t make sense, even to him. After all, he had truly never preached in a professional capacity and had little theological training and experience beyond what he had learned from his father. But with the blessing of his family and with the church congregation behind him, he took the stage just one week after his father’s death and the rest is, well, history.
“We never dreamed it would grow,” Osteen told TheBlaze from a side room at the massive church, going on to say that his initial goal was simply to maintain what his father had built.
“That’s part of our message,” he proclaimed, adding, “God’s dream for your life is bigger than your own. And that’s what I’ve seen.”
When compared to 1999, life has changed dramatically for Osteen. Aside from personal growth, he highlighted the immense responsibility he has — a level of devotion and energy that wasn’t previously required of him. But he embraces his intense schedule.
“It’s fun, I enjoy doing it. I don’t feel pressured or stressed out,” he said. “I’m not overworked. I just feel…very blessed.”
The popular pastor was also humble in describing his beginnings, urging individuals to never find themselves un-amazed by what God has done in their lives. He reflected on the fact that, at a time, the current location of Lakewood was where the Houston Rockets once played — a team he frequently cheered on in the very same stadium that he now preaches in.
“Every time I drive up to this building or even like today when I’m on the platform I see my old season tickets where all through my 20s I used to sit and watch the Rockets,” he said, with excitement coloring his tone. “And I think, man…it just reminds you, look where we are today — did you ever dream?”
PROSPERITY & SIN: TACKLING THE CRITICISMS
Osteen is no stranger to controversy, as critics regularly claim that he touts a prosperity gospel of sorts (that wealth is something that the Bible promises to Christians) and that he is too soft on sin. When it comes to taking criticism in a more general sense, the preacher says that he takes it in stride.
“I try to, having good people around me, accept and take any valid criticism,” Osteen explained, highlighting that he chooses to ignore some of the more flagrant criticisms coming from detractors.
On the prosperity gospel front, he flatly denied the charge and framed his messaging by distinguishing between “prosperity” and “wealth.” That being said, he went on to note that he doesn’t engage in counter-criticisms of those who rail against him, as he believes that it is his ideological opponents’ right to hold differing opinions.
“I see God as being good, being for us — [a] God that wants to bless us and calls us to excel. Now, some people turn that into ‘You know, Joel’s saying, God wants to be rich.’ It’s not that,” he said. “It’s [that] God wants us to excel, to have money to fulfill our dreams, and to have peace — to me, that’s prosperity.”
When it comes to sin, Osteen also believes that critics get his message wrong. After asking him how he responds to those who see him as ignoring mankind’s sinful nature, he candidly responded that he believes he does, indeed, talk about sin — but that he does so using different methods.
“A lot of what I do is in a positive light. It’s who I am…to me, the scripture says it’s the goodness of God that leads to repentance,” Osteen proclaimed.
Rather than hammering congregants with negative messaging, Osteen takes a more affirmative approach.
“I would rather tell them we can be better fathers, we can overcome an addiction, we can let go of the past. I deal with it in an overcoming way,” he added.
“There’s a camp that’s more hellfire,” he admitted, noting that this divergent approach can be chalked up to differences in theological opinion.
THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY TO THE POOR, BEING ‘SAVED,’ & HEAVEN
So what is the Christian responsibility for the poor? Osteen candidly described his view that the gospel commands Christians to reach out to those in need. His own brother, in fact, is currently working at a charity hospital in Africa and Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen Ministries engage in special service projects regularly.
The massive globe he preaches in front of every service also trumpets the ministry’s global mission.
“I think that we all have a responsibility. It’s a part of the gospel to reach out and help those in need,” he said. “And so, it’s a part of our message. It’s a part of what we teach all of the time.”
But Osteen believes that it’s essential to help people work through their own issues so that they can be fully-prepared and equipped to help their fellow man. The preacher said that it’s tough to reach out to others if individuals, themselves, aren’t “healthy and whole.”
“My message and my ministry is to empower people to become who God’s created them to be so that they can help others,” he added.
And for him, it all comes down to the Bible’s most central message — that Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and is a savior. Without pause, the preacher delved into what he believes it means to be “saved,” a term that is central to Christian doctrine.
According to Osteen, “saved” means having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Salvation, he contended, is reliant upon that tenet. This, he said, paves the way toward a “guarantee of heaven” and helps individuals avoid “separation from God.”
As for sin, Osteen sees it as a barrier to heaven that Jesus came to alleviate. Here’s how he explained the dynamic:
“We were born with sin and sin can’t enter heaven. Sin keeps us away from God. And, we all had this debt that we couldn’t pay. In the Old Testament they had to sacrifice animals and if you did enough right, you could get your sins covered. The gospel is that Jesus came and when he shed his blood and when he died and rose again, he was the ultimate sacrifice. And when you receive his forgiveness — and we call it redemption — you can be free from sin and not be separate from God.”
While the televangelist is often criticized for allegedly watering this message down, he didn’t hesitate to provide his full views on the matter. The aforementioned words, regardless of how critics feel about how Osteen deploys his message, generally coincides with what most evangelicals would say on the matter of sin and salvation.
PREPARING FOR SERMONS & INSPIRING THE MASSES
Seeing Osteen live or on television is unique for a variety of reasons. Among them, the pastor’s 26-minute sermons appear to be completely committed to memory. In our discussion, he described his intensive process of putting messages together and then presenting them.
His seamless presentation distinguishes him from other speakers and preachers who find themselves dependent upon transcripts and outlines. While this is not a critique of those who rely upon these elements, the impact of Osteen’s speeches may very well be attributed to his ability to present them in an engaging and invigorating way that leaves audiences feeling as though he’s speaking directly to them.
That’s not to say he never draws a blank. He does. And when it happens, he said he usually just lets the congregation know and glances at the few notes he has.
Osteen went on to also explain the blessings he sees coming from the messages and events he holds. Among all of the benefits he feels coming from his work, the preacher said that seeing his sermons and messages impacting lives is the biggest personal blessing he regularly receives. He called the opportunity to impact his fellow man “humbling and rewarding.”
“The biggest blessing is being able to help people you’ve never met,” Osteen said. “To realize you’ve impacted their lives. There’s no feeling like that.”
The final question we had for Osteen focused upon a 30-second pitch. If he had only a small fragment of time to drive a message home to listeners, what would it be? Naturally, his comments focused upon positivity and a relationship with Christ.
“I would hope that they would receive Christ and have a relationship with Him — their creator,” he said. “And then, my second thing would be that…know that God is for you. You’re here for a purpose. You’re a person of destiny. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of life.”
In the end, Osteen said he would want others to regularly realize their immense purpose and that others need them. These realizations, he believes, tie into knowledge about who Christ is. –By Billy Hallowell/The Blaze/July 26, 2012
May 12, 2013
Pope Francis On Sexual Abuse By Priests: Catholic Church Must 'Act Decisively'
Pope Francis wants the Catholic Church to "act decisively" to root out sexual abuse of children by priests and ensure the perpetrators are punished, the Vatican said on Friday.
Francis, in a meeting with the Holy See's doctrinal chief, Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, had declared that combating sexual abuse was important "for the Church and its credibility", a statement said.
Francis inherited a Church mired in problems and a major scandal over priestly abuse of children. It was believed to be the first time he had taken up the issue of sex abuse with a senior member of his staff since his election on March 13.
Mueller is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department which includes the office of the "promoter of justice", or sex crimes prosecutor, which investigates cases of sexual abuse and decides if priests are to be defrocked.
Francis said the department should continue to "act decisively as far as cases of sexual abuse are concerned, promoting, above all, measures to protect minors, help for those who have suffered such violence in the past (and) the necessary procedures against those who are guilty," a statement said.
It said the pope wanted Catholic bishops around the world to promote and put into place "directives in this matter which is so important for the witness of the Church and its credibility".
A victims' group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said the statement did not go far enough and criticized it for saying that the Church's stance against sexual abuse was "a continuation" of the line wanted by Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict.
"Action, not discussion, is needed," SNAP said in a statement.
"We can't confuse words with actions. When we do, we hurt kids. We must insist on new tangible action that helps vulnerable children protect their bodies, not old vague pledges that help a widely-discredited institution protect its reputation," it said.
SNAP and other victims groups say there is much still to be discovered about how the Church behaved in the past and want more bishops who were aware of abuse to be held responsible.
The Catholic Church's crisis began in Boston in 2002 when media began reporting how cases of abuse were systematically covered up and abusive priests shuttled from parish to parish instead of being defrocked and handed over to civil authorities.
Since then, the Catholic Church in many countries has set up new guidelines to deal with cases of past abuse, prevent new cases, report abuse to police, and stop potential abusers from entering the priesthood in the first place. –By Philip Pullella; Editing by Barry Moody and Alistair Lyon/Huffington Post/May 5, 20113
Francis, in a meeting with the Holy See's doctrinal chief, Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, had declared that combating sexual abuse was important "for the Church and its credibility", a statement said.
Francis inherited a Church mired in problems and a major scandal over priestly abuse of children. It was believed to be the first time he had taken up the issue of sex abuse with a senior member of his staff since his election on March 13.
Mueller is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department which includes the office of the "promoter of justice", or sex crimes prosecutor, which investigates cases of sexual abuse and decides if priests are to be defrocked.
Francis said the department should continue to "act decisively as far as cases of sexual abuse are concerned, promoting, above all, measures to protect minors, help for those who have suffered such violence in the past (and) the necessary procedures against those who are guilty," a statement said.
It said the pope wanted Catholic bishops around the world to promote and put into place "directives in this matter which is so important for the witness of the Church and its credibility".
A victims' group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said the statement did not go far enough and criticized it for saying that the Church's stance against sexual abuse was "a continuation" of the line wanted by Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict.
"Action, not discussion, is needed," SNAP said in a statement.
"We can't confuse words with actions. When we do, we hurt kids. We must insist on new tangible action that helps vulnerable children protect their bodies, not old vague pledges that help a widely-discredited institution protect its reputation," it said.
SNAP and other victims groups say there is much still to be discovered about how the Church behaved in the past and want more bishops who were aware of abuse to be held responsible.
The Catholic Church's crisis began in Boston in 2002 when media began reporting how cases of abuse were systematically covered up and abusive priests shuttled from parish to parish instead of being defrocked and handed over to civil authorities.
Since then, the Catholic Church in many countries has set up new guidelines to deal with cases of past abuse, prevent new cases, report abuse to police, and stop potential abusers from entering the priesthood in the first place. –By Philip Pullella; Editing by Barry Moody and Alistair Lyon/Huffington Post/May 5, 20113
Gay Marriage & Legalized Marijuana
For those who haven't heard, Washington State just passed both laws - gay marriage and legalized marijuana.
The fact that gay marriage and marijuana were legalized on the same day makes perfect biblical sense because Leviticus 20:13 says, "If a man lies with another man they should be stoned."
We just hadn't interpreted it correctly before!
FB/Author Unknown
The fact that gay marriage and marijuana were legalized on the same day makes perfect biblical sense because Leviticus 20:13 says, "If a man lies with another man they should be stoned."
We just hadn't interpreted it correctly before!
FB/Author Unknown
Is That God Talking?
I still remember how startled I was when a young woman I was interviewing told me God had spoken to her, audibly.
I was doing ethnographic field work in a quietly charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. This was the kind of church in which people sought an intimate, conversational relationship with God. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God.
This woman, however, said that she had been to a job interview and that later, while tidying up at home, she had heard God say, “That’s not the one” — and that she had looked around to see where the voice had come from. She told me that she heard from God like that many times. The first time as an adult was when she was driving alone in an unfamiliar part of the city — and God spoke up audibly out of the back seat and told her that he would always be with her.
After that, I started to ask people in the church more systematically about whether they had ever heard God speak audibly. About a third said yes. They reported odd auditory events in which God said “Sit and listen” or “Read James” or “I will always love you.”
This woman’s account is a good example: “The Lord spoke to me clearly in April, like May or April. To start a school.”
You heard this audibly, I asked? “Yeah.”
Were you alone? “Yeah, I was just praying. I wasn’t praying anything, really, just thinking about God, and I heard a voice say, ‘Start a school,’ I immediately got up and it was like, ‘O.K., Lord, where?’ ”
What do we make of this? I don’t think that anthropologists can pronounce on whether God exists or not, but I am averse to the idea that God is the full explanation here. For one thing, many of these voices are mundane. A woman told me that she heard God tell her to get off the bus when she was immersed in a book and about to miss her stop. Moreover, odd auditory experiences are quite common. A questionnaire posed to 375 college students found that 71 percent reported vocal hallucinations of some kind, according to a study published in 1984 (a finding consistent with my own research). A 2000 study found that 38.7 percent of the population reported visual, auditory or other hallucinations, including out-of-body experiences.
Schizophrenia, or the radical break with reality we identify as serious mental illness, is also not an explanation. The people who reported these events simply weren’t ill in that way, and schizophrenia is not common (the prevalence among American adults is 1.1 percent in any year). Moreover, the patterns of their voice-hearing are quite unlike the patterns we associate with schizophrenia. The voices heard by people with schizophrenia are often harsh and commanding. They go on and on — sentences, paragraphs, sometimes crowds of people screaming and yelling insults at the poor voice-hearing person throughout the day.
The unusual auditory experiences reported by congregants just weren’t like that. They were rare. Most people said they’d had one or two in their lifetime. They were brief — just a few words. They were pleasant. And they did not have that sense of command. The woman who said God instructed her to start a school — well, she hasn’t done it.
I eventually discovered that these experiences were associated with intense prayer practice. They felt spontaneous, but people who liked to get absorbed in their imaginations were more likely to experience them. Those were the people who were more likely to love to pray, and the “prayer warriors” who prayed for long periods were likely to report even more of them.
The prayer warriors said that as they became immersed in prayer, their senses became more acute. Smells seemed richer, colors more vibrant. Their inner sensory worlds grew more vivid and more detailed, and their thoughts and images sometimes seemed as if they were external to the mind. Later, I was able to demonstrate experimentally that prayer practice did lead to more vivid inner images and more hallucination-like events.
There’s plenty here to alarm secular liberals. A subject in the prayer experiment recalled that she was watching TV when “God told me, ‘Vote for Bush.’ I said — I was having this argument with God. I said out loud, I said, ‘But I don’t like him.’ You know. And God said, ‘I didn’t ask you to like him.’ ” She thought she had heard this exchange with her ears. She voted, in 1988, for George Bush.
The more interesting lesson is what it tells us about the mind and prayer. If hearing a voice is associated with focused attention to the inner senses — hearing with the mind’s ear, seeing with the mind’s eye — it suggests that prayer (which today, the National Day of Prayer, celebrates) is a pretty powerful instrument. We often imagine prayer as a practice that affects the content of what we think about — our moral aspirations, or our contrition. It’s probably more accurate to understand prayer as a skill that changes how we use our minds. -By T. M. Luhrmann/NY Times/May 1, 2013
I was doing ethnographic field work in a quietly charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. This was the kind of church in which people sought an intimate, conversational relationship with God. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God.
This woman, however, said that she had been to a job interview and that later, while tidying up at home, she had heard God say, “That’s not the one” — and that she had looked around to see where the voice had come from. She told me that she heard from God like that many times. The first time as an adult was when she was driving alone in an unfamiliar part of the city — and God spoke up audibly out of the back seat and told her that he would always be with her.
After that, I started to ask people in the church more systematically about whether they had ever heard God speak audibly. About a third said yes. They reported odd auditory events in which God said “Sit and listen” or “Read James” or “I will always love you.”
This woman’s account is a good example: “The Lord spoke to me clearly in April, like May or April. To start a school.”
You heard this audibly, I asked? “Yeah.”
Were you alone? “Yeah, I was just praying. I wasn’t praying anything, really, just thinking about God, and I heard a voice say, ‘Start a school,’ I immediately got up and it was like, ‘O.K., Lord, where?’ ”
What do we make of this? I don’t think that anthropologists can pronounce on whether God exists or not, but I am averse to the idea that God is the full explanation here. For one thing, many of these voices are mundane. A woman told me that she heard God tell her to get off the bus when she was immersed in a book and about to miss her stop. Moreover, odd auditory experiences are quite common. A questionnaire posed to 375 college students found that 71 percent reported vocal hallucinations of some kind, according to a study published in 1984 (a finding consistent with my own research). A 2000 study found that 38.7 percent of the population reported visual, auditory or other hallucinations, including out-of-body experiences.
Schizophrenia, or the radical break with reality we identify as serious mental illness, is also not an explanation. The people who reported these events simply weren’t ill in that way, and schizophrenia is not common (the prevalence among American adults is 1.1 percent in any year). Moreover, the patterns of their voice-hearing are quite unlike the patterns we associate with schizophrenia. The voices heard by people with schizophrenia are often harsh and commanding. They go on and on — sentences, paragraphs, sometimes crowds of people screaming and yelling insults at the poor voice-hearing person throughout the day.
The unusual auditory experiences reported by congregants just weren’t like that. They were rare. Most people said they’d had one or two in their lifetime. They were brief — just a few words. They were pleasant. And they did not have that sense of command. The woman who said God instructed her to start a school — well, she hasn’t done it.
I eventually discovered that these experiences were associated with intense prayer practice. They felt spontaneous, but people who liked to get absorbed in their imaginations were more likely to experience them. Those were the people who were more likely to love to pray, and the “prayer warriors” who prayed for long periods were likely to report even more of them.
The prayer warriors said that as they became immersed in prayer, their senses became more acute. Smells seemed richer, colors more vibrant. Their inner sensory worlds grew more vivid and more detailed, and their thoughts and images sometimes seemed as if they were external to the mind. Later, I was able to demonstrate experimentally that prayer practice did lead to more vivid inner images and more hallucination-like events.
There’s plenty here to alarm secular liberals. A subject in the prayer experiment recalled that she was watching TV when “God told me, ‘Vote for Bush.’ I said — I was having this argument with God. I said out loud, I said, ‘But I don’t like him.’ You know. And God said, ‘I didn’t ask you to like him.’ ” She thought she had heard this exchange with her ears. She voted, in 1988, for George Bush.
The more interesting lesson is what it tells us about the mind and prayer. If hearing a voice is associated with focused attention to the inner senses — hearing with the mind’s ear, seeing with the mind’s eye — it suggests that prayer (which today, the National Day of Prayer, celebrates) is a pretty powerful instrument. We often imagine prayer as a practice that affects the content of what we think about — our moral aspirations, or our contrition. It’s probably more accurate to understand prayer as a skill that changes how we use our minds. -By T. M. Luhrmann/NY Times/May 1, 2013
About the Author: T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” is a guest columnist.
If I Die Before I Wake
As I approach my twilight years, I am struck by the inevitability that the party must end. And one clear, cold morning after I'm gone, my spouse will awaken in the warmth of our bedroom and be struck with the pain of learning that sometimes there isn't "anymore."
No more hugs, no more special moments to celebrate together, no more phone calls just to chat, no more "just one minute."
Sometimes, what we care about the most gets all used up and goes away, never to return before we can say good-bye, or say "I love you."
So while we have it, its best we love it, care for it, fix it when it's broken and heal it when it's sick.
This is true for marriage. And old cars, children with bad report cards, dogs with bad hips, and aging parents and grandparents. We keep them because they are worth it, because we are worth it.
Some things we keep -- like a best friend who moved away or a son-in-law after divorce. There are just some things that make us happy, no matter what.
Life is important, like people we know who are special. And so, we keep them close!
Suppose one morning you never wake up, do all your friends know how you really feel?
The important thing is to let every one of your friends know your true feelings, even if you think they don't love you back.
So, just in case I'm gone tomorrow, please rest assured I voted against that incompetent, bleeding heart, socialist piece of shit Obama! -Author Unknown/Shared by Mary
No more hugs, no more special moments to celebrate together, no more phone calls just to chat, no more "just one minute."
Sometimes, what we care about the most gets all used up and goes away, never to return before we can say good-bye, or say "I love you."
So while we have it, its best we love it, care for it, fix it when it's broken and heal it when it's sick.
This is true for marriage. And old cars, children with bad report cards, dogs with bad hips, and aging parents and grandparents. We keep them because they are worth it, because we are worth it.
Some things we keep -- like a best friend who moved away or a son-in-law after divorce. There are just some things that make us happy, no matter what.
Life is important, like people we know who are special. And so, we keep them close!
Suppose one morning you never wake up, do all your friends know how you really feel?
The important thing is to let every one of your friends know your true feelings, even if you think they don't love you back.
So, just in case I'm gone tomorrow, please rest assured I voted against that incompetent, bleeding heart, socialist piece of shit Obama! -Author Unknown/Shared by Mary
Homeless in Suburbia
As more suburban students face homelessness, schools have a crucial role to play in ensuring their safety and fair treatment.
In Denver’s western suburbs, a social studies teacher thought up a novel approach to teaching her students the unsettling realities of urban homelessness. She assigned them the task of sleeping overnight in the backseat of the family car.
But the assignment held a surprise in store for the teacher—one that provides a glimpse into the reality of 21st-century poverty in America. The teacher did not realize that one of her students was homeless. The girl had already spent many nights in her parents’ car.
“These days in suburbia, you never know who you will have in your class,” says Sheree Conyers, homeless liaison for the Jeffco Public Schools of Jefferson County, Colorado. “These are hard times. So many of our families are in transition.”
A decade ago, the Jeffco Schools had just 59 homeless students in a district that serves about 86,000 students. By 2012, there were close to 3,000, representing 3 percent of the district enrollments. At Parr Elementary School, 28 percent of the students were homeless, according to a 2012 report.
The increasing poverty in Jefferson County, where close to one in three students qualifies for free and reduced price lunch, reflects the explosion of poverty in suburbs nationwide. Throughout the 2000s, the suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the nation, according to a 2011 analysis of U.S. Census data by the Brookings Institution. From 2000 to 2010, the report also says, poverty grew by 53 percent in the nation’s suburbs.
This rapid change has left many educators behind. They are still teaching as if the suburbs have remained immune from the poverty that has long troubled urban areas, says M.J. Lechner, a University of Colorado-Denver professor who oversees seven student teachers at Parr. “Some teachers have been responsive [to the changes],” she says, “while others are still struggling to give up the notion that all kids are the same as they were 10 years ago.”
A Poorly Defined Problem
The explosion in suburban poverty is part of a larger, more disturbing trend. Childhood poverty nationwide is at its highest point since 1993, with 16.5 million, or 22 percent of children ages 18 and under living in poor families, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Race is still a factor. For African-American children, the poverty rate was 38 percent; for Latino children, it was 32 percent.
Being classified as “poor” means that a family of four earns no more than $22,314. However, the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University estimates that families typically need twice that income to cover their basic needs. That looser definition puts 44 percent of American children in low-income families.
The growth in suburban poverty has had a major impact on suburban schools, like those near Denver. Without the safety net of social services that city governments provide for the urban poor, suburban schools have had to scramble to set up programs that address basic needs, such as adequate food and clothing, for their students from low-income families.
The Jeffco district has established school-based food banks and an emergency fund for health needs, such as eyeglasses or medication. It also has held clothing drives at schools with large homeless populations. Schools feed students free or low-cost meals during the week, but not on the weekends. So 13 Jeffco schools have partnered with community sponsors and local food banks to provide food for the weekends.
At Parr, school officials have even altered the curriculum to accommodate homeless students. But some teachers have not adjusted to the new reality. “If a student has neither the place nor the tools with which to complete tasks sent home, they are often reprimanded or punished by missing recess,” Lechner says. “This makes our homeless population feel even more singled out and ostracized.”
Who Are the New Suburban Poor?
According to Scott Allard, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, the new suburban poor are a mix of old and new poverty. In more mature cities, like Chicago and New York, poverty has grown up around the inner-ring suburbs, where urban families have migrated from rundown city neighborhoods and the recession has deepened financial need. Many such communities experienced a spike in poverty during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.
The new suburban poverty, says Allard, has developed in the outer-ring suburbs, which underwent tremendous growth in the 1990s and 2000s. New immigration patterns have brought immigrants directly to the suburbs as well, unlike previous waves of newcomers who first settled in urban areas. In addition, Allard says, these outer-ring suburbs were hit hard by the recession, and by the subprime mortgage bust, which has led to foreclosure on more than 6 million homes.
“It’s not unusual for immigrants now to go straight to the suburbs and become part of the working poor,” says Allard. “The changes in the suburbs have been significant.”
This means that the face of suburban poverty can be diverse. Impoverished immigrants may lack both language skills and job prospects. In addition, some who were once members of the suburban middle class have lost their jobs and their homes. A traditional view of America’s underclass is that poverty is a cultural phenomenon that gets passed down from generation to generation. But the new suburban poverty, at least in part, comprises families descended from the middle class who find themselves suddenly poor.
How Educators Can Help
In Denver’s western suburbs, a social studies teacher thought up a novel approach to teaching her students the unsettling realities of urban homelessness. She assigned them the task of sleeping overnight in the backseat of the family car.
But the assignment held a surprise in store for the teacher—one that provides a glimpse into the reality of 21st-century poverty in America. The teacher did not realize that one of her students was homeless. The girl had already spent many nights in her parents’ car.
“These days in suburbia, you never know who you will have in your class,” says Sheree Conyers, homeless liaison for the Jeffco Public Schools of Jefferson County, Colorado. “These are hard times. So many of our families are in transition.”
A decade ago, the Jeffco Schools had just 59 homeless students in a district that serves about 86,000 students. By 2012, there were close to 3,000, representing 3 percent of the district enrollments. At Parr Elementary School, 28 percent of the students were homeless, according to a 2012 report.
The increasing poverty in Jefferson County, where close to one in three students qualifies for free and reduced price lunch, reflects the explosion of poverty in suburbs nationwide. Throughout the 2000s, the suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the nation, according to a 2011 analysis of U.S. Census data by the Brookings Institution. From 2000 to 2010, the report also says, poverty grew by 53 percent in the nation’s suburbs.
This rapid change has left many educators behind. They are still teaching as if the suburbs have remained immune from the poverty that has long troubled urban areas, says M.J. Lechner, a University of Colorado-Denver professor who oversees seven student teachers at Parr. “Some teachers have been responsive [to the changes],” she says, “while others are still struggling to give up the notion that all kids are the same as they were 10 years ago.”
A Poorly Defined Problem
The explosion in suburban poverty is part of a larger, more disturbing trend. Childhood poverty nationwide is at its highest point since 1993, with 16.5 million, or 22 percent of children ages 18 and under living in poor families, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Race is still a factor. For African-American children, the poverty rate was 38 percent; for Latino children, it was 32 percent.
Being classified as “poor” means that a family of four earns no more than $22,314. However, the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University estimates that families typically need twice that income to cover their basic needs. That looser definition puts 44 percent of American children in low-income families.
The growth in suburban poverty has had a major impact on suburban schools, like those near Denver. Without the safety net of social services that city governments provide for the urban poor, suburban schools have had to scramble to set up programs that address basic needs, such as adequate food and clothing, for their students from low-income families.
The Jeffco district has established school-based food banks and an emergency fund for health needs, such as eyeglasses or medication. It also has held clothing drives at schools with large homeless populations. Schools feed students free or low-cost meals during the week, but not on the weekends. So 13 Jeffco schools have partnered with community sponsors and local food banks to provide food for the weekends.
At Parr, school officials have even altered the curriculum to accommodate homeless students. But some teachers have not adjusted to the new reality. “If a student has neither the place nor the tools with which to complete tasks sent home, they are often reprimanded or punished by missing recess,” Lechner says. “This makes our homeless population feel even more singled out and ostracized.”
Who Are the New Suburban Poor?
According to Scott Allard, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, the new suburban poor are a mix of old and new poverty. In more mature cities, like Chicago and New York, poverty has grown up around the inner-ring suburbs, where urban families have migrated from rundown city neighborhoods and the recession has deepened financial need. Many such communities experienced a spike in poverty during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.
The new suburban poverty, says Allard, has developed in the outer-ring suburbs, which underwent tremendous growth in the 1990s and 2000s. New immigration patterns have brought immigrants directly to the suburbs as well, unlike previous waves of newcomers who first settled in urban areas. In addition, Allard says, these outer-ring suburbs were hit hard by the recession, and by the subprime mortgage bust, which has led to foreclosure on more than 6 million homes.
“It’s not unusual for immigrants now to go straight to the suburbs and become part of the working poor,” says Allard. “The changes in the suburbs have been significant.”
This means that the face of suburban poverty can be diverse. Impoverished immigrants may lack both language skills and job prospects. In addition, some who were once members of the suburban middle class have lost their jobs and their homes. A traditional view of America’s underclass is that poverty is a cultural phenomenon that gets passed down from generation to generation. But the new suburban poverty, at least in part, comprises families descended from the middle class who find themselves suddenly poor.
How Educators Can Help
Teachers can help low-income students simply by knowing all their students better. A teacher who’s aware that a student is sleeping in a car—or just struggling to stay in her house—will be more sensitive about approaching topics like homelessness. Teachers can also help by confronting biased attitudes against low-income neighbors. Jokes about “rednecks,” “white trash” or dressing “ghetto” should be addressed as they come up in classrooms and hallways.
But much of the most important work needs to take place at the administrative level. Here are some tips for school administrators who might be seeing widespread poverty at school for the first time:
Watch for changes of address.Families facing sudden poverty may move a lot. In many cases, the parents are understandably afraid their children will be forced out of a desirable school or district. This puts great stress on the students—stress the school or district can ease in part by helping the parents understand their rights.
Work around the car culture.Gasoline and car maintenance can be huge expenses. Don’t assume that parents can always shuttle their kids to and from school activities.
Become familiar with the McKinney-Vento Act. This federal law guarantees the rights of children and youth experiencing homelessness to a free and appropriate public education. It requires a local homeless education liaison in every school district. It also ensures enrollment, access to services, school stability and academic support.
Help with fees. Students who are suddenly impoverished usually avoid field trips and extracurricular activities that require fees. In some cases, they’ll even misbehave right before a big event to be prohibited from going. Make sure teachers are on the lookout for this behavior, and make sure the school has a response. For example, see if the PTA can create a fund to keep these students from being marginalized.
Find out what’s needed. Ask parents what’s needed to help their children stay in school. Perhaps they need the library open late a few nights a week to have a place to go after school. Perhaps students need more computer access to complete assignments. Perhaps they need help with meals or transportation.
Provide services. After the problems have been identified, advocate for ways to address them.
Conyers, Jeffco’s homeless liaison, says one of the simplest things educators and support staff can do is to simply remain alert. A student’s sudden poverty is likely to show up in increased absences, exhaustion, mood changes, change in performance and an unkempt appearance.
Also, educators should understand that the families of these students now face the daunting task of navigating the labyrinthine social-service network—a disorienting and often embarrassing task. “These former middle-class families don’t know how to apply for food stamps, they don’t know where to begin,” Conyers says. “There needs to be more hand-holding.”
Combating the “Culture of Poverty”
Educators grappling with the new poverty in the suburbs often turn to popular writers such as Charles Murray and Ruby Payne. They will find themselves misled.
According to The New York Times, “The libertarian writer Charles Murray has probably done more than any other contemporary thinker to keep alive the idea of a ‘culture of poverty,’ the theory that poor people are trapped by distorted norms and aspirations and not merely material deprivation.”
Murray reinforced that idea in his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. One of his long-held beliefs is that social programs make the problems of poverty worse, not better. But Murray’s libertarian beliefs leave him little room to do more than call for less government. “I don’t do solutions very well,” he says.
Payne, an educational consultant, has had a more direct impact on schools. Her work is rooted in a long-held view that much of American poverty is generational, with children growing up in families that have been mired in the underclass for two or more generations. Although her outlook is popular, critics argue that her characterizations are overly simplistic, even bigoted, and harm relations between teachers and students.
According to Payne, children whose families have been poor for generations tend to value relationships over achievement, believe in physical fighting to resolve conflicts, view the world through a strictly local lens and value food for its quantity rather than quality.
Low-income children run into problems, says Payne, because their schools are run on the hidden rules of the middle class. These rules hold that work and achievement are the driving forces for decision-making, that fights are conducted with words rather than fists, the world is defined in national terms, and food is valued for its quality rather than quantity.
Paul Gorski, an assistant professor of integrated studies at George Mason University, says that Payne’s approach—considered a “deficit” model because it focuses on what low-income children lack—doesn’t hold up. The increasing diversity of the poor in the suburbs, he says, makes such an approach even harder to justify. “The suburban poor are diverse, and becoming even more diverse, so the stereotypical version of the poor, urban person just doesn’t work anymore.”
Gorski says that educators need to move away from a focus on the “culture of poverty.” Instead, they should look at more structural issues, such as the lack of resources in some schools that teach the poorest children. Today, that includes suburban schools struggling to address the needs of a new wave of impoverished children.
“We talk about education being the great equalizer, yet our poorest students are in the least equipped schools,” he says. “We don’t need to fix poor people. We need to fix the system.” -By David McKay Wilson/AlterNet/January 3, 2013
About the Author: David McKay Wilson, a regular contributor to the Harvard Education Letter, traveled to India in 2003 to interview workers enslaved in bonded labor in the state of Tamil Nadu.
CROUSE: ‘I Do’ Does Matter
Marriage has never before been in such tattersIn a Time magazine cover story in 2009, author Caitlin Flanagan asked, “How much does [marriage] matter?” She summarized her long article: “There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.”
Pro-marriage activists face a tough task in trying to repair the damage to marriage. Counselors are left trying to restore the wrecked lives of women and children from the fallout in personal lives and society as marriage has been undermined and declared unnecessary, irrelevant and/or impossible. Social science research has convinced the majority of scholars that marriage matters; demographic data make the case that marriage matters. Common sense, accumulated wisdom and shared experience agree: Marriage has far more impact on adults than most people acknowledge. Researchers indicate that married people have better health, longer and more productive lives, greater general happiness and better mental health than non-married individuals. Furthermore, they also agree marriage performs a critical function for society. Nothing harms children quite the way that not having married parents does. As Ms. Flanagan summarizes, “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.” She adds, “Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home.”
Marriage, then, is important because the family is the context within which the next generation establishes lifelong habits and develops character. The child will learn - to the degree that the child’s family has the desirable characteristics and the child’s family life prepares him or her - to become a well-adjusted, productive adult who will contribute to the community and nation as a law-abiding and involved citizen. In this context, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote, “Marriage is treated by all civilized societies as a peculiar and favored contract. It is in its origin a contract of natural law.”
Indeed, most social scientists agree that marriage also has very important positive social consequences for communities and nations. The traditional married-couple family is the most effective training ground for building citizens who contribute to the common good. Marriage conveys numerous economic, educational, health and safety benefits that establish a foundation from which communities and nations thrive. Marriage has been called the “social glue” for the way it binds fathers to their children and unites couples while helping to strengthen the bonds between people and their nation.
Marriage is virtually a universal societal institution; cultures around the globe consider marriage the link that unites parents with their children and families to their communities. Though marriage is a critical institution in civil society, researchers agree that it is endangered and in a fragile state. Some even call the situation a crisis in that there is heated public debate (based on unfounded assertions of anti-family ideologues) as to whether a married-couple - mom-and-dad - family is the most stable and nurturing environment for couples and their children. After 40 years of distorted data and misrepresentation about the questions related to family structure, there are literally thousands of studies agreeing that the best family structure for children’s well-being is the married-couple family with a mom and dad. The studies also agree on the social costs of family disintegration. American taxpayers pay an enormous price for family fragmentation: divorce, unwed childbearing, crime, drug abuse, education dropouts, domestic violence, chronic illness, poverty and foster care. This tremendous body of research, however, does not deter those who have a vested interest in seeing the current negative trends continue and seeing the institutions of marriage and family - as they traditionally have been composed - disintegrate beyond functionality.
Without strong marriages, there cannot be strong democracies because democracy depends on an informed, mature citizenry of good character. In the absence of real-life daddies, the government is becoming the father in the family - though not a very effective one. A report in USATodayindicates that Americans “depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation’s history.” A record 18.3 percent of the nation’s personal income was a payment from the government in the form of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other federal programs. Personal wages, at 51 percent in 2010 and 50.5 percent in February 2011, accounted for the lowest share of income since the government began tracking the data in 1929.
No wonder family researchers and historians are concerned. At this point in American history, the confusion, ambivalence and controversy over marriage are at a tipping point where the outcome is uncertain and the stakes are enormous. The reams of research data and the common experiences of teachers, social workers and law enforcement officers who see the outcomes of family breakdown on a day-to-day basis need to break through the media fog to reach the minds of the public to change attitudes and convince young people that marriage matters for each of them and that it matters for all of us. –By Janice Shaw Crouse/Washington Times/February 7, 2012
About the Author: Janice Shaw Crouse is author of “Children at Risk” (Transaction, 2009) and “Marriage Matters” (Transaction, 2012) and a senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute.
May 5, 2013
Boy Scouts Treacherous “Compromise” … Splitting The Baby?
The Boy Scouts of America's leadership's shocking attempt to accommodate homosexuality has generated a huge conservative backlash across the nation -- which hopefully will stop this unconscionable betrayal -- in spite of the BSA's actions. Yesterday, I did an interview with the national Christian station WVCY America, which you can listen to by clicking HERE. The good news is already the BSA is retreating by ditching the preposterous idea of allowing openly homosexual adult Scoutmasters. However, the new "compromise" (allowing homosexual Boy Scouts) is unworkable, as WVCY's Jim Schneider and I discuss on the program.
The second item below is an excerpt from a superb column by WND columnist Jane Chastain, who eviscerates the Scouts' foolish "compromise" -- which, if enacted, could destroy the Scouts as we know them. (In Canada, the "gaying" of the Scouts led to its membership plummeting.) Note how Jane confidently asserts that "homosexuality is a choice." Yes, it is: we are all responsible for our sexual behaviors. "Sexual orientation" is an artificial construct designed to help normalize sexual perversion (sort of like the words "gay" and "homophobia"). Always remember: homosexuality is not Who You Are; it's What You Do -- and I can't imagine anything more disruptive to the Scouts than a bunch of "gay" Boy Scouts talking up their deviant "sexuality" to other boys! Shame on the Boy Scouts' for bowing to political correctness!
PS. Today I was interviewed by American Family Association's "One News Now" regarding the Mormon Church PRAISING the BSA's fatally flawed "compromise." It seems that the LDS Church (which has always been outside of biblical Christianity) is now rapidly abandoning Truth on the homosexual issue -- a development that will greatly affect the pro-family landscape on same-sex issues. It is a pity that the Mormons, who often led (and hugely funded) the cultural battle to preserve natural marriage, are caving in to the homosexualist lobby. –Americans For Truth
Note: The above is an email sent by the organization.
The second item below is an excerpt from a superb column by WND columnist Jane Chastain, who eviscerates the Scouts' foolish "compromise" -- which, if enacted, could destroy the Scouts as we know them. (In Canada, the "gaying" of the Scouts led to its membership plummeting.) Note how Jane confidently asserts that "homosexuality is a choice." Yes, it is: we are all responsible for our sexual behaviors. "Sexual orientation" is an artificial construct designed to help normalize sexual perversion (sort of like the words "gay" and "homophobia"). Always remember: homosexuality is not Who You Are; it's What You Do -- and I can't imagine anything more disruptive to the Scouts than a bunch of "gay" Boy Scouts talking up their deviant "sexuality" to other boys! Shame on the Boy Scouts' for bowing to political correctness!
PS. Today I was interviewed by American Family Association's "One News Now" regarding the Mormon Church PRAISING the BSA's fatally flawed "compromise." It seems that the LDS Church (which has always been outside of biblical Christianity) is now rapidly abandoning Truth on the homosexual issue -- a development that will greatly affect the pro-family landscape on same-sex issues. It is a pity that the Mormons, who often led (and hugely funded) the cultural battle to preserve natural marriage, are caving in to the homosexualist lobby. –Americans For Truth
Note: The above is an email sent by the organization.
Ireland Abortion Restrictions Under Fire
Thirty-thousand Irish citizens converged on Dublin in January to tell the government to leave Ireland's pro-life law alone. Ireland is one of the last safe nations in Europe for unborn children.
That could all soon change since Ireland's abortion restrictions have come under intense international pressure and relentless attacks in the Irish media, and now Ireland's pro-life law is being blamed for the death of a pregnant woman.
Ireland's news media and pro-abortion groups have been pushing a story that a 31-year old pregnant Indian woman named Savita Halappanaver died because she couldn't have an abortion.
Niamh Ui Bhriain with the Life Institute, and a national pro-life leader, says, "When news of Savita's death first broke, it was massively exploited by abortion campaigners. This became a global headline, and the global headline was Ireland had killed Savita Halappanaver because of our pro-life law. And people were making these claims without knowing any of the facts."
Savita Halappanaver died last year at University hospital in Galway from septicemia or blood poisoning. Her husband claimed they requested an abortion three different times in hopes of saving her life. She was 17 weeks pregnant. The media reporting has made it sound like she died because she couldn't have an abortion.
But at an inquest into her death last week, medical experts determined that Savita died from sepsis, E. coli, and a series of medical errors termed a "medical misadventure." Nevertheless, the media continues to make it look like she died because she was denied an abortion.
Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill, one of Ireland's leading psychiatrists and a pro-life leader, said, "The Irish media went to the world media and said, 'Look at Ireland. Catholic Ireland is allowing people to die because they can't have abortions.'"
Abortions Allowed for Suicidal Mothers
Pro-abortion groups want the government to make law what Ireland's Supreme Court ruled in something called the X Case, which would allow abortion if the mother felt suicidal. But experts think that would lead to defacto abortion on demand.
Sinead Ahern with the pro-abortion group Choice Ireland says, "Every day that the government fails to act to legislate for the 'X case' is another day that women's rights are being violated and women are potentially being placed at risk."
But the message is that women's lives are in danger because of Ireland's abortion law would seem to be exactly wrong; Ireland is one of the safest places in the world for a pregnant woman.
Ui Bhriain says, "Irish doctors are not prevented from intervening when there is a life-threatening condition arriving in pregnancy, that they would always intervene to save the mother's life, even if that means the unintended death of the baby. We have banned abortion for 30 years. In that time we have become one of the safest places in the world for a mother to have a baby, and that's according to the United Nations."
Pro-lifers Pressure Prime Minister: 'Protect Abortion Law'
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny was elected on the promise that he would not open the door to abortion in Ireland, but he is already wavering. Pro-life protestors in January called for Kenny to keep his pro-life promise.
The Irish parliament is said to already be formulating legislation that would allow abortion in Ireland if the mother is suicidal.
Even though a majority of the Irish people are pro-life, the odds are now stacked against Ireland's pro-life law.
Ui Bhriain warns that "the most pro-life country perhaps in the whole Western world is now standing on the brink of abortion."
The European Union has been pressuring the country to change its law. Pro-life leaders say they're being outspent by millions of dollars. Even Ireland's government gives taxpayer money to groups that refer for abortion. Faced with that kind of firepower, pro-life forces can only take their message to the streets and try to win one heart at a time. The forces arrayed against Ireland's abortion law are very strong.
Ui Bhriain says, "But the pro-life movement is fighting back hard. We cannot make this the year abortion is legalized in Ireland, and our pro-life ethos is destroyed forever." -Dale Hurd/CBN
That could all soon change since Ireland's abortion restrictions have come under intense international pressure and relentless attacks in the Irish media, and now Ireland's pro-life law is being blamed for the death of a pregnant woman.
Ireland's news media and pro-abortion groups have been pushing a story that a 31-year old pregnant Indian woman named Savita Halappanaver died because she couldn't have an abortion.
Niamh Ui Bhriain with the Life Institute, and a national pro-life leader, says, "When news of Savita's death first broke, it was massively exploited by abortion campaigners. This became a global headline, and the global headline was Ireland had killed Savita Halappanaver because of our pro-life law. And people were making these claims without knowing any of the facts."
Savita Halappanaver died last year at University hospital in Galway from septicemia or blood poisoning. Her husband claimed they requested an abortion three different times in hopes of saving her life. She was 17 weeks pregnant. The media reporting has made it sound like she died because she couldn't have an abortion.
But at an inquest into her death last week, medical experts determined that Savita died from sepsis, E. coli, and a series of medical errors termed a "medical misadventure." Nevertheless, the media continues to make it look like she died because she was denied an abortion.
Dr Seán Ó Domhnaill, one of Ireland's leading psychiatrists and a pro-life leader, said, "The Irish media went to the world media and said, 'Look at Ireland. Catholic Ireland is allowing people to die because they can't have abortions.'"
Abortions Allowed for Suicidal Mothers
Pro-abortion groups want the government to make law what Ireland's Supreme Court ruled in something called the X Case, which would allow abortion if the mother felt suicidal. But experts think that would lead to defacto abortion on demand.
Sinead Ahern with the pro-abortion group Choice Ireland says, "Every day that the government fails to act to legislate for the 'X case' is another day that women's rights are being violated and women are potentially being placed at risk."
But the message is that women's lives are in danger because of Ireland's abortion law would seem to be exactly wrong; Ireland is one of the safest places in the world for a pregnant woman.
Ui Bhriain says, "Irish doctors are not prevented from intervening when there is a life-threatening condition arriving in pregnancy, that they would always intervene to save the mother's life, even if that means the unintended death of the baby. We have banned abortion for 30 years. In that time we have become one of the safest places in the world for a mother to have a baby, and that's according to the United Nations."
Pro-lifers Pressure Prime Minister: 'Protect Abortion Law'
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny was elected on the promise that he would not open the door to abortion in Ireland, but he is already wavering. Pro-life protestors in January called for Kenny to keep his pro-life promise.
The Irish parliament is said to already be formulating legislation that would allow abortion in Ireland if the mother is suicidal.
Even though a majority of the Irish people are pro-life, the odds are now stacked against Ireland's pro-life law.
Ui Bhriain warns that "the most pro-life country perhaps in the whole Western world is now standing on the brink of abortion."
The European Union has been pressuring the country to change its law. Pro-life leaders say they're being outspent by millions of dollars. Even Ireland's government gives taxpayer money to groups that refer for abortion. Faced with that kind of firepower, pro-life forces can only take their message to the streets and try to win one heart at a time. The forces arrayed against Ireland's abortion law are very strong.
Ui Bhriain says, "But the pro-life movement is fighting back hard. We cannot make this the year abortion is legalized in Ireland, and our pro-life ethos is destroyed forever." -Dale Hurd/CBN
A Retiree’s Last Trip To Food Lion
At the check-out line of a local Food Lion supermarket, a senior citizen with a large bag of Purina dog chow in his shopping cart was asked by the woman standing next to him if he had a dog.
What was the woman thinking? Did she think he had an elephant?
To the question, the retired fellow replied, 'No, I don't have a dog. I am starting the Purina Diet again. I probably shouldn't because the last time I did it, I ended up in the hospital, and I awakened in the Intensive Care Unit with tubes coming out of practically every hole in my body and IVs in both arms. But I had lost 50 lbs."
The oldster then continued to say that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it worked was to load his pockets with Purina Nuggets and simply eat one or two every time he felt hungry; the food was nutritionally complete so it worked well and he was going to try it again.
It should be mentioned here that practically everyone in check-out line was now enthralled with the old man's story.
Horrified, she asked if the guy ended up in Intensive Care because the dog food poisoned him.
He told her, "No, I stopped to pee on a fire hydrant when a car hit me."
The guy standing behind the woman looked like he was going to have a heart attack at the way he was laughing so hard.
Food Lion informed the old man not to shop in that store anymore!
Better watch what you ask some retired people. They have all the time in the world to think of crazy things to say. –Author Unknown
Meditation
Admit what you want without hesitation and give yourself full permission to attract it as you go about the business of living your life. ~ Charly Emery
If I could share 500 words to inspire, this is the important wisdom I'd want to pass along to others...
No matter what you've endured in life, you can "recycle" your experiences into tools and stepping stones that propel you forward faster and simultaneously bounce your baggage to the curb.
If you've ever felt consumed by your choices or challenges, I know how you feel. In my late teens I suffered two incidences of rape that left me emotionally scraping and crawling through a sea of shame and assumptions about what my life could then be. I left the college education I worked so hard to achieve and hid my secrets within a marriage while packing on an extra 50 pounds for almost seven years.
When our experiences confine us, we often define ourselves by default, which then dictates our lives. I've learned that it's less about what happens to you in life, and more about what you decide about you and your life after it happens.
After losing my extra weight, my memories resurfaced revealing that virtually every aspect of my life was a lie. When I looked closely I saw that I'd built my life as someone else because I'd decided I could no longer be the person I wanted to be. Who do you give yourself permission to be, and why?
Understand you are a combination of who you were born to be, and who you give yourself permission to be --and you can change the ratio anytime.
Your rules and beliefs drive your choices and actions. If you modify the beliefs that are sabotaging or limiting your life, you can create new results just as powerfully. The key is to use your experiences as stepping stones so they propel you forward faster. By recycling your challenges for insight, even the hardest experiences reveal value that empowers you to reconcile those experiences and heal as you move forward.
Baggage is the accumulation of lessons not yet learned just waiting to be transformed into arrows of insight you can use to reach your goals.
That's what recycling your experiences does for you.
Don't worry if you struggle with believing in what you want either. Desire and curiosity is all it takes.
When I wanted to transform my life quickly, respected experts told me I couldn't. However, my curiosity about whether I could along with my desire to do so empowered me to redefine my life from the inside out. I also connected with instincts I didn't know existed.
Your life experiences are an untapped university of knowledge and information just waiting to be utilized.
Recycling mine helped me discover who I am, build on who I wish to be and create a life that reflects my true interests and passions. What I once believed would hold me back instead paved the path for a wonderful new chapter of life.
Instead of working hard to rise above your experiences, comb through them for tools and make them elevators that lift you to new heights in your life. The best in life and love await you. -Charly Emery/Inspire Me Today
About the Author: Charly is a personal strategist and the author of Thank Goodness You Dumped His A**: Use Those Mr. Wrongs to Lead You Straight to Mr. Right.
If I could share 500 words to inspire, this is the important wisdom I'd want to pass along to others...
No matter what you've endured in life, you can "recycle" your experiences into tools and stepping stones that propel you forward faster and simultaneously bounce your baggage to the curb.
If you've ever felt consumed by your choices or challenges, I know how you feel. In my late teens I suffered two incidences of rape that left me emotionally scraping and crawling through a sea of shame and assumptions about what my life could then be. I left the college education I worked so hard to achieve and hid my secrets within a marriage while packing on an extra 50 pounds for almost seven years.
When our experiences confine us, we often define ourselves by default, which then dictates our lives. I've learned that it's less about what happens to you in life, and more about what you decide about you and your life after it happens.
After losing my extra weight, my memories resurfaced revealing that virtually every aspect of my life was a lie. When I looked closely I saw that I'd built my life as someone else because I'd decided I could no longer be the person I wanted to be. Who do you give yourself permission to be, and why?
Understand you are a combination of who you were born to be, and who you give yourself permission to be --and you can change the ratio anytime.
Your rules and beliefs drive your choices and actions. If you modify the beliefs that are sabotaging or limiting your life, you can create new results just as powerfully. The key is to use your experiences as stepping stones so they propel you forward faster. By recycling your challenges for insight, even the hardest experiences reveal value that empowers you to reconcile those experiences and heal as you move forward.
Baggage is the accumulation of lessons not yet learned just waiting to be transformed into arrows of insight you can use to reach your goals.
That's what recycling your experiences does for you.
Don't worry if you struggle with believing in what you want either. Desire and curiosity is all it takes.
When I wanted to transform my life quickly, respected experts told me I couldn't. However, my curiosity about whether I could along with my desire to do so empowered me to redefine my life from the inside out. I also connected with instincts I didn't know existed.
Your life experiences are an untapped university of knowledge and information just waiting to be utilized.
Recycling mine helped me discover who I am, build on who I wish to be and create a life that reflects my true interests and passions. What I once believed would hold me back instead paved the path for a wonderful new chapter of life.
Instead of working hard to rise above your experiences, comb through them for tools and make them elevators that lift you to new heights in your life. The best in life and love await you. -Charly Emery/Inspire Me Today
About the Author: Charly is a personal strategist and the author of Thank Goodness You Dumped His A**: Use Those Mr. Wrongs to Lead You Straight to Mr. Right.
Religious Racism: Texas Church Argues There's a Biblical Precedent For Strict Racial Segregation
Nacogdoches' Appleby Baptist Church commits a sin against humanity.The curse of Ham,” an old-time Biblical (mis)interpretation used to vilify black people and justify slavery and laws against racial intermarriage, is still alive and spreading bigotry in the United States.
The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars.
But the canard is trumpeted loud and clear in an online statement of conviction by Appleby leaders. The East Texas church, 90 miles from Shreveport, La., is “a bit of a throwback, but these people are still out there,” Rachel Tabachnick, a fellow at the think tank Political Research Associates, told Hatewatch. She researches the impact of the religious right on politics and society.
For hundreds of years, the so-called curse of Ham was frequently taught by religious leaders as the source for racial differences, and in more recent times was seized on as a Biblical excuse for segregation and slavery, said Tabachnick. “There’s been a shift, and you don’t often see churches that are this forthright now, but the underlying theme is still there in fundamentalist holdout churches.”
The Appleby church, whose pastor could not immediately be reached for comment, proclaims a litany of racist beliefs on its website: The black descendants of Ham like fair-skinned women, of course. And “the proof of the presence of God among the Israelites was the absence of the black skinned folk of Canaan … It is obvious God is a separator, not a mixer. It is God who set the boundaries.”
And who’s in favor of the races mixing? The church knows: “Satan wants to eliminate color by interracial marriages. Someone will ask why do we have to see color when we look at one another? Why can’t we just see each other as people? The same reason you see a Poodle, German Shepherd, Beagle, etc. God made us different and set the bounds. You don’t get thoroughbreds by taking the fences down. You get thoroughbreds by putting the fences up.”
In case you don’t get the meta-message about thoroughbreds versus mongrels, the church’s statement mangles a Biblical passage in Matthew in which a Canaanite woman pleads with Christ on behalf of her daughter, who is assumed by the Appleby church to be black. “Christ terms her people as dogs,” the church says. “‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs.’ … Unlike modern day blacks yelling about equal rights, this woman humbles herself and says ‘Truth Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.’”
The bottom line: Why don’t blacks know their place? Read the Bible!
Hewing to an extreme fundamentalist principle, Appleby condemns ancient Hebrews for “immorality, idolatry, and interracial marriages.” We’re seeing the punishment to this day, it insists. “Interracial relationships bring much heartache. … Before the coming of Christ, there will be many more half-breed producing marriages that will, in turn, produce more hate and envy against what the Lord has commanded.”
In case you wondered where the love of Christ fits in with all this, the church has an answer: “In Salvation, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ In salvation, there is no difference, but when it comes to marriage, there is.”
Finally, for proponents of our 13th Amendment, the church helpfully reminds us that slavery is fine with God. “The New Testament does not condemn slavery,” it says. “What it does condemn is the misuse of a slave.”
Although such overt racism is certainly waning in fundamentalist Christianity, especially in the Southern Baptist Convention (which now has a black president for the first time), Tabachnick worries about remaining outposts.
And there’s great concern about the increased teaching of Biblical literalism to thousands of U.S. children. Homeschooling is on the upswing, and public dollars are flowing into private schools through vouchers and corporate tax credit programs, she points out. In textbooks used by students in these programs “some of the foundations for the Biblical justification of racism and slavery are still being widely taught,” Tabachnick said.
So the same seeds of hatred proudly displayed by Appleby and an unknown number of other independent fundamentalist churches are scattering, planted to grow in coming generations. -By Marilyn Elias/AlterNet/April 26, 2013
Debt Slavery: 30 Facts About Debt In America That Will Blow Your Mind
When most people think about America’s debt problem, they think of the debt of the federal government. But that is only part of the story. The sad truth is that debt slavery has become a way of life for tens of millions of American families. Over the past several decades, most Americans have willingly allowed themselves to become enslaved to debt. These days, most of us are busy either going into even more debt or paying off the debt that we have accumulated in the past. When your finances are dominated by debt, it makes it really hard to ever get ahead. Incredibly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year. Even while median household income continues to decline (now less than $50,000 a year), median household debt continues to go up. According to the Federal Reserve, median household debt in America has risen to $75,600. Many Americans spend decades caught in the trap of debt slavery. Large numbers of them never even escape at all and die in debt. It can be a lot of fun to spend lots of money and go into lots of debt, but it can be absolutely soul crushing to toil and labor for years paying off those debts while making others wealthy in the process. Hopefully this article will inspire many people to try to escape the chains of debt slavery once and for all.Because the truth is that the American people need a wake up call. Consumer borrowing rose by another $19.3 billion in December. Right now it is sitting at a grand total of $2.5 trillion according to the Federal Reserve.
Overall, consumer debt in America has increased by a whopping 1700% since 1971.
We always criticize the federal government for going into so much debt, but we rarely criticize ourselves for our own addiction to debt.
Debt slavery is destroying millions of lives all across this country, and it is imperative that we educate the American people about the dangers of all this debt.
The following are 30 facts about debt in America that will absolutely blow your mind….
Credit Card Debt
#1 Today, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.
#2 Overall, Americans are carrying a grand total of $798 billion in credit card debt.
#3 If you were alive when Jesus was born and you spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent $798 billion by now.
#4 Right now, there are more than 600 million active credit cards in the United States.
#5 For households that have credit card debt, the average amount of credit card debt is an astounding $15,799.
#6 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#7 The average interest rate on a credit card that is carrying a balance is now up to 13.10 percent.
#8 According to the credit card calculator on the Federal Reserve website, if you have a $10,000 credit card balance and you are being charged a rate of 13.10 percent and you only make the minimum payment each time, it will take you 27 years to pay it off and you will end up paying back a total of $21,271.
#9 There is one credit card company out there, First Premier, that charges interest rates of up to 49.9 percent. Amazingly, First Premier has 2.6 million customers.
Auto Loan Debt
#10 The length of auto loans in America just keeps getting longer and longer. If you can believe it, 45 percent of all new car loans being made today are for more than 6 years.
#11 Approximately 70 percent of all car purchases in the United States involve an auto loan.
#12 A subprime auto loan bubble is steadily building. Today, 45 percent of all auto loans are made to subprime borrowers. At some point that is going to be a massive problem.
Mortgage Debt
#13 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.
#14 Mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP has more than tripled since 1955.
#15 According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, approximately 8 million Americans are at least one month behind on their mortgage payments.
#16 Historically, the percentage of residential mortgages in foreclosure in the United States has tended to hover between 1 and 1.5 percent. Today, it is up around 4.5 percent.
#17 According to Dylan Ratigan, 46 percent of all mortgaged properties in Florida are underwater, 50 percent of all mortgaged properties in Arizona are underwater and 63 percent of all mortgaged properties in Nevada are underwater.
#18 Overall, nearly 29 percent of all homes with a mortgage in the United States are underwater.
#19 If you can believe it, the mortgage lenders now have more equity in U.S. homes than the American people do.
Medical Debt
#20 Medical debt is a major problem for a growing number of Americans. One study discovered that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
#21 Sadly, the number of Americans that are protected by health insurance continues to decline. An all-time record 49.9 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all right now, and the percentage of Americans covered by employer-based health plans has fallen for 11 years in a row.
#22 But even if you do have health insurance, there is still a good chance that you could end up with huge medical debt problems. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.
Student Loan Debt
#23 Total student loan debt in the United States is rapidly approaching 1 trillion dollars.
#24 If you went out right now and starting spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#25 In America today, approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loan debt.
#26 The average student loan debt load is now approximately $25,000.
#27 After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago.
#28 One survey found that 23 percent of all college students actually use credit cards to pay for tuition or fees.
#29 The student loan default rate has nearly doubled since 2005.
#30 Student loans made to directly to parents have increased by 75 percent since the 2005-2006 academic year.
At this point, most Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt. According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
Our entire economy has become based on credit.
Do you need a car?
Just get an auto loan.
Do you need a house?
Just get a mortgage.
Do you need to fill up your house with stuff?
Just get a credit card.
Do you need an education?
Just get a student loan.
In fact, if you are anything like a typical American, you probably have a mortgage you can barely afford, you probably have at least one auto loan, you probably have several credit card balances and you probably have a student loan that you deeply regret.
So what should you do if you are drowning in debt?
First, make a firm decision that you are going to break the chains of debt slavery once and for all.
Secondly, come up with a plan to reduce your debt. Paying off debt that carries a high rate of interest first (such as credit card debt) is usually a good idea.
The big financial institutions want to get us into as much debt as possible, because all of this debt makes them incredibly wealthy.
Don’t play their game.
Yes, that may mean that you may have to put off certain purchases until you can come up with the money, but in the long run you will be much better off. -By Michael/The American Dream/February 9, 2012
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