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AlterNet’s Ten Most Popular Stories of 2006

AlterNet’s Ten Most Popular Stories of 2006

Here’s an interesting list from AlterNet – their ten most popular stories of the year. ALterNet is a great resource, although a couple of the stories surprised me.

They also have the top ten most discussed (which leans hard on 9/11), the top ten Iraq myths, the top ten outrageous right-wing comments of 2006, the top ten most popular book reviews, the top ten sex and relationship stories, and my personal favorite – a meta-list of the top ten top-ten lists of 2006.

AlterNet published thousands of articles in 2006 — here are the 10 that readers liked the most.

10. Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s Oil
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as “the prize.”

9. Stephen Colbert: New American Hero
By Don Hazen, AlterNet
When Colbert turned up the heat on Washington’s elite, he revealed the big split between those basking in power and those fighting for change.

8. Where Bush’s Arrogance Has Taken Us
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
An illegal war, a long list of eroded rights, and a country run by and for the benefit of corporate campaign donors — all courtesy of the imperial presidency.

7. Lobbying for Armageddon
By Sarah Posner, AlterNet
Some influential evangelical leaders are lobbying for an attack on Iran. But it’s not about geopolitics — it’s about bringing about the End Times.

6. Why Religion Must End
By Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet
A leading atheist says people must embrace rationalism, not faith — or they will never overcome their differences.

5. Tyranny of the Christian Right
By Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet
The largest and most powerful mass movement in the nation — evangelical Christianity — has set out to destroy secular society.

4. Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
by Jan Frel, AlterNet
A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the ‘supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.’

3. Iraq’s War Porn
By David Swanson, Tomdispatch.com
We believe the war would end if the media showed more images of the human horrors in Iraq, yet we turn away when they’re placed in front of us. Not anymore.

2. Men Who Love Burgers and Loathe Sex
By Susie Bright, HuffingtonPost.com
There’s an unhappy host of young men who seem to have soured on the mating game — but why?

1. Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State
by Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast
From secret detention centers to warrantless wiretapping, Bush and Co. give free rein to their totalitarian impulses.

Check out the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006, too.

Evangelical Atheists Oppose Christian Nationalism

Evangelical Atheists Oppose Christian Nationalism

I would like to see more opposition to the (so-called) christian nationalism (or dominionism) movement that has such a destructive effect on the American values of liberty, justice, and freedom.

Opposition from the perspective of atheism(s) is one method:

As an “out atheist,” Collette-Van Deraa said she often feels scorned as the other – “capital O in quotes.”

“There are misconceptions that atheists hate anyone who is in organized religion, or that atheists are baby killers or old-people killers,” she said. “There is a sense that atheists to some extent can’t be sensitive to the spiritual views of others.”

Though theologically not a religious group, the courts have increasingly ruled atheism deserves the same protections.

“And it should,” said Derek H. Davis, a Baptist who has written about atheism and is dean of the college of humanities and graduate school at University of Mary-Hardin Baylor in Texas. “Nonreligion as a worldview needs to be treated like a religious worldview in terms of giving people protections to live out their conscience.”

A cyborg alliance across groups that would suffer should the ideas of dominionist movement gain further traction would be helpful. The issue of net neutrality has shown that there can be unlikely alliances between people and groups who agree on little else, but can work together on a specific issue. Right now, many decent people are being manipulated into giving up many of the central messages of christianity – compassion, forgiveness (and perhaps most importantly) kindness toward others.

I was involved with the JWs for many years; their rule-based authoritarian regime looks less and less “fringy” in American life. Just when it seemed (to me, at least) that we were actually moving toward a society of freedom and justice for all, intolerance and hate went on the upswing.

From within organized religion, spiritual leaders of various paths must raise their voices to oppose fear-hate-control religious movements – and remind their people of the ethical paths of wisdom and compassion within their diverse disciplines. You can’t force spiritual insight or affinity using the methods and ideas that are antithetical to the whole point, just as you just can’t force “democracy” at gunpoint and expect that it will be democracy.

Whether by opposition or better example, the time is now to hold the manipulation up to the light. Atheism is not the only position to take, but the rights of those who do not believe in the God of contemporary hardline right-wing-affiliated Christianity matter just as much as anyone else in America. There is plenty of ammunition to support atheism these days – especially if you actually associate dominionists and other such power-mongers with God. (We’ll leave the issues of hypocrisy and cynicism to the side for the moment. I personally believe that it’s really all about the power and the money.)

There is no “generic” atheist. There are atheists who oppose any notion of God, there are atheists who are just not interested in ideas about God, there are atheists who are more humble toward religious reality than the ones who thump their chests about it, there are atheists who believe God is dead, there are atheists who see atheism as a religious position, there are atheists who really only oppose the views of God to which they have been exposed. There is a diversity of opinion on any given issue, except that – overall – there is some agreement that agenda of the christian nationalists should be opposed on the basis of freedom of (and freedom from) religion. This is something that affects everyone (even christians!). Americans should not be forced to be christian. The particular pseudo-christianity that is being shoved into being is powerful insult upon injury.

Once when Jesus and His disciples were traveling to Jerusalem, they were refused lodging in a Samaritan village. “And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, ‘Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?’ But He turned and rebuked them, and said, ‘You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.’ And they went to another village” (Luke 9:54-56).

The results of the recent election give me hope, but when you consider the wide range of Republican offenses, the numbers were still very close. Too close. It should have been a landslide in every race. Now is the time for Democrats to show what they can do – and there is a lot to do. If they are successful across many fronts, perhaps this country can begin to reorient itself, to recover and thrive. The damage to our system of government and to our citizens has been great. The next several weeks will be very dangerous as the last session of the current Congress tries to push through whatever it can while Republicans still hold the majority.

Americans shouldn’t be traveling with people who want to regulate the whole country under one theology, especially this theology of power and control. The power-hungry manipulators (of any religion) who use religion as a tool to control the masses have missed the central messages of faith. This reality resonates with people of deeper and kinder and more loving faith – in American, in the Middle East, and all over the world. If a messiah or prophet showed up, for the first or second or thousandth time, these would be the first in line to scapegoat, jail, institutionalize, behead, hang, or stone her/him to death. And in the name of God, too.

If there really is a God of Love, I say that God weeps to see what is said and done in God’s name.

“I pray you, Lord, make me taste by love what I taste by knowledge; let me know by love what I know by understanding”
— Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

“What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor. The rest is commentary” –Hillel the Elder

atheism

Faith, Power, Pluralism

Faith, Power, Pluralism

Jesus Is Not a Republican By RANDALL BALMER
Volume 52, Issue 42, Page B6

Nicely thought-out piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education – worth your time to read. A sampling to whet your appetite:

Equally striking is the rhetoric that leaders of the religious right use to motivate their followers. In the course of traveling around the country, I have been impressed anew by the pervasiveness of the language of militarism among leaders of the religious right. Patrick Henry College, according to its founding president, Michael Farris, “is training an army of young people who will lead the nation and shape the culture with biblical values.” Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, in Ohio, issues swords to those who join his organization, the Center for Moral Clarity, and calls on his followers to “lock and load” for a “Holy Ghost invasion.” The Traditional Values Coalition advertises its “Battle Plan” to take over the federal judiciary. “I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare,” Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, famously declared about his political tactics in 1997. I wonder how that sounds in the ears of the Prince of Peace.

America has been kind to religion, but not because the government has imposed religious faith or practice on its citizens. Quite the opposite. Religion has flourished because religious belief and expression have been voluntary, not compulsory. We are a religious people precisely because we have recognized the rights of our citizens to be religious in a different way from us, or even not to be religious at all. We are simultaneously a people of faith and citizens of a pluralistic society, one in which Americans believe that it is inappropriate, even oppressive, to impose the religious views of a minority — or even of a majority — on all of society. That is the genius of America, and it is also the reason that religion thrives here as nowhere else.

Evangelicals need once again to learn to be a counterculture, much as they were before the rise of the religious right, before succumbing to the seductions of power. The early followers of Jesus were a counterculture because they stood apart from the prevailing order. A counterculture can provide a critique of the powerful because it is utterly disinterested — it has no investment in the power structure itself.

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