Universal Life Church

Many of us are already aware of all of the retail weddings, adventure weddings, and other alternative wedding ceremonies that have redefined the way people tie the knot, but now yet another monkey-wrench has been thrown into the cogs of the wheels running the traditional wedding industry. Soon, brides and grooms may get the chance to be married by their favorite pop icon: megastar Lady GaGa has announced plans to become a legally ordained minister.

The worldwide-famous singer of Poker Face and Alejandro, a supporter of gay rights who has inveighed strongly against the passage of California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, has stated that she intends to become ordained as a minister so that she can legally perform weddings for her gay fans, a goal which has only been bolstered by the recent federal court ruling repealing the ban. Quoting Heat Magazine, On Top Magazine reports that the star is currently taking online courses in how to become a legal wedding officiant and has undertaken completion of the necessary paperwork to finalize her ordination.

And just as bungee-jumping, skydiving, and even ceremonies held inside Taco Bell and Home Depot have helped to modernize the traditional wedding ceremony and make it more relevant and meaningful to modern-day couples, so are Lady GaGa’s plans for solemnizing her fans’ nuptials. According to Showbiz Spy and MTV, she plans to incorporate the ceremonies into her live concerts by performing them onstage, where fans will exchange wedding vows in front of audiences characterized largely by a younger, more liberal generation fed up with convention.

The singer has had much to say on her own behalf about the traditional definition of marriage, how it hinders civil rights for loving couples by fixating on procreation and sexual anatomy, and how recent civil rights achievements have inspired her songwriting. After Judge Vaughn Walker repealed Proposition 8, the artist famously wrote on her Twitter feed: “At the moment’s notice of PROP 8 death [sic] I instantly began to write music.” Moments later, she tweeted in emphatic majuscule letters, “REJOICE and CELEBRATE…. Our voices are being heard! Loud! SCREAM LOUD AMERICANOS!” And at a recent MTV awards ceremony, the singer showed her gratitude for receiving 13 Video Music Award nominations, stating, “God put me on Earth for 3 reasons: To make loud music, [make] gay videos, and cause a damn raucous.”

But the singer’s efforts in promoting marriage equality have not met without opposition. According to Gawker, Apple’s new social networking Web site Ping has censored the comments the star made about the reversal of Proposition 8: “Apple left out a string of tweets in which GaGa lauds the downfall of California’s anti-gay marriage law in its introduction of Ping, the new iTunes-based social network which lets you connect with artists and other music fans”. Could this action on the part of Ping stir up a debate over freedom of speech and media bias? It is food for thought.

It remains to be seen how Lady GaGa’s new sacerdotal aspirations will play out in the end, at least in California. The federal appeals court currently reviewing the Proposition 8 case is not expected to arrive at a decision until December. In the mean time, one can only imagine the glittering spectacle a Lady GaGa concert-wedding would consist of, and what a paradigm shift it would entail for the sacrament of holy matrimony in general.

Sources:

MTV UK

One India

On Top Magazine (Article 1)

On Top Magazine (Article 2)

Showbiz Spy

The largest Lutheran denomination in the United States appears to be on the brink of a schism as the result of differences among members. Sentiments have become divided over the organization’s movement away from strict, evangelical, Bible-based fundamentalism, and towards a more egalitarian acceptance of women and sexual minorities. The split highlights the growing theological chasm between those who cling devoutly to Biblical authority on one hand, and those who believe in social justice and vindication for scorned “sinners” on the other. Of course, the fundamentalists are right, for the Bible told them so—or are they?

The split came one step closer 27 August in a Protestant megachurch in Ohio, at a meeting of conservative Lutherans. In a preliminary vote, 199 congregations belonging to the Lutheran Coalition of Renewal (Lutheran CORE) voted to break away from the Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), creating the much smaller and more conservative North American Lutheran Church. 136 congregations refrained from voting, awaiting the second vote to make the split official. (Ironic how the ELCA contains the word evangelical, but turns out to be less preoccupied with notions of scriptural authority.)

The underlying motivation for breaking off from the ELCA is a devotion to Biblical teachings. Lutheran CORE activists treat the Bible as the source of all moral instruction and criticize the ELCA as straying from this “one-and-only” holy book of “truth”. Paraphrasing Paull Spring, the bishop of the brand new fundamentalist offshoot, Andrew Welsh-Huggins of the Associated Press reports that conservative Lutherans have “serious concerns about the ELCA’s movement away from holy scriptures as the final authority for church beliefs”. However, ELCA members—who tend to believe that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God, but rather a collection of texts composed by imperfect human beings—argue that the church’s goal should not be to stick stubbornly to hierarchical scriptural teachings, but to adapt to new, more egalitarian social paradigms.

One of the social policies adopted by the ELCA is a renewed commitment to dismantling old-style ecclesiastical patriarchy and fostering gender equality. But for Spring, the gender-neutral language used by his more liberal cohorts—such as the substitution of “Creator” and “Savior” for “Father” and “Son”—is just one example how the church has gone astray by stripping away the purported maleness of the Judeo-Christian God. Referring to gender roles and how they should be determined, Spring asks, “Is it holy scripture, which Lutherans have always confessed, scripture alone, or is it supposed to be some combination, that as well as some mood of the times?” For Spring, the answer is clear: the role of women should be determined by books authored by males which were deemed authoritatively divine centuries later by early Church fathers—who were male—and who were somehow divinely inspired by God to make a determination which very conveniently happened to give dominion to males. Of course, there was not yet an official Christian canon to dictate the divine inspiration of these bishops in the first place, but the convenient thing about blind faith is that one can ignore such logical conundrums and render one’s sheep prostrate simply by preaching louder, harder, and more passionately, and by employing rhetoric more shrewdly than ever. The notion is that if it has always been this way (as established so conveniently by these early church fathers) it therefore ought to remain this way. This, however, is an is/ought fallacy: just because something has been a certain way does not mean it should be, because does and should are not interchangeable. Of course, blind faith does away with this logical problem, too. Just preach harder, and sweat a lot, precious Bible in hand.

But perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back is the ELCA’s ordination of ministers and other clergy members who are gay. Even some fundamentalist Lutheran congregations allow women to be pastors—as long as they preach from a holy book that dictates male domination of women. It is hard to make this exception for non-celibate gay pastors. (After all, it is hard to ordain somebody in a church whose holy book commands that that person shall be put to death.) As Welsh-Huggins reports, the vote by Lutheran CORE members was motivated largely by “the ELCA’s decision to move gay pastors into its fold”, and this move, which made the ELCA “the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. to allow noncelibate gays into its ranks”, proved to be “the tipping point for many Lutherans”. But for the Lutheran CORE and its new North American Lutheran Church, they are only following the teachings of the holy Bible, which, of course, we have just demonstrated are perfectly sound and divinely inspired, a legacy preserved by heterosexual males who certainly do not have positions of power to protect. Perhaps this new denomination can go yet a step further and truly fulfill God’s will by ordering that all adulteresses, or people who touch pig-skin, be put to death. After all, this too is commanded in their “divinely inspired” book. But why has this not yet been done, one might ask? No worry—they will pull something of their sleeve to help them out of this pinch.

Despite all of the arguments against the North American Lutheran Church’s split from the more socially progressive ELCA, there are surely a host of convenient excuses to obscure their fundamentally irrational and ill-conceived resistance to gender equality and homosexuality. But one stands out above the rest. Quite simply, the Bible says so—no matter how hard one thinks about it. And, of course, the church fathers who compiled the Bible just happened to be the voice-pieces of a ventriloquist father-god. Remember—don’t think about it. Just believe.

Source:

Associated Press

Colbert first took a shot at the phobia gripping the public by pointing out some of the inherently Arabic, Islamic, or Middle-eastern customs and practices mistakenly taken for granted as Western: “Interesting side-note: one in five Americans also believe polls are Muslim—they do use Arabic numerals”. It makes one wonder how many anti-Muslim zealots actually know that the numerical system they use is Arabic in origin. It also makes one wonder how many Americans know that, while many innovators of algebra were Greek and its origins can be traced back to ancient Indian mathematics, the word algebra comes from the Arabic word al-jabr, meaning “restoration”, while many algebraic methods currently used in American high-school classrooms are also Arabic in origin. (But don’t expect the average high-school student to tell you this.)

But what was Colbert’s solution for Obama’s purportedly Islamic mien? The president, he suggests, just needs to try harder to foist his evangelical Protestant faith on the Bible-hungry masses—but with a savvy modern twist. “First of all, he needs to go to church. And I know that he has, but he needs to go to church harder! Maybe Twitter from the pew, or at least—at least carry a Bible wherever he goes. Like Jesus says in Matthew 5:47: ‘Pray big, or go home.’” (Actually, this notion of using technology for religious worship isn’t so novel after all. In previous posts, we’ve discussed the consecration of laptop computers and mobile telephones, the ritual blessing of motorcycles, and the relationship between spirituality and social networking.) But let’s not stop there. Why not urge the president to hold prayer meetings in the oval office, or lavish Christian-themed balls in the East Ballroom of the White House? Perhaps Michelle Obama can re-decorate the whole White House to replicate the set of the TBN series “Praise the Lord”, replete with ornate, gaudy, fake-gold chairs. Maybe then the American public will be satisfied the leader of their nation, founded on the official separation of church and state, is “Christian enough”. Oh, wait, there is that pesky little establishment clause of the First Amendment forbidding government endorsement of religion, which was set up by all those atheists and deists who helped found the United States.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Colbert also lampooned the barefaced hate, racism, and ignorance of the Ground Zero thugs who cornered a black man who looked Muslim. While a video clip ran showing the man trying to squirm his way through the crowd, the comedian sarcastically declaimed,

This gathering of peace-loving hate-lovers was ruined when a Muslim had the gall to walk through the crowd! There he is wearing his Islamic terror-hat and his al-Qaeda cosy fleece pullover. Luckily, there were some alert patriots who immediately shouted him down. Just listen to him respond by spewing his Muslim hate-speech: “You didn’t ask who I was. I want no trouble. [...]. I’m not even Muslim!”

As it turns out, the poor man was just a black man named Kenny, one of the carpenters working on the construction of the new World Trade Center. All it takes it to wear the wrong clothing and have the wrong skin color to be vilified as a murdering jihadist—even if you are working on repairing the very structure destroyed by such jihadists.

If that isn’t enough to turn your stomach, some of the sophistries demonstrators were spewing will. At one point, the video reel depicted a man wearing an American flag headscarf and holding a sign that read “You can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a synagogue in Mecca”. The witty Colbert retorted, “Not only a moving battle-cry, but also a very patriotic yarmulke.” But the sign’s message is underlyingly fallacious. The logic (if one can call it that) is basically as follows: “If we can’t practice religion freely on private property in your country, then you can’t practice religion freely on private property in our country. And yet the very reason we dislike you is because you object to democratic principles and civil rights such as practicing religion freely on private property.” This makes no sense. If the reason one dislikes another group is because that group does not cherish the same freedoms, it is nonsensical to mimic that group by denying the same freedoms. The logical, and magnanimous, thing to do would be to show Muslim fundamentalists the error of their ways by proving that they can practice religion freely on private property in the United States, not by mimicking the same error.

So there we have it, folks. Yet another delicious and satisfying morsel of satire flaying the skin off sugar-coated mock-patriotism and exposing it for what it is—plain old chauvinism. Oh, by the way. Newsflash: millions of Muslim children are at risk of cholera in the Pakistan floods, and a wave of deadly bombings has killed dozens of Muslim civilians in Iraq. But that’s just world news, and they’re just innocent Muslim civilians.

Source:

Colbertnation.com

For anybody with an IQ over 70, the current opposition to mosque construction in the United States—and not just the proposed mosque at Ground Zero—reflects nothing more than sanctioned xenophobia. The arguments of opponents betray a consistent pattern of ignorance—ignorance of the Islamic faith, of the mosque’s actual function, of the fact that opposition to mosque construction extends across the country, and is not just an exception made for the Ground Zero memorial site, and of the problems with fighting fire with fire. Perhaps most disturbing of all is how persuasive the right-wing’s glaringly hypocritical and fear-based rhetoric is to the average American, who eats it up with rabid, juvenile zeal.

The first of these arguments, that the proposed mosque at Ground Zero is being sponsored by the same type of jihadists who murdered 3,000 people on 9/11, is simply false. The sponsors of the Ground Zero mosque are not jihadists—they are Sufists, followers of a moderate, peaceful, mystical branch of Islam. In fact, jihadists despise Sufism. As Wayne Besen of The Huffington Post explains, Sufists “hate” radical Islam so much, “that fundamentalists have intimidated many [Sufists] and attacked [their] shrines in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.” So, no, the Muslims sponsoring the Ground Zero mosque are not like the 9/11 extremists, and it is not valid to claim that all Islam is co-extensive with fundamentalist Islam; it would be like claiming all Christians are Crusaders or Spanish Inquisitors, and we know this is not true. In fact, if anything, the Sufists who propose the Ground Zero mosque are in the same boat as Christians—they are both the subjects of jihadist attacks, so, if anything, they should be standing in solidarity with one another.

The second argument claims that these “extremists” want to build a “victory mosque” at Ground Zero. Well, this claim already falls apart since we have just proved that these Muslims are not extremists, so they could not be endorsing an extremist triumphal mosque in the first place. But let us grind this specious claim into dust with one further refutation. As Besen points out, the mosque endorsers “have gone out of their way to explain the project and mollify fears. The center represents an olive branch to other faiths and hopes to promote a peaceful brand of Islam.” Therefore, the proposed mosque is not intended as a symbol of extremist victory, but as a symbol of peace and solidarity among all people—regardless of their religion—who suffer at the hands of religious terrorism. How mosque opponents are able to interpret this interfaith peace-building mission as one of holy war and fundamentalist infiltration—especially when it is being proposed by people who are themselves being oppressed by fundamentalists—is beyond bizarre.

According to the third argument, mosque opponents do not wish to ban Islamic institutions nationwide—they only wish to stop the proposed structure at Ground Zero. But this, too, is false. Islamophobes have opposed construction of Islamic spiritual centers and places of worship all across the United States. Take the example of the proposed Islamic community center in the suburbs of Nashville, Tenn. As Blake Farmer of NPR explains, “[r]ecently hundreds of protesters marched around the town square in Murfreesboro, Tenn. They carried signs that read, ‘Enough Is Enough’ and ‘Stop Terrorism’.” Meanwhile, showing that the sentiment was inspired by the 9/11 attacks, a woman in the crowd shouted out, “[h]ave you forgotten the twin towers?” (Apparently she is certain that the same people who would attend the proposed Nashville center are just like the jihadists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.) So, yes, opposition to the construction of Islamic institutions is epidemic in America. Following the logic of opponents, the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution suddenly becomes arbitrary and no longer counts when, say, a Muslim center is proposed at Ground Zero, or, say, in a Nashville suburb. Who knew it was so easy to cherry-pick constitutional rights? And yet these same people do not decry places such as Westboro Baptist Church, the followers of which are infamous for parading around with giant placards proclaiming, “God Hates Fags”, which, arguably, would instill terror in the spectator. Now just ask yourself, that doesn’t seem very fair, does it?

Of course, one might argue, “but somebody can be a hypocrite and still be right.” True. And one might counter that this ultimately makes no difference, because we still have a First Amendment which says all of these groups can practice their religion freely—as long as they do not impinge on the civil and human rights of others. (And this includes criminal restrictions on malicious harassment.) And if we are going to inveigh against sharia law, let us not forget the Christian Bible, which justifies stoning adulteresses to death.

One final point to be made is that some mosque opponents have actually invoked violence as a viable solution to the threat of fundamentalist Islam—which, ironically, they oppose because of its violence. Xenophobic tidbits are to be found everywhere on the Internet, but the following user comment, from the ultra-right-wing publication Front Page Magazine, takes the cake: “We are going to have to resist with violence and even then I think it is too late to save the country. The barbarians have breached the gates.” (A subtly jingoistic allusion to the Ottomans’ sacking of Constantinople, perhaps?) So the logic, then, is to defend against the one thing we fear—violence—with, well, with the one thing we fear—violence, hoping that “our” violence is a justified pre-emptive strike. But a pre-emptive strike against whom? We have already established that the Muslims sponsoring the Ground Zero mosque are peace-loving Sufists, not hijacking jihadists, so all we are left to assume is that these indignant and unruly spawn of the Judeo-Christian tradition would entertain the idea of inflicting violence on religio-cultural diplomats. The illogic is galling.

We have established that opposition to mosque construction makes no sense for at least four reasons (there are more, but they would not accommodate the brevity of this article). The first is that the mosque is being endorsed by peaceful Sufists who are being oppressed by the very same type of jihadists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks; the second is that the mosque is not a “victory mosque” symbolizing jihadist triumph over the West, but a gesture of peace proposed by said Sufists; the third is that mosque opposition is not just an exception made for the Ground Zero site, but is a nationwide trend that flies in the face of the very same constitutional protections that opponents themselves seek to preserve; and the fourth is that it makes no sense to denounce violence only to use violence to oppose violence—especially when your imagined “enemy” is not in fact the perpetrator, but a fellow victim of the same violence. We are left, then, with just one conclusion—mosque opponents are xenophobes.

Can you provide a sound argument in support of the current opposition to mosque construction? Please share it with us.

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Sources:

Front Page Magazine

The Huffington Post

National Public Radio