Universal Life Church

Despite the ideological differences between France and the Roman Catholic Church, it turns out the two see eye-to-eye on at least one human rights issue receiving attention in the news lately: French first lady Carla Bruni and the Vatican have both formally denounced the proposed stoning of an Iranian woman for transgressing against the tenets of the Islamic faith. The unlikely alliance might be seen to illustrate a general Western disapproval for fundamentalist Islamic practices. Ultimately, the indignant backlash from Iran against the condemnation has proved to be a weak and desperate attempt to justify the practice.

It is the first time the Universal Church of Rome has issued a formal statement showing interest in diplomatic efforts to save the life of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old widow and mother of two who has been cleared of charges she tried to murder her husband, but who remains on trial on charges of adultery. The statement roundly criticized the proposed stoning method in particular as an inhumane form of capital punishment, but the Vatican spokesman Rev. Frederico Lombardi has also expressed the Church’s opposition to the death penalty in general. Of course, the Church has not always categorically opposed the practice (as anybody can tell by a basic understanding of history) and it has had to wrestle with early Christian teachings which are ambiguous at best on the topic, but if the point is to stop the execution, the Church should be abandoning its traditional stance anyway.

Echoing the view of the Vatican, French first lady Carla Bruni and president Nicholas Sarkozy have both voiced their support for Ashtiani, and citizens have expressed their outrage by marching in cities across the largely secular French Republic. Meanwhile, as BBC’s Christian Fraser reports, “France has urged the United Nations to threaten new sanctions over the case”. Going a step further, Bruni wrote a personal letter to the accused adulteress, in which she expressed her sympathy and an inability to comprehend the fairness of such a punishment:

I just can’t see what good could come out of this macabre ceremony, whatever the judicial reasons put forward to justify it. Shed your blood and deprive children of their mother, why? Because you have lived, because you have loved, because you’re a woman and because you’re Iranian? Everything within me refuses to accept this.

Iran state newspaper Kayhan (whose editor is a representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) wasted no time in responding to the heartfelt and impassioned missive. A recent editorial in the paper titled “French prostitutes join the human rights protest” slammed Bruni for being a hypocrite, citing allegations she dismissed back in April that she had an affair with a singer. French actress Isabelle Adjani, a friend of Bruni, has also been criticized by Kayhan as a prostitute and a hypocrite.

The issue is complicated enough as it is without going into every detail. (Visit Care 2 Make a Difference Web site in the links below to read about the case in greater depth.) Here let us focus on the response from Iran’s state media (for what it is worth).

The response consists of a specific type of attack ad hominem. Rather than respond to Bruni’s actual argument against the practice of stoning, the editor (a mouthpiece of Iran’s religious leader) distracts from her point by pointing out her own purported adulterousness. However, this is a tu quoque argument, or an appeal to hypocrisy. Even if Bruni were a prostitute or an adulteress herself, this fact would not discredit her argument, because a person can fail to practice what they preach, and what they preach can still be correct. So, Bruni’s personal life has no bearing on the issue at hand, which is whether a woman—a widow and a mother—deserves to be beaten to death with rocks just because she may have had sex with somebody other than her husband.

Of course, this sort of reasoning will likely prove futile as it falls on the deaf ears of right-wing religious fundamentalists who stick stubbornly to the tenets of their faith, but it is not just fundamentalists who are listening—it is also the average citizen, not to mention Western diplomats. If the mere idea of stoning somebody to death for adultery does not strike one as barbaric already, it will certainly seem so if the desperately irrational tone of its defenders is highlighted as it has been above. It provides only more reason for decrying the practice.

It is also satisfying to see an institution like the Catholic Church, which has seen much scrutiny in recent months over allegations of child molestation, take a high-profile stance against human rights violations in unison with such a proudly secular state as France. Hopefully the two can overcome their differences with regard to religion in order to focus their efforts on what really counts.

As our ministers already know, the Universal Life Church Monastery strongly believes in the right of the individual to live their life as they see fit so long as this does not infringe on the rights of others and is within the law, so we offer our support to Ashtiani, increase awareness of her plight, and, even if only in some oblique way, to peacefully change the minds of her oppressors.

Sources:

The BBC

Care 2 Make a Difference (Article 1)

Care 2 Make a Difference (Article 2)

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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

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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

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