“Be a Hitler”

I have written many times about how there is a militant and bigoted group of Buddhists that includes Buddhist monks who feel that Sri Lanka should be a purely Sinhala Buddhist country and that every other ethnic-religious group does not belong. They have incited mobs to attack non-Sinhala Buddhists, most recently against the Muslim minority. Now a leading monk has gone to the next level, explicitly urging a presidential candidate to adopt Hitler as a model.
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The little-known story of the San Antonio Four

I have written before about cases of people who were incarcerated for long periods of time even though they were innocent of the crime. On a broadcast of the radio program Latino USA I recently learned of the case of four women who were convicted of Satanic sexual abuse and rape of two young nieces of one of the women. This was at the height of the hysteria over Satanic acts perpetrated on children in day care centers and the like.
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Give the religious an inch and they’ll try to take a mile

The US Supreme Court frequently takes up cases involving the Establishment Clause about the extent to which religious elements can be introduced into the public sphere. Rather than unequivocally declare that it should never be allowed and thus ending the debate once and for all, a decision that would likely result in them having to face the wrath of the religious in America, they have instead tried to rule very narrowly, inserting intricate conditions on when such things can be allowed. They have done this with prayers, religious displays, and the like.
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Now that’s what I call a swearing in

Many people think that before you can hold any public office, you have to swear on the Bible. Some think that any religious text will suffice. But Mariah Parker, who was elected as a county commissioner in Georgia, decided to show that this was false in the most emphatic way. She not only swore on a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X held by her beaming and clearly proud mother, her other hand was raised in a clenched fist while she did so.

Way to go, Mariah! We need more people breaking these silly traditions.

Excellent critique of Sam Harris

I came across this excellent and thoughtful critique of Sam Harris (and in passing the members of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ that he belongs to) by someone who identifies himself as T1J. The title of the video is Why I Stopped Idolizing Sam Harris and, as the author explains, “While I don’t hate Sam Harris like some other progressives, he has stopped being the intellectual hero that he once was in my eyes.” The video explains the reasons for that disenchantment. The video is 23 minutes long but is so well done that I did not notice the time passing.
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Good luck with that appeal, bishop!

A Catholic bishop in Ireland says that those Catholics who voted in favor of repealing the ban on abortion have committed a sin and should go to confession. He tried to explain the vote.

He said the result indicated something “a little bit shocking” in Irish society. “There are cultural Catholics and committed Catholics… To be honest, many people would consider themselves Catholics, religion has become somewhat divorced from faith.”

He said “I think perhaps one of the problems we face is that for too long we’ve tended to rely exclusively on a model of faith formation which is addressed to young people in schools, and apart from the Sunday homily there hasn’t been serious faith formation in our parishes.

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Irish abortion ban overturned

With most of the votes counted, the people of Ireland have voted to overturn the complete ban on all abortions, including in the cases of rape, incest or fatal fetal abnormality, that had been written into the constitution by a large margin of 68%-32%, pretty much in line with early exit polls but contradicting opinion polls that had shown a close vote. For an overwhelmingly Catholic country, this is a huge deal, and the ‘yes’ vote won in every region, even in the most staunchly Catholic ones. What is astounding, as Robert Mackey informs us, is that it was only as recently as 1983 that the ban was imposed by a huge margin of 67-33%. This is a huge change in opinion in a short time.
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How Facebook enabled Buddhist vigilante violence in Sri Lanka

The New York Times has a daily podcast where they discuss with their reporters a single story that they covered. On Wednesday, May 16 they had an episode titled When Facebook Rumors Incite Real Violence about how rumors on Facebook led to deadly violence in Sri Lanka. (Scroll down to find it.) The story provides yet another example of how religious majorities tend to be intolerant and that Buddhists, despite their reputation of being a ‘peaceful’ religion, are no less susceptible to violence than Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims. There is no religion that cannot be turned into a vehicle for intolerance and violence when they acquire the means to be so.
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Great moments in evangelical hypocrisy

One of the amusing things to observe is how so many leading lights in the evangelical Christian movement have abandoned all pretense of upholding moral standards in their efforts to defend their support of Donald Trump. That support was always highly hypocritical even at the best of times, excusing vicious assaults on the poor and the LGBT community and other marginalized groups as long as the politician opposed abortion and spouted pieties about their god and family values. But now even that fig leaf is gone and they have been revealed to be absolutely shameless in their abandonment of even the rhetoric of morality.
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