Monthly Archives: October 2012

Yoga is “a goy” spelled backwards

Posted on by Phillip T Stephens

Once again Christian parents are up in arms, this time in California. It seems their innocent children are being subjected to yoga classes, which is tantamount to forced Hinduism. Needless to say, the Christians want to sue.

I did the math, and it does seem that yoga is a perniciously anti-Christian practice. If you spell yoga backwards, you get “a goy.” Any one who knows Yiddish knows that “a goy” is the term for someone who is not one of God's chosen people. It doesn't get more insidious than that. We might as well be forcing our children to pray to Ganesh.

CNN asked a spokesman for the Christian Right why parents would object to yoga and he said exactly the same thing. Well, not the backward spelling thing, but that making kids practice yoga was forcing them to “take poses that honor Hindu Gods.”

Up until that moment I didn't know that “downward facing dog,” and “salute to the sun,” were Hindu gods, not to mention “corpse,” “tree,” and “mountain.” But, it seems, they are.

Oh, wait. Using the backward spelling trick, “downward facing dog” is really “downward facing God.” It all makes sense to me now.

Carol is Cherokee, and we made medicine bags at the Cherokee Township meeting this afternoon to appreciate the artifacts of their passing culture. It reminded me of school, when we made headdresses and other native artifacts. I realized that if we were to make medicine bags in school these days, the Christian Right would claim we were honoring Native American Gods and sue the school district.

As I recall, with school funding being slashed right and left because of No Child Left Behind, schools had to give up arts and PE just to keep their budgets afloat. Yoga seems to me to be a pretty cost effective way to provide physical fitness. The districts could even stiff the parents for the cost of the mat as a “school expense.”

If the suit is filed, and upheld, a small minority of Christians will have denied school children across the country another opportunity for fitness.

So I will conclude with a thought I have shared before:

Stop whining, Christians. You sound like babies who lost their pacifiers. You're supposed to be persecuted. It's in your Bible. People are supposed to hate you, revile you and even kill you. How can you bear the cross when you can't even bear to be in the same room with people who disagree with you?Listening to you, I would think the US Constitution is supposed to spin a comfy womb where you can suckle the milk of faith and never be exposed to doubt.

When you stand before God at judgement and he asks what you did for him, you should hope you have something more to offer than you voted Republican and stopped a yoga class.

Christian group outs Jesus

Posted on by Phillip T Stephens

If they aren't calling him outright gay, then he's guilty of promoting a homosexual agenda. Oh, the American Family Association (AFA) won't come out and say it, but if you follow their latest campaign, it's pretty clear that's what they believe.

No, you think to yourself. How can that be true?

No, the AFA would cry. We would never.

But it's right out there. All you have to do is speak Christian. It was inevitable, really. The Corporate Christian Complex (CCC) has been so busy pushing their anti-liberal agenda they were bound to line Jesus in their sights and Dick Cheney him.

Here's the story. The Southern Poverty Law Center has sponsored Mix It Up day for the last dozen years. The purpose of the event is to bring kids from diverse backgrounds together and encourage mutual understanding. Their cover story is to stop bullying, but the AFA has made it clear that stopping bullying promotes a homosexual agenda.

That's right, stopping bullies makes kids queer.

To show how straight they are, AFA launched a campaign to bully schools into dropping the event. According to the AFA, a campaign against bullying is a campaign to stop young Christians' free speech rights to express their disapproval of homosexual behavior.

Free speech by bullying is a well-established Christian and Constitutional doctrine. It isn't enough for young Christian boys and girls to say, “We think homosexuality is wrong.” They have to be able to torture, humiliate and beat those deviants to a pulp. Christian kids know, more than unenlightened kids, that tolerance is the first stage of homosexual infection.

Of course, if bullied kids turned the tables on Christian kids and tortured, humiliated and beat them to a pulp, Christians would be the first to call it a hate crime. And it would be a hate crime. So those gay kids should just turn the other cheek and take the punishment they deserve.

So where does Jesus come into this? Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek and take their punishment. Jesus told his followers to do unto others as they would have others do to them. And Jesus loved to have mix it up days where prostitutes and gamblers, tax collectors and the faithful would gather at the same table and share.

In fact, Jesus loved mix it up days so much, he wanted everyone to mix it up all the time. And if you speak Christian, you know those are sure signs of someone who promotes a homosexual agenda. Let's be honest, if someone promotes a homosexual agenda, he's really doing it because deep down inside, he's homosexual himself.

Since groups like the AFA insist that Jesus was a bachelor his entire life, I think it's pretty clear what conclusions they want us to draw.

WWJD? Defy the IRS

Posted on by Phillip T Stephens

Last Sunday 1400 pastors openly defied the IRS by endorsing candidates from the pulpit in spite of rules prohibiting this. The pastors call the event “pulpit freedom Sunday” claiming that the IRS is violating their free speech rights as citizens.

What these pastors forget is that when they speak from the pulpit, they no longer speak as citizens but as the official representatives of tax exempt organizations. This means that the money to pay their salaries and bonuses is not created by making wealth but by syphoning it away from the government.

You can write off your donations to the organizations that pay their salaries, and the organizations (called churches) that sell books and merchandise don't have to pay taxes on that income either. In other words, those very pastors are sucking at the government tit.

If they had to compete with other pastors directly for your income (on which you have to pay taxes), many of those pastors and their organizations would go flat broke. So they owe their livelihoods to the very governments they challenge.

In short, these pastors don't speak as citizens but under government subsidy. And they should not be allowed to endorse candidates any more than other government employees.

This year, those pastors went a step further. They mailed those sermons to the IRS. And they knew they could get away with it because if the Department of Justice went after them, they could play martyrs in Obama's war on faith.1

The act of mailing those sermons is, of course, very Christian. Didn't Jesus tell us in the sermon on the mount that if you think someone offends you, slap them on the cheek publicly?

This Christian war on democracy (funded by the Corporate Christian Complex who, in turn, is subsidized by money written off from taxes that the rest of us would have to pay the federal government) goes back to the sixties. The Supreme Court ruled that citizens could not be coerced into participating in public prayer which, ironically, is something Jesus said Christians shouldn't do to start with (Matt. 6).

From our reaction, you would think the government had burned us at the stake or crucified us in front of the White House.

You see, these same pastors think that not only should they disobey Jesus, they should expect the rest of us to do it with them. They should be allowed to display symbols of their faith whenever and wherever they please (much like marking their own territory).

At the same time, they think the symbols of other faiths should be hidden away so they don't have to be offended by them. They resent Kwanza programs or art projects displaying Moslem or Hindu traditions in schools. They think mosques should be prohibited on sites where they should be allowed to build churches.

In short, they think they should be afforded a different standard of citizenship. Sort of a citizenship premium pass, paid for on our dime. And that is about as unAmerican as you can get.

I remember a song from Bible School, “they'll know we are Christian by our love.” Instead they know we are Christians by our obstinance, hypocrisy and double-standards. Then those same pastors wonder why others hate us.

1It's actually more complicated, but it boils down to the same thing. The IRS lost a court case brought by this same group of pastors raising a technical challenge. The court ruled the IRS had to change how they inspected churches in violation of their rules. Were the IRS to rewrite those rules to comply with the court order and legally go after offending churches, then those churches would claim they were victims of the war on faith. back

Christlike or contradiction?

Posted on by Phillip T Stephens

It's easy to forgive Romney for a complete about face in this week's debate with President Obama. After adopting an extreme tax reduction policy in the primaries, and waiting for Obama to criticize it first, he suddenly announced that he had never proposed such a thing at all.

Of course, he could have told viewers his new tax policy before Obama criticized the old one. But what's the fun of that? And if you can't win a debate without a little sandbagging and a sucker punch or two, then you're giving your opponent an unfair advantage.

When President Obama called Romney on his tectonic policy shift, Romney blithely told the President that “if you repeat something often enough, people will believe it,” but that didn't make it true.

This is, in turn, set the tone for the entire debate. Once he established that he could fluster Obama, all he had to do for the rest of the evening was say, “I never said that. You're misrepresenting me.” And because of the rules of the debate Jim Lehrer couldn't say, “but Governor Romney, didn't you propose exactly that in the primaries?”

Romney's strategy upset a lot of Democrats, especially when everyone who watched the debate decided Romney won. And, clearly, in the court of public opinion, he did. Even I have to admit, Obama looked like he was on the ropes, with his best punches denied him. The question is, did Romney really do anything wrong by completely reversing his opinion?

The strategy also emboldened right wing pastors across America to declare open war on Obama from their pulpits today, but that will have to wait until next week.

Some might argue Romney was merely following the example of Jesus. After all, at one point in his campaign Jesus said, “he who is not with me is against me.” (Matt 12:30) But elsewhere he said, “whoever is not against us is for us.” (Luke 9:50) So it sounds like Romney is only doing what Jesus would do.

Liberals might argue that conflicting aphorisms are not the same thing as lying about a previous policy proposal. But isn't that straining at gnats?

Let's look at Romney's record to see how much he wants to follow Jesus' example. He's reversed himself on abortion, health care, tax codes and just about every other policy. And he certainly certainly shares Jesus' views about the poor and needy.

Oh ye liberals, of little faith. What more could you possibly ask for? Granted there is not return policy on Presidents, and once you elect one you can't repent for four entire years. But if he's good enough to reverse position and win a debate, he's clearly good enough to be President.