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FROM AP: AP Top Olympic News At 4:32 p.m. EDT
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FROM AP: Mets 4, Braves 3
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
We have scarcely skimmed the surface of violence and intolerance to Christians in Muslims worlds. If it should continue at its present rate, Christianity will very soon be completely eradicated in its homeland.
The Western Wall is a good place to launch a re-commitment to the Torah's vision of "one law," of unity without uniformity, and to Israel's imperfect but vigorous expression of democracy in action.
Vatican officials admit the pope won't actually be doing the hunt and peck to type messages and instead someone in the Vatican's secretariat of state will actually compose the tweets on his behalf. But they promise it will be his words and only his words.
The more specific you get, the less likely you are to be correct. This is certainly manifest in the inconvenient truth that so many religions describe what God wants from us in such different terms.
While I am an unwavering proponent of equal rights for consenting adults of any sexual orientation, I agree with the National Organization for Marriage in one respect: The government has no business entangling itself with religious conceptions of marriage.
The essence of the Vedic culture, today known as Hinduism, teaches that none of us are white, black, brown, red or yellow. We are spiritual beings, eternally lovers and servants of God, who have forgotten our spiritual nature.
Some of our neighbors are grateful just to be alive -- not because of natural disasters but because of members of their community. Two incidents of violence, one extreme, were perpetrated at houses of worship in recent days.
"What is that sucking sound?" I asked a classroom of seniors at San Pedro High School in California. I had been invited to speak for their Career Day, Making a Difference In Our Youth. Upon the wall I showed a picture of a vacuum cleaner. A few giggles erupted through the room.
Whether Obama is Muslim or not is beside the point. The president's religious background shouldn't matter in a presidential election -- or any American election for that matter.
Our government is far from perfect, but at least we can vote without the proverbial (or literal) gun to our heads. So I say to the 90 million Americans who won't vote this year -- don't take this right for granted.
When women are detained and arrested at the Western Wall in Jerusalem for wearing Jewish prayer shawls and "endangering public peace" by intoning word and melody of prayer, we are all diminished.
Without hypocrisy, the conservative mind would explode from the sheer force of its eternal contradictions and Dinesh D'Souza, along with his phantom, would be sucked into the void. Hypocrisy is the glue that holds it all together.
The thing I find most troubling about fundamentalism, whether in politics or in religion, is the war fundamentalists declare and then wage on almost anyone whose opinion or understanding of truth is different from theirs.
If a nut case sees the innuendo loaded Jihadi ad in the subway, and sees a woman next to it, be it a Muslim, Sikh, Catholic, Hindu or other, he is tempted to hurt that woman, the woman can scream that she is not a Muslim. Do the nuts know any difference? What if she is a Muslim?
This is part of a larger task of how to turn us all toward each other in an open conversation about what it is to be human and how we should treat each other. Christopher Hitchens was integral to that conversation, and I miss him.
In his famous letter to the first Jewish synagogue in America, George Washington wrote that the United States government grants "to bigotry no sanction." But because our government does grant to all its citizens freedom of speech, it protects the rights of Pamela Geller.
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