Author: David Crump

Author, Speaker, Retired Biblical Studies & Theology Professor & Pastor, Passionate Falconer, H-D Chopper Rider, Fumbling Disciple Who Loves Jesus Christ

“The United States and Europe are Lost as Far as the Palestinians are Concerned”

It is mind-numbingly absurd to hear the president of the United States seriously referring to “the two state solution” as the best hope for the Palestinian people.

The supposed “two state solution” died years ago, asphyxiated beneath the weight of 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers occupying hundreds of illegal,  Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank; buried beneath the unending

U.S. President Joe Biden signs the visitors book as Israeli President Isaac Herzog looks on at his residence in Jerusalem, July 14, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Israeli land grabs, government annexations of “military zones,” illegal home demolitions, unremitting crop destruction, orchards butchered, olive trees and vineyards uprooted, not to mention the brutal, suffocating military occupation now entering its 75th year.

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, Biden’s appeal to the future prospects of a two-state solution, one for Israel and one for Palestinians, expresses America’s surrender to Israel’s stone-cold hard-heartedness, inflexibility, and Zionism’s blinding belief in Jewish, ethnic entitlement.

Posing as a neutral mediator, while never — no never — acting as anything of the sort, the US has encouraged decades of false hope and wasted effort in supposed “Peace Talks” between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Granted, Yasser Arafat was a foolish negotiator — but never the intransigent deceiver that Israel and the USA always made him out to be — and the PLO made plenty of irresponsible mistakes while betraying their own people.

But as Israel’s greatest political supporter, financier, and supplier of military hardware and technology, the US never intended to assist the Palestinians in their efforts to escape Israeli’s colonial domination.

For instance, when dealing with the Likud negotiators under Begin and Netanyahu, the US never — never — challenged the Likud party platform proclaiming that Israel would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state.

If that’s not reprehensible collusion, I don’t know what is.

After all, what are 4.5 million Palestinian refugees when compared to two colonial, nuclear armed super-powers pledged to watch each other’s backs? The strategic interests of neither America nor Israel has ever included the moral imperative of justice for oppressed, brown-skinned, Arab human beings.

Why has anyone ever been foolish enough to imagine otherwise?

Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper is titled “Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate.”

Read Levy’s analysis below (all emphasis mine):

At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.

This hope drew its last breath at Augusta Victoria. In his speech Biden mused at great length about his and his family’s time in the hospital; he remembered the intensive care ward. A flat line on the monitor meant death, he learned there. About an hour later, in Bethlehem, the monitor flatlined. The path the Palestinians embarked on 50 years ago has come to an end. They have reached a dead end.
At the beginning of the ‘70s, a new star appeared in the political skies: the cardiologist Issam Sartawi, a refugee from Acre, a student in Iraq, an exile in Paris and an architect of the plane hijackings. He underwent a complete change. He became the Palestinians’ trailblazer to the West’s heart; until then they had relied on nonaligned countries. Sartawi led the Palestinians to Bonn, Vienna, Paris and Stockholm instead of Moscow, Jakarta, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur.

This was depicted as an excellent choice. The protégé and even the darling of Western Europe’s social democratic stars of those days – Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and François Mitterrand – continued on to the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with meetings with representatives of the Israeli left. Yasser Arafat enthusiastically joined the path his adviser had blazed. It seemed much more promising than winning support from Karachi.

Fifty years later this road has reached its end, with the Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An American president only gives them a few hours – on a visit that gives new meaning to the terms doing the minimum and lip service. So the time has come to awaken from the dream that Europe and America will ever do something for the Palestinians that won’t be to the satisfaction of their unassailable cherished one, Israel.

It’s a president who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, [Biden mispronounced her name as Abu Al-Qaeda!] the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce. The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.

With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?

Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.

It’s enough to look at the picture of the meeting in Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian men in ties around the two leaders in a group photo of despair. It’s enough to recall Biden’s words in 1986 to the secretary of state at the time, George Shultz: “I hate to hear an administration … refusing to act on a morally important point. … I’m ashamed that this country puts out a policy like this, that says nothing, nothing.”

Biden was referring to U.S. policy on the previous apartheid country, South Africa. Amazingly similar remarks can be hurled now at Biden because of his approach to the second apartheid country. But there’s no Biden to hurl them.

“The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools”

Among the several blogs that I follow is William Trollinger’s Righting America: A Forum for Scholarly Conversation About Christianity, Culture, and Politics in the US.

His most recent post, titled “The Appallingly Bad History Taught at Fundamentalist Schools,” is a review including brief excerpts of a new book  by Kathleen Wellman titled Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2021).

Here is a brief excerpt, but I encourage you to look at the blog — or, better yet,  buy the book — to see the long list of shocking, Right-Wing punditry that passes for “objective” American history in far too many private, Christian schools:

If you know anything about history, this post will make you laugh and/or cry.

And/or make you angry. 

And the latter emotion is particularly appropriate.

In her book, Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters, Kathleen Wellman (Professor of History at Southern Methodist University) reports on world history textbooks produced by Abeka Books (published by Pensacola Christian College), Accelerated Christian Education [ACE], and Bob Jones University Press [BJU]. These textbooks are popular among fundamentalist homeschoolers and are often adopted at fundamentalist Christian schools. 

For example, the Answers in Genesis K-12 school, Twelve Stones Academy, uses the BJU text.

Wellman heroically examines these texts in great detail. Why did she subject herself to such a painful task? As she notes in her introduction, these fundamentalist textbooks

have an influence that has extended far beyond the confines of fundamentalism . . .  Their views, as indeed the textbooks insist, increasingly define American Christianity. These curricula’s narrative of Christian history has been grafted onto right-wing political and economic positions. And right-wing political interests have promoted these views. (2)

Here are just a few examples from Hijacking History:

  • “These textbooks label [ancient] Africa the Dark Continent . . . ‘the fear, idolatry, and witchcraft associated with animism’ [Abeka text] prevented African economic and cultural development” (74).
  • “The Abeka curriculum claims the Greeks made no progress in science, even though Greek scientific works set the standard for virtually every science for over fifteen hundred years . . . [More generally, Greek] civilization was fundamentally flawed, and their efforts ultimately produced no benefits.” (83)

Click here to see the entire post.

The continued replication of the repulsive racist, colonialist, imperialist trope describing Africa as “the Dark Continent” illustrates both the longevity and the currency of a western imperialist mindset in certain sectors of American society.

Furthermore, aside from the fact that the African continent was once populated by thriving, complex, urban-centered civilizations, I am stunned to discover that there are history textbooks asserting that the ancient Greeks never produced anything of “any benefit”?!

My, oh my.

No wonder Donald Trump has hoodwinked so many conservative Christians in

Raphael’s “The School of Athens” depicting Plato and Aristotle in debate

this country (many of whom are heavily invested in the Christian school and home schooling movements).

No wonder many parents are raising a ruckus and protesting at local school board meetings against Critical Race Theory and multiculturalism in the classroom.  These are the families fleeing public schools for the same Christian academies and home school networks now using horrible history texts.

And the dumbing down of America, particularly American evangelical-fundamentalism, continues unabated.

We are well into the dark ages of American cultural history.

Thucydides could teach them all a thing or two about history, while a little time with Aristotle could help them learn how to use their minds.

A Proposed 28th Amendment for Gun Control. I’d Vote For It

The film maker and famed political commentator, Michael Moore, has composed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution. He presented the Amendment to Congress on July 11, 2022.

The 28th Amendment would repeal and replace the 2nd Amendment.

As lifelong hunter and gun owner, I would vote YES.

You can check it out here at Moore’s blog. I have also reproduced the entire Amendment below:

XXVIII AMENDMENT

SECTION 1.
The inalienable right of a free people to be kept safe from gun violence and the fear thereof must not be infringed and shall be protected by the Congress and the States. This Amendment thus repeals and replaces the Second Amendment.

SECTION 2.
Congress shall create a mandatory system of firearm registration and licensing for the following limited purposes: (a) licensed hunters of game; (b) licensed ranges for the sport of target shooting; and (c) for the few who can demonstrate a special need for personal protection. 

All who seek a firearm will undergo a strict vetting process with a thorough background check, including the written and confidential approval of family members, spouses and ex-spouses and/or partners and ex-partners, co-workers and neighbors. A mental health check will also be required. There will be a waiting period of one month to complete the full background check. 

SECTION 3.
Those who meet all the requirements for the restricted gun owners groups and successfully pass the background check must take a firearms safety class and pass a written test on an annual basis. 

SECTION 4.
The minimum age for the restricted groups who can own a firearm is 25 years old. Renewal and review of the firearms license will occur on an annual basis. 


SECTION 5.
Congress will stipulate and continually update the limited list of approved firearms for civilian use, including weapons in the future that are not yet invented. The following firearms are heretofore banned:

  • All automatic and semi-automatic weapons and all devices which can enable a single-shot gun to fire automatically or semi-automatically;

   • Any weapon that can hold more than six bullets or rounds at a time or any magazine that holds more than six bullets;

   • All guns made of plastic or any homemade equipment and machinery or a 3D printer that can make a gun or weapon that can take a human life.

SECTION 6.
Congress shall regulate all ammunition, capacity of ammunition, the storage of guns, gun locks, gun sights, body armor and the sale and distribution of such items. No weapons of any kind whose sole intention is the premeditated elimination of human life are considered legal. Congress may create future restrictions as this amendment specifically does not grant any American the “right” to own any weapon.  

SECTION 7.
Police who are trained and vetted to use firearms shall be subject to comprehensive and continuous monitoring and shall be dismissed if found to exhibit any racist or violent behavior. 

SECTION 8.
Persons already owning any of the above banned firearms, and who do not fall into the legal groups of restricted firearms owners, will have one month from the ratification of this Amendment to turn in their firearms for destruction by local law enforcement. These local authorities may organize a gun buy-back program to assist in this effort.

Listen to Three Privileged, Christian White Guys Scold the Black Community

I would say that the news clip below is “unbelievable” except that it appeared on the Christian Broadcast Network. A network that conforms its opinion pieces so closely to the conservative, Republican obsession with “law and order” that you’d be forgiven for assuming its commentators all had day jobs as prison guards.

This editorial discussion is supposedly highlighting the importance of the

Jayland Walker

public “having all the facts” about a situation before drawing conclusions or making objections to the work of the authorities.

But then, conservative Christianity has always highlighted the importance of “obeying the authorities,” no matter how abusive they may be.

The matter at hand is the police murder of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio and the quick display of community outrage that followed.

The initial police reports, the details of which have not been changed, explained that Mr. Walker was going to be stopped for some unspecified sort of traffic violation.

Mr. Walker then took the police on a high speed chase which ended with him leaping from his car and running away. Police allege that Walker fired a gun out his car window during the chase.

As Walker ran away, his was chased by 8 – 9 policemen who fired 90+ rounds at his back. Mr. Walker never returned fire because, as the police later discovered, he was unarmed. (Duh, the fact that he never turned to fire back while unsuccessfully dodging a hail-storm of gunfire, hadn’t tipped them off to this already?)

Walker’s body was hit by 60+ bullets. He died at the scene.

These were the original facts. They are still the facts.

Mr. Walker is another unarmed black man gunned down for the crime of running from the police who consistently insult, abuse, assault, and murder unarmed black men.

As an African-American friend asked me not long ago, “David, why can’t white people understand why we are afraid of the police? We have good reason to be.”

Nevertheless, these CBN commentators object. They insist that most, perhaps all?, media reports have not mentioned the (alleged) gunshot out of Walker’s car window during the car chase.

However, EVERY report that I have read and watched HAS either shown the relevant video or mentioned the alleged gun fire from Walker on the highway.

In other words, CBN is ginning up an illegitimate, irrelevant concern for their own rhetorical purposes. Can anyone say, MANIPULATION? or PROPAGANDA?

But they all say these things oh so unctuously with such apparent concern…

They also fail to mention the many, many times that the police have been caught LYING to the public in their initial police reports in order to protect themselves and hide their own wrongdoing.

Naturally, the local black community responded with a large, peaceful, public protest demanding answers and accountability.

The very next day these three CBN Christian stooges, doing the half-step shuffle for white privilege, self-righteousness, hard-heartedness, foolishness and stupidity, scold the black community (!) for expressing their grief and anger, while exercising their first amendment right to cry out in the streets for justice.

I am sorry, but I find the entire diatribe to be absolutely infuriating!

Here we see three comfortable, extremely well paid, audacious examples of the poisonous fruit of white privilege dripping with the decay of dead men’s bones, all white-washed and dressed up pretty for broadcast TV.

I am sorry, but this report is nothing but pious hackery, blindingly oblivious to the persistent and pernicious racial/racist dynamic playing itself out over and over and over again in our city streets.

It is also painfully obvious — AGAIN– that something has gone horribly wrong with the way police officers are being trained to handle both people and their weapons.

It’s not a few “bad apples,” folks. It’s the entire system that appears to be rotten.

I could go on, but I will stop now. Watch for yourself. Especially notice the mini-sermon about “unrighteous responses” given in coordination with the film of African-American protesters walking through the streets.

Really?!?!

I have asked in the past. I am asking again. If anyone has a video clip of an unarmed white man being shot or chocked to death by police, please send it to me.

Legal Conundrums Raised by Both the Rights of a Fetus and “Bodily Autonomy”

A friend of mine sent me the link to a fascinating article yesterday in reaction to my last post about the moral implications of believing that life begins at conception (see here).

This article investigates the legal issues that have arisen in America’s courts by consistently applying the principles of fetal life and individual bodily autonomy.

The piece is titled “The Rights of the Fetus and the Principle of Bodily Autonomy” and is published on the website of the Anastasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry. It is written by David Gill, Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Below is an excerpt:

The fetus is treated very inconsistently by U.S. law today, and not just in abortion situations.  For example, the fetus can inherit property.  If a pregnant mother dies before or in childbirth, but the fetus survives and is born alive, courts have decided that the child can inherit property along with other living siblings, and the state will appoint guardians for the child if needed.[1]

The fetus can be the victim of personal injuries in assaults in thirty-eight states.  For example, in November 2014, in California, Scott Peterson was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife Laci and the second degree murder of their unborn son Connor.[2]  In November 2017, in Texas, Devin Patrick Kelley committed a gun massacre at First Baptist Church in Sutherland, Texas, murdering 26 people, including Crystal Holcombe and her unborn child, who was at eight months of gestation and was counted as a person among the victims.[3]  The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 makes a motorist guilty of two homicides in motor vehicle accidents when both a pregnant mother and the fetus in her womb die, even if that woman was on her way to abort her fetus.

The fetus’s life legally overrides its mother’s “religious freedom” interest in refusing blood transfusions if she is a Jehovah’s Witness.  In 1964, the New Jersey court, in Fitkin Memorial Hospital v. Anderson, decreed that a pregnant woman who was a Jehovah’s Witness did not have the right to refuse a blood transfusion when doctors believed that the procedure would preserve the life of the fetus she carried.  The 1985 In re Jamaica Hospital case in New York’s State Supreme Court decided the same.  The New York court recognized the mother’s right to an abortion at that stage in her pregnancy, but maintained that in the circumstance where the mother was in need of a blood transfusion for another emergency reason, the state’s significant interest in protecting a midterm fetus’s life outweighed her religious beliefs against blood transfusions.

Under such laws, fetuses could have their interests defended against poisoning from lead in drinking water, biotoxin exposure, etc. as much as alcohol and other substances.  In a helpful law journal article, Robin Trindel highlights numerous examples of courts that have even upheld children’s legal suits against a defendant “for prenatal injuries where the defendant’s negligence occurred prior to the child’s conception.”[4]  For example, in Renslow v. Mennonite Hospital (1977), a minor daughter who was also incompetent, represented by her mother, successfully sued a hospital for administering an improper blood transfusion to the mother eight years prior to her getting pregnant.  The Rh incompatibility in the mother’s blood caused brain, nervous system, and organ damage to her daughter.[5]  A similar case occurred in Bergstreser v. Mitchell (8th Cir. 1978), concerning a child being adversely affected by the doctors who administered a Caesarian section improperly to her mother for her previous child.   In Jorgensen v. Meade Johnson Laboratories, Inc. (10th Cir. 1973), deformed twin infants, represented by their parents, successfully sued a birth control drug manufacturer for their condition, which included mental retardation, physical deformity, pain, and suffering.[6] 

The Curlender v. Bio-Science Laboratories (1980) case in California surprised many because a child successfully sued for a “wrongful life” cause.  She was in constant pain from Tay-Sachs disease.  She had been conceived because her parents had relied on the company’s assurances that their genetic tests were accurate and that their child would not have genetic complications.  Whereas parents had been able to sue on the grounds of a wrongful birth cause, this was the first time in U.S. legal history where a child won a case on the grounds that she should not exist—that is, of a wrongful life.  Observers in many fields registered their alarm at what Curlender meant for the legal jeopardy of science and medical professionals.[7]  Taking that one step further, can a child sue the society into which it was born because it was born into poverty?

You can read the entire article and find the footnotes here.

Thoughts and Questions About the Beginning of Life

Obviously, this post is spurred by the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade and the many conversations now occurring state-to-state about local abortion laws.

The premise of the anti-abortion (I refuse to use the term pro-life, since it is highly misleading) movement has always been the claim that “life begins at conception.” A secondary entailment of that assumption is the definition of “life” as the existence of a human person.

Let me begin by putting my cards on the table: I used to espouse this view myself. In the past, I have led protesters in prayer near an abortion clinic. But no more. Over the years, I have undergone a slow transformation.

Nowadays, I believe that only God knows when another “life” (see above) begins inside a woman’s body. Pinpointing this arrival of new life into the world is beyond human comprehension.

A human embryo

However, having said this, I also recognize two things. First, I recognize that opposition to abortion has been unanimous throughout Church history, going back as far as the earliest Christian Church fathers (among those who left written records). However, granting this fact still does not answer the question of when life begins.

For instance, some Jewish literature indicates that life was not thought to begin until the mother could feel movement inside of her body. So, terminating a pregnancy prior to that experience would not necessarily be considered abortion by all.

Second, understanding that the fertilization of a woman’s egg (both the egg and sperm are called a “gamete”) begins a process resulting in the creation and eventual delivery, assuming no interference, of a human baby. Whether or not we can say with certainty when life begins does not change the fact that pregnancy is a process that eventually produces a new life.

Thus, it only makes sense that abortion should be avoided as much as possible – yep, I am no longer an absolutist on this point, as I will explain below – as dictated by whatever reasonable concerns are raised by a pregnant woman’s circumstances.

Yes, I know that “reasonable concerns” is a subjective constraint, but it is not my goal in this post to explore that problem. I will only say that the current story of the pregnant 10-year-old Ohio girl, raped and impregnated by her father, raises more than enough “reasonable concern” to justify an abortion, in my mind.

Sadly, Ohio state law is now denying her that humane solution – yes, humane solution – to her tragic plight. That strikes me as terribly wrong.

Rather, in this post I want to explore the inconsistencies that I see in the conservative, anti-abortion position. Inconsistencies which suggest to me either that few conservatives actually believe what they claim to believe, OR they are ignorant, and therefore should remove themselves from this debate about the details of conception, contraception, and pregnancy.

Let’s first remind ourselves of the physiological details that everyone in this debate ought to understand…despite the fact that many, obviously, don’t.

Here is a simplified version:

When the female gamete, the egg, is penetrated by a male gamete, a sperm, fertilization occurs and produces a zygote. Remember that, according to conservative, anti-abortion advocates, this is when life begins, “at the moment of conception.” So, a zygote is a living person, according to this view. No, don’t try to quibble over this. A zygote is either “alive” or it’s not. And we are only talking about one kind of life: a human life.

After about five days of cell division, the zygote becomes a blastocyst.

The zygote or blastocyst continues to travel down the woman’s fallopian tube (coming from the ovary) towards the uterus and takes between four to ten days on average before implanting into the uterine wall.

But not every fertilized egg/zygote makes it to implantation. Implantation seems to be the moment when the blastocyst officially becomes an embryo. The embryonic period lasts for eight to nine weeks. At week nine or ten the embryo becomes a fetus.

The transition from a dependent fetus to an independent baby, capable of living outside the mother’s body, remains a matter of debate, partly contingent on the expanding capabilities of medical technology.

Sometimes the zygote implants inside the fallopian tube creating what is called an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies are dangerous for the mother and are typically terminated (aborted, according to conservatives?) either naturally, chemically, or surgically.

Do you know of a woman, anti-abortion activist who terminated her ectopic pregnancy? I’d love to hear answers to my following questions.

Depending on what study you read, somewhere between 40% to 70% of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus but are “flushed” from the woman’s body along with her menstrual fluids. In other words, IF life does begin at conception/fertilization, as anti-abortion activists insist, then either God or nature, whichever you prefer, is the greatest abortionist of them all.

More than that, if anti-abortion activists were serious about this belief, then why are these abundant “natural abortions” not being memorialized? Does anyone do this? Please tell me if you know.

Wouldn’t it make sense, both logically and morally, that every woman, anti-abortion activist – at least those who are still menstruating and capable of becoming pregnant – who believes that life begins at conception, ought to collect her monthly menstrual fluid in a bag for burial?

I am serious and not in any way trying to be flippant. That may sound foolish, but why? Does anyone do this? I really want to know. And if not, why not?

If you truly believe that life begins at fertilization, then it only makes sense, and conforms to the moral imperatives of honoring all life, to see those 40% to 70% of fertilized but unimplanted zygotes as “preborn babies” (to use the manipulative, propagandistic lingo deployed by certain activists).

In which case, every one of them deserves a decent burial with a headstone. Right? And, if not, why not? Please explain this to me and help me to understand. I have never heard of anyone doing this. Why?

This brings us to the question of miscarriages.

I am well aware of how extremely traumatic a miscarriage can be for everyone involved. In no way am I trying to be cavalier or callous. Nevertheless, we all must take the full implications of our moral positions with all seriousness.

If life begins at conception, then every miscarriage is a naturally occurring abortion which ends the life of a pre-born baby. This must be true at whatever stage in pregnancy the miscarriage occurs.

Obviously, this conviction is at the heart of what makes the experience of a miscarriage so very, very heartbreaking for those women who experience one.

So, let’s think this through together.

How many anti-abortion advocates who experience a miscarriage insist that the remains of their miscarriage be buried with a funeral and a headstone?

Perhaps some people do this. I don’t know? Do you know of any? I am asking questions for the purposes of logical and moral consistency. I would love to hear some answers from my readers.

In any case, miscarried fetal tissue is the remnant testifying to a human death, if human life does begin at fertilization. In which case, it is deserving of a memorial. How many conservative Christians name their miscarried fetuses and visit their graves?

Perhaps some do, which is wonderful. At least, they are showing real moral consistency.

Naturally, these questions also apply to those state legislatures that are talking about criminalizing the morning after pill, which chemically prevents the zygote from implanting into the uterus. Perhaps these activist legislators argue that this type of “abortion” is not a natural occurrence, so it is different from the 40% to 70% of fertilized eggs that are flushed naturally with a woman’s menstrual fluid.

But anyone making that argument is also underlining the importance of memorializing and properly burying those “flushed” zygotes…on a monthly basis. How many of these legislators do this themselves? I suspect the answer is, none.

But, why not? And, if they don’t do this, then aren’t they being hypocrites by criminalizing the morning after pill? I’d say they were.

The only logical response I can see to any of my questions is to say that “the degree” of life involved in these different events varies according to the developmental stage of the effected zygote, embryo, or fetus. So that, even though “life” begins at conception, certain stages of that “life” can legitimately be terminated, whether by nature or by human intervention, without the need for memorializing, burial, naming, or celebrating because they are “less alive” than they would be at other stages.

But if this is the case, then we have all agreed to the existence of those subjective matters regarding the “reasonable concerns” that make some abortions acceptable, depending on the mother’s circumstances (see above). Yet, these are the very concerns over a woman or a girl’s well-being that the average anti-abortion activist refuses to recognize.

This, my friends, is a major problem in this position, as I see it.

Christians need to think clearly and consistently, especially when the lives and future prospects of young girls and women are all at stake.

We need to follow the moral implications of our beliefs and behaviors all the way through to the very end, consistently, without fudging for personal preference.

Furthermore, we have no business applying moral directives to other people’s lives when we are not following those directives ourselves.

Personally, I don’t see any of these matters being taken seriously by the Religious Right; at least, not in the public conversation.

That’s a big problem for the anti-abortion movement.

Israel convicts World Vision official despite evidence he’s innocent

Israel-Palestine news recently published a story about Israel’s arrest and conviction of a Christian official with the humanitarian organization, World Vision.

Israel targeted NGOs and Palestinian children in one fell swoop in the June 2016 arrest of Mohammad Al Halabi – World Vision- Australia director of the West Bank and Gaza

But this is a standard Israeli move. Despite a lack of evidence — in fact, the defense produced abundant evidence demonstrating that the accused was completely innocent — Israel moved aggressively on its bogus charges.

You can find the article by Kathryn Shihadah at Israel-Palestine News. It is titled “Israel convicts World Vision official despite evidence he’s innocent.” I have reproduced the article’s highlights below:

Israel found Mohammed El Halabi guilty of diverting $50 million from World Vision charity, ignoring compelling facts: the total budget for 10 years was under $23 million; El Halabi’s alleged ‘confession’ was directed by Israeli authorities; independent audits showed Israeli charges were unfounded; and both the Australian government (a major donor to World Vision) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted special reviews and found no wrongdoing.

In violation of international law, Israel kept Mohammed El Halabi in prison for weeks before he was allowed access to an attorney, and before informing his family of his whereabouts. He reported that his Israeli interrogators beat him – the UN says his treatment “may amount to torture.” 

Israel’s reliance on highly questionable “secret evidence” to convict El Halabi (and thousands of other Palestinians) indicates a deeply flawed judicial system.

Click here to read the entire piece.

How Christian nationalism paved the way for Jan. 6

As the January 6 congressional investigative committee takes a break, lets

MAGA Jesus. Photo by Tyler Merbler, via Flickr.

remind ourselves about the role Christian Nationalism played, and continues to play, in stirring political violence and rebellion in this country.

“Christian Nationalism” is an ideology promoting the belief that the USA is a “Christian nation,” “God’s very own country” in fact, now being used by God to spread his divine gifts of salvation, liberty, democracy, and capitalism to the rest of the world.

According to Christian nationalists, America is unlike any other nation in the world because it occupies a unique place in God’s heart. America is a “chosen nation.” If you look for this message in the parades and other official events celebrating Independence Day, you can’t miss it.

Below is an excerpt from an article in Religion News Service titled “How Christian nationalism paved the way for Jan. 6” written by Jack Jenkins. He disects the influence of Christian nationalism in the revolt of January 6:

WASHINGTON (RNS) — On June 1, 2020, then-President Donald Trump marched across Lafayette Square outside the White House, trailed by an anxious-looking team of advisers and military aides. The group shuffled past detritus left by racial justice protesters after a frantic mass expulsion executed by police minutes prior with clubs, pepper balls and tear gas.

The dignitaries stopped in front of St. John’s Church, where presidents, including Trump, have traditionally attended services on their Inauguration Day. St. John’s, which had suffered a minor fire the day before, was closed. But Trump took up a position in front of its sign and turned toward the cameras, a Bible held aloft.

“We have the greatest country in the world,” Trump said. In the distance, sirens wailed.

Washington’s Episcopal bishop, whose diocese includes St. John’s, condemned

“Jericho March” participants march around the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday Jan. 5, 2021, in Washington. RNS photo by Jack Jenkins

Trump’s stunt, saying it left her “horrified.” But White House chief of staff Mark Meadows declared he was “never prouder” of the president than in that moment, calling it a rejection of “the degradation of our heritage or the burning of churches.” Trump’s evangelical Christian advisers were similarly effusive, lauding the photo op as “important” and “absolutely correct.”

In retrospect, the “symbolic” message of Trump’s Bible photo op, as he termed it, operates as a bookend to the Christian nationalism on display at the attack on the U.S. Capitol seven months later. It communicated, however histrionically, that the president was leading an existential fight against politically liberal foes calling for a racial reckoning, but at the center of which was an attack on Christian faith. From that moment on, Christian nationalism — in the broadest sense, a belief that Christianity is integral to America as a nation and should remain as such — provided a theological framework for the effort to deny Democrats the White House.

As Trump’s poll numbers dipped the same month as the photo op, his campaign redoubled efforts to stir up support among his conservative Christian supporters. Then-Vice President Mike Pence embarked on a “Faith in America” tour, while Trump conducted interviews with conservative Christian outlets and held rallies at white evangelical churches.

Referring to “American patriots,” Trump told rallygoers at Dream City Church in Phoenix: “We don’t back down from left-wing bullies. And the only authority we worship is our God.”

In August at the Republican National Convention, Trump described early American heroes as people who “knew that our country is blessed by God and has a special purpose in this world.” Pence, in his speech, adapted Christian Scripture by swapping out references to Jesus with patriotic platitudes.

Despite then-candidate Joe Biden’s public discussion of his Catholic faith, and the overt religiosity of the Democratic National Convention, Donald Trump Jr. told the GOP crowd that “People of faith are under attack” in the United States, pointing to restrictions on large gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet it was Trump’s religious supporters who did the attacking the final night of the RNC. After leaving the convention’s fireworks-filled celebration at the White House, conservative Christian commentator and Trump loyalist Eric Metaxas was filmed punching an anti-Trump protester off his bike and fleeing into the night, only admitting to the assault days later in an email to Religion Unplugged.

After Trump lost the election in November, a report from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation concluded that Christian nationalism, also referred to as white Christian nationalism, was used to “bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” according to BJC’s Amanda Tyler.

RELATED: New report details the influence of Christian nationalism on the insurrection

In the days after the vote, Florida pastor Paula White, leader of the White House faith office, preached a sermon from her home church in which she called on “angels” from Africa and other nations to assist in overturning the election results. The next night, insisting she was only addressing “spiritual” matters, White vacillated between the ethereal and the electoral: She entreated the Almighty to “keep the feet of POTUS in his purpose and in his position” and decry any “fraud” or “demonic agenda” that “has been released over this election.”

You can read the entire article here.

Frederick Douglass: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”

All understanding is relative.

Mr. Frederick Douglass

Any adult who does not understand this simple truth has not been paying attention to the way life works. But, then, many of us go through life with our minds closed and our eyes firmly shut.

To these folks, my understanding of life is the only possible, the only acceptable understanding. And it probably should be enforced onto anyone who disagrees with me.

It remains the case that, even in today’s America, race, class, education, political, and economic opportunities all play a sizeable role in determining how people evaluate their lives, set their priorities, and consider their circumstances.

Frederick Douglass was an American statesman, abolitionist, author, orator, and an escaped slave. In 1852, Mr. Douglass was asked to give a speech about the significance of the American Day of Independence, July 4th.

As a former slave fighting in the front lines against the institution of American slavery, his perspective on Independence Day celebrations was very different from that of the average, well-off, white person.

Then, as today, race and class matter. They matter greatly. They make all the difference in how a person understands life, and what events appear worthy of celebration.

As I argue regularly on this blog, similarly stark differences in perspective ought to be heard in Christian evaluations of this secular holiday, the 4th of July.

The fact that the average American Christian typically applauds in the front row of this annual standing ovation for American “freedom,” brazenness, and over consumption is additional testimony to our cultural captivity, not to mention our spiritual blindness.

Listen to what Mr. Douglass said:

You can read the complete text of Douglass’s powerful speech here.

Although Douglass’s entire speech is brilliant, for me, the special genius of Douglass’s wonderful oratory is on fullest display in the following excerpt. (The emphasis is mine):

. . . What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.  

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour…  

A War Foretold in Ukraine

Years ago I was arrested in downtown Chicago for protesting against NATO, an organization that OUGHT to have been disbanded immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Its continuous expansion eastward, creeping threateningly country by country toward Russia’s western border, has triggered the current war between Russia and Ukraine — exactly as many had warned.

NATO is continuing its eastward expansion by embracing more Russian neighbors as it is poised to welcome Finland and Sweden into the western, military alliance.

Smart people will recognize the additional threats to European stability found at the heart of these new, senseless memberships being pushed by the US government.

Unfortunately, however, our current crop of foreign policy leaders demonstrate that high SAT scores do not necessarily translate into the considerable wisdom needed to engage in foreign affairs with even a modicum of humility, foresight, and restraint.

How many more times will we throw fuel onto the Ukraine/Russian fire while wringing our bloody hands in feigned innocence and refusing to take any responsibility for our criminal instigations?

As with so many problems in this world, the roots of this war can be traced back to America’s lust for world dominance. Rather than sit down and talk with others about how we might share the global pie, we can’t help but connive in hostile, surreptitious strategies for consuming more and more of the pie for ourselves.

Allow me to add — especially on this 4th of July weekend — that it is much easier for the thoughtful Christian to recognize and identify one’s own nationalistic foolishness — such as belittling Russians, valorizing Ukrainian Nazis, and waving the American flag while imagining that American intervention is the exemplary solution to this world’s problems — once we grasp what it means to “seek FIRST God’s kingdom and his righteousness.”

Once my priorities are properly arranged around the supreme priority of learning to be like Jesus and elevating my KINGDOM CITIZENSHIP above every other loyalty,  I will see excessive patriotism and all forms of nationalism for what they are — IDOLS waiting to be burned in the fires of kingdom living.

Below is an excerpt from a recent article titled “NATO and a War Foretold” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, published in Counterpunch.

The entire article is well worth reading as it walks through the history of expert, authoritative warnings against NATO expansion, the very thing we continue to do:

. . . This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver, most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.

Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to keep sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.

We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward. Those should include a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state, something that President Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.

And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.

But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior. Instead of calling for  compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous Alliance will instead promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.

While the world determines how to hold Russia accountable for the horrors it is committing in Ukraine, the members of NATO should do some honest self-reflection. They should realize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO and replace it with an inclusive framework that provides security to all of Europe’s countries and people, without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable and anachronistic, hegemonic ambitions.

Click here to read the entire piece.