DebateGate

Probably the most famous of all Jesus' parables, the prodigal son is the third in a trilogy of parables that are found in Luke 15. The first is the Lost Sheep, the second the Lost Coin, and the last being the Prodigal Son.

Does anyone have any thoughts, interesting points, or meanings for these parables? Do they conflict with any other teachings of Christ or any of the Apostles?

I'll post the parables here, from the NAB:

The Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7)

1 The tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to him,
2 but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."
3 So to them he addressed this parable.
4 "What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?
5 And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy
6 and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.'
7 I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.

The Parable of the Lost Coin

8 "Or what woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it?
9 And when she does find it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found the coin that I lost.'
10 In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

The Parable of the Prodigal Son

11 Then he said, "A man had two sons,
12 and the younger son said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me.' So the father divided the property between them.
13 After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.
14 When he had freely spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he found himself in dire need.
15 So he hired himself out to one of the local citizens who sent him to his farm to tend the swine.
16 And he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed, but nobody gave him any.
17 Coming to his senses he thought, 'How many of my father's hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger.
18 I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
19 I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers."'
20 So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.
21 His son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.'
22 But his father ordered his servants, 'Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
23 Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast,
24 because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.' Then the celebration began.
25 Now the older son had been out in the field and, on his way back, as he neared the house, he heard the sound of music and dancing.
26 He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean.
27 The servant said to him, 'Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.'
28 He became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father came out and pleaded with him.
29 He said to his father in reply, 'Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends.
30 But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.'
31 He said to him, 'My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours.
32 But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.'"

Another view
Paul Prescott, academic, on I Am Shakespeare

Paul Prescott
Monday September 10, 2007

Guardian

Anyone who really believes that Shakespeare didn't write his plays - as this show, conceived by actor Mark Rylance, suggests - is flying in the face of the evidence. The play is surfing the crest of a vogue for conspiracy theories.

If you come in knowing nothing about the so-called "authorship controversy" surrounding Shakespeare, you'll be sprayed with pseudo-factual shrapnel. The show is entertaining, if not strictly educational: it is an interactive bonanza, with phone-ins and audience votes. Shakespeare is sent off-stage, leaving the usual aristocratic suspects - the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere; the Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney; and Sir Francis Bacon - to reveal that it was they who actually did the writing. Afterwards, we are invited to text our reviews: "Gr8 set. Oxfd is hot!!! 1hr 2 long", and so on. These democratic stunts sit uneasily with the play's patrician subtext: that a middle-class boy from an anonymous Midlands town could not have grown into a great playwright. This is nonsense.

Let's be clear here: there is no controversy, only evidence and fantasy. The evidence points to Shakespeare; the fantasy points to everyone else. It's curious that Rylance, a former artistic director of London's Globe Theatre, should be masterminding this. After all, he allowed the theatre to be called Shakespeare's Globe - why didn't he call it Bacon's Globe?

It's worth remembering that, until 200 years ago, nobody doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. Rylance clearly believes that anyone other than the man from Stratford wrote Shakespeare. Personally, I'd rather believe that anyone other than Mark Rylance wrote I Am Shakespeare.

? Interview by Paul Arendt.

? Dr Paul Prescott teaches Shakespeare at Warwick University.

? I Am Shakespeare is at the Malvern Festival Theatre (01684 892277), until Saturday, then touring.

Currently the United States pays more per patient and as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on Earth. So, does that mean that we are receiving the best care? Do we have the highest life expectancy, the lowest infant mortality rate, the best treatment for the most people?

No. According to the OECD, we do not have any of those. In fact, we run about middle of the pack. Even in terms of medicine research, three of the five top drug manufacturers are European companies.

So, what do we have?

We have the best medical care in the world, for a few people who can afford it.

I received my employer's charitable donations booklet today, which is provided by the United Way. One of the many health-related charities to which employees may donate is a group called FACES. They provide information and assistance to families of children who need to undergo reconstruction surgery after being born with birth defects and skull deformities.

It is likely a wonderful organisation. They have an entire section of their website based on How to Pay the Bills?

The first sentence reads: "Dealing with the cost of medical treatment for your child can be overwhelming."

They go on to provide example letters so you can complain to your insurance company if they deny your claim to pay for your child's facial reconstruction. They also provide links to charities that help defray medical costs as well as a few programs.

http://www.faces-cranio.org/

For people who talk about the evils of "socialised medicine", I wonder, what about leaving a child with a cleft palate or skull deformity? Or forcing a couple into bankruptcy so that they can get their child's deformity corrected?

John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for President, spoke of a 50 year-old man in West Virginia who could not speak because of such a deformity that has never been corrected. It was a cleft palate that could have been fixed with a childhood surgery, but had never been. Imagine the opportunities this man missed in his fifty years because his family was too poor to have anything done about it.

It doesn't matter if you like Edwards or not (that wasn't an endorsement of him, just a point he raised). This is no way for a civilized nation to run a healthcare system. Call it socialised medicine, universal healthcare, or whatever - but it works far better than the leviathon we've created.

Link

Flag fight
West Asheville couple say they were assaulted by deputy
by David Forbes in Vol. 14 / Iss. 01 on 08/01/2007

The July 25 arrest of a West Asheville couple for desecrating the flag has sparked a storm of controversy, including doubts about the constitutionality of the rarely enforced state statute. The Buncombe County Sheriff?s Office is investigating the handling of the matter, and Sheriff Van Duncan has expressed regrets about the incident, telling Mountain Xpress that ?we would normally not have handled the situation that way.?



Local activists Mark and Deborah Kuhn say a Buncombe County sheriff?s deputy invaded their home and used excessive force in responding to a complaint that the couple was desecrating an American flag. The flag, which they?d hung upside down on their porch as a protest, had several statements pinned to it, including a photo of President Bush with the words ?Out Now? on it and an explanation that the upside-down flag is a traditional distress signal.

The Kuhns, backed up by several neighbors who witnessed the confrontation, assert that a sheriff?s deputy violently invaded their home on Brevard Road. The Sheriff?s Office maintains that the couple assaulted Deputy Brian Scarborough and resisted arrest. Scarborough, who is also a National Guardsman, became a full-time deputy on June 13 after spending seven months in Iraq. Scarborough had been a reserve deputy since 2003.

According to the Sheriff?s Office, Scarborough arrived at the home at 8:45 a.m. in response to a complaint lodged that morning by Staff Sgt. Mark Radford of the National Guard?s 105th Military Police Battalion, which is based in Asheville.

?I?d taken photos on my personal cell phone after I got off duty and out of uniform,? Radford told Xpress. ?The [National Guard] Armory is a gathering place for a lot of cops; they?ll come here to do their paperwork. I showed the pictures to him [Scarborough], asked him if it was illegal and left it in his hands.

?I can?t speak for the Guard, of course, but personally, I felt [the display of the flag] was totally uncalled for,? he added. ?If they want to do the political thing, that?s fine, but don?t deface the flag.?

A constitutional act
The U.S. Flag Code, a federal law that spells out rules for flying and displaying the flag, regards an upside-down flag as a distress signal and prohibits attaching anything to the flag. No penalties are prescribed for failing to follow the rules, however, and they are routinely violated by such activities as writing on the flag, using it in clothing or advertising, and flying a dirty or tattered flag.

And in separate rulings in 1989 and 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court found that defacing a flag to express an opinion is a constitutionally protected act of free speech. Furthermore, a 1971 ruling by the District Court for Western North Carolina declared the state statute unconstitutional.

?It?s specifically protected under the Constitution,? said attorney Bruce Elmore, who?s representing the Kuhns. ?The founders burned King George in effigy, and protecting that sort of protest was clearly their intent. They realized that it?s unpopular speech that needs protection.? Elmore serves as board president for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.

But Lt. Randy Sorrell says the Sheriff?s Office has to enforce any statute that?s on the books. ?It?s not our job to judge whether it?s constitutional.? And even though the couple lives in the city of Asheville, Sorrell explained, ?When we receive a complaint that the law is being broken, we have to respond.?

This is only the third time anyone has been charged under the state?s 1917 flag-desecration law, according to Dick Ellis, public information officer for the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts.

?We have codes for looking up crimes; this one is so rarely used we don?t have a code for it, but it?s still on the books,? Ellis said. ?It?s come up twice before, once was on [the UNC-Charlotte] campus in 1970, a student had a flag with a two-fingers peace sign and a slogan on the back of a jacket and campus security stopped him. The other time was a state trooper stopping some guy who had an American flag on the top his car.?

In both cases the charges were dismissed. The two people charged later challenged the constitutionality of the law, leading to the district ruling.

?Enacted during a period of national chauvinistic fervor, it [the flag desecration law] is an uncommonly bad statute,? Circuit Judge James Craven Jr. wrote in the ruling. ?Despite our respect, and indeed love, for these symbols of state and nation, we are compelled to hold the statute unconstitutional.?

Conflicting stories

Expressing distress: Deborah and Mark Kuhn on the porch of their West Asheville house. The glass panel of their front door (not pictured), which was broken during the incident, was recently patched over.
Exactly what happened on July 25 is in dispute. The Kuhns say they heard a knock on the door and answered it; after being shown the statute, they took down the flag. Scarborough then asked for their identification.

?The flag covered our whole front porch; he comes up with this printout about the law and tells us that we can?t attach things to the flag, that we?re desecrating it,? said Deborah Kuhn. ?We tell him we?re not meaning to desecrate it?all we had was a picture of [President] Bush with ?Out Now? on it and a note saying this was not a sign of disrespect. We did this because the country is in distress, and we don?t know what to do.?

Then, she said, Scarborough ?started talking arrest, so we took the flag down. He kept wanting to see our ID. We refused. We said, ?Why should we show you our ID?are you arresting us?? So we walked back into the house and closed the door.? Kuhn emphasized that the deputy had not produced a citation book or attempted to write a citation before asking for ID.

At that point, however, the accounts diverge. According to Deborah Kuhn, Scarborough ?tried to force the door, but we got it closed and locked it with the dead bolt. He then kicked it, punched the glass out, unlocked our door and came after us.?

But the arrest report states that ?the man [Mark Kuhn] refused to identify himself and slammed the door on the officer?s hand, breaking the glass pane out of the door and cutting the officer?s hand.?

The Kuhns? account, however, is backed up by Jimmy Stevenson of Ace Hardwood Floors, who was working nearby and says he saw Scarborough break down the door.

?I saw that one cop [Scarborough] pull up, and I saw those people come out on the porch and start talking to him,? said Stevenson. ?They took their flag down, asked the officer to leave and closed the door. Then he started kicking the door: He kicked it about five or six good times, then he laid right into it. After he got done kicking it, he broke the window out?I saw him hit the window.?

Deborah Kuhn says that Scarborough then ?pursued my husband into the kitchen. They were scuffling, [and] Mark was trying to get away from him. He pulls out his billy club, and I call 911 and say that an officer has broken into our house and is assaulting us.?

Scarborough sustained a cut to his arm when the window broke, and Mark Kuhn had several cuts on his face from the scuffle with Scarborough.

?I was just trying to defend myself and back away from him,? said Kuhn. ?They never, ever told us why we were being arrested until we were in jail.?

Elmore maintains that citizens are not required to produce identification at an officer?s request. ?There?s no law that says you have to show your ID?that?s why you have people arrested as ?John Doe? or ?Jane Doe? all the time,? he said.

But Sorrell said there are ?many statutes concerning producing ID, such as before taking a person into custody.?

Deborah Kuhn also asserts that no warrant was displayed or permission asked to enter the house. After calling 911, she says, she ran outside and began screaming for help.

?The arrest was illegal,? said Elmore. The Kuhns ?had committed no crime, had not been charged with any crime, and the deputy had no right to force entry into their home. They had the right to defend themselves.?

Sorrell disagreed. ?An officer can enter a residence to effect an arrest?that?s not the same thing as a search warrant,? he said.

Neighbor Sam York was awakened by the struggle as the Kuhns and Scarborough came out into the yard. ?I woke up to Debbie screaming,? he said. ?Mark and Debbie were saying, ?You assaulted us,? and the officer was demanding their identification. Then another officer threatened them with a taser. He told Debbie to back away or he?d taser her and demanded that Mark get on the ground.?

Sorrell confirmed this part of the account, saying, ?When they were outside, one of the other officers produced a taser, and he [Mark Kuhn] surrendered and submitted.?

Deborah Kuhn?s screams also drew the attention of Shawn Brady and several of his roommates, who live next door. ?I run outside and ask them what?s going on, and there?s cops chasing Mark around his car,? said Brady. ?They threaten to taser him and demand that he get on the ground. He gets on the ground, and we ask them what they?re being charged with. They tell us it?s none of our concern. I tell them they?re our neighbors, and it is our concern.?

Neal Wilson, one of Brady?s roommates, also saw the deputy produce the taser, he says. ?He was shouting at [Mark] to get on the ground.?

Brady and roommate Tony Plichta said that after they?d repeatedly inquired about the charge, the deputies replied that ?they didn?t know yet? what it would be.

?This is an outrage,? said Brady. ?The First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments were clearly broken today.? Plichta expressed similar sentiments, saying, ?They actually wanted to know why we cared?these are our neighbors.?

Following the arrest, the Kuhns were taken to the county jail, where they were charged with two counts of assaulting a government official and one count each of resisting arrest and desecrating an American flag. Their son posted their $1,500 bail shortly afterward. And though the Kuhns say the flag was taken as evidence, the Sheriff?s Office said it has no record of it.

Sheriff Van Duncan told Xpress on July 30 that his office?s Internal Affairs division is conducting an investigation of the incident.

?We?re looking into it right now and trying to see how we can proceed to make sure an incident like this doesn?t happen again.?

He added: ?I regret that it happened this way?we?re not trying to enforce that statute.?

Duncan said that he?d met with the Kuhns and that ?we?re talking to the District Attorney, we?re talking to their attorney and we?re trying to get this resolved.?

Sounding the alarm

This was not the first time the flag had attracted attention. A week before, on July 18, an Asheville police officer had stopped by to inquire about the upside-down flag.

?He was very polite and just said that because it was a sign of distress, he wanted to make sure everything was OK,? Deborah Kuhn explained. ?We said we had it out as a show of desperation?our country is in distress, and we just don?t know what to do. We asked if we had violated any ordinance. He said, ?No, you have every right.??

Asheville Police Chief Bill Hogan confirmed that the city had received a complaint and sent an officer by.

?We researched it?left it at the officer?s discretion and decided not to take any enforcement action,? Hogan said.

As for the Sheriff?s Office operating in the city, ?I wouldn?t say it?s a usual occurrence?we try to coordinate our efforts so as not to duplicate service,? Hogan said. ?But there have been a number of cases where they have answered complaints inside the city.?

Normally, Duncan noted, if the call is within city limits and not an emergency, the office forwards it to the Asheville police.

After the visit from the APD, Deborah Kuhn said she added the photo of Bush and the explanation of their reasons for the protest.

A couple of days later, Mark Kuhn said that an unidentified man in military fatigues came to their door. He was driving a car with a federal license plate, and ?He stood here telling me that I needed to take the flag down or fly it right,? said Kuhn.

Because the couple lives close to the armory, Kuhn said he assumed the man was with the National Guard.

Wilson, Plichta and Brady all confirm Kuhn?s account and say that after the man had stopped by, they also saw him drive by several times in the following days. They also report seeing several other men in fatigues taking pictures of the flag one night.

And as the Kuhns were being arrested and taken off, Wilson said he saw a man in fatigues drive by and shout, ?Go to jail, baby!?

Radford, who made the complaint, said he?d first noticed the flag on July 20 but had taken pictures from the road. He said he never came to the house or met the Kuhns in person?and he never drove by the house as they were being arrested.

?I?d never even seen their faces until I saw them on the news?I didn?t go up to them, and I didn?t talk to them,? Radford said. ?I just turned over the photos [to Scarborough that morning] and said, ?It?s in your hands.??

At press time, National Guard Armory officials had not answered requests for comment on any involvement with the incident.

Elmore said the Kuhns have no plans to sue the Sheriff?s Office. ?Right now, the first priority is defense against the criminal charges,? Elmore said. ?We?re not concerned with monetary compensation here?we?re concerned with making the Sheriff?s Department follow the law and respect citizens? rights, whether they agree with what they?re doing or not.?

If convicted, the Kuhns could face up to 420 days in jail.

After his experience, Mark Kuhn said he is convinced that this is not an isolated occurrence. ?If Americans don?t wake up to the martial state we?re in, the cops, the police, the sheriffs, the state police will all come to our door and take us away. ... It?s time for America to wake up.?


Follow-up: Link

I guess all the talk at Iran, despite knowing that the Sunni insurgents were responsible for the majority of the violence in Iraq has come to fruition. We've chosen our side, the same side Saddam chose and the British Empire before him.

A green light to oppression
Brian Whitaker
July 31, 2007 1:30 PM

link

In a move supposedly intended to counter Iranian influence, the US has announced a series of arms deals with Middle Eastern countries.

Apart from Israel, which will receive $30bn in military aid, Egypt will get $13bn. Five Gulf states - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE - will also be sold weaponry to the tune of $20bn, with the lion's share going to the Wahhabi regime in Riyadh.

Thus, in the name of "working with these states to fight back extremism" (as secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it), the US is arming two of the Arab world's leading human rights abusers: Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The reaction from Tehran was predictable. US policy "is creating fear and concerns in the countries of the region and trying to harm the good relations between these countries", foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran. And he's absolutely right.

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

In Egypt, the tiny Shia population is already harassed by the authorities and treated with suspicion. Some of this has been documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Its report talks of Shia Muslims being arrested - ostensibly for security reasons - but then being subjected to torrents of abuse by state security officers for their religious beliefs.

One officer is quoted as telling a suspect: "I'm going to keep tabs on you. If you try anything, I'll make you regret it. I'm prepared to forgive the members of the Gamaa'a Islamiyya [the armed Sunni Islamist group], although they murder us, but I wouldn't forgive you, because at least the Gamaa'a Islamiyya shares my creed."

In Saudi Arabia, where Shia account for 20% of the population (and, more critically, 75% in the oil-rich region), the official policy, as Matthew Mainen of the Institute for Gulf Affairs noted recently, is to treat them as polytheists, idol worshippers, and as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy against Islam.

"Matching the indoctrination of Saudi Arabia's public education system, governmental practices and policies reinforce the notion that Shia Muslims are subhuman. Shia books, education, music, and art are banned in Saudi Arabia. Shias are further barred from playing any political, social, or religious role in Saudi society, and are not even allowed to provide testimony in courts of law ...

"As long as Saudi Arabia continues to promote and practise an ideology holding that it is the obligation of Sunni Muslims to purge Islam of Shias in the great jihad, hundreds of Saudi insurgents will continue to cross the Iraqi border to further the sectarian violence without hindrance from the Saudi security forces."

As the US state department itself has observed in a report on religious freedom in the kingdom:

"Members of the Shia minority are subject to officially sanctioned political and economic discrimination ...

"Members of the Shia minority are discriminated against in government employment, especially in national security-related positions, such as in the military or Ministry of Interior. While there are some Shia who occupy high-level positions in government-owned companies and government agencies, many Shia believe that openly identifying themselves as Shia would have a negative impact on career advancement ... While there is no formal policy concerning the hiring and promotion of Shia, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some companies -including companies in the oil and petrochemical industries - well-qualified Shia are passed over for less-qualified Sunni compatriots ...

"The Government also discriminates against Shia in higher education through unofficial restrictions on the number of Shia admitted to universities."

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

I wanted to address this, if for no other reason than to provide some clarity, which was sorely lacking (through my own fault) in another thread.

Note that nearly all Christian Churches (I don't want to say all because there may have been a stray denomination of Protestantism or two) were completely against contraception until the 1930's and it was really the 1960's when the Protestant denominations reversed their prior stances and either fully accepted birth control or chose "individual conscience" which is another way of accepting it.

The question is, what changed?

Christians throughout early Christianity and even the early Reformationists knew of it as the sin of Onanism: Genesis 38:7-10.

The biblical penalty for not giving your brother’s widow children was public humiliation, not death (Deut. 25:7–10). Yet, God killed Onan as punishment for his crime (note that this is one of the few times God kills a human without any go-between). This means his crime was more than simply not fulfilling the duty of a brother-in-law. Jewish and Christian theologians had always considered Onan's crime as a violation of natural law, even separate from that of self-pleasure as Leviticus separates (15:16-20 - which discusses ritual purification).

The natural law that Onan violated was one of the earliest forms of birth control, coitus interruptus.

By the way, contraceptives are nothing new and neither is the Christian attitude that they should be forbidden.

Augistine wrote in 419:

I am supposing, then, although you are not lying [with your wife] for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility.

Martin Luther:

The exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches . . . is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime. . . . Consequently, he deserved to be killed by God. He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him.

John Calvin:

The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.

John Wesley:

Those sins that dishonor the body are very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile affections. Observe, the thing which he [Onan] did displeased the Lord—and it is to be feared; thousands, especially of single persons, by this very thing, still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls.

Note: quotes taken from Charles D. Provan, The Bible and Birth Control

My question is, what changed in the mid 20th century that 1900 years of Christian and Jewish teaching was suddenly reversed?

And with apologies to that fine magazine:

4DHS



This was an actual image taken after someone tried to explain something simple to Sirs. The patient is slowly recovering after nine years in a mental health facility where there are still occasional symptoms of hysteria including outbursts of: "MSM," "Islamofascism," and a stunning rendition of Nearer My Bush to Thee.

Domer Waxes Poetic

Domer: Adieu, these magniloquent periphrastic disquisitions left countless a peerless poster agog in temerarious revulsion. Anon, your scurrilous prostitution of our inviolable lingua franca will never be absolved.




The excitement is almost too difficult to be contained as people fall over themselves to read JS's next brilliant words of wisdom and knowledge.




Ami prepares to make another post, always fearful that someone may destroy him with a logical paradox.




Missus, Professor, and Plane reminisce about the "good old days."




Brass, Michael, and Lanya reminisce about the "good old days."



Prince's ideal future.



JS's ideal future. Oooh - socialist architecture, isn't it inspiring? ZZZZZzzzzzzz...

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Naomi Wolf
Tuesday April 24, 2007

Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2 Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3 Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4 Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5 Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7 Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8 Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9 Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10 Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.