Ain’t love strange? Yes…..yes it is!!!

Author’s progressive attitudes attract followers, confront religious right

Caryle Murphy
The Washington Post
Updated: 4:18 a.m. ET Sept. 10, 2006

Lyndsay Moseley was no longer inspired by the evangelical Christian faith of her youth. As an environmental activist, she believed that it offered little spiritual support for her work and was overly focused on opposing abortion and gay marriage.

Then the 27-year-old District resident discovered Brian D. McLaren of Laurel, one of contemporary Christianity’s hottest authors and founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in upper Montgomery County.

“He always talks about the environment as a priority when he talks about the church being relevant to the world,” Moseley said. “He’s leading a [spiritual] conversation that needs to happen,” one that “I’ve been hungry for.”

McLaren has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in an increasingly active group of progressive evangelicals who are challenging the theological orthodoxy and political dominance of the religious right. He also is an intellectual guru of “emerging church,” a grass-roots movement among young evangelicals exploring new models of living out their Christian faith.

…

“When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels,” McLaren said in a recent interview.

Scot McKnight, a professor of religious studies at Chicago’s North Park University who has studied McLaren’s career, said that “he wants there to be greater cooperation among Christians, and he thinks evangelical Christians have aligned themselves too closely with the Republican Party. He wants to see Christians . . . pursue what is right, regardless of the political party’s platform.”

What makes McLaren’s ideas attractive to progressive evangelicals appalls the more numerous conservatives. Noting that he fails to condemn homosexuality, one conservative Web site called him “A True Son of Lucifer” for ignoring “absolute biblical truth.” And last year, Baptists in Kentucky revoked a speaking invitation after McLaren said that followers of Jesus might not be the only ones to gain salvation.

Full article

Scot McKnight …thinks evangelical Christians have aligned themselves too closely with the Republican Party. Really Scottie? Ya think?? They both do share a winning formula- scare the hell out of everybody. Force people to comply to and ‘obey’ their wishes (and fears). Frauds. All of them.

Man will always have a thirst for knowledge. It’s what moves us forward. Lacking knowledge (and understanding) many have and will continue to turn to religion for answers. (When in doubt, put it in a book and call it gospel!)

McLaren, and others like him, offer a shimmer of hope for the future.

Allan Sloan

Newsweek

Sept. 18, 2006 issue - Next month the White House and its congressional allies will be taking victory laps when the deficit for fiscal 2006 is announced. The stated deficit for the year, which ends Sept. 30, will be $260 billion or so. That will be down $58 billion from 2005 and a whopping $77 billion below what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted in January. The White House says this is happening largely because tax revenues have surged-which they have. It sure sounds great.

But let me share a dirty little secret with you: the real federal deficit isn’t $260 billion. It’s more than double that. And when you calculate what I consider the real deficit-hold on to your hats, it’s $558 billion-you come out with slightly more than last year’s real deficit, which I put at $551 billion. Revenue surge, shmevenue surge. Things are getting worse, not better.

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Here’s the deal. The stated deficit is the difference between the cash that the government takes in and the cash it spends. That’s $260 billion-the number most analysts use to measure the deficit. But Uncle Sam will also borrow almost $300 billion from federal trust funds: $177 billion from Social Security, and an additional $121 billion from “other government accounts” such as federal-employee pension funds. Some $78 billion of this total comes from the Treasury’s taking Social Security’s cash surplus this year and spending it. Most of the rest comes from the government’s paying what it owes the trust funds-primarily for interest on their $3.6 trillion of Treasury securities- with I.O.U.s, not cash. (All my numbers, by the way, are based on public budget documents.)

If a company tried to keep books this way, its accountants would scream faster than you can say Sarbanes-Oxley. But we’re playing by the rules of Washington Math.

Article here 

People, our government is in desperate need of a complete overhaul. If we continue to turn our backs to crap like this, America will at some point cease to exist.

The Australian

September 10, 2006

FIVE years after the Sptember 11, 2001, attacks, the trail of their chief mastermind, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, has gone cold, The Washington Post has reported on its website.

The newspaper said US commandos, whose job is to capture or kill bin Laden, have not received a credible lead in more than two years.

Nothing from the vast US intelligence world - no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image - has led them anywhere near the Al-Qaeda leader, the report said, citing unnamed US and Pakistani officials.

“The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence” that could have led to his capture, The Post quotes one of the officials as saying.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Following a request from President George W. Bush to “flood the zone,” the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to his pursuit, the newspaper reported.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the “zone” is.

“Here you’ve got a guy who’s gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly,” the Post quoted T. McCreary, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, as saying. “And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That’s an extremely difficult problem.”

link

Doin’ a heckuva job there Bushie…  I can see why that 30’something-percent can be so proud of you.