The National Day of Prayer has been hijacked by the Religious Right
April 27th, 2008 at 02:51pm Pat Cunningham
The National Day of Prayer, this year’s edition of which is set for Wednesday of this week, is controlled by Focus on the Family and like-minded groups on the Religious Right.
But some folks are trying to make the event more INCLUSIVE.
Entry Filed under: National Day of Prayer, Focus on the Family, Religious Right
18 Comments Add your own
1. Kaus | April 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Jealous? You’re an atheist Pat…why do you care? Let it go man, or join the club!
2. Pat Cunningham | April 27th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I am NOT an atheist. Quit telling me what I think, Kaus. By the way, what “club” do you think I should join? And don’t tell me the Christian club. There are hundreds of Christian demoninations, and their beliefs vary widely. There is no single “Christian point of view” on almost any issue, despite what you hear from the TV preachers. Indeed, lots of Christians argue that members of certain other denominations are not really Christians at all. It’s one gigantic exercise in self-righteousness and holier-than-thou-ism.
3. Kaus | April 27th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
This is a national day of prayer. You are not a Christian….you are not Muslim or Jewish….so who are you going to pray to? If you aren’t going to pray….then let the rest of us have our day.
4. Menlo Bob | April 27th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Consider two possibilities:
1.They should re-name it. Call it the National Convert a Muslim Day. Muslims used to hijack airplanes in the Middle East all the time. Consider the hijacking the National Day of Prayer as payback.
2.Call it Dobson Day. It’s short, forgettable and is truth in advertising.
5. Dave | April 27th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
This article is another example of poor reporting by an unbeliever that has no idea what he is writing about.
6. Pat Cunningham | April 28th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Dave: Who are you calling an unbeliever? The fact is, as shown in the material to which I linked, that the bigots of the Religious Right have hijacked the National Day of Prayer. If you can’t grasp that, it is you who is the unbeliever in facts.
7. hokumboy | April 28th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Pat,
I’ve come to think of you as more of a Deist. Am I right? That, of course, would put you in some pretty damn good company.
8. Pat Cunningham | April 28th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Yeah, Hoke, Deist is a pretty fair characterization of where I’m coming from. I’m a lapsed Catholic, and I think of myself as a searcher. I read more about religion than any other subject except for politics and American history. My readings suggest that there are millions of so-called true believers who have very little knowledge of what’s in the Bible.
9. hokumboy | April 28th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Pat kindly let me know that I somehow posted this in the wrong thread:
” Is it just me? Or is there something Schutzstaffel scary about this window sticker?
http://www.ndptf.org/catalog/prod_NP223.cfm?series=0&brand=0 ”
So Pat, if by any chance McCain gets elected President, do you think his spiritual advisor, Hagee, will ask him to include those who are part of “The Whore of Babylon” in any National Days of Prayer?
10. Pat Cunningham | April 28th, 2008 at 9:32 am
If McCain gets elected, we’re gonna need a National Day of Prayer every day.
11. Kaus | April 28th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Hokum, Hagee was a donor, not an advisor. Until Hagee appears on CNN for 1 hour like Rev. Wright….
12. redrover | April 28th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
“Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.”
– Thomas Paine, as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine (which contains no pagination or source citations)
13. redrover | April 28th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
“Had the Christian Religion done any good in the world I would not have exposed it, however fabulous I might believe it to be. But the delusive idea of having a friend at court whom they call a redeemer, who pays all their scores, is an encouragement to wickedness.”
– Thomas Paine, in a letter written to Joel Barlow, at Washington, dated Broome Street, New York, May 4th, 1807.
14. Kaus | April 28th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Redrover….you sound like Marxism is the better way to go. Let\\\’s do a body bag count on those slain in Russia and China and compare notes shall we?
15. Pat Cunningham | April 29th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Kaus: There’s nothing especially Marxist in what Redrover says. Actually, the words aren’t his; they’re Thomas Paine’s. Are you saying Paine was a Marxist, Kaus? Pretty good trick, since Paine died nine years before Marx was born. Y’know, Kaus, one can be skeptical about religion without being a Marxist about it. Lots of the Founding Fathers, to one extent or another, were skeptical about religion. Jefferson even wrote his own bible, leaving out the parts of the King James version he didn’t like. By the way, Kaus, how’s your familiarity with the Good Book? Do you really know what’s in it?
16. Kaus | April 29th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Pat, I’ve read the good book sans the appocrypha cover to cover 4 times, and read it every day. Redrover bashes religion, my counter point is that an ideology sans religion-Marxism- has been more brutal (communist China, Viet Nam, North Korea, Russia).
17. Mary | April 29th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
This statement can be found on the National Day of Prayer Task Force web site (http://www.ndptf.org):
The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance held on the first Thursday of May, inviting people of all faiths to pray for the nation. It was created in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States Congress, and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. Our Task Force is a privately funded organization whose purpose it is to encourage participation on the National Day of Prayer. It exists to communicate with every individual the need for personal repentance and prayer, to create appropriate materials, and to mobilize the Christian community to intercede for America’s leaders and its families. The Task Force represents a Judeo Christian expression of the national observance, based on our understanding that this country was birthed in prayer and in reverence for the God of the Bible.
and
People with other theological and philosophical views are, of course, free to organize and participate in activities that are consistent with their own beliefs. This diversity is what Congress intended when it designated the Day of Prayer, not that every faith and creed would be homogenized, but that all who sought to pray for this nation would be encouraged to do so in any way deemed appropriate. It is that broad invitation to the American people that led, in our case, to the creation of the Task Force and the Judeo-Christian principles on which it is based.
I’m sure somebody will call me stupid or something, but I don’t find any of these statements to be difficult to accept.
18. redrover | April 30th, 2008 at 10:51 am
It would be hard to quantify and compare the human suffering caused by totalitarian “Marxism” with the human suffering caused by totalitarian “Christianity”.
It is certain that totalitarian Christianity has had much more experience at afflicting innocent people than totalitarian Marxism.
Consider the death tolls taken by inter-Christian religious persecution, over minor ideological differences, that began less than a century after the death of Jesus and continues today in places like Greece:
http://www.cswusa.com/Countries/Greece.htm
Nearly 19 centuries of violent anti-Semitism is a Christian crime that outdid anything one can blame on the “Marxists”. The Holocaust was originally the brainchild of Christian “reformer” Martin Luther,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_and_antisemitism#Use_by_the_Nazis
It is no coincidence that Krystallnacht took place on Martin Luther’s birthday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystallnacht#Contemporaneous_German_response
After several centuries of murdering one another and their Jewish neighbors in the name of Jesus, European Christians went out from their cesspool of a continent and began to enslave and exterminate the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia, Africa and Asia. All of these violent acts were justified by their devotion to Jesus.
I, a born-again agnostic, detest the crimes of totalitarian Marxists like those in China and Vietnam, but I can’t help but wonder at how one of the most publicly pious Christians in our community, our Congressman Don Manzullo, supports so-called “free trade” with those detestable regimes despite their many crimes, of which he is certainly aware.
In my view, this “free trade” policy is just Christian enslavement and extermination by proxy in that it provides funds for those regimes to commit their atrocities against their own citizens and huge profits to American corporations who exploit those oppressed people.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed