Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?
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Hey There: I just want to say how appalled and saddened I am about what is happening in the US. It is said the the Roman Empire actually took centuries to collapse totally. If 45 gets in again the USA will fall off the cliff by the end of the eight years of his tyranny, bigotry, stupidity, cruelty . I have more adjectives but .......
I have a friend in Seattle who I love like a sister but I don't want our border to open until the USA gets a grip on itself. Yesterday BC had 170 active cases. Unfortunately there were three deaths at LTC facilities. We are in the position now to go to Phase III. I hope we don't screw it up.
I find myself absolutely gobsmacked by the Repugnicians in the Senate. Do they have no moral compass at all? How can they claim Christian values? And Pence lying through his teeth about flattening the curve! If I believed in God I would be praying fervently every night for an end to all of this. So I just fervently HOPE
It is a pity about Samaritan's Purse. I was not aware of the Evangelical leanings. I had hoped that they actually were Christian in the real sense of the word, doing good deeds because that is what good people do -- not tainted by a twisted religious philosophy.
Be kind. Stay safe. Stay calm (to quote Dr Bonnie Henry - our Chief Medical Health Officer for BC)
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Samaritan's Purse is a homophobic charity that only hires straight Christians "The Christian charity group that erected a 68-bed field hospital in Central Park to care for coronavirus patients is under fire for requiring volunteers to sign a "statement of faith" that disqualifies gays, non-Christians and atheists."
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magiclight: Wow. That I did not know. So much for good works. What happened to "feed them first,then spread the Gospel" or something like that? You can't help looking after sick people if you are not a straight Christian? My vocabulary fails me at this time.
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On a lighter note check out children's view of Covid. One of my favorites is the 2 pigs hugging, just something about their squished together faces.
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This is from the christian leaders in Arizona
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She seems like a nice lady if woefully ignorant about the history of the planet. Believing that the earth is only 6,000 years old isn't a problem. Believing that there has never been environmental disasters caused by humans is the problem.
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She actually touched on a much darker subject - the Earth will carry on just fine.
http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia
(Warning: a little strong language at the end)
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Miriand...how well you tell that story. None of us are essential to this planet.
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This is a very slow thread. It always has been. I thought it might be a bit energyzing if we each posted an article, essay, book review, movie clip that interested us. I promise to read what ever is posted even if it seems strange or not something I would be interested in. I'll know you agree when you post something.
Here is an essay that moved me. It's titled, "How to Sell Your Rape" by Lacy Crawford. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/opinion/lacy-crawford-memoir-rape.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
If you can't access this for any reason, let me know and I will post the entire essay.
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Great idea ananda...
In this day of media influencers, Crawford's itemized piece comes across as monetizing trauma to reach the widest audience. It is and probably always has been how personal stories get published. Don't get me wrong, that is not an indictment. Check off each item on the list of which she has 23 on getting it published and another 10 on post publication. The last post publication item is…'Your children are a new generation. It might be different for them. It won't. It might" is somehow not comforting.'
Storytelling and publishing are distinct, yet at times bound together. Story telling will always be important irrespective of the arena in which they are told.
I looked up Lacy Crawford's book "Notes on a silencing" reviewed in the Washington Post. The reviewer, Rachel Louise Snyder, writes "The book is a stunning, audacious attempt to reassert power over her own story. After all, she writes, stories and power "are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water." And water, Crawford says, wins every time. "What I want to know, even now, is: how?
My first realization of the power of stories came from reading Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. She is Laguna and writes in Ceremony "I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death."
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony0 -
I belong to a living history club that focuses on the middle ages and renaissance. This video made me want to make vinegar so badly! I already make a drinking syrup (sekanjabin) that uses vinegar, so this played directly into my interests.
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He talks about the uses of vinegar. One of the ones he didn't mention is vinegar is an excellent anti-bacterial wash. Lovely video.
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rc
Here's her op-ed. I find it such a powerful and moving story.
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?
By Caroline Randall Williams
June 26, 2020NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of "airbrushing" history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn't understand. You cannot say it wasn't my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don't just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I've got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma's Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
And here I'm called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.
This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, "Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach." It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.
But here's the thing: Our ancestors don't deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person's reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.
Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.
To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body's story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of "Lucy Negro, Redux" and "Soul Food Love," and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.
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Divine... if anyone reads no further than the first sentence.... 'I have rape-colored skin' and ponders that phrase how can they bow before the monuments of men who raped untold thousands of women.
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Divine I loved that piece too. Powerful. Embodying history.
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Divine - thank you for posting. Very powerful piece that lays it all out.
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This is the link to the report of the catholic church receiving at least a billion and possibly 3 billion dollars from the US govt in ppp loans.
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magiclight, that report is so frustrating! All that money yet they still pass around the collection plate. All that covered up abuse and people still give. A religion that oppresses women to the nth degree. Believers brainwashed from birth to blindly follow biblical baloney.
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I thought this was an insightful article making many good points:
The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments
For five years, a team of researchers asked women about their experience after having—or not having—an abortion. What do their answers tell us?
July 7, 2020
The Turnaway Study, about the fallout of receiving or being denied an abortion, will be understood, criticized, and used politically, however carefully conceived and painstakingly executed the research was.
There is a kind of social experiment you might think of as a What if? study. It would start with people who are similar in certain basic demographic ways and who are standing at the same significant fork in the road. Researchers could not assign participants to take one path or another—that would be wildly unethical. But let's say that some more or less arbitrary rule in the world did the assigning for them. In such circumstances, researchers could follow the resulting two groups of people over time, sliding-doors style, to see how their lives panned out differently. It would be like speculative fiction, only true, and with statistical significance.
A remarkable piece of research called the Turnaway Study, which began in 2007, is essentially that sort of experiment. Over three years, a team of researchers, led by a demographer named Diana Greene Foster, at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 1,132 women from the waiting rooms of thirty abortion clinics in twenty-one states. Some of the women would go on to have abortions, but others would be turned away, because they had missed the fetal gestational limit set by the clinic. Foster and her colleagues decided to compare the women in the two groups—those who received the abortion they sought and those who were compelled to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term—on a variety of measures over time, interviewing them twice a year for up to five years.
The study is important, in part, because of its ingenious design. It included only women whose pregnancies were unwanted enough that they were actively seeking an abortion, which meant the researchers were not making the mistake that some previous studies of unplanned conceptions had—"lumping the happy surprises in with the total disasters," as Foster puts it. In terms of age, race, income level, and health status, the two groups of women closely resembled each other, as well as abortion patients nationwide. (Foster refers to the study's participants as women because, to her knowledge, there were no trans men or non-binary people among them.) Seventy per cent of the women who were denied abortions at the first clinic where they sought them carried the unwanted pregnancies to term. Others miscarried or were able to obtain late abortions elsewhere, and Foster and her colleagues followed the trajectories of those in the latter group as well.
While you might guess that those who were turned away had messier lives—after all, they were getting to the clinic later than the seemingly more proactive women who made the deadline—that did not turn out to be the case. Some of the women who got their abortions (half of the total participants) did so just under the wire; among the women in the study who were denied abortions (a quarter of the total), some had missed the limit by a matter of only a few days. (The remaining quarter terminated their pregnancies in the first trimester, which is when ninety per cent of abortions in the United States occur.) The women who were denied abortions were on average more likely to live below the poverty line than the women who managed to get them. (One of the main reasons that people seek abortions later in pregnancy is the need to raise money to pay for the procedure and for travel expenses.) But, in general, Foster writes, the two groups "were remarkably similar at the first interview. Their lives diverged thereafter in ways that were directly attributable to whether they received an abortion."
Over the past several years, findings from the Turnaway Study have come out in scholarly journals and, on a few occasions, gotten splashy media coverage. Now Foster has published a patiently expository precis of all the findings in a new book, "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion." The over-all impression it leaves is that abortion, far from harming most women, helps them in measurable ways. Moreover, when people assess what will happen in their lives if they have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, they are quite often proven right. That might seem like an obvious point, but much of contemporary anti-abortion legislation is predicated on the idea that competent adults can't really know what's at stake in deciding whether to bear a child or not. Instead, they must be subjected to waiting periods to think it over (as though they can't be trusted to have done so already), presented with (often misleading) information about the supposed medical risks and emotional fallout of the procedure, and obliged to look at ultrasounds of the embryo or fetus. And such scans are often framed, with breathtaking disingenuousness, as a right extended to people—what the legal scholar Carol Sanger calls "the right to be persuaded against exercising the right you came in with."
Maybe the first and most fundamental question for a study like this to consider is how women feel afterward about their decisions to have an abortion. In the Turnaway Study, over ninety-five per cent of the women who received an abortion and did an interview five years out said that it had been the right choice for them. It's possible that the women who remained in the study that long were disproportionately inclined to see things that way—maybe if you were feeling shame or remorse about an abortion you'd be less up for talking about it every six months in a phone interview with a researcher. (Foster suggests that people experiencing regrets might actually be more inclined to participate, but, to me, the first scenario makes more psychological sense.) Still, ninety-five per cent is a striking figure. And it's especially salient, again, in light of anti-choice arguments, which often stress the notion that many of the quarter to third of all American women who have an abortion will be wracked with guilt about their decision. (That's an awful lot of abject contrition.) You can pick at the study for its retention rate—and some critics, particularly on the anti-abortion side, have. Nine hundred and fifty-six of the original thousand-plus women who were recruited did the first interview. Fifty-eight per cent of them did the final interview. But, as Foster pointed out in an e-mail to me, on average, the women in the study completed an impressive 8.4 of the eleven interviews, and some of the data in the study—death records and credit reports—cover all 1,132 women who were originally enrolled.
To the former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among others, it seemed "unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." In a 2007 abortion-case ruling, he wrote that "severe depression and loss of esteem can follow." It can, but the epidemiologists, psychologists, statisticians, and other researchers who evaluated the Turnaway Study found it was not likely. "Some events do cause lifetime damage"—childhood abuse is one of them—"but abortion is not common among these," Foster writes. In the short term, the women who were denied abortions had worse mental health—higher anxiety and lower self-esteem. In the longer run, the researchers found "no long-term differences between women who receive and women who are denied an abortion in depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-esteem, life satisfaction, drug abuse, or alcohol abuse." Abortion didn't weigh heavily in determining mental health one way or the other. Foster and her co-authors note, in an earlier article, that "relief remained the most commonly felt emotion" among women who got the abortions they sought. That relief persisted, but its intensity dissipated over time.
Other positive impacts were more lasting. Women in the study who received the abortion they sought were more likely to be in a relationship they described as "very good." (After two years, the figure was forty-seven per cent, vs. twenty-eight per cent for the women turned away.) If they had been involved with a physically abusive man at the time of the unwanted pregnancy, they were less likely to still be experiencing violence, for the simple reason that they were less likely to be in contact with him. (Several of the participants interviewed for the book talk about not wanting to be tethered to a terrible partner by having a child together.) Women who got the abortion were more likely to become pregnant intentionally in the next five years than women who did not. They were less likely to be on public assistance and to report that they did not have enough money to pay for food, housing, and transportation. When they had children at home already, those children were less likely to be living in poverty. Based on self-reports, their physical health was somewhat better. Two of the women in the study who were denied abortions died from childbirth-related complications; none of the women who received abortions died as a result. That is in keeping with other data attesting to the general safety of abortion. One of Foster's colleagues, Ushma Upadhyay, analyzed complications after abortions in California's state Medicaid program, for example, and found that they occurred in two per cent of the cases—a lower percentage than for wisdom-tooth extraction (seven per cent) and certainly for childbirth (twenty-nine per cent). Indeed, maternal mortality has been rising in the U.S.—it's now more than twice as high as it was in 1987, and has risen even more steeply for Black women, due, in part, to racial disparities in prenatal care and the quality of hospitals where women deliver.
Yet, as Foster points out, many of the new state laws restricting abortion suggest that it is a uniquely dangerous procedure, one for which layers of regulation must be concocted, allegedly to protect women. The Louisiana law that the Supreme Court struck down last Monday imposed just such a rule—namely, a requirement that doctors performing abortions hold admitting privileges at a hospital no more than thirty miles away. As Justice Stephen Breyer's majority opinion noted, "The evidence shows, among other things, that the fact that hospital admissions for abortion are vanishingly rare means that, unless they also maintain active OB/GYN practices, abortion providers in Louisiana are unlikely to have any recent in-hospital experience." Since hospitals often require such experience in order to issue admitting privileges, abortion providers would be caught in a Catch-22, unable to obtain the privileges because, on actual medical grounds, they didn't need them. The result of such a law, had it gone into effect, would have been exactly what was intended: a drastic reduction in the number of doctors legally offering abortions in the state.
The Turnaway Study's findings are welcome ones for anyone who supports reproductive justice. But they shouldn't be necessary for it. The overwhelming majority of women who received abortions and stayed in the study for the full five years did not regret their decision. But the vast majority of women who'd been denied abortions reported that they no longer wished that they'd been able to end the pregnancy, after an actual child of four or five was in the world. And that's good, too—you'd hope they would love that child wholeheartedly, and you'd root for their resilience and happiness.
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human autonomy: people have to be able to make their own decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately affect their own bodies and the course of their lives. Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the extent to which individuals may feel such emotions, hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for legislative bans and restrictions.
The Turnaway Study will be understood, criticized, and used politically, however carefully conceived and painstakingly executed the research was. Given that inevitability, it's worth underlining the most helpful political work that the study does. In light of its findings, the rationale for so many recent abortion restrictions—namely, that abortion is uniquely harmful to the people who choose it—simply topples
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Maybe a bit off topic for this thread, but I found these Buddhist nuns live a very different life than most religious communities The kung fu nuns of Kathmandu take the empowering of girls very seriously.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/07/05/886043783/the-kung-fu-nuns-of-kathmandu
Each summer since 2010, the nuns have held week-long self-defense workshops in Ladkh, India to teach young women the basics of kung fu. Jigme Migyur Palmo, who became a nun at the age of 13, is one of the instructors.
"We need to help as many young girls as possible. They don't know that rape or sexual assault is wrong so we work to educate them and [teach them] how to handle difficult situations," Palmo says.
The workshops teach young girls various kung fu techniques, including take-downs and strikes. They also act out potential sexual assault scenarios — like being attacked from behind — and how to handle themselves in everyday settings, such as problems that might arise traveling to school on buses as well as dealing with cat-calling at outdoor markets and shopping malls.
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Kung Fu was originally developed by an order of Chinese monks and also taught to nuns of the same order. It was developed as a means of self defense during a time of the waring states so they could defend themselves without killing.
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magiclight, I loved the Kung Fu nuns article. It brings up a range of emotions in me. Frustration and anger of the patriarchal practice of not allowing women to partake in some of the traditions, yet inspired by the nuns who choose to disregard these societal norms and forge ahead to learn kung fu and then spread these lessons to women and empower them. I just get so angry that cultures insist on keeping women oppressed, at how they devalue us. But read the stories of how Buddhist practices help women gain strength, focus and confidence, why wouldn’t anyone want that?
Thanks for sharing this story.
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Heard this recently - If you believe in predestination, why bother to look both ways before you cross the street.
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I like that one, Minus Two. Though I have to say, intellectual consistency is not a hallmark of most religions.
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Time to repeal the Hyde amendment
In U.S. politics, the Hyde Amendment is a legislative provision barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape. Before the Hyde Amendment took effect, an estimated 300,000 abortions were performed annually using taxpayer funds.
Taxpayer funds are also used to fund executions. Hmmm? How is that for cognitive dissonance among religious right?
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I think there may be two reasons Churches are demanding to completely reopen. People give more when they are being watched by their neighbors. Donations are down since the virus. The longer people stay away from church, the more likely they will be to skip church altogether and donations will not recover.
I wonder if I will be proven correct.
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I think so. BIG Catholic Church up the street from me. During winter, I can’t get out of my driveway after Mass lets out. Now with Covid, no mass. They depend on collecting$$ to help fund the school. They have signs around town for enrollment. Will be interesting to see what happens
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The sad thing is those megachurches ask their attendees to tithe so their ministers can live like that and drive expensive cars. Remember Jim and Tammy? Meanwhile they are counting every penny to be able to feed and clothe their families.
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