I don’t use my cell phone very much. Whenever I visit my father, though, and he is in a pretty good mental space, I love to grab it and call someone back east to whom he hasn’t spoken for a while so that they can chat. Despite Dad’s progressive dementia, he pulls it together for those calls and truly lights up when he hears the voices of people he loves so much. This afternoon, as the phone vibrated to life, I noticed that I had a voicemail….. strange……. when I listened, and heard that it was from the Department of Homeland Security, I realized this was change I could really believe in.

Yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Satan resonded to Pat Robertson’s recent attack. See for yourself why he thought Robertson was making him look bad:

Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll. You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

Another letter writer believed it might be another God who was offended by the Haitians:

We have been very fortunate to have a Chinese student with us for a couple of weeks as a short term intern. Robert Woo comes from Nanjing, a historic city in eastern China, and is studying economics and political science as a sophomore at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. He wanted a warmer place for the winter break and contacted us to volunteer here. He has some initial experience with China’s social activism, and has written on Global Voices, an excellent website for listening in on conversations around the world. We asked him to write something about China today. The rest of this is all his.

Half-Leaps Forward

By Robert Woo

Every time I think about my own country, China, I think of Dickens’s quotation: “This was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” China has come a long way to realizing truly modernized society but has not got there, yet. So when you think about anything bad you might read or remember about China, you have to take some history into account. And by that I mean looking at the progress that has been made.

China has become more or less a better place than it was, say, a hundred years ago. We have surely become a stronger nation and have obtained greater wealth. And more importantly, the seeds of rights and citizenship have been sown; more and more people have come to realize that they, in Mao’s words, are actually “the masters of this country.” This trend has been slow, but undeniable.

So, it is the best of the times.

What does this mean? The bulldozer on fire.

But there are many moments when you simply have to scratch your head and ask, what does this mean? What is this monstrous and absurd thing called “China” all about? In this blog post I’ll try to give you some insider’s glimpses of both this country’s absurdity and what the movement for social change is like there.

The emperor and the child

Want to hear about a real-life version of Up or Avatar? A Shanghai couple, after getting only 10 percent of the money that they should have received in compensation for the demolition of their house, turned violent against a horde of evictors and law enforcers. The man armed himself with a bow and arrow, and the woman burned down the bulldozer with a homemade Molotov cocktail.

I’ve been reading the GoddessScholars list and surfing the web looking for eulogies of Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian (from theos, ancient Greek for God) who made thealogy possible (from thea, ancient Greek for Goddess). And in reading through several of them, I’ve been remembering how important she was to me in the early 1970s. At that point in time, I could buy every book on feminism that came out, and I did. But not each one opened up my mind like Beyond God the Father.

I can tell from my notes that although it was published in 1973, I must have read it in 1974. At that time I was a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding member of the Feminist Criticism Collective. Feminist literary criticism didn’t exist at that time, so we were creating it as we went along.

Here are just a few of the important ideas I found in Beyond God the Father:

1) That women had “the power of naming stolen from them, and that the liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves” (p.8)

2) That in the women’s movement, “[W]omen are hearing ourselves and each other, and out of this supportive hearing emerge new words” (p. 8). I guess I must have forgotten that Daly originated this thought, because a couple of years later Nelle Morton said it again as a slogan, and that’s when it stuck for me. Morton said femininst “women were hearing each other into speech.”

3) That we needed to overcome “methodolatry” (p. 11).

At this moment, I am angry with God.  Do you not see this God?  Did you cause this?

As I view the destruction, death, and devastation of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, I am angry with God.  God, the Being that is the power, the sense, and the presence of Radical Love allowed this.  Theodicy fails us.  There is no explanation or excuse for an all powerful Being who could not or would not prevent this.  Is there some geological explanation that tells us that for some reason the earth’s tectonic plates needed to shift?  Was this adjustment built into the structure of earth’s basic design?

We live in a time of agony. The faces of the devastated people in Haiti come to shock us today. But we learn from UNICEF that

… more than 24,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable causes like pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition. Nearly 200 million youngsters are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence.

This is not the pain of simply being human, of the uncurable disease, natural disasters and death that have always been with us. It is the pain of neglect; of avoidable and curable disease, of killing poverty across the tracks from unimaginable wealth. You know this, we all know this. We seem to be trapped.

But still we dream of a world where our security comes from generosity to each other. And many many people are striving to make it happen, and the news is not all bad any means. We need to believe in the possibility of it more.

So I was very happy to see that people coming to this blog in the last 14 hours–after I sent out an email to our large list with the headings of the week’s posts (a list you can join here, which gets a wider range of emails than you can get from the “Join Tikkun Daily” button above)–clicked on the post “The opposite of consumption isn’t thrift. It’s generosity” far more than on any other (over twice as much as the next favorite post). We know the pain of the world, but we come to places like Tikkun to find encouragement for the countercultural belief, that often feels naive to us even though we know better, that we can create a caring world. It can happen. And not only in our immediate circles. We can think big. We can look after each other and all the life on our planet. Breathe in that idea, open to what it will take, not knowing how it will happen. Share the belief, connect, give. We don’t know how but we do know how.

People from all around the world are remembering the nation of Haiti in this time of suffering and loss–some by their prayers, others through acts of generosity and solidarity. Several of my Brazilian friends have asked that we join with them in remembering one of the victims of Tuesday’s earthquake– Zilda Arns Neumann. She was visiting Haiti on a medical mission.

By all accounts, she was spiritual progressive – a rare combination of doctor, social activist, and spiritual leader. (In fact, she was three time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.) Together with her brother, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, (Cardinal Archbishop of São Paulo), she has stood out as one of Brazil’s contemporary peacemakers.

So, as we continue to pray for Haiti and her people, let us also remember the lives of saints such as Zilda Arns. May her life shine forth a bit more light into this moment of darkness, and may her small acts of love encourage us to do likewise.

My atheist anti-religious friends will tell me all about Pat Robertson’s vicious words on Haiti. They may not send me all the many words from religious leaders giving a call that is more true to the founding spirits of the great religions. Thanks to Aminah Carroll for sending this piece from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that says all that really needs to be said.

Message from ISNA president Dr. Ingrid Mattson on the Haitian Earthquake

It has been reported that a prominent Christian leader, Pat Robertson, has said that Haiti has been “cursed” by a “pact with the devil.” Fortunately, this is not the mainstream Christian position and my friend, the Reverend Paul Raushenbush, has rejected Robertson’s “blaming the victims” theology. Religious leaders must take a stance against extremist voices in their community, and I am glad to see Rev. Raushenbush respond to Robertson’s ridiculous and offensive suggestions.

As Muslims, we believe that human suffering is not always explainable or understandable. We do know that innocent people suffer all the time, from sickness and natural disaster, and that in such cases, we are required to do two things: First, pray and remember, as the Qur’an says that “to God we belong and to Him we return.” Second, we must help those who are suffering. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, reported in a Sacred Hadith that if we want to be close to God, we should visit the sick and feed the needy. On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will say, “O son of Adam, I fell ill and you did not visit me.” The person will say, “O Lord, how could I visit you when You are the Lord of the worlds?” He will say, “Did you not know that So-and-so fell ill and you did not visit him? If you had visited him, you would have found Me with him [the hadith continues].”

The rest is here.

A rightwinger at a netroots conference has been emphasizing the importance of reason in his work. The videographer unexpectedly asks him what reason feels like. It feels like security, the conservative replies. He had a tough childhood, and embracing reason helped him to get out of the chaos of his life.

The videographer is Edwin Rutsch, whose website on progressive values and empathy is an enticing place I hope to explore. I met Edwin at the Engaging the Other conference, where he was taping people talking about empathy. It turned out we live a block from each other on the same street. So we’ve been getting together. This week he was describing the recent PBS TV series “This Emotional Life.” He praised the series but had one basic criticism of it, that it maintained the fiction, so endemic to our culture, of reason and emotion as somehow opposites. He quoted George Lakoff on the neuroscience of mirror neurons, which shows that in the brain our capacity to reason is literally constructed upon our ability to empathize with other people.

There is an interesting article in the NY Times Ideas section today about Environmentalism as a Religion. It points out that environmentalism has the concept of guilt and sins (leaving the water running and the lights on), the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox (green) than your neighbor, and new heresies include failure to compost or refusal to go organic (I would add questioning global climate change). It has Satan figures (evil corporate chief executives), prophets (Al Gore), and even a belief in an imminent apocalypse if we don’t change our ways.

While the article points out that “environmentalism as a religion” is not a new idea, it does provide a nice short summary of the concept. To what extent is this idea true, and if so, is that a bad or good thing?

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a quotation from Albert Einstein (1875-1955), as translated by Alan Harris:

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and oldest mainspring of scientific research. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

“I hope that there is a change in consciousness, but how could it ever be claimed that it came from me? Any change will do, even if it just pisses the person off! That could be a beginning to something great. Right?” — John Neilson

It is the gift and the burden of each of us to live the life we are given. If during the course of that life it happens that we become an artist, then the whole world is blessed. Because an artist not only lives each day, but also sings it, writes it, paints it, documents it, offering a unique and precious perspective from which the wise may learn and heal.

When Sharon Siskin founded Positive Art in 1988, she built a foundation from which a generation of HIV+ artists have been sharing their point of view with a world hungry for understanding.

By providing classes and materials, studio space, grant facilitation, and a sense of community to artists living with HIV/AIDS, Positive Art has enabled powerful images and sentiments to be brought forth into the culture, empowering expression from artful souls uniquely qualified to communicate about fear, loss, and rebirth.

Says Siskin,

When I teach art in educational institutions, I often tell my beginning art students that every mark that they make is a physical record of what they were doing or feeling in their life at that moment.

The process and the art object are about making meaning, both privately and publicly.

That search for meaning is evident in John Neilson’s blood paintings, works created using infected human blood as a medium.

(My Bloody Self, John Neilson, mixed media and blood. To see more work by the artists of Positive Art, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

Once again, a bungled terrorist attack produces bungled security responses. One can’t help but wonder if there is a final solution hidden in the minds of these people: if they can just make flying so difficult and arduous that no one does it, then there won’t be any airborne terrorism, will there? I can’t be alone in wishing that one politician, in some country, would point out that your chances over the past ten years (including 9/11) of being killed by lightning are 20 times greater than being killed by air terrorism. And the number of lives that might be saved if the energy directed at malicious airplane passengers were instead focussed on drunken car drivers boggles the mind.

Though for serious mind-boggling it’s the new horror film: invasion of the body scanners. Just so we know exactly what this entails, here’s a trailer, a movie of a man and a woman going through the scanners. It is, of course, nsfw (not safe for work.) The first of a number of logical inconsistencies in the protection scheme was that in the UK, the scanners show enough to violate the child pornography laws, so no one under 18 will be scanned.

It’s not an act of God. It’s a natural disaster that we know how to mitigate: in a rich country with good building codes few die. But this is a rich world, so why are there poor countries where tens or hundreds of thousands die?

Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. But how much will we be family again once the crisis is off our front pages?

Once again we fortunate citizens of rich countries write checks to disaster agencies. Once again the people who go from our country to the disaster do all they can in the moment, and we thank them for doing it. Then they, more than the rest of us who find other matters occupying our minds, are faced with the question of what kind of aid helps most in the long term.

“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, give him a fishing rod and he and his family eat forever” goes the saying (and it works even better, all the reports show, if the “he” is a “she”). But in fact the local bully boy takes away her rod, or – mafia-like – makes her pay protection money to keep it, or in capitalist style makes her rent it back, and meanwhile the fish have all been taken by the big boys, whatever their designation: criminal, capitalist, or politician. So the aid agency professionals come to see that only systemic political solutions work in the long run, and they frequently become socialists or some other brand of visionary. But to espouse socialism and get into conflict with the local and global (often US-based) criminal capitalist powers ruins their agencies’ chances of raising large sums during disasters, because the large American public has not faced the same questions about long term solutions and have not been there watching when the donated fishing rods were taken away, and so have not cared enough to agonize about the solutions. So most of the aid workers back off their radicalism, because their salaries and chance to return to help the poor depend on fundraising from the widest-possible public during disasters. They settle for what can realistically be done, and often good things can be done, and often not. The world development profession includes many decent people, but like President Obama, they are hampered by the lack of radical energy in the great American, European and Japanese publics.

So after we write our checks to our preferred agencies, let’s this time put more energy into long term solutions. Tikkun has for the last few years promoted the idea of a US foreign policy based on generosity not domination, symbolized by the idea of a Global Marshall Plan to end world poverty. You may prefer another route. But the idea is to think big, really big. Thinking small is attractive, more personal and manageable. But we can’t afford to only think small, because too many rebuilt villages and businesses have been devastated by the big boys’ trade policies that deny poor farmers’ a fair price for their produce, and by all the many predatory practices of the international money and power system. Port-au-Prince was not unbuilt in a day.

From Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing

Nicholas Kristof wrote his Sunday NY Times column this week about “Religion and Women.”It’s both a discouraging overview of women’s oppression here and abroad and a hopeful look at how many of the best-known leaders of our time are beginning to agitate for women’s equality, and very specifically, their equality within religion. Following up on his links, I discovered that The Elders, a group including Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Gro Brundtland, and Ela Ghatt (founder of SEWA) began an initiative this summer called “Equality for Women & Girls” that states:

Religion and tradition are a great force for peace and progress around the world.

However, as Elders, we believe that the justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a higher authority, is unacceptable.

We believe that women and girls share equal rights with men and boys in all aspects of life.

We call upon all leaders to promote and protect equal rights for women and girls.

We especially call on religious and traditional leaders to set an example and change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions.

The Elders are fully committed to the realisation of equality and empowerment of all women and girls.

The Elders, 2 July 2009.

Mary Daly (October 16 1928 - January 3 2010). Susan Henking writes, "For me, it is enough to recall the sight of her plaid flannel shirt as she read (in a much more humorous tone than I had anticipated) from her works across the years."

I missed the fact that Mary Daly, the astounding feminist theologian, died a week ago. My local paper reprinted an article from the Boston Globe, but the best piece commemorating her I could find turned out to be published by our friends at Religion Dispatches here, by Susan Henking. The Globe quotes Daly:

“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin,” she wrote in the opening of “Sin Big,” her New Yorker piece. “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’ “

From Susan Henking’s piece in Religion Dispatches:

I asked Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb to write something for Tikkun about her recent experience at the Gaza Freedom March. Here is what she sent:

Gaza Freedom March: Why I went to Cairo

by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, cofounder of Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence and The Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, NY

Operation Cast Lead was a massacre filled with thousands of heart breaking stories. Each of the 1400 persons killed represents an entire world. Yes, it is also a war crime to fire kassam rockets into Israel with the intention to kill civilians. Over 2,000 rockets and 1,600 mortar shells were fired into Israel in 2008 alone. Some among the Palestinian population use armed force to resist Israeli’s military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank. According to international law, armed resistance against illegal occupation can be considered a just cause, as long as the rules of war are observed. However, as a person committed to nonviolence, I view the use of militarism by states or non-state actors to ensure security or resist occupation as a self-defeating strategy that promotes more violence and suffering and does not, in the end, result in well-being or peace for beleaguered populations. However, for those who believe in the use of military force as a viable option, Israel’s response to kassam attacks went far beyond legal and ethical boundaries. The much maligned Goldstone report proved beyond reasonable doubt that Israel intentionally targeted civilians and civilian institutions with deadly weapons. This is nothing new.

Operation Cast Lead made clear that the sixty year Israeli military siege of the people of Palestine has increased in brutality and ferocity. Sixty years of evidence that includes eye-witness reports, analysis of video, satellite and photographic images, medical reports, forensic analysis of weapons and ammunition remnants, and the written observations and testimony of thousands of witnesses from Palestine, Israel and the international community reveal a continual pattern of continuous assault that has very little to do with Israel’s claim of ‘security’. Rather, the end game is creating ‘facts on the ground’ that establish a Jewish state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea which limits Palestinians to 20% of the national population. Israel employs forced displacement, blockade, air strike, land mines, rubber bullets, white phosphorous, dime bombs, torture, beating and sexual humiliation, arbitrary arrest and administrative detention of minors and adults, water and land theft, Jewish only roads, hundreds of military checkpoints, security fences, nightly incursions, human shields, collaborators, deportation, permit systems, denial of access to economic opportunity, health care, culture and education, targeting of sewage and electricity plants and water installations, uprooting of thousands of trees and the destruction of thousands of homes to force the remaining Palestinian population into small enclosed areas that can only be described as open air prisons.

Ariel Sharon described these enclaves designated as the future Palestinian State as ‘bantustans’. In short, all these tactics amount to what is considered the crime of apartheid for the sake of creating a state that awards national and civil privileges based on Jewish identity while confining the excess non-Jewish population to their own ‘homeland’.

This is the ugly truth that is so hard for Jewish people and millions of so-called Christian Zionists to face.

This is the first post in a series about science and spirituality that Dave Belden introduced here.

The so-called “God particle” and the search for it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, has spurred a lot of hubbub.

There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. To name but a couple, the LHC is the largest modern science experiment, costing billions of dollars, and, in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, antimatter is developed at the site of the LHC in order to destroy the Vatican.

But I think a good deal of the hubbub has to do with the name “God particle” itself. Here a particularly ridiculous YouTube video claims that the particle was so-named to promote atheism and that the LHC heralds the end of the world. Others seem to take the name of the particle a bit too literally, claiming it won’t be found since God is immaterial. It’s funny because non-scientists so rarely pay so much attention to the ins and outs of particle physics.