A dark horse emerges victorious in Alabamas election: the black voter

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

For eight and a half years, I observed the ascendance of the Trump phenomenon from the perspective of a black Christian woman with a perch on the inside of the evangelical hurricane — as a professor at Wheaton College.....

So as the precinct numbers rolled in Tuesday night, they did not surprise me...... Predictably, 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Judge Roy Moore......

But according to CNN, 96 percent of black voters backed Jones. Among black women, the figure was 98 percent.
So in a moment where the foundational fault lines of the American creed have been laid bare by the spilled blood and suffering of my black brothers and sisters at the hands of law enforcement, it turns out that black Christians, not white evangelicals, are the story.

In every movement for social justice in this country, people of faith have been very prominent as leaders and followers.
And this is not said to in any way diminish the work of non-theists in the same causes.

To read more:

http://religionnews.com/2017/12/15/a-dark-horse-emerges-victorious-in-alabamas-election-the-black-voter/

[trotsky]

1. What a coincidence!

In every movement for social justice in this country, people of faith have been very prominent as leaders and followers.

In every institution and group responsible for social INjustice, people of faith have also been very prominent as leaders and followers.

[Act_of_Reparation]

2. Why I Am Not a Christian

“That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.' Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

-- Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian", 3/6/1927

[trotsky]

3. Bertrand Russell FTW. n/t

[Cuthbert Allgood]

5. Though it is hard to pinpoint specific moments

reading that essay as a freshman in college was the time when I felt it was OK to admit to myself that I was an atheist.

[Act_of_Reparation]

6. Same here.

Reading Russell for the first time was a pivotal moment for me.

[trotsky]

7. Absolutely.

If we want to make a list, let's add Robert Ingersoll.

[MineralMan]

4. Dark Horse - Black Voter

Very clever headline, to be sure...

Oh, wait...it's religionnews.com. Never mind.

[trotsky]

8. ...

[Act_of_Reparation]

9. When I think of a publication that really has its finger on the pulse of black America...

...I think of the most abjectly white-bread publication known to man: religionnews.com

[trotsky]

10. Here's some more quality material from religionnews.com:

Give Trump a chance!

Was Trump right about Jerusalem?
http://religionnews.com/2017/12/19/trump-jerusalem/

[MineralMan]

11. Now, be nice. That website is important to

some people. It's their primary source of news, although it's not really news, but commentary and editorializing. That's OK, though, since we've mostly forgotten what actual news is these days.

"Who, what, when, where and how" has become "Here's how you should think about this story."

religionnews.com is really only about one religion and it's not news. But, hey, anyone can register a URL.

[Act_of_Reparation]

12. You're right. We wouldn't want to be intolerant, would we?

I mean, if saying "God isn't real" fits the bill, then certainly we can't impugn the integrity of religionnews.com. We might hurt someone's feelings!

[MineralMan]

13. Somehow, I had never been aware of religionnews.com until

I started visiting DU's Religion Group. Perhaps it doesn't have a broad base of readers. I don't know. Or, perhaps it needs better writers or something. It seems to be misnamed, so maybe that's the problem.

[Act_of_Reparation]

14. The target demographic is pretty narrow.

People interested in religion but not so interested in religion they go to Christianity Today or so liberal they go the HuffPo.

[MineralMan]

15. Perhaps it's designed to provide material for its readers to repost

here and there on the Internet. There are many people who want to post things on various, but need material. Maybe that's the target audience. Feedstock for discussion, perhaps.