No Vision – Just Ambition – In America Today

http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=80779

I started writing this less than a week ago and I thought Oh No, another sour grapes thing about the RCC in the seventies in Philly that drove the masses out of the churches and schools in time or at least in the inner city as they are now calling my old neighborhood.

As some friend has described to me, with planned or likely closings of RC churches here, there actually, there will be no RC churches in the Frankford and Harrowgate sections of the city soon. 

My own grade school closed in 2003. And the economics of it all is not necessarily racist. The state and city screw things up with popular school vouchers legislation or threat of its passage which from a distance I do not know much about.  

I do know that as soon as you add money to a system with school vouchers or even employer covered health or dental care, you directly or indirectly inflate the basic cost of doing business. That is economics and some politics.

That education in America is big business with student loans, seven hundred dollar college text books etc. That is economics and politics.

The real crux of the matter was that jobs first went south and then overseas and emptied the local factories of very marginal jobs of the average factory workers when those jobs went south. That is economics.

Without a job - you and your environment become dysfunctional. Not rocket science to understand. 

The above bill board in the shabby shopping district of downtown Philly at Third Street and Market Street was where us factory workers went to find bargains that the department stores  further up the street could not offer us. We paid cash. We had no credit.

The money for that billboard came out of the archdiocese’s coffers or some non-profit organization or the obsessive compulsive wallets of Koch Brothers or Mellon Scaife types doing their social experimentation on the masses.

Like I said I started to write this a few days ago, stopped and erased it. I was inspired at first by the historic photo archives picture because of the date and the subject matter – abortion.

1971 was about the time I stopped going to church.  I was tired of the Sunday pulpit demands to write my state legislature to demand that Catholic Sharia Law on Contraception become the law in Pennsylvania.

Science had made a paradigm shift thing and the new chemistry of birth control just overwhelmed the boys in the RC clergy. They have never caught up.

It is a funny thought and I have mentioned it one way or another in the five years since I started this blog, the church left me, us behind when it abandoned spirituality and went straight for the economic and political approach to human sexuality.  

That if an ambitious Cardinal Krol was not hell bent on becoming pope, and attended his flock with some love instead of a Wharton Spreadsheet; maybe the economics and politics of the inner city and the racial divides could have been addressed.  

That some jobs in factories could have been saved, that there would have been less racial fear and less white flight to the suburbs and places like Frankford or Harrowgate would still have catholic grade schools, high schools and even churches there today.

In other words, there was no vision.  There seemed to be only ambition to achieve some corporate religious agenda.

There was no Vision.  There was only Ambition.

And that stagnation, which ignores the heart or the spirit of things and life situations that matter to us locally, could have been addressed by mature efforts and solutions. 

So it goes. 

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No Dolan-style Charity from the Vatican to Nuns who Talk about Shhh! (sex) – Sister Margaret Farley

The Vatican is attacking a retired theologian nun, Sister Margaret Farley, for her book on human sexuality published in 2006.

At Amazon.Com: 

Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," by Sister Margaret Farley

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Love-Framework-Christian-Sexual/dp/0826429246

Can’t have women let alone nuns define what the Vatican Penis Cult is only allowed to define in what to do with your naughty parts etc. 

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http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/157502835.html?page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue

Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex. 

Fruitfulness need not "refer only to the conceiving of children," she writes. "It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others" rather than just succumbing to "an egoisme a deux." (“Love is a selfishness of two.”) 

The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty" outside of marriage or procreation, or on one's own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are "deviant," and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense. 

This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests "as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood." 

Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was "charity," not "payoffs." But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe "charity" is not the word that would come to mind.Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Farley's opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified. 

"Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out," she writes. 

If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style "charity." 

Fork in the Road - Secular vs. Religious Morality

The Prez and the VP came out in favor the a civil rights issue on Marriage Equality in the past few days.

The Prez did so a day after the redneck bible thumpers in North Carolina had to reinforce their own "religious" POV which goes with the Old Testmament and for lack of more civil words, the male penis right to fuck his property, whether it be woman, slaves or other "chattels".

It is amazing what I have seen in my lifetime of the far right religious nuts taking on the absolute authoritarian Roman model of the guys in silk and lace at the Vatican.  Of taking over a political party and wearing a false mask of Jesus.

That model makes no apology and exploits any human being male or female, straight or homosexual, or "priest-like" sexual (question mark ?) persons who by birth or accident wander into the precincts of religious stone age authority.

It is a day when the fundies are pushing gay hate in Africa as a means to slide into the socio-economic scheme there as a moral factor in the growing future wealth of that continent.

The old are bankrolling the current propaganda war in the west, Europe, North America and parts of South America against the idea that someone might be born with a sexual orientation different than the majority tribe POV.  The young already cherish their freedom to choose life the way they see fit and as God intended.

It is a great day when an African-American President of the United States can interject a secular moral idea based on individual introspection based on a pro-Jesus POV onto the world stage.

While traditions in Africa will not likely to change.  From this day forward another global morality base idea is brought into sharp focus to the rest of humanity.  While the Muslim world is not likely to follow on the merits of same sex marriage, the idea, the seed of change, of a diverse global POV is planted.

It is remarkable when the old men in the Vatican in the sixties put all their prestige and money so to speak on the Craps Table and based the whole future of a dying church on trying to monopolize an individual's right to choose and or to deny their right to live out freely what God has imposed on them as an individual in terms of his or her animus, animal nature.

The spiritual power, the "higher angels of out nature", is the goal, the evolution of the species to achieve over the baser forms of our shared lesser nature.

It is to be remembered that the words of the arch-villian of humanity, archbishop Wojtyla's advice and prejudice to Paul VI on birth control, took a biased view of Protestantism and the rights of individuals by stating that the "holy spirit" was exclusively with the Roman Catholic POV.

Well maybe the "holy spirit" now speaks on matters of human sexuality directly to the individual, a very Protestant concept, and the old fashioned generally corrupted religious POV is growing obsolete in the new global arena of thought.

The Enlightment, though blockaded and detoured through the recent past, is on a clear path to the future.

Human morality and human sexuality are no longer properties owned by the state and or state religion in this new dawning global age.

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