#erica

The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive. ↗

— Melissa V. Harris-Perry

#christianity #religion #women #religion

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us. ↗

— Richard Wright

#american #native-son #race #religion #us

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#elected-officials #government #politics #religion

We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, 'race,' 'gender,' or 'sexual orientation,' and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest. . . . In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other diifference between them. ↗

— Tony Judt

#intellectual #liberal #religion

You know what these “God Bless America” people oughta do? They oughta check with that Jesus fellow they’re so crazy about. They’re always talking about “What would Jesus do?” They don’t wanna know so they can do it – they just wanna know so they can tell other people to do it! ↗

— George Carlin

#religion #religion

Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [sic] own laws (so that after God and the Devil 'tackle a guy, they don't kick him in the head'), but each side is not above cheating—with God breaking the rules occasionally by throwing in 'a miracle'. Strangely, Mailer doesn’t mention Jesus in this agonising analogy, but then the notion of the 'super-sub' may be an image too far even for him. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#book-review #devil #god #jesus #miracles

Several professional athletes have wrongly taught many young Americans by example that the only way to succeed in sports is to take steroids. ↗

— Jim Sensenbrenner

#example #many #only #professional #professional athletes

The President also talked at length about how well the American economy is doing. Apparently, he got his information on this topic from his millionaire supporters. For the average working family, these are trying economic times. ↗

— Jose Serrano

#also #american #american economy #apparently #average

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#fiction #humor #rsas #humor

Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition. ↗

— George S. Patton Jr.

#war #life