When we talked before about Todd Bentley, I was secretly hoping he was just a bullshitter and was making up all that stuff about beating people with the love of God.
Unfortunately it appears I was wrong - Todd Bentley really does hit people.
[WARNING - THIS VIDEO IS PRETTY HARD TO WATCH]
The really unfortunate thing is that this stuff is becoming so widespead even in the UK.
Posted in Violence | 4 Comments »The Tank Man video has to be one of the most inspirational bits of tape ever recorded. I know you’ve all see it before, but it is pretty amazing so I thought it would be worth seeing again.
What, if anything, inspires you about this video and would you like to share any other video you have with us which really inspires you?
Posted in Videos, Violence, War | No Comments »As I’ve blogged elsewhere, I get a mite annoyed when people imply that if I disagree with them, I’m disagreeing with the Will of God.
Why do Christians speak like this? Is it some kind of power trip?
And then, this. God told him to clothes-line the sick. I need to go and watch it again, I’m not sure I quite believed my eyes.
h/t: leaving munster
Posted in Healing, Violence | 7 Comments »We find ourselves stuck in a hopeless paradigm, where it feels necessary to empathise with the sensibilities of the aggressor so as not to sound “unpatriotic”, while remaining blind to the untold anguish of the victims. Some actually feel the need to go so far as to blame the Iraqis for their own misfortune
From Ramzy (Warning: Graphic photos of Iraq War Violence)
I never noticed this analogy before. But Ramzy, in describing something about America, has also managed to describe something about abusive family systems, where the perpetrator is protected and sympathized with, and we try to ignore the state of the victim (for terror, I suppose, of having to acknowledge our own victimization).
Posted in Quote for the Day, Violence, War | 9 Comments »I sense a little anger here. It’s a kind of heartbroken anger–tears threaten to come.
So back on December 15th, 2 beautiful, delightful little Iraqi children in Karbala. Died. Blown Away. By a U.S. made and U.S. deployed cluster weapon. found. in. a. play. field. They thought it was some kind of toy.
How long have we known that these weapons blow. up. little. children. for. years. after. they. are. deployed.?
At least 40 years.
I wrote about it on this blog.
And I’ve been waiting around for weeks hoping upon hope to find out their names when Iraq Body Count finally caught their database up to december 15th of last year.
But of course, it is not to be. Like some overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of innocents who have died in Iraq, their names weren’t found out by IBC. It only made it into their incidents database. No names.
I shall not even be allowed to know the names of these beautiful children who were killed by *my* nation, *my* army, *my* weapons manufactured by *my* fellow citizens in a factory on *my* native soil.
Maybe if I keep talking about this, almost everyone will keep mostly ignoring it.
Someone should build a proper memorial to all the innocent people the U.S. has killed over the last half century. Maybe that’s impossible. Something like a gigantic statue of a CBU-87, right in the middle of the mall in Washington D.C. as tall as the Washington monument. with hundreds of thousand of tiny dead child statues all over the ground underneath it. That would work. That would be perfect for my mood today. It could be a sort of national shrine. We could all make a pilgrimage to it every year, or something.
Posted in Violence, War | 6 Comments »So a word up front. I decided to write a post about domestic violence, knowing *almost* nothing about the issue.
2 years ago at Off The Map Live, a lady named Nancy Murphy was the leader of one of the plenary sessions. As soon as she got the mike, she told the hundreds of us who were in the room that she was going to be playing a 911 call from a 5 year old girl which had involved domestic violence. The thought of listening to such a call so terrified me that I quickly left the room, an act which I have often regretted since then. I think I might have been able to stay if I had had a bit more warning. Afterwards, I saw that many of the conference goers were crying. I’m a little ashamed that I ran out of the room. One of the things I tend to like about myself is my willingness to face hard truth. And then it turned out that I wasn’t willing at all in that case.
Statistics vary, but it looks like *at least* 1 in 5, and up to 50% of, women in most Western nations have at some point experienced physical assault by their intimate partner. Just let that sink in for a moment.
I found out later a little more about Nancy Murphy. She is the executive director of Northwest Family Life, which is a non-profit based in Seattle which helps families who are dealing with domestic violence issues, specifically targeting christians. Part of the reason I decided to write about domestic violence today is because I wanted to let our Seattle readers know about a kind of fun volunteer opportunity this Friday from 4-8 pm involving pizza and envelope stuffing, for which the original volunteers became unavailabe. The contact for that is dgoodman @ nwfamilylife.org. I think NFL is pretty freaking kewl because they are helping both victims and perpetrators experience astounding, life altering, positive change.
Wanted to draw your attention to an article by Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is perhaps most famous for running the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment, along with Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, which is also mentioned in the article, are both fascinating and disturbing studies which demonstrate, ala Lord of the Flies,that we are far more deeply affected by, and vulnerable to, the influence of our environments and of authority than we would like to imagine, and that this vulnerability means that any one of us could relatively quickly be led to engage in criminal and inhumane behaviours which are against our deepest held beliefs, ethics, or morals. You can watch a great 51 minute documentary which was produced about the Stanford Prison Experiment, called “Quiet Rage, The Stanford Prison Experiment” on Google Video.
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The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges) recently published an article in which they interviewed 50 Iraq war veterans about their experience and what things are really like over there. This stuff struck me as obvious, but I still had to force myself to wade through the 12 pages of horrifying description. It occured to me that this used to not strike me as obvious–I used to think that war actually works well and is a great idea.
In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, “a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.”
Posted in Death, United States, Violence, War | 11 Comments »
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A Declaration Against Torture
Friday, June 29th, 2007The group Evangelicals for Human Rights recently released An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights In An Age of Terror. Here are a few excerpts:
Even when a person has done wrong, poses a threat, or has information necessary to prevent a terrorist attack, he or she is still a human being made in the image of God, still a person of immeasurable worth…A person might do inhuman acts, but is never inhuman…
It is clear to us that the terrorist attacks that jolted the nation in 2001 have blurred our nation moral vision…The boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible in war have been crossed in the current “war on terror”…
We renounce the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any branch of our government (or any other government)…We call for the extension of basic human rights and procedural protections to all persons held in United States custody now or in the future, wherever and by whomever they are held.
Posted in Violence | 8 Comments »
- What do you think about the positions taken in this declaration?
- Do you believe that torture can ever be justified?
- Do you agree that the United States is suffering from blurred moral vision?
Movie Review: Butterfly (La Lengua de las Mariposas)
Friday, June 22nd, 2007His first day at school, six year old Moncho was so frightened and humiliated that he lost control of his bladder, which only made his fellow students laugh uproariously at him. But that evening, his new teacher, Don Gregorio, comes over to his home to apologize and request that he return to school. Thus begins a beautiful relationship in which Moncho and his teacher explore nature and the wonder of learning together. We watch Moncho’s year unfold with his tailor father, his older brother, and the small Spanish town where he lives.
At one point Moncho asks his teacher “Is hell real?”. His teacher replies “Can you keep a secret, just between us two? Hell is not some place where you go when you die. Hell is here–we create our own hell”
When Don Gregorio retires from his position as school teacher, he gives an impassioned speech in which he says “If we could see just one generation–just *ONE* generation–grow up being inculcated with the ideas of liberty and freedom, we shall have changed Spain!”
Don Gregorio, however, is a Republican, and the Fascist forces in the country are becoming stronger in the lead up to the Spanish civil war. The movie ends up being, in some ways, very disturbing. It makes, however, a profound and extremely powerful statement about violence and conflict as forces in and of themselves, and how they deeply affect and change us as humans.
Some questions that arose for me:
- How is it possible for us to escape being either the perpetrators or victims of violence?
- How can we choose to respond rather than react with fear to violence, and still remain emotionally alive and vulnerable?
- What role does ‘the church’ in our own culture play in perpetrating violence as a means of interpersonal control, manipulation, and control?
If you haven’t yet seen Butterfly, you can rent it from NetFlix
Posted in Movie Reviews, Violence | 6 Comments »