oct 18th, 2006
the naked face of christism -- as the well-packaged mask of white imperialism.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: swami
While feeling concerned about the "definitive results of Islamization" in
India, also please feel concerned about the aggressive evangelism (JOSHUA
PROJECT--$20 Billion Plus project) emanating from America, well-funded,
superbly networked, backed by the highest of the land, seized of its moral
supremacy, having India as one of its key targets (as revealed in a
disturbing exposé), a jingoistic president, multi-million dollar
corporations, high technology, a grand if furtive mission, networks spanning
the globe, and biblical invocations. Only it's real. And its got India in
its crosshair:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main_free.asp?filename=ts013004synopsis.asp
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main.asp?filename=ts013004shashi.asp
US FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES:'GEORGE BUSH HAS A BIG CONVERSION AGENDA IN INDIA.'
http://www.christianaggression.com/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1078984877
STATISTICS AND FACTS FROM THE JOSHUA PROJECT
http://www.christianaggression.com/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1095518305
CAN HINDUISM FACE THE ONSLAUGHT OF PROJECT THESSALONICA?
http://www.christianaggression.com/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1130133787
Also, please read carefully:
BOSTON GLOBE SERIES ON AMERICA EXPORTING FAITH
October 11, 2006
Source Link:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/10/11/healing_the_body_to_reach_the_soul/
http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1161098955
(Articles in this four-part series examine how American religious
organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government):
PART 1: CHANGING THE RULES:
BUSH BRINGS FAITH TO FOREIGN AID,
AS FUNDING RISES, CHRISTIAN GROUPS DELIVER HELP -- WITH A MESSAGE
http://tinyurl.com/yfy2wd
or
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=508&Itemid=125
PART 2: CHURCH MEETS STATE: EXPORTING FAITH:
RELIGIOUS RIGHT WIELDS CLOUT, SECULAR GROUPS LOSING FUNDING AMID PRESSURE
http://tinyurl.com/ylluj4
or
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=509&Itemid=125
Part 3: THE MUSLIM WORLD | EXPORTING FAITH:
TOGETHER, BUT WORLDS APART,
CHRISTIAN AID GROUPS RAISE SUSPICION IN STRONGHOLDS OF ISLAM
http://tinyurl.com/wer7g
or
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=511&Itemid=125
PART 4: MISSIONARIES IN TRAINING | EXPORTING FAITH: HEALING THE BODY TO
REACH THE SOUL, EVANGELICALS ADD CONVERTS THROUGH MEDICAL TRIPS
http://tinyurl.com/y5l2cn
or
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=512&Itemid=125
* * *
NYTimes Series: Part 1:
IN GOD'S NAME:
AS EXEMPTIONS GROW, RELIGION OUTWEIGHS REGULATION
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=513&Itemid=125
NY Times Series: Part 2:
IN GOD'S NAME:
LIMITING WORKERS' RIGHTS
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=514&Itemid=125
NYTimes series: Part 3:
IN GOD'S NAME:
GIVING EXEMPTIONS
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=515&Itemid=125
NYTimes Series: Part 4:
IN GOD'S NAME:
RELIGION-BASED TAX BREAKS: HOUSING TO PAYCHECKS TO BOOKS
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=516&Itemid=125
Excerpts:
======================================
The US government has given $10.9 million to Food for the Hungry, a
faith-based development organization, to reach deep into the arid mountains
of northern Kenya to provide training in hygiene, childhood illnesses, and
clean water. The group has brought all that, and something else that
increasingly accompanies US-funded aid programs: regular church service and
prayer.
President Bush has almost doubled the percentage of US foreign-aid dollars
going to faith-based groups such as Food for the Hungry, according to a
Globe survey of government data. And in seeking to help such groups obtain
more contracts, Bush has systematically eliminated or weakened rules
designed to enforce the separation of church and state.
For decades, US policy has sought to avoid intermingling government programs
and religious proselytizing. The aim is both to abide by the Constitution's
prohibition against a state religion and to ensure that aid recipients don't
forgo assistance because they don't share the religion of the provider.
But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed
series of executive orders -- a policy change that cleared the way for
religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional
government funding. It also helped change the message American aid workers
bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to
touting the healing powers of the Christian God.
Bush's orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion
in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said
religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand
out government aid, so long as the services don't take place while the aid
is being delivered. But the rule allows groups to schedule prayers
immediately before or after dispensing taxpayer-funded aid.
Bush's orders also reversed longstanding rules forbidding the use of
government funds to pay for employees who are required to take an oath to
one religion. In addition, the president's orders allowed faith-based groups
to keep religious symbols in places where they distribute taxpayer-funded aid.
And in implementing the president's orders, the administration rejected
efforts to require groups to inform beneficiaries that they don't have to
attend religious services to get the help they need. Instead of a
requirement, groups are merely encouraged to make clear to recipients that
they don't have to participate in religious activities.
Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get
Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate
Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the
barrier between government and religion.
"I got a little frustrated in Washington because I couldn't get the bill
passed," Bush told a meeting of faith-based groups in March 2004. "Congress
wouldn't act, so I signed an executive order -- that means I did it on my own."
The legality of Bush's moves is being challenged by a group advocating
separation of church and state. The lawsuit, claiming both that Bush
overstepped his powers and that the orders violate the Constitution, is
inching its way through the federal courts.
Faith-based groups have long delivered humanitarian assistance in distant
and dangerous places, marshaling an impressive array of volunteers. But
Bush's initiative has put government dollars into faith-based providers in
unprecedented fashion. A Globe survey of more than 52,000 awards of
contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements from the US Agency for
International Development -- which distributes taxpayer-funded assistance
overseas -- provides the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of
Bush's policies on foreign aid.
The survey of prime contractors and grantees, based on records obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act, shows a sharp increase in money
going to faith-based groups between fiscal 2001, the last budget of the
Clinton administration, and fiscal 2005, the last year for which complete
figures were available. Faith-based groups accounted for 10.5 percent of
USAID dollars to nongovernmental aid organizations in fiscal 2001, and 19.9
percent in 2005.
========================================
1 comment:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601101.html
Losing Faith in the President
Critical Book by Ex-Staffer in Religion-Based Effort Is Out
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; Page A19
White House officials realized they had a problem, former staffer David Kuo writes in his new book, "Tempting Faith," when they saw how a panel rated the first applications for grants under the "faith-based initiative," President Bush's vaunted effort to help religious charities.
On a scale of 1 to 100, respected national organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America scored in the mid-70s to mid-80s, "while something called Jesus and Friends Ministry from California, a group with little more than a post office box," scored 89 and Pat Robertson's overseas aid organization, Operation Blessing, scored 95, according to Kuo.
"It was obvious that the ratings were a farce," he writes, adding that he and other White House aides feared that if the list became public, "it would show once and for all that the initiative was purely about paying off political friends for their support."
Portions of Kuo's explosive book, which formally went on sale yesterday, were leaked last week by MSNBC. They brought heated denials from White House press secretary Tony Snow and other current and former Bush administration officials.
The book is full of insider anecdotes and details, many of which were not reported by MSNBC, and some of which can be read as defending rather than attacking the Bush White House.
In the case of the grant applications, for example, Kuo says that the ratings obviously favored conservative Christian groups but that the White House "really did have nothing to do with" it. The problem, he asserts, is that the "peer review" panel chosen by the Department of Health and Human Services came from the "faith-based policy world."
"There are, at most, 100 people in think tanks, foundations, major nonprofits and the like who really work on these issues and who support the president. Virtually all of them are very compassionate and dedicated evangelical Christians who tend to be politically conservative," Kuo writes. "They were supposed to review the application in a religiously neutral fashion. . . . But their biases were transparent."
Kuo tells a story about meeting a member of the review panel at a party. He says she giggled as she recalled, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero." Kuo says he laughed but, at the same time, was aghast.
"Some in the press would later 'expose' that we in the White House had doled out grants to friends. They were technically wrong," he writes. "We didn't do it. We didn't have to. The White House influence was so great that its will was carried out by other appointees in other departments without thinking."
In addition to being a memoir of his three years in the White House, where Kuo was deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until December 2003, the book is a saga of falling in, and out of, love with conservative Christian politics.
Kuo, 38, recounts that in college, he was a liberal who interned for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). But he got a girlfriend pregnant, and they went together to an abortion clinic. "We regretted it. We were relieved. I knew what we'd done. I had no idea what we'd done," he writes.
Haunted, Kuo became an antiabortion activist. When he moved to Washington to work for the National Right to Life Committee and, later, for the CIA, he began attending First Baptist Church in Alexandria. It was there, he said in an interview yesterday, "that I learned that being a good Christian means being a conservative Republican."
Before the age of 27, Kuo took William J. Bennett as a mentor, wrote speeches for Ralph Reed and Robertson, and was domestic policy adviser to then-Sen. John D. Ashcroft (R-Mo.). In 1998, he joined George W. Bush's campaign for president.
Kuo said he was "dazzled" by Bush's talk of compassion. But in his telling, the administration's actions never matched its rhetoric. During the scramble to win tax cuts, for example, the promise of $8 billion per year for charities was scrapped.
To try to climb up the White House's list of priorities, Kuo said, he and others working in the faith-based office offered to politicize their efforts. The White House political affairs office gave them a map of battleground states in 2002, and they used it to plan conferences to win support for GOP candidates. "Smart politics, bad morals," he said in retrospect.
In 2003, Kuo was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. It is still growing slowly, he said, giving him perhaps five or 10 years to live.
"I feel a pressing spiritual need to say what I think is important," he said. "And I really think that what is important is to be able to warn Christians about politics, that they should not throw so much at politics, because they're being used, and it will not answer the problems, and it corrupts the name of the God we're trying to serve."
Post a Comment