Bush and Saddam Are Brothers?

According to Desmond Tutu God has a Dream and it's that everyone in the world is part of the same family.

So, in this interview with Beliefnet.com, he says that means George W. and Saddam are brothers.

Here's a snippet:


BELIEFNET: Is it realistic to say there are no enemies when we are involved in a war?

TUTU:
God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion. People are shocked when I say that George Bush and Saddam Hussein are brothers, that Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon are brothers, but God says, “All are my children.” It is shocking. It is radical. But it is true.



In the interview, Tutu doesn't get into details of what you ought to do if your brother is a homocidal dictator and generally dangerous to human society, but he's got a point. Some people might accuse Tutu of underestimating the power of human evil but a man whose seen the kind of murder and oppression he saw under apartheid and still thinks there's hope that people can forgive one another deserves to be listened to.

This was a banner week for Beliefnet--they have the Tutu interview and a book excerpt.

Then there's the interviews with Randall Terry, the former head of Operation Rescue and gay marriage opponent and his son Jamiel, who just came out of the closet along with an op-ed piece Randall wrote.

Here's a family that ought to do some more talking in private and less in print. But there are the hard stories of the gay marriage issue. It's common to talk about a conflict that Evangelicals/Catholics against gays advocates, but sometimes the battles are fought at the dining room table as well as in the city square and courthouse.

I pray my children--who are all under six--never come to me and say "Dad, I'm gay."
But if my boy or my girls were to do that I could not love them any less. Nor could I imagine any circumstance when they wouldn't be wecome in my house. I just pray I'd hear it in person and not in the pages of a magazine.

I found this on beliefnet as well. It sounds made up by sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. It seems some shoppers were disturbed when a man dressed up as Jesus showed up in a grocery store parking lot, covered in fake blood, while another man scourged him.

The two men skeedadled before police arrived but at least one officer thought he'd still get a chance to nap Jesus.

According to the Albany Democrat-Herald, the official report included this comment.

"I am confident that (Jesus) will be back some day soon."

I am not making this up.

Bad Stem Cell Writing

A couple weeks back I posted about this new bioethics report from the Presidents Council on Bioethics and how it would lead to simplistic religion reporting.

Here's an example from the Christian Science Monitor from a story on cloning.

For years, cloning has pitted religious conservatives against medical researchers. Conservatives view all human embryos as life and, thus, oppose research that destroys them.

Medical researchers, on the other hand, see the stem cells that embryos provide as promising avenues to cure some of humanity's most intractable diseases.



Are there no medical researchers who are concerned about the implications of cloning?

Are there no medical researchers who are religious conservatives?

Are their no religious liberals who are concerned about cloning, or liberals of any stripe who wonder if cloning is at least a morally questionable thing to do?

And are there no medical researchers who think that embryonic stem cells are all they are cracked up to be?

According to this piece, apparently not.