Martin has complained that the disgusting recipes are making him nauseous, so I’ll hold on the meathead for a while for fear of upchuck.
Here are some costumes instead.
Have you guessed what they are yet?
Mind you, there’s always one who has to go and take the theme that little bit too far.
Now that’s taking willy-waving to silly extremes.
More on alleged rapist Pastor Sergio Alvarizares of the Casa Del Padre church in Portland, Oregon: now questions have arisen about his real estate holdings and church accounts.
USAnians, you think you’ve got problems with the God Squad. General Sir Richard Dannatt, the evangelical Anglican in charge of Britain’s army:
I think there is very much an obligation on a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations and the general conduct of their lives.’
Well, OK, nice of him to care about his troops’ psychic wellbeing, I suppose. But then Dannatt went on:
“In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal,” he said.
So…. he’s persuading young men to go gladly to their deaths by telling them an unprovable fairy tale of post-mortem bliss ?
That sounds familiar.
Pope Urban II recruiting for the Crusades promised that all who died in the reclamation of the Holy Land from the infidels would be forgiven all venal sins and ascend immediately to Heaven (paradise).
Last June the general gave a seminar to his senior commanders, telling them to prepare for ‘generational conflict’ with an Islamic jihad.
What’s the odds his next speech will have the word ‘martyr’ in it’?
Portland pastor arrested on suspicion of rape
[..]Wednesday, October 17, 2007
WADE NKRUMAHPortland police have arrested the 38-year-old pastor of a Northeast Portland church on accusations that he raped or sexually abused eight women at Father’s House, a church ministering to Portland’s Spanish-speaking population.
Sergio Alvarizares was arrested Monday at his home in Ridgefield, Wash., as part of a two-week investigation that started when officers responded to a disturbance call at Father’s House, 1725 Northeast Alberta St.
[…]
Northeast precinct officers arriving at Father’s House on Sept. 30 learned that several members of the church had confronted Alvarizares about allegations of improper sexual contact. Later that night, six women reported sexual assault to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. During the investigation, police identified two more victims.
Alvarizares is facing one count of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree attempted rape and 10 counts of first-degree sex abuse.
Schmautz said other than Alvarizares’ association with the church and the accusations, police know little about his background.
He has been quoted a number of times on issues of concern to the Latino community. In May 2006, he spoke about how some workers feared to march in demonstrations against a crack-down on immigrants.
“I talked to my congregation on Sunday,” Alvarizares said. “There were some who were intimidated by employers and afraid to leave their jobs.”
The church Web site, www.casadelpadre.com, says Alvarizares is founder and pastor of the international ministry El Shaddai in Portland and of El Shaddai churches of the Northwest U.S. and is now pastor general of the international ministry Casa del Padre Inc.
There are 1,268 congregations worldwide in a network called Red Apostolica & Profetica Mundial CDP, the Web site says, including in the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America, Cuba and India.
The Web site says Alvarizares is from Guatemala. His wife, Mayra, is listed as a pastor on the Web site.
In 2002, Alvarizares was senior pastor at Mission International El Shaddai on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. That year, he was part of a church group that planned to go to Cuba and Colombia to train church leaders and to visit Ecuador for a leadership conference.
The investigation continues. Police request anyone with information call Detective Jeff Sharp at 503-823-0453.
Wade Nkrumah: 503-294-7627; wadenkrumah@ news.oregonian.com
Casa Del Padre list one of their primary beliefs as ‘”If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad. (1 Corinthians 12:26 NLT)” Maybe this is a way of making every church member suffer?
This arrest is slightly different than other evangelical sex offence arrests, being as it is a Latino fundy pastor accused, rather than some redneck, boondocks self-ordained nutjob ‘reverend’. But it’s the fundy bit that’s important. And Alvarizes is no ordinary fundy.
Evangelical charismatic churches are steamrollering their way throughout South and Central America Casa Del Padre has churches all over North and South America and is firmly in the vanguard of the Latino fundy wave, both in the US and abroad.
Latin America is undergoing what David Stoll, author of Is Latin America Turning Protestant? calls a new Protestant Reformation.
Nowhere is this so evident as in Central America, where in the last 15 years fundamentalist Christianity has spread with prairie-fire speed. In Guatemala a third of the population are evangelicos, or non-Catholics. And 10 to 15 per cent of Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans now belong to the evangelical community, which is expanding three times faster than the population.
The Catholic hierarchy in the region calls it “the invasion of the sects” and places the blame squarely on the United States. The Honduran bishops accuse the CIA of covertly financing evangelical growth and the Guatemalan church hierarchy brands the evangelical movement an imperialist conspiracy to block revolutionary change and maintain US political and economic dominance.
Casa Del Padre also works in concert with other evangelical, charismatic churches that specifically aim to convert Moslems to Christianity:
Ministry History
In 1997 a missionary from Costa Rica joined Global Teams, followed by another in 1999. Both have been working in a Muslim country since that time. In 2001 Global Teams was invited by several Costa Rican churches to hold a mission conference aimed at recruiting missionaries and mobilizing churches. Four new missionaries joined Global Teams as a result and went to the Muslim world to explore long term service in 2002. Global Teams works closely with La Casa Del Padre (House of the Father), partnering to build a bridge for Costa Ricans to the unreached, especially in the Muslim world.
They also have churches in Costa Rica and El Salvador in partnership with “Red Apostolica & Profetica Mundial CDP” including in the USA, Mexico, Cuba and India.
It’s big business. This isn’t just another fundy: this is the hispanic James Dobson.
These hispanic evangelical churches are in the forefront of pushing US protestant hegemony in South and Central America and they’ve worked hand in glove with the Republican religious right to further their political aims.
But political campaigns are merely the respectable side of religious revolution in Guatemala. Numerous evangelical groups co-operated with the military in its bloody counter-insurgency war begun during the Rios Montt regime. Groups like the US-based Youth with a Mission and Christian Broadcasting Network joined with the Reagan Administration to support Rios Montt’s crusade to mop up leftist insurgents. These evangelicos worked closely with the military to establish ‘model villages’ on the ashes of Indian communities destroyed by Rios Montt’s legions.
The bloody counter-insurgency campaign razed over 400 Indian villages in the early 1980s. But it still failed to eliminate the insurgents – most of whom were poor Indian peasants. The transition from military to civilian rule in 1986 temporarily raised popular hopes for peace and improved socio-economic conditions. But the army never lost power and human rights abuses are again on the rise.
The battle for the beautiful north-western highlands of Guatemala has prompted the most intensive co-operation between the military and the fundamentalist right. In its ‘Operation Whole Armor,’ Bible Literature International claims to have distributed over 70,000 Bibles to Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitary patrols. The Summer Institute for Linguistics pitches in with interpretation services for the army’s civil-affairs and psychological operations teams. Others sponsor food distribution and educational programs in contested areas.
It is not hard to find evidence linking the explosion of evangelical churches – mostly the Assemblies of God church or highly emotional neo-pentecostal sects – with Washington and right-wing forces right across the region. The campaign to overturn the Sandinistas in Nicaragua attracted a stream of US evanglicals to the contra camps on the Honduran border. They passed out Bibles and supplies shipped to Central America on US military aircraft and banana boats.
Politics is also behind the hand-out programs that US evangelicals sponsor in many Honduran communities. Alan Dansforth, the US director of World Gospel Outreach, explained that food hand-outs are used as a bait to attract poor families to church services. He said that evangelicalism ‘can be a powerful tool to head communism off at the pass’. In El Salvador US missionaries are regularly invited to deliver anti-communist sermons on military bases. The right-wing Paralife International recently sponsored the tour of a Vietnam veteran who told Salvadoran troops that killing in the fight against the communist Anti-Christ was the ‘duty of every Christian’.
I’v a feeling this rape arrest is likely to be the tip of an iceberg for Casa Del Padre.
UPDATE: Martin read the following post and accused me of woolly thinking and rambling. So here’s a shorter, sharper representation of my views on Christianity.
— —————————————————-
I am a committed atheist although I was entirely educated at Anglican schools. Despite my religious upbringing in the heart of the established church, something always perplexed me. Why is it that, when Jesus was such a political radical, have Christian churches become the oppressive power that he himself railed against in The Beatitudes?
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.Blessed are the meek,
for they shall possess the earth.Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they shall be satisfied.Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called sons of God.Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Well, Christians have had endless centuries to make that come true and it patently hasn’t. Why? Why do the religious so often choose to deify the messenger rather than listen to the message?
It might be because eminent historical thinkers such as Jesus are venerated as gods by their devotees, who choose to treat them like comic superheroes rather than the exceptional, yet human and flawed, thinkers that they were.
Strip away the magic accoutrements and what you see in the historical, corporeal figure of Jesus is a fallible human being trying to work out how it might be possible for societies and individuals to live at peace with one another. The core message of Christinity is not difficult to ascertain: do as you would be done by. But to some that is a radical, dangerous poltical message: they don’t want to do as they would be done by, they want to do as they like: and those people have managed to turn a political movement into an edifice of organised religion that enables them to do just that.
Today’s cult of politico/religious celebrity has its roots in the politics of ancient times. Just as today, there were those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. In this case it was not only those with interests in temple-building, temple accoutrements, unguents, hereditary priesthood and so on -the whole temple and god industry – who were primarily interested in gulling money and offerings from the credulous, but also the political elites who used the temple industry as a means of controlling a sometimes rebellious populace. (Oh, I’m sure there were those in the god industry who believed in the supernatural too, but organised religion has always provided a good living throughout history for intelligent people with few scruples.)
But once Jesus himself was dead, murdered by his political opponents in the god industry and politics, how were his fellow radicals to spread his political message and combat the existing power structures, without their leader’s charismatic presence?
They soon learned that to attract followers you have to market your message, to tailor it to your audience, with a few cute stories and clever magic tricks. Alleged miracles like being flown up into the sky, or fed by birds, or raisng the dead: anything to give a bit of spice to what after all, was a dry lecture. After all, who wants to be sat and hectored at about how to behave?
The primary political messages of peace, love and charity thus became encrusted with fairy stories and tales of supernatural derring-do. The actual political core of what Jesus said, with its strictures about greed and dishonesty and excessive wealth and so on, was so weighed down with myth-making that it became submerged:the fairy stories became popular and the ancient elites saw there was more money to be made from co-opting this new movement than represing it and voila, the charlatans and hypocrites moved in.
Whatever the supenatural folderols added by later adherents, at the heart of Jesus’ message is that radical political idea, that challenges all the pillars of our society – that greed and violence are wrong, that we should love our neighbours as ourselves and that we are all human not divine. According to what I’ve read of the New Testament or commentaries on it, what he actually said as that what some call divine is not some external magic entity, but part of our innate human intelligence. We are alll divine. The divine is us, not magic
Take the Church of England’s theology of the Trinity, which to my mind (though IANA theologian) stems from a fundamental misunderstanding. What Jesus’ words say to me is that there is no god – what we choose to call divine is part of us, not something supenatural. What makes heaven is here on earth in how we choose to live and to treat each other. Deeds not words, acts not faith.
There is no beardy man in the sky, no gods, no flying horses, no personifications of thunder or the wind, just us and what we do.
But that message was turned it into a magic show by well-meaning disciples to raise money and support from populations all over the ancient world and so the radical political thinker was added to the pantheon of god/celebrities marketed by the religion industry.
Jesus was transmogrified indeed – turned from a simple carpenter who could think into a celebrity superhero.
What might have been a political movement to shake the world became an integral part of maintaining the greed-driven status quo. That’s what power does with anything that threatens it: liike a hydra it infiltrates, envelops, digests and regenerates into new forms, some of them hideous.
Power has turned a radical political idea inside out.
I’m may be a committed atheist, but even I can see the beauty and simplicty of the political ideas in the Sermon On The Mount. As a guide to live by Jesus’ philosophy is exemplary. But it wasn’t divinely inspired by a beardy man sitting on a cloud, it was written by a living, thinking human being just like you and me, a man who knew that what matters is what we do, not what we profess to believe. Not a celebrity a superhero or a god, just another man.