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Contents contributed and discussions participated by isabella R

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isabella R

Blogger: Cranmer - Post a Comment - 0 views

www.blogger.com/comment.g

politics money corruption Roman Catholic religion catholicism Germany

shared by isabella R on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • isabella R on 24 Sep 12
     
    point of the post, which is that to withhold the sacraments from someone who does not pay for them,
isabella R

Enlightened Catholicism: In Germany: Catholics Must Pay To Pray - 0 views

enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/...atholics-must-pay-to-pray.html

catholicism Germany politics money corruption taxes religion Roman Catholic

shared by isabella R on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • isabella R on 24 Sep 12
     
    It does illuminate at least one thing about the institutional church that is still applicable in the US. At any point when the church has half a chance to use to coercive power of government to enforce its own rules - it will in fact do so
isabella R

Bilgrimage: Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God: Concluding Theological Reflec... - 0 views

bilgrimage.blogspot.com/...s-quest-for-living-god_21.html

Elizabeth Johnson books theology blogs homosexuality

shared by isabella R on 21 Sep 12 - No Cached
    • isabella R
      isabella R on 21 Sep 12
       
      I don't intend to imply that there's any kind of exact equivalency between the lives and experiences of gay people today and those who underwent the Holocaust. BUT IT SHOULD BE IMPLIED....IT BEGAN JUST LIKE THIS...JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE YET TO SEE THE END GAME, SHOULD NOT MAKE YOU APOLOGETIC, OR FEEL AS IF YOU ARE BEING POLITICALLY INCORRECT; PEOPLE HESITATE TO TREAD ON THAT SACRED GROUND CALLED "THE HOLOCAUST" AS IF IT WAS UNIQUE, SPECIFIC, UNREPEATABLE....BUT THE PLAIN TRUTH IS THAT IS IS REPEATABLE, THE HOLOCAUST ITSELF WAS A RERUN....DO NOT APOLOGIZE FOR HISTORY
  • What I do want to say is that the mechanisms by which people of faith--and theologians in particular--justify oblivion (from the Latin root, "to forget") for a certain targeted minority group right in front of their faces are the same.
  • And the effects are the same
isabella R

Paul Ryan: A follower of St. Thomas Aquinas or Ayn Rand? | National Catholic Reporter - 0 views

ncronline.org/...-st-thomas-aquinas-or-ayn-rand

politics money Mitt Romney Paul Ryan lies taxes catholic religion

shared by isabella R on 21 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • In fact, many of Ryan's ideas and policies appear to be directly at odds with Catholic teaching.
  • The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calls this "an effort to have low- and middle-class households bear the entire burden of closing the fiscal gap and bear the costs of financing an additional tax cut for high income households.
  • Ryan says he would mitigate this effect by scrapping various tax exemptions, but he hasn't specified them. How does this square with Pope John XXIII's statement that tax burdens should "be proportioned to the capacity of the people contributing"?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Experts reckon that inequalities in America have widened to levels not seen since the early 1900s, but Ryan seems to want them wider still. Back in 1931, Pope Pius XI denounced "the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless." American poverty may be less extreme now than then, but a study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that in 2004 the poorest 20 percent of Americans had "negative wealth" (more debts than assets). That was before the subprime disaster.
  • Ryan's willingness to see the superrich still richer can only be justified on the anarcho-capitalist principle that "taxation is theft," which reflects the libertarian belief that one has absolute, unlimited rights to whatever assets one lawfully acquires. But the church explicitly teaches that property rights are not absolute. Hear Pope John Paul II: "The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone." Or St. Thomas: "Man ought to own external things not as his own, but as common, so that ... he is ready to communicate them to others in their need."
isabella R

America Magazine Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, S.J., R.I.P. - 0 views

www.americamagazine.org/...entry.cfm

america theology liberation theology El Salvador Roman Catholic justice religion politics corruption money Mitt Romney news

shared by isabella R on 20 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • John Paul II and the then Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Ratzinger condemned the nascent liberation theology in Latin America and took strong steps to shut it down. While their motives are understandable, since they feared Marxism in its European version, and could not understand or accept a Christian version of it, this was a major misstep that ended up causing great harm to the Church. Whether they meant to or not, Wojtyla and Ratzinger were making a political choice. In preventing liberation theology, as preached by these martyrs, from reaching its full stage of development, they were keeping the Church aligned with the old power structures of Latin America. They might just as well have sent a telegram. These religious men and women, who in the name of the Gospels, stood with the poor, would not be defended by their Church. They were expendable, and they were murdered.  
  • The Republican candidate for President, Mitt Romney, got a large part of the initial investment to start Bain Capital from wealthy El Salvadorian clans that, beside funding Bain, also funded the right wing El Salvadoran death squads.  It is unknown if any Bain profits went back to El Salvador through the hands of these investors to fund more murders of the poor, of priests and of nuns, but it is a question that needs to be answered. Certainly Bain paid these El Salvadoran “investors” many times over what they invested.
  • isabella R on 20 Sep 12
     
    this was a major misstep that ended up causing great harm to the Church. Whether they meant to or not, Wojtyla and Ratzinger were making a political choice. In preventing liberation theology, as preached by these martyrs, from reaching its full stage of development, they were keeping the Church aligned with the old power structures of Latin America. They might just as well have sent a telegram. These religious men and women, who in the name of the Gospels, stood with the poor, would not be defended by their Church. They were expendable, and they were murdered.  
isabella R

Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America: Book III Chapter 1 - 0 views

xroads.virginia.edu/...ch3_01.htm

Tocqueville books politics government American History class

shared by isabella R on 12 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • In 1675 the lower classes in Brittany revolted at the imposition of a new tax. These disturbances were put down with unexampled severity. Observe the language in which Madame de Sevigne, a witness of these horrors, relates them to her daughter:
  • Your letter from Aix, my daughter, is droll enough. At least, read your letters over again before sending them, allow yourself to be surprised by the pretty things that you have put into them and console yourself by this pleasure for the trouble you have had in writing so many. Then you have kissed all of Provence, have you? There would be no satisfaction in kissing all Brittany, unless one liked to smell of wine. . . . Do you wish to hear the news from Rennes? A tax of a hundred thousand crowns has been imposed upon the citizens; and if this sum is not produced within four-and-twenty hours, it is to be doubled, and collected by the soldiers. They have cleared the houses and sent away the occupants of one of the great streets and forbidden anybody to receive them on pain of death; so that the poor wretches (old men, women near their confinement, and children included) may be seen wandering around and crying on their departure from this city, without knowing where to go, and without food or a place to lie in. Day before yesterday a fiddler was broken on the wheel for getting up a dance and stealing some stamped paper. He was quartered after death, and his limbs exposed at the four corners of the city. Sixty citizens have been thrown into prison, and the business of punishing them is to begin tomorrow. This province sets a fine example to the others teaching them above all that of respecting the governors and their wives, and of never throwing stones into their garden.1 Yesterday, a delightful day, Madame de Tarente visited these wilds; there is no question about preparing a chamber or a collation; she comes by the gate, and returns the same way. . . .
  • You talk very pleasantly about our miseries, but we are no longer so jaded with capital punishments; only one a week now, just to keep up appearances. It is true that hanging now seems to me quite a cooling entertainment. I have got a wholly new idea of justice since I have been in this region. Your galley-slaves seem to me a society of good people who have retired from the world in order to lead a quiet life.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It would be a mistake to suppose that Madame de Sevigne, who wrote these lines, was a selfish or cruel person; she was passionately attached to her children and very ready to sympathize in the sorrows of her friends; nay, her letters show that she treated her vassals and servants with kindness and indulgence. But Madame de Sevigne had no clear notion of suffering in anyone who was not a person of quality.
    • isabella R
      isabella R on 12 Sep 12
       
      OR, Mr. Alexis de Tocqueville, an example of the "Banality of Evil".  Top Nazis also loved their family and could be warm and congenial
  • In our time the harshest man, writing to the most insensible person of his acquaintance, would not venture to indulge in the cruel jocularity that I have quoted; and even if his own manners allowed him to do so, the manners of society at large would forbid it. Whence does this arise? Have we more sensibility than our fathers? I do not know that we have, but I am sure that our sensibility is extended to many more objects.
    • isabella R
      isabella R on 12 Sep 12
       
      Well all I can say Mr. Alexis de Tocqueville: Welcome to America of 2012, where cruel jocularity passed for serious journalism and everyday small talk.
  • When all the ranks of a community are nearly equal, as all men think and feel in nearly the same manner, each of them may judge in a moment of the sensations of all the others; he casts a rapid glance upon himself, and that is enough. There is no wretchedness into which he cannot readily enter, and a secret instinct reveals to him its extent. It signifies not that strangers or foes are the sufferers; imagination puts him in their place; something like a personal feeling is mingled with his pity and makes himself suffer while the body of his fellow creature is in torture.
    • isabella R
      isabella R on 12 Sep 12
       
      Mr. Alexis de Tocqueville, some of the worst practices of this pastime is practiced by those who claim to be "True"christians, rather than...I am not sure what our fellow christians really think of us who do not hold their politcal  views...because, if they know nothing else, they know their bibles and know they cannot judge our hearts, which only God can see.  However, everything else is up for open display and dissection
  • isabella R on 12 Sep 12
     
    HOW CUSTOMS ARE SOFTENED AS SOCIAL CONDITIONS BECOME MORE EQUAL We perceive that for several centuries social conditions have tended to equality, and we discover that at the same time the customs of society have been softened. Are these two things merely contemporaneous or does any secret link exist between them so that the one cannot advance without the other? Several causes may concur to render the customs of a people less rude but of all these causes the most powerful appears to me to be the equality of conditions. Equality of conditions and greater mildness in customs are, then, in my eyes, not only contemporaneous occurrences, but correlative facts.
isabella R

Romney's Death Squad Ties - 0 views

www.readersupportednews.org/...12885-romneys-death-squad-ties

corruption facism Mitt Romney El Salvador Bain Capital politics money

shared by isabella R on 26 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • One of the most well known victims of the death squads of the military of El Salvador is Archbishop Oscar Romero, known as the voice of the voiceless. He was a prominent advocate for the poor, a leading critic of U.S.-backed Salvadoran military government. He was killed by members of a U.S.-backed death squad while delivering mass at a hospital chapel. I want to play an excerpt from the film "Romero," which stars Raúl Juliá who played Archbishop Romero.
  • isabella R on 26 Aug 12
     
    We begin today with new scrutiny Republican candidate Mitt Romney is facing about his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital. The latest controversy surrounding Bain concerns how Romney helped found the company with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40% of Bain's start up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador beginning during the 1980's. The investors include the Salaverria family, whose former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, has previously accused of directly funding the Salvadorian paramilitaries. In his memoir, former Bain executive Harry Strachan writes, "Romney pushed aside his own misgivings about the investors to accept their backing." Strachan writes, "These Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital's May investor meetings and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital." For more, we're joined by Ryan Grim, Bureau Chief for The Huffington Post . He's connecting the dots in the latest story headlined, "Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads". Ryan, welcome to Democracy Now! If you could carefully laid out the story, and set the stage in El Salvador in the early 1980's, what was happening there, the carnage.
isabella R

Mitt Romney Reaped Huge Tax Benefits Based On 'Active' Role At Bain Capital - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...mney-bain-taxes_n_1828816.html

election taxes Bain_Capital tax capital money news corruption lies Mitt Romney politics

shared by isabella R on 26 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • isabella R on 26 Aug 12
     
    The distinction is valuable, for the IRS treats passive and active income and losses differently. If a passive investment loses money, the taxpayer can only write off that loss if passive gains have also been made and only at a 15 percent rate. But active losses can be written off at a 35 percent rate and deducted from the taxpayer's ordinary income. In other words, a taxpayer wants active losses, not passive losses. So by describing many of his investments as active, Romney saves himself millions of dollars in taxes. With those active investments, he is also securing a tax break few Americans enjoy: When he wins, he's paying a 15 percent rate on the gain. When he loses, he's writing it off at 35 percent, meaning that tax policy is subsidizing Romney's risk in his Bain investments.
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