Because this occurred before this creation of this blog, we have never reviewed this video from 2007. In an outrageous act of religious intolerance, a visiting Hindu priest was stopped twice from offering the opening prayer in the United States Senate.
Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, was about to offer a prayer when three Christian protesters with the anti-abortion group Operation Save America began to shout. The first protester asked for God’s forgiveness for allowing the ”false prayer.” As Senator Bob Casey jumped to the priest’s aide, the first protester screamed “Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight. This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before You.”
When Casey called for the sergeant-at-arms to intervene, another protester screamed “No Lord but Jesus Christ! . . . There’s only one true God!”
There are many paths to GOD. All fundamental organized religions express their intolerance and therefore their ignorance. Remember GOD IS LOVE!
This reminds me of a book that I read years ago called the “Lost Years of Jesus” dang if wiki did not have a reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_years_of_Jesus
Could he have been studying Hindu? Only the Buddha doth know.
Amen to that Frankdawg. (Whoops!)
Stuff like this always reminds me of a line from an old Roy Harper song:- “And the world that Christ fought is supported by using his name”.
I really wanted to include atheist wingnuts in that previous rant but at the moment I can’t think of a single violent episode perpetrated by atheists against any religious group based on their beliefs.
There may be some former “X” believers that have turned away & attacked “X” believers but that may be settling old grievances more than actual belief hostility & at the moment I don’t recall any.
The three dominant religions all pray to the exact same invisible cloud being. Every religion in the world that I have ever heard or read about has peace and love for others as a basic tenet. Every major religion & most of the minor ones I am aware of have some wingnut flank that uses those same teachings to justify horrible abuses of any group that does not bow, kneel, hold hands, light incense and/or recite the same words the same way they do.
These wingnuts are no different from the Moslim wingnuts, the Jewish wingnuts, the Hindu wingnuts, the Sikh wingnuts or the various factions of Christian wingnuts that even object to other Christians (see Baptist/Catholic).
Religion is the only real abomination.
srl23 wrote, in part,
“…I fail to see the purpose of blogging about this three years after the event.”
________________________________
Because this blawg is about learning, which I did by reading the 3-year-old thread.
Furthermore, you must not have read the previous post by ‘IraqVet’. He risked his life under deplorable conditions and he was willing to die for a system that he did not fully understand.
IraqVet, this old Army veteran and atheist thanks you.
It’s pseudo Christians like these that give God a bad reputation.
Agree with mespo
Here is Hindu Trick.
Abraham is a sanskrit word.
a Brahama – the one.
So which is the false religion.
While I agree this is an act of pure intolerance and an absolute embarrassment, I fail to see the purpose of blogging about this three years after the event. There seems to be no shortage of current events to discuss.
To be honest, I was surprised to learn that official government meetings routinely open with a prayer.
In the military, I was always told that the reason for having chaplains was to ensure that deployed soldiers were not deprived of their freedom of religious worship. OK, that makes a certain amount of sense.
But even in the military, we never opened staff meetings and briefings with a prayer (OK, I take that back: for a while, we used prayer to open some joint meetings we had with the Iraqis, but that was strictly a propaganda move to show them that we all “worshipped the same god,” as if that would make them like us better).
The military chaplain did insinuate himself into more formal occasions, like change of command ceremonies, where the padre would always be called up to give an invocation. But I always thought that was just a “hey, we’ve got a chaplain, might as well use him” kind of thing.
As I learn more about how civilian government operates, it’s kind of disheartening that Congress has latched onto the military chaplain tradition as an excuse to get their own full-time paid Chaplains of the House and Senate, and that they always open the meetings of our secular legislature with a decidedly non-secular prayer (occasionally throwing a non-Christian officiant into the rotation doesn’t make it secular, it just makes it ecumenical).
Seems kind of ripe for a Supreme Court challenge. But given how the Pledge of Allegiance “under God” challenge was recently shot down, it almost seems counterproductive to try with this court.
mespo–
“We shall know they are Christians by their love – and tolerance.”
Amen, brother!
I don’t, however, believe that all Christians are as intolerant as the ones we heard in this video. Maybe Christians such as these fanatics would like to change the official US motto to “In the Chrisitan God We Trust.”
Dear Christians,
When somebody is praying in a manner that doesn’t fit with your particular beliefs, you stand quietly with neutral body language. You can even pray to the deity of your choice (as long as it’s silent). Just ask any atheist.
I have read some Hindu religious text and they are similar to the teachings of Jesus. What they did was wrong.
It gives me the warm and fuzzies seeing Christians truly living by, and vigorously practicing, the message of the good book – exhibit one’s ignorance and bigotry to the best of one’s ability by obnoxiously screaming like banshee’s against those who don’t share their beliefs.
Definitely! what mespo said….that was a textbook worthy demostration of intolerance at it’s near nastiest…
What mespo said.
We shall know they are Christians by their love – and tolerance.
Unbelievable. Good for Bob Casey. I wonder if a Moslem has ever opened the Senate with a prayer. Does anyone know whether the screamers were hauled out and this man allowed to continue?