When I was 26, I found out I was going to hell. Young, impressionable, and without a strong faith, I listened intently as the pastor of a church I was visiting described in graphic detail the tortuous, unquenchable flames that would burn human bodies forever and ever. He spoke of worms eating away at decaying flesh, total darkness without the presence of God, and worst of all, no release from those horrors for all eternity. I certainly didn't want to be one of those unfortunate many to feel the flames licking at my feet soon after leaving life in this world. So I took out the proper fire insurance and asked Jesus to save me from my sins and, therefore, from eternal torment in hell. Whew! That was 25 years ago, and hell is still a hot topic.

Hell haunts me deep down inside, where I fear to tread and fail to admit uncertainty lest ripples of doubt disturb my secure little world of faith, lest someone find out and think me less Christian and more heretic. I have no intention of doing away with hell. I can't -- certain verses in the Bible won't allow me to do that. So I am very concerned about remaining faithful to the Christian scriptures; but I'm even more concerned about remaining faithful to the God of love, who loves the worst of the worst, the world's enemies, including, even, the Hitlers, the Idi Amins, and the Osama bin Ladens of the world. Our traditional views of hell as a place of eternal punishment where unbelievers dwell in undying flames contradict the image of God as merciful, forgiving, and compassionate. Our traditional focus on hell as an evangelistic tool does not genuinely communicate the very heart of the gospel. If we receive Jesus as Savior merely because we want to avoid hell, we miss the entire point.

More...

My legal and advocacy work both in the U.S. and abroad has given me the unique opportunity to view challenges faced by the Muslim community in multifarious socio-political settings. What is clear to me is that the challenges faced, and to be faced in the coming century, by the Muslim community require the utilization of the same individual and societal instruments under evaluation. These include the appropriate and permissible application of individual and communal freedoms, the freedom as an individual to study one's faith and offer new and relevant interpretations of such, and the freedom for a community as a whole to practice its faith in the public and private sphere. And so, I see major challenges faced by the Muslim community in the twenty-first century as coming from two arenas: 1) intra-community differences, such as disparate interpretations of gender roles, or differing theological and historical critical interpretations of the Quran; and 2) extra-community relations, such as variant understandings of how self (Muslim) versus other (non-Muslim) should interact and the responsibilities of each toward the other.

Much of my legal and advocacy work while at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, non-partisan law firm that protects the free expression of all faiths, has been in Muslim communities in the Muslim world, particularly in Egypt and Pakistan, where the central short and long-term challenge is a government that is authoritarian and/or corrupt. State control of religion, whether through monitoring of mosque sermons or prosecution of "deviant" interpretations -- Shia, Koranist, Ahmadi, or even Sunni -- under national security pretexts, politicizes religion so that "Islam" ultimately becomes a tool to be manipulated by the state to best serve its interests. The realization of religious freedom, free speech, and other fundamental human rights is dependent on adequate checks on government power. With activists routinely imprisoned and harassed, the countercurrent to government restrictions is always struggling to gather momentum.

More...

Anyone who has read Founding Brothers, or any other great read about the men who founded this country, can't help but be blown away by how different politics were back then.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the Federalists and anti-Federalists, were locked in an epic ideological struggle, the result of which has shaped the entire development of this nation.  At the end of the day, neither Adams nor Jefferson wanted to surrender the rights that the Americans had fought so bravely to secure.  Jefferson believed that the largest threat to these freedoms was a strong national government, and Adams believed that both external and internal threats, combined with the weakness of the early nation, could inevitably lead to the fall of the United States, dissolving the American dream in cataclysm.  Somewhere along the road, the debate became more defined as the tension between liberal interpretation (loose, spirit of the law, pragmatic) and the conservative interpretation (strict, cautionary, individualistic) of the Constitution of the United States.  The Federalists believed that the best way to secure liberty was to ensure strength, security, and prosperity for the people of the United States.  Problems and threats were to be treated pragmatically in order to form a more perfect union.  The anti-Federalists feared the construction of a dragon that would devour itself, a strong centralized government that would replace the King with a bureaucracy and special interests.  Trading big government for security and prosperity was not a risk the anti-Federalists were willing to take.

I could write about how neither the modern Democrats nor the modern Republicans fit the liberal nor conservative label.  After all, it is the "Conservative" party that would like to define marriage, revise the 14th amendment, mandate English as the official language of the United States, and even change the way senators are elected.  Perhaps the most glaring departure from strict interpretation would be the method that congress has used to wage war without a declaration of war by congress, and this is made even more striking when wars are waged preemptively.  On the other hand, proponents of gay marriage are very happy that our founding fathers didn't define marriage in our founding documents.

More...

Weekly Mulch: Fighting the Joe Millers of the World

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Joe Miller, Sarah Palin's choice candidate for one of Alaska's Senate seats, does not believe in climate change. That didn't bother Alaska voters: this week, Miller bested Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the state's Republican primary. If that weren't worrisome enough, it also emerged that the fossil fuel industry spent eight times more than environmental groups on lobbying in 2009, the year the House passed the climate change bill. It's been a bad year already for environmental causes, and as the November election edges closer, progressives might want to start working overtime to regain momentum on climate and energy issues.

Murkowski was solidly against the idea of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulating carbon. But she was willing to talk about cap-and-trade programs, and at the very least, she was willing to admit climate change was happening. Depending on how November's election shakes out, the shift towards climate-denial in Congress may only worsen. A slew of Republican candidates are convinced that, as one put it, "only God knows where our climate is going," as Care2 reports.

A tougher tomorrow

Current political trends bode badly for the planet. If Congress couldn't pass climate legislation while are in Democrats control of the House and Senate, there's little hope that lawmakers will step up when facing opponents who don't believe in climate change.

Carla Perez has a few ideas about how progressives and environmentalists can fight back -- and they begin with accepting that, yes, giving up fossil fuels would mean sacrifice, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. Perez, a program coordinator at social justice group Movement Generation, appeared recently on National Radio Project's Making Contact and imagined how life would look without fossil fuels:

No iPods. No iPads. No plasma TVs. No motorized individual vehicles. No plastic bags. No pleather boots for $9.99 from Payless.... Then again, no island of plastic twice the size of Texas. No plumes of sulfuric acid over Richmond, California. No skyrocketing rates of cancer and diabetes concentrated in native and people of color communities all over the world. No spontaneous combustion of flames off of contaminated rivers.

"How bad would it be?" she asked.

Target practice

To move from iPods to environmental justice, though, people like Perez will have to keep politicians like Joe Miller out of Washington. In an interview with Yes! Magazine, Riki Ott, a marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, makes a good point about the challenges that environmental advocates face.

"This BP disaster, like the Exxon-Valdez, is more than an environmental crisis--it's a democracy crisis," Ott says. "Right now we're playing the game: Going through regulatory arenas, tightening some laws. But that's not good enough. The real question is, how do we get control of these big corporations?"

Electing politicians that don't take corporate money or listen to industry lobbyists will help. Another way to move away from the dominance of fossil fuel companies is offering real alternatives to using their products.

Brave new NOLA

In New Orleans, in the five years since Katrina hit, the people rebuilding the city have worked to create greener alternatives, as Campus Progress reports. Here's just one example:

Go Green NOLA encourages homebuilders to think small, since smaller homes use less energy. The group also makes suggestions such as installing windows and insulation systems with special attention to local weather and climate -- think: humidity, and lots of it--and using shade trees and other landscaping to help beat back the southern sun.

Change can happen without devastation preceding it. In Massachusetts, the Green Justice Coalition worked to ensure that environmental justice provisions made it into the state's $1.4 billion energy efficiency plan, The Nation reports. What's more, the coalition made certain that Massachusetts citizens would feel the impact of the new plan directly:

There will be a financing plan to make energy-saving home improvements more affordable. Many of the 23,300 jobs to be generated by the plan will go to contractors who pay decent wages and meet "high road" employment standards. Finally, four pilot programs across the state will test a radically new outreach model by going door to door and mobilizing low- and moderate-income families in building greener neighborhoods.

Women lead the way

Progress doesn't happen on its own, of course. At RH Reality Check, Kathleen Rogers suggests that female leaders make all the difference. "Women get the connections between climate change, public health and economic growth, because climate change is disproportionately affecting women," she writes. "A new generation of women entrepreneurs, leaders and civil society, have demonstrated the potential for being the solution to the climate crisis. But they must be mobilized and given an opportunity to influence government and business."

Rogers is right. Leaders are out there. Just listen to the whole of Carla Perez' comments on Making Contact. The Green Justice Coalition's Phyllis Evans also gets it. And even Sen. Murkowski was willing to work on climate change compromises, on some level.

Of course, it's not just women who can lead the country and the planet away from current environmental and democratic crises. Paths forward are emerging; anyone can follow them.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

More...