Dan Brown Bashes Religious Right

Read Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol (DoubleDay, 2009), and a passage hit home like Lewis Lapham during the Bush years.

It's great reading an author, feeling like he just read your mind.

Writes Brown:

From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to American politics—the name Jesus had been hijacked as an ally in all kinds of power struggles. Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest, herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding. They defended their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand. They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions. Now, after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.
- p 327

Rightwing Catholic Bishop Hit in Open Letter

One wonders what the prince of peace and love would say were he to encounter the hate and hypocrisy inflicted in his name by such men as Bishop Robert Morlino, who in one sense supposedly leads 270,000 Catholics in the 11-county Madison, Wisconsin diocese.

Madison-area Catholics are speaking out today against Morlino in an open letter at the back of the Business section of Sunday's Wisconsin State Journal.

Peace, compassion, tolerance and love.

Such qualities seem to elude this priest of what the great humanistic writer Jimmy Breslin termed the "Church that Forgot Christ," after Breslin left the Catholic Church that abandoned many of the teachings of Christ and other great humanists in history.




















via mal contends