The UmBlog

to be a decent human being! I think many of us use Bible verses to be selfish though. Sometimes Christians can be the greatest humanitarians and sometimes the worst. My country has elected Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump. One freed millions of enslaved humans and the other, when he speaks from his heart, not a teleprompter, can't find a problem with white nationalists who think Lincoln was wrong. Our country is deeply religious. But it was the religious convictions of the Christian progressive, Harriet Beecher Stowe , author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, who fanned the abolitionist flame into the conflagration of the Civil War. She was "progressive" because she rejected the bible proof texts that permitted slavery and empathized with the humanity of the enslaved humans in her country. via the Naked Pastor Some biblical proof texts that are used to end a debate are merely proof that the bible was written by humans who wrote in the context of culture they were famili...

World War 2 was started by agressive nations motivated in part by racial supremacy. Hitler told Germans and Austrians that they were the superior race of Aryans. He also used the European Jewish population as a scapegoat for all the ills they had brought on themselves when they lost WW1. The Japanese also considered themselves a superior race and saw a distinction between themselves and all other Asian people in China, Korea, and the Pacific islands. In Japan, anyone not Japanese was sub-human. In central Germany, anyone not "Aryan" was sub-human as well. The United States sent to the slaughter nearly 300,000 Americans to defeat these racist ideologies. Ironically, the United States had its own racist ideologies to defeat within. Eighty years prior to WW2, over 200,000 Americans died in conflict over this very issue in the Civil War. Before and after that war, the US used genocidal means to eradicate it's own aboriginal population. A footnote in American history Hitle...

In response to the meme #blacklivesmatter some white supremacists tried to counter with the meme #alllivesmatter. African Americans have consistently responded saying "black lives matter" does not contradict all lives matter but points to the problem of disproportionate human rights violations against people of African heritage. In other words all lives do NOT matter if black lives do NOT matter. It fell on deaf ears. White supremacists claim any protesters who affiliate with black lives matter are terrorists. They are including many whites and many, many clergy. But when one shouts, nuance is not necessary. This weekend a white man from Ohio drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Chralottesville, Virginia. This small city decided to honor the injustice against black americans by renaming parks who had previously honored slave holding, secessionist generals from the Civil War, Lee and Jackson. The insecure men of the alt-right held a rally to protest this. Th...