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Joining Spirit with the Billions of Us Human Beings

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By Ernie McCray

I was driving and turned my radio to 89.5, KPBS, and there was a conversation going on about “7 Billion Others,” an exhibit that’s opening in the U.S. for the first time – at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA): February 21 to September 13.

I liked what I was hearing and googled around and found, on the MOPA website, 45 questions written for visitors to the exhibit to answer so that they can find in themselves that spark that resides in us all and connects us to the journey of human beings featured in the video project.

My answer to the first question was: Ernest Charles McCray; age 76; retired school principal; widower; American as in United States of America.

Here are my replies to the other questions, based on what first came to my mind:   [Read more…]

The San Salvador and Junípero Serra: Celebrating Spanish Catholic Domination

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By Steven Newcomb / OB Rag

Early this year, 2015, the Maritime Museum of San Diego is scheduled to launch a replica of the colonizing Spanish ship called “San Salvador” (“Holy Savior”). That was the ship which Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in 1542, sailed into the Kumeyaay bay of the Kumeyaay Nation’s territory. As a result of that voyage, the society of the United States now typically calls that bay, and the city adjacent to it, by the Catholic name, “San Diego” (“Saint Diego”).

Cabrillo sailed up the Baja peninsula under a royal commission that the Spanish crown had granted to a vicious and deadly psychopath, a conquistador named Pedro Alvarado. The royal commission authorized Alvarado “to discover and conquer” places he was able to reach by sailing northward along the Baja peninsula. When Alvarado was killed in Guatemala, the Spanish viceroy charged Cabrillo with sailing north on the basis of that royal commission.   [Read more…]

Junipero Serra: Canonizing the Colonizers

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By Eric Loomis / Lawyers, Guns & Money (LGM)

Pope Francis has decided to make Junipero Serra a saint. Serra was a Franciscan in California who founded many of the California missions in the 18th century, effectively making him an agent of colonization as well as a converter of Native Americans to Catholicism.

Building these missions meant forced labor from Native Americans while the conversion process obviously demonstrated a lack of respect for indigenous cultures as well as the compulsion of these conversions. Physical abuse of Native Americans was common, with many recorded beatings and whippings. A lot of indigenous people in California are very upset about the choice to canonize Serra.   [Read more…]

Slamming Science: Pat Robertson Claims Evolution Is To Blame For Lack Of Miracles In America

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By Simon Brown / Americans United

TV preacher Pat Robertson might be the king of the head scratchers, and he unleashed another whopper recently when he claimed that God performs fewer miracles in the United States because of our widespread belief in evolution.

For some reason Robertson still has a television show, and on Monday a viewer named “Ken” asked him why “amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?”

I was unaware that people are being routinely raised from the dead in African nations, but let’s play along for a bit with Pat here.   [Read more…]

Yazidi Moon

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By Nat Krieger

On the night of August 10th the people of San Diego looked up in the sky and saw exactly what thousands of Yazidi men, women, and children trapped on the slopes of Mount Sinjar saw: a supermoon, the moon closer to our planet than it will be for more than another year.

In the day leading to the super, or perigean moon, I searched the web trying to find something out about this people on the verge of extermination. There isn’t much. First the shock of learning that for nearly a thousand years a faith described as syncretic and nonviolent had withstood the never ending storm surge of monotheism spinning across the Middle East and Mesopotamia…

…Followed by the realization that, as with most religious minorities who don’t force their beliefs on other groups and rely on oral tradition to teach their children, the few written accounts of the Yazidis are nearly all by outsiders who offer mainly speculation as to when the religion started, or why, or what its roots are.   [Read more…]

Why You Can’t Reconcile God and Evolution

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Four reasons that “God made evolution happen” makes no sense.

By Greta Christina / AlterNet

“Of course I believe in evolution. And I believe in God, too. I believe that evolution is how God created life.”

You hear this a lot from progressive and moderate religious believers. They believe in some sort of creator god, but they heartily reject the extreme, fundamentalist, science-rejecting versions of their religions (as well they should). They want their beliefs to reflect reality – including the reality of the confirmed fact of evolution. So they try to reconcile the two by saying that that evolution is real, exactly as the scientists describe it — and that God made it happen. They insist that you don’t have to deny evolution to believe in God.

In the narrowest, most literal sense, of course this is true. It’s true that there are people who believe in God, and who also accept science in general and evolution in particular. This is an observably true fact: it would be absurd to deny it, and I don’t. I’m not saying these people don’t exist.

I’m saying that this position is untenable.   [Read more…]

Is Marriage Becoming Obsolete for Millennials?

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New research reveals deep ambivalence about marriage among young people.

In a new Pew poll, researchers asked people of all ages how they felt about marriage and having kids. One question asked if society is better off if people made these goals a priority. The answers point to a future shakeup that will reconfigure the social and economic landscape.

For respondents over 65, a strong 61 percent said yes, it’s in society’s best interest to prioritize marriage and kids. But that number gradually declined for every age group until you reach Millennials, of whom only 29 percent agreed. An astonishing 69 percent of Millennials said society is just as well off if people have other priorities.

The pundits have been puzzling over what to make of this.   [Read more…]

El Machete Illustrated: Every Child is Sacred

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San Diego Free Press is proud to announce our site’s debut of cartoonist Eric J. Garcia’s El Machete Illustrated. He’s a political cartoonist from Chicago who will be sharing the occasional toon with us here at SDFP. Much like the Free Press’ regular editorial cartoonist Junco Canché, Eric focuses his poli-toonists eye on latino issues and lefty politics. Please welcome him with a comment below. You can follow him on Twitter @garciaink or friend him on Facebook.   [Read more…]

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