Slate: "Send a Message to God - He has gone too far this time"

In the wake of the tsunami disaster, it's time for believers to take a more proactive role in world events. It's time to boycott God.

Centuries of uncritical worship have clearly produced a monster. God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place. They will excuse his unwillingness to stave off destruction with alibis ('God wasn't there when the tsunami hit' - Suketu Mehta) and relativising ('for each victim tens of thousands yet live' - Russell Seitz), even if those excuses contradict God's other attributes, such as omnipresence or love for each individual life.

Where is God's incentive to behave? He gets credit for the good things and no blame for the bad.

Ah, the difficulties of radical monotheism.

That's the problem, after all. When Christians, Jews, and Muslims proclaim that God is one and that there is one God, it puts us in a fix when the world goes to hell. How do we explain evil when the one and only God is good?

Heather Mac Donald's piece in Slate is angry, sarcastic... and important for people of faith to read. We might not have pat answers for her accusations against God (or rather, she rightly would not accept from us any answers that are merely pat), but we have an obligation to take those charges seriously. The question of evil and suffering in the world demands our honest and humble engagement. Mac Donald's essay dares us to wrestle with that question.

NYT: "Clinton Seeking Shared Ground Over Abortions"

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that the opposing sides in the divisive debate over abortion should find 'common ground' to prevent unwanted pregnancies and ultimately reduce abortions, which she called a 'sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.'

In a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters near the New York State Capitol, Mrs. Clinton firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of 'religious and moral values' on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.

'There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate - we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved,' Mrs. Clinton said.

This isn't just politics - this makes very good sense, and it's about time Democrats woke up to this possibility. No one should be celebrating abortions; no one should point to high rates of abortion as a mark of excellence in our society. Even those who support legal abortion should be able to acknowledge that an abortion is never a cause for gladness - it is always a tragic choice born out of unfortunate circumstances. Pro-choice people ought to work just as hard as pro-lifers to reduce the number of abortions in our country. The goal is not to make abortion illegal, but to make it largely unnecessary, through programs of education, adoption, birth control, counseling, and social services supporting young mothers.

Mrs. Clinton is doing our nation a great favor - she is acknowledging that there is (or should be) a huge common ground between people who support abortion rights and those who wish to see abortionists put out of business. What progress could be made in really reducing the number of abortions in this country if instead of wasting all our energies fighting over its legality, we were to work together, putting all our resources into supporting women, so that legal abortion would eventually become the sad medical option of last resort?

The current pro-life/pro-choice options senselessly and needlessly polarize the issue. Senator Clinton is smart enough to recognize that the vast majority of people of good will on both sides of the issue consider abortion a tragedy and would work to minimize that tragedy in the lives of women if given the chance. This is the sort of leadership our country needs more of.

Ted Rall: 'The Normalization of Horror"

As Congress prepared to rubberstamp the nomination of torture aficionado Alberto Gonzales as the nation's chief prosecutor, the Washington Post broke news that would have torn a saner nation apart. The Bush Administration, the paper reported January 2, is no longer planning to keep hundreds of Muslim prisoners currently rotting away in U.S. concentration camps at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram merely 'indefinitely.' The Defense Department and CIA are now planning 'a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions' for these innocents.

We're locking them up forever. Without due process.

*feels sick*