[Mb-civic] Re: Bill Moyers: 9/11 & the Sport of God

[Patricia Kittleman]

Once again you have delivered to us what most of us would have missed and I
thank you as I pass it on to many,many others

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>From: Linda Hassler <lindahassler at sbcglobal.net>
>To: CIVIC <MB-Civic at islandlists.com>
>Subject: Bill Moyers: 9/11 & the Sport of God
>Date: Mon, Sep 12, 2005, 5:27 PM
>

> This article is adapted from Bill Moyer's address this week at Union
> Theological Seminary in New York, where Judith and Bill Moyers received the
> seminary's highest award, the Union Medal, for their contributions to faith
> and reason in America. I'm sending just the first two paragraphs. Read the
> whole by clicking the truthout.org link given. He concludes the speech
> (article) with something very important to us at this time.
>
> http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105X.shtml
>
> 9/11 and the Sport of God
>     By Bill Moyers
>     Commondreams.org
>
>      Friday 09 September 2005
>
>      At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized
> in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do.
>
>      My spiritual forbears did not take kindly to living under theocrats
> who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others.
> "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils," thundered the dissenter Roger
> Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan
> authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a "pitiful negligible
> minority" but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as
> "incendiaries of the commonwealth" for holding to their belief in that
> great democracy of faith - the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to
> pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In
> 1651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded
> whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another
> Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts. His friends offered to pay his fine for his
> release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the
> pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said,
"that must free the soul."
>