No rest for the wicked
The first-ever Hindu prayer in the U.S. Senate was disrupted by three loud Christian protesters this morning, one of whom sounded like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear:
“Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight… We shall have no other gods before you…” [Link]
The male protester told an AP reporter, “we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away. For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god…” Capitol police identified the protesters as Ante Nedlko Pavkovic, Katherine Lynn Pavkovic and Christan Renee Sugar…
[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid defended the choice and linked it to the war debate. “If people have any misunderstanding about Indians and Hindus,” Reid said, “all they have to do is think of Gandhi,” a man “who gave his life for peace…” [Link]
The protesters couldn’t even be bothered to get the religion’s name right:
“This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world… You look at India, you look at Nepal — there’s persecution going in both of those countries that is gendered by the religious belief that is present there, and Hindu dominates in both of those countries.” [Link]
The leader of the protesters’ group misread his American history:
“Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” [Link]
Many of the founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, were actually deists:
[Jefferson] was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God…
… morality required no divine sanction or inspiration, no appeal beyond reason and nature, perhaps not even the hope of heaven or the fear of hell; and so the whole edifice of Christian revelation came tumbling to the ground… [Link]
Some Christianists complained:
“When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down…” [Link]
The director of [a] pro-Israel ministry is concerned about… allowing someone to… [pray] to over 300 million gods. [Link]
Silly ministry. The pundit didn’t have time to pray to 300 million deities this morning. They only do that at weddings when you’re straining for a crack at the samosa table.
Pundit Rajan Zed is from Reno, a gambling city presumably in need of moksha-assisting services.
on Thursday, July 12th, 2007, 5:26 pm in Issues, Religion, Video clips › 
Email this
› 
Retweet
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
are these 3 christian fools from the bible belt south? tolerance is something that they don’t ‘get’.
I guess this is the context you mentioned earlier. Yech.
It sickens me those creeps had an opportunity to present their idea of “patriotism” to the world via international TV. They don’t represent Americans. They represent nutjobs. (Of course the same can be said of the Bush administration. I’m going to go weep now.)
Nina, don’t weep. Just mock and loathe.
Manish, you should have instead used a photograph from this.
Certainly. But they do represent a substantial population of the country, too. The three folks’ sentiment is quite popular all across the country.
I feel you, but there are about 30 million self-proclaimed evangelical Christians in America. And that’s not counting all the non-evangelical __________s who also feel the same way about polytheistic, non-Christian religions, etc. They are a force to be reckoned with and they hold a lot of sway in politics, we can’t ignore that.
But yeah, I wish they were just fringe crazies too.
Relegating fundamentalist nutjobs to the bible belt South does no service to the fact that the bible belt extends into the north and these nutsos were in DC to interrupt a service. The reality is that this is the unenlightened America encouraged by the political status quo right now.
I still prescribe valium for every American alive today.
With America’s expanding girth, the belt does need to get wider and wider.
oooh…. priest zed was quoting the ‘asotoma sadgamaya’ from the gita in english translation… :)…
forget about the idiots who were trying to interrupt… i remember when i was in the first grade and went to a private ‘christian’ school (being hindu), the kids encircled me calling me a ‘devils’ child… yes, almost 25 years later it still haunts me…
while in medical school, one of the smartest gal in our class was an extreme christian… she told me i’m going to hell since i wasn’t christian… brilliant… simply brilliant.. thankfully, i’ll never be using her as a referral…
and the bible belt expands far beyond the south… as i was in multicultural LOS ANGELES for all of that crap to happen…
stupid idiots…
they need to wake up and smell the coffee and see that all rivers eventually lead to the same ocean..
peace.
maitri:
i’ll sign those prescriptions if you need me too :)
*remember the time i was told to go worship my buddhist idol at the atlanta airport?*????
chickpea, be careful. maitri is actually Rush Limbaugh in disguise.
Who came up with this stupid idea at the first place?? There are hell lot of burning issues today right from broken medicare/immigration/cost of education/iraq war/gas price ..list is endless……….. Where america is heading dear?????? . India and China is the future.
GAP made in India..iPhone made in China..:-) Enjoy
Don’t forget ladies/gents that this country was founded on extreme violence. An entire group of peoples (the other Indians) were made nearly extinct, their indigenous cultures wiped out, and their lands appropriated. Early “Christian” settlers deliberately gave clothing infected with poxvirus to the Native Americans who had no natural resistance to it. Right after that this country started capturing and enslaving another race, it took a civil war to win emancipation, and hundred years later civil rights to win equal freedoms. If all desi’s in this country were here in the late 1950s or 60s, I don’t think we could have shared a drinking water fountain with the goras. Well, all of this was justified in the name of religion. Look at the idiots who populate the Senate, Trent Lott (a certified racist and bigot), who paid homage to another certified racist and bigotâ€â€Jesse Helms, and Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, what a f#@$# lun-bin. Many of the founding fathers were screwing their African slaves, while talking about god and freedoms. Let me save my comments on the 2000 years of intra-Christian conflicts, the crusades, the savagery in the name of god, and the holocaust for another day. Christianity has a proud history of blood in its hands.
Thank you Ronald Reagan for unearthing these once fringe idiots and giving them a voice in mainstream political argument. In the name of power and control, the television evangelists found a home within the Republican Party. Study of this phenomina is essential in understanding what these stupid, stupid people are about. Politics=religion. Read the book(s) containing all the hate, bigotry and intolerance: believe it and do the superior dance while joyfully damning unbelievers to hell. Does anyone see a slippery slope leading toward further and deep trashing of the Constitution of the United States of America?
Happy Bastille Day everyone…too bad it doesn’t have a more modern application like ‘happy let’s cut off the heads of everyone at the 700 Club day’…LOL, sorry about that but I couldn’t resist.
I am an Indian & a Christian and am proud to be both. An irresponsible comment from a few nuts should not cloud our sentiments of the majority of the American public. Most of us Indians, be it Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists or Muslims live here very comfortably, practicing whatever we believe in with no hindrance from anyone. Thatis why we are still living here. There are some in our country who will give anything to see India as purely a Hindu nation, just as there are Muslims in other parts of the world who will want nobody but Muslims in their part of the world. But these radicals are in the minority. Just as I pride myself as being an Indian Christian who can live in peace & harmony in India, I equally pride myself to be an American of Indian origin who can live in this country (US) with the same freedom as the rest of the folks in this country. That is what makes a country like India & the US so great.