For those with religious connections, this is a season of celebration of rebirth, with festivals including Eid, Passover, and Easter falling around the same time. For Christians, today is Easter Sunday.
But celebration and hope are difficult to sustain right now, due to the world situation indicated by the Guardian headline this morning — see the screenshot below.
"Before getting into the rest of the updates, I know many of you reached out about Trump’s Easter post this morning. I saw it, and I also saw how parts of the media covered it. In my view, there is a tendency to downplay or normalize behavior that is not normal. If any other president posted something like that, it would be treated very differently."
~ Aaron Parnas
#Trump #Iran #war #Easter #death #violence #destruction
/2
https://aaronparnas.substack.com/p/major-good-news-update-and-calling
Good morning, everyone.
"This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now."
~ Steven Beschloss
"Trump’s glorification of the destruction of civilian infrastructure—in Iran and Washington DC—is emblematic of those who seek to sabotage civilization because it threatens their unfair advantage over the population."
~ Jim Stewartson
#Trump #Iran #war #Easter #death #violence #destruction
/5
https://www.mind-war.com/p/back-to-the-stone-age-the-iran-war
"Donald Trump wants to reverse the polarity of civilization. In a civilized country, the military exists to protect civilians. But in Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s America, civilians only exist to provide resources—and bodies—to the military."
"Civilization is not the accumulation of power, or the building of grand monuments to a leader or a nation. It is not creating the greatest capacity for violence, posting the highest number in a stock market’s history, or adding chatbots to the kill chain. To the contrary, it is the ability of a population to constrain those very powers that defines whether it is truly civilized, or merely a sacrificial battleground."
"It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.
It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things."
~ Paul Krugman
War crimes coming: A horrifying update
Noting that "we are much closer to nuclear war today than we were six weeks ago, Julie Roginsky says,
"There is a quiet, unsettling clarity settling over the world right now that has announced itself with a stark pattern. Watch closely, and you will see it.
It spans Ukraine, Iran, and most tellingly, the Korean peninsula."
#Trump #Iran #war #Easter #death #violence #destruction
/9
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-most-dangerous-thing-about-the
"I’m going to choose to step away from my initial reaction — We have elected an actual madman.
We are in deep, deep shit. —
breathe, and focus instead on the also true that lunatic man knows he’s in big big trouble. Of course, that doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t.
HAPPY EASTER EVERYBODY!"
~ Rebecca Schoenkopf
#Trump #Iran #war #Easter #death #violence #destruction
/11
https://www.wonkette.com/p/jesus-fcking-christ-is-fckin-risen
"On Easter Sunday, the president posted profanity and skipped church. The pope asked him to stop the war. …
The theological divergence between the two most prominent American Christians on the world stage is complete."
~ Rudy Martinez
#Trump #PopeLeo #Iran #war #Easter #death #violence #destruction
/12
https://www.chicanoinparis.com/p/the-rest-of-the-world-report-april-a42
@wdlindsy I have lots of bones to pick with other actual Christians, including the pope. But Trump is a not a Christian. One of these men leads a church. The other can destroy humanity by force and destroy life on earth. This is not a mere philosophical divergence of views. The Christian thing to do is to remove Trump from power
He is an unrepentant rapist, felon and war criminal. He can change his ways, but he needs to do that work on himself away from weapons of mass destruction.
@ChrisCorrigan @wdlindsy Trump "identifies as Christian" in his own speech. However, he redefines the term "Christian" to suit his ends. Which is common in cults, I think: twisting language, cherry-picking scripture, gaslighting & brainwashing until followers happily agree "black is white".
Where is the Church that reclaims the language of the Gospel and stands for what is morally right, and against what is wrong?
His anger at the pope is a good indicator.
But American churches seem MIA so far.
@deborahh @wdlindsy I’m going to do that thing…”not all churches.”
Denominations like the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and large sections of the historical Black Church among others are important progressive mainline voices, in the vein of my own United Church of Canada here. However part of that progressive theology also means querying things like power and wealth and so you don’t see it as a religion that associates with power much.
@deborahh @wdlindsy nevertheless, these people and spiritual leaders are to be found in the frontline of movements for civil rights and social justice standing in theologically committed stances to oppose brutality, war, hatred and cruelty.
These denominations are often stranger bedfellows at times, agreeing on broader social justice goals, while differing on things like LGBTQ rights or the ordination of women. Nevertheless, the voices are there, well established, and visible.
William Lindsey 
Chris Corrigan
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦