Christina Engela

Irony: When those who call others a 'threat to Christianity' reject the crucial tenets of their own faith themselves.

Beauty... Is what you are after a lifetime of struggle in the face of hostility, surviving, and standing scarred and unafraid, triumphant before your enemies.

I can understand backward patriarchal reasoning coming from a male, but from a woman - and of all people, a leader of women? It says something profound about leadership - and, if anything - what it says about followers is not very flattering at all.

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?

Right now though, there is little that concerns me more than the impending assault on the human rights and equality of women and the pink community in South Africa. Right now there are events afoot in this country which justify my concern.

If you 'don't do politics', trust me - politics will do you.

If you 'don't do politics' , trust me - politics will do you.

It seems to me that wherever religion and politics mix in one body, fascist values - and not 'family values' - rear their ugly head.

Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity?

Freedom is being whole on my own and not needing somebody else to complete me.

What i know from history is this: Those who do not appreciate their freedom and aren't prepared to protect it, will lose it.

Because freedom and liberty and equality are as vital as breath, we only notice their absence when we are left gasping when the colors of diversity and individual liberty are drained from the world around us.

It seems that the price of having freedom is having to constantly fight to keep it.

Freedom isn't hard to lose - but it's a hard thing to win back once it's been lost.

Peace with non-fundamentalists terrifies the fundamentalist because to them, being Christian doesn't mean just being 'good' - it means being 'better' than others. Being better that others means having to see them as enemies - and making war on them. The fundamentalist views not being allowed to make war on their enemies as oppression of their faith, or defeat.

Nationalism leads to all sorts of nasty things (even Nazi things) like fascism and war.

In my view, any government whose state is perpetually at war, and remains so in spite of initiatives to make peace, is incompetent and unfit and should resign.

How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends.