Do hallowed notions of church and state need to be revised?

In my opinion, in some ways yes, in some ways no. In the United States, that line has always been very, very sacred and not to be crossed. In other nations, the theocracy is the state. And of all 200 some nations worldwide, there is every variation in between. The pope recently released an encyclical straight from the vatican addressing many contemporary social issues which intersect with politics. Most notably, the encyclical contained a call to arms to address the problem of global warming. Do these desperate environmental times call for desperate measures? This will undoubtedly cause much debate and be answered in different ways by different people, but I would tend to say yes, bearing in mind some caveats. It is also interesting to note how conservatives across all cultures, East and West, seem to try to intervene in what are essentially PRIVATE matters (reproductive rights, human sexuality) and force these rights to conform to their ideas of morality. Like many people, I strongly disagree with this attempt to legislate morality. It is equally dangerous here and there. From the middle east, to India, to the United States the dangerous trend of fundamentalists attempting to infringe on individual sovereignty seems to keep popping up. No, the great and free United States is not immune (just look at the continual attacks on abortion and even contraception by right wing groups). And recently in India, in response to the growing gay communities' attempts to receive legality and respect fundamentalist Hindu and Muslim leaders attacked with a vengeance and claimed that legalizing homosexuality would be unacceptable. All very interesting food for thought. . .

Adding my two cents to the MJ mania

The fervor with which Michael Jackson's death has received is undeniable. The media's coverage is constant, and people can't stop talking about how though they may have made fun of him when he was alive, they always respected his music. I've always found the case of Michael Jackson interesting on a deeper level. When he changed his skin color over the years, from black to white to whiter, most people (most, but not all) viewed this as just one more personality quirk, one more sign of his mental illness and eccentricity. I always viewed it differently. He certainly had a self-abasing streak, and accusations of pedophilia do cast a cloud of suspicion over his image. However, I blame our society for this man's downfall into madness. Though I am the last person to erase the personal responsibility of the individual, in this case it seems startling clear to me that it is a racist society which brought him down this path of madness. The man felt that white was better, so much better in fact that going through painful, crazy surgery was a reasonable idea to him. No, I don't buy the idea that this was some sort of 'artistic statement.' That lets us, our society, off the hook. The fact is, Michael Jackson felt so god-awful in his own original skin, that he had to take matters into his own hands. Has any prominent white man or woman in our society ever tried to become black? I don't think so. It seems that Michael Jackson's last recording, "They Don't Care About Us," is also his redemption. The song is good, so good in fact it gave me chills the first time I listened to it. Jackson has become the outspoken, wild and unlikely champion of the black people living in Africa. The gist of the song is that the West (as a whole) does not care about these people. The colonization of Africa, and our meddling in African political affairs over the years to assist our own greed proves that point. I believe this last song of his was his redemption. He reclaimed his forgotten skin color, his forgotten history, and made a ballad that will inspire some and sicken others in its truth: