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By Scott, May 8, 2006 9:42 AM

The May 15, 2006, issue of Time magazine has an essay by Andrew Sullivan (here) that rings true for me.  Perhaps for you, too, but at a minimum it should make you think.

My Problem with Christianism
A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda
By ANDREW SULLIVAN

Are you a Christian who doesn’t feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women’s equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them–and respecting their neighbors’ choices. That doesn’t threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God’s real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one’s beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats’ view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That’s what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn’t. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It’s time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

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By Scott, May 1, 2006 1:14 PM

My company changed its name a couple weeks ago and so I needed to add a new primary address for those who had the old domain as a primary, and move the old primary to a secondary. I was surprised that I couldn’t hardly find any existing scripts to accommodate such an endeavor so I had to resort to doing it myself.

This script goes through all accounts in a given AD domain and whose primary email address is the "old" SMTP domain name, makes the primary a secondary, takes the username portion of the address and appends the new domain and makes it the new primary. I log all of the old address and new addresses to the screen, so redirect the output to a file to capture that. It doesn’t check for preexisting addresses so conflicts can occur. I had previously done my own extract to look for those, so dealing with them manually was easier and faster than coding for that.

I modified the script each time I ran it to change the AD domain I wanted to search (though I could have just defined an array of domain names and looped through each of them), and ran it against DLs and public folders, too, adjusting the filter to return the different object types. You will need to do the same.

Download the code here, or copy below.

Option Explicit
'Set value for domain to run against and LDAP filter to use
'Also set the old and new SMTP domain names on line 33
'If you need to update the display name to remove a company designation, that is line 80
dim strDomain, strSearchFilter
strdomain = "nbdomain" 'Put the NetBIOS domain name here
'Update filter below to return the object types you want, e.g., users, groups, publicfolders
strSearchFilter = "(&(objectcategory=publicfolder)(mailnickname=*)(mail=*@olddomain.com))" 

'Connect to AD
Dim objConnection, objCommand, objRecordSet, objUser
Set objConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
objConnection.Open "Provider=ADsDSOObject;"
Set objCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
objCommand.ActiveConnection = objConnection
objCommand.Properties("Page Size") = 10000

'Retrieve user objects
Const ADS_PROPERTY_UPDATE = 2
objCommand.CommandText = "<LDAP://" & strDomain & ">; " & strSearchFilter & "; distinguishedname"
Set objRecordSet = objCommand.Execute
wscript.echo "Count:" & objRecordSet.RecordCount
While not objRecordSet.EOF
	Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & Replace(objRecordSet.Fields("distinguishedname"),"/", "\/"))
	wscript.echo objUser.displayName & "; " & strDomain & "\" & objUser.sAMAccountName

	'Set values for new email addresses
	Dim blnExists, strNewMail, i, strOldProxy, strAddress
	Dim arrProxyAddresses, intProxyAddresses, strNewProxy, intProxyForLoop
	arrProxyAddresses = objUser.proxyAddresses
	intProxyAddresses = UBound(arrProxyAddresses)
	intProxyForLoop = intProxyAddresses	

	'Set value for mail
	strNewMail = Replace(objUser.mail, "@olddomain.com", "@newdomain.com")
	wscript.echo vbTab & "Old mail: " & objUser.mail
	wscript.echo vbTab & "New mail: " & strNewMail
	wscript.echo ""

	'Log old SMTP proxies
	For each strOldProxy in arrProxyAddresses
		If UCase(Left(strOldProxy,5)) = "SMTP:" Then
			wscript.echo vbTab & "Old proxies: " & strOldProxy
		End If
	Next

	'Change primary to secondary and add new primary
	blnExists = False
	For i = 0 to intProxyForLoop
		dim strAddressType, strAddressBody
		strAddressType = Left(arrProxyAddresses(i),5)
		strAddressBody = Mid(arrProxyAddresses(i),6)
		If UCase(strAddressType) = "SMTP:" Then
			If strAddressType = "SMTP:" Then
	    			arrProxyAddresses(i) = Replace(arrProxyAddresses(i), "SMTP:", "smtp:")
	    		Else
	    			If LCase(strAddressBody) = LCase(strNewMail) Then
					blnExists = True
					arrProxyAddresses(i) = Replace(arrProxyAddresses(i), "smtp:", "SMTP:")
				End If
			End If
		End If
		If i = intProxyForLoop Then
			If Not blnExists Then
				ReDim Preserve arrProxyAddresses(intProxyAddresses + 1)
				arrProxyAddresses(intProxyAddresses + 1) = "SMTP:" & strNewMail
			End If
		End If
	Next

	'Log new SMTP proxies
	For each strNewProxy in arrProxyAddresses
		If UCase(Left(strNewProxy,5)) = "SMTP:" Then
			wscript.echo vbTab & "New proxies: " & strNewProxy
		End If
	Next
	wscript.echo ""

	'Remove component designation from display name
	Dim strDisplayName
	strDisplayName = Replace(objUser.displayName, " - COMPANY", "")
	wscript.echo vbTab & "New display: " & strDisplayName

	'Commit changes
	objUser.Put "mail", strNewMail
	objUser.PutEx ADS_PROPERTY_UPDATE, "proxyAddresses", arrProxyAddresses
	objUser.Put "displayName", strDisplayName
	On Error Resume Next
	objUser.SetInfo
	If Err.Number <> 0 Then
		wscript.echo "Update unsuccessful!"
	Else
		wscript.echo "Update successful"
	End If
	wscript.echo vbCRLF
	On Error Goto 0
	objRecordSet.MoveNext
Wend

Set objRecordSet = Nothing
Set objUser = Nothing
Set objCommand = Nothing
Set objConnection = Nothing