Religulous online

FYI, the full Bill Maher documentary "Religulous" can be found on the Google video site, either for streaming or for download to an iPod. I watched it last night. It has its moments, but it gets a little bogged down at the end. It's good for some great laughs, though.

The link can be found here.

The Slippery Slope of an Obama Presidency

“Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” released October 22 by Focus on the Family Action, an activist group affiliated with James Dobson’s conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. This letter was discovered and published in the January 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine.

October 22, 2012

Dear friends,

The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama won. Many Christians voted for him, as they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.

In his first week in office, Obama fired all ninety-three U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, recruiting the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush Administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq War. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them also have been bankrupted by legal costs.

[....]

Finally, the far left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they quickly set about to enact their entire agenda. The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that laws barring same-sex “marriage” violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

[....]

The Boy Scouts chose to disband rather than be forced to obey a Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual Scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. President Obama invited homosexual-rights leaders from around the United States to join him at the White House as he signed an executive order directing all branches of the military to abandon their “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and start actively recruiting homosexuals. As a result, homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting.

The Supreme Court nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sex acts.

The Supreme Court declared that home schooling was a violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents agreed not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment. Thousands of homeschooling parents, seeing no alternative in the United States, have begun to emigrate to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand.

[...]

This goes on.

If this letter were written by some small far-right wacko group, it would be unfair to assume mainstream Christians tolerate this garbage. As an analogy, even though I am very pro-conservation, I would hate to have my beliefs equated to those of the Earth Liberation Front, a violent eco-group.

But what makes this letter so disturbing is that it was not written by a small splinter group. Focus on the Family Action is the lobbying arm of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, a powerful mainstream Christian organization.

One aspect of the letter I find odd is that abortion is not mentioned. The letter's hysteria would be somewhat understandable if the writer thought lives were at stake. Instead, it's old-fashioned fear-mongering propaganda based on wedge issues like homosexual marriage and home schooling.

If you can bear to do so, read the entire letter here.

Bless His Noodly Appendage

Efforts were afoot recently on the Polk County School Board (in the Tampa, FL
area) to begin teaching the "concept" of intelligent design in science classes
as an alternative to evolution, at a time when new state standards mentioning
evolution by name for the first time are under consideration. It appeared that
this bonehead move had the support of a majority of the school board, but that
was before the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster arrived...

Read the rest of the story here.

Reason is for infidels

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research.

"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation's top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee.

"The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party," Carmona added.

Carmona said Bush administration political appointees censored his speeches and kept him from talking out publicly about certain issues, including the science on embryonic stem cell research, contraceptives and his misgivings about the administration's embrace of "abstinence-only" sex education.

...

Carmona said the administration prevented him from voicing views on stem cell research. Many scientists see it as a promising avenue for curing many diseases. But because it involves destroying human embryos, opponents call it immoral.

Carmona said he was prevented from talking publicly even about the science underpinning the research to enable the U.S. public to have a better understanding of a complicated issue. He said most of the public debate over the matter has been driven by political, ideological or theological motivations.

"I was blocked at every turn. I was told the decision had already been made -- stand down, don't talk about it," he said.

Carmona testified with two predecessors, Dr. C. Everett Koop, who served under President Ronald Reagan, and Dr. David Satcher, named by Clinton but whose term ended under Bush.

Carmona said some of his predecessors told him, "We have never seen it as partisan, as malicious, as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have worse than anyone's had."

Read the entire article here.

Is Nevaeh actually another word for hell?

To paraphrase David Cross, "The terrorists hate our freedom? I hate our freedom!"

Read this to find out why.

Blind Faith

Percentage of Americans who can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible: <50

Percentage of Americans who can identify the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount: 33

Percentage of Americans who mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves": 75

Percentage of Americans who can name even one of the four Gospels: 50

Percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian: 82

One bad sentence, one good review

From a review of a new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson comes one of the worst sentences I've read in a long time. I know that the author of the review, John Updike, is a master prose stylist, one of the greatest American authors alive, but this sentence is confusing and terrible, and made worse because it sounds like it's trying so hard to impress.

Nor, herself a feminist symbol, though not a member of any feminist organization, did she neglect the cause of gender equality.

This sentence could be reworded ten different ways, each time making it clearer and less showy. To wit: "Though she was a feminist symbol who attended to the cause of gender equality, she did not belong to any feminist organization."

Other than this ugly sentence, the review is interesting, making the book, and the subject of the book, sound fascinating.

In 1927, she established a temple commissary that, as the Depression settled in, emerged as “one of the region’s most effective and inclusive welfare institutions.” According to Epstein:

When the schools stopped feeding children free lunches, Aimee took over the program. When city welfare agencies staggered under the load of beggars, the women of Angelus Temple sewed quilts and baked loaves of bread by the thousands. When bread lines stretched for city blocks . . . Angelus Temple was the only place anyone could get a meal, clothing, and blankets, no questions asked.

She brushed aside the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, and that between legal and illegal residents. One Mexican, the actor Anthony Quinn, who as a teen-ager acted as a translator for her, told an interviewer, “During the Depression . . . the one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and within an hour there’d be a food basket there for you. . . . She literally kept most of that Mexican community . . . alive.” In an era when anti-black racism was freely expressed, not least loudly by fundamentalist white Protestants, she persistently tried to make “interracial revival a reality at Angelus Temple,” bringing a series of black leaders to its pulpit and welcoming into the congregation poor Southern blacks who had recently immigrated to a Los Angeles of increasing racial tensions. The same week of the Detroit race riots, in June of 1943, McPherson publicly converted the notorious black former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson on the Temple stage, and embraced him “as he raised his hand in worship.”

Read the entire article here.

What are America's Founding Fathers' Beliefs?

George Will, one of the most staunch conservatives in America, wrote a review recently of "Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers," by Brooke Allen. In it, he points out the recent errors of historians:

Not since the medieval church baptized Aristotle as some sort of early — very early — church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”

I am used to arguments like this from liberals, but it is refreshing to read this from a true right winger. Many modern arguments about our founders' religious beliefs are built more on sanctimony than they are on research, and this book seems to give the lie to many modern conceptions of our early history. To wit:

Her thesis is that the six most important founders — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton — subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.

Eighteenth-century deists believed there was a God but, tellingly, they frequently preferred synonyms for him — “Almighty Being” or “Divine Author” (Washington) or “a Superior Agent” (Jefferson). Having set the universe in motion like a clockmaker, Providence might reward and punish, perhaps in the hereafter, but does not intervene promiscuously in human affairs. (Washington did see “the hand of Providence” in the result of the Revolutionary War.) Deists rejected the Incarnation, hence the divinity of Jesus. “Christian deist” is an oxymoron.

Allen’s challenge is to square the six founders’ often pious public words and behavior with her conviction that their real beliefs placed all six far from Christianity. Her conviction is well documented, exuberantly argued and quite persuasive.

When Franklin was given some books written to refute deism, the deists’ arguments “appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough deist.” Revelation “had indeed no weight with me.” He believed in a creator and the immortality of the soul, but considered these “the essentials of every religion.”

What Allen calls Washington’s “famous gift of silence” was particularly employed regarding religion. But his behavior spoke. He would not kneel to pray, and when his pastor rebuked him for setting a bad example by leaving services before communion, Washington mended his ways in his austere manner: he stayed away from church on communion Sundays. He acknowledged Christianity’s “benign influence” on society, but no ministers were present and no prayers were uttered as he died a Stoic’s death.

Adams declared that “phylosophy looks with an impartial Eye on all terrestrial religions,” and told a correspondent that if they had been on Mount Sinai with Moses and had been told the doctrine of the Trinity, “We might not have had courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.” It is true that the longer he lived, the shorter grew his creed, and in the end his creed was Unitarianism.

Jefferson, writing as a laconic utilitarian, urged his nephew to inquire into the truthfulness of Christianity without fear of consequences: “If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comforts and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.”

Madison, always common-sensical, briskly explained — essentially, explained away — religion as an innate appetite: “The mind prefers at once the idea of a self-existing cause to that of an infinite series of cause & effect.” When Congress hired a chaplain, he said “it was not with my approbation.”

In 1781, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged “the Great Governor of the World,” but six years later the Constitution made no mention of God. When Hamilton was asked why, he jauntily said, “We forgot.” Ten years after the Constitutional Convention, the Senate unanimously ratified a treaty with Islamic Tripoli that declared the United States government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

...

In 1953, the year before “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared July 4 a day of “penance and prayer.” That day he fished in the morning, golfed in the afternoon and played bridge in the evening. Allen and others who fret about a possibly theocratic future can take comfort from the fact that America’s public piety is more frequently avowed than constraining.

Read the entire review here.

News?

We all know that Fox News has never been a paragon of objective journalism. Now, hard-hitting Fox News has started to show signs of...well...not being a news organization any more.

When unexplained violence takes center stage, we tend to turn to modern psychology to explain it.

But there is an alternative explanation, one that has been played out in film, stage and writings since the beginning of history.

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

Dr. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, shouts an unequivocal “Yes!”

“Based on what I’ve seen in the news," Roberts said in an interview, "there’s no doubt that this act was Satanic in origin."

With "news" like this, is satire possible any more? Read the article here.

Controversy

SYDNEY, Australia - A sign saying "Jesus Loves Osama" outside some churches in Australia drew criticism from the prime minister and religious leaders on Thursday, though they conceded it was probably true according to Christian beliefs.

One sign outside the Central Baptist Church in downtown Sydney also had a smaller footnote saying "Jesus said: `Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."' Several other churches in the city had similar signs urging prayers for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, according to local media.

I can understand the controversy, but I don't think the sign is wrong. The point seems to be that somebody is asking any Christian who is filled with hate to replace it with love, something Jesus would certainly agree with, I imagine. I would truly like to know, if any Christian is reading this, if the sign is incorrect.

Many evangelicals I have spoken to have said, when it comes to things like homosexuality, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." It seems that these signs are simply reminding Christians of the first half of that statement--"Love the sinner." I don't think anyone needs to be reminded about the second half.

Read the entire story here.