religion
pharyngula | December 9, 2007Would you care to attend Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church for a morning? Philip Bloom has a short documentary in which he used a hidden camera in the Phelps compound. It's as you might expect: raging howls of a sermon, condemnations and hatred, people hoping that millions of others die and go to hell. Phelps has 13 children (11 of whom are lawyers!) and 54 grandchildren, and looking around the pews there can't be many more attendees than that.
The end is particularly disturbing when two of Phelps' teenaged granddaughters come up to regurgitate the very same hate speech at the reporter.…
gregladen | December 8, 2007The Rev. Michael Dowd is preaching a surprising message: Evolution is real and science points to the existence of God.
For the last five years, the author and former evangelical pastor has lived out of a van with his wife, crisscrossing the nation to deliver the good news.
His latest book, Thank God for Evolution, drew endorsements from five Nobel laureates and dozens of religious leaders. With the battle between science and religion at a fever pitch, it couldn't come at a better time. Just last week Texas papers reported that a curriculum director had been fired in October for forwarding…
gregladen | December 8, 2007... or a cult.... But really, aren't they all cults?
Germany's federal and state interior ministers have declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional, clearing the way for a possible ban.
The ministers have asked Germany's domestic intelligence agency to examine whether the Church's legal status as an association could be challenged.
Scientology is not recognised as a religion in Germany.
A Church of Scientology statement said the ministers were "completely out of step with the rest of the world".
The attempted ban is "a blatant attempt at justifying the on-going and never-ending…
pharyngula | December 8, 2007Remember that awful, nonsensical "Letter from Hell" on GodTube? It was a particularly contemptible example of the evangelical impulse — the message was that not only will you suffer horribly in hell if you are naughty, but all your friends will, too…and it'll be all your fault.
Would you believe a schoolteacher showed that video in a public school?
It's a patently evangelical video for an especially disgusting version of the Christian cult, it plainly says that its purpose is to "help teens share Christ with their friends," it was downloaded from Godtube, and it was shown in a class with a…
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2007
John, hear me.
What? Who said that?
It is I, God.
Oh come on. PZ, is that you? I'm not buying it.
It is I, God. Look, I'll prove it. [Clouds in the sky form the letters "Yep, It's Me" for a minute and then evaporate.]
Ummm, OK, for the sake of argument, let's say it is You, and I'm not hallucinating. What do You want?
I want to tell you how you all must live your lives.
Why? Because You say so? Or because it will benefit us? I mean, you have a track record of delivering arbitrary rules for no apparent benefit to us, and plenty to those who say they represent You. Haven't you…
jrosenhouse | December 7, 2007Meanwhile, here's Chris Matthews in full tantrum after the Republican candidates were asked if they accepted Biblical literalism in the big You Tube debate:
MATTHEWS: Governor, I think you, like a lot of conservatives, believe in the original purpose of the Constitution as written. It's our sort of secular bible. It says there should be no religious test ever required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. Why are you Republican candidates submitting to religious vetting about your belief in the literal nature of the Bible? Why put up with those kind…
clock | December 7, 2007Archy reports that the papal official astronomer said so:
Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "…
tqa | December 7, 2007
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated eleven years, four months, and one day before I was born, but I miss him. There are issues today where his voice is needed even more than it was needed in 1960. But Kennedy is dead and buried, but the issues of religion he had to confront are not. And his voice needs to be heard, because Kennedy was firm in his stand, he was eloquent in the way he expressed it, and he was right.
Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion that many have compared to Kennedy's. And it's not an entirely unreasonable comparison. Like Kennedy, Romney gave his…
clock | December 7, 2007This year I have no time to follow even the Democratic primary race (in which I am interested) and am certainly not going to waste my time on the GOP race. I took a brief look once they all announced and picked up some news here and there on the blogs or NPR, and realized they are just a circus car full of clowns.
But I could not resist reading (thanks, Ed) this WSJ commentary on the reception of the Romney religion speech by his target audience, the hopelessly brainwashed:
Romney Address Wins Mixed Evangelical Reviews:
Some Christians didn't want to hear such preaching about plurality. The…
pharyngula | December 7, 2007Well, Mitt Romney just lost the secular vote.
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom
opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most
profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure
together, or perish alone.
Oh, wait. He never had it.
That speech was an appalling piece of dreck. He claimed the mantle of John F. Kennedy, but no, he's no idealistic Democrat, and he sure mangled the Kennedy sentiment that we should elect our presidents as secular leaders, with no allegiance to any church, into an obscene insistence that our…
tqa | December 6, 2007
Poor Rob Crowther seems to be having a bad week. First, his big Iowa press conference turned out to be a total non-event. Then, it turned out that some of the people who did mention the press conference didn't quite manage to spin it the way he was hoping for. The Ames Tribune, in particular, seems to have sparked his ire. His response to them is well worth the read - the first sentence, in particular, is quite simply one of the most (unintentionally, of course) funny things I've seen in a long time:
The Ames Tribune editorial today tries to make out that Discovery Institute is more…
gregladen | December 6, 2007PZ Myers bagged this hysterical video on the Garden of Eden's family reunion. Here. A must see.
OK, I'll see you one and raise you one:
(I never really thought about it before, but GI Joe kinda is a clothes horse, isn't he?)
gregladen | December 6, 2007And some are very very annoying. We had crazy Christians running around last year putting up anti-Evolution billboards. Now, this:
Running right through the heart of the Twin Cities is a spiritual road that dozens of evangelical churches say is specifically mentioned in the Bible as the "Way of Holiness." They call it the "Highway of Holiness." Others call it Interstate 35.
Evangelicals throughout the Midwest... have been praying at 24-hour prayer rooms for a month for Interstate 35 in order to "light the highway." Young people in the movement have been holding "purity sieges" in front of…
gregladen | December 6, 2007But there is only room in it for Christians.
"There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders.... In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.'
Notice that Adams at least said "Moral and Religious" ... Romney, on the other hand, clearly implies that true morality comes only from religion. Don't…
oracknows | December 6, 2007This video would argue that the answer to the question in the title is no:
"I don't think anything predated Christians"?
What about Judaism? You know, the Old Testament, the book in which, Christians say, many prophecies of Jesus' coming were made?
I'd try to reassure myself that she's just more ignorant than average about history, but I'm not sure that she is.
(Via Pure Pedantry and Crooked Timber.)
Of course, this is the same woman who doesn't accept evolution and wouldn't commit to an opinion about whether the world is flat, as seen in this video:
Any bets on how long before we hear…
gregladen | December 6, 2007Conservative Radio Talk Show Host Michael Savage is suing the Council on American-Islamic Relations for using a 4-minute bit of his show "The Savage Nation" to raise awareness of his conservative politics among potential advertisers. Savaged called the Queran "a throwback document" and a "book of hate." I wonder what Savage things of, I don't know, the Old Testament, for instance?
"What kind of religion is this? What kind of world are you living in when you let them in here with that throwback document in their hand, which is a book of hate," Savage said during the portion of the…
gregladen | December 6, 2007Brian Larnder, bless his soul, has written an overview (maybe a book review) of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement
From Brian:
... the concept of eugenics found a very welcome home among the christian faithful of the day from the late 19th Century through the first few decades of the 20th Century. The American Eugenics society sponsored an annual contest for the best eugenics sermon of the year and apparently many clergymen participated, readily supplying biblical quotations to make the case for eugenics.
AHA! I say! (see)
Go and read Brian's post! He…