Religion

Joe Conason has a very enlightening piece up about Mike Huckabee and his addiction to letting criminals walk free. In the article Conason points out something very interesting, yet missed in this debate:

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated.

Religion clouded Huckabee’s judgment, which resulted in the release of a record number of prisoners, including Maurice Clemmons. This is the very reason why we should chose leaders based upon their performance, instead of how many times they pray. Would Jesus let someone like Clemmons walk free to constantly repeat the violent crimes he had done all his life? I highly doubt it.

The next time someone says they will use their religious views to lead our nation, we now only have to point to the actions of Huckabee to argue against them.

Image by thisisbossi via Flickr

Here is a disturbing new trend appearing in America:

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment?

Maybe not.

The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

How “Christian” of them. Not really. Psalms is one of the greatest books in the Bible to twist and mangle into your own beliefs. It deals mainly with human emotions, which makes it easy to twist and mangle into anyone’s own belief.

That’s a possibility under the Senate version of the health care bill. Separation of church and what? I wonder if Bobby Jindal could get paid for his exorcism services?

Remember that black guy toting the AR-15 to an Obama event a few weeks back? Well here is video of him sitting in the church while his pastor goes on about “hating” the President and wishing him dead.

Apparently the Secret Service is already looking into this. I wonder when church officials will. Isn’t preaching hate against everything Jesus stood for?

Who Would Jesus Torture?

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

The people that believe we should torture and call themselves Christian are really a class act. If they truly believe in their religion then they must not fear an eternity spent in fire and brimstone.

I guess this guy was focused on the fanny instead:

A Colorado Springs man who narrates the Bible in Spanish on CDs and works in the Spanish broadcasting department of Focus on the Family appeared in court Monday in Golden on two felony counts of using the Internet to lure a 15-year-old girl for sex, The Denver Post reports.

Juan Alberto Ovalle, 42, was arrested Friday when he drove to Lakewood to meet the girl — who turned out to be an undercover officer — after discussing various sexual acts he wanted to perform with her, the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office said.

Ovalle, a native of the Dominican Republic, is listed as the “Voice Narrator/Artist” of the Spanish Reina Valera Biblia, available on 64 CDs, and can be heard here discussing an upcoming Focus on the Family conference with directors of the evangelical empire’s outreach to the Spanish-speaking community.

People like James Dobson spend all this time worrying about those “evil gays, ruining society'”, when they have actual predators on the payroll, and religious leaders wonder why there is a “crisis of faith” in our country. Intelligence and common sense  isn’t in  any abundance with this crowd – that’s for sure.

That is the point of Jon Meacham’s latest article:

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

The whole article deserves a good reading. And ask yourself if the article is of any shock. Consider what has happened in religion in our country lately. You got priests molesting children and getting nothing more than a slap on the hand. We just got done with one of the most christo-fascist Presidents in our history, which lead us into endless wars. Perhaps that explains this part:

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

There used to be a time when I was uncomfortable admitting my atheism. I live in a really red area that loves them some God. But now that is changing. I actually proudly admit it and find people more willing to admit the same.

Atheism has been on the rise for a long time in this county, and we are now becoming a major player. That’s why I was getting pissed with bloggers on our side going after Obama for not appointing any gays or Jews to his cabinet, but there was no talk about him not appointing any Atheists. We are a much larger portion of the population now than gays and Jews combined.

Just think – if these numbers continue on this trend, before long we will be able to declare Jesus an illegal immigrant.

I found this story via Andrew Sullivan, who is going after Belief Net’s Rod Dreher.

Terry Caffey can still taste the blood and gunpowder.

He can hear the staccato gunfire, the shrieks of terror and the plaintive wail of his 13-year-old son – "Why? Why?"

He can feel the heat and suffocating smoke from the fire that rolled along the floors and up the walls of his cabin tucked in the piney woods of East Texas.

And he can see his wife – a humble woman whose fingers danced and spirit soared at her church's piano – slumped at the foot of the bed, her neck slashed so savagely that a coroner's report would say she was nearly decapitated.

The story is rather long and does deserve a read, as the story is very tragic, but I want to focus on one part that Dreher focused on, and resulted in Sullivan calling him “clinical”, a highly appropriate response:

Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.

The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.

"I guess you'd call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' "

But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin.

A 16-year-old freshman, she was infatuated with Charlie Wilkinson, an 18-year-old senior – who Caffey describes as cocky and disrespectful.

(emphasis added)

The accusations that this school had “a lot of bisexual kids” has no implication on the actual story or what lead to the deaths. That author just threw it in there to get some gay hate going on it sounds like, and moron’s like Dreher focus on it. There is no evidence to even back this claim up in the story, it’s just a claim made by the victim of a heinous crime. But Dreher is taking it as gospel. As matter of fact the thought there might even be some bi-sexual activity is more shocking than the murders to him:

What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF?

First off Mr. Religion – WTF means “what the fuck”. You better go and repent those sins now. But to be shocked by some baseless claim by an individual who went through one of the most traumatic incidents imaginable, and taking that as more shocking than the actual crime – well that is just sick.

Like I said in my earlier post, the Vatican has talked about a “crisis in faith”. With people like Dreher out there, is it any wonder why?

Pope Benedict tries to deepen his ties with Nazi-Germany:

The Vatican stirred a diplomatic maelstrom yesterday when it announced that it had lifted the excommunication of four rebel bishops, including the British Holocaust-denier Richard Williamson.

The decree repealing the 20-year-old Vatican punishment, imposed after the traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated the four as bishops in defiance of the Pope's authority, was signed on Wednesday by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops. This coincided with the broadcast on Swedish state television of an interview with Mr Williamson in which the breakaway bishop denied the Holocaust.

"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," he told SVT television in an interview that was recorded in Germany last November. "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

Does this make the Pope the same as Iran’s leader now?

Bill and his "War on Christmas". Oh how it ends up making him look like a buffoon.

Link:

O'Reilly tries to use the Klan as an example in his argument and says that courts wouldn't allow them to make their own displays. Of course he is using MLK Day as his example in this, but let's go with Christmas. If a government allows Jewish people to display a menorah, would they allow the KKK to display a cross? By Bill's argument the answer would be no. If you go by the facts, the answer is yes, and it has been done - right here in Cincinnati.

You know, these guys should watch it. Obama is soon to be running the country, along with his own party. He might decide to suddenly enforce the law and that could mean churches violating their separation from stat could suddenly end up owing a bunch in taxes. Here’s the latest:

Parishioners of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Modesto have been told they should consider going to confession if they voted for Barack Obama, because of the president-elect's position condoning abortion.

<p>"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously," the Rev. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph's, wrote in a letter dated Nov. 21.

54% of Catholics voted for Obama. This so called “person of God” is telling a majority of Catholics that they have sinned. That’s pretty ballsy. I wonder if Jesus would have voted for Obama, or if he would rather vote for the party that endorses things like torture and taxing the poor more so the rich can thrive? Perhaps this priest should look at confessing himself.

That’s Kathleen Parker’s latest advice to the GOP:

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I'm bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

This is sure to get the right wing all riled up. Of course Parker is right. There’s nothing wrong with trying to appeal to the religious, it’s when you try to pander to the religious extremists that you start having problems. Most religious people believe that politics is no place for religion, but the Republicans seem to ignore that.

Here's another one for the IRS to investigate:

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

"Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president," Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

If these people who claim to be working for God want to continue to ignore the laws of this land, then it is time for them to start paying taxes. It's that simple. You don't play by our rules, we won't either - including the ones you like.

This time it happened a couple of miles from me:

A former Hamilton resident who worked the audio-visual system for an area church allegedly sent child pornography while on the job.

Albert Jefferson Stone, 28, of Harrison Avenue in Cincinnati was arrested Wednesday, Nov. 12, by the FBI and charged in U.S. District Court with distribution of child pornography.

To Rev. Larry Davis, the church's pastor, Stone was just "sidetracked":

"He just got messed up, you know, sidetracked," Davis said. "He's a really good boy. Comes from a good family. A lot of prayers are going out for him."

Does this sound sidetracked?

According to the complaint, Stone told investigators "I don't know how to explain it to you ... It's the Catholic girl plaid skirt thing. If you drive by a Catholic high school and they are getting out of school — that's hot."

That sounds messed up to me, not sidetracked. There are a lot of Catholic high schools in the greater Cincinnati area. I wonder how many he was just driving by.

Deuteronomy 5:8, which some people that call themselves Christian might want to refer to:

Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.” Don’t they know that God taking over the economic systems would be SOCIALISM from SPACE? Also: God will be very mad that they are worshiping a bronze idol here, since his second commandment PROHIBITS THAT, duh? Thank you Wonkette operative “Dan the Man” for the sexy photo.

Don't you just love religion and how it only applies when these followers want it to apply?