My vast influence over the Christian book market is clearly hitting its stride.

Rick Warren, I’m coming for you next!

Here’s Ed Stetzer, co-author of 11 Innovations in the Local Church: How Today’s Leaders Can Learn, Discern and Move Into the Future, talking about the recent Outreach Magazine Christian book awards:

The new issue of Outreach Magazine gives their reader-submitted “Resources of the Year” in several categories. What came in at the number one spot for Leadership Training Resource of the Year may surprise some of you (and it greatly disappointed three authors who co-wrote a certain book that was a runner-up).

When he mentions his own book as a runner up to I Sold My Soul on eBay, he adds a side comment: “Cue the weeping and gnashing of teeth…”

All in good fun, of course

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get my hands on a scan of the actual magazine… if I get it, I’ll post a link to the page with the award!

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Here’s an article you don’t read everyday.

Martin L. Smith explains to fellow Christians the benefits of religious dialogue with atheists.

In the process, he actually gets most of his descriptions of atheists correct:

… adherents [of atheism or agnosticism] believe human beings can and must create for themselves lives that are worth living, that we must forge values that work now without the claims of a supernatural source. It believes that though human beings enjoy only a few decades of existence and our species is destined for extinction, yet the adventure of human existence is sufficiently glorious to be lived well.

…

… Go deep in conversation with our humanist neighbor and we might discover a commitment to justice, decency, compassion, even to virtue, for their own sake. The idea that atheists are intrinsically likely to believe that anything goes morally is a slander. So in dialogue with humanists, Christians may find themselves more in agreement than they imagine. When I talk with an avowed humanist committed to social justice and strong personal ethics of compassion and fidelity, I find myself in hearty agreement that goodness is to be chosen from the heart because it is good, as our mystics have always held. Making a choice from fear of punishment is spiritually infantile.

…

… There are millions of intelligent people who aren’t prejudiced against spirituality but who see no signs of the existence of God when they look hard at the same world we live in as people of faith. It is very healthy for Christians to realize how mysteriously hidden God is. We believe that God is hidden intentionally. If God were obvious, our devotion would be coerced. It is because we can say No to the being of God that when we do say Yes we are acting in real freedom.

I take issue with Smith’s mention of atheism as a stance of faith. But outside of that, it’s rare to hear that sort of respectful commentary about atheists coming from a priest.

(Thanks to Donna for the link!)

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Short answer: Only a few people know and they’re not saying much of anything. Yet.

Since Ellen Johnson left, Frank Zindler has stepped in as the (temporary) President of American Atheists.

But why she left is not all that clear.

On American Atheists’ website, a letter to members reads:

Following over 13 years of outstanding service to American Atheists and the cause of State-Church Separation, Ellen Johnson is leaving her post as President of the organization.

The nearly identical — and more recently updated — letter on AA Communications Director Dave Silverman’s website reads:

Following over 13 years of outstanding service to American Atheists and the cause of State-Church Separation, Ellen Johnson is no longer President of the organization.

A slight change in wording…

Ellen didn’t leave voluntarily. Rather, she was forced to step down from the AA board of directors.

The 13 year tenure of Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, came to an abrupt end at a special meeting of the board of directors held April 29.

…

While Zindler stated that Johnson left for “personal reasons”, in an e-mail response to an interview request to Humanist Network News, Johnson stated that she was “fired.”

A new statement from Zindler reads:

By a majority vote of the Board of Directors of American Atheists, Inc, and by a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors of two of the other four corporations, Ellen Johnson was involuntarily removed from the office of President of American Atheists, Inc. and from the office of President of the other four corporations.

The bylaws of each of the five corporations permit the removal of the President by a majority vote of the Board of Directors.

Out of deep respect for Ellen Johnson’s many services to American Atheists, in deference to her privacy, and with the desire that her Presidency be remembered favorably by history, American Atheists asks that this statement be accepted without calls for further explanation.

Be assured that the action taken was in the best interests of the organization and of its membership.

While I understand the need for privacy, there’s some issue (or issues) Ellen and the board disagreed about that led to the parting of ways, and AA members have a right to know what it was.

Dave, as any good Communications Director must do, is trying to keep things calm while under fire with questions. He’s responding to what he can, but since he can’t reveal much, it’s not too helpful.

He’s said that the Board will reveal what they can after they’ve spoken to the various parties involved. Basically, they want to make sure they’re saying the right thing.

What would be helpful is communication from Ellen herself.

Since she and her crew just ended the Freedom Walk today, we’ll hopefully be hearing from her soon. (Incidentally, the Mississippi governor was not present to receive Bill Moore’s letter, but it was delivered as planned. Congratulations to the group for finishing their Walk.)

Zindler, who has been active with AA for over three decades, is the temporary replacement, but he has said he does not want the position for too long:

He told the Humanist Network News that “before the new year, hopefully, we’ll have someone else.” Zindler, citing his age, (nearly 69) said he would be happy to act in an advisory capacity in the future, but feels that “fresh ideas” are needed in a leader of the organization.

I’m anxiously looking forward to what changes may come from all this. But the delayed response of the AA Board is not a good omen for the future.

…

What are some of the changes people would like to see in AA’s future? Silverman asked and the most popular response seems to be: a more modern and dynamic website.

I’m all for that, but it seems like an odd thing to request when being asked what major changes you’d like to see made to a national organization with AA’s history. Why is the focus not on more cooperation with other groups, major initiatives to organize atheists, or further legal action to support our rights?

Also, without a webpage-design volunteer, an update of the page would take some money. Without coming clean about what happened with Ellen in a timely manner, the Board is risking losing some of the precious memberships it has.

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Via Jessica Hagy’s Indexed:

Is it fair to put them in the same league?

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I’m just going to rename this site “Things I Stole from Anne Jackson.”

She asks her readers this:

How many bibles do you have in your house?

By my count, I have 17.

(People like to give me Bibles…)

The real question:

Why do you have more than one, you godless heathen?

And what do you do with them if they’re not just gathering dust?

On a side note, the “Bible Printing Capital of the World” is set to open in a couple weeks in Nanjing, China — it has the potential to produce 23 Bibles a minute. (Thanks to David for the link!)

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Pastor Deacon Fred of Landover Baptist Church has this to say about Iron Man:

The first thing you have to understand about the movie, “Iron Man,” is that it is based on a super hero comic book series. For those of you who are not aware, super hero comic books are cartoon-style magazines read by effeminate young boys who don’t play sports…

Surprise, surprise… he hasn’t seen the movie:

I’ve never opened a comic book in my life, and to be honest with you - I’ve never seen the film, “Iron Man.” I don’t have to! Amen? Jesus, the Holy Spirit who dwells within me, and a few hours of TMZ work as a guide to figuring out what this movie is really all about on a spiritual level that unsaved people will never understand or appreciate.

The general idea of every super hero story is always the same, a mild mannered man gets super powers and tries to save the world without the blessing of Jesus Christ… We’ve basically got ourselves a mild-mannered-man who overdoses on Viagra. Iron Man is named for his enormously taught and giant tally whacker which is used to knock out villains with a quick gyration of his hips.

The entire issue of the LBC newsletter can be found here.

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Hanna Rosin, author of God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America, discusses this peculiar and omnipresent phenomenon at Slate.

Here are the best couple paragraphs you’ll read all day:

One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?

Over time, I came to understand this as a symptom of a larger phenomenon: evangelicals’ deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture. Whether or not they were the butt of all of Stewart’s jokes seemed irrelevant to them. The point was that the high priest of political comedy spent a lot of time thinking about them. Once, after I’d met Jon Stewart, they all crowded around and asked the same question: What does he really think of us?

She discusses Daniel Radosh’s book (Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture) and how Christian popular culture is a watered down version of mainstream pop culture.

The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he’s likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who’s not a Christian at all, and doesn’t even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?

…

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for a strap-on dildo or bondage (liberation through submission). There’s a Christian planetarium, telling you the true age of the universe, and my personal favorite—Christian professional wrestling, where, by the last round, “Outlaw” Todd Zane sees the beauty of salvation.

The Prank 3:16 video referred to in the article, by the way, can be seen here.

And did anyone else know about the JPM — Jesus-per-minute — counts on Christian music by some watchdog groups?

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Someone brought that comic to my attention (via The Flowfield Unity).

No, I don’t agree with it.

I was asked recently if, on the whole, I thought atheists were smarter than the religious.

My gut instinct was to say “Yes.” The vast majority of scientists don’t believe in God. Despite what critics might say, I find the books written by the New Atheists much more intellectually stimulating than most of the “Christian lit” I read.

But I know far too many intelligent theists to say they are not as smart as the atheists I know. There are also a number of atheists who are… well… less than brilliant.

Obviously you have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

So where would you draw the line between intelligent (however you define it) and not?

Maybe you think someone who believes Christ rose up from the dead shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But that would eliminate every Christian from the list including some well-known scientists (atheist Reed Braden adds: “I’m dumber than Francis Collins by far”).

Maybe you think someone who believes in Creationism can’t be very educated.

But Dr. Kurt Wise (who studied under Stephen Jay Gould) is one example of someone who really does know his stuff and chose to follow Scripture instead of science.

Maybe you think you’re smarter than someone who believes in any type of (non-religious) superstition.

But wouldn’t that eliminate virtually everyone you know?

So what’s a dealbreaker when it comes to intelligence and religion?

Where do you draw the line and say that someone is less intelligent than you because of a particular belief?

(Thanks to all the people who let me bounce these ideas off of them!)

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The LA Times had its weekly round up of the most popular opinion stories… look who came out on top!

The best, the brightest, the movers, the shakers and the thinkers came out, but it was a New Jersey high school student who took the Number 1 spot in the week’s most popular Opinion stories. But fear not, James Q. Wilson fans: the Pepperdine professor whose textbook Matthew LaClair attacked gave as good as he got, and made the list at Number 9.

Matthew LaClair = #1

James Q. Wilson = #9

Go Matthew!

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Steve Kreuscher from Zion, IL wants to legally change his name to In God We Trust.

First name: In God.
Last name: We Trust.

Kreuscher, a Christian who gave up on organized religion 20 years ago, said the new name would symbolize the story of his life.

“I’ve had to trust God through incredibly hard times,” he said.

Going through an “extremely painful” divorce, bouts of severe depression, money problems and a life-threatening home invasion, he believes God protected him through it all.

He’s also worried atheists might finally be successful in having the phrase “In God We Trust” removed from U.S. currency.

“Those words are an endangered species,” Kreuscher said. “You might take it off the money, but you can’t take away my name.”

(Because if we took the phrase off the money, it could no longer be said…?)

The name change will happen next month if the judge approves his request.

It’ll cost him up to $400.

That’s chump change, though. He’s charging $78,000 for this piece of art.

Somehow, it seems like we could make 2389241 jokes about this name change.

I can’t think of any right now.

Surely something’s popping into your mind… what you got?

(Thanks to infideljoe for the link!)

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Neil Mammen, a guest blogger at Christian author Frank Turek’s blog, throws out a question to the atheists:

Atheist readers, what if you were to suddenly find out tomorrow that the God of the Christian Evangelicals was real?

I.e. that He HAD created the world, had created you, the Bible was true, Jesus had died on the cross for your sins etc etc.

What would you do?

…

Anger? Agreement? Kowtowing to this being? Resigned acceptance, passive aggression, active aggression, resigned damnation?

Would you fall on your face and worship him? Why or why not?

He acknowledges that this isn’t going to happen tomorrow. (Let’s extrapolate and say “never.”)

He’s also not asking how this would happen — just asking what the reaction would be. It’s just a hypothetical.

So let’s put the big IF out there and see what the response is like.

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Ray Comfort took the time out of his day to tell you this:

I hope you atheists and evolutionists realize that we eventually win. Read the last chapter of the Book.

That’s it.

He doesn’t specifically say which book…

So now I’m just confused.

Which book is he referring to?

And what does it tell us about the future of atheism?

And who is the “we” who will eventually win?!

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Courtesy of the fabulous Jessica Hagy:

Even more interesting? When those inside the church use it to make a point.

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This is too funny.

Sean Clarke of the Spiritual Science Research Foundation (whatever “Spiritual Science” means) has written a letter of protest again the new Mike Myers movie “The Love Guru.”

Clarke isn’t the only person upset with the movie (many Hindus are calling for protests), but he is quite possibly the craziest.

He says the movie denigrates gurus — we are supposed to laugh at them! Blasphemy, he says.

Try reading this with a straight face:

The trailer released by Paramount pictures shows utter disrespect for the deep spiritual significance of the Guru. It shows the Guru in a very poor light and encourages the audience to laugh at the Guru. I could not believe my eyes when the trailer revealed Mike Myers playing a Guru through a whole range of denigrating scenes, some of which are quite lurid, such as the Guru wearing a chastity belt, having an erection, involved in bar brawls, accepting money to playing cupid, etc. In the trailer the character Pitka is proclaimed as the second best Guru in India. Was this a calculated statement or was this pulled out of some juvenile script writer’s repertoire? For a country that has produced revered Gurus and Saints such as Swami Vivekanand, Ramkrushna Paramhansa and Yogi Arvind, does Paramount Pictures actually believe that Mike Meyer’s portrayal of a Guru will join the ranks of the most illustrious Saints/Guru’s of India? Was your research team / script writer not aware of the sanctity of the Guru prior to making the movie? Did they even consult leaders in Spirituality (apart from Mr. Deepak Chopra of course) if the script was potentially hurting?

I can’t tell if that last line is a knock on Chopra…

Of course Myers won’t achieve the ranks of the revered Gurus. He would never claim to have psychic powers.

That’s when Clarke shows us he’s off the deep end.

SSRF is an organisation dedicated to spiritual research. Through knowledge that we accessed from the Universal Mind and Intellect, we have published the spiritual repercussions about making a movie such as ‘The Love Guru’ and also watching it.

At a spiritual level, as per the science of Spirituality when we do good deeds, we earn merits and when we do bad deeds we incur demerits. That is, how we live our lives has consequences that we have to face in this life or the afterlife. To understand the results of this spiritual research better, let’s take an example of the possible demerits on a scale from 1 to 100 that a person would accrue if he were to murder an average person, a seeker and a Saint. The demerits accrued if an average person is murdered is equal to 30 units, if a seeker is murdered equal to 60 units, and if a Saint is murdered is equal to 100 units. The demerit earned when a person murders a Saint is the maximum possible. This is because a Saint affects society at large positively, at a spiritual level.

Who calculated these things, I wonder…

Clarke even presents a chart so you can understand “the sheer gravity of the spiritual consequences for people associated with a movie such as ‘The Love Guru’. The table shows what it would mean to them in context of these acts alone.”

You may want to hang it on your fridge.

Would anyone like to point out where the “nether region” is…?

By the way, don’t even *think* about questioning this notion of Hell. It’s spiritual science.

Clarke says the producers should do the following:

1. Change the name of the movie
2. Remove any form of denigration towards the Guru
3. Apologise to the international spiritual community

In other words, don’t release the film.

Right…

And apologize? Even without this movie, the concepts of reincarnation, spiritual regions of Hell, and “demerits” are laughable. The movie isn’t making me take those beliefs any less seriously.

I just got 12 demerits for writing that.

(via Sepia Mutiny)

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