As long as we’re talking about “marriage” we’re going to continue to see a stalemate on this issue as those who believe in a traditional, biblical view of sexuality and those who want the basic rights afforded to others all around them each refuse to give an inch.

So what’s the solution?

The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.

Let me be clear that I don’t oppose this suggestion. There are problems, like the fact that “civil unions” are not treated as equal to marriage. We might be able to fix some of that with legislation, but I suspect the lingering taint of “not real marriage” will persist for generations.

But for other reasons as well I’m reluctant to accept such a compromise. Part of my response has to include a little history. Here’s a snippet from Gary Wills:

The early church had no specific rite for marriage. This was left up to the secular authorities of the Roman Empire, since marriage is a legal concern for the legitimacy of heirs. When the Empire became Christian under Constantine, Christian emperors continued the imperial control of marriage, as the Code of Justinian makes clear. When the Empire faltered in the West, church courts took up the role of legal adjudicator of valid marriages. But there was still no special religious meaning to the institution. As the best scholar of sacramental history, Joseph Martos, puts it: “Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church, and throughout the Middle Ages there was no single church ritual for solemnizing marriage between Christians.”

Only in the twelfth century was a claim made for some supernatural favor (grace) bestowed on marriage as a sacrament. By the next century marriage had been added to the biblically sacred number of seven sacraments. Since Thomas Aquinas argued that the spouses’ consent is the efficient cause of marriage and the seal of intercourse was the final cause, it is hard to see what a priest’s blessing could add to the reality of the bond. And bad effects followed. This sacralizing of the natural reality led to a demoting of Yahwist marriage, the only kind Jesus recognized, as inferior to “true marriage” in a church.

The church fathers ranged from men who thought that marriage was a lesser good than celibacy (St. Augustine) and those who thought it a lesser evil than fornication (St. Jerome). Most seemed to agree with St. Paul that “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” (1.Cor 7:1)

The Church came to marriage late and grudgingly. Only in the twelfth century did Aquinas add an Aristotelian spin on marriage and make it a sacrament. Note that this is not a biblical argument but a natural law argument. Protestant founders like Luther and Calvin seemed to reject it when they left marriage as a civil institution.

Which raises the question: exactly what claim does Hyatt think Christianity has over a civil institution that predates the religion, and which the religion resisted for centuries?

So here’s a counteroffer for Hyatt: let’s leave “marriage” as a civil institution. It has an extremely long history of being a civil institution, and for most of its history the Christian church was happy to leave it as such. Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like “covenant,” since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.

This is a serious suggestion. Conservatives have claimed the word “covenant” as a way of reclaiming of the idea of marriage from the 15 min. in Las Vegas variety. Unlike civil unions, covenants will not be tainted as a kind of marriage lite. It stands a much better chance of working for everybody than the original compromise.

They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause. Eventually, that strategy made Christianity the majority faith of the Roman empire.

I’ve run across these ideas about Paul before, and I thought I’d use this as an excuse to complicate them a bit.

John, Jesus and Paul

Let’s get the first part out of the way. According to tradition, John the Baptist and Paul both met the same fate: beheading as a punishment for troubling the authorities. And according to most historical Jesus scholars, John the Baptist played mentor to Jesus, so you can’t say he never accomplished anything. Any comparison has to accept that John started the movement that Paul found so inspiring.

Hoffman alludes to 1 Corinthians and Paul’s claim to be “all things to all men.” But accepting that at face value causes a problem when you run into one of Paul’s testy moments. For example, in Galatians we get to see Paul when his authority has been questioned.

Paul insisted that he derived his authority solely from God – no scholar’s modesty here. He prayed that “If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.” And cursed “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” Since his opponents were arguing for circumcision, this is sometimes translated as a wish that they’d ‘finish the job’ and castrate themselves. Fun guy.

Rather than being a flexible teacher, Paul had a very touchy pride that appears to have led to rifts between himself and the rest of the movement. His preaching led to a near riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:21-41), which the author of Acts attempts to explain away as caused by the base motives of the pagans, but which was more likely caused by the perception that Paul was dishonoring the patron Goddess Artemis.

Constantine

Then there’s the question of how much Paul accomplished. This question is hard to answer, because we have no reliable numbers from the period. Most of the traditional estimates come from Christian sources that were written very late. Some estimate that 10% of the Roman population was Christian by the time of Constantine.

There are problems with that number. 10% is also an estimate as to the number of Jews in the Empire. We have a great deal of archaeological evidence for the presence of Jews, including artwork and synagogues. In comparison, we have scant archaeological evidence for the presence of Christians.

This has led some historians, notably Peter Brown and Kenneth Harl(*), to suggest that Christians never spread as widely or as deeply as once thought. Whatever Paul’s successes as a missionary, his converts mainly stayed within the Jewish communities. The Neronian persecution put the brakes on future missionary work, and Christianity remained a minority of the Jewish minority until Constantine

If Brown and his colleagues are right then Constantine’s role is absolutely vital. There are many people who shaped early Christianity, like Paul, Ignatius and Origen. Without their influence Christianity may have survived, but it seems unlikely that it would become a world religion. However, without Constantine and the powers of the emperor, there is no real question: Christianity would have remained an afterthought.

So what can we atheists learn from “old time religion”? I suppose the lesson is that it doesn’t matter how cranky and controversial you are. If one of your converts holds absolute power, then your success is assured. I’m not sure how this lesson is useful, but there it is.

(*) Arguments here drawn for Kenneth W. Harl’s Teaching Company lectures, “Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity.”

I grew up in North Carolina, the state currently at the center of this argument. My problem with this picture is that the creator assumes that most folks now accept interracial marriage. From my experience, the opposition isn’t dead, it’s merely gotten quiet.

One thing: it’s a truism that funerals are for the living. From my perspective, funerals exist to help the survivors come to grips with the gap that has opened up in their lives.

Different people will need different things as they learn to cope with the death of a loved one. But I have a hard time understanding the role of the southern baptist ceremony I just saw. All the talk about heaven and the repeated bouts of evangelism seem to me to miss the point. None of it helps close the hole that now exists.

(As an aside, I think that if Rabbi Hillel had been a Baptist, he would have stood on one leg are recited John 3:16 and the Great Commission, then proclaimed that all the rest of the Bible was commentary. I’m an atheist, but sometimes I think I get more from the Bible than they do.)

Madalyn Murray O’Hair got in trouble once when one of her supporters suggested that an atheist funeral was a contradiction. Chuck the body in a hole and go on. This strikes me a foolish and blind. The psychological issues that exist are very real and have to be dealt with, and where better to start than a funeral?

And honestly, I don’t think that religion helps deal with the problems nearly as well as many believers insist. More often than not it simply changes the subject. Perhaps the deceased is in heaven, but I’m still alive and I have to keep on living. How do I cope?

Which raises the question: what would a truly atheist funeral look like?

The death of my grandfather, combined with some medical problems among the rest of my family, mean that I’m going to have to take some time off to deal with family matters. I’m not likely to be near a computer for the next week.

If the silence gets too much, you can use the time to write a guest post of your own. You can submit your posts to: vorjack.unreasonablefaith@gmail.com

Thanks folks. Back in a week or so.

Vorjack

Back when I was a wee little vorjack, my grandfather would always tell me Jack stories. These were little folk stories common in the southern appalachians.

Some Jack stories have fairy tale elements: kings, giants and dragons. You’re probably familiar with Jack the Giant Killer or Jack and the Beanstalk. My grandfather’s stories were always more mundane. They were stripped down Horatio Alger stories; no so much rags-to-riches as rags-to-financial-self-sufficiency.

The typical story had a small young man named Jack out in search of his fortune. Along the way he would have to outwit his larger, oafish older brothers (Will and Tom traditionally) and get cheated by a prosperous but conniving farmer. He would eventually outmaneuver the farmer with some clever wit or some homespun common sense, marry the farmer’s daughter and become prosperous.

Now open your bible to the story of young Jacob, about Genesis 25:24 to about Genesis 30:43. Jacob is a small young man out in search of his fortune. But first he must outwit his larger, oafish older brother (Essau) and he’ll get cheated by a prosperous but conniving farmer, his uncle Laban. Eventually Jacob outmaneuvers Laban with some clever animal husbandry, marries both of the farmer’s daughters and becomes prosperous.

Tricking the Trickster

The parallels are interesting. Both Jack and Jacob are archetypal trickster characters. And when the trickster is your hero, you can’t just have him launch into his pranks. The other guy has to start it. And so, Jack and Jacob get taken.

In Jack stories, this frequently involves squeezing more work out of the poor boy. In one story I remember, the conniving farmer orders Jack to plow until he can no longer see. Once the sun goes down Jack starts to unhitch the mules, only to turn around and find the farmer handing him a lantern. Once the lantern has burned out the sun is starting to rise. Keep plowing, boy.

Poor Jacob works for his uncle for seven years so that he can marry Laban’s daughter Rachel. Finally, on the day of the wedding, Jacob lifts the veil and finds the Laban has switched Rachel with his other daughter Leah. Ha! Sorry, Jacob, you got the wrong daughter. Seven more years of work if you still want the other one.

(You may notice that the women are practically non-entities in these stories. That’s the proof that they’re stories for young boys, for whom girls are still alien creatures.)

Brains over Brawn, Looks and Money

Eventually, the trickster wins by outsmarting his rival. In another Jack story, the conniving farmer is despairing the number of suitors after his daughter. In frustration. he tells his daughter that he’ll throw a dance, and whoever she’s dancing with at the end will be her husband.

Jack overhears, and convinces the other suitors that he just saw the daughter eating ramps (wild garlic) and that if they were going to get close to her they’d better eat ramps as well. While the other suitors are chowing down on ramps, Jack chomps on some breath mints that he’d palmed earlier. When the dance occurs, the daughter – who was sensible enough to have never touched a ramp – cannot tolerate the breath of any suitor except Jack.

The idea that eating ramps can protect you from the smell of ramps is a questionable bit of folk wisdom. (in my experience, the only thing that works is moving to another state.) But our boy Jacob uses an even less likely bit of ancient wisdom to make his fortune.

It stems from an agreement between Jacob and Laban: Jacob would watch Laban’s flocks, and in return Jacob would get to keep those sheep that were spotted and speckled. Sneaky Laban tried to cheat, by removing all the speckled sheep from his flock before Jacob could even begin. Where would Jacob’s wages come from now?

Jacob decided that is there were no speckled sheep in the flock, then he’d make his own. In the ancient world, it was believed that a baby would be affected by what the mother was looking at during the moment of conception. So Jacob took branches and cuts strips of bark off, making them striped and speckled. He placed the branches near the watering trough where the sheep would breed. And so many striped and speckled lambs were born, and Jacob’s fortune began to grow.

Just Another Tall Tale

So where exactly do these parallels come from? Barring a time machine, the most obvious answer is that the storytellers took the Jacob story as a model. But the men from the region I’ve met were not the sort to look to the Bible for bedtime stories. Religion is a sober thing, not a source of entertainment.

I kind of like the idea that there’s just something natural and intuitive about the shape of the story. When telling stories to a young grandson, what better hero than a strapping young lad. I like the idea that men have been telling such stories to sons and grandsons for over 2,500 years.

Unfortunately, my own grandfather is no longer telling these stories. He died last weekend, after long life, and surrounded by friends and family. He left behind a sprawling family, a hundred whittled toys, the lingering smell of pipe tobacco and fragments of stories like the ones above. I can no longer remember more than a few bits and pieces, but I hope that there are others who are passing down the old Jack stories, along with the love of a story well told.

But there’s something horribly, wonderfully inappropriate about Bristol Palin coming out for “traditional marriage.” There’s just something wrong with Palin, whose aborted courtship was practically a reality show, using this as a teaching moment.

Instead, I’ll just bring you this breaking news story from the able journalist Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice:

Worldwide Parody & Satire Industries Collapse

NEW YORK – May 11, 2012 – Roiled by a lengthy Republican primary that featured sickly-wife dumper Newt Gingrich in the role of family values advocate, prissy uterus invader Rick Santorum as a small government champion and multimillionaire vulture capitalist Mitt Romney shedding Armani suits in favor of mom jeans and “work” shirts as he positioned himself as a regular guy (with a car elevator), the global parody and satire industries utterly collapsed Friday.

The market sector had teetered on the verge of collapse this week following an accusation from thrice four-times-married drug addict Rush Limbaugh that President Obama had attacked the institution of marriage by coming out in favor of same-sex unions. But some analysts had thought the sector was positioned for recovery.

Those hopes were dashed early Friday when parody and satire futures were bludgeoned by the publication of an opinion piece by 21-year-old single mom Bristol Palin. The daughter of failed vice-presidential candidate and serial quitter Sarah Palin criticized the president for allowing his daughters to influence marriage equality policy, decried the persecution of conservative Christians and urged the president to direct his children since “dads should lead their family.”

“Parody and satire were already on life support thanks to Rush,” said analyst Seymour Butts of the Under the Bleachers Report. “But when Bristol let loose, even hard-bitten industry veterans who had survived the Nixon and Reagan years threw in the towel.”

Most experts were unable to articulate a scenario under which parody and satire could recover. However, at least one long-term analyst envisioned a resurgence contingent upon a direct asteroid strike on the earth that wipes out all existing life, after which single-cell organisms might once more emerge and evolve to acquire language skills.

Bring on that asteroid. It’s late, and we need it.

But that cutting joke gets turned around and slices the wrong way when the word “biblical” is substituted for the word “creationist.” It thus winds up reaffirming Ham’s assertion that his “scientific creationism” is the best and the only way to read the Bible. It suggests, as Ham does, that “biblical = creationist.” It suggests that Hamsterian “scientific creationism” provides a valid interpretation of the story of Noah rather than being a weirdly illiterate exercise in missing the point.

Whenever we atheists talk about the bible, I’m reminded of the great Ingersoll quote:

“Too great praise challenges attention, and often brings to light a thousand faults that otherwise the general eye would never see.

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature’s night.

These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.”

Ingersoll was writing this before the Liberal/Fundamentalist split, before the waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants really began to arrive on American shores, before Tri-Fath America and so on. As one historian put it, America was as Reformed Protestant a nation as it was possible to be. Ingersoll could speak to an audience who overwhelmingly believed that the Bible should only be approached in a literal, “face value” fashion.

But that’s not the case today. While still a third of American Christians are biblical literalists, two thirds are not. Catholics are now the largest single denomination, making up almost a quarter of the Christian population. The numbers of liberal Christians are growing. The largest growing religious group are the unaffiliated, many of whom are seekers with broad religious ideas.

Should we still be approaching the public as if we’re talking to protestant biblical literalists? Granted, the literalists are still a large and vocal faction who need to be countered, but maybe it’s time to start aiming at biblicism rather than the bible itself. Maybe we should be trying to marginalize the biblicists, rather than treating them like the standard.

My birth state of North Carolina has been convulsed with arguments over Amendment One, AKA North Carolina Senate Bill 514, an amendment to the state constitution which declares that “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”

The citizens voted on, and passed, the amendment on Tuesday. Chagrin, but no real surprise.

Amendment One is redundant and poorly written, but it is now the law of the state. But as an editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer points out, maybe it should really be called Amendment Two:

If Amendment One passes on Tuesday, it won’t be our first state constitutional provision regulating marriage. In 1875, we altered our charter to declare that “all marriages between a white person and a Negro or between a white person and a person of Negro descent to the third generation inclusive are, hereby, forever prohibited.”

The 1875 amendment, too, was adopted shortly (two years) after an invigorated anti-miscegenation statute had been enacted by the legislature. Even more clearly than is the case today, the proponents could not have worried that an amendment was actually needed. No one fretted that a 19th century North Carolina court would invalidate the earlier separationist statutory rule.

The interracial amendment was apparently designed to serve other aims. It was constitutionalism by epithet, by exclamation point. No government structure or power or authority was actually altered. Instead, North Carolinians used the constitution to double down – to declare, in as potent a format as exists, their unyielding hostility to marriage between blacks and whites.

The amendment stayed in place until 1971, when the a new constitution was adopted. That’s about four years after Loving vs. Virginia made it problematic.

Hopefully, we won’t have to wait a century for amendment one to be repealed. But until then, tarheels, won’t you consider a relocation to upstate New York? As someone who grew up in the piedmont, I find the upstate most congenial. Cooler, but with similar landscape. Same depressed economy, but maybe if enough of you come north we can fix that. Just transfer your hatred of NC State to the Yankees and you’re halfway here.

Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.

“Drive-by attacks” in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.

Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

Hey Daniel, are you still designing church websites? Is there something you need to tell us?

Anyway, Yahoo News suggests this is all the fault of the womens:

As recently as just four or five years ago, white males made up the vast majority of Internet users, with white women and then minorities following behind. Today though, nearly two out of every three Internet users is Asian, either from China, India, or the United States. And of Internet travelers in the United States, women are now as represented as men, which the newswire says, accounts for the increasing likelihood of hacker attacks on religious sites, which are predominately visited by women.

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok?

Parts of this sermon went viral, making Harris one of the most disliked people on the net in short order.

This Sunday, our friend Justin Griffith, who is located at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, attended a protest held by the Military Atheists & Secular Humanists at Fort Bragg and other groups outside Berean. Griffith actually got a little closer, getting inside for a brief interview with the pastor. Snippets of the interview were used by news sources, but here’s the whole thing:

Griffith picked up on part of Harris’s response:

Justin Griffith: “But you wouldn’t literally use a rod would you?”

Sean Harris: “No, of course not. We may use some instrument of discipline in a careful and appropriate way. Depending on the age of the child, depending on the weight of the child.”

Maybe Harris will soon publish a book including his conversion charts of force-per-pound punishments.

I’m not exactly sure how to react to much of it. Much of it is hung on the nail of evolutionary psychology. I’m not fit to pass judgement on the academic field, but what trickles out into the popular sphere has a low signal-to-crap ratio. Wood mentions that his exposure came as an undergrad. That makes sense, because he sounds like that friend everyone had in college who took two philosophy courses and suddenly understood everything. I’m hesitant to take him seriously.

This hesitation isn’t helped by some jumps he makes. Early on, he conflates evolutionary success with economic success. The fact that these are not the same should be obvious.

It doesn’t matter how many “large-screen televisions and other flashy toys” I have. If I don’t breed, I’m an evolutionary failure. I think the popularity of this this conflation – at least in America – comes from the Protestant work ethic. And that leads to a second problem.

Wood states that “Religion can offer a proud and defiant response to evolution,” but does it actually play out that way? There’s nothing magic about religion. It’s a human creation that is subject to the same drives and forces as the rest of human culture.

I think Wood has a heavily idealized view of the origins of religion. But even if we accept that Mohammad was the bold re-envisioner of human society that Wood makes him out to be, what has happened since then? Like the rest of our culture, religion has adapted to fit the needs of the people within it. And if Wood is right with his view of evolutionary psychology – (and to be clear, I don’t believe he is, and I’m not sure he believes it either) – then we should expect to see religion quickly come to serve those base drives that underlay human behavior.

I should probably respond to the content of the posts. I might do so later. Right now, I’m going to be a bad blogger and just use Leah’s title as an excuse to post an old strip from Queen of Wands:

Queen of Wands, December 8, 2003 by Aerie

… and this is the REAL reason you should fear Charles Darwin.

The billboard has been taken down. The CEO of Heartland explains: “The Heartland Institute knew this was a risk when deciding to test it, but decided it was a necessary price to make an emotional appeal to people who otherwise aren’t following the climate change debate.”

Emotional appeal. Because that’s exactly the way to help people make an informed decision on a factual matter.

Doris Rosado watches her teenage daughters, Ninette and Kiara Mongrut, get the numbers “666” tattooed on their wrists, beaming with pride. The number typically conjures up biblical symbolism tied to the Antichrist, but this St. Catharines, Ont., family belongs to a obscure Christian sect for which “666” is a positive symbol of their group’s messianic leader.

“They wanted to do it,” Ms. Rosado, 45, said at the St. Catharines tattoo parlour where her daughters were inked. “But now it’s more important because we’re counting down… I’m so proud.”

For this family, and other members of Growing in Grace International, these tattoos are a way of demonstrating their faith as true believers of Jose de Luis de Jesus — who they fervently believe is the second coming of Jesus Christ — before a day of reckoning they believe will wipe out most of humanity.

The group, which they say has branches in five Canadian cities and members in more than 130 countries, believes that on June 30 (or July 1 across the international dateline), their Texas-based leader and his followers will be transformed, said Alex Poessy, the group’s bishop in Canada.

Apparently Mr. de Jesus is located in Texas, but there is a small following in Canada. I don’t imagine there a too many things that cross cultures like that. Anyway, most of Mr. de Jesus’ prophecies sound similar to Weinland’s: collapse of governments, bankruptcy of the monetary system, etc. The transformation of his followers is an interesting twist, and it seems to be inspired by Marvel Comics rather than the Bible:

But Mr. de Jesus also predicts that the “transformation” will endow him, and his loyal followers, with superpowers, such as the ability to fly and walk through walls, said Axel Cooley, the bishop’s daughter.

“[We can] run and not get tired. Go through fire and not get burned…. I could be talking to you right now, and then I could go through that wall. So, you’ll know there is a difference,” Cooley said.

How many times have you heard some sort of deterministic, flowery phrase that generally goes like this, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”? If you run in Christian circles this is generally accompanied with some poached Bible verses, “Before you were born, even when the Lord was forming you in your Mother’s womb. He knew you. And even more, the Lord declares, ‘I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you.’”

He quotes Bill Hybels, “He’s the God who has orchestrated every event of your life to give you the best chance to get to know Him, so that you can experience His love.”

Bailey’s responses are brutal, but I’ll let you view them on his site. What struck me was the contrast between this idea that the all-wise, all-knowing God has a carefully scripted plan for your life, and the way that some Christians use intercessory prayer. If God already has a plan in place, what’s the point of praying for something to happen or not happen?

For an extreme example, consider this image from The American Jesus, where Zack found this line on the back on a book by Benny Hinn. Note the arrow:

These two ideas exist side by side in contemporary American Christianity. On one hand, God had a plan for you already laid out before you were even born. On the other, God will drop that plan if you ask nicely. How do you maintain both ideas at the same time?

It appears to be a cross between “found footage” horror films like Paranormal Activity and a Chick tract.

The kickstarter page has been sitting at $225 of a $12,500 goal for a while now. I might kick some money over there. Atlas Shrugged II is supposed to be out this year, and there should be some competition for the title of “Decade’s Worst Movie.”

As readers of this site know, May 27, 2012, is the time that I have stated as being the date Jesus Christ will return as King of kings over all government on this earth. For such an event to come to pass, the Trumpets of Revelation must all sound, the United States and dollar collapse, the ten nations of Europe arise to fulfill the final revival of the Holy Roman Empire, and Russia with China must unite against Europe in WWIII.

Weinland is a member of the Worldwide Church of God, a strange sect founded by Herbert W. Armstrong. You might be familiar with it if you read Otagosh, one of the few blogs in our circle that deals with it directly.

Weinland also has some words for those of us who would dare to mock him:

Weinlan is famous enough to have an attack blog dedicated to him: False Prophet Ronald Weinland

That said, a book review at MIT’s The Tech caught my eye, particularly the closing paragraph:

The historical Jesus that emerges from Ehrman’s mainstream defense is a purely human, miracle-free Jewish male with a very common name living in first century Palestine, who after an unremarkable youth went on to teach things that many others had taught before; one more apocalyptic preacher, among many others at the time, whose predictions were proven wrong within a generation; one more “troublemaker” crucified like countless others by the Romans after a drive-thru trial during the Pilate administration. Being such, the Jesus that can be reconstructed from history with any certainty is, for all practical purposes, as irrelevant as the mythical one, effectively shrinking the debate on his existence from a grandiose quest with theological implications to an inconsequential and endless exercise in academic hair-splitting.

John Shuck gives another review worth reading. He responds to Ehrman’s view of Jesus:

I find his apocalyptic Jesus really depressing. That Jesus is hard to preach. I am not sure if we have to have Jesus resemble Harold Camping to be a real guy. We might be skeptical of a Jesus we admire, but we might also be skeptical of a Jesus we despise. It may be equally hard to accept that Jesus is an onion. Peel off each layer of fiction until you get to…nothing? Give this country preacher a break! I have to encourage the folks, you know?

Shuck also has a worthwhile review of Robert M. Price’s The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems. He catches Price in one of his agnostic moods and quotes him:

There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth.

In a way, this isn’t all that far from Ehrman’s position. Ehrman would argue that Jesus probably existed and probably was an apocalyptic preacher. However, beyond that there’s little we can say, because all the details are mired in the religious belief of Jesus’ followers.

Bad Catholic posts a long text-heavy meme-studded image, which seems to tie atheists support of gay rights to a need for universal morality. But I think that BC is involved a different argument from the ones I’m used to seeing. Consider this segment:

BC rejects this, but I’m not so sure. I have no interest in policing the biases and mental states of my neighbors. I think it’s silly and ill-informed, but I’m not going to go so far as to say that a belief that homosexuality is sinful is itself immoral.

But there are two problems. The first is that I’ve never met someone who will say, “I just really hate gay people.” Bigots seem to feel they have a reason for their hatred, and a reason that you should share that hatred. Once these reasons come out the argument shifts from “Is hating gays immoral?” to “Is hating gays warranted?” And that is a completely different argument.

Second, what bothers me most is when this belief turns into action. I have homosexual friends, and I value them and their happiness. When someone attempts to harm them, it harms me. When someone attempts to strip them of a right or a privilege, it pains me. Therefor it is completely reasonable for me to oppose someone attempting to harm them, and doubly so when someone attempts to use the collective power of the state to do so. It quickly gets more complicated, but that’s the heart of it.

The short version is that I don’t see how this argument relates to a need for universal morality. Maybe I’m missing something?

Tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews will participate in a huge rally to be held on Sunday evening, May 20, at Citi Field (Shea Stadium) in Queens, New York, to combat the evils of the Internet and the damages caused by advanced electronic devices.

[...]

The website JDN cites one of the event organizers who said: “This will be a mass rally never before seen in the history of Orthodox Jewry in the U.S. It will be a gathering of unity of all the Jews living in the U.S., a gathering to disseminate information and a prayer rally for the success of Klal-Israel’s war on the Technology which threatens the sanctity of the homes of Israel.”

The “Gdolei Israel” (leading sages) behind the conference have specifically ordered to schedule it for the eve of Rosh Chodesh Sivan, a day which is considered particularly fortuitous when it comes to children’s education, since the goal of their campaign is to save the generation from the ravages of advanced technology.

Every generation complains about the technologies of the next generation. I used to hear a neverending litany of complaints about kids watching television. Now it’s the internet. But to pack a stadium?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Go to Vimeo for a larger version, or PhD for still images. H/t Open Culture.

One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that “secularism” – or, just as often, “Secular Humanism” – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. It was, as religious historian and Lutheran minister Martin E. Marty has written, “an instance where one can date precisely the birth of a religion: June 19, 1961.” That was the day the Court ruled in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins striking down the Maryland Constitution’s requirement of “a declaration of belief in the existence of God” to hold “any office of profit or trust in this state” — specifically, in atheist Roy Torcaso’s case, the office of notary public. In his decision, Justice Hugo Black, writing for a unanimous court, further asserted that states and the federal government could not favor religions “based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs” – and, in a fateful, ill-considered, and entirely offhand footnote explained: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would be generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”

From here, things get wacky. As unearthed by the outstanding scholar Carol Mason in her masterpiece “Reading Appalachia from Left to Right,” in 1974 a Jesuit priest and Fordham University law professor named Edward Berbasse argued that “since humanism is now considered by the court to be a religion , it must be prevented from being established by the government.” An activist asked him if that meant they could win their fight to ban the satanic textbooks being forced down their children’s throats in Kanawha County, West Virginia by taking the matter to the Supreme Court. “I think you may have the material if you can get a crackerjack lawyer,” Father Berbasse responded. A Supreme Court case was never actually attempted – not least because, as Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have pointed out, “While historically there has been an organized humanist movement in the United States since at least the 1800s, the idea of a large-scale quasireligion called secular humanism is a conspiracist myth.” In Kanawha County, the textbook fight was fought out with dynamite instead. Nationwide, however, the conspiracist myth took on a life of its own – even unto the halls of Congress.

I also loved this part:

Liberals, dumbfounded by irrationality in that patented liberal way, pointed out that the number of people calling themselves “secular humanists” was only a handful, so how could they possibly possess such omnipotence. Well, fundamentalists would counter, doesn’t that just prove the success of their conspiracy?

Ain’t America grand?

*groan* America was founded on that kind of thinking. Is the British Government placing a minuscule tax on tea? It’s a conspiracy! The small size of the tax is just proof that they’re trying to lull us into a sense of complacency. Paranoia: America’s first founding principle.

According to the Providence Journal, the Cranston RI school district now has a whopping big legal bill to pay as a result of their fight to preserve a prayer banner against a complaint lodged by Jessica Ahlquist. It’s large enough that they’re putting the local taxpayers on the hook immediately:

The school district and the city will split the $150,000 in legal fees owed to the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, under a proposal approved by the School Committee Monday night.

The vote was unanimous in favor of the proposed fee split proposal submitted by School Supt. Peter L. Nero.

The school district will pay $75,000 toward the legal fees owed the ACLU for representing Cranston High School West student Jessica Ahlquist, 16, in a challenge to the constitutionality of a prayer banner which used to hang in the school’s auditorium.

$150,000 is actually less than I’d expect. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the ACLU bargained down its own fees so as not to bankrupt the district. I remember that they did that in Dover.

We used to talk about the “Dover Trap,” the tendency of certain school districts to push “intelligent design,” get sued, and wind up in debt. This looks to be the same sort of thing.

Honestly, what kind of legal advice are these school boards getting? They rarely even have any new arguments, and yet they hope to win court cases against long established precedents. All they’re doing is breaking their own budgets.

Planetary Resources is establishing a new paradigm for resource discovery and utilization that will bring the solar system into humanity’s sphere of influence. Our technical principals boast extensive experience in all phases of robotic space missions, from designing and building, to testing and operating. We are comprised of visionaries, pioneers, rocket scientists and industry leaders with proven track records on—and off—this planet.

Back to io9:

This is big news on several fronts, not the least of which being the fact that this venture stands to reinvigorate the world’s passion for space exploration. Money can be a powerful motivating factor, and all indications suggest that there a LOT of it to be made mining resources like water and precious metals from near-Earth asteroids. [...]

“If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids,” Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. “They’re just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system.”

Well, damn. I didn’t think I’d see a serious bid to mine near Earth asteroids in my lifetime. Of course, it still remains to be seen how serious this is, and then how successful it is.

Still, I’m excited. That’s your cue to tell me why this is all going to end in tears.

A video of the aurora taken in norther Finland, Norway and Sweden during 2011

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video was created using images of Saturn and its rings from NASA’s Cassini probe and Voyager mission:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That summer, one marked distraction was provided by the prediction of an impending apocalypse. For decades, astrologers had foretold that, on 16 September 1186, a momentous planetary alignment would stir up a devastating wind storm, scouring the Earth of life. This bleak prophecy had circulated among Muslims and Christians alike, but the sultan nonetheless thought it ridiculous. He made a point of holding a candlelit, open-air party on the appointed night of disaster, even as ‘feeble-mind[ed]‘ fools huddled in caves and underground shelters. Needless to say, the evening passed without event; indeed, one of his companions pointedly remarked that ‘we never saw a night as calm as that’.

Say what you want about Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn, but the man had style.

In 2008, when Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 122 was preparing to deploy to Iraq, the unit’s commander, Lt. Col. William Lieblein, did something very wise and sensible — he changed the nickname of the unit from “Crusaders” back to its former name, the “Werewolves.” Stating the obvious, Lt. Col. Lieblein said, “The notion of being a crusader in that part of the world doesn’t float.”

But now, under new leadership, the unit is going back to being the “Crusaders,” complete with an insignia of a crusader shield with a big red cross on it and a crusader knight as its mascot.

The squadron’s new commander, Lt. Col. Wade Wiegel, is apparently focused on the history of the name within the Marines rather than the larger history of the name. At least in print.

Rodda and Fred Clark focus on the offensiveness of the name. Clark brings up the massacre of Jerusalem, and points out the obvious problem of accepting the Crusaders as role models. But there’s another problem that interests me.

Let’s be honest: taken as a whole, the Crusaders lost. They lost bad. They spent as much time fighting amongst each other and against their own allies as against the infidels. They committed every sin in the book, from the aforementioned massacre to (allegedly) cannibalism. Yes, they had initial success against a disunited foe, but they were unable to sustain, and they left behind an Islam that was more unified, more militant and meaner.

Why do we celebrate these losers? Whether it’s the Crusaders, or the Confederate States of America or the Spartans, we always seem to want to romanticize the folks who got spanked by history. Why can’t we let them moulder in peace and model ourselves on the winners?

Interesting idea. I’m always ambivalent about pay walls, but it helps to know that the money is going to those who need it. But given the spendthrift nature of the blogosphere, I don’t know if it will work. Why pay for opinions that you can get for free on countless other blogs? And it will hamper the inevitable back-and-forth of blog arguments if you can’t link to something that’s members only.

Out of curiosity, would you be more likely to use a site that has a pay wall over a site that has as many ads as Patheos? Just to be clear, I have no way of arranging such a thing, I’m just asking.

Apparently he had a run in with none other than Rosie O’Donnell, leaving the Superbowl. The exchange was acrimonious (NSFW):

James has now apologized … for not using more forceful language:

I’m wondering if this struggle will be easier for the people who come into atheism after us. Or even if it will be a struggle at all. I’m wondering if they’ll look at atheism the way my friend Tim and I look at existentialism. “Sure, there’s no God, and my consciousness is a biological product of my brain, and my sense of a cohesive identity and selfhood is a somewhat illusory mental construction, and when I die I’ll just be gone forever. So what? That’s fine with me. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

Read the whole thing, because I think she spells it out very well. It’s also a good follow-up to the flap that she sparked over at Slacktiverse.

It’s interesting to look back at the history of Western atheism. For centuries, atheism was an accusation that you threw at other people. There is little evidence that anyone was actually an atheist from the collapse of Rome until maybe the 17th century. Then, slowly, people began to express doubts in private correspondence and journals. Then people started embracing streamlined religions like deism and pantheism. Then you started to see people call themselves agnostics. Then, finally, atheists.

It’s as if atheism was something we had to tip-toe up to. But now we’re here. So what’s next?

I’d like to think that Greta is right. Now that we’ve elbowed some cultural space for atheism, and shored it up with arguments and counter-apologetics, maybe atheism will soon become unremarkable.

The school officials said that they were just “making Bible available,” and said that is some other group wanted to supply religious texts like the Gideons, then the school would make those available as well. Strivelli put that to the test by supply various Pagan books, and the administration blinked. They elected to review their policy on distributing religious material.

Recently a new policy was drafted: Policy 652. It’s a broad policy on religion in the school. It seems fairly moderate by my standards, allowing such things as a “moment of silence.” Frustratingly, it doesn’t actually include a policy on religious material distributed by outside groups, as that is still under review. It recently came up for a vote, and the debate was acrimonious.

I suspect that you can fill in most of the arguments yourself. If you can’t, Angela Pippinger of The Pagan Mom Blog reports that all the usual tropes were there. First was the guy who wanted everyone to know that the whole problem was the fault of outside agitators one lone student:

The most crazy part of the evening is when a gentleman by the name of Honeycutt called out Ginger Strivelli by name. This is not the first time he did this, he has done it at EVERY meeting and sticks by the story that this is a work of Ginger all by herself and everyone else supports bibles being school. He states this after Baptist ministers, Rabbi’s, UU ministers, Presbyterians, and Catholics stand up in support of the policy!

Isolate and minimize the other party. Classic reactionary tactics.

And of course the old “you’re banning prayer!” reaction:

And speaking of blatant ignorance, more people could not get it through their thick heads that kids were not being instructed that they could not pray. Several children got up to speak about how they were going to pray anyway and the school could just kick them out.

Despite all this, the policy passed unanimously. I suspect that this reflects the fact that the policy really is moderate. Byron Ballard, a local columnist, comments:

We will have to police the system for years to come, calling, demanding, emailing. Every time a child whose parents practice a minority religion is othered or belittled or otherwise bullied because of that–someone will have to contact the system and demand that something be done.

Even if the policy had no loop-holes, the situation would require constant vigilance. Unless Buncombe County has changed in the decade since I lived there, it’s overwhelming Evangelical Christian. A majority like that is always going to have problems remembering to respect the rights of the minority. Even well intentioned members of the majority will find themselves leading prayers and pushing Bibles, simply because that’s what everybody does.

Northeast Health has agreed to abide by Catholic health restrictions upon completion of its affiliation with two Catholic systems, St. Peter’s Hospital (part of Catholic Health East) and Seton Health (part of the Catholic Ascension Health system). That change in hospital policy means an end to abortions, tubal ligations, contraceptive counseling and other services at Northeast Health’s Samaritan Hospital in Troy and Memorial Hospital in Albany. The impact would be particularly severe in Troy, where the only other hospital is St. Mary’s, part of the Seton Health with which Northeast Health is affiliating.

Ugh. While this won’t directly affect me, it’s going to be bad news for the greater Albany region if most of our hospitals can’t offer contraceptives, particularly with the cuts to Planned Parenthood. There’s a compromise of sorts, but it’s marginal:

The solution is the Burdett Care Center, a 20-bed maternity facility on the second floor of Samaritan Hospital. It is separately incorporated to insulate the center from the Catholic restrictions that now prevails in the rest of the hospital. As part of the state approval, the center had to be completed prior to the secular hospital’s merger with the two Catholic health systems. The Burdett Care Center consolidates all maternity services from both Troy hospitals and allows women delivering babies to have post-partum tubal ligations

“insulate the center from the Catholic restrictions” That makes it sound like Catholic teachings are some kind of EM field.

The regional Planned Parenthood is keeping an eye on things. I like and respect the people who run PP, but I don’t know how much they can do in this situation.

Is this happening in any other parts of the world? Does the Catholic Church have an out-sized role in hospital care everywhere, or is it just here?

I’ve heard some grumbling. Now that you’ve had a couple days to get used to it, what do you think of it? Is there anything you particularly like or dislike?

There, I feel better now.

I hate the way absolute evil always hogs the covers, don’t you?

Yet, when left with a Bible for a suitable length of time, the same people will produce timelines like the following:

As folks like Fred Clark will tell you, there’s no quick and easy explanation of the Rapture in the Biblical text. You have to take pinch of Daniel and a soupçon of Ezekiel and fold it into the Revelation of St. John. Is this really “face value”? Can we call this “literal” in any meaning of the word?

(Image via Christian Nightmares)

Crock-o-duck is annoying. Every time I run into it, I realize that we’re going to have to start from the very beginning and dispel all the common misunderstandings about evolution before proceeding. It’s fractally wrong.

This is from Way of the Master: Prague, part of the dynamic duo’s trek through Europe spreading the good news of crock-o-duck. Sorry, Europe, but religious ignorance seems to be the only thing that America can export these days.

Via American Jesus.

(Note: Do we really need separate “Oh the Stupidity!” and “Ray Comfort Mania” tags? Isn’t the second just a sub-category of the first?)

Now we sit back and wait for the fundies to boycott reruns of Mr. Belvedere

Via Joe.My.God.

EDIT: And here’s a version that actually works from Friendly Atheist. Sorry about that.

It is widely believed that as the audience matures, and the fogeys shuffle off to complain about the next media revolution, video games will tackle more mature themes. But what about religious themes?

First off, it’s obvious that Danny is a secularist. When talking about religious themes (at about 2:30) he automatically jumps to secularism and religious freedom. Fine, but recognize that religion is a broad topic.

Folks like James McGrath are happy to expound on the way that science fiction handles religious issues – sometimes without mentioning religion at all. A discussion of guilt and redemption could be considered a discussion of Christian themes, even if no one name-checks Jesus. A discussion of the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force is just as much a religious discussion as a commentary on the First Amendment. A game doesn’t have to feature religious conflict to have religious content.

I don’t agree that video games shy away from depictions of religion, and the early days were not a barren wasteland. Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging dealt with Reagan era policy, including the emphasis on traditional religion. In Sid Meier’s original Civilization, building temples and cathedrals pacifies your population: Religion as the opiate of the masses. The original Portal, which sparked arguments about what qualifies as a game, involves a character who becomes a science fiction messiah and leads humanity to a new Kingdom.

Darklands, which was set in medieval Germany, tried to stay true to medieval Catholicism, with a lengthy list of saints that you could pray to for various effects. In the fourth Ultima game you were tasked with becoming a secular redeemer by mastering a virtuous life. Most other fantasy games had some sort of polytheistic religion in the background.

Adventure, an expansion of Colossal Cave, was one of the first video games with a story, and it had a major portion in a church. And if you want a depiction of the futility of prayer, try typing “xyzzy”.

I could go on (endlessly). The point is that video games have always dealt with religion on some level. So I think the response to, “why aren’t games handling religious issues?” is “what do we mean by handling?” and “which religious issues?”

(Postscript just to say goodbye to Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, whose computers got me started.)

I’m still waiting for the Pat Robertson/Bob Larson superhero team-up.

The use of insults, no matter how subtle, in order to attract someone seems counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, I’ve been told it works under certain circumstances. Which makes me think about Christianity in general and Calvinism is specific.

Is this negging?

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock.

Granted, negging is subtle, and this is anything but subtle. Still, to me the principle seems similar: damage someone’s sense of self worth so that they turn to you for comfort.

One of the basic principles of Reformed Christianity is that all of us are horrible sinners who completely deserve to burn in hell for eternity. But wait, God is merciful! Turn to him, or rather to his representative, and do what we tell you.

Is this the same as negging, or am I off track?

The only downside is that it is so complex that it’s impossible to keep track of what’s going on. Still, it’s dynamic enough to be fun to watch.

Via io9

Well, wrong, as Matthew Paul Turner is covering.

Driscoll is a big fan of sex, so long as it’s heterosexual married sex and the women folk remember to be responsive, submissive and don’t get any ideas above their God appointed station.

He’s a patriarch. Respect his authority and he’s fine. Reject his authority – by, for example, having differing opinions – and he’ll f’ck you up.

According to Peter Lumpkins, the trustees at Liberty University are of a different mind:

Sources say trustees took a vote, and the vote was unanimous indicating that Mark Driscoll is not welcome at Liberty University. In addition to Driscoll’s “potty mouth” approach to pulpit etiquette playing a role in their decision, his “Reformed” theology, Acts 29 Network, and the provocative hedonistic understanding of a___ s__ came up as well … Trustees were apparently flabbergasted that Driscoll was considered for an invitation in the first place.

These folks are puritans, desperately afraid that someone, somewhere is having fun, and then using old Saxon words to describe it.

But wait, now the Liberty U website is denying this claim:

On April 4, 2012, a Southern Baptist blogger, Peter Lumpkins, wrote an innacurate account of Liberty’s recent Board of Trustees meeting as it relates to the university’s invitation to Mark Driscoll to speak in Convocation. Lumpkin’s recent blog contains information that is defamatory and portrays Liberty University in a false light.

The Board of Trustees of Liberty University did not vote unanimously that Mark Driscoll is not welcome on campus, as the blog states, and, in fact, Mark Driscoll is still scheduled to speak in Convocation at Liberty University on April 20, 2012.

Meanwhile, Sophia at Mars Hill Refuge, a blog for recovering members of Mars Hill, is busy pouring kerosene on the flames:

So to raise curiosity about a problem (emotional and spiritual devastation coming out of Mars Hill church) that we have seen for years in our community and now spreading nationwide as Driscoll’s fame and Acts 29 church network grows, we need to spark curiosity about what is happening behind the scenes. If demand is created then news outlets will cover these devastating stories of people who were once on the inner circle of Mars Hill church. Since Driscoll is a national bestseller and getting lots of media attention we decided to petition Liberty University to rescind their invite for Driscoll to speak on their campus on April 20th. We think that would get the conservatives and fundamentalists engaged as well. Once the truth is brought to light then healing can begin, as any survivor will tell you.

I’m very curious to see how this plays out.

Via Buzzfeed and thanks to Kodie in the forum.

It’s bad when a church tries to co-opt popular culture, it gets worse when they’re 30+ years off the mark.

Via American Jesus

Yay.

As usual, this type of masculine Christianity calls for martial imagery. This time it looks like they drew inspiration from “Game of Thrones.”

Via Christian Nightmares

Then some atheists decided to point out one of the major flaws in the Bible: its pervasive acceptance of slavery. They do this with the following billboard:

When Mark Shea at the National Catholic Register hears about this, he chastizes us atheists for expecting too much from the Bible:

One of the things grownups understand is that things like the epistle to the Colossians were not written by a wizard who could wave a wand and eradicate an institution that had existed absolutely everywhere the fallen human lived since the dawn of time. He was the messenger of a small, harrassed religious sect which possessed absolutely no political power in either the Roman empire to which he went, nor in the tiny Jewish country from which he hailed. His mission was not to be a second Spartacus, but to announce the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Much as normal people have always done, he worked within the granite “givens” of his culture.

We seem to be caught in the middle here. We could wish that Mr. Shea would skip over the atheists and talk directly to the people who are praising the Bible as the book from which all morality flows. He could explain to them that no, Paul had a very limited agenda and shouldn’t be relied upon to provide the foundation for American law. Somehow, that never happens.

As an aside, the Quakers were a “small, harassed religious sect which possessed absolutely no political power” during the 17 and 18th century, and yet they are considered the world’s first anti-slavery institution. (There were anti-slavery individuals before that, but the Quakers seem to be the first group.)

We’ve taken the cherubim and changed them from the fierce guardians of Eden into chubby little naked children with wings.

If someone really was born in a stable, it would be an ugly scene with blood on the straw and the smell of afterbirth and manure. We’s sanitized it and put it on Hallmark cards.

Somehow, “Biblical” has come to mean “wholesome” in American culture. So Rachel Held Evans presents these Biblical entries into the cloying “Precious Moments” line. Here’s my favorite:

And also:

These were originally created by Tom LaMothe, pastor of First Baptist Church in Greenport, New York. I’d say they are pitch perfect.

I’ve never understood why men like Kent and Hovind, who are at the extreme end of the creationist insanity spectrum, seem to want to prove that dragons existed. Bad enough that Hovind wants us to believe that the T-Rex breathed fire, but now Kent wants us to believe that the dinosaurs had flaming noses.

The short was written and directed by Johnathan Brooks. Via Dangerous Minds

(via Exploring our Matrix)

I believe that the meme originated at the College for Creative Studies with this wonderful piece:

I’d consider one about atheism, but many people wouldn’t recognize it as a joke. Science, maybe?

However, one of the most interesting memos details NOM’s plan to aid its cause by recruiting attractive but unintelligent celebrities. From GLAAD:

It sounds like a headline from the Onion, but strategy documents uncovered yesterday, from the nation’s most prominent anti-gay marriage group, the National Organization for Marriage (found by the Human Rights Campaign), reveal a novel approach to convincing Americans to vote against marriage equality: recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities. (p.19/20)

“Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries. (This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual elites.)”

I just love the phrase “non-cognitive elites.” I wish NOM well in its attempts to enlist pretty dumb celebrities. There certainly are enough of them, but they’re going to have to fight the Scientologists for every one.

Lisa Miller talks about the book at the Washington Post:

Between 1991 and 2011, the number of adult women attending church weekly has declined 20 percent. The number of women going to Sunday school has dropped by about a third, as has the number of women who volunteer at church.

And although the Barna data have been disputed by other researchers, Henderson goes further. Even those women who go to church regularly, he says, are really only half there: Their discontent keeps them from engaging fully with the project of being Christian. He calls this malaise among women “a spiritual brain drain.”

This echos a theme we’ve been hearing for several years now. We’ve been told that people are no longer content with their family church. People are leaving in single numbers, and soon they will be leaving in droves.

But Felice Lifshitz at the University of Chicago Divinity School points out that these problems are as old as the Bible itself, and yet the patriarchy still remains.

The current wave of “resignations” fits squarely into a 2000-year-old tradition of tension over gender and spiritual authority; if proponents of patriarchal forms of religious organization do not feel particularly threatened by the alarm bells Henderson has rung for them, it is because historical precedent encourages complacency on their part. After all, their predecessors always managed to hold on to power. “The men of the right” have found, in every generation, a substantial number of Christian women who considered the limited roles and secondary status allotted to them to be quite comfortable. It is certainly easier to execute simple, circumscribed tasks such as meal preparation than to shoulder the responsibility for major policy decisions. But every generation has also witnessed rebellion and discontent.

I’m going to have to side with Lifshitz. Christianity has a history of offering Christian women half a loaf, and finding women who will be satisfied with that.

Despite Driscoll’s involvement, I hear that the documentary comes closer to siding with Rob Bell.

Massey starts by quoting David Wright of Answers in Genesis setting the date of the Deluge at 2348 BC. He then provides some basic ancient history, so that we can see just what the rest of the world was doing during or soon after being drown:

It must have come as a real shock to Noah and his children when, in 2334 BC – only 14 years after the flood – Sargon the Great began establishing the powerful Akkadian empire. [...] “Barefoot and pregnant” doesn’t begin to describe the work involved in repopulating the planet at the pace necessary to give Sargon armies to fight and people to rule.

[...]

Down in Egypt, the United Kingdom established by Menes circa. 3000 BC was humming along nicely. By the time of Noah’s flood, the Egyptians were just wrapping up their 5th dynasty. Pharaoh Unas was, no doubt, quite perturbed to see his empire underwater, especially since he was in the middle of building a pyramid complex at Saqqara, which you can visit to this day.

It reminds me a bit of the old Onion article: Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World:

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

[...]

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

That means one thing in American politics: negative campaigning. The attacks are going to start early, and they’re only going to get worse as time goes on. Since there’s a lot of money from big donors floating around, we can expect so see a lot of big budget attack ads.

I take this Santorum ad to be a taste of what’s coming:

Please note the anviliscious jump cut from Ahmedinejad to Obama right after the narrator talks about the “sworn American enemy.” It’s at 0:41 -

Via Joe.My.God.

This clip has garnered a lot of attention. It starts out with Terry declaring that America is a Christian nation and that there is only one God (“… and his name is JEee-sus!”) He follows that by telling everyone that doesn’t like all that, or that doesn’t like America or “the way we do things,” that they should GET OUT!

The church is now squirming about the clip and the attention that it’s gotten. They’ve removed that section from their Ustream archives, and their Worship Minister posted this on Facebook:

Terry would like us to believe that these comments were taken out of context. But while Right Wing Watch does clip their videos short, it’s still hard to draw anything but a negative conclusion from this little tirade.

Also adding to the agnostic/atheist wing of the collective is Greg Epstein at Good Without God. Well, maybe. In his last post he comments, “I’m exhausted and wondering how the hell bloggers do it.” One thing we do is self-indulgent administrative posts where we try to send traffic to everyone else. Hope that helps.

While it’s not an atheist/agnostic blog, we now have a group blog titled Science on Religion which looks extremely promising.

And of course, the biggest news: Bristol Palin! Yes indeed, over at Bristol’s Blog … eh, I’m sorry, my fingers will rebel if I try to type a glowing review. Star Foster decided to make a silk purse out of this: 13 Reasons I’m Glad Bristol Palin Is At Patheos.

6. The Atheists Are Ignoring Her
Which cracks me up. Not a peep out of them this week about her. They are hardly a reticent bunch, and shy and retiring aren’t among their attributes. I love that they are in their own little world far away from all us “religious nuts.”

*cough* Yeah, we’re not really venturing far out of our happy place, are we? I’ll cop to not being “shy and retiring,” but can I plead “clueless and socially inept” instead?

Plus, at the moment Palin is focusing her blog on Trig, which isn’t something to get worked up about unless you’re Andrew Sullivan.

Kind of embarrassing that I didn’t know about it until a link in the sidebar of Exploding our Cakemix sent me to Star’s post. So the atheist blogger found out about the conservative evangelical blog from a liberal Christian blog and a pagan blog. That pretty much sums up Patheos, I think.

Here’s the Grey Lady with all the gory details:

Tebowmania appears to be headed to New York. In a move that diversifies their offense but threatens to undermine Mark Sanchez, the Jets on Wednesday agreed to a trade for Tim Tebow, the popular but polarizing quarterback from the Denver Broncos. [...]

In helping to guide Denver to an A.F.C. West title last season, Tebow authored several last-minute comebacks, including a 95-yard drive that silenced the Jets on Nov. 17. That success, achieved despite an unconventional style and limited throwing skills, could divide a fan base with the first poor — or even average — performance by Sanchez.

As the story notes, there are some snags. It kinda looks like someone at the Jets failed to read the fine print and they may have to cancel. Clearly, Satan and his minions are at work.

Via Exploring our Matrix

Via Jesus Needs New PR, who originally mistook this for a lamp.

My first thought after glancing at these is: hasn’t it always been this way? I used to hear a bit of common wisdom in the Episcopal Church: young adults quit going to church only to come back once they become parents. Now that we’re keeping closer watch on the numbers of the “unchurched,” maybe we’re just noticing it more.

Piatt suggests that “Young adults today are the most un-churched generation in a long time.” That’s probably true, but only because we’re still feeling the effects of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Evangelical Christianity. Before this period, the majority of Americans were probably unchurched, particularly in the south.

Be that as it may, Hemant points out that many of Piatt’s reasons are self-serving. He never even hints that some might leave the church because they are told they must give intellectual assent to certain historical and scientific propositions that are simply not true.

Hemant comments:

My guess is that most of you are thinking Piatt forgot the most obvious reason people leave church: They figured out God doesn’t exist. [...]

As fun as it would be to pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves credit for Christians leaving the church, we don’t deserve it. Turns out the Church just keeps shooting itself in the foot.

It seems that Christianity cannot fail, it can only be failed.

I’ve noticed this pattern with any number of groups. Once a member has left, or has become unpopular, they are quickly branded as “not a real” member of whatever. For example, as George W. Bush’s poll numbers plummeted, it was very amusing to hear certain conservatives explain why he was “not a real conservative,” despite having previously argued that his election was a victory for conservatism.

Any failures on the part of a conservative can never be the fault of the ideals of the conservative movement. There’s always some way to shift the blame, and avoid facing the idea that maybe movement conservatism just doesn’t work as a political philosophy.

At least Piatt isn’t pretending that all those that have left the church were never really Christian, although there is a bit of condescension towards those who think Christianity is not relevant. But he’s still shifting the blame towards everything but the doctrines and traditions of Christianity.

For the most part it’s a standard “multiple worlds” hypothesis story, where every decision you make is made in a different way by an alternate you in another dimension. We’re all familiar with that sci-fi plot device, right?

That’s when it gets weird:

Welcome to the Infinite You.

Quantum Jumping is a visualization process where you use your mind to ‘jump’ into parallel dimensions, and gain creativity, knowledge, wisdom, skills and inspiration from alternate versions of yourself.

This happens through a phenomenon known as “thought transference.” You see, although the solidity of our world seems indisputable, Quantum Theory suggests that our physical reality is nothing but a very elaborate mirage. A super-hologram of information and energy. A Matrix.

From there we get New Thought taken to an extreme. It’s not just that the “law of attraction” will make your thoughts become reality. Instead, reality itself is nothing more than thought: “the substance of the universe, of your reality, may be nothing more than consciousness or thought.”

You can pretty much fill in the blanks from there. By using these special mental techniques, you can be richer, happier, healthier, etc.

“Sweet Home Alabama” being played on two solid-state Tesla coils:

Via Jesus Needs New PR

Students and staff at a high school in Dunkerton, Ia., were shocked when an assembly intended to address drug and bullying issues instead featured anti-gay messages that offended many students, staff and parents, the Lacrosse Tribune reports.

“They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42,” parent Jennifer Littlefield told the Lacrosse Tribune. “It just blows me away that no one stopped this.”

The group also told students that girls who aren’t virgins at their weddings will have mud on their dresses, according to the paper.

I went to school in a little fly-speck town in North Carolina. I clearly remember the fledgling garage bands that would come through and do concerts in the gymnasium. Each one would pause in between covers of Van Halen and Bon Jovi to announce that they were Christian and hoped that we were to.

My guess is that the administration thought that this group would be more of the same. Someone didn’t do their homework:

Junkyard Prophet, the Minnesota-based traveling band that was brought to Dunkerton High School to discuss practices for good decision making, is part of the You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Christian youth ministry that holds assemblies in public schools.

[...]

Superintendent Jim Stanton told the Lacrosse Tribune that the group received good feedback when they performed at the school in the past, and that they must have changed their message since then.

Here’s a portion of the assembly, where they engage in some bashing of Sir Elton:

This has sparked some pavlovian outrage. From the Times Live:

The advert, flighted on Monday night during e.tv’s 7pm news and during the popular Grey’s Anatomy drama series on M-Net, has prompted more than 100 complaints in less than a day.

While no official response from Red Bull was received, a staff member said yesterday the offending advert had been pulled from the air.

A 77-year-old man from Oklahoma cannot deny human-caused climate change

[...]

Inhofe doesn’t just deny any human contribution to climate change, he denies that such a thing is even possible. He claims the Bible tells him it isn’t possible.

And yet for the past 26 years, Inhofe has represented the state of Oklahoma in Congress. Oklahoma was the heart of the Dust Bowl, one of the worst “anthropogenic” ecological disasters of all time.

The Dust Bowl proved that human activity is quite capable of altering the climate. It proved that Inhofe’s reading of Genesis is hogwash.

There’s an added layer of irony here. It was a belief in anthropogenic climate change that led to the Dust Bowl. Let me just quote a paragraph from Marc Reisner’s classic history/polemic, Cadillac Desert: the American West and its Disappearing Water:

This enormous gush of humanity pouring into a region still marked on some maps as the Great American Desert was encouraged by wishful thinking, by salesmanship, that most American of motivating forces, and, most of all, by natural caprice. For a number of years after 1865, a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains. Guides leading wagon trains to Oregon reported that western Nebraska, usually blond from drought or black from prairie fires, had turned opalescent green. Late in the 1870s, the boundary of the Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of the Great Basin.

Such a spectacular climatic transformation was not about to be dismissed as a fluke, not by a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent. A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was “Rain Follows the Plow.” Since the rains coincided with the headlong westward advance of settlement, the two must somehow be related.

Professor Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, was a leading proponent. “Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled,” he announced in declamatory tones, “towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and roads made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture…. I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature, and not periodical, and that it has commenced within eight years past, and that it is in some way connected to the settlement of the country, and that as population increases the moisture will increase.” Ferdinand V. Hayden, who was Thomas’s boss and one of the most famous geographers and geologists of his time, also subscribed to the theory. (Hayden happened to be a notable rival of John Wesley Powell, who believed otherwise.)

The exact explanations varied. Plowing the land exposed the soil’s moisture to the sky. Newly planted trees enhanced rainfall. The smoke from trains caused it. Vibrations in the air created by all the commotion helped clouds to form. Dynamiting the air became a popular means of inducing rain to fall, Even the Secretary of Agriculture came out for a demonstration in Texas. “The result,” he reported, “was—a loud noise!”[originally all one paragraph]

The idea that “Rain Follows the Plow” gave an intellectual underpinning to the mad dash for farm land in the American Midwest. In other words, everyone was banking on “anthropogenic climate change” to alter the climate of states like Iowa, Oklahoma and Nebraska. Unfortunately, in this case, the skeptics were correct. Rain does not follow the plow.

The title “Dust Bowl” was coined after April 14, 1935, also known as Black Sunday. High winds following a prolonged drought picked up an estimate 300,000 tons of topsoil and carried it across the plains. By April 19, the soil that had been lifted up to the upper winds made it all the way to Washington D.C.

A group of senators were meeting to discuss the proposed Soil Conservation Act when they noticed that it was getting dark in the middle of the day. According to legend, several senators from the midwest had been passionately arguing against the bill. When it got dark, they stepped outside, and watched their states pass overhead. If one of the senators berated the soil in the name of the Bible, no one recorded it.

How exactly do you win, when the founder of the religion won by dying? Does “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” mean that the victor is the last to cross the finish line? Obviously there can be no Monopoly style rent, since usury is prohibited by the Bible.

Via Scotteriology and Christian Nightmares.

Comfort and Cameron made a secret recording of the ritual. (which is at least unethical and likely illegal, but whatev.) They played clips of it on their adventure on the “Way of the Master” podcast, but that particular episode seems to have disappeared. Fortunately, the “satanic panic” quasi-parody site Objective Ministries saved a copy of that segment, and it’s available on their website.

“If listening to Pagan religions try to contact their deities gives you the creeps … um, Sean Hannity is on, you might want to tune in to him.”

I’m sorry, but what’s the difference? Are you telling me that Hannity isn’t offering up incense to the genius of Ronald Reagan?

Most of the problems that Cameron seems to have with the group come down to the fact that this isn’t Protestant Christianity. Words like “orthodoxy” don’t have much meaning without a power structure to enforce them. I think he’s a bit confused by the fluidity and diversity of the movement. Since his ministry is dedicated to reducing Christianity into a series of non-negotiable bullet-points, his reaction doesn’t surprise me.

At least Cameron does seem to have paid attention. Or at least, read their website. Which is what makes the whole thing so baffling.

Do you think that Druids are really a strange and secretive lot? Read their blogs.

Do you think your Johnny is dabbling in dark magic? Check his Facebook page.

Think it may be Satanism? Well, is it Theistic Satanism or Non-theistic Satanism? Perhaps you’d better read some of their faqs.

Honestly, if there was an evil occult conspiracy, it would have a blog circle, a webforum and half a dozen junior members policing its Wikipedia page.

Somewhere I picked up the idea that Cyrus the Great, the ruler of Persia who allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland, was a great example of enlightened rule. In a recent TED talk, Neil Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, spoke about the Cyrus Cylinder. The Cylinder, a triumphal declaration of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon, explains how Cyrus repatriated displaced people, rebuilt temples to the Babylonian god Marduk, and in general acting like an enlightened and merciful conqueror. MacGregor spoke about it in glowing terms:

The Cylinder bears one of the “great declarations of a human aspiration,” comparable to the American Constitution and Magna Carta. Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire he established (ca. 550-330 B.C.E.) bequeathed to history “a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.”

Over at HuffPo, Jacob L. Wright … complicates this story:

As most historians who specialize in early Persian history would readily point out, the chief objective of Cyrus and his successors was no different than that of other imperial powers: to maintain control of their vast empire and to exploit the wealth of its subjects. [...]

Influenced in great measure by the biblical image of Jews returning to their homeland under Persian hegemony, many assume that the rule of Persian kings was much more tolerant than that of the Assyrians. But recent research has demonstrated the significant lines of continuity between these two empires. The Persians engaged in the same mass deportations and harsh punishment of rebels for which the Assyrians are famous. The extent to which the Persian court involved itself in the affairs of its subject peoples was determined by concerns for the king’s prosperity. In order to ensure that wealth flowed from the provinces into the imperial coffers, rulers sometimes practiced the politics of benefaction, granting favors to representative groups in return for loyalty and compliance.

Hat tip to Robert Cargill, who sums it up well:

The fact that Persia preferred to rule its provinces, including עבר-נהרה (Avar-Nahara), the Persian province Yehud (known previously as Judah) through temples and religious leaders (and governors, rather than risking the rebellion of foreign kings), should not disguise the fact that it was just as authoritative as Babylonian and Assyrian empires that preceded it. In fact, Persia went the extra step of promoting a single national tongue – Aramaic – an issue that is just as controversial today in the US as it was then in Persia.

The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years. The growth was fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, the changing racial makeup of America, and the prospect of four more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country.

The number of hate groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year reached a total of 1,018, up slightly from the year before but continuing a trend of significant growth that is now more than a decade old. The truly stunning growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.

Apparently the Patriot movement declined under President Bush, but rose again after the subprime collapse and the election of Obama. I had always known that this was the case, but the actual numbers are frightening:

The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding. From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274. That works out to a staggering 755% growth in the three years ending last Dec. 31. Last year’s total was more than 400 groups higher than the prior all-time high, in 1996.

It’s almost a rule of history that every revolution sparks a counter revolution, and every advance creates a backlash. The SPLC is blaming that for the rise in the number of Anti-Gay hate groups:

The LGBT community made significant advances in 2011, with the repeal of the “Don’t Act, Don’t Tell” policy on gay men and lesbians in the military, the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage by Americans and the legalization of such bonds in New York state. But it was precisely these advances that seemed to set off a furious rage on the religious right. [...] Overall, the number of anti-gay hate groups in the United States rose markedly, going from 17 in 2010 to 27 last year.

You must oppose abortion, in any circumstances.

You must uphold the right to have guns, all kinds of guns.

You must endorse the idea of a balanced state and federal budget, whatever it takes, even if your primary responsibility is to be sure the county budget is balanced.

You must favor, and live up to, abstinence before marriage.

You must be faithful to your spouse. Your spouse cannot be a person of the same gender, and you are not allowed to favor any government action that would allow for civil unions of people of the same sex.

You cannot now, from the moment you sign this pledge, look at pornography.

It’s those last three that seem likely to be the sticking point. Given the track record of Republican candidates in recent years, requiring everyone to sign this pledge would seem like a quick way to depopulate the party.

I’m glad that the good folks of Laurens County have taken this step, and I can only hope that it catches on throughout the country. I believe that moral purity, rather than political skill, should be the defining characteristic of Republicans candidates. Of course, I’m a Democrat.

Via Dangerous Minds and TPM

Scott points out that the music is “To Build a Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra. Quite lovely.