From the Associated Press:

A Rome high school has decided to install vending machines selling condoms for its students, sparking angry reaction from the Catholic Church which claims the move will only encourage youths to have sex…

L’Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, said Thursday that sex was being reduced to ‘‘mere physical exercise.’’ The paper lamented that young people these days have no spiritual guidance when it comes to sexuality, and that educators are more concerned with ‘‘the health and hygiene consequences of sex’’ than the moral implications.

We wouldn’t be seeing all this nonsense if choirboys could get pregnant.

A confession:

In a note read on Vatican Radio, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, cautioned against limiting the concerns over child sexual abuse to Roman Catholic institutions, noting that the problem also affected the broader society.

Hear this, from the American Family Association:

Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture…

What about the term “killer whale” do SeaWorld officials not understand?

If the counsel of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed, Tillikum would have been put out of everyone’s misery back in 1991 and would not have had the opportunity to claim two more human lives.

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

So, your animal kills somebody, your moral responsibility is to put that animal to death. You have no moral culpability in the death, because you didn’t know the animal was going to go postal on somebody.

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

Pursuant to our recent interest in agnosticism and atheism, I pass along a specimen of Bertrand Russell’s apostasy, written 60 years ago but as fresh as yesterday’s earthquakes in Haiti:

Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science has gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have taken up another.

After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against theories of psychology and education. At each stage they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is. Let us note a few instances of irrationality among the clergy since the rise of science, and then enquire whether the rest of mankind are any better.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod the clergy, both in England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people are aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin — the virtuous are never struck by lightning.

Therefore if God wants to strike anyone, Benjamin Franklin ought not to defeat His design; indeed to do so is helping criminals to escape. But God was equal to the occasion, if we are to believe the eminent Dr. Price, one of the leading divines of Boston.

Lightning having been rendered ineffectual by the “iron points invented by the sagacious Dr. Franklin,” Massachusetts was shaken by earthquakes, which Dr. Price perceived to be due to God’s wrath at the “iron points.” In a sermon on the subject he said, “In Boston are more erected than elsewhere in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. O! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.”

Apparently, however, Providence gave up all hope of curing Boston of its wickedness, for, though lightning-rods became more and more common, earthquakes in Massachusetts have remained rare. Nevertheless, Dr. Price’s point of view, or something very like it, was still held by one of the most influential men of recent times. When, at one time, there were several bad earthquakes in India, Mahatma Gandhi solemnly warned his compatriots that the disasters had beeen sent as a punishment for their sins.

What are we to make of this?

The studies show there’s significantly less racism among people who don’t have strong religious beliefs, while highly devout religious communities exhibit more prejudice against people of other races (with seminaries showing the highest degree of racism). The researchers found barely any difference between the amount of racism among religious fundamentalists and more moderate Christians. “Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant,” they write in their paper.

The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives. The smallest, tiniest intellect may be quite as valuable to society as the largest. It may be still more valuable to itself: it may have all the capacity for enjoyment that the wisest has. The purpose of man is like the purpose of the pollywog — to wriggle along as far as he can without dying; or to hang on until death takes him.

Quoted in Infidels and Heretics: An Agnostic’s Anthology, edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice.

UPDATE from the same source: “I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.”

Here’s the Word of the Lord from John Hart, who is communications director for famed Christian Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma:

Coburn’s opposition to government programs, Hart said, stemmed from his concern for the poor. “His faith informs everything he does,” Hart said. He went on to say that, in the New Testament, Jesus mentions the poor some 300 times. “He doesn’t view the Bible as a think-tank document.,” Hart said. So, Coburn, before he contemplates a policy, Hart said, first asks himself, “How will it impact the people least able to fend for themselves?”

“He has come to the conclusion that large government enterprises harm poor more than help them,” Hart said, offering Medicaid as an example. He conceded that the government health-care program does help some poor people, but he contends that it hurts others, because “40 percent of doctors refuse to accept Medicaid.” (Coburn is an MD himself.)

Hart said that the expansion of Medicaid beyond the ranks of the “truly poor” will only hurt more people.

And, in a not unrelated story, we learn that, “Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.”

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – A Senate committee voted Tuesday night to restore $50 million a year in federal funding for abstinence-only education that President Barack Obama has pushed to eliminate.

The 12-11 vote by the Senate Finance Committee came over objections from its chairman, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.

Two Democrats — Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas — joined all 10 committee Republicans in voting “yes” on the measure by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah.

Thank God I’ve found another repressed minority to belong to (I was already a male WASP, although the P has dwindled to showing up at an occasional funeral).

Even in a city like Atlanta, some people feel religious pressure. Ed Buckner, president of American Atheists, said the Atlanta Freethought Association has members who “never saw any need [to gather with others] until they came to Atlanta – and people behind you in line in the grocery store say ‘Do you know Jesus?’

It seems to me that the only possible answer to that question would be “None of your damned business,” although as a Freethoughter I’m of course open to other suggestions.

…have been surprised by such religious recrudescences as Operation Rescue and the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller. Patriots and Peoples, a blog whose existence I discovered about five minutes ago, quotes the Founding Father:

The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious; ready at the word of a lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere, the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus.

You’ve been hearing about the C Street house where Sanford and Ensign and Wamp and many another sinner of the GOP lived and loved and laughed together.

But it’s all a whole lot creepier that you even think, unless you happen to remember Jeff Sharlet’s 2003 piece in Harper’s called “Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats.”

The book which grew out of it, The Family, is just out in trade paperback, and I urge you to buy it. And you will, once you read the 2003 piece. Excerpt:

It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian — a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ’s honor — but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers’ meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father’s fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God…

Religious notes from the New York Times:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Some of those seated in the pews of New Bethel Church here Saturday night, their firearms tucked to their sides, saw themselves as modern-day pioneers…

Likewise, Tommy Hillerich, 68, a retired truck driver, and Maya, 58, his wife, a former auto upholstery worker, did not bring their firearms inside but firmly believe in their right to do so.

“I don’t see a thing wrong with having a loaded gun in there,” Mr. Hillerich said. “If the pastor’s in there and he’s got a concealed weapon and somebody comes in and starts shooting people, he can take him out. That’s his right.”

Here’s an old item from the dawn of Bad Attitudes that I just came across. Sadly, it’s still relevant.

The Reverend Michael Bray of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Bowie, Maryland, runs an annual benefit banquet for imprisoned murderers, bombers, arsonists and other criminals in the anti-abortion movement:

“For example, he said, Paul Hill, convicted for the 1994 killings of a doctor who performed abortions and his escort in Florida, sent along a letter listing the ten commandments. Mr. Malvasi’s contributions to the charity auction, Mr. Bray said, included the watch he used as a timing device in a bombing attempt in the 1980s.

“‘You can understand the level of levity here,’ Mr. Bray said. He added that the items sold for amounts up to $100.” (New York Times, March 31, 2001)

From Edward O. Wilson’s great 1978 book, On Human Nature:

The one form of altruism that religions seldom display is tolerance of other religions. Their hostility intensifies when societies clash, because religion is superbly serviceable to the purposes of warfare and economic exploitation. The conqueror’s religion becomes a sword, that of the conquered a shield.

From the story in today’s New York Times about the Catholic Church’s network of children’s schools in Ireland for the “poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted,” run in Christ’s name by sadists and sexual abusers. I happen to know a woman who was raised in one of these houses of mercy; she confirms what the church had managed to keep hidden until the 1990s.

The devil, as usual, is in the details:

Some of the schools operated essentially as workhouses. In one school, Goldenbridge, girls as young as seven spent hours a day making rosaries by stringing beads onto lengths of wire. They were given quotas: 600 beads on weekdays and 900 on Sundays.

Riding freights around the country many years ago, I ran across a man who told me, “If you’re ever hungry, boy, ask a poor man.” Good advice, and still good today:

America’s poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What’s more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does…

Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America’s households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent…

Pastor Coletta Jones, who ministers to a largely low-income tithing congregation in southeast Washington, The Rock Christian Church, thinks that poor people give more because they ask for less for themselves.

“When you have just a little, you’re thankful for what you have,” Jones said, “but with every step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and gets you into a state of never being satisfied.”

How come we get commentators like Carrie Prejean and the French get Carla Bruni? From the Daily Mail:

French First Lady Carla Bruni today launched an astonishing attack on the Pope — accusing the Catholic Church of ‘damaging’ countries like Africa with its birth control proclamations.

The Italian-born former supermodel said she was so dissatisfied with the Pontiff that she no longer practised the religion she was born into.

Her outburst, made at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris, caused outrage — not only among France’s millions of Catholics, but also among those who do not believe it is the job of an unelected First Lady to criticise a world figure, least of all the Pope.

Miss Bruni said: ‘I was born Catholic, I was baptised, but in my life I feel profoundly secular.

‘I find that the controversy coming from the Pope’s message – albeit distorted by the media — is very damaging.

‘In Africa it’s often Church people who look after sick people. It’s astonishing to see the difference between the theory and the reality.’

Seriously. Doesn’t the Supreme Court of the United States of America have anything better than this to do?

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal appeals court to re-examine its ruling in favor of CBS Corp. in a legal fight over entertainer Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.

The high court on Monday directed the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to consider reinstating the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission imposed on CBS over Jackson's breast-baring performance at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Rather than make some biting comment about Christianity and hypocrisy, I'll just report, and let you decide.

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

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

Fom the Wall Street Journal (paid link):

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Benedict XVI said on his way to Africa Tuesday that condoms weren’t the answer in the continent’s fight against HIV, his first explicit statement on an issue that has divided even clergy working with AIDS patients…

“You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms,” the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane headed to Yaounde, Cameroon, where he will begin a seven-day pilgrimage on the continent. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

As your immigrant great-grandpa used to say: “He no play-a da game, he no make-a da rules.”

This from Bristol Palin, for whom I hope all goes well.

(CNN) — In her first interview since giving birth, the teenage daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said having a child is not “glamorous,” and that telling young people to be abstinent is “not realistic at all.”

“It’s just, like, I’m not living for myself anymore. It’s, like, for another person, so it’s different,” Bristol Palin told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “And just you’re up all night. And it’s not glamorous at all,” she said. “Like, your whole priorities change after having a baby…”

The best option is abstinence, the teen said, but added that she didn’t think that was “realistic.”

More heartwarming news from our BFF in the Middle East:

A Saudi judge has ordered a woman should be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes after she was gang-raped, it was claimed last night.

The 23-year-old woman, who became pregnant after her ordeal, was reportedly assaulted after accepting a lift from a man.

He took her to a house to the east of the city of Jeddah where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night…

According to the Saudi Gazette, she eventually ‘confessed’ to having ‘forced intercourse’ with her attackers and was brought before a judge at the District Court in Jeddah.

He ruled she had committed adultery — despite not even being married — and handed down a year’s prison sentence, which she will serve in a prison just outside the city.

She is still pregnant and will be flogged once she has had the child.

From the International Herald Tribune:

ROME — Responding to an extraordinary burst of global outrage, especially in Pope Benedict XVI's native Germany, the Vatican for the first time on Wednesday called on a recently rehabilitated bishop to take back his statements denying the Holocaust.

Late last month, the pope revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, including Bishop Richard Williamson, a Briton, who in an interview broadcast last month denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

In a statement issued Wednesday, the Vatican Secretariat of State said that Bishop Williamson "must absolutely, unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah," or Holocaust, or else he would not be allowed to serve as a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church.

However the question that must be troubling Catholic clergy, church scholars, schismatics of various flavors, theologians, and just plain laymen with any common sense at all, is whether the bishop will have his fingers crossed. Certainly the Pope will.

Pope Benedict just named one Fr Gerhard Maria Wagner as assistant bishop of the Austrian city of Linz.

Fr Wagner is notorious for his extreme views — he has accused the popular Harry Potter novels of spreading Satanism, and described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for the sinners of New Orleans.

He wrote in a parish newsletter that the death and destruction caused by the hurricane in New Orleans was divine retribution for the city’s tolerance of homosexuals and permissive sexual attitudes.

The future bishop said he was glad that Katrina destroyed not only nightclubs and brothels in New Orleans, but also five of the city’s abortion clinics.

Televangelist John Hagee:

I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are —were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade on the Monday that the Katrina came, and the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing.

The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi :

[Al Qaeda’s then-leader in Iraq] issued a statement on the Internet calling Katrina divine retribution. “God’s great wrath has hit the head of the oppressors,” the statement read…

In the recording, al-Zarqawi said, “I believe the devastating hurricane that hit the United States occurred because people in Iraq or Afghanistan — maybe a mother who had lost her son or a son whose parents were killed or a woman who was raped — were praying for God and God accepted their prayers.”

And, from the third of the great Semitic monotheisms, here’s Ovadia Yosef…

… a former chief rabbi of Israel and the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement, said Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for President Bush 's support for Israel's Gaza pullout.

“Bush was behind the (expulsion of) Gush Katif,” he said. “He encouraged Sharon to expel Gush Katif…we had 15,000 people expelled here, and there 150,000 (were expelled from New Orleans — ed. note)

Everybody else is giving advice to Obama, why not Francis Bacon? And so, from his essay “On Seditions and Troubles”:

A smaller number that spend more and earn less do wear out an estate sooner than a greater number that live lower and gather more. Therefore the multiplying of nobility and other degrees of quality in an over proportion to the common people doth speedily bring a state to necessity; and so doth likewise an overgrown clergy; for they bring nothing to the stock; and in like manner, when more are bred scholars than preferments can take off…

Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done chiefly by suppressing or at least keeping a strait hand upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.

Bad news for Seinfeld freaks and all you freaks at the Westboro Baptist Church:

Washington state officials placed a moratorium late Friday on permitting any more holiday displays inside the Capitol this year.

An atheists’ sign placed near a Nativity scene sparked a controversy after commentators on Fox News drew attention to it. Afterward, Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office was flooded with nearly 15,000 phone calls from people nationwide who opposed the sign.

The moratorium in effect denies space to several requests, including one for a sign that says “Santa Claus will take you to Hell” and a “Festivus” pole. Festivus is a mock holiday popularized by the “Seinfeld” sitcom in the 1990s.

Merry Christmas from the Westboro Baptist Church!

“You’d better watch out, get ready to cry/ You’d better go hide, I’m telling you why/

’cuz Santa Claus will take you to hell.

“He is your favorite idol, you worship at his feet,/ but when you stand before your God He won’t help you take the heat.

“So get this fact straight: you’re feeling God’s hate,/ Santa’s to blame for the economy’s fate,

“Santa Claus will take you to hell.”

From the Associated Press, a Prince of the Church making his priorities clear:

SANTIAGO, Chile – Madonna is causing “crazy enthusiasm” and “impure thoughts” on her first concert visit to Chile, a prominent retired cardinal complained on Wednesday, as he paused in a tribute to a late dictator to denounce the pop star.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina criticized the flamboyant singer during his homily at a Mass in honor of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw the deaths of some 3,200 dissidents during his 1973-1990 rule…

Medina said that some of those who claim to seek justice for violations of human rights under the dictator are actually seeking revenge.

I would prefer to describe myself as a libertarian agnostic when describing my beliefs on religion rather than an atheist. I am not a libertarian in the strict sense in terms of my personal political philosphies by any stretch of the imagination, but would describe myself in those terms in regards to the one subject of religion. Personally I care little about another person’s religious beliefs unless I sense their religious beliefs as endangering my own freedom to believe as I wish. I hope and wish that no one (except perhaps my wonderful wife) cares about my religious beliefs. However, I am happy to report that I am not living in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 although I question whether that may again be part of nation’s future if we continue on the path of the last eight years.

The song posted below is described as an “atheist spiritual” on YouTube although I tend to think the former definition fits the song better. However, I made up the term libertarian agnostic and have no idea whether it is in common use or not. My beliefs on the subject of religion seem best described by some of the writings and letters of Einstein, although I am not he by any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t believe that another’s religion is anyone’s business unless they use religion as a force or club to infringe on the lives of others who choose a different path, as we often see happening in America today. Nevertheless, I like the song and I like the style of Chris Wood, the singer of this song, and thought I would share it with others who may find it to be helpful at this time in the life of our nation, whatever you chose to call the song. If religious songs, or libertarian religious folk songs are not your cup of tea, I’ll probably be serving whiskey on some upcoming post, so feel free to remain on the wagon for this one.

The name of this song is Come Down Jehovah, and it was written by Chris Wood. It is on somebody’s list of “top ten atheist songs”, but I'm not sure why. The song seems to have more of an agnostic than an atheist flavor to it in my opinion. I don’t see how an atheist song could possibly have a spiritual component to it, and yet we find the songwriter asking Jehovah to come down and the devil to come up and make themselves known to all their cohorts here on Earth. I find it to be a cup of tea and not a shot of whiskey, but then I regard folk music as a form of poetry more than a form of musical entertainment much of the time, so interpretations can often differ in this type of creative work.

[update: The link to Chris Wood above has a playable folk song called The Cottager’s Reply, which is or was a commentary about the huge rise in rural home prices in the English countryside in recent years and one cottage owners reasons for his refusal to sell. Worth a listen.]

I haven’t paid as much attention to the Tom Cruise-Scientology nexus as I should have. This video brought me up to speed, and I hope it will do the same for you. There are only two words to describe the effect it had on me: “holy” and “shit.”

Once the initial bemusement passed, though, I began to wonder how a Martian would react to a video of a not-too-bright Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist babbling on about his own One True Faith.

…and so I won’t even try. These are excerpts from Women Against Sarah Palin, the wonderful website to which my sister Pat alerted me, and about which I blogged earlier this week.

Sarah Palin is the classic example of a woman being used by those in power to remove power from women.

I want to love a mother, governor and VP candidate, but Palin horrifies me, she seems to epitomize the American inability to be introspective, to polarize and see everything in terms of black and white, good or evil, right or wrong. This intolerance and inability to get out of a narrow perspective and see the divine spark in all is at the core of the danger America is creating for itself, and feeds the dissension in America. She has a sharp, but not a deep mind fast with the comebacks, but more interested in bullying an argument than in understanding the truth.

Even in this very red state of Alabama, we know the difference between a show horse, a hobby horse, and a work horse. You do not represent working class women, farm wives or single mothers — ALL of whom turned to Hillary Clinton with great hopes. You charged women for their own rape kits when you were mayor in Wasilla. You use housekeepers and nannies to care for your kids. You don’t want sex education in schools, but you let your daughter get pregnant! You do not now, nor will you ever speak for us!

I can hardly begin to express the depth of my anger at hearing Ms. Palin denigrate the many community organizers I worked with and proudly call my friends. Community Organizers make the world a better place, doing God’s work day in and day out, night after night. To hear that convention audience laugh in response to her snide remarks really pissed me off. I didn’t realize just how steamed I was until a dear friend (another longtime community activist) sent me an e-mail with this message: Jesus was a Community Organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

Sarah Palin represents the slap of the dinosaur’s tail — a deadly, horned swipe of a breed going extinct; quite likely, in her throes of excited thrashing, to kill off many individuals, many careers, many dearly held gains, won since 1963, for which many of us fought with our brains, our convictions, our blood, our time, our eloquence, and our money…

Are we ready to stand idly by while an old, ill man, watches Sarah’s shapely behind, while fingering his wedding ring? Are we ready to give up our time to choose, our right to decide and let this mockery of a modern woman, this poorly educated bigot tramples our civil rights? Are we ready to die if our life is endangered by an unhealthy pregnancy? Are we willing to let Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the other megalomaniacs at the helm of the Republican party decide the course of our lives, our daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives?

Even the power she gained as the mayor of a town of a mere 5000, immediately corrupted her; her wide swipes through the administration she inherited were so disruptive to that small government entity that an immediate remedy was set in place — an administrator had to be hired to do the job of running the town while she was mayor. And still, the surplus she inherited turned into a deficit — IMAGINE the damage she could orchestrate on a national level.

The Alaskan legislature took to wearing buttons that said, “Where’s Sarah?” because she spent so little time in Juneau. Once again, the GOP is deceiving the American people in a most callous and calculating way — just because they put a skirt on this time doesn’t change a damned thing!

Women in particular should project hope and love and caring for others, and Ms. Palin does none of this, choosing instead to be mean-spirited and accusatory in every single speech and action. I can only hope that with time, people will recognize this and realize that we need someone quite different from her to take us down the road to respect and REAL morality.

But she is not the problem — our problem is the white old men that insist on running this country with their need to control, their archaic laws and ideas. Their lives are based on fear and ridiculous needs to dominate our pocketbook, our bodies and to shoot before thinking and talking. They also have a great need to distort the truth — in other words LYING. This young woman from Alaska is being fooled with — she is their decoy — but she might be elected and then she could be a heartbeat away from being in charge of our lives.

The American people have become distracted. Palin, participating in this election as a trojan horse, has come with phrases that involve animals and lipsticks, bridges to nowhere, and eBay, leading americans in to an abyss of distractions pulling away from the very sobering facts that who she represents and the policies she supports are a complete replica of the current Bush administration, on paper, and without personality mud-slings, the Palin/MCCain ticket represent four more years of the same policies the world has come to hate.

Here we have the ideal ticket for anyone who supports women’s rights — Obama and Biden — versus two people who think women are brainless fools. The fact that Palin wears a skirt doesn’t mean she has respect for women. On the contrary. It just means that she uses her sex to stop any questions about her competence by accusing the questioner of sex-discrimination. Frankly, I didn’t buy that argument when Hillary made it and I’m certainly not buying it from Palin.

This classic bait and switch move has the electorate once again focusing on the culture wars instead of the real ones, on pseudo-feminism instead of tolerance and equality.

Her extreme beliefs regarding abstinence-only education did not work even for her own daughter! and yet she wants to force it on our daughters! We will not have it. We can do better, there are stronger, more thoughtful and fair minded women in this country who are fit to run it.

Is Ms.Palin really the best the Republican party has to offer in terms of a female? I guess there are slim pickings for a woman who will support an antiquated and sexist Republican agenda.

The cruel irony of Senator Clinton blooding herself on that glass ceiling only to have a puppet escorted through on the arm of a warrior…

These people are two loose cannons on a rolling deck and I genuinely fear for the future of our great country. If John McCain is unable to see his term through, Sarah Palin is next in line as leader of the Free World.

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.” Really? Because the parents of children with disabilities in Alaska don’t have much of a friend or advocate right now. Even in years of great surplus, she actually cut state funding for special education services and Medicaid — the program that children and adults with disabilities rely on for health care.

Ms. Palin is also well documented as a local bully who tries to fire anyone who disagrees with her. After eight years of an unqualified President who has done everything in his power to position America as a global bully, this characteristic is the last quality we need in the White House for four more years.

Sarah Palin sees the hand of God in a $30 billion Alaskan national gas pipeline. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she has stated.

Ms. Palin and I clearly worship very different gods. I see the hand of God not in the wallets of the oil companies, but in the pristine Alaska coastline, its majestic polar bears, whales, and glaciers — all of which Big Oil will despoil. Perhaps Ms. Palin has made the mistake that afflicts a frightening number of our citizens: confusing God with money.

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has recently posted a very timely and newsworthy item about Sarah Palin that should be read and distributed in both the right and left wing parts of the political blogosphere. Particularly to those who work in faith based organizations.

A worker at a faith based community organization and a community organizer for that group is frightened at what Palin really meant when she attacked community organizers at the Republican Convention. She starts out detailing what her thoughts were when she heard about Palin’s attack on Community organizers. A portion of the post is printed below.

The quote from Dickens, A Christmas Carol, comes to mind: “Are there no workhouses; are there no prisons?” This was Scrooge’s response to “community organizers” seeking donation for the poor.

Last night community organizers were equated with irresponsibility and radicalism by Gov. Palin in her speech.

Working for a faith-based nonprofit that offers (and people really know they can count on us to give them support with dignity) support and aid to individuals and families who are in tough ongoing or temporary financial situations, I consider myself to be a part of what was dismissed by Gov. Palin last night as irresponsible and radical. I worry that our sources of donations will fall not just because of having less disposable income to donate, but because of the truly irresponsible words that Gov. Palin used last night about the work that people like me do.

Let’s see you argue with this, from Eye of the Storm:

i’m going to say this one time, and then i’m going to shut up. re: bristol palin. the american liberal is, — seriously, literally — pro-abortion and anti-choice, believes essentially in mandatory abortion. what does the average liberal mom do when her 16-year-old daughter shows up pregnant? drags her immediately to the abortion clinic, whatever the daughter’s (or the babydad’s, of course) misgivings.

the american left thinks that bristol palin having her baby is, actually, morally wrong. and more to the point, it shows something terrible about her mom, who had a moral obligation to make her daughter have an abortion. and one reason for this is that if you have a baby when you’re 16, you will likely slip out of our class. you’ll go live with joey, the kid who wants to be a mechanic. you’ll take classes at the community college instead of heading off to a decent school. you’ll end up in a housecoat with a houseful of wailing babies, listening to faith hill.

what haunts the imagination of the american liberal: my family, in the next generation, will be white trash. maybe it would be more interesting to look at these sorts of motivations than to try to figure out “when human life begins.”

What’s needed here is a vaccine for stupidity. From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Parents refusing to have their children vaccinated against measles have helped drive cases of the illness to their worst levels in a dozen years in the United States, health officials reported on Thursday…

“Of the 95 patients eligible for vaccination, 63 were unvaccinated because of their or their parents’ philosophical or religious beliefs,” the CDC said…

Outbreaks of measles are being reported now in Israel, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Britain among people who are declining the vaccine.

British health officials said in June that measles had again become endemic for the first time since the mid-1990s due to parents declining to get their children vaccinated.

Very much like the rewarding relationship that working class evangelicals have with the Republican Party:

ASSOCIATED PRESS — Australian media say a lost humpback whale calf has bonded with a yacht it seems to think is its mother.

The 1- to 2-month-old calf was first sighted Sunday in waters off north Sydney, and on Monday tried to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave.

It may be that somewhere, sometime, a hate-crazed liberal once shot up a right-wing fundamentalist church, but no such occasion comes to mind.

And as for “acting alone,” where do you suppose the vicious simpleton below got the idea that things like desegregation, a living wage, women’s rights and gay rights were the cause of all his troubles?

Anything come to mind this time? Limbaugh? O’Reilly? Hagee? Falwell? Coulter? Parsley? Robertson? Savage? And on. And on. And on…

From the BBC:

A man accused of shooting dead two people in a Tennessee church was motivated by hatred of liberals and anger at being jobless, US police say…

“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Chief Owen said…

The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church describes itself on its website as working for social change since the 1950s, including desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights.

Police say it appears Mr. Adkisson was acting alone.

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly…

Today’s text is taken from the spoken word of Clarence Jordan, one of the finest and bravest Christian gentlemen the South ever produced.

Jordan, a wealthy lawyer who gave up the law to found Koinonia Farm, would walk into a rich man’s house and say, “Nice piece of plunder you’ve got here.”

This just in from medieval Rome:

…The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs…

I'm kind of partial to this little ditty by Iris DeMent. Let it be.

Our friend Neddie over at BNJ put up another fine post last week, “An Atheist at Christmas”. Acknowledging and bewailing the manifold sins and wickednesses of the mass emailing lists of friends, he finds particular excess in a recent one.

In sum, the item forwarded to me was simple intellectual pollution, more goddamned dumbness that cloaks itself as folksy wisdom and makes its forwarder feel virtuous for having passed it on.

Besides the slanders and the untruths, and the profoundly irritating conflation of the concepts of "secular" and "atheist," what was most off-putting about the thing was its general aggrieved tone, as though its author were part of some put-upon minority, an underclass of the righteous who loathe the idea that many people don’t take their religion quite as seriously as the righteous think they ought.

If you’ve been reading John Dean recently, you might have encountered the work of Bob Altemeyer, a research psychologist at the University of Manitoba who studies authoritarian personality types. He’s got decades’ worth of survey information and results; other researchers have both added data and extended the ideas.

Authoritarians include followers as well as the power-hungry. Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as the covariation of three attitudes: conventionality, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression. Conventionality involves conforming to social conventions and believing that others ought to do the same. Authoritarian submission means believing in leaders and authority as the best means of keeping society prosperous. Authoritarian aggression indicates the subset of aggressive tendencies that is disinhibited when it’s perceived to be sanctioned by authority, or would help authority maintain its position.

Altemeyer’s Enemies of Freedom is not as famous as it should be. Admittedly it includes a lot of statistical detail, but the detail builds an argument that covers a lot of ground, makes a lot of sense, and seems to provide useful frameworks for understanding some behavior patterns that often occur among fundamentalists and social conservatives in particular.

Dean’s recent Conservatives Without Conscience brought new attention to Altemeyer’s work, and several surprising facts emerge. He’s managed to get this research done without grants, by using his own money and getting a lot of data from his own students, their parents, and their friends. He has a writing style that has you laughing in the preface, and throughout, despite the density of the numbers. Plus, you quickly begin to trust him, because he tells you so much about his thinking and experimentation: what he surveyed for, how he munged the data, how he interprets the results, where ambiguities continue to exist, and on to the next step.

Thus it’s perhaps not surprising that Enemies of Freedom isn’t so easy to find. In fact there were none at Powell’s or eBay, and I was forced to resort to Amazon. Where I discovered two used copies, one $138, the other $154.

Fortunately, as Professor Altemeyer kindly pointed out in an email, he has an updated version of the content, minus the vast majority of the statistical detail, and thus both shorter and easier to read. I’m half-way through it and I highly recommend it. Oh, and The Authoritarians is free.

Among the most interesting issues Altemeyer examines is the question of why people remain in the relatively closed world that authoritarians must inhabit if they wish to maintain their viewpoint. Many, perhaps most, tend to modify at least some of their views and behavior when they encounter new information. But they generally grow up in a heavily circumscribed world that keeps them safe and gives their lives shape and structure, so they have no reason to leave it, or to disbelieve its tenets.

Of course many people grow up in such situations and rebel, or suffer inner dichotomies, or simply lose the ability to reconcile everything and give up. Those whom Altemeyer’s scale labels High Right-Wing Authoritarians, however, feel comfortable there. (By the way, there could also be left-wing authoritarians, who instead of submitting to established authority would submit to revolutionary authority. But there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are RWAs, nor does Altemeyer’s scale directly look for them.)

After looking at several possible explanations, Altemeyer’s data led him to conclude that two factors dominate in the backgrounds of authoritarians. First, they see the world as a very dangerous place, with possibilities for disaster looming around every corner. Second, they see themselves as upholding the Good and the Right as opposed to all those folks who don’t hue to the same high standards they perceive themselves to follow.

Thus they have reason to be frightened, plus aggressive impulses against those who appear to deserve censure, which are inhibited by their strong need to conform to social convention. They need reinforcement to tell them that they’re still in the group; they get a thrill from thumbing their noses at those they figure will in some sense get Left Behind; and they’re often insufferably hypocritical.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing Altemeyer discovered, though, was how frequently such people modified their views with experience, which turned out to be the strongest factor in determining attitudes, stronger than parents and upbringing or religion. For instance, many students entering college are emerging from their parents’ world for the first time, and bring with them the attitudes that worked in that world, and predicted what would happen. They may have been taught that sex is bad, or that homosexual folks are scuzzy and evil; then they have sex, or they meet someone who’s homosexual, and discover that what they’ve been taught isn’t true.

People do change. As Bishop Tutu says, every situation is capable of transfiguration.

Religious news from Iowa:

“I’m concerned a lot of Christians are thinking about the values issues and forgetting about the creator behind the values issues,” Ms. Gherkey said. “I guess I feel like this country and this world needs a president who would be able to pray to the God of the Bible and he would be able to hear his prayers.”

She wondered, Would Mr. Romney’s prayers “even get through?”

I musta been out of the room, or maybe I missed Sunday school that week. But I don’t remember anything in the New Testament promoting hate. In fact, I thought the only real advance Christianity made, the only feature of import not taken directly from Egyptian myth or Buddhist practice from centuries or millennia earlier, was the command to love your enemy.

So how dumb must a preacher be to believe that “God Hates Fags”?

By protesting at the funeral of a 20-year-old Marine killed in Iraq, the morons from Westboro Baptist Church (how could it be any other denomination?) have managed to run up a $10.9 million fine, and in my opinion ten times that much would have been acceptable as well.

Fred W. Phelps Sr., Westboro’s founder, vowed to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Richmond, Va.

“It’s going to be reversed in five minutes,” he said. This case, he added, “will elevate me to something important,” as it draws more publicity to his cause.

Likely true. Alan Dershowitz will probably show up, in between pro-torture speeches and articles, to defend Phelps’s right to be obnoxious, and money will pour in from morons around the country, now bereft of some of their favorite anti-gay ministers, for various reasons we needn’t go into at this moment.

These people are such idiots that they can stand on a street corner and sing “God hates America” to the obvious tune, and see no incompatibility with the message of the Prince of Peace. They’re not protesting war, or murder. They’re protesting sex. War is fine, as long as it’s purely heterosexual. Hey, anyone who’s seen Starship Troopers or Battlestar Galactica knows sex and war go together. Perhaps it’s only near the field of battle that Christianists can find a way to enjoy themselves. Oh, that’s right, enjoying things is a sin, I forgot. I’m supposed to be unhappy my whole life.

After the verdict, Phelps and his two daughters named in Snyder’s lawsuit said they believed that it was really their religious beliefs that were on trial.

“The goofy jury threw a fit at God,” Phelps said.

Sit on it, Westboro Baptist Church.

For full details of this dispatch from the reality-based world, simply click here:

The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.

The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.

The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Go read The Theology of American Empire at The Smirking Chimp. It’s by Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We should all listen to him, but we won’t. Sample:

The bipartisan consensus on U.S. foreign policy calls for us to be powerful enough to dominate them. But every step we take to dominate only antagonizes more people and makes some of them really want to harm us. As long as we keep on this self-defeating road, we are not a national security state. We are a national insecurity state.

So, we need to redefine national security in a way that meets people’s need for a second value that so many of us share: moral certainty. This involves a faith in some rock-bottom kind of goodness in the world, which many Americans believe has a special home here in the United States.

There is a special kind of goodness, rooted in a special kind of theology, that does have an old and honored home here — the goodness of nonviolence. There have always been Christians who were certain that the only moral way to treat others, even enemies, is with love, not violence. They knew it because Jesus said it, right there in the Bible. In 19th-century America, the abolitionists and Thoreau turned the theology of nonviolence into a homegrown strategy for political change.

Martin Luther King, Jr. took this strategy a crucial step further. He preached that it’s the government’s role to help bring all people together in what he called “the beloved community” (something very much like what the Social Gospel called the Kingdom of God). Every government policy should promote “the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother [and sister]” — the responsibility to help every person fulfill their God-given potential.

Are progressives the new evangelicals?

They’re being used and lied to in the same fashion, by people almost as dishonest, and equally unconcerned for the country.

In fact a case can be made that the people using the progressives, who are often called Democrats (with as much justification as Bush as being called a uniter), are even more cynical and far less concerned for the country than those they claim to oppose, commonly called Republicans.

Naturally labels do not encompass all individuals. Senator Patrick “GFY” Leahy and Representatives Conyers and Waxman head the pack that springs to mind as believers in the only really admirable part of the United States: the ideals set down in the founding documents by a bunch of rich white male landowners, who ignored many of those ideals in their own lives, setting a standard for hypocrisy that their descendants have worked overtime to maintain to the present day.

So it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. But we figured the season would end, someone would ask for too much money, and the network would have to re-jigger the lineup before next season. And, worst case, we can always switch channels.

A little research on David Kuo, and you’re confused.

The author of Tempting Faith, and the talk of the Beltway when it came out, he has a diverse and suggestive background. For instance, he spent a year as a CIA intelligence officer, wrote speeches for Bob Dole, worked for Bill Bennett’s “think tank”, may have co-authored a book with Ralph Reed (Reed doesn’t credit him but the Heritage Foundation does; who ya gonna believe?), and came to Reed after a stint as John Ashcroft’s policy director. He also worked for two Kennedys, Joe in 1986, when Kuo was in college, and Ted in 1989, plus Gary Hart.

All this would tend to put Kuo in a position of great interest and usefulness to his former intelligence-community employer. Which is not to say he is CIA, or even that he thinks of himself as helping the agency. A close relative of mine was once sent on a CIA mission that was obvious to everyone around him, Americans and Nicaraguans, at the time. To this day he doesn’t understand why people thought that, since the agency never contacted him. I believe the technical term is “useful idiot”.

Of course it’s possible that Kuo is really a CIA or Illuminati plant, but I doubt it.

For one thing, judging by various TV interviews, he’s either got the classic simplistic Christian view of the psyche, or he’s the best actor since Johnny Depp. You kinda have to like him for the same reasons that make you shake your head in wonder. How can a decently intelligent person be so silly, so naïve?

So maybe he is a plant. Although he seemed quite sincere about his concern for the poor in interviews,

NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling reported that it was Kuo, when he worked at Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition as a “top adviser to the coalition’s main political strategist”, who in 1995 “helped draft the coalition’s manifesto, the ‘Contract with the American Family’ [that] argues that the nation should ‘abolish all major federal welfare programs’ and turn them over to ‘private and religious organizations.’”

Still, maybe it’s possible to argue for all help to the poor coming from churches and still be an honest, intelligent person. I can’t immediately reconcile that opposition; but for someone who can believe the Christian stories are actual history, while the Isis and Osiris story is myth, it might not be as much of a stretch.

I was fascinated to discover Kuo’s backstory, in part because his television appearances gave the impression of someone shallow but sincere. Obviously there’s more here than meets the eye, though precisely what it is remains unclear.

One can postulate, though, a person who really believes that Christianity is God’s gift to man, a cornucopia of blessings that would provide for all our needs, as if we were lilies arrayed more grandly than Solomon, would we but submit, believe, obey, and follow the rule that is absolute. Certainly a lot of humanity is looking for that rule.

Perhaps Kuo is a true believer, in other words, who is trying to manipulate the system to assist in what he perceives to be the divine plan. Such people do exist, and their simplicity and honesty make them credible enough to be often dangerous and occasionally effective.

The message of his book is apparently that the White House, and in particular the political wing, used the bait of money and influence, a sort of modern Temporal Power, to keep the evangelicals on board long enough to get their votes for the war, cutting taxes for the ultra-rich, and destroying what remained of the real economy. Thus, admittedly, creating the type of situation in which appeals to the (increasingly numerous) weak and desperate fall on eager ears, and the proposition that this life is not the one that matters is attractive.

So, it seems to me, either Kuo is actually angry at being used and abused, or he is pursuing a strategy too sophisticated for my simple understanding to grasp.

My question is, How long will it be until some equivalent true believer on the left recounts the details of the Democratic scam currently being run on progressives?

Because we’re clearly being used in the same way for the same reasons.

When Clinton describes herself as an agent of change, and skips the DLC meeting but attends YearlyKos, why don’t we laugh? Because we’re so desperate to be taken seriously that we look to the scummiest, low-downest politicos who’ve recently reversed their positions and claimed opposition to what we hate, gratefully accepting the invitation to a sure-to-be-ignored focus group. Oooh, we’re players now.

When Obama claims the superpower of removing conflict from politics, why doesn’t anyone ask him what’s left of politics afterwards? Without conflict politics would be an excresence, a waste of time for anyone who doesn’t like to fight, a mental World Wrestling Federation.

When Pelosi and Reid claim inability to affect events, despite holding both houses of Congress, they get grief from the Republicans for their inability to act. Democrats, apparently of the opinion that to beat a Nazi party you must become a Nazi party, encourage a lockstep march to the drum beat by the most hypocritical member of Congress in either party, which is saying something. “We can’t do anything unless Uncle Joe lets us” is obviously false, as all the candidates who aren’t currently squirming to avoid responsibility (in other words, those not currently in Congress) constantly emphasize.

Yes, I know the Republicans are filibustering everything that hits the Senate floor. How does that affect the House? Why don’t the Democrats in the House pass a withdraw-from-Iraq bill and let the Republican Senators filibuster it? Make them do it on the floor, as opposed to the current system: “Oh, you plan to filibuster? Okay, since we can’t pass anything, there’s no reason to show up at work. Let us know if you change your mind.” Make them do it on national TV, show their silly speeches and specious reasoning. Sure, the networks will refuse to cover anything that might end the war sooner, but CSPAN and YouTube will take care of that.

We don’t need a third party in this country, we need a second one. One that doesn’t promote war because its donors demand it.

What we seem to have is a Democratic party unable to break through the filibuster barrier, and unwilling to use its one incontrovertible method of ending the war now, namely removing the funding. The House can do that. Not even a unanimous Senate could prevent it. But the Democrats calculate that they are more likely to win the White House in 2008, and more likely to increase their Senate margin, if the war is still going.

The Speaker of the House, in particular, would rather hold onto her job with bloody hands than solve the war and risk losing the political game; and the Majority Leader’s got her back.

We need to let these people know we will not support this strategy. The problem is, I expect in the end that most wimpy liberals will, as usual, compromise away their beliefs and vote for the people whose strategy they do not support. That’s what’s killing Iraqis today: the liberals, not the conservatives.

This is from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

When the Rev. Jerry Falwell was dispatched from Lynchburg, Virginia to a Better Place last Tuesday, there was not a single Republican candidate for president to see him off. What an ungrateful bunch.

The night Falwell died, their grief was so palpable before the Fox News presidential debate, the moderator had to caution them to refrain from further expressions of sorrow, lest valuable time be taken from examinations of their near-unanimous defense of torture.

But on Tuesday, the man who created a Moral Majority to elect right thinking Christians couldn’t attract higher quality Republican mourners than a few shopworn former presidential candidates like Gary Bauer and Pat Robertson. You’d think the lowest tier candidates Michael Huckabee, Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo, who attacked evolution in the first Republican debate, would have found it in their interests to show up, but no. Not even Newt Gingrich, who spoke last week at Falwell’s Liberty University commencement and railed against radical secularism, could make it back.

There was one might-have-been Republican president in the congregation, last year’s fallen star, former Virginia governor and senator George Allen. Allen has more time for funerals than Romney, McCain, Giuliani and the rest ever since that Macaca thing cut short his own campaign for president mainly by causing him to lose his bid for reelection to the Senate last year.

The Bush administration expressed its gratitude for Falwell’s unstinting support by sending Tim Goeglein, described as a mid-level White House staff member in charge of outreach to religious and other special interest groups.

Tim did as expected, though, telling the mourners Falwell was “a great friend of the Administration.” But he may have risked offending the Big Guy — Bush, not Jehovah—when he gushed, “In all my time in the White House, I have never met a man who loved God and Country more than Jerry Falwell.”

Forgetting someone, Tim? Aren’t you the same White House official Tim Goeglin, who said after 9/11, “I think President Bush is God’s man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility?” Or is there, God help us, more than one mid-level Tim Goeglin in the White House?

However, we should not be too hard on Tim, as he is not without redeeming values. In trying to find out who the Bushies sent to the Falwell rites, I discovered Tim is the author of a brief appraisal of George W. Bush that all of us can endorse:

“It’s amazing and I mean amazing what God has wrought in George W. Bush.”

Somehow this atrocity slipped by me, but it didn’t slip by Thomas Ware at Homeless on the High Desert. And so I pass this and this on.

Since there’s no date on the sites linked above I called one of the lawyers in the case to make sure that it’s still current. It is, and just today Doctors Opposing Circumcision received permission to file an amicus brief before the Washington Supreme Court.

It’s no news that the law is an ass, but this case is a beaut even for America’s legal system. Suppose the boy’s father wanted his son’s ears surgically pinned back or his nose bobbed, against the boy’s will. Would the judge have slapped that father silly, or what?

Or suppose the mother were a Baptist from Tennessee and the father a Moroccan Muslim, just to pick a circumcising faith at total random. Young Mohammed’s foreskin wouldn’t be any safer in Fort Knox than it would be in the courts of Washingon State.

It’s always seemed to me that jailing hardcore lawandorder Republicans served more of a social purpose than prison usually does, since it tends to turn control freaks into advocates for prison reform. Charles Colson comes to mind.

But I may have to rethink the whole matter. I’ve just been reading The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk by Susan McDougal, perhaps the only person to come out of the attempted lynching called Whitewater with her honor intact:

The atmosphere at Carswell [Medical Prison] was completely different than at Faulkner County Detention Center, and I found it very hard to integrate. Part of this was because of the floor I was on, and part of it was because the long-termers were so hardened. And part of it came from a very unexpected source: the evangelical Christian movement in the prison.

Started by ex-Watergate felon Charles Colson, the ‘born again’ movement had metamorphosed from a very worthy project to a kind of gang — the Christian Crips of prison. Led by a few strong, outspoken women, the Christian converts habitually told other prisoners when they could eat, when they should pray, and with whom they should socialize.

They were unabashedly intolerant of anyone who disagreed even slightly with their view, and they seem to reserve special contempt for the Jewish women on the floor. Routinely harassed, the Jewish women tended to keep their mouths shut and kept themselves separate from everyone else.

Having been raised a Christian, I was angered by this perversion of Christian principles. I never could stand the hypocrisy of those who claimed to be religious yet acted in profoundly unGodly ways. It was one of the things that I had grown to despise about Kenneth Starr.

Once again, the leaders of Christianity’s antediluvian wing phone heaven to find out which burning issues of the day Jesus deems most important. Jesus, bored, blows them off by telling them what they want to hear: take another stupid pill and call Me in the morning:

Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.

The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.

I just discovered Blog of the Gods, which I instantly added to our blogroll and from which I stole this:

Moments after being called to the stage to pick up the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Dreamgirls co-star Jennifer Hudson corrected the Academy’s mistake, placing credit squarely where it’s deserved: with Me! Almost the first words out of her mouth were, “Look what God can do.”

I’m sure that’s what the nominees who lost were thinking, too.

Later in her speech, Hudson repeated her thanks, “I thank the Academy… Definitely have to thank God, I guess, again.”

You guess? I suppose I’ll let that slide, since most of the other winners entirely forgot to cede credit to Me. In fact, that’s why you won. I don’t love any of the other supporting actresses at all. They suck, especially the little girl from Little Miss Sunshine …

I know we’ll all want to watch Ted Haggard, the latest televangelist to be forced out of one closet or another, as he jokes with his flock about being blackmailed by a gay man. This is beyond creepy.

Recently, while visiting my mother down in the rural South, I was surprised to see symbols typically seen at military events at her United Methodist Church — a huge mural of an Eagle set in the background of an American Flag. For a few years after the Vietnam War, it was not uncommon to see an old Gospel favorite favorite performed at white Southern Churches — “Down By the Riverside,” the powerful refrain in the lyrics remind us to follow the teachings of Christ:

I was able to find on YouTube this old favorite being performed by a white choral group, judging from the clothing, from the early 1970’s. However, this video was not available to be viewed on YouTube as it contained the following excoriation: “This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community”. Only by registering with the site is it possible for anyone to even know that white Christians once performed this old favorite. Perhaps except for some remote locations in places like rural Georgia, where I am told Sunday School teachers of a certain stature remind their students that “We Study the Prince of Peace and not the Prince of Preemptive War”, I have come to the conclusion that these days white Christianity in America is composed of a largely warmongering crowd. Perhaps too many of its members work for the Military Industrial Complex. Fortunately, YouTube does offer up some excellent versions of this old favorite performed by true Ambassadors of Peace. Here to bring you a message of Peace is Sister Rosetta Tharpe and chorus, praising him with stringed instruments. Hallelujah!

Sooner or later it gets to be too much and people start weighing in. Just hope it isn’t too little too late.

The religious right, which helped re-elect President Bush in 2004 by rallying opposition to abortion and gay marriage, is now facing a pushback from the religious left.

With a faith-based agenda of their own, liberal and progressive clergy from various denominations are lobbying lawmakers, holding rallies and publicizing their positions. They want to end the Iraq war, ease global warming, combat poverty, raise the minimum wage, revamp immigration laws, and prevent “immoral” cuts in federal social programs.

…

“I join the ranks of those who are angry because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus but whose actions are anything but Christian,” declared Meyers, who has written a new book, “Why the Christian Right is Wrong.”

(read more)

In 1880 Charles Darwin wrote:

Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science.

Unfortunately advocates of fettered thought have not returned the favor, and insist upon slaying, wherever it rears its head, the serpent of knowledge. It is poorly understood that the snake in the Garden of Eden was the good guy.

I would normally let my esteemed conservative colleague Jon Swift or Jesus General handle this, but this one I’ve got to do myself. With less than two weeks before the most important holiday in the Christian tradition, not one person at any store I visited today said Happy Easter, or even Merry Easter to me. In fact, they didn’t even say Happy Holidays. I’m one of those who thinks Good Friday counts as a Holy Day, or Christian holiday, or whatever.

What’s wrong with these people that call themselves Christians? Surely they’d be up on their high horses about this obscene slander of Christianity by the business world. Target, Wal-Mart, Jiffy Lube, Burger King, McDonalds, I went to them all. From nary a one of them have I heard Happy Easter. I’m also sure that I would have heard about it if Jerry Falwell or Oral Roberts or Benny Hinn had made a fuss about how everywhere you go in this nation these days, no one bothers to tell you Happy Easter when you shop. It’s a national disgrace I tell you. I’m beginning to wonder if all these people who call themselves Christians are nothing but a bunch of fakers. Well, anyway, the Easter Bunny isn’t coming to our house this year anyway, because our sweet Mabel already did him in.

You know, they’ve gotten so whacked-out, and they create so much disgust at themselves in venues you’d think would lean toward homophobes ( an antigay church, soldiers’ funerals), that I’m beginning to suspect that Westboro Baptist is an underground branch of ACT UP.

Here is the Word of God as lately revealed to His children through Pat Robertson, who is not only the Lord’s mouthpiece but can also leg-press 2,000 pounds and is a graduate as well of Yale Law School, which must be mighty proud.

NORFOLK, Va. — Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”

“God considers this land to be his,” Robertson said on his TV program The 700 Club. “You read the Bible and he says `This is my land,’ and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, `No, this is mine.’”

…In discussing what he said was God’s insistence that Israel not be divided, Robertson also referred to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had sought to achieve peace by giving land to the Palestinians. “It was a terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless he was dead,” he said.

What will happen on that black day when He must perforce kill off Pat Robertson? And who will tell us why?

So you remember the furor about the Episcopal diocese that elected the first openly gay bishop? Well, he’s the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, and he’s got a speech posted at Alternet.

There are two kinds of giving, but I like to think of it as downstream giving and upstream giving. It’s not enough to pull the drowning victims out of the river, you need to walk back upstream and find out who’s throwing them in. So there’s both downstream-giving that actually takes care of victims of oppression. And then there’s upstream-giving — walking back upstream to do justice and to promote systemic change to find the underlying causes that are causing all this.

The religious right is upstream, throwing people in the river and it’s time we named it for what it is. It’s time we took the Bible back. It’s time we took our faith back and stopped having to apologize for being Christian or Jewish or Muslim without having to explain, “No, we’re not that kind of a Jew, we’re not that kind of a Christian.”

I think right now for gay and lesbian people it’s easier to come out to someone as gay than it is to come out as Christian. We have allowed ourselves to be hijacked. Part of what I’m trying to do in my ministry is use my skills and my office to say that there are Christians in this world who feel differently about these issues. It takes religious people to fight back against religious people.

Simbaud rightly criticizes— perhaps jestly — my recent tirade, but leaving the sandbox for the boxing ring, I’d like to comment on Simbaud’s recent post, which contains Joe Bageant’s latest essay. Joe makes some good points about the “Left Behind” series, but perhaps his dislike for Christian fundamentalism blinds him to the truly evil aspects of the “Left Behind” series of books.

I think Joe misses the point of the books entirely in his essay, or perhaps, like Moses, just hasn’t taken us to the promised land yet. The “Left Behind” series (which I admit I haven’t read, but I think I understand the hidden darker message that they represent and I, like Joe, know a few of the finer points of the Book of Revelation) is part of a darker new meme that has been lifting its head lately.

Another example of this meme in literature is a book that my sister was recently mindlessly blathering with gushing praise over — Who Moved My Cheese. I suppose I could name a dozen others like it, but that one sufficiently makes the point.

The dark evil business forces, represented best by the Republican party but also strongly influencing the Democratic party, are destroying all of the longheld protections for average ordinary Americans. Unions, pensions, company loyalty to workers, health care, etc., ad nauseum are all under attack and have either been destroyed or are heading in that direction.

The truth is, most folks are getting left behind economically. The “Left Behind” series just makes people feel that they aren’t, and that’s what is so insidiously evil about them. I would take issue with Joe that the series is about religion. Religion is just something to make the folks who really are getting left behind feel better about it.

I think Joe emphasizes the religious aspect too much and should just cut to the chase, like Woody Guthrie did when he wrote “I Ain’t Got No Home”:

On his visits to the migrant camps that autumn [1938], Woody found that one of the more popular songs was a bouncy, jolly Baptist hymn called “This World Is Not My Home,” which had been made popular by the Carter Family…

There was something about the song that bothered Woody. It was a mild annoyance at first, but it developed into a grating, pulsing anger as the weeks passed and he couldn’t wipe either the tune or the idea from his mind. He was hearing the words in a different way than he’d ever heard them before. He was beginning to understand that the effect of this song was to tell the migrants to wait, and be meek, and be rewarded in the next life. It was telling them to accept the hovels and the hunger and the disease. It was telling them not to strike, and not to fight back. He was outraged by the idea that such an innocent-sounding song could be so insidious. An alternative set of words exploded out of him, and stood the song on its head…

Not only was “I Ain’t Got No Home’ a clever parody of the fundamentalist sensibility and a fine song in its own right, it also represented a clear turning point in Woody’s life. It was a rejection of the passive Eastern spiritualism that had fascinated him since Pampa (and also a rebuke to his old idols, the Carter Family). It was, in a way, a call to arms — at the very least, an attack on inaction.

I’m looking forward to the next essay.

Finally, elected Democrats are starting aggressively to point out that the commonly accepted New Testament Jesus of love and compassion would vote a straight Democratic ticket:

In one example Wednesday, several congressional Democrats stood before the Capitol Christmas tree as they urged raising the minimum wage. They called it key to the “true meaning of Christmas — hope, generosity and goodwill toward others.” In another, they protested Republican budget cuts for the poor as an affront to Christian values.

UPDATE: Link to more, courtesy of JA in the comments.

The December 5 New Yorker has a fine piece by Margaret Talbot (unfortunately not on line) about the latter-day Scopes trial unfolding in Dover, Pennsylvania. Talbot shows us that even creationists evolve:

Over the past century, creationists have adapted to new environmental conditions. Thwarted in the effort to pass statutes that ban the teaching of evolution altogether, they tried statutes that called for “balance.” Stymied again, they’ve tried to introduce the proviso that evolution is “just a theory.”

The idea that there is a design to nature has a long lineage — going back to Paley, at least, or arguably to Aristotle. Tellingly, its newest incarnation emerged in close tandem with the defeat of creationism in the courts. Barbara Forrest, a historian of the intelligent-design movement, testified at the trial that the first Of Pandas and People manuscripts contained the word “creationism”’ precisely where the words “intelligent design” appear now.

Far be it from me to claim that the American people are intelligent.

But it’s a cliché that Americans tend toward the middle of the spectrum on nearly every issue. Such a tendency of democracy was noted at least as long ago as Tocqueville. This, I submit, supports my claim that there is a middle ground between intelligence and idiocy, where most Americans can be found. If they’re not too heavily propagandized.

For instance, consider the non-controversy surrounding the teaching of Intelligent Design, a phrase in which I use initial capitals because it’s a trademark rather than a scientific theory. If it were a theory, it would have produced some science, but as we know, it hasn’t.

Sure, I’m aware of the Kansas board of education’s retreat into the eighteenth century. But against that I weigh the eviction from the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board of eight members who voted to teach ID in public-school science classes.

I’m also aware that, according to a recent CBS poll,

51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.

But 67% of those polled say that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution. Sure, 48% of those who believe God created humans in their present form disagree, but that group tends to be less educated and more church-oriented; in other words, these people have less knowledge to work with, coupled with a built-in bias. They aren’t examining the evidence, they’re deciding what they want to believe. Which is every American’s right, as it is every American’s right to ridicule such an approach.

This is exactly the sort of thinking that Gibbon found to be the destructive legacy of the Roman version of Christianity. When you believe in miracles, you no longer consider evidence to be important.

Laurie Goodstein in today’s New York Times provides some examples of the moderating influence of intelligence in America today.

The [ID] movement was intended to be a “big tent” that would attract everyone from biblical creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith. The slogan, “Teach the controversy,” has simple appeal in a democracy.

The problem for the ID folks is, of course, that there is no controversy to teach. This is simply a slogan. Propaganda, in other words.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

Interesting, but not unexpected. More surprising is that the big tent is having trouble covering even those religious folks who don’t balk at the idea of understanding something of nature.

Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, said: “I teach at the largest Baptist university in the world. I’m a religious person. And my basic perspective is intelligent design doesn’t belong in science class.”

Mr. Davis noted that the advocates of intelligent design claim they are not talking about God or religion. “But they are, and everybody knows they are,” Mr. Davis said. “I just think we ought to quit playing games. It’s a religious worldview that’s being advanced.”

Of course, the Times and the times being what they are, we’ve gotta have some he-says-she-says:

John G. West, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design, said the skepticism and outright antagonism are evidence that the scientific “fundamentalists” are threatened by its arguments.

“This is natural anytime you have a new controversial idea,” Mr. West said. “The first stage is people ignore you. Then, when they can’t ignore you, comes the hysteria. Then the idea that was so radical becomes accepted. I’d say we’re in the hysteria phase.”

Note that the proponent of what everyone knows is creationism, inherently a fundamentalist approach, uses the word fundamentalist pejoratively. He recognizes that even in the US, a country as friendly to fundamentalism as any in the world, in which a large percentage of the population believes in a literal devil, “fundamentalist” is a label that makes many people uncomfortable.

It’s also interesting how sophisticated the ID people have become with respect to marketing. ID is not a controversial idea. It’s bullshit, and they know it. They know they can’t argue on the merits, so they act like they’ve got something and assume that beer-guzzling TV watchers will not bother to check out the facts.

Clearly the Discovery Institute people think they’re going to lose the Dover lawsuit, so they are trying to dissociate themselves from it:

Now, with a decision due in four or five weeks, design proponents like Mr. West of Discovery said the Dover trial was a “sideshow” — one that will have little bearing on the controversy.

“The future of intelligent design, as far as I’m concerned, has very little to do with the outcome of the Dover case,” Mr. West said. “The future of intelligent design is tied up with academic endeavors. It rises or falls on the science.”

In which case, Mr. West will have to find other employment.

These guys are such losers that it’s almost unfair to pick on them, except for the fact that they’ve designed their entire campaign around what they know to be dishonest statements.

Harold Bloom, the eminent scholar at Yale, in a distillation of his long and admirable life of study and consideration of early Christian and Judaic writings, declares that the original Jewish Yahweh is no god of mercy and compassion, as is commonly supposed. But then again, says Bloom, neither is the original Jesus Christ.

From Professors Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson’s Evolution, published in 1911 by Henry Holt & Co., here are two thoughts for the talibangelists of our devolved day:

Darwin has, in fact, brought us more nearly back to the Noah’s ark of our childhood than we commonly realize; for do not all these stories of thrushes, lizards and what not quaintly recall the origins of human races from the dispersion of Shem, Ham and Japheth?

And…

Most briefly stated, the view of evolution thus reached is that of definite variation: its branchings essentially dichotomous rather than indefinite, with progress essentially through the subordination of individual struggle and development to species-maintaining ends. The ideal of evolution is thus no gladiator’s show, but an Eden; and though competition can never be wholly eliminated — the line of progress is thus no straight line but at most an asymptote — it is much for our pure natural history to see no longer struggle, but love as “creation’s final law.”

Since tomorrow is supposed to be the biggest shopping day of the year, all bad attitudeans might find it helpful to take time to stop for a moment of quiet reflection with Reverend Billy, Pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping. If anyone chooses to convert, we offer up one of Reverend Billy’s action plans of intervention for quiet resistance against the evils the church exposes. If you’ve got the bandwith [dial up needn’t apply], watch Reverend Billy preach against Starbucks’s evil corporate culture. Friends, feel that power!

A seminal Action in our resistance against consumerism. Enter the Wal Mart or big box store singly or in small groups, grab a shopping cart and you are ready. You don’t announce this Action, although sometimes whirlers wear official “Whirl Mart” shirts.

Don’t put anything, nothing, into your cart. Push it into the aisles of the store, not gesturing or talking, just look straight ahead. Eventually join in a line of your fellow empty carts, but don’t say hi to anyone. Keep your zen-like non-shopping concentration. If someone cuts your line by coming from a side aisle (mothers with kids get right-of-way) then the line breaks and reforms like the proverbial worm. Lines can become independent for a time, but they usually join up again somewhere down the line. There is scripted goal. The arrival is the journey.

Daniel L. Hartl is the Higgins professor of biology at Harvard, and he speaks as follows:

More seriously, I find it paradoxical that a minimum of 15 percent, and perhaps as many as 50 percent, of fertilized eggs in humans, many of which have major chromosomal abnormalities, undergo spontaneous abortion. A reproductive system whose failure rate would be regarded by any respectable engineer as catastrophic hardly seems the work of intelligent design, unless the Intelligent Designer has a very high tolerance for abortion.

Kansas University:

The Religious Studies Department is offering a course next semester titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies.”

“The KU faculty has had enough,” said Paul Mirecki, chairman of the department. “Creationism is mythology … Intelligent design is mythology. It’s not science.”

As proof that extreme right-wing politicians and science can never coexist peacefully, this article from MSNBC serves it to us on a platter:

Florida’s citrus crop contributes billions of dollars to the state’s economy, so when that industry is threatened, anything that might help is considered. Back in 2001, when citrus canker was blighting the crop and threatening to reduce that vital source of revenue, an interesting — if not quite scientific — alternative was considered.

Katherine Harris, then Florida's secretary of state — and now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — ordered a study in which, according to an article by Jim Stratton in the Orlando Sentinel, “researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test ‘Celestial Drops,’ promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its ‘improved fractal design,’ ‘infinite levels of order,’ and ‘high energy and low entropy.’”

The study determined that the product tested was, basically, water that had apparently been blessed according to the principles of Kabbalic mysticism, “chang[ing] its molecular structure and imbu[ing] it with supernatural healing powers.”

How to weaken and divide the country, Part 232: push the government between Americans and their doctors by meddling with the FDA’s drug-approval process for the morning-after pill for political reasons. As always, there is honor in the anti-choice position at the individual level, but no one has the right to impose even valid personal choices on another family:

According to the Government Accountability Office, top officials — some of them political appointees of President Bush — took “unusual” steps to impede the approval process.

Coupla quotes from the Dalai Lama’s op-ed in the New York Times:

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

This openness to change sets the Dalai Lama, and the philosophical tradition he represents, apart from most Western thought. For example, I’ve often argued politics with a friend from the East Bay who was schooled in Roman Catholicism. As a result, he clings to his beliefs regardless of the facts, and is therefore without understanding of the world. When I send him articles from the Washington Post about the American use of Russian gulag prisons, and the torture of Iraqis by Americans, he refuses to believe it, claiming that it hasn’t been proven in court and is therefore no more than the “rantings” of members of MoveOn.org.

This attitude, so typical of certain philosophical positions that are held in the West, is what brought on the Dark Ages. As Gibbon intimates, the ability to believe in miracles means the inability to recognize reality and react to facts. Such people will never be able to manipulate the world around them, because they’ll never understand it. They prefer the certainty of the philosophies they’re locked into, despite the evident falsehood of those philosophies.

As Bertrand Russell put it:

Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them.

The Dalai Lama does not have this problem. He’s ready to accept new ideas and change his views when it becomes clear that it would help him achieve his goals.

At Princeton University, Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist, is studying the effects of meditation on attention. At the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Kemeny has been studying how meditation helps develop empathy in school teachers.

Whatever the results of this work, I am encouraged that it is taking place. You see, many people still consider science and religion to be in opposition. While I agree that certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles, I also feel that people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.

[…]

I believe that we must find a way to bring ethical considerations to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry.

Rather, I am speaking of what I call “secular ethics,” which embrace the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.

Eyes on the prize: what are we going for?

A deeper dialogue between neuroscience and society — indeed between all scientific fields and society — could help deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and our responsibilities for the natural world we share with other sentient beings.

Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity.

You can’t make this kinda stuff up.

Pat Robertson is pissed at the residents of Dover, PA. These worthy folk, you’ll remember, decided they didn’t want their school board to consist of idiots who believe that the universe is too complicated for them to understand.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club.”

And you know it must be true, because Pat has a direct line to God. He doesn’t even have to go through the Pope.

“God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in his eye forever,” Robertson said. “If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”

Right. This is a God of forgiveness, but not infinite forgiveness. He gets pissed, just like the Reverend Pat.

In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Which, realistically, are all the same thing anyway.

I subscribed to the Sojourners newsletter — well worth the weekly links I might add. It tells me that lawyer Gaillard T. Hunt has filed a motion in federal court; you might find it as interesting as I did. I don’t have a link to the quote below because it was in the newsletter, but read what lawyer Hunt has to say; he represents one of those unfortunate souls down in Cuba. To put all this in proper context, Sojourners also provided this link.

Incidentally, the court motion also mentions some Shakespeare works too — I’ll refrain from commenting on the significance of minor titles in this dispute.

Hunt writes, “Now they won’t let my guy at Guantanamo have a Bible. This is true. He asked for one, I sent one down, and a Staff Judge Advocate went out of his way to dress me down for doing so, and told me definitely that the prisoner could not have a Bible. ‘We’re trying to run a prison here,’ he said, or words to that effect… Where’s Chuck Colson when you need him?”

Okay, I admit to being a great fan of the Dalai Lama, who is considered by Tibetan Buddhists “to be the 74th manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the enlightened Buddha of compassion”; and it’s not only because of my attraction to Zen Buddhism. (After all, there are very significant differences between Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.)

Anyone who’s seen him in action knows what I mean. I once saw him interviewed by John McLaughlin — the shouting talk-show host, not the guitar player (that would be an interesting interview) — who, as it happens, is a former Jesuit priest. McLaughlin spent most of the thirty minutes trying to wring a condemnation of the Chinese government out of the Dalai Lama. To his increasing frustration, he never came close. Despite all the horrible things the Chinese government has done to the Tibetan Buddhists, the Buddha of compassion never budged.

Another source of amusement has been the movement, obviously inspired by doctrinaire Chinese, to keep the Dalai Lama from speaking at the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience.

A petition drive, begun primarily by Chinese American researchers, seeks to have the Dalai Lama’s appearance canceled. The protesters, who argue that a religious leader should not be given such a prominent role at an important scientific conference, say they have gathered at least 600 signatures. There have also been competing letters and an editorial in the journal Nature.

“The presentation of a religious symbol with a controversial political agenda may cause unnecessary controversies, unwanted press, and significant divisions among SFN members from multiple geographic locations, and with conflicting religious beliefs and political leanings,” reads the petition, which was signed by several hundred non-Chinese researchers and academics as well.

The Dalai Lama’s speech is part of a series called “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society”. Next year’s speaker is scheduled to be architect Frank Gehry. So what’s the big deal? Neuroscience is not allowed to interface with meditators?

His recent book, The Universe in an Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, tries to make the case that modern science and Buddhist thought have surprisingly similar aims, methods and sometimes conclusions — though he resists efforts to see the world in purely material terms. (Some of his thoughts about limits to the theory of evolution when it comes to how life and consciousness began earned him a rather harsh book review in the New York Times, including a suggestion that he was proposing a Buddhist version of intelligent design.)

The similarities between Eastern religions and modern physics have produced some fascinating writing. The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav had a tremendous affect on my view of the world — it convinced me that there is no such thing as an objective reality (a view I think many physicists would disagree with). Another book along the same lines is Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics.

During yesterday’s session, some of those parallels between Buddhist thought and cutting-edge science were on display.

Wolf Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, explained how his research has found that neuronal coordination within the brain is key to human understanding and performance — a conclusion that Buddhist thought intuited long ago.

Here’s why the Dalai Lama kicks ass on the Kansas Board of Education and the losers from the Dover, PA, school board:

While politics and religion are always important to the Dalai Lama, aides say, his involvement with science is especially significant to him. Given the frequent hostility between religious and scientific thought in the United States, many find the Dalai Lama’s explorations into such subjects as quantum physics, or the neuroscience of consciousness, or evolution and the physical nature of emotions to be remarkable.

And he has been known to back that up: He often says — and affirmed again in front of yesterday’s audience — that when science proves that Buddhist scriptures are incorrect, then the scriptures should be rejected.

Brian Brown: Just another macho, undeniably heterosexual protestor against gay marriage and civil unions.

Some of you know the drill. The preacher gets fired up, and reaches out to all the parishioners to come forward, confess all their sins and get saved. Night after night he relentlessly preaches on. There are so many damned sinners out there that soon enough, the tent can’t hold the crowd and the preacher has to go out and get a new tent to hold the overflow crowd.

Hallelujah, Glory be to God, the Revival has come to town!

Now that we’ve gone over that, Steve Clemons over at the Washington Note alerts us to news that the tent has arrived! Get your bottle of whiskey and we’ll all go down and watch the spectacle.

Well, news has just reached TWN that Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding not only into a new website — but also into more office space.

Fitzgerald’s office is at 1400 New York Avenue, NW, 9th Floor in Washington.

What I have learned is that the Office of the Special Counsel has signed a lease this week for expanded office space across the street at 1401 New York Avenue, NW.

[Update: Steve Clemons is now reprting that reports of the arrival of the tent addition are erroneous. Looks like we’ll have to pack ourselves in tight, but hold on, the beginning of the end may very well be nigh.]

At that awful hour of the Passion, when the Savior of the world felt deserted in His agony, when — “The sympathizing sun his light withdrew, And wonder’d how the stars their dying Lord could view” — when earth, shaking with horror, rung the passing bell for Deity, and universal nature groaned, then from the loftiest tree to the lowliest flower all felt a sudden thrill, and trembling, bowed their heads all save the proud and obdurate aspen, which said, “Why should we weep and tremble? We trees, and plants, and flowers are pure and never sinned!” Ere it ceased to speak, an involuntary trembling seized its very leaf, and the word went forth that it should never rest, but tremble on until the day of judgment.

Link

The Christian Coalition has long maintained that it champions family values. A cornucopia of evidence exists that suggests nothing could be further from the truth. For a close up view of the antics of this rogue outfit, I would suggest that you read this article in the Virginia Pilot for a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable view of this declining institution. Let’s hope these example of pestilence within the organization are a sure sign portending that the Christian Coalition will soon be left behind. A short teaser appears below, but please go read the whole thing — this kind of article warms the cockles of my heart — hopefully it will do the same for yours.

Based in Chesapeake through the 1990s, the coalition moved to an office on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2000. Its Chesapeake landlord sued the group in 2001 for $76,546 in back rent, in a case that is still open in Chesapeake Circuit Court.

Within months of the move to Washington, 10 black employees filed a racial discrimination lawsuit alleging that they were forced to enter the office by the back door and eat in a segregated area. The coalition settled the suit in December 2001 for about $300,000, according to several published reports.

Down in Florida, that other Bush fellow is prevaricating.

Some wonder whether there’s a contradiction in Bush’s push to spend hundreds of millions of tax money on the high-tech Scripps Research Institute for science while also funding religious schools that question one of biology’s basic tenets.

When asked about this, Bush was again uncharacteristically evasive.

“That is so loaded. That’s like, you’ve already written the article, why do you want me in it? It’s not fair,” Bush told a reporter when asked.

So that’s a “no” then?

“No, that’s nothing,” Bush said. “That’s no comment. The governor refused to comment. That’s what it is in the article: The governor refused to comment.”

When will he?

Evidence of intelligent design reaches us from Great Britain:

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible …

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”.

They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.

“Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”

Mrs. Batard sends along this helpful information (perhaps suggesting something but I don’t care to go there). The bottom line — beware of getting any kind of help in Texas. I shudder to think what the evacuees are having to put up with in Texas. I’ve posted a short message below from one of the faith based psychiatry programs for shrinks in Texas. Hearing voices from God is apparently considered completely sane in Texas, especially for shrinks. Please go read the rest.

The teaching that is presented is so completely Biblical and Christ-centered it leaves no room for anyone to doubt that they have just heard from God.