Americans, And They Wonder Why We Laugh At Them

It's somewhat of a pity that the header of this short clip gives the game away to a certain degree.  I had rather hoped to ask you to watch the clip prior to any disclosure as to who the fellow really was.

I can still do that I'm thinking, the fact that you know he's a Pol won't detract too much I don't suppose, and let's face it, it's not as though Paul Broun is a household name outside America, or inside for that matter I shouldn't wonder.

So with no display of the header from the original article, might I ask you to watch this one minute clip first and then go to the text and enjoy that "You cannot be serious" moment.

Every American has every right to be religious. And every American has every right to make religious speech (just not in places where others are compelled to listen to it or participate in it, like public schools). And every American has the right, if they so choose, to deny reality. You can argue that aliens created human technology, Santa Claus, whatever – you have that right. . . blah blah 

Now comes the cracker and the gist of the piece.

. . . The real problem, and what frustrates me to no end, is that the Republican Party would place someone like Paul Broun, who obviously has a disdain for science and the factual reality of the world around us, to THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY! Forget the fact that he’s been married four times. Forget the fact that he’s a Conservative Evangelical. These aren’t the problem. The problem is that, based upon his fundamentalist religious convictions, he DENIES the fundamental tenets of science. Yet, despite this, the Republicans named him the CHAIR of the SCIENCE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND OVERSIGHT! Go to article

Footnote: I was tempted to make the header read: Republicans And They Wonder Why We Laugh At Them but to be fair, I'm sure there are plenty of Democrats who equally fit the same bill.

The Bizarre Christian "Quiverfill" Movement

I despair, I really do, these people are beyond the pale. And I have marked the quote with an asterisk that really goes beyond the pale to border on the insane.

"What a cute arrow-maker, can I go down on it?"

"No, arrows aren't made that way!"

And yer man! he just had to be called Jim Bob didn't he, or some such.

The Bizarre Christian "Quiverfill" Movement Pushing Women to Procreate for "God's Army"

Leaders of the Quiverfull movement encourage women to have as many as 20 children, regardless of the effects on their health.
By Vyckie Garrison
August 29, 2012

During a recent interview on the Today Show, Jim Bob Duggar blurted out, "It's fun trying!" when asked if he and Michelle were actively seeking to have another baby. Today's host, Savannah Guthrie responded to the mega-dad's salacious remark with, "Jim Bob - you sly dog!"

Viewers may have come away with the impression that TLC's "19 & Counting" celebrity parents, Jim Bob & Michelle Duggar hold very casual, perhaps even avant-garde attitudes regarding sex and sexuality.

But a quick look beneath the surface reveals that America's most celebrated Quiverfull couple believe and espouse decidedly unhealthy ideas when it comes to sex and babymaking.

Although Jim Bob makes frequent displays of romantic affection toward his prolific wife, Michelle, which would suggest that the couple might enjoy sex for non-procreative purposes, the "biblical family values" advocates-- whose "literal" interpretations of scripture inspire the Duggars to receive each and every pregnancy as an unmitigated blessing from God--also teach that the primary purpose of woman is to conceive and bear sons, i.e., "arrows" for God's army.

Consider Romans 1:27: "And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."

Quiverfull movement leader, Mary Pride, in her seminal book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism and Back to Reality, offers the following interpretation of "the natural use of the woman" ...

*Since the word used for female is connected so strongly with the idea of nursing babies, whereas it has no connection at all with the idea of sexual activity, I believe that God is saying here that when women exchange their natural function of childbearing and motherliness for that which is "against nature" (that is, trying to behave sexually like a man), the men tend to abandon the natural sexual use of the women and turn to homosexuality. (pp. 27-28)

Nancy Campbell, "editress" of Above Rubies--an international Christian women's magazine-- encourages "women in their high calling as wives, mothers, and homemakers" by explaining in her book, Be Fruitful & Multiply: What the Bible Says About Having Children, that the word "woman" is a combination of the words "womb" and "man." Woman means "womb man" or "man with a womb."

With regard to the Romans 1:27 "natural use of the woman" passage, Campbell says, "Women were created by God's design to function as nourishers by nourishing life in their womb and a babe at their breast. When women deliberately turn away from their natural functions, they do it to their own detriment." (pp. 105-107)

Sure "family values" champion, Jim Bob Duggar puts on a nice show of desiring his godly wife for more than just her ability to produce yet another arrow for his already overflowing quiver ... but Jim Bob's hermeneutics as well as his politics belie enigmatic presuppositions about the purpose of marriage, sex, and Christian wives.

Speaking in regard to Todd Akin's recent "legitimate rape" and Paul Ryan's rape as a "method of conception" remarks, Amanda Marcotte explains the fundamentalist mentality that, "the fact that someone can make a baby means that making babies is what she is for. ... Women are among an array of objects to be used. The refrigerator is for storing food. The bookshelf is for holding books. The woman is for making babies. You no more give her a choice in the matter than you would give your refrigerator veto power over what food it holds because it didn’t like your method of shopping."

Could another pregnancy be life-threatening for Michelle Duggar? Might it be risky for baby #20? Could another pregnancy leave their 19 already-born children motherless? Yes - of course! Is Jim Bob Duggar having fun trying to get his wife pregnant nevertheless? If making babies is Michelle's divine purpose - if that is why God made her ... why shouldn't her husband enjoy knocking her up one more time? It's only natural.

Jim Bob - you sly dog!

Vyckie Garrison, single mom of 7 kids, is a former adherent of the Quiverfull movement – a growing segment of Christian fundamentalist who advocate biblical patriarchy, prolific motherhood, homeschooling, courtship & betrothal, and other crazy shit like that. Garrison tells the story of how she came to embrace the extreme lifestyle and why she left at her “No Longer Quivering” blog and has created The Spiritual Abuse Survivior Blog Network. - AlterNet

Louisiana Louisiana I Despair

And I bet I'm not the only one.

I ran this story a couple of months ago, albeit in a slightly different format, but what harm running it again?

But what I didn't realise until I did a 'Louisiana' search in the search function, was just how much I had featured Louisiana in the past. I shall leave links at the bottom of the page. (Update: now tagged)

14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools
By Deanna Pan
Aug. 7, 2012

Thanks to a new law privatizing public education in Louisiana, Bible-based curriculum can now indoctrinate young, pliant minds with the good news of the Lord—all on the state taxpayers' dime.

Under Gov. Bobby Jindal's voucher program, considered the most sweeping in the country, Louisiana is poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to help poor and middle-class students from the state's notoriously terrible public schools receive a private education. While the governor's plan sounds great in the glittery parlance of the state's PR machine, the program is rife with accountability problems that actually haven't been solved by the new standards the Louisiana Department of Education adopted two weeks ago. Blah blah

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: "Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

2. Dragons were totally real: "[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007
3. "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ."—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994
4. Africa needs religion: "Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government."—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004 Read on

And as always, with posts of this nature, you may wish to strap in prior to proceeding.

Louisiana Vying For Title America's Most Stupid State?

More Louisiana Lunacy: A Special Report From Loch Ness

Louisiana's Fucked Up (The Arse) Laws

Justice Thomas He's a Louisiana Man

I Don't Know What Justice Looks Like But I'm Sure It Doesn't Look Like This: Waterproof Louisiana

God Bless The Louisiana Department of Corrections

Louisiana Tops Again: Shut Your Mouth Or I'll Smash Your Face In

Modern-Day Court Lynching; Jena Louisiana

Diaper Dave And The Louisiana Loonies

Pre-Marital Sex is “stinking, filthy, dirty, rotten sin”

Just as with police brutality stories, I stopped covering abstinence only stories some while ago. (See sidebar) But how could I resist when I came across such Talibangelical inspired dogma as that featured in the header?

And the owner of such an attitude? Not as you might think, a misogynist Baptist (Republican) preacher, but rather a woman charged with designing and implementing abstinence education guidelines. Just what you need!

. . . . 1. Abstinence-Only Education Relies on Spirituality and Moralizing, not Social/Behavioral Theories

The “A-H” points which define federally acceptable abstinence-education, and the curriculums designed around those points, seem to be based not on peer reviewed social/behavioral theoretical models—but on the spiritual and moral world-views of the persons who were given authority to conceive, implement, and fund abstinence-only sex education programs (4). Consider the following example. During his first term, then-President Bush appointed a woman named Pam Stenzel to an influential task force at the Department of Health and Human Services which was charged with designing and implementing abstinence education guidelines. For Stenzel, social/behavioral theories and scientifically rigorous research are the not the foundations on which to build an education program. The reason why society should not condone pre-marital sex? Because, she says, it is “stinking, filthy, dirty, rotten sin” (4). Stenzel continues:

What [they] are asking is does [abstinence-only education] work. You know what? Doesn’t matter. Cause guess what. My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public schools’ job should not be to keep teens from having sex. Our job should be to tell kids the truth! People of God...commit yourself to truth, not what works! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day I’m not answering to you, I’m answering to God. . . AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin safely (4).

Unfortunately, Stenzel and her cohort are not teaching only their own children, but millions of American young people who deserve sex education based on empirical evidence, not moral zealotry. While it may be possible to frame various abstinence-only curriculums as having some connection to industry-accepted social/behavioral theories, the attitude that Stenzel exemplifies is one of obsession with personal beliefs about spirituality and morals. more challengingdogma

This article was linked from a contemporary piece in the Guardian: How Obama's healthcare reform boosted abstinence-only sex education

. . . In Tennessee, for instance, a bill that passed the house and senate in April 2012 specifies that teachers must "exclusively and emphatically" endorse abstinence, or face a $500 fine. The bill stipulates that contraceptives may be discussed only as an inferior means of preventing pregnancy and disease. The bill also allows parents to sue public school teachers and staff for allowing students to engage in what is bizarrely termed "gateway sexual behavior" – such as holding hands or hugging.

American Family Association: Churches Supporting Gays Caused Colorado Massacre

American Family Association: Churches Supporting Gays Caused Colorado Massacre
July 21, 2012

Fred Jackson, the news director for the American Family Association (AFA), yesterday blamed the Colorado massacre that took twelve lives and wounded another 58 people on mainline Churches supporting gay people. Jackson, who echoed sentiments of the AFA’s Bryan Fischer by blaming the ACLU, also blamed liberals — liberal churches and liberal media — along with movies and the Internet, and an overall lack of the fear of God, for the tragic shooting. More

The American Family Association is a certified anti-gay hate group.

Thank You God: March of The Penguins

I was only looking for a few lines to give the post above some relevance, but then I found this movie review from Christian Answers.

It's not a miracle surely, but just as I was about to settle for something lesser, this review fell into my hands. It's almost as though my prayers were answered. Just as I was starving for the real thing, it seemed to fall out of the sky, manna from heaven then?

So do please read this wonderful account of God's creations on earth, but if you get lost somewhere on the way, just remind yourself this is a review about a wildlife documentary.

And my review of the review? These people are insane.

There is a caption or two in this poster I'm sure, but it just so happens I have a couple of penguin related graphics of my own. Below.

March of the Penguins - Movie review, Christian Answers

In the harshest place on earth, love finds a way.

A successful documentary presents facts artistically, Luc Jacquet succeeded. “March of the Penguins” is an extraordinary film narrated by Morgan Freeman (“God” in Bruce Almighty). The film follows a flock of Emperor penguins, for a year, as they emerge from the frigid waters of Antarctica and travel 70 miles in harsh winds and freezing temperatures to make it back to “where they were all born.”

After reaching their traditional breeding ground, they select a mate and are monogamous to that mate for the current mating season. After the female lays the egg, they will engage in an intricate dance to pass the egg from female to male. The male protects the egg while the mother makes the 70+ mile trek back to feed (the journey gets longer as the water gets further away due to freezing).

During the mother’s absence, the father shields the egg from hazardous weather conditions. The chick hatches while the mother is away, so upon her return she will see her chick for the first time. The father then departs for his 70+ mile trek back to the water for his food. The traveling back and forth by mother and father continues until the end of the season when they will all return to the water as a family.

Once they reach the water, the parents dive back in and part ways, and the chicks stay on the ice and will likely never see their parents again.

The movie gives a detailed account of the life of an Emperor penguin with many interesting facts. During the course of the year, the penguins seemingly show signs of love, jealously and grief for a variety of reasons. You may feel you know more about Emperor penguins than you ever wanted to know, but there are life lessons that can be learned.

It is a story of nature, not of Hollywood, so gone are the special effects and computer imaging. They are replaced with actual, breathtaking footage of Antarctica splendidly captured by filmmakers. The temperatures drop as low as 80° below zero, and the winds rage at 100 mph, which makes the filming of this movie phenomenal. Stay for the credits to see actual behind-the-scenes footage.

VIOLENCE: The violence in the film is brief and mild, only depicting what truly happens in nature. In one scene, a Leopard seal eats a penguin, and a couple of close-up images of the seal’s mouth and teeth just prior to the attack may be a little frightening for a young child. The actual attack is not shown, only implied. In another scene, a bird is preying on the newly-hatched chicks, and one is caught and eaten by the bird. It is obvious when these scenes are about to take place, if you felt the need to cover your child’s eyes.

DISTURBING: Some chicks die due to the elements, and they show one dead that may upset a young child.

PROFANITY: None

SEX/NUDITY: The penguins mate during the film, but it is understood, not shown.

OBJECTIONABLE: The male and female penguins select a mate and are monogamous to each other for that season only. Morgan Freeman says, “All bets are off” referring to the next season when they will choose a different mate. It seemed inappropriate and out of place in relation to the rest of the movie.

“March of the Penguins” has lessons to teach about:

“LOVE”: According to the film, the penguins take this tremendous journey for “love” and to find a mate and reproduce. The dedication, cooperation, and affection are exemplary between the pair.

PERSEVERANCE: We could learn a lot about perseverance from Emperor penguins. I was quickly reminded of the ant in Proverbs 6:7-8 “It has no commander, overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” No one is reminding these penguins what to do; they know what to do, and they do it. They are prepared, persistent and committed, much like we are called to be as witnesses for Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 4:15 “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

The penguins endure treacherous conditions, yet they continue on their journey, focusing on what lies ahead (new life). It may be a bit of a stretch, but I thought of what we, as Christians have to endure to get what lies ahead for us (eternal life). Philippians 3:14 “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: One year in the life of an Emperor penguin is a great indication of the existence and character of God. Romans 1:20 “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” He is absolutely perfect! Every detail has been taken into account, and every provision has been made. Witnessing all the love and care that He must have put into creating the penguins is small compared to what He put into creating us. Matthew 6:26 “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” Leaving the theater, I was more in awe and in love with my Creator.

FRIENDSHIP/COMMRADERIE: All the penguins wait to start their journey until the last of them is out of the water, giving a sense of unity. As the penguins make their journey, they will all stop from time to time until one of them picks up the trail again, and then they all start moving. It is similar to what we are called to do in the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:27-28 “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues.”

While the fathers are caring for their unhatched chicks and braving the harshest of weather, they all huddle together in a huge heap for warmth. The ones on the outside rotate, so they all have a turn in the middle. Philippians 2:2-4 “then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

I was truly fascinated by the lives of these penguins, maybe because I felt we as humans could emulate much of it and be better followers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They all worked together towards a common goal; there was no fighting, gossiping and disorder. There was apparent “love,” cooperation and order. 1 Corinthians 12:25 “so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”

I found the movie exciting and educational (but my three year old found it boring). What a great feeling it was to leave the theater without watcher’s remorse (sitting through a movie that went against my value system or offended my Lord and Savior). It was weird to see something on the big screen that I would normally watch on PBS on my 26-inch television. I would see “March of the Penguins” again, but not in the theater—in the cost-effective, comfort of my living room. Christian Answers

And as you do with these kinds of articles, you have a quick trawl through the comments. Just the one then for today, but it's a cracker. And do try the link, I pray.

Now, from a Christian perspective, in the opening scenes of the movie, it explains that the yearly penguin routine has gone on for millions and millions of years, which we all know is false. Since I was unable to see the whole film (thanks to the little ones—not my choice to take them by the way) I am not able to give further input from a Christian point of view. And, I have no intentions of ever viewing it again, so overall, I’ll have to give it a big thumbs down.
My Ratings: Average/3
Paula, age 26

"Which we all know is false" Paula age 26. Age 26, what bleedin' hope is there in this world?

Right click, open in new tag. Click again when opened.

Another One For Southern Poverty Law Center: Santorum Forming Conservative Group

Because there is one thing you can guarantee, get Ricky and those good Christian folks all under one roof, there will be so much hate about you will be able to package it. They will by comparison, make the Grand Wizard of the KKK look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm.

"Patriot Voices" is the proposed name, that should give you an inkling of what is to come. But I am rather surprised, that they haven't got "Family" in the title, because you can't really call yourself a hate group until you nail that shingle to the door.

Santorum Forming Conservative Group
June 8, 2012

Rick Santorum is back, baby, and he’s got a plan to knock your socks off with a new group to promote conservative issues. Patriot Voices will make sure Santorum’s election talking points will be ringing in your ears long after November. “One of the things that we found as I traveled around the country is that people came up to me a lot and said ... I was out there speaking about things that gave voice to their concerns on a lot of issues,” he told Fox News. Now, thanks to Patriot Voices, Santorum will be able to “mobilize 1 million conservatives around this country who are committed to promoting faith, family, freedom, and opportunity.” The Daily Beast

Read it at ABC News

The Southern Poverty Law Center

Christians United For Israel: One Million Bats

"The floor of the cave has been on the phone, it wants its batshit back." - Bill Maher

Just a short piece on the crazy, Christians United For Israel, who, if they are to be believed, have just recruited to the bat cave, their one millionth bat.

What's with all the bats you say? Well really you have to go back to my July 2007 post, Beyond Belief: Rapture Ready by Max Blumenthal to truly appreciate the batshit.

Rather than send you off to that post, I have brought the whole thing over here and it is now pasted below. And where below I say, Blumenthal's film is an absolutely must watch, I mean it's an absolute must watch.

Drive on!

Delusional Milestone
By Lawrence Davidson
April 08, 2012

Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel (CUFI) announced the “registration of their millionth member” on 18 March 2012. This organization, founded in 2006, with the goal of “realizing the political potential of tens of millions of evangelical Americans who support Israel” can also be said to have the goal of destroying, in the name of God no less, the legitimate political aspiration of Palestinian statehood. And, the CUFI now has as much influence with our Republican Congress as does the Jewish Zionist lobby, AIPAC.

Why should the devout Mr. Hagee and his one million followers be so enamored of Israel? Actually, they have no rational reasons to offer. However, they do have a number of non-rational ones. For example, “We support Israel because all other nations were created by an act of man, but Israel was created by an act of God.”

Hagee and his followers do not know that this is so. They just ardently believe it is so. Yet there is a difference between demonstrable fact and belief. As to subject, ardent belief, or what might be called faith, is widely variable and changes over time. Thus, for a considerably longer period of time than the life of Hagee’s particular brand of Christianity (in fact for thousands of years) vast numbers of people ardently believed in the reality of the Olympian Gods. For almost 1200 years, countless individuals, every bit as assured of their faith as Pastor Hagee, came to the shrine at Delphi to prey to Apollo and, through his oracle, the Sibyl, petition for the God’s advice and favor.

There is no more hard evidence for Hagee’s faith than that of the Sibyl. Think of the lottery. Despite people’s belief in their “lucky number,” every number has an equal probability of turning up. In the same way, when John Hagee dies he has an equal chance of finding himself on the shore of the River Styx as he does at the gates of heaven or hell. Of course, this comparison is not completely accurate. Here there is also the equal chance that no number turns up at all, and Mr Hagee simply dissolves into worm food.

Just so there is no hard evidence for the claim that Israel was created “by an act of God.” (As to modern Israel there is no historical doubt that the deed was done by a combination of Jewish militias, the British Empire, and the General Assembly of the United Nations.) The Bible stories are just that, stories, and quoting them as if they constituted evidence beyond the realm of faith just won’t do.

No one credits the stories told in Hesiod’s Theogony (the story of the origin of the Olympian Gods) as proof positive of the existence of the Zeus and Apollo. Pastor Hagee would counter that the Theogony was “created by an act of man”while the Bible is, allegedly, the divinely inspired words of God. And, indeed, it appears that up to one-third of the adults in the United States agree with him. Unfortunately, it is quite possible that as many people now believe in the literal, divine truth of the Bible (and therefore the divine origin of Israel) as once believed in the reality of Zeus and his Olympian clan.

However, yet again, belief no matter how ardently held, does not make something true. And, it does not matter if it is the belief of one person or a million. The situation is the same. Faith is not the same as fact.

Unfortunately, this does not put an end to our subject. Faith may not move mountains but it can move the masses. It can move Hagee’s million and many others as well to actions that are very real indeed. It can move people to empty their wallets in an effort to financially support their alleged certainties. Worse yet, it can move them to take up arms and slaughter their neighbors–or at least cheer on others who do so.

I have a strong suspicion that if the Israelis some day evict every last Palestinian from Pastor Hagee’s “Holy Land,” killing thousands in the process, the pastor will shout Hallelujah and salivate in anticipation of the second coming of Christ. It is just a personal opinion, mind you, but if you believe so strongly that you are willing to underwrite murder and mayhem you constitute a real danger to world peace. As such you should be preaching your defense before the International Criminal Court rather than preaching to the multitude. ICH

Professor Lawrence Davidson - Department of History - West Chester University

~ ~ ~

Beyond Belief: Rapture Ready by Max Blumenthal

Once a flood, pray excuse the analogy, someone comes up with the goods, that were it not on film, it would be beyond belief, stunningly beyond belief.

Blogger Max Blumenthal has come up with such goods in the form of a short film entitled, Rapture Ready: The Unauthorised Christians United for Israel Tour.

I will let Blumenthal give his own introduction, but the film is an absolutely must watch. I should and would write further if I were not truly lost for words after witnessing the goings on in this asylum.

Truly, Only In America.

On July 16, I attended Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee and his minions have forged close ties with the Bush White House and members of Congress from Sen. Joseph Lieberman to Sen. John McCain. In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government.

But CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow. Among the rapture ready was Republican Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. None of this seemed to matter to Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

Throughout CUFI's Israel Summit, videographer Thomas Shomaker and I were hounded by PR agents seeking to prevent us from interviewing attendees about the End Times. The conference, we were told, was about "one message" - evangelical Christians supporting Israel. We were instructed to only interview CUFI leaders capable of sticking to the talking point that their support for Israel has, as Hagee declared, "nothing to do with the End Times." But I was forbidden from asking Hagee about statements he made in his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," that appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution. After doing just that during a press conference, I was removed from the conference by off-duty DC cops summoned by members of Hagee's family.

I have covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. During this time, I attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders. I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington. See for yourself. Max Blumenthal

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost on Vimeo.

The Body of Jesus

“A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but if you waste 15 million of them, apparently you get Texas.” - Keith Olbermann.

Visit? Strap in.

Tennessee Goes Monkey Again

No comment.

Tennessee Goes Monkey Again
By Katherine Stewart
01 April 2012

It’s been a great couple weeks in Tennessee – unless you happen to be a public school student, gay, or not a fundamentalist Christian, or the time horizon in which you think about the future of humanity and the environment extends beyond the next decade or two. On March 26, the state legislature passed a bill that will have the intended effect of inserting creationism and climate science denial into public school classrooms. Just a week earlier, on March 19th, the House passed a bill to permit the display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings (HB2658). And Tennessee is currently debating a bill that is intended to give schoolyard bullies an exemption from the law if their bullying happens to be motivated by “sincerely held” religious bigotry.

The creationism bill is rich in historic irony. Four score and seven years ago, a Tennessee high school biology teacher named John Scopes was charged with the crime of teaching evolution. At the time, Tennessee had an anti-evolution law, known as the Butler Act, in honor of John W. Butler, the leader of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. Trial lawyer Clarence Darrow said, of his involvement in the case, “I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it – religious fanaticism.”

Back then, press coverage portrayed the fundamentalist groups backing the anti-Darwin forces as anti-intellectual, chauvinistic – the “sharpshooters of bigotry,” in Darrow’s words. The widely accepted view was that those who supported the teaching of creationism in public education were motivated by fear, superstition, and prejudice. They represented an obstruction of modernity and progress that was construed as un-American. The fallout was so toxic that Christian fundamentalism retreated as a political force for decades.

The recently passed bill in Tennessee was opposed by pretty much every credible organization involved in the teaching of biology, including the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, and all eight Tennessee members of the National Academy of Sciences. But the legislators of Tennessee obviously knew better.

The interesting question that comes up in light of Tennessee’s storied history as a center for biological ignorance is: why does it seem that we have moved backwards on this subject? There are a number of cultural and social forces at work, of course, but there is a much cruder and more effective force at work too: money. Creationism is now only part of teaching about supposed “scientific controversies” that the Tennessee bill wishes to address; the other part is climate science.

The new Tennessee legislation, which has been given the Orwellian title, The Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, is based on model legislation provided by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate lobbying group that takes the view that human activity plays little to no role in harmful climate change, and that EPA regulations are a “train wreck.” ALEC’s sponsors include, among others, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, United Healthcare, and Koch Industries.

The person overseeing the ALEC committee that adopted the model legislation, Alexandra “Sandy” Liddy Bourne, who happens to be the daughter of notorious Watergate operative G. Gordon Liddy, left ALEC some time ago to work for the Heartland Institute—a climate science denial group that recently gained some notoriety when internal memos detailing its cynical strategies for manipulating public opinion and public school science curricula were leaked. The calculus of the corporate sponsors behind the Tennessee anti-science bill and others like it (yes, there are more such bills in other states) seems pretty straightforward: The less the public knows, the more money ALEC sponsors make. Which may be true, if your time horizon is short enough.

Tennessee’s anti-bullying—rather, anti-anti-bullying—legislation involves a kind of irony that is a little sadder than that of the anti-science bill. It is important to note that Tennessee already has some anti-bullying laws on its books. The state and its schools have acknowledged that bullying is a problem and that something should be done about it. As well they should: last December, a young man named Jacob Rogers became the latest public high school student to kill himself after being relentlessly bullied in his Tennessee high school for being gay. The intention of the new bill—introduced just one month after Jacob’s suicide – is to carve out an exemption for those bullies who can lay claim to a sincere religious motivation for their hatred.

In its hectic month defending the rights of pious bullies, the rights of those who don’t want to know anything about science, and the rights of the representatives of the majority religion to stamp their doctrines over public property, the Tennessee legislature has done us the service of raising an interesting question. Why is it that the people who are so hostile to science also seem to be hostile to gays, to children, and especially to gay children? Why is it that creationists are always the ones who are most convinced that God did not create any LGBTs? And why is it that the people who are most frightened at the prospect that their school might expose their children to the reality that some of their fellow students are LGBT are so often the same ones who don’t want their children exposed to the realities of evolution?

If short-term money is the fuel behind the Tennessee rampage, it seems pretty obvious that what Darrow called “religious fanaticism” is the fire. All of which goes to show that just as science provides an ever-increasing wealth of opportunities to enrich the mind, so ignorance multiplies its damages without limit. RD.net

The Ever Invading Creep of The American Talibangenical

A far better article than might first appear, and not just because it embraces two pet hates of mine, Jesus in the military and Jesus in the US Air Force.

Far more than highlighting the sanctimony and hypocrisy of those particular bunch of hired killers, the article exposes the degree to which these groupies for God have infiltrated every walk of life. But in fairness, I have edited out some of the more esoteric links that were included in the original article.

If you haven't read my two previous posts, the 'US Army' and the 'USAF', links below, you really should, because to read is to believe, what might otherwise be considered unbelievable.

This paragraph should give you a taste of things.

I spend (sic) over 20 years of my life as an evangelical Christian, and during that time these behaviors seemed benign, even laudable to me. Today, as a psychologist who creates resources for former fundamentalists, I find them disturbing. Even so, I am sympathetic to the moral conundrum fundamentalism can cause for genuinely decent people. After I watched the documentary Jesus Camp, a friend commented, “Wasn’t that horrifying?” I had to confess that it seemed kind of, well, normal -- and that I could relate to the woman running the camp.

How the Fundamentalist Mind Compels Conservative Christians to Force Their Beliefs on You

Good people are willing to subvert the U.S. Constitution and even violate human decency in their quest for converts.
Valerie Tarico
March 7, 2012


Many evangelicals wear their religion on T-shirts and around their necks and on car bumpers and eye-blacks. They hand out tracts on college campuses and stage revival meetings on military bases. They use weddings and funerals to preach come-to-Jesus sermons. In their resolve to spread the good news that Jesus saves, some also do things that are more morally dubious.

In Tucson, nice young couples cultivate relationships with lonely college students without disclosing that they are paid to engage in “friendship missions.” In Seattle, volunteers woo first- and second-graders to afterschool Good News Clubs that the children are incapable of distinguishing from school-sponsored activities. In Muslim countries, Christian missionaries skirt laws that ban proselytizing by pretending to be mere aid workers, putting genuinely secular aid workers at risk. In the U.S. military, soldiers bully other soldiers into prayer meetings or the Passion of the Christ and then send bizarrely profane emails to people who try to stop them.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of evangelical zeal in recent decades has been millions of unnecessary deaths in Africa. Many evangelicals saw the HIV epidemic as an opportunity.

“AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history,” said Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse. Another group that pursued HIV dollars has its mission built right into its name: Community Health Evangelism. Christian ideology ultimately redirected billions of U. S. aid dollars away from science-based results-oriented interventions such as contraceptive access and safe-sex education and into programs that espoused traditional Christian values: monogamy, evangelism, and compassionate after-the-fact care for the sick.

I spend over 20 years of my life as an evangelical Christian, and during that time these behaviors seemed benign, even laudable to me. Today, as a psychologist who creates resources for former fundamentalists, I find them disturbing. Even so, I am sympathetic to the moral conundrum fundamentalism can cause for genuinely decent people. After I watched the documentary Jesus Camp, a friend commented, “Wasn’t that horrifying?” I had to confess that it seemed kind of, well, normal -- and that I could relate to the woman running the camp.

To explain why Christians will sometimes violate their own commitment to compassion or truth in the search for converts, it helps to consider the psychology of fundamentalist religion.

Religion has a set of superpowers—ways it shapes or controls human thinking and behavior. Chief among these is the fact that religions take charge of our moral reasoning and emotions, giving divine sanction to some behaviors and forbidding others. Because there are many kinds of “good,” all of us make moral decisions by weighing values against each other. For example, most parents place a value on not hurting their children and yet get them immunized because long-term health trumps short-term pain. Religion can alter the way we stack those competing values, adding emotional weight to some, removing it from others.

The relationship between religion and morality is complicated. Religion claims credit for our moral instincts. It channels them via specific prescriptions and prohibitions. It offers explanations for why some things feel right and others feel so wrong and why we find the wrong ones tempting. It engages us in stories and rituals that bring moral questions to the fore in day-to-day life. It embeds us in a community that encourages moral conformity and increases altruism toward insiders. It creates the sense that someone is always watching over our shoulder.

When religious edicts align with the quest for love and truth, religion’s power can encourage us to be more compassionate, kind, humble or act with integrity. But religions also assert moral obligations that have little to do with love or truth, harm or wellbeing. Consider, for example, sacramental rituals, pilgrimages, circumcision, veiling, vows of silence or rituals of purity. Some demands of piety have little human or planetary cost. But other times, divine edict compels adherents to do harm in the service of a higher cause that to outsiders simply doesn’t exist. The Aztec and Inca practice of human sacrifice to appease gods was one of these. To outsiders it was a horrifying moral violation; to insiders more analogous to a community vaccination; the young men and women who were sacrificed gave their lives for a greater good—the wellbeing of the whole society.

Since religions add to an adherent’s bucket of moral obligations, they can create moral dilemmas or tradeoffs where none would otherwise exist. Should I spend my days studying Torah or working to feed my children? Should I drive my daughter to the hospital even though it’s Friday? Should I give the little I can spare to the poor or to the nuns? Should I wander with a beggar bowl or help my father tend the fields so my sisters can go to school? Should I encourage my poor African parishioners to wear condoms to prevent HIV or tell them to entrust God with their family planning?

Sometimes the tradeoffs are a matter of life or death, as when Saudi girls may have been forced to remain in their burning school rather than flee unveiled. Or consider the case of a young Arizona mother who had to choose between her own death and the abortion of a 12-week fetus her church deemed a person. She chose to live so she could continue raising the children who waited for her at home. But her bishop, who saw the abortion as premeditated murder, excommunicated a nun who helped her, claiming the more moral path was to allow the death of both woman and fetus as God’s will.

Evangelical Protestants who believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of God take as one of their highest mandates a verse they call the Great Commission. I have seen it emblazoned in letters two feet high on the wall of a megachurch: Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 28:19, NIV). The word evangel means good news, and the name evangelical identifies Christians whose beliefs center on spreading what they think is the best news ever to reach the human race: that Jesus died for our sins and anyone who believes can be saved from hell. (One of my deep secrets as an evangelical teenager was how much I hated trying to sell other people on the Four Spiritual Laws that laid out the plan of salvation.)

Follow me, says the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel, and I will make you fishers of men. For evangelical Christians, fishing for souls is an obligation that can trump all others. What good does it do to feed the hungry or tend the sick if you leave their souls to eternal torture? Catholic Christians typically believe that good works are of value in their own right. Universalist Christians believe that the death of Jesus on the cross ultimately redeemed all of creation. Modernist Christians believe the Bible is a human document and that the life of Jesus is more important than his death. Evangelical Christians believe they have a moral obligation to proselytize.

Beliefs have consequences, and one consequence of evangelical belief is that decent people end up doing ugly things in order to recruit converts and save souls. It is because they care about being good that they do harm. In the much quoted words of Steven Weinberg, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The mechanism by which this happens is that religion creates a narrative in which the evil serves a higher good.

A new book by Mikey Weinstein, No Snowflake in an Avalanche, offers a window into how corrosive the Great Commission can be. It chronicles a harrowing decade in, what is to Weinstein, a fight to the death for religious freedom. You may be familiar with fragments of the story. When fundamentalist Christians at the Air Force Academy began goading and harassing Weinstein’s cadet son, Curtis, they awoke a grizzly bear.

Weinstein assumed at first that the harassment was an anomaly and would be addressed quickly. Alas. The more pressure he applied using his own standing as an Academy graduate and former Reagan administration attorney, the more he uncovered an entrenched network of fundamentalist Christians that ranged from cadets to chaplaincy to brass, and that pressured all others to convert: Clubbish Bible-believing cadets bullied Catholics, Muslims, Jews, nontheists and even mainline Protestants (who, after all, weren’t real Christians to them). Evangelical chaplains brazenly told supporters they were missionaries on the public dime and the armed services was their mission field. Righteous officers pulled rank and pressured subordinates to participate in Bible studies and prayer meetings –and covered up abuses. Middle Easterners complained that America’s troops were Christian crusaders, and outside organizations fanned the flames by providing tracts and Bibles so that combat soldiers could work on converting Iraqi and Afghan civilians.

Livid about violations against the U.S. Constitution and livid about the personal violations and added dangers being endured by America’s soldiers because of the crusade mentality, Weinstein formed the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Since then, thousands of phone calls, letters and emails have poured in from all arms of the services--not only from the academies but from men and women whose lives are on the line in war zones. The MRFF has fought like a cornered lion on their behalf—fierce, muscular and unpredictable—leaving fundamentalist perpetrators convinced that Weinstein and his colleagues are agents of Satan.

As exposure after exposure has demonstrated, the evangelizers are legally in the wrong. They also are in violation of well-established moral and ethical principles including, often, humanity’s most central moral principle, the Golden Rule. They would be outraged if adherents of other religions solicited their children or exploited their collegial relationships in the quest for converts. So why don’t they give it up? They can’t. Their beliefs require that they push as hard as they can to implement their understanding of God’s will.

In recent years, evangelicals have expanded their outreach in the military, public grade schools, "faith-based” community services and international aid programs, leveraging existing structures and secular funding streams when possible to support their work. To qualify for grants or gain access to public facilities, they argue that they are social service providers, not missionaries. From a personnel standpoint they argue that they are churches, exempt from civil rights laws. America’s Supreme Court has been remarkably willing to let them speak out of both sides of their mouths, which means this trend will continue. Evangelical organizations like Officers Christian Fellowship, Child Evangelism Fellowship, Prison Fellowship Ministries and World Vision will proselytize as much as they are allowed to, diverting as many public dollars as they can, because that is what their reading of the Bible demands.

Inside and outside of Christianity, vigorous debate is challenging the pillars of fundamentalist belief, like the idea that the Bible is literally perfect or that Jesus was the ultimate human sacrifice. But the evangelical quest for converts will be constrained only by whatever moral limits the rest of us set. AlterNet

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Previous:
US Army: Bible Bashing For Jesus

USAF: A Most Ungodly Organisation

Afghan Kill Team Fail The Spiritual Fitness Program

Plenty more under the Armed Forces tag.

The Religious-conservative Insanity of the American Right

Enjoy your trip sister mine, to Ida-fuckin-ho of all places. The poor dear is labouring under the misapprehension that America is a modern industrial nation and not the theocratic police state that it is.

And a little further reading for you Sister, and then perhaps the next time I tell you about all this shit, you might not look at me in disbelief. Wake up! smell the coffee.

I know you won't, but you could also try Google search, Idaho religious cults.

http://onlyinamericablogging.blogspot.com/search/label/TSA

TSA Horror Stories

The Religious-conservative Insanity of the American Right

Liberal Jews in the U.S. are doubly fearful - of the messianic insanity now spreading in American politics, of its Israeli version and, most of all, of the link between the two.
By Avirama Golan
March 14, 2012

It's nothing new, but the approaching elections are bringing into sharper focus the fact that the United States is two opposite, contradictory and mutually hostile sides of the same experience. The first Afro-American leader in the history of the nation is sitting in the White House and introducing, together with his wife, a revolutionary policy of which the government health insurance law is only the beginning, but the forces operating against him are dark and powerful.

In the state of Pennsylvania an amendment to the abortion law could soon be enacted, which would require gynecologists to perform a vaginal ultrasound on every woman who requests an abortion. The woman, for her part, would be forced to look at the image of the fetus, hear its heartbeat and listen to a detailed explanation of its condition.

The proposal, initiated by Republican State Rep. Kathy Rapp who is running for reelection, has been called "state-sanctioned rape," but Republican congressmen are competing among themselves to have it adopted.

That is only the tip of the iceberg of the religious-conservative insanity that is erupting like a volcano on the American right. From the start, the Republicans have made unfounded accusations against President Barack Obama - he's a Muslim, he's not a U.S. citizen, he is raising taxes (a day after he had lowered taxes for the middle class ) and hates the Church and religion. They claim he is leading the government into blatant intrusion in the life of the individual (but they don't consider a vaginal ultrasound to be an intrusion into a person's life ).

Who said the government has to take care of the weak? Republican candidate Rick Santorum asked Obama this week. After all, that task is reserved for only one entity - God! There is no question that God has a central role in these elections. And so does the devil. In 2008 Santorum (in whose Catholic opinion even Protestants are not sufficiently Christian ) maintained that the devil had infiltrated the U.S. administration and was destroying the country.


U.S. Democrats are now experiencing a profound fear that the important principle mandating separation of religion and state in the United States is being eroded with horrifying speed. And how unsurprising that this Democratic public includes many Jews - far more than what seems to be the case when Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaps loud applause at an AIPAC convention. These Jews are now doubly fearful - because of the messianic insanity now spreading in American politics, and because of its Israeli version and, most of all, because of the link between the two.

A huge community of secular, traditional, Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox Jews is witnessing two political systems that have broken the rules and are working with what looks to them like a worrying lack of restraint. They believe that the connection between the evangelical extremists and the settler extremists, which is being forged over the heads of the American public (and behind the backs of the Israeli public ), has long since passed the bounds of legitimacy - in the huge budgets being invested in it and the brainwashing that is following in its wake.

The way in which Netanyahu is speaking directly to the American right - in what is proving to be a cynical bypassing of the fragile dialogue between Jerusalem and Washington - is arousing frustration here. Human rights organizations, liberal communities, academics and public figures are all expressing dissatisfaction and despair in light of the Haredi-religious-ultra-nationalist extremism in Israel, and the strengthening of the connection between it and ultra-nationalist, white Christianity and extreme right-wing and extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewry in the United States. Only recently have many of them discovered that the same Sheldon Adelson who is pouring a fortune into Newt Gingrich's campaign for the GOP primaries is also the publisher of the Israel Hayom freebie newspaper that supports Netanyahu. When they found out they raised not one but both eyebrows.

In that case, they are saying, maybe the time has come for Israelis on the left and in the center - who for years have told that same silent and loyal public not to interfere - to join hands with millions of American Jews who are afraid, like them, for the future and fate of Israel. Truly, the time has come to demonstrate to the Israeli government the power of a public that can not only donate generously, but can also demand a change in policy, a reining in of extremism and renewed thinking about the nature and identity of the Jewish state. ICH

Mississippi Republican Voters: Sublime Ignorance

Although why the writer should single out Mississippi I don't know, I should imagine there ain't a great deal of difference between any of 'em, south or west of New York State. As the video below will attest.

Bring Out the Dinosaurs: 66 Percent of Likely Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Are Creationists
Mark Karlin
03/13/2012

A columnist for "The Atlantic" chastised a Democratic-affiliated polling firm for asking likely Southern GOP primary voters if they thought Obama was a Muslim. Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that the president is Islamic, the writer asks?

There's a point to be made that in this age of demagogic factoids, repeating them in some ways gives them more credence.

On the other hand, isn't it of significance to discover that "new data from Public Policy Polling ...shows that 52 percent of Mississippi Republican believe President Obama is a Muslim (a comparatively slight 45 percent of Alabama GOP voters agreed with them)"? In addition the poll shows some further disarming responses: 66 percent of likely Mississippi Republican voters don't believe in evolution; 60 percent of Alabama GOP followers share that opinion. Oh, and 67 percent of likely Alabama Grand Old Party voters believe that the state's xenophobic and harsh anti-Mexican "immigration law" is a "good thing."

When you add these and other poll responses together, you realize that a large portion of the Southern Republican voting base that is living in the dark ages. The much-commented upon belief that Obama is a Muslim is just the most sensational of poll revelations, because it is so contrary to a verifiable fact.

What you have here is a profile of a segment of the US population that is somewhat akin to a religious cult with a deep fear of anyone who doesn't look and talk like they do. Of course, the "Obama is a Muslim" meme (repeated in innuendo so often on FOX and by right wing talk show hosts such as Limbaugh) plays to the racial animosity of the heritage of the Confederacy. Maybe many likely GOP primary voters don't even know that believing such a false "factoid" is just a cerebrally coated way of reflecting, "I don't want a black man as president; 'real' Americans are white."

Polls such as this pre-primary one reinforce the idea that the South may have lost the Civil War, but the inherited values and beliefs of the Confederacy now dominate the Republican Party. As a result, this "backwards in time" outlook currently has a stranglehold on the United States through Republican control of the House of Representatives. Furthermore, the US Senate Republican caucus frequently appeals to this base and stifles progress through the threat of filibusters. Not to mention that the GOP field of presidential candidates heavily leans in the direction of this minority of voters living in a bubble.

In that regard, knowing that the majority of likely Mississippi GOP voters believe that President Obama is a Muslim and that 66 percent of them are creationists is information worth knowing. Buzzflash

This little pearl from Lynchburg Tennessee. Originally posted under the header, Now I Know How Idiots Get Elected President.

It's scary to say the least, especially when you see the young uns caught up in all this nonsense. If we can't look to to youth to cast off this yoke of ignorance, who can we look to?

This Week's Religious Wanker of The Week: Sen James Inhofe

It was never going to be a surprise that this tosser is a Republican, just as it was never going to be a surprise that he hails from some backward, flat earth, mid-west state.

And in spite of him being bought and paid for by the oil and gas industries, I don't doubt for a minute that he believes every word that comes out of his backward Oklahoma gob.

America! it's beyond redemption.

Sigh: Senator Inhofe Believes Global Warming is Hoax Because "Only God Can Change the Climate"

In a radio interview with Voice of Christian Youth America, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that his belief that global warming is a hoax is biblically inspired. Promoting his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe told interviewer Vic Eliason on Wednesday that only God can change the climate, and the idea that manmade pollution could affect the seasons is “arrogance“:

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Inhofe went on to attack evangelical leader Rich Cizik, the former Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has made the religious case for fighting climate change pollution. Inhofe said Cizik has been “exposed as a liberal” and that he is like idolatrous Romans described in the Bible as those who “give up the truth about God for a lie.”

In the interview, Inhofe did not mention he has received $1,352,523 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $90,950 from Koch Industries.

VCY America also argues that Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud, Muslim extremists have infiltrated the federal government, and that the United Nations has engineered the Agenda 21 program to transform human society through population control and energy use. AlterNet

Youtube's Censorship of Free Speech Regarding Religion

Unedited.

I hope this post still works, because for one reason or another, it has taken a rather circuitous path to get where it has.

Though it is basically a tale of censorship, and in my case as a UK resident, one of censorship and copyright, the underlying theme is one of disappointment.

Disappointment, great disappointment in where we as a species are headed. In an age and in a period of our history when we should be glorying in, and of our own enlightenment, there are still great swathes of humanity, whose purpose and intent is that we remain, or even less unacceptable, regress to a pre-industrial era of superstition and theocracy.

For those that would have us remain, and in a period far earlier than pre-industrial, earlier by a millennium or more in fact, of them, the followers of the Prophet Mohamed, there is no hope whatsoever. No hope whatsoever that those of the Islamic faith will ever embrace modernity or enlightenment. But as we know, content as they might be to live by the dark ages edicts of an illiterate bandit, there is no such contentment that the rest of us are disinclined to embrace their particular brand of mythology.

The refusal to accept the science of what we are doing to our planet apart, the tenets of Islam constitute one the greatest threats imaginable to a civilised, just and harmonious society.

But, but, yes I hear you, I know your argument; what about the rest of them, the Christian fundamentalists, are they any better? Simply, no.

Are they in fact worse? Only in the fact that Christianity has been replaced as the religion of death they're not; and I'll truck no argument from anybody, that Islam is anything other than this. Fundamental to its core, if you don't accept its teachings your dead. Well, if you open your mouth to say as much you are, let alone tweet such thoughts, but of the tweets, we will look a little later to one of the featured videos.

It's not my intention to turn this post into us and them, or my God is bigger than your God kind of thing, because quite frankly, I think both sides are insane, only by varying degrees. But as it is their turn under the spotlight, let us see to what degree, they disappoint us in terms of our modern day society. And to do this, there is no better place to look than the politics of the Christian right of America.

At which point reason, regarding religion and politics in American public life, ceased to be part of the equation, I couldn't really say, I have only been observing such things since 2006, but nonetheless, extremism was every bit as present then as now. The outrageous inclusion of 'faith' and politics that we see so inextricably mixed today, was as I say, still at the forefront of political life then. The most astounding example would have had to have been in a televised 2007 Presidential debate candidates, when asked to raise their hands if they don't believe in evolution, Sen. Sam Brownback, Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Tom Tancredo all said they do not.

My point being, is it so very far removed from having Mullahs in charge of the running of a country?



Two more short clips, where the response of the audience is quite frightening.





Here's a short bonus clip, just forty three seconds, it's enough.



Bad enough then that this blatant religiosity is such a part of modern politics, but even worse, is the extreme platform that today's politicians, both those already elected and potential candidates, adopt as though somehow being quite reasonable and acceptable. But those platforms are anything but reasonable and acceptable, they are in fact nothing less than biblical.

Already we see around the US such policies in force, and more on the way each passing day. And everyone of those policies the recipient is a female; how could it not be when the legislation, semantics apart, comes straight out of the Bible, written when I ask?

Again bad enough, that these policies are being implemented by those already in office, but to actually run as a candidate for POTUS with a platform based on such fables, just staggers the imagination. And perhaps even more staggering, these policies are looked on favourably by no small percentage of the electorate.

Bringing us full circle, back to disappointment in what should be an enlightened period in our history as a species.

So what exactly was it that caused me to write about this disappointment? To answer that question we have to look at the recent behaviour of an organisation that should epitomise enlightenment, Google/Youtube. It should, but it doesn't; not when it starts to censor content based on religion, could anything really be more disappointing than that I ask?

I am going to make use of a few screenshots, both to explain my path to this sorry state of affairs and to clarify certain points, a picture being worth a thousand words blah blah.

We start off with something I re-tweeted.



Coincidentally, the featured video was the same one as in my own digest alert from Youtube.


Let's see what all the fuss is about says I. Therein lay a problem.



This because the clip contained a few seconds of Richard Dawkins taken from his Root of All Evil. A program I am fully entitled to watch in this country by the way, via Channel iplayer. Let's leave the logic of that one out of it all and move straight on.

Looking at the associated videos, I came up with this from the Amazing Atheist, who, if you pick them out, makes some germane and salient points.





24 hours later:

It seems Youtube has had a change of heart regarding its policy, shown below.




So much for enlightenment in the 21st century.

Why such a reversal on the part of Youtube? Enter Isaac Newton and his third law, for every action ....



Ah so! Not only that, with a thousand others mirroring the clip, we can kiss the copyright issue goodbye, it just becomes unenforceable. And of course, then allowing me to view the clip in question.

But the critical thing here, is not the content per say, inoffensive that it is, but that, quote: Youtube's professional team of moderators reviewed these videos and impartially came to the conclusion that they did not confirm to Youtube's stated policy.

To other little note worthies regarding this video; enter the tweets, and yer man ain't never going to get an Oscar




And one of the offending videos, the Best Emotional Porn, below for you to take offence at.

Most people will look at communal animals, and their need to be in groups will be outstandingly obvious. However people are that taken up by the first person perspective of life, that they don't immediately recognize their own biological need to be in groups. Its not just a preference, its biologically hardwired into your brain. Being with friends is good, and being with powerful friends is even better. It is therefore unsurprising that if you are going to fantasise about a friendship, that as the rewards are better for having a powerful invisible friend, than a weak one, that most people end up having a 'relationships' with an ultrapowerful god.

It is hard to contest that there are real emotional rewards yielded from such fantasies, and I have no problem with that. However when these fantasies have destructive effects on the society around those who hold them it becomes an issue. Indeed the extent to which such fantasies can pervert and corrupt a member of society are aptly summed up in William Lane Craig. Arguably the strongest interpersonal behavior is that of protecting infants. William Lane Craigs religion perverts his behavior to such an extent that he will happily justify putting a sword through a babies skull with a smile on his face and a tune in his heart knowing that, according to his fantasy, that the infant received an infinite good as a consequence of him killing it.

Banned video list.


Rules on (emotional) masturbation.




The end.


Bonus.

The Sad Race for Bottom on the Loony Right

As Santorum and Romney battle for the extremist vote, progressives should be worried, not gloating.
Robert B. Reich
February 27, 2012

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years – and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples’ lives.

This was enough to stir right-wing evangelicals in the South, social conservatives in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and stop-at-nothing extremists in Washington and the media who hounded Bill Clinton for eight years, then stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.

They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years. Even formerly sensible senators like Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar are moving to the extreme right in order to keep their seats.

At this rate the GOP will end up on the dust heap of history. Young Americans are more tolerant, cosmopolitan, better educated, and more socially liberal than their parents. And relative to the typical middle-aged America, they are also more Hispanic and more shades of brown. Today’s Republican Party is as relevant to what America is becoming as an ice pick in New Orleans.

In the meantime, though, we are in trouble. America is a winner-take-all election system in which a party needs only 51 percent (or, in a three-way race, a plurality) in order to gain control.

In parliamentary systems of government, small groups representing loony fringes can be absorbed relatively harmlessly into adult governing coalitions.

But here, as we’re seeing, a loony fringe can take over an entire party — and that party will inevitably take over some part of our federal, state, and local governments.

As such, the loony right is a clear and present danger. Alternet