May his days be few; may another seize his position. (NRSV)

Of course God works in mysterious ways and often needs his followers to do his dirty work. So if this movement gets enough momentum, it’s only a matter of time before some lunatic tries to act on this “biblical advice.”

The ironic thing, of course, is that these Christians seem forget one of Jesus’ main teachings: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:24)

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You folks may remember a previous post on Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina and the book burning they were planning to have. The Church, run by Pastor Marc Grizzard, was planning to burn the usual targets: heavy metal music and smutty movies. But they also planned to torch all translations of the bible other than the KJV:

“We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, ESV, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT [...] These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.”

And then there would be fried chicken with all the sides.

Well, the best laid schemes of mice and morons often go awry. The blog “Right Wing Watch,” declares it the Worst. Book Burning. Ever:

“But when the big day came around, a combination of rain, protesters, and a state law against burning paper all conspired against them. Here’s what happened:”

Bless their hearts.

They tries to make the best of it. According to their website:

Our goal was to destroy garbage as noted below, and we did just that. We didn’t care how it was destroyed; only that it was destroyed. These same people must have never heard about “Paper, Rock, & Scissors.” Scissors cut paper, and paper tears real easy. We destroyed everything as planned. Praise God!

No word on the fried chicken.

I have no rap sensibilities, so I have no idea if this would be considered good or bad in style, but the lyrics seem pretentious. I mean seriously:

Where He laid down the law for God-ruled government. Commonly referred to as the Mosaic covenant. Sin was imputed. So for man to know he’s unrighteous, God instituted animal sacrifices. This was to show our constant need for atonement.

Would anyone appreciate that except a room full of theology-obsessed evangelicals?

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When a Christian Post story starts with the sentence “Conservative pastors rallied outside the Justice Department on Monday to test the limits of the newly expanded hate crimes law” you know you’re in for a treat. In wake of a new hate-crime bill that just passed, they wanted to make sure they could still “defend their freedom to proclaim biblical truths” (read: spew venom about homosexuality and gender identity).

“You may choose to disbelieve or disagree with us but you have no right to seek to silence us,” said Dr. Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America Action, as pro-gay clergy and some from the gay and lesbian community gathered with signs reading “My love is legit.”

“If this law is used to silence me or any of these preachers for speaking the truth, then we will be forced to conscientiously defy it,” Scarborough declared. “That is my calling as a Christian and my right as an American citizen.”
…
Clergy, religious broadcasters and conservative groups fear the legislation will subject them to prosecution for preaching what they believe the Bible says – that homosexual behavior is sin. While some believe they are exaggerating the effects of the expanded hate crimes law, the group on Monday was convinced they could be targeted for their speech and beliefs.

Yeah, not so much. They proceeded to say anti-gay things in hopes being arrested, giving them standing to challenge the law. To no avail. According to Dana Milbank, who was reporting on the event for the Washington Post, the cops were more interested in checking their blackberries than arresting the preachers. Why?

To break the new law, you need to “plan or prepare for an act of physical violence” or “incite an imminent act of physical violence”.  That shouldn’t be too controversial.  If the preachers really wanted to break the law they shouldn’t have stopped at “Homosexuality is a sin,” but continued to say “and should be punished by immediate stoning as the Bible says.  Let’s get ‘em, who’s with me?”

What followed the press conference was not an arrest, but a counter-demonstration when gay protesters took over the lectern to hold their own news conference:

“We’re here to say, my love is legit!” announced David Valk, an organizer of the National Equality March for gay rights.

Another speaker, Ian Thomas, went to the microphone and announced: “I was created a bisexual male. Just like many figures in the Christian Bible, I like boys and girls!”

[organizer Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission] turned angrily to the AV guy. “We’re not on the clock, are we?” He turned with equal anger to Valk. “You guys gonna help us pay for the microphones?”

The gay activist smiled. “God,” he said, “works in mysterious ways.”

In this case, God took the form of Chuck Fazio, from DC Podiums. Fazio was hired by the religious conservatives to provide the sound system for the event, but upon learning of their cause, he decided to donate his proceeds to the gay rights activists and to give them a chance at the microphone before shutting down the amplifiers.

How cool is that?  I used to do sound for events at the Library of Congress, but I never saw anything like it. Major kudos to Mr. Fazio.

(via Rob Boston’s post for of Americans United for Separation of Church and State)

How does a man recover from publicly first condemning homosexuality in front of thousands and then being caught in a meth-crazed sexual affair with another man? I don’t know either, but if you have ideas I’m sure Ted Haggard would love to hear them.

Poor guy. He’s back at home “healing rapidly” and wants to start prayer sessions again.

“A couple of weeks ago we decided we’d like to have a prayer meeting at our house,” said Haggard. “Now we’ll see how many come. We thought about going to one, but because of my deal we knew that some people would be awkward there. So we thought, if we have one at our house then everyone who comes is comfortable with what’s gone on in my life.”

Haggard said he has no expectations. It could draw five people, it could draw 200, he said.

I got a chuckle from this:

Haggard said his struggles parallel those in the Bible.

“Most of the primary characters of the Bible had horrible, horrible incidents in their lives. David misused his power to murder people. He was an adulterer. And he was still a man after God’s own heart,” Haggard said.

Well, of course David was “still a man after God’s own heart” – God can relate to those urges!  Did Haggard miss the stories about God’s senseless slaughter and that one time he impregnated a married women?

On a more serious note, I can recognize that this is a man struggling with beliefs and feelings that are difficult to reconcile, and I hope he can find peace one way or another.  Yes, the suffering is due in large part to his own mistakes, but I don’t like to imagine what he must be going through.

If he’s looking to preach again, he could always apply for a job on the supposedly reformed-gay “Love Won Out” tour.  As far as I can see, the conference’s purpose is to help people cope with unwanted homosexuality both in themselves and in loved ones.  Alas, they do this by insisting that it can and should be overcome.

There are some redeeming qualities of the tour – it’s nice that they teach parents not to disown gay children and it’s nice that they try to present everything with love instead of hatred…  Congratulations; you’re at least attempting to mitigate the damage your deranged views on sex have done to people’s self-esteem, their families, and their relationships. Bra-vo.  My friend Carrie Poppy sums it up nicely in her Examiner.com article, saying:

“Forgive me if I don’t stand up and cheer. Your bronze-age religion instills deep guilt, fear and self-loathing in otherwise healthy individuals, and then helps them deal with those emotions by encouraging their denial of self-identity? Onward, Christian soldiers!”

Rumor has it that this was done by the then-President of Seattle Atheists.

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If a couple has been married for more than five years, any persistent disharmony in their marriage relationship is usually attributable to the husband’s lack of understanding and applying genuine love. (Gary Smalley, If He Only Knew, 73)

It seems that stems from the perspective that the husband is the “leader.” In fact, Smalley acknowledges that the husband is biblically “responsible for the disharmony in [their] home.”

Do you agree or disagree that it’s usually the husband’s fault when there’s persistent disharmony after 5 years?

Jim Stevens says he’s not particularly religious and is clueless about why an image resembling Jesus Christ keeps appearing on his pickup.

Stevens — of Jonesborough — says nearly every morning, an image that looks to him like the face of Jesus Christ has appeared in the condensation on the driver’s side window of his Isuzu truck.

A Johnson City Press photo of the truck showed a facial image.

Stevens said when he first saw the image, he figured it would evaporate and not return. But it kept reappearing for two weeks now.

Stevens said folks at the grocery store he goes to were amazed to see the image.

He says he isn’t going to wash the truck for a while.

I’ll give this guy credit though — at least he just says “I don’t know” and isn’t worshiping it. That’s some progress!

(I’m obviously kidding that I had anything to do with the sticker, but that’s my initial guess based on the detail of the image and when it appears.)

Update: It’s even simpler than I first said — who needs rain-x when you have sticker residue? So I removed the rain-x complication.

A similar committee: Microsoft in 1978

We finally have discovered, beyond any shadow of a doubt, how our universe was been created. No, it’s wasn’t by some all-powerful eternally begotten long-haired hippy. Nor was it from an Invisible Pink Unicorn (bless his holy hooves). It ends up the universe was created by committee.

Doesn’t everything make so much more sense now?

The most extensive analysis yet undertaken of the structure and contents of the universe conclusively proves the universe was created not by a single entity, as has been widely suggested, but by “a fractious and disorganized committee or committees given to groupthink and petty infighting”, according to Drs. Karl Pootle and Yumble Frick, co-authors of the study. The analysis is expected to have profound implications on the theoretical underpinnings of many popular religions….

“Biodiversity is the primary stumbling block,” said Dr. Pootle. “Whoever created this cacophony of species would have had to be infinitely powerful and infinitely creative, but also infinitely schizophrenic to come up with the myriad different solutions to identical problems that the creators of the universe have. Either that, or we’re looking at a different kind of process altogether”….

“If you’re one guy designing a universe, why come up with twenty different ways of tackling the same issue?” Pootle said. “If you’re omnipotent, presumably you know perfectly well whatever the one solution is that will work best, and you go with that. The fact that the world obviously doesn’t work that way is what led us first to the committee theory. The plants and animals that inhabit the Earth show the kinds of random and incoherent thinking that can only otherwise be found in the products of design committees where there’s a lot of CYA and turf protection going on.”

Here’s a little ditty I learned back in the days of Vacation Bible School:

The Lord is good to me,
And so I thank the Lord,
For giving me
the things I need,
The sun and rain and an apple seed.
The Lord is good to me.

I suspect that many of you are baffled, particularly those of you from outside the US. This is supposedly the prayer of Johnny Appleseed, an early American missionary who traveled the frontier, planting small patches of apple trees along the way.

The song was featured in a short Disney film that was inflicted on boys of my generation. It depicted Johnny as a simple man, his only possessions a bible, a pouch of apple seeds and a tin pot which he carried on his head. Since it’s a Disney cartoon, Johnny pauses to cavort with the woodland creatures at every opportunity.

The Swedenborg Collective

Pullquote: I have often talked with angels on this subject, and they have invariably declared that in heaven they are unable to divide the Divine into three, because they know and perceive that the Divine is One and this One is in the Lord.
Emanuel Swedenborg

This is one of those cases where the reality is more complicated than Disney could handle. The man who inspired the legend was named John Chapman, a curator of apple nurseries in Ohio in the early 19th century. He was indeed a traveling evangelist, but not the sort that Disney imagines. Chapman was a actually a traveling Swedenborgian.

The Swedenborgian Church is an offshoot of Christianity, based on the writings of an 18th century Swedish visionary named Emanuel Swedenborg. Like many religious visionaries, Swedenborg believed that Christianity had been obscured by centuries of misunderstanding, and that he was receiving revelations of the pure religion directly from God. His new religion was mystical and difficult to grasp, but he clearly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He also rejected the simplistic interpretation of Sola Fide (faith alone), and insisted that faith is only a guide to the true path to salvation, which included works of charity.

The Swedenborgian “New Church” became moderately popular in England, then spread to the US in the early 19th century. In America, which they called the “New Jerusalem,” Swedenborg’s writings were influential if not exactly popular. It’s hard to say how many members the church had, but it did directly influence the Transcendentalists. Swedenborg’s concept of a three-tiered heaven may have influenced Joseph Smith’s emerging Church of Latter Days Saints.

Johnny Appleseed’s Religion

Pullquote: “This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.”

John Chapman was a star player, from the early days of the American church until his death in 1845. Consider this extract from a meeting of the English branch of the New Church, shortly after the American branch was founded:

There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in a house or out of a house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty of fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church Swedenborg, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers [...] This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries. (quoted in Occult America, 39-41)

No word on whether or not he danced with raccoons.

Some years back, the historian Mike Wallace coined the term “Mickey Mouse History” to describe the sanitized, streamlined history that frequently gets produced in America. This is the sort of commemorative history that is informed more by nostalgia or ideology than historical principles. The Disney image of Johnny Appleseed is a perfect example of this, but the problem goes deeper.

The period where Chapman was active is known as the Second Great Awakening. It’s usually depicted as the triumph of Evangelical Christianity as it spread through the land, driven by tent revivals and itinerant preachers. Stories like Chapman’s remind us that the reality was far more complex than that. Religion in America has always been heterodox and complicated, from the founding to today.

No Joke

Skewering Pat Robertson, The Most Dangerous Man in America, in 700 words or less is no easy task. Where does one begin? Books, like the above by Robert Boston, have already been written, and there may not be enough trees to cover all the facts.

On top of that, Pat hides his sins easily in broad daylight, bumbling his way through fundie TV so we assume no one takes him seriously. Hasn’t everyone been rolling their eyes at the mere mention of the 700 Club for decades now?

I’ve been recently called out for my mean-spirited attacks on these poor, innocent, easy targets who are so woefully misled and far out that they threaten no one. Who listens to some jerk blaming immigrants and other heathens and homos for hurricanes, who calls them “termites” and calls for a “Godly fumigation”? Clearly, anyone who famously states that women seeking equality are actually socialists looking to “leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians” is a joke and nothing more. Pat’s prophecies have come and gone with the wind, and his conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and Masons were nowhere near as riveting as Dan Brown’s.

Blood Diamonds

But it’s no joke. Marion “Pat” Robertson is an extremely influential man in matters that extend beyond spirituality and blundering racist faux pas. He has a political agenda, twisted morals, huge media power, insatiable thirst for money at all costs, tremendous business acumen, and influential henchman saturating every aspect of American life, from dieting to banking to war. And then there’s the little matter of blood diamonds.

I encourage all of you to look up Pat’s proclamations on the evil Hindus, Satanic atheists, homosexual Scots, the “rightful” dominion of Christians (but only some kinds of Christians), the evils of yoga,  the voice of God as special immunity for people blowing up abortion clinics, his calls for various assassinations of leaders he doesn’t like, and how his own half-million dollar racehorse had nothing to do with gambling, which he speaks against. And how “Women should listen and learn quietly and submissively.” Or how the special energy shake God used to nourish him made him capable of 2,000-lb leg presses, nearly 1.5 times the power of the world record champion.

The Elephant in the Room

But these sheer idiocies with which we cull hilarious lists really detract from the sinister reality behind the scenes. The media mogul formed the first Christian Broadcast Network and today pumps his belligerent 700 Club mumblings to a million people a day. Other programming goes around the world in some 50 languages. Founder of the Christian Coalition for America, The American Center for Law and Justice, and big wig at the Moral Majority and umpteen other rhetoric-spewing think tanks, Pat’s putting your grandma’s money toward making sure justice exists only for his approved brand of Christians and no one else. (And for his private jets.) Pat’s ties to, funding for, support of, and influence on political players is huge. He has been involved in politics himself, and is extremely influential in pushing his creationist, dominionist, racist, anti-women, anti-progress agenda from behind the scenes.

What a Relief

Pat has close business ties to shady political figures linked to genocidal warfare. Indeed, he’s a good friend of Zaire’s (now Congo) Mobutu Sésé Seko. Mobutu was the totalitarian dictator of Zaire from ’65 to ’97, a man especially fond of public executions for anyone whom he didn’t like.  Pat sunk some 8 million into blood diamond mining, given permission to mine by his friend Charles Taylor, Liberian warlord. (Pat has said that the investment was for “evangelism.” Riiiiight.) Taylor has recently been arrested after living in hiding, and faces 11 charges for war crimes, including arming, funding, and instructing rebels to pillage, rape, steal, and hack off people’s arms and legs over diamonds. Even Bush was against Taylor, and Pat lambasted him for not supporting Taylor, a “Baptist, Christian president.”

Considering that Pat’s “Operation Blessing” supposedly helps genocide and war victims in Rwanda, Congo and west Africa, isn’t it a little bit, um, wrong, to invest money in a major cause of said holocausts? Pat came under fire when it was observed that his planes, supposedly carrying refugees toward relief, were actually transporting his mining gear and profits! It was ruled that Pat had indeed diverted donations, but he saved his arse because the planes had a few relief supplies on them.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer my atheist and homo friends over greedy torture-mongers and genocidal maniacs, or preachers who cover their bloody tracks.

Lorette C. Luzajic writes about all kinds of interesting people at Fascinating People.

A picture of a real live witch, not Kimberly Daniels.

Oh all you guys think Halloween is just fun for the kids. Not true! We’re actually worshiping Satan and playing with demons!

At least according to Kimberly Daniels, who has an article published on CBN and Charisma, two popular Christian websites. She says:

If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

Lucifer is a part of the demonic godhead. Remember, everything God has, the devil has a counterfeit. Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of: the Luciferian Spirit (the false father); the Antichrist Spirit (the false holy spirit); and the Spirit of Belial (the false son)….

Really? A counterfeit Satanic trinity? You just can’t make this stuff up.

Well, that’s not true. They do make this stuff up.

Mrs. Satanic Expert continues:

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Citation needed. And that could be said after most of her sentences.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference….

The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon….

Decorating buildings with Halloween scenes, dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches are all acts rooted in entertaining familiar spirits. All these activities are demonic and have occult roots.

Well there you have it, folks. An expert on all the activities of the demonic Satan worshipers — which I guess is us, since we celebrate Halloween — has thus declared it so.

While this woman is afraid of demons and witches, I’ll be honest… I’m a little afraid of her. She makes statement after statement about things she can’t possibly know. She doesn’t know there’s a demonic trinity. She doesn’t know that most of the candy sold has been “prayed over by witches.” She doesn’t know that curses become active during this season. Those are assertions that are impossible to prove.

I don’t think this woman is stupid. Her article is fairly well-written and she’s obviously given the topic a great deal of thought. So if she’s not stupid, what is she?

There’s two options: she’s either a fraud or very self-deluded.

Update: Daniels’ article has been deleted by CBN with no explanation — I’d guess from all the negative attention. As someone on reddit said, this is an article so crazy CBN deleted it.

109. ARGUMENT FROM LACK OF DISPROOF, a.k.a. ARGUMENT FROM SHIFTED BURDEN OF PROOF
(1) You can’t prove God doesn’t exist!
(2) Therefore, God exists.

(source)