Releasing Religion

My Faithlessness: The atheist way through AA

2011-08-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

By Marya Hornbacher, Special to CNN

(CNN) - Kicked back with his boots on the table at the head of the smoke-dense room, the meeting's leader banged his fist and bellowed, “By the grace of this program and the blood of Jesus Christ, I’m sober today!”
I blinked.

This was not an auspicious beginning for the project of getting my vaguely atheistic, very alcoholic self off the sauce.

I wondered if perhaps I’d wandered into the wrong room. I thought maybe I’d wound up in Alcoholics Anonymous for crown-of-thorn Christians, and in the next room might find AA for lapsed Catholics, and downstairs a group for AA Hare Krishnas and one for AA Ukrainian Jews.

But a decade later, I’ve become aware that 12-step programs are home to people from every religion, denomination, sect, cult, political tilt, gender identity, sexual preference, economic strata, racial and ethnic background, believers in gun rights and abortion rights and the right to home schooling, drinkers of coffee and tea, whiskey and mouthwash, people who sleep on their sides or their stomachs or sidewalks.

Anyone who cares to sober up, in other words, can give it a shot the 12-step way. The official preamble Alcoholics Anonymous states: "The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

And millions of people want that and find a way to do it in this program. I’m one of them. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a raging drunk. Now I’m not.

It wasn’t magic; it was brutally hard work to get from point A to B. I do believe I’d be dead without the help of the people and the structure of the steps in AA.

But I don’t believe in God.

To read the full article, click HERE.

Faith Without God

2011-08-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

Being an atheist/agnostic/non-believer/free-thinker has its perks. I mean, you don't have to go to church on Sunday and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to feel tied down to a bunch of rules that some institution placed on you. You can open up your mind to the world around you and see it for the beauty that it is, not what you interpret some god or gods make it.

One downside, though? Finding faith in times of need.

You see, I'm a performer. And it's a tough career I've chosen, particularly when you have kids (which I do). As it happens, I've applied for a position that would solve a ton of our problems. It would be a long term gig--no, CAREER. It would prevent us from moving constantly to the next gig. It would include benefits, plenty of paid vacation time and time off, it would come with prestige, and it would help me support my family. Not only that, but I'd be SINGING. Which is what I do.

At this point, while waiting for the invitation for the live audition, if I was a godly woman, I would put my faith in the Lord. I would ask for help with this, because I know it would give my family a better life. Selfish prayer? Maybe. But I'm just saying that's what I'd do. It would be so much easier to put trust in a God and know that he would help me through this time in my life.

But the thing is, I don't. So how does an atheist find "faith"? And by the term faith, I'm not talking about faith in a god, or faith in a religion. Just plain faith. The definition of the word is "confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability." In this case, I'm taking it as faith in myself. And believe me, that is much harder than finding a faith in God. To have faith in yourself, you can depend on no one but you. At the end of the day, if you failed, it's your failure and not anyone else's. Faith in oneself is a full responsibility. How many people can say that have it?

I'd love to displace that responsibility and put it on a God. That would be easier. That would take the pressure off. It would be in his or her hands, not mine. But as such, I believe you must be stronger to find faith in yourself and yourself alone. It takes a kind of will... a kind of decision. It means you're constantly choosing yourself, even though at many turns, you may doubt.

I have faith in other things, too. I believe there are good people in the world. That the world is, ultimately, a good place. That the people hiring at this job are doing it in an honest way. I could give you a list. But this is the burden I'm bearing at the moment, so I've been wanting to share it with all of you. Faith doesn't have to be a dirty word for an atheist. We can still find faith, it just has different meaning.

Another upside? If I get the job, it's because I deserved it. I earned it. Not because a god earned it for me. So there's a sense of pride in that. I have hope. I am working on my faith. If any of you want to share your own stories, please feel free to do so in the comment section. How have you developed your own sense of faith?

Al Franken DEMOLISHES Focus on the Family Witness

2011-07-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

U.S. Senator Al Franken caught Thomas Minnery (VP for government & public policy for Focus on the Family) mis-characterizing a study about children being raised in nuclear families. This is priceless.

Focus on the Family (a tax-free government supported group) is anti feminism, pro corporal punishment, pro National Day of Prayer, pro teaching evolution in public schools, pro death penalty, and strives to prove that being gay is a "choice".

Militant Atheism

2011-07-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

From Austin Cline, About.com

Myth:
Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are demonizing Christians, labeling them anti-science and anti-intellectual.

Response:

Atheists today are no less vocal or sharp in their criticisms of theism and religion than they were last year or ten years ago; however, there have been a few very high-profiles books and criticisms which appear to have set some religious theists on edge. They are not accustomed to such pointed, direct attempts to refute or undermine their beliefs and feel they are being demonized by irreligious atheists. Disagreeing with someone and saying they are wrong is not demonization, however.

For one thing, the criticisms leveled against religion, religious beliefs, and theism are no worse than — and in most cases are quite a bit less nasty than — many of the things which conservative religious believers have been saying about atheism, secularism, and godless liberalism for many years now. The people complaining today about being demonized did not, as far as I know, raise their voices in protest against the demonization of others by members of their own community. When demonization is only bad when it's done to you, then your complaints only end up being self-serving.

Demonizing someone means representing them as evil or diabolic. Atheist criticisms may portray religion, religious beliefs, or religious theism as evil or harmful, but it's quite rare for atheists to do this to religious believers as a class. Some may indeed do this, either because they really hate religious believers or simply because they carelessly allow attacks on beliefs to slip over into attacks on believers. Either way it's definitely wrong and shouldn't happen.

At the same time, though, believers themselves shouldn't treat criticism or even attacks on their religion as attacks on them personally. People may regard their religion and their theism as the central axis on which their lives turn, and even treat attacks on their religion as a personal insult. This does not justify saying that critics are "demonizing" them as individuals. If an atheist is able to maintain a distinction between a belief and the person holding the belief, then the believer should try to do so as well.

As to the claim that Christianity is being treated as anti-science and anti-intellectual by atheists, there is a lot more validity to this. Atheists do frequently criticize Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, as anti-science and anti-intellectual — because very often, that's precisely what Christianity is. Research shows that about half the people of America believe that the universe is a mere 6,000 to 10,000 years old, for example. They only reason they believe this is because of conservative Christian views of the Bible, religion, and science — it's not Buddhism or Taoism causing people to adopt such a manifestly false view of reality.

This belief about the age of the universe is wrong, and unequivocally so. It's not disrespectful to say so, nor is vociferously arguing against this view an example of "intolerance." Furthermore, any religion which encourages, promotes, teaches, or supports such a view can only be deemed anti-science and anti-intellectual — the same goes for more "moderate" efforts, like Intelligent Design. It's a complete denial of everything we have learned from most fields in the natural sciences as well as of the basic methodology by which science operates (and due to which science has proven so much more successful than religion).

As for being anti-intellectual, there are examples of Christians promoting exactly that in reaction to atheist criticisms. One person wrote in to the Times: "Why does Professor Richard Dawkins begrudge us our illusions? Knowledge is not necessarily a solution." I don't think that a person can get much more anti-intellectual than to say that they would rather have illusions (presumably comforting and comfortable illusions) over knowledge. When a religion encourages people to prefer to be deceived rather than acquire an accurate understanding of reality, it is unquestionably anti-intellectual.

There is nothing about religion which absolutely requires it to be anti-science or anti-intellectual. Religion is simply a type of belief system and there are certainly secular belief systems which are anti-science and anti-intellectual as well. There are, however, strong tendencies in religions which incline them towards totalitarianism, absolutism, and dogmatism. These qualities can be key components in an anti-science, anti-intellectual stance, and it's to be expected that religion might be this way more often than chance would dictate.

There is nothing militant or intolerant about criticizing any belief system which is anti-science and anti-intellectual — not even if one attacks or mocks such a belief system. Given how much our species and our societies today depend upon science, technology, and the best possible use of the human intellect, we need to fight such belief systems as much as possible. If people hold to a belief system that teaches them to believe manifestly false things for bad reasons, they should be told this and encouraged to give up this belief system for something better.

How I Became An Atheist- Hugh's Story

2011-07-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

This is a wondering telling from Hugh Kramer of the LA Atheism Examiner on how he "crossed over" to atheism. Thank you for sharing, Hugh.

This is part of a series of autobiographical stories of how people become atheists. I start with mine but guest writers are invited to contribute theirs too. Write to me on my Facebook page for more details. The first guest contributor's story will appear tomorrow.

Some people experience epiphanies; something occurs, perhaps even something ordinary and in an instant, their previous worldview shatters and they are changed forever. I envy those people for my progress to new ways of seeing the world has always been plodding and often painful. My personal transformation from theist to atheist took place over more years than many of my readers have been alive. I never intended to become an atheist and in some respects I was only dragged into atheism kicking and screaming. Experience and what Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, called "Die verfluchte Huhre, Vernunft" (That damned whore, Reason) are what dragged me there.

I did have some small advantages though. I grew up in Los Angeles, which is not a particularly religious town and was raised in a not particularly religious Jewish family. We took the existence of God for a given and observed a few of the major holidays but otherwise the only strongly-stressed Jewish rule we were taught was to live life as good people. By the time my parents decided I needed to learn more about Judaism in preparation for my Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish coming of age ceremony), I was too old (11 going on 12) for the transplant to take. I still believed in God and still considered myself Jewish but I couldn't take all the dietary and other restrictions seriously.

The next transformation didn't take place until I got to college. There I discovered science and philosophy. Oddly enough, it wasn't the works of greats like Hume or Locke or Nietzsche that had the biggest influence on me. It was something I read before them that made me receptive to new mental landscapes like theirs. I'm almost ashamed to admit that it was an otherwise stupid piece of nonsense called "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg" I was assigned to read in Sociology 101. It was mostly New Age woo (unscientific, non-evidence-based assertions) but the central concept, that was more than one way to see the world (what German philosophers call "Weltanschauung") struck me almost with the force of a revelation. I feel stupid admitting it now but the idea had just never occurred to me before. As this new thought gradually sunk in, it had the effect of opening me up to new ideas and concepts. I was still vaguely theistic though because I wanted to believe in a fair universe; that there was some kind of balance between good and bad or right and wrong.

That idea started teetering because of another book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity by behavioral psychologist, B F Skinner. The book argued that free will was an illusion and that belief in individual autonomy was hindering both the scientific understanding of psychology and the development of a healthier, happier society. While I found those ideas convincing at the time, what I took away from the book more permanently was an understanding that the evidence-based scientific method was probably the best tool mankind has ever developed for the accurate evaluation and acquisition of knowledge... and because it provided techniques to compensate for personal bias, I decided it could be applied to personal knowledge as well. I reexamined a lot of beliefs at this time that I had taken for granted. Some held up under scrutiny. Some didn't. I changed my stance on the Vietnam War, for instance. More importantly, I took another look at my ideas about religion and found them wanting. There was no good evidence of a balance in the universe between what I thought good or bad. There was no good evidence of any force personally interested in it or me either. I couldn't prove there wasn't some kind of supernatural force behind the universe but I also couldn't see that the claims of special knowledge of any religion had more than faith going for them either.

So I became an agnostic. I remained one for decades. It took the events of 9/11/2001 to change that. I can't remember a time when I didn't think religious fanatics were nuts (so nuts in fact, that I coined the word "fanutic" to describe them). It just hadn't been brought home to me before on such a personal level how dangerous to the modern world religion could be.

And it wasn't just Islamic fundamentalists that scared me. I began to notice how religion also provided cover for extremists in America and in my own community. I saw them attacking civil rights for women and homosexuals. I saw them trying to undermine science in the classroom and in scientific research. I saw them infiltrating the military, the judiciary and school boards; all in an effort to roll back the clock to a time when human rights were dispensed at the whim of divine autocrats (or at least their self-styled interpreters) if at all. I could not prove there were no gods, but it had been a long time since I believed in any. I called myself an agnostic though because I'd felt no pressing need to make any declarations about it.

Now I did.

I still can't prove there are no gods, but I think them highly unlikely and don't believe in any. More than that, I think the belief in such supernatural overlords is, in essence, an embrace of the irrational and dangerously skews a person's perspective even in its milder forms. In its more virulent forms, I think it's a malignancy that eats individual freedom and threatens the existence of a civilized world.

That's why I became an atheist.

And an activist.

2011-07-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

(Emy's Note: Are you as scared as I am?)

By Liane Membis, CNN

There’s a new set of housewives on the block.

These women aren’t whining about fashion faux pas and socialite misgivings. Their stories are cast somewhere between the books of Genesis and Revelation.

Ty Adams, a web-based evangelist and author, is producing “The Real Housewives of the Bible,” a two-part DVD series that tracks six women dealing with the ups and downs of marriage as they strive to be good wives.

Adams said that “outrageous reality shows” like Bravo’s “The Real Housewives” series and VH1’s “Basketball Wives” inspired her to create a more wholesome version of the franchise.

“I was frustrated with what I was seeing,” she said. “A lot of society is looking towards programming to educate them on relationships and these shows haven’t effectively done that.”

“They have ruined and tainted our ability to secure good relationships and to make women into good wives,” said Adams, who is based in Detroit.

Adams has provided Christian relationship advice for nearly ten years, since she founded a production company called Heaven Enterprises in 2002. She’s the author of Single, Saved and Having Sex, has produced religious DVDs and plays and offers sex and relationship advice through a web-based column called “Ask Ty.”

Adams says the goal of her “Real Housewives” DVD, due out later this month, is helping women juxtapose real-life issues with Christian teaching. She says that teaching includes women’s obligation to attempt to sustain relationships that have endured extra-marital affairs and other hardships.

“Because we live in a media-driven society, telling these age-old stories of adultery, loneliness and longing through entertainment helps women relate,” Adams said.

Each character on the show represents a different woman from the Bible. A character based on the biblical Sarah struggles with infertility. (The biblical Sarah was barren until she reached old age).

Gold-digging women are likened to Delilah from the Book of Judges, who seduced and deceived Samson - who'd fallen in love with her - through repetitious requests.

And the show features plenty of Jezebels.

“Many single women can get a man but they can’t keep a man,” Adams said. “So many singles have been in girlfriend status for so long that they only understand that mentality. They don’t know what it takes to be a good wife in order to sustain a relationship and some parts of society promotes that.”

Why U.S. is not a Christian nation

2011-07-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

By Kenneth C. Davis, Special to CNN

July 4, 2011 9:10 a.m. EDT

(CNN) -- As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals -- that "All men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called "American Scripture."

But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words -- "a wall of separation between church and state" -- lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a "Christian Nation" and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July.

It is true these words do not appear in any early national document. What may be Jefferson's second most-quoted phrase is found instead in a letter he sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.

While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "

The framers ... understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America.

--Kenneth C. Davis

The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."

Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the "shining city on a hill" where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death.

As president, Jefferson was voicing an idea that was fundamental to his view of religion and government, expressed most significantly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777.

Revised by James Madison and passed by Virginia's legislature in January 1786, the bill stated: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened (sic) in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ..."

It was this simple -- government could not dictate how to pray, or that you cannot pray, or that you must pray.
Jefferson regarded this law so highly that he had his authorship of the statute made part of his epitaph, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (Being president wasn't worth a mention.)
Why do Jefferson's "other words" matter today?

First, because knowing history matters -- it can safeguard us from repeating our mistakes and help us value our rights, won at great cost. Yet we are sorely lacking in knowledge about our past, as shown by a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But more to the point, we are witnessing an aggressively promoted version of our history and heritage in which America is called a "Christian Nation."

This "Sunday School" version of our past has gained currency among conservative television commentators, school boards that have rewritten state textbooks and several GOP presidential candidates, some of whom trekked to Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in early June 2011.

No one can argue, as "Christian Nation" proponents correctly state, that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ's divinity.

More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.
But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence -- the very war celebrated on the "Glorious Fourth" -- against a country in which church and state were essentially one.

They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.

And that is why the U.S. Constitution reads as it does.

The supreme law of the land, written in the summer of 1787, includes no references to religion -- including in the presidential oath of office -- until the conclusion of Article VI, after all that dull stuff about debts and treaties: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (There is a pro forma "Year of the Lord" reference in the date at the Constitution's conclusion.)

Original intent? "No religious Test" seems pretty clear cut.

The primacy of a secular state was solidified when the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. According to Purdue history professor Frank Lambert, that "introduced the radical notion that the state had no voice concerning matters of conscience."

Beyond that, the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, specifically rejected a Senate proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as an official religion. As Lambert concludes, "There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself as a Christian Republic."

The actions of the first presidents, founders of the first rank, confirmed this "original intent:"

-- In 1790, President George Washington wrote to America's first synagogue, in Rhode Island, that "all possess alike liberty of conscience" and that "toleration" was an "inherent national gift," not the government's to dole out or take away

-- In 1797, with President John Adams in office, the Senate unanimously approved one of America's earliest foreign treaties, which emphatically stated (Article 11): "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) ..."

-- In 1802, Jefferson added his famous "wall of separation," implicit in the Constitution until he so described it (and cited in several Supreme Court decisions since).

These are, to borrow an admittedly loaded phrase, "inconvenient truths" to those who proclaim that America is a "Christian Nation."

The Constitution and the views of these Founding Fathers trump all arguments about references to God in presidential speeches (permitted under the First Amendment), on money (not introduced until the Civil War), the Pledge of Allegiance ("under God" added in 1954) and in the national motto "In God We Trust" (adopted by law in 1956).

And those contentious monuments to the Ten Commandments found around the country and occasionally challenged in court? Many of them were installed as a publicity stunt for Cecile B. DeMille's 1956 Hollywood spectacle, "The Ten Commandments."

So who are you going to believe? Thomas Jefferson or Hollywood? On second thought: Don't answer.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kenneth C. Davis.

Can you Be a Patriotic Atheist?

2011-07-04T12:28:00.001-07:00

Gay Marriage: A Bittersweet Victory?

2011-06-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

by Howard Chua-Eoan on Time.com. Saturday, June 25, 2011

I woke up this morning to discover that, despite my best efforts, I was still only married to my job.

I had spent part of the night in Greenwich Village with the crowds outside the Stonewall Inn celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state. I proposed to several passersby but every single one laughed. The thumping of "Y.M.C.A." on an adjacent boombox killed any possibility of romance. (Why is that song always played at weddings?)

I had wandered down from a party about 10 blocks north, in Chelsea, one of New York City's gay enclaves. The gathering at that apartment was slightly surreal. It appeared to be familiar: handsome young men flirting with each other over sweets and alcohol. But now they had a complex new dimension to navigate through — albeit the kind of calculus that heterosexuals can do in their sleep. Or when they sleep with each other. Or when they wake up and discover who they have slept with. It's the possibility of marriage, lurking subtly somewhere in one's head. Imagine all the psycho-sexual-financial-commercial-legal dramas that will emerge as that little formula weaves itself into the lives of gay New Yorkers. Soon, we can have the kind of domestic life straight people have. One day, we may no longer even be gay. Just the people next door. No more parades. (See pictures of New Yorkers celebrating the legalization of gay marriage.)

Of course, that's not going to happen soon. No matter that New York is the largest state of the Union to hold that the union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman is equal to that of a man and a woman.

California, the largest state in the Union, had that distinction for a few months before electoral and judicial jiu jitsu tied marriage up in knots there. There are 44 more states to go and a rowdy presidential campaign season that is bound to roil a whole range of political bases. And who knows if the legalization of gay marriage in New York, because it is New York, will actually work against marriage equality across the country. Could an exodus of gay people from the rest of the U.S. to the Empire State sap the will (and pocketbooks) of campaigns to legalize marriage in, say, Missouri or Minnesota or Kansas? Just saying.

But in one very important way, marriage will not quite be marriage even in New York, even 30 days from now when the law goes into effect. That is because the psycho-sexual-financial-commercial-legal dramas that entangle the domestic lives of straight people often have another component — religion. And religious institutions have an exemption in the new law from accommodating gay people. It was key to the passage of the legislation. (See how Albany passed the vote.)

Marriage without a church or temple wedding isn't going to be the real thing. Why can some people have all the bells and whistles in the church of their choice but not me? Of course, there have been and will be congregations and churches that allow gay men and lesbians to be married in their midst and to bless those unions, recognizing that God loves them just as much as Governor Andrew Cuomo does. But some rich and influential religious institutions are not only free to continue to reject gay men and women as equal beneficiaries of all aspects of faith but will now rally their congregants to reject politicians who are willing to abide with this extension of secular civil rights — no matter how much acceptance there is of same-sex marriage elsewhere, no matter how many wedding announcements appear in the New York Times.

I write this as a deeply religious Christian who is pained that the church that otherwise provides me with so much spiritual comfort and joy will never allow me to marry within its walls. Some clerics may be "liberal" enough to turn a blind eye to gay relationships so long as they do not have to recognize them, much less grant them any kind of imprimatur. And, as of now, even in New York, religious institutions cannot be compelled to perform such a simple act of charity.

The state cannot force a church to change its beliefs. Even gay people realize that is wrong. And so, just to remind folks that we're here we will have to continue to march in our parades and to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Nonetheless, waking up this morning, I was very happy not to be in Kansas anymore.

Jesus Rapper

2011-06-24T12:49:00.000-07:00

I'd like to take a break from the normal discussion to present this video. And may I just say: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

Onetime priest crusades for abuse victims suing Catholic Church

2011-06-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

(CNN) - As a young man studying for the priesthood, Patrick Wall imagined life as a professor and football coach at a Catholic university.

It didn't work out that way. Two decades later, Wall has not only left the Catholic Church, he has become one of its most tireless opponents.

He's an ex-priest, driven from ministry by the feeling that his superiors used him to help cover up sex abuse by other clergymen.

And he's using the training he gained as a priest to work with victims of abuse who want to take the church to court.

Since 1991, Wall says he has consulted on more than 1,000 abuse cases, helping lawyers pick apart defenses mounted by dioceses from Alaska to Australia.

Now a senior consultant at the law firm of Manly and Stewart in Southern California, Wall spoke to CNN on the sidelines of a recent conference for legal and religion scholars at Cardiff Law School in Wales.

In Philadelphia, where four priests and a Catholic school teacher were indicted on sex abuse charges earlier this year, Wall says he is helping the district attorney build an unprecedented criminal case not only against the clergy, but against an archdiocesan official who supervised them. The priests – one of whom is the church official – and the teacher have denied the allegations.

The case is potentially historic. Wall doesn't know of another case where a U.S. prosecutor has gone after an official at the top of the church hierarchy as well as the suspected abusers themselves.

Prosecutors are trying to convict a vicar – the man who supervised the priests in the archdiocese – with child endangerment because they say he allowed suspected abusers to have contact with young people.

The case raises the possibility that a high-ranking church official will end up behind bars.

Wall hopes the threat of prison time will change the way American bishops respond to abuse allegations in a way that civil lawsuits have not.

"In the civil cases, we have taken over $3 billion, but you're not getting a lot of change in the system," he says.

Patrick Wall outside a recent conference in Wales.

There has been more than a decade of intense focus on abuse by priests across the United States and Western Europe, plus lawsuits, investigations, and Vatican statements, including instructions to bishops around the world just last month to come up with an abuse policy.

And even so, Wall says, priests are still abusing children.

"I'm working on stuff that happened in the summer of 2010," he says. "It's the same old sodomy."

A life-changing assignment

Wall was studying to be a priest at Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, when there was a life-changing knock on his door one morning after breakfast.

At his door that day in 1990 was the head of the abbey, Abbot Jerome Theisen, with an assignment, Wall says.

Wall, then 25, was to move into one of the freshman dormitories at the university associated with the abbey. The abbot wanted him to become a faculty resident, a staff position that involved keeping an eye on first-year university students in college housing. He was to make the move immediately, that very morning.

Wall knew why.

"Starting in 1989, we started getting hit with lawsuit after lawsuit" from people alleging that priests had abused them, Wall says. He says the abbot told him that credible abuse accusations had been made against the man Wall was to replace.

Brother Paul Richards, a spokesman for Saint John's Abbey, said that the monastery and university had no record of why Wall was asked to work in the dorm. Abbot Theisen has died, Richards added.

Saint John's Abbey adopted a policy on sexual abuse and exploitation in 1989, it says on its website, saying that made it “among the first institutions to adopt” such a policy.

Wall, for his part, says the abbot's request put him on the road to becoming what the church unofficially calls a "fixer," a person who parachutes in to replace clergy who have to disappear quickly and quietly.

Wall as the temporary administrator at a Maplewood, Minnesota church in 1995.

One of Theisen's successors, Abbot John Klassen, issued an open letter of apology in 2002, saying that "some members" of the monastic community had engaged in "abusive sexual behavior with people in our schools and parishes."

A lawsuit was filed earlier this month against Saint John's by a man who says he was abused in the 1960s by a priest who later served as abbot between Theisen and Klassen. The abbey says it was “shocked” by the charges against the late Abbot Timothy Kelly, who died of cancer last year.

It says it is investigating the claims against Kelly, calling them “the first allegations that Abbot Kelly violated his vows or was an abuser.”

Wall plans to testify in that case, he told CNN.

"In the fall of '92 we had another 13 [abuse] cases come through," Wall says. "They pushed up my ordination" by a few months, Wall says, so he could step into the shoes of another priest who had to vanish.

Understanding the damage

It was after his ordination, Wall says, that he began to understand the trauma that abusive priests were inflicting, not only on their victims but on victims' families and communities.

As a new priest, Wall started hearing confessions of victims' relatives who blamed themselves for the abuse, telling Wall "I should have known, I should have seen the signs."

A heavy-set man who laughs easily, Wall still looks like the linebacker he was in high school and college. He peppers his speech with words like "dude" and casually refers to people who he thinks have done something stupid as "morons."

But relating the confessions of victims' relatives, Wall's cheerful demeanor hardens.

"I'm telling them, 'You haven't committed a sin,'" he says.

Wall, right, with his mom, dad and a diocesan priest in 1989.

Wall says that child abuse isn't like other injury cases, such as car crashes, in which a victim might be 10% at fault. Instead, he says, "100% of the blame is on the perpetrator."

Over the next four years, Wall says that the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis sent him to four more places in Minnesota where priests needed to move out fast.

He learned a lot. Wall says he saw that there was a budget for handling cases of priestly sexual abuse as far back as 1994, eight years before the scandal blew up nationally with revelations about abuse in Boston, Massachusetts. The archdiocese could not immediately confirm that, but spokesman Dennis McGrath said he would not be surprised if it was true, saying the archdiocese had been a leader in helping victims of abuse.

Wall did what the church told him to do for as long as he could, he says, but his doubts continued to grow.
"I followed the party line," he says. "But it's pretty hard to follow the party line when you don't think the party line is moral any more."

The breaking point came in 1997. Wall was in Rome, studying for a master's of divinity degree. His abbot called from Minnesota to tell him he was being posted to the Bahamas.

It was not the dream job it might sound like.

Wall says that the Bahamas was where Saint John's was sending priests it had to keep away from people because of abuse allegations. Richards, the abbey's spokesman, flatly denies the charge.

"I basically was going to be a prison warden," Wall says.

"Without much planning, I said, 'Basta cosi,'" he says, lapsing into Minnesota-accented Italian meaning, "Enough of this." Wall had decided to leave the priesthood.

Patrick Wall at his first mass as a priest in December 1992.

The abbot did not take that well, Wall says, warning that he would never make it in "the real world," that he would not be released from his priestly vows and that the order would bill him for the master's degree it had sponsored for him. The tab for the degree was about $48,000, he says.

Richards denies those allegations. "It has never been the abbey's practice to require payback for education from members of our community who have left," he says, "and it was not the case with Pat Wall."

Wall says the abbot's threats did not change his mind.

"All it did is piss me off even more," he says. "I left without a plan in December 1997."

Insider knowledge

Wall says he went home to Lake City, Minnesota to live with his parents, then bounced from job to job for nearly five years. He got married and had a daughter. He made good money as a salesman in Southern California but says he found the work as intellectually stimulating as "shovelling dirt."

And then, in 2002, the California state legislature did something that would change Wall's life. The state opened a one-year window to allow victims of clergy abuse to sue the church, even if the if the statute of limitations on the case had already expired.

Wall's eyes light up as he discusses the moment.

The law did not specifically target the Catholic Church, Wall says, noting that some rabbis were sued as well. But Catholic organizations were by far the largest group of defendants.

Still, suing a Catholic diocese was no easy task. "The litigation demanded a level of expertise that had never been needed before," Wall says.

Because of his religious training in canon law, as the Catholic Church's rules are known, Wall had that expertise. He knew how and where the church kept records. He knew where money came from and where it went. He spoke Italian and Latin.

In his first case, he testified against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, California, challenging its claim that it did not know the Franciscan friar at the center of abuse allegations.

Wall insisted that the archdiocese and any priest in it would have easy access to church records saying who the Franciscan was and who had jurisdiction over him.

The case settled out of court, Wall says.

The Diocese of Orange declined to comment for this article, as did the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which is the defendant in several cases currently involving Wall’s firm, Manly and Stewart.

Jeffrey Lena, a lawyer who represents the Vatican in the United States, also declined to comment.

But Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota-based lawyer who specializes in suing the Catholic Church on behalf of abuse victims and filed the suit against Saint John's Abbey, is full of praise for Wall.

Anderson calls Wall “an extraordinary researcher, academic and hands-on voice of experience from the inside.”

He praises the former priest's “courage,” and says he is a “powerful, insightful source of information based on his own personal experience and his study of the phenomenon” of abuse.

An old problem

Wall argues that the problem of abuse by priests is far older than anyone in the church admits publicly.

The earliest church records concerning sexual misconduct by priests come from the Council of Elvira, he says. That synod took place in what is now Spain in the year 309.

There was a treatment center for abusive priests in Hartford, Connecticut, as far back as 1822, Wall says, and the Vatican issued instructions to American bishops on how to judge and punish accusations of criminal acts by priests as far back as 1883.

Wall provided his translation of the 1883 instructions to CNN. They do not refer to any specific crimes, but refer to “abuses” and “evils.” They set out how to investigate, judge and punish crimes by priests, laying out rules such as the examination of witnesses in private, and the opportunity for the accused to know the charges and to respond and appeal.

The Philadelphia district attorney's office declined to comment on assistance it is receiving from Wall, saying it was prevented by court order from discussing the case with the media.

But Wall says that years of seeing how the Catholic Church handles abuse cases have convinced him that the church will not solve the problem itself.

He says he's not impressed by new instructions from Rome last month giving bishops around the world a year to come up with procedures for handling allegations of abuse.

"It's a Circular Letter," he says, using the official church term for the document. "That means it's for the circular file. Bishops are going to throw it away."

Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops revised its 2002 charter around dealing with sex abuse allegations to reflect the Vatican's new standards.

Wall believes the Catholic Church will survive this scandal.

"It's going to fix itself," he says.

"The institution is going to become radically smaller" as people abandon the church, he predicts. "The loss of membership, the problems in the criminal courts, the statements from the pope - these are all good."

Perpetrators need "access, power and money" in order to commit crimes and get away with them, Wall argues. A smaller, weaker Catholic Church won't be able to provide those things, making it less of a haven for abusers, he says, which will lead to a cleansed institution.

In the meantime, Wall says, the church should give up trying to handle abusers internally and let the law step in.

He recommends that the church "completely get out" of child protection, hand over all its files to civil law enforcement, and make bishops sign a legal oath every year that there are no perpetrators in the ministry - which would open them to criminal prosecution if they are found to have lied.

"Otherwise," he says, "I'll be prosecuting priest sex abuse cases for the rest of my life."

Rightwing Talk Show Host Says He's a Victim of Gay Hate Crimes

2011-06-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

Another great one from Hugh at the LA Atheism Examiner. June 13, 2011

Today, Bryan Fischer, host of the American Family Association* talk radio program, Focal Point, told his audience that he is the victim of a hate crime by homosexuals. Fischer claims that homosexual "activists" are trying to "demonize" the AFA and him in order to "derail 'The Response' prayer rally that Gov. Rick Perry is organizing."

You can find a short video of Fischer claiming victimhood in the column at left.

Fischer has an interesting definition of what a hate crime is too:

"You are watching a hate crime in action, because the definition of a hate crime is harrassment; intimidation that is based by prejudice; motivated by prejudice against somebody's religious beliefs."

That's a little more exclusive than other definitions like, for instance, the one the US Department of Justice uses. In addition to religion, that one includes criminal acts based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

Fischer, who regularly refers to "homosexual activists" as Nazis and terrorists, did, however, broaden his definition of hate crimes a little in his broadcast:

"...so this intimidation, this harrassment, and remember, one of the definitions in a hate crime of 'harrassment' is derogatory terminology, derogatory language, all kinds of epithets that are going to be thrown at us that meets the definition of a hate crime."

One last note: According to his Wikipedia entry:

"Fischer has been sharply criticized for his written and verbal attacks on Native Americans, African Americans, Muslims, gays and Hispanics. Fischer's divisive comments were cited by Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in explaining the hate group designation they gave to the AFA in November 2010."

*The American Family Association (AFA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that promotes conservative Christian values such as opposition to same-sex marriage, to pornography, and to abortion, as well as other public policy goals such as deregulation of the oil industry and lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act. (ibid)

**(Many thanks go to Right Wing Watch who do the heavy lifting and watch people like Bryan Fischer so I don't have to)

10 Scariest States to Be an Atheist

2011-06-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Photo Credit: Eric Ingrum via Flickr Another Great article by Greta Cristina. June 8th, 2011, Alternet.org

Let's be clear. It's not like it's easy to be an atheist anywhere in the U.S. Atheists are the most distrusted and disliked of all minority groups -- more than blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and gays and lesbians -- and polls show that Americans are less likely to vote for an atheist than they are for a person in any other minority or marginalized category. And this hostility can have serious consequences, in the form of harassment, bullying, ostracism, vandalism, alienation from family, loss of jobs, and more.

But to be honest, there are parts of the country where being an atheist really isn't all that awful. Heck, I live in one of them. There's some bigotry, some discrimination, a fair amount of misunderstanding and even hostility... but all things considered, it's pretty okay.

And then, there are some parts of the country where being an atheist sucks.

Let's talk about a few of those, shall we?

Now, to a great extent, how badly it sucks to be an atheist may not depend on the state you live in. It's sort of like the red-state/blue-state myth: cultural differences in the United States break down more along urban/rural lines than they do along state lines. Is it easier to be an atheist in New York than in Texas? Maybe... but it may also be easier if you're in Austin, Texas than if you're in rural upstate New York.

Many atheist and secularist leaders I spoke to stressed this point. According to Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason (the organization responsible for many of the atheist billboard campaigns), "As for the worst states to be an atheist, it doesn't generally work that way. It depends on what part of a state you are in."

In fact, he's not even sure that this difference always breaks down along urban/ rural lines. "Is the key idea that the more rural areas give us the most trouble?" he asked. "Maybe. But we had bus ads vandalized in Detroit, too." And he added that in Kentucky, "we had no problem in Louisville, but I still can't get a billboard company to run our ads in supposedly more liberal Lexington."

And according to the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, "No state is really safe for non-believers. You find creationist ideas in schools from Louisiana to New Jersey. You find efforts to send secular tax dollars to religious schools in Indiana and Florida. And, finally, you find polls done of all Americans demonstrating that plenty of families don't want their sons or daughters marrying atheists. There are many sad states of affairs."

So the point here isn't to show that some states suck for atheists worse than others. The point is to show that anti-atheist bigotry is real. The point is to show that it has real-world consequences. And the point is to let you know what some of those consequences are.

So with all that being said -- let's get on with the list! If you're finishing your degree in secular studies and are trying to decide where in the country you want to plant your godless stakes... here are some places you might want to avoid.

#10: Pennsylvania. Yes, I know. Everyone's expecting this list to be overloaded with the deep South. And I'll be getting there soon enough. But religious privilege and anti-atheist hostility don't stay below the Mason-Dixon line. Anti-atheist bigotry can, and does, happen anywhere.

And Pennsylvania is Exhibit A. Specifically, Annville, Pennsylvania, where atheist veterans marching in the Memorial Day parade were jeered, booed, insulted, cursed at, yelled at to leave, and told they were going to burn in hell. Not once or twice by a couple of fanatics... but repeatedly, throughout the course of the parade.

Let me spell that one out again. In small town America, veterans -- veterans, on Memorial Day, marching in a Memorial Day parade -- were jeered, booed, insulted, cursed at, yelled at to leave, and told they were going to burn in hell.

Because they were atheists.

'Nuff said.

#9: Idaho. Where atheist billboards -- not in-your-face controversial ones, but almost aggressively mild ones, simply announcing that atheists exist and are good people -- are vandalized on a regular basis. According to Maggie Ardiente of the American Humanist Association, "Thanks to a member of ours who lives in Moscow, Idaho, the AHA has been putting up billboards over the past two years to promote humanism and atheism. When we put up a factual, non-controversial billboard that said, 'Millions are Good Without God,' it was vandalized twice! We continue to put billboards in the area, but there is often additional security provided when we put up a new one."

Just like it says in the Bible: "And whatever place will not take you in and will not give ear to you, when you go away, put off the dust from your feet... and then deface their billboards like a douchebag."

#8: Arkansas. (I told you I'd get to the deep South!) Hey, at least in Idaho, atheists can put up their dang billboards. In Arkansas, the Central Arkansas Transit Authority (CATA) has flatly rejected an atheist ad that the Central Arkansas Coalition of Reason wanted to put up on 18 buses... solely and entirely because the content of the ads -- "Are you good without God? Millions are" -- is atheist.

I am not kidding. Even the public excuses being given for rejecting the ads -- possible vandalism and even "terrorism" due to the "controversial" nature of the ad -- are based on the fact that these ads have atheist content, expressing the "controversial" view that atheists, you know, exist, and are good people. And as the behind-the-scenes scrambling reveals, they are blatantly doing this based on religious hostility to atheism.

Check this out:

In response to an e-mail message dated February 28, 2011, from Plaintiff's media broker to the Advertising Agent conveying the content of the Proposed Advertisement, the Advertising Agent forwarded the message to Betty Wineland, the Executive Director of the Authority, stating in her accompanying message (in its entirety): "Dear God......HELP!" Ms. Wineland replied: "I need Him now more than ever. Good grief. I think we need to throw religion into the advertising policy - as a negative. Stall while CATA reviews."

Let me spell this one out very plainly: A government-run public transit authority is rejecting religious-themed advertising -- solely because the religious view being advertised is the view that religion is mistaken. And no, they haven't changed their policy to reject all religious-themed ads. They still take religious-themed ads. Just not ones from atheists.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: Yes. They're being sued.

#7: Alabama. The state where the actual governor, Robert Bentley, said in actual words, "Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister." The state where it took an interfaith delegation, led by the Anti-Defamation league, to inform him that there are non-Christians in Alabama. Non-Christians who -- I hope I don't have to remind you -- are fully fledged legal residents of the state. Non-Christians whom Bentley also serves as governor... every bit as much as he serves the Christians. As American Atheists president David Silverman says, "Top of my list is Alabama, home of Roy Moore and 'You are not my brother' Governor Bentley. It appears that to hold office in Alabama, you have to be completely ignorant of American Law and despise the Separation of Church and State."

Oh, and in case that's not enough: Let's talk about some places where it sucks to be an atheist in high school. Let's talk about the Secular Student Alliance, and its new program specifically devoted to supporting high school atheist groups. Let's talk about the resistance that atheist students routinely get from public high school administrators who want to block students from forming secular groups. And let's talk a little more about Alabama. The only state where the SSA has had to initiate a lawsuit about it.

Duncan Henderson wanted to form a secular club at his public school -- which he has the full legal right to do. But his school principal denied his request. According to JT Eberhard, campus organizer and high school specialist at the Secular Student Alliance, "When Duncan's father scheduled a meeting to discuss the matter, the principal showed up to the meeting with a lawyer, who more or less repeated, 'We're going to follow the law' in response to every question. But the school has not followed through on that promise to follow the law. The school has stonewalled, and attempts by the SSA to discuss the matter were met with an email from the school's attorney saying they're not going to speak to anybody."

Hence -- lawsuit. Which, as of this writing, is happening solely and entirely in the state of Alabama. As Eberhard added, "While it's not the first state in which we have seen pushback from adults in a position of authority over students to the idea of atheists forming clubs in the same way religious students form clubs, it is the first state in which we've had to bring in lawyers to fight for equality denied."

#6: North Carolina. Where in December of 2009, Cecil Bothwell couldn't even get elected to the Asheville City Council, without people trying to invoke laws -- antiquated laws overruled by the Supreme Court, but laws nonetheless -- banning him from taking office because he's an atheist.

Okay. Let's be fair. This isn't exactly an isolated case. Lauren Becker of the Center for Inquiry points out that several states have antiquated laws on the books banning atheists from holding office. "The Supreme Court has said that federal law prohibits states from requiring a religious test to serve office," she says, but "there are still some states that have such laws, whether they enforce them or not."

North Carolina, however, has the distinction of actually trying to enforce one of these laws. Less than a year and a half ago.

#5. Florida. On the other hand, in Florida, you might get kicked out of a city council meeting simply for wearing an atheist T-shirt. And if you protest against prayers at city council meetings, you might actually get arrested.

So that's gotta suck.

#4: Rhode Island. Did you hear the one about the public high school with the prayer banner in the school gym -- a prayer banner specifically addressed to "Our Heavenly Father"? The public high school that got asked to take the banner down by 15-year-old atheist high school student Jessica Ahlquist, since it's an unconstitutional promotion of religion by government? The public high school that's digging in its heels and hanging on to the banner, despite decades of unambiguous legal precedent making it clear that they're in the wrong? The public high school that's getting sued by said atheist high school student and the ACLU... and is still digging in its heels, devoting extensive time and resources to defending their promotion of religion?

That's Rhode Island, folks. And this story isn't just about a school administration insisting on its right to unconstitutionally establish religion. It's about a community's ostracization of an atheist teenager -- in some cases to the point of threats of violence. Ahlquist has been shunned, insulted, vilified, and even threatened with violence. Students in an English class in her school said -- during class -- that she should be "smacked around and beat up" for fighting the prayer banner. Comments in the Providence Journal article on the story were ugly, personal, even threatening -- to a great extent about the ACLU, but largely about Ahlquist herself. ("I think you need to talk to a doctor and get help... you are sick in the head." "Looks like we have a moon bat in the making." "Make no mistake, Jessica and the Bolshevik thugs representing her are driven by anti-Christian bigotry and intolerance and censorship... Curse them to hell.")

In fact, according to the Providence Journal, Ahlquist and another student were removed from their regular classroom schedule last month -- after some students said they intended to harm her. To quote JT Eberhard, high school specialist at the Secular Student Alliance, "In the city of Cranston, an entire community, perhaps an entire state of adults, is engaging in a smear campaign against a single high school student. Her crime? Believing her school violates the first amendment by hanging a prayer banner in the gym invoking the phrases 'Our heavenly father' and 'Amen'."

And this is in New England. This is Rhode Island. The first of the 13 original colonies to declare independence from British rule. The state specifically founded as a place of religious freedom, as a response to religious persecution. A slat in the cradle of liberty. And they are vilifying and threatening a 15-year-old girl for being an atheist, and for insisting that her public school follow the Constitution and not shove religion down her throat. Anti-atheist bigotry is everywhere. It's not just in Alabama or Mississippi. Or even Texas.

#3: Texas. Wow. Where do you start with Texas? The public high school graduation ceremony that was like a revival meeting? The transit company that changed their policies and stopped accepting any bus ads for any religious organizations... just so they wouldn't have to take ads from atheists? The governor who responded to economic troubles, natural disasters, and terrorism by initiating a state day of prayer, and has exhorted Texans to "call on Jesus"? The governor, again, who decreed three official state Days of Prayer for Rain? The public school where they distribute Bibles? The high school textbooks which teach that the Bible was a "foundational text" in the framing of the U.S., that the King James Bible "remains one of the... most-loved books in the history of the world," and that "the sun went black" when Jesus was crucified? The state Constitution that says, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being"? The teachers that get fired, not for being atheists, but for being suspected of being atheists? The town where they get seriously hysterical about atheists playing "Jingle Bells" in a Christmas parade?

Come on. Did you really expect Texas not to be on this list?

#2: Mississippi. I could say a lot about Mississippi. For instance, I could talk about how, when the Second Chance Prom was being organized for lesbian student Constance McMillan, the state chapter of the freaking ACLU refused to take money from the American Humanist Association and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation... because it was atheist money. I shit you not. In an e-mail message to AHA, Jennifer Carr, the fundraiser for the ACLU of Mississippi, said, "Although we support and understand organizations like yours, the majority of Mississippians tremble in terror at the word 'atheist.'" The ACLU would later apologize and accept the money; but, as Maggie Ardiente of the AHA, puts it, "We were very disappointed to see an organization that's famously known for standing up for everyone's rights -- including the right to be an atheist or humanist -- initially discriminate against us."

That's reasonably messed-up. But I want to focus instead on a much more practical, nuts-and-bolts, life-screwing-up form of anti-atheist bigotry -- child custody.

It is depressingly common for atheists to have child custody limited, or even denied, explicitly on the basis of their atheism. Cases have been documented again and again and again, in states including Michigan, Minnesota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. But according to Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, "Mississippi is the most serious offender." Volokh goes on to say, "In 2001, for instance, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld an order giving a mother custody partly because she took the child to church more often than the father did, thus providing a better 'future religious example.' In 2000, it ordered a father to take the child to church each week, as a [lower] Mississippi court ordered... reasoning that 'it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training.'"

Try to imagine a judge in this country denying or limiting custody to a parent, explicitly and specifically, because they were Jewish. Because they were Mormon. Because they were Baptist. And now, try to imagine a judge in this country denying or limiting custody to a parent, explicitly and specifically because they're an atheist. You don't have to imagine it. This is real. This happens. And it happens in Mississippi more than anywhere else in the country.

And finally, we come to my Number One Worst State to Be an Atheist:

#1: Louisiana.

I freely admit that this list, and the order I'm presenting it, is subjective. It's not based on a careful statistical analysis of rigorously gathered data based on journalistically objective criteria about anti-atheist bigotry. It's based on stories that happened to get my atheist dander up. It's based on stories that made me sad -- and enraged.

And the story that happened in Louisiana made me sad, and enraged, more than almost any other.

I'm talking about Damon Fowler.

I'm talking about the atheist high school student who opposed his public school having a school-sponsored prayer at his graduation. Whose name was leaked. And who, as a result, was hounded, pilloried, and ostracized by his community; publicly demeaned by one of his teachers; physically threatened; and thrown out by his parents, who cut off his financial support, kicked him out of the house, and threw his belongings onto the front porch. Whose public school went ahead and had the graduation prayer anyway. Who has had to leave his home and move in with his sister near Dallas, Texas.

You know things are bad when your atheist safe haven from extremist religious persecution is in Texas.

That's Louisiana.

Worst. State. Ever.

And you wanna know the really sad thing? This piece could have been a lot longer. This could easily have been the 20 Worst States to Be an Atheist. The 30 Worst. Heck... the 50 Worst.

You've got Maryland. Where yet another atheist high school student started a group, whose posters were torn down by other students -- and where actual parents of those students wrote letters to the editor supporting the vandalism, and calling the atheist posters "an atrocity." You've got Georgia. Where students taking their AP tests at a church were proselytized to by church members. You've got Utah. Where, says American Atheists president David Silverman, "The state attorney general is trying to have the Roman Cross pronounced secular so it can be placed on public buildings and schools without regard to equal access." You've got Oklahoma.
Where still another public high school student tried to start an atheist group, and was accused by his principle of trying to start a "hate group"... and where the faculty advisor for the group suddenly withdrew, saying she had been told sponsoring the group would be "a bad career move." You've got... oh, you get the idea.

Is anti-atheist bigotry as bad as homophobia or racism, misogyny or transphobia? No, probably not. Not for the most part. I don't like comparing oppressions; it's divisive and pointless, and I don't think anything is gained by playing "more oppressed than thou." There are a few ways that anti-atheist bigotry is worse than others -- the roadblocks being tossed up against high school students leap to mind, as does the whole "least trusted/least likely to be voted for" thing. But atheists don't seem to be subject to the same level of physical violence as gay or trans people -- or the same level of economic oppression as women or people of color. And I'm not saying that they are.

My point is not that anti-atheist bigotry is as bad as other forms of bigotry. It exists. It is real. It happens all over the country. And it has real-world consequences.

So if you're ever tempted to ask why atheists are so angry, or why they have to kick up such a fuss all the time, or why they want to organize and form groups based on what they don't believe in... remember that.

A Monologue from Bill Maher

2011-06-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Oregon jury convicts faith healing parents

2011-06-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

This one's from Michael Stone over at the Portland Atheism Examiner. June 7th, 2011 5:11 pm PT

Tuesday afternoon an Oregon jury found Timothy and Rebecca Wyland guilty of criminal mistreatment for denying medical care to their baby daughter, Alayna. The couple now faces up to five years in prison.

The jury deliberated a little over an hour, and was unanimous in their verdict.

Authorities filed charges against the Wylands after an abnormal and deforming buildup of blood vessels in the child's left eye was left untreated. The buildup, known as a hemangioma, would have left Alayna blind in the left eye if untreated.

While the Wylands prayed over Alayna, anointed her with oil and used other spiritual rituals endorsed by their church, they failed to seek medical attention for their daughter's obvious ailment. From January to June of 2010 the couple did nothing while their daughter's condition deteriorated.

The Wyland's are members of the Followers of Christ Church located in Oregon City. The church is notorious for prohibiting members from seeking medical attention, favoring prayer over medical treatment. The consequences of church doctrine have been tragic: the preventable deaths of numerous children.

Defense attorneys for the parents tried to argue the couple was the victim of religious persecution - an argument the jury was definitely not buying.

The Wylands are the third Followers of Christ Church couple to be prosecuted over the past two years for failing to provide medical treatment to their children. In two previous cases, the children died.

The Wylands lost custody of their daughter last summer. She has since improved under court-ordered medical care.

Last month the Oregon state Senate voted to end legal protection granted to parents practicing religious faith healing. The legislation ends legal protection for parents who choose faith healing to the exclusion of modern medicine in treating their children's health.

The new legislation is in large part a response to the deaths of numerous children belonging to members of the Followers of Christ Church located in Oregon city, the same church the Wylands attend.

Is Religion Dying Out?

2011-06-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

How the Bible was used to justify slavery, abolitionism

2011-05-29T18:48:00.000-07:00

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) - How did churchgoing, Bible-worshiping Christians justify holding slaves? It’s a question I’ve long had as a Civil War buff and that has new resonance on Tuesday, which marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

I’ve read books about politics and generals during the war. But I hadn't read much about the religious dimension to the Civil War until I came across a recent USA Today column.

Henry G. Brinton, a pastor at Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia, writes that the Bible was used a weapon by both the North and the South. Brinton says some contemporary Americans are making the same mistake their Civil War ancestors did by twisting the Bible to support their own battle cries.

Brinton, author of “Balancing Acts: Obligation, Liberation and Contemporary Christian Conflicts,” says both the Union and the Confederacy invoked the Bible to justify their positions on slavery.

Slaveholders justified the practice by citing the Bible, Brinton says.

They asked who could question the Word of God when it said, "slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5), or "tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect" (Titus 2:9).

Christian opponents of slavery elevated biblical principles of justice and equality above individual passages that approved exclusion, Brinton says.

He wonders if a new biblical approach is needed today, as people grapple with polarizing issues like gay marriage.

Opponents of gay marriage, Brinton notes, follow a literal approach to the Bible when they cite Old Testament passages that declare, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22).

He wonders if gay marriage foes are making the same mistake as defenders of slavery:

But perhaps reproduction is no longer the goal of every person and every marriage. Many couples choose not to have children, or marry late in life when they are unable to produce children. The New Testament values of faithfulness, love, sacrifice and promise-based commitment can be practiced by heterosexual couples without children — and by same-sex couples as well. Discussions of gay marriage can focus as much on scriptural equality as on the ability to reproduce.

At the same time, Brinton says liberal Christians may be making their own mistakes with their approach to the Bible:

Liberals also use Scripture for their purposes, citing commandments such as "thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13) whenever a war breaks out or the death penalty is being debated. But the commandment is actually a prohibition against murder, arising out of blood feuds and vengeance killings between ancient clans and families. A literal reading of this verse does not give us the moral and political guidance we need today.

Brinton says Abraham Lincoln offered the most constructive religious perspective during the Civil War. "My concern is not whether God is on our side," he said. "My greatest concern is to be on God's side."
What do you think? Is it fair to invoke the Bible for political causes?

Letter from close friend offers rare glimpse into President Lincoln's 'theist' beliefs

2011-05-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN

(CNN) – President Abraham Lincoln was a "theist and a rationalist" who doubted "the immortality of the soul," a close friend said in a letter that provides a rare, intimate glimpse into the Civil War president's religious views.

"Mr. Lincoln’s religion is too well known to me to allow of even a shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist - a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary -– supernatural inspiration or revelation," William H. Herndon wrote in a letter dated February 11, 1866, to Edward McPherson, clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Herndon was one of Lincoln's closest friends. The two met in Springfield, Illinois, and practiced law together for 17 years before Lincoln became president in 1861. After Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, he authored "Herndon's Lincoln," a biography based on contributions from Lincoln's friends and contemporaries considered among the most authoritative for its proximity to the elusive president.

The three-page letter, which is being offered for sale by the Raab Collection for $35,000, offers a rare account from someone close to Lincoln on the subject of his religious beliefs – a topic that has eluded historians. Lincoln did not discuss his religious beliefs and he did not belong to a church.

"Lincoln was reticent to discuss religion, particularly after his election, which has fueled the ongoing debate about whether believed in God or if he was Christian in the way we would explain it today," said Nathan Raab of the Raab Collection. "These are subjects still being debated."

His early religious outlook was colored by the evangelical Baptist faith of his parents and a Calvinist theology of predestination - the belief that the fate of all men and women had been predetermined by God, PBS.org said of Lincoln in its "God in America" series. Lincoln rejected this Calvinist view later in life and shunned emotional excess, but the Calvinism of his youth left him with a sense of fatalism that endured throughout his life.

How the Bible was used to justify slavery, abolition

Lincoln's views on providence and God's will in the context of the Civil War have been the source of great scrutiny over the years.

In his letter, written less than a year after Lincoln's death, Herndon wrote that the president was "the purest politician."

"At one time in his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force. Subsequent to this he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the change he ever underwent. I speak knowing what I say. He was a noble man – a good great man for all this," he wrote.

"I love Mr. Lincoln dearly, almost worship him, but that can’t blind me. He’s the purest politician I ever saw, and the justest man. I am scribbling – that’s the word – away on a life of Mr. Lincoln – gathering known-authentic – true facts of him."

The Age of the Earth

2011-05-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Livin' Large on Doomsday!

2011-05-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, anybody invest in one of these? Maybe I should switch over to the Dark Side?

Too Soon?

2011-05-11T19:43:00.000-07:00

Has everyone saved the date? May 21st, 2011?

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

A Dead Man We Can All Be Happy About

2011-05-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

Well no matter who you are or what your beliefs, you're probably glad Bin Laden is dead. For those who are interested, Bin Laden was the founder of Al Qaeda, expelling two fatwas: that civilians and military personnel for the United States should be killed. He is an excellent example of the dangers of religious extremism in our world. Bin Laden believed in Sharia, the restoration of God's Law in Muslim Nations.

Though he's been said to follow Wahabisim, it's important to note that only political leaders can call for Jihad. Clearly, he thought otherwise. He was, after all, a wealthy man with many followers.

As to his greivances against the United States, he has said this:

"First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."

Osama had 5 wives, and 11 male children, many of whom he was preparing to following his footsteps. One wife was shot in the leg when his facility that he was occupying was infiltrated. And it's thought that one of his daughters, born only days after the 9/11 attacks, was present at the shooting as well.

I say the world is a better place without him, and without his way of thinking. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't need a picture or a video depicting his death. I'd just rather put him from my mind altogether.

The Humanist Bible

2011-04-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

The Giraffe: Proof that if There IS a God, He's Kind of a Dolt

2011-04-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

The top comment on this video was, "It doesn't matter how much evidence you show me, I still won't listen." Well, THERE you go!! At least they're being honest. That about sums it up if you don't believe in Evolution, you're just making a conscious choice to ignore what's right in front of you. But hey, this is America. You can be ignorant if you choose to be.

Nails Used to Crucify Jesus Found?

2011-04-13T07:10:00.001-07:00

Evolution in America: Why Are We So Far Behind?

2011-04-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

by Tim Nordstrom from Buzzle.com

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

These words were published by Charles Darwin in 1859 in his book The Origin of Species. There, Darwin laid out a new theory of human development, one in which we developed from primitive life forms – tiny, single cell organisms – into the intelligent beings that exist today, over millions and millions of years. This theory also introduced us to a new family – our evolutionary cousins, like the chimpanzee. It placed man’s existence in a natural setting and gave us more humble origins than perhaps we were used to.

In the 150 years since Darwin first published his book on evolution, mountains of evidence have been found supporting his theory. Geology and astronomy have shown that the Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. Physics has discovered that the universe is between 13 and 15 billion years old. Anthropologists and Paleontologists have discovered transition fossils that illustrate how species have evolved. And DNA and genetics have developed to the point where we have mapped the human genome, and can compare it to other species. I mentioned our cousin, the chimpanzee; a recent study has shown that human and chimpanzee DNA are 99.4% similar in the most critical areas. They are, indeed, our evolutionary relatives.

It is an amazing feat, what science has accomplished in enhancing our understanding of the incredible world in which we live. One cannot help but be in awe when hearing the age of the world, let alone the universe, and comparing it with the short time we are given to be on the planet.

Unfortunately, in spite of the evidence, there are a large number of people who would rather fight the scientific accomplishments we have achieved than accept a wider understanding. In the United States, several recent polls have shown that between 40% and 50% of Americans flatly reject evolution. By comparison, between 70% and 80% of people in Denmark, Sweden, France and Japan accept evolution as fact. In fact, out of 34 countries polled, the United States ranked 2nd to last in belief in evolution coming just ahead of Turkey.

So what is rotten in America? The problem, to put it plainly, is the Bible -- or, rather, an interpretation of the Bible that is particularly prevalent in the United States. First of all, let me make it clear: I am not against being religious, or believing in God. I’m not against the Bible itself. What I am against, strongly, is the idea that the Bible should be read 100% literally.

Let me further illustrate how big of a problem this is: in the 100% literal interpretation of the bible, the Earth was created in literally six days (God rested on the seventh), and mankind – as a species – is literally 10,000 years old. This idea is commonly referred to as Creationism.

However, we know, through science, that the human race is somewhere around 200,000 years old. We know the Earth and everything on it was not created in 144 hours. We have discovered these theories through science: the same science that has proved to work time and time again. It is the same science that has given us the electricity that powers our computers and lights, the vaccinations that help fight diseases, the principles behind broadband Internet connections, and so much more. Science goes where the evidence goes. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but that is okay. The nature of science is such that it can admit mistakes, correct itself, and still be credible.

The Bible does not talk about science. At all. At approximately 775,000 words. It is a long book, but not so long that it could encompass all we know about science, and teach about the Word of God. The Bible doesn’t talk about DNA, or pulsars, or the ionosphere, or bacteria. It says nothing of extrasolar planets, viruses, or electricity. It doesn’t have to; it’s not a science book, and it isn’t meant to be one. To read it as such is to miss the point of many of the lessons it does teach.

Nonetheless, in several polls conducted by Gallup, CBS, and other credible sources, between 44% and 46% of Americans polled believe the literal interpretation of the bible – that the human race was placed on Earth, by God, 10,000 years ago -- a direct contradiction of every available shred of evidence. Worse, 65% of people polled by CBS favored teaching Creationism alongside evolution in schools. Over a 1/3 – 37% -- favored teaching Creationism instead of evolution!

I have often heard, from people trying to find middle ground, that we should teach both ideas. After all, we live in a democracy. If the people want creationism, we should allow them to teach it. And I agree: but not in a science class.

Science is not democratic. Science attempts to understand world as the evidence shows that it is – not portraying the world as we might want it to be. The simple fact that an alternate idea exists or is popular does not make that idea science. We don’t demand that we teach views that the Earth is flat, and that the Earth is round. We don’t demand that we teach views that the Earth revolves around the sun, and that the sun revolves around the Earth. If there is serious scientific controversy over a theory, it is valid to teach that controversy, within the confines of science. The question with regards to evolution is twofold: are there serious scientific disagreements over the basic element of the theory, and is creationism a valid scientific alternative?

The answer to both of those questions is a resounding NO!

There are many intelligent people in the world who are religious; there are many intelligent people in the world who believe in God. That is not what this is about. What it is about is having a reasonable view of religion; tempering one’s view of the Bible, and one’s spirituality, with what we, as a species, have learned about the world through centuries of careful observation and experimentation. It is about making spirituality work with the facts that surround us.

Over the tens of thousands of years we have existed, human belief about God and spirituality has evolved as our knowledge of the universe has evolved. When Nicholas Copernicus showed that the Earth revolves around the sun, it shattered a long-held belief about our place in the universe – a place that, at the time, was supported by the Bible. People didn’t want to believe that the Earth was not the center of the universe. It was humbling; it made our species suddenly seem less special, less important. But the evidence is inescapable. Now it is common sense that the Earth revolves around the sun.

And people still believe in God.

Evolution is the same. We learned something new about the universe – God’s universe, if you believe that – and it isn’t quite like we originally thought. But the evidence is inescapable. As rational beings, we owe it to ourselves to examine the world truthfully and honestly. The vastness of the universe, the amazing complexity of evolution, and the progression of the human race from a single cell to the complex creatures that exist today, can instill a profound respect for the universe – and maybe, too, for that which created it.

My Take: Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you

2011-04-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

Written by By Karl W. Giberson on CNN.com

Jesus once famously said, “I am the Truth.”

Christianity at its best embodies this provocative idea and has long been committed to preserving, expanding and sharing truth. Most of the great universities of the world were founded by Christians committed to the truth—in all its forms—and to training new generations to carry it forward.

When science began in the 17th century, Christians eagerly applied the new knowledge to alleviate suffering and improve living conditions.

But when it comes to the truth of evolution, many Christians feel compelled to look the other way. They hold on to a particular interpretation of an ancient story in Genesis that they have fashioned into a modern account of origins - a story that began as an oral tradition for a wandering tribe of Jews thousands of years ago.

This is the view on display in a $27 million dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky. It inspired the Institute for Creation Research, which purports to offer scientific support for creationism.

And it’s hardly a fringe view. A 2010 Gallup poll indicated that 4 in 10 Americans think that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

While Genesis contains wonderful insights into the relationship between God and the creation, it simply does not contain scientific ideas about the origin of the universe, the age of the earth or the development of life.

For more than two centuries, careful scientific research, much of it done by Christians, has demonstrated clearly that the earth is billions years old, not mere thousands, as many creationists argue. We now know that the human race began millions of years ago in Africa - not thousands of years ago in the Middle East, as the story in Genesis suggests.

And all life forms are related to each other though evolution. These are important truths that science has discovered through careful research. They are not “opinions” that can be set aside if you don’t like them.

Anyone who values truth must take these ideas seriously, for they have been established as true beyond any reasonable doubt.

There is much evidence for evolution. The most compelling comes from the study of genes, especially now that the Human Genome Project has been completed and the genomes of many other species being constantly mapped.

In particular, humans share an unfortunate “broken gene” with many other primates, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques. This gene, which works fine in most mammals, enables the production of Vitamin C. Species with broken versions of the gene can’t make Vitamin C and must get it from foods like oranges and lemons.

Thousands of hapless sailors died painful deaths scurvy during the age of exploration because their “Vitamin C” gene was broken.

How can different species have identical broken genes? The only reasonable explanation is that they inherited it from a common ancestor.

Not surprisingly, evolution since the time of Darwin has claimed that humans, orangutans, chimpanzees, and macaques evolved recently from a common ancestor. The new evidence from genetics corroborates this.

Such evidence proves common ancestry with a level of certainty comparable to the evidence that the earth goes around the sun.

This is but one of many, many evidences that support the truth of evolution - that make it a “sacred fact” that Christians must embrace in the name of truth. And they should embrace this truth with enthusiasm, for this is the world that God created.

Christians must come to welcome - rather than fear - the ideas of evolution. Truths about Nature are sacred, for they speak of our Creator. Such truths constitute “God’s second book” for Christians to read alongside the Bible.

In the 17th century, Galileo used the metaphor of the “two books” to help Christians of his generation understand the sacred truth that the earth moves about the sun. “The Bible,” he liked to say, “tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens ago.”

To understand how the heavens go we must read the book of Nature, not the Bible.

The Book of nature reveals the truth that God created the world through gradual processes over billions of years, rather than over the course of six days, as many creationists believe.

Evolution does not contradict the Bible unless you force an unreasonable interpretation on that ancient book.
To suppose, as the so-called young earth creationists do, that God dictated modern scientific ideas to ancient and uncomprehending scribes is to distort the biblical message beyond recognition. Modern science was not in the worldview of the biblical authors and it is not in the Bible.

Science is not a sinister enterprise aimed at destroying faith. It’s an honest exploration of the wonderful world that God created.

We are often asked to think about what Jesus would do, if he lived among us today. Who would Jesus vote for? What car would he drive?

To these questions we should add “What would Jesus believe about origins?”

And the answer? Jesus would believe evolution, of course. He cares for the Truth.

Get Your Intelligent Design Out of My Science Classroom

2011-04-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I came across the news about the Tennessee bill. Have you heard of this one? I'm referring to the bill trying to get Intelligent Design taught in public school science classes. If you haven't heard the story, read up on it here.

I have heard so many reactions to this, most of them negative. But then there are those that support it. "Let kids hear both sides and decide for themselves."

Not. That. Simple.

"What are atheists afraid of?" Is another thing I hear. Well, I'll tell you what this is really about. I'm not telling you that your worship of your god is right or wrong. I'm not going to go into whether or not I agree or disagree with you. What I am going to say is science and religion are oil and water. They are not the same thing. For those of you who believe science has some kind of agenda, I wonder where you heard such a thing? For science is absent of its own opinion. Science is repetitive study & analysis, where we follow a process to land upon a theory or a law. The minute science discovers proof of God's existence, or the rising of Jesus to heaven, good old unbiased scientists all over the world will say, "Yup! You were right and we were wrong!"

Yet because science continually disproves religion, people say evolution is an "agenda", and that Darwin didn't believe his "theory". Look, for those of you who still believe that the world is 4,000 years old, do you know that the person who calculated that date was a Bishop from the 17th Century? (See James Ussher). Why are we still going by his calculations when science clearly can determine the age of the earth through carbon dating? And if you think this is another "scientific agenda", think again. All testing is done blind. That way the scientists don't know which rock it is they're looking at. Still, the results prove the same thing over and over and over again. Tested by different scientists all over the world, I think we have a much clearer idea of the age of the earth instead of some rough estimation made by a Bishop in 1650.

As to Darwin, was he unsure about his ideas? Only in the sense that he hesitated to publish them. I mean, who wouldn't? His wife was a devout Christian. That was hard enough on her. But to write such material back then was unheard of. Even frightening. Heck, it would have been so much easier for Darwin NOT to publish "The Origin of the Species". But the thing is if he hadn't, Alfred Russell Wallace would have. And why? Because Darwin didn't just make up a theory. He researched. He studied. He looked at what was right in front of him. And so did other scientists. Everyone began coming to the same conclusions as Darwin.

Today, we know so much more than Darwin did in his day, and so much scientific knowledge has proven Darwin's theories to be true. Evolution is all around us. We are living proof of its existence. Fossils, while not the most important evidence, are indeed a part of that. Should one fossil be found in a different time period than what scientists have studied, then we'd be able to diprove evolution.

But guess what? That's never happened. Every fossil remains exactly where it's supposed to be. More support for the theory. And don't get me started on the word "theory". In every day language, a theory is a "hunch" or a "speculation". But in science, a theory is a proposed explanation. Much like in a courtroom when we have to piece together clues to solve a crime, the theory of evolution does the same for science.

Science does not have the answers to everything. Nor does it claim to. That seems to bother people, and I don't know why?

So for those of you STILL suggesting that intelligent design needs to be taught in schools, I ask you this: WHICH Intelligent Design would you have us teach? The Greek god idea that Chaos created the world, and Eros drew Chaos & Gaia together to produce the Titans? (Not the Tennessee Titans, my football friends). Or should we focus on the Kalpa Cycle that the Buddhists believe, in which land forms on water, spiritual beings begin to populate the earth, then man forms and takes us through a cycle which we are destined to repeat again? Or perhaps we should focus on Hinduism's idea of Intelligent Design, in which Purusa is sacrificed and his lower body becomes the earth; the rest becomes the heavens. How would you feel if your child's science teacher taught one of these as the alternative to evolution. You'd be pissed, right? Just as I'd be pissed if my children's science teachers tried to get them into believing some god guy created the universe.

Look, if you want to teach your Intelligent Design stuff in schools, do it in a theology, philosophy, or humanities class. But keep it out of the science room. Because religion is not about science. It's a faith based idea. And part of the separation of church and state is to allow all of us to worship (or not worship) how we choose. If you want your child to believe in the god of the Bible, that's fine. That's what church is for. Just remember that despite how passionate you are about your religious beliefs, it's easy to forget that they're your opinion. You're entitled to it. But you may not preach it in a public school disguised in the cloak of "Intelligent Design".

Top 12 Reasons Not to Let Homosexuals Marry

2011-04-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Lee Totten

1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.

2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can't legally get married because the world needs more children.

3. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful, since Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.

5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are property, blacks can't marry whites, and divorce is illegal.

6. Marriage equality should be decided by people not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of minorities.

7. Marriage equality is not supported by religion. In theocracies like Australia or America, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion.

8. Marriage equality will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

9. Legalising gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behaviour. People may even wish to marry their pets or TVs because a dogs and televisions have legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why single parents are forbidden to raise children.

11. Marriage equality will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven't adapted to ending slavery, allowing women the right to vote or increasing life spans.

12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a "separate but equal" institution is always legal or constitutional. Separate schools for Aboriginals and African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

Meet The Same Sex Parents Next Door

2011-03-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

From cnn.com by Patty Onderko, Parenting.com

(Parenting.com) -- My 3-year-old twin boys and I are camped out on the terminal floor at the Denver airport, halfway through a five-hour flight delay and surrounded by plastic planes, action figures, and lollipop wrappers. Soon another set of young boys is lured to our sticky little campsite by the tinny, baritone catchphrases coming from a Buzz Lightyear toy.

"Twins?" their mom asks, after the four boys negotiate the rules of engagement (the newbies could play with Buzz but not Spidey). "Mine, too," she confirms. With common ground established, we begin sharing the complaints of our kind ("I have to buy two of everything!").

Parenting.com: Answering kids' toughest questions

As our kids play superheroes, I'm introduced to her husband, who shares the same strong Boston accent of his wife. We're all chatting amiably when my wife, Emily, returns from checking on our flight status. "You guys sisters?" the mom asks.

And here is the moment I hate: the Explaining of the Situation (EOTS). Most of the time, the EOTS is not a big deal at all, but then again, we live in New York City. Not just New York City, but a liberal enclave in Brooklyn called Park Slope, where, depending on the time of day at the local playground, same-sex parents just might outnumber straight ones.

I recognize, though, that not everyone is down with two women or two men raising kids together, so there's the chance this family might quietly pack up their stuff and build their own campsite somewhere else upon the EOTS. Will our impromptu party suddenly become unbearably awkward?

"No, we're not sisters," I say, as I have hundreds of times before (Emily and I do look somewhat similar). "We're partners."

My new friend brightens and says, "Oh, who carried?" Who carried?! After I tell her that it was me who carried, we swap birth stories. Her husband leans over to tell Emily that he gained 25 pounds worth of sympathy weight. "Did you have the same problem?" he asks.

Clearly, the only person there with any judgments or preconceived notions was me. I shouldn't have been surprised. In the five years that Em and I have been married (no, it's not legal), and in the three and a half years since we had the boys, that's pretty much the way it's gone.

Parenting.com: 5 tantrum stoppers that actually work

We've received nothing but love, support or, surprisingly, plain old indifference from friends, family and strangers. That apathy says a lot about how much a part of the social fabric we have become. Truth be told, we're neither sensational nor worth remarking upon. We're just the New Normal.

At home with June and Jane

There are approximately 1 million gay families raising approximately 2 million kids in the United States, according to the Family Equality Council, though it's hard to know our exact numbers since census data doesn't exactly count us.

We have the highest population percentages in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, and Boston, but we're not just on the coasts or in major urban centers. Utah, Hawaii, Wyoming, and Nevada all rank as top-ten states with the largest number of same-sex spouses per 1,000 households. In fact, nearly 30 percent of the people who responded to a recent Parenting.com poll have a friend or relative who's a same-sex parent.

"You can throw a dart at the map and find at least one set of same-sex parents wherever it lands," says Ellen Kahn, the family project director for the Human Rights Campaign, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization.

Parenting.com: What to do when your kids is bullied

Wherever we live, it turns out that we're raising some pretty well-adjusted kids. The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), which followed the children of 154 lesbian mothers over 25 years, reported that our teens had fewer behavioral problems and better school performance than their peers with straight parents.

Nanette Gartrell, M.D., the lead NLLFS researcher, was not surprised by the results. "The children we studied were highly desired," she says. "They didn't result from a broken condom or too much alcohol. Their parents worked hard to have them and didn't take the privilege of having kids lightly. They took parenting classes and educated themselves. That's what makes for a good outcome, no matter what the family structure. They built strong communities for their families from the beginning."

I don't think any gay parent thinks her or his kids are better than anyone else's. But what the findings do prove is that our offspring are no more likely to be messed up than anyone else's. We're not raising freaks.

Our kids are totally, boringly normal. And that's a salient argument against those who think that having gay parents is patently unhealthy for children.

The fight to be normal

It would be naive, of course, to say that it's all rosy for gay Americans and their families. Most polls show that about 50 percent of the country is still opposed to legalized marriage for gay couples, and the lack of marital rights has a huge impact on financial and legal status once kids are brought into the mix.

Parenting.com: How to teach spirituality to kids your own way

Without a federally or state-recognized union, the biological children of one partner have no legal connection to their nonbiological parent. In order for the nonbiological parent to ensure medical benefits for his or her own kids, or to assume custody if, God forbid, his or her partner dies, they have to go through a process called second-parent adoption. Emily and I did this.

In a nutshell, you fill out a lot of paperwork with your lawyer, a social worker makes several visits to your home, and then you appear in front of a judge to testify on your own behalf. It's a humiliating and costly ($2,000 to $3,000) process.

Legal issues aren't the only ones same-sex parents face. Denise Freeman DeCandia and her partner, Cari DeCandia, were both raised Christian and value their faith. So when Denise gave birth to their son, Cortland, eight months ago, it was important to them and their families to have him baptized. They began looking for more liberal denominations near their Cary, North Carolina, home. So far, they've asked four churches to baptize their son, and received refusals from all of them.

One reverend wrote Cari, "We'd be delighted to have you visit us...but unfortunately I would find it impossible to baptize a child being raised in a same-sex partnership." He closed the note with the words "Every Blessing."

The rest of U.S.: America's opinion

So, yes, there's room for improvement. When I wrote a story for Babytalk (Parenting's sister publication) about my pregnancy, we got a letter from a woman who said she "threw up in her mouth" when I mentioned Emily. I laughed it off, but it really stung. Fortunately, we received dozens of positive letters to counteract the effect of the handful of negative ones.

Parenting.com: The best remedies for rude tween behavior

In fact, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center and commissioned by Time magazine found that most Americans' view of what constitutes a family is loosening. Three out of five people said they view a same-sex couple with kids as a family, too.

Kendra Martin, a mom of two in Hayesville, a small mountain town in North Carolina, is a classic example of the shifting attitude. Her cousin is a lesbian who has an 8-year-old son with her partner. Before the boy's birth, Martin admits she was worried about how he would fare.

"I was concerned it would be hard for a son not to have a father, and I thought he would be teased by his peers. I just thought, 'Why bring someone into the world when you know he'll have challenges?' But I've realized their son has no more difficulties than any other child. I've learned all kids get teased, and it's the parents' job to help them deal with hardship. All parents have the same issues."

"Polling clearly shows that Americans are more comfortable than ever with gay people becoming parents," says Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, who has two kids with her wife, Cheryl Jacques. "The bottom line is that we are parents first, and that creates a common ground. Bedtime, bathtime, playground, homework: We all speak the same language. To our neighbors, we're not the 'lesbian moms.' We're Jen and Cheryl, raising Tim and Tom."

In other words, with all of the demands they bring and liberties they curtail, our kids -- in the end -- may be what forces us all to simply be what we are: a family.

If You Don't Chuckle At this Sign There's Something Wrong with You

2011-03-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

20,000 Hits for Releasing Religion

2011-03-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

Releasing Religion has reached 20,000 hits. Thank you to everyone who's come by for a visit. Whether you agree with what you see or not, I hope it's made 20,000 people think. Have a wonderful day!

-Emy

'Book of Mormon' Set to Open on Broadway

2011-03-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

By Cassie Spodak, CNN

New York (CNN) – A new musical set to open on Broadway Thursday night looks at religious faith and doubt with a healthy dose of imagination: the audience meets Jesus, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith, Satan, and an African warlord as well as Darth Vader, Yoda and two hobbits.

The production, called "The Book of Mormon," was written by "South Park" creators Mark Stone and Trey Parker, along with Robert Lopez, who wrote the Broadway hit "Avenue Q."

The creators have used music, irreverent comedy, and obscenity to tackle controversial subjects before, but they say their approach is new to Broadway musicals.

“Broadway, for so many years, was a very wholesome community,” Lopez told CNN. “As far as comedy, (Broadway) has not progressed as far as movies and TV (even though) there are no censors.”

Lopez met Stone and Parker after they saw "Avenue Q," which followed young puppets and humans living in a fictional New York as they dealt with careers, relationships, sex and the challenges of managing expectations.

When they asked him what he wanted to work on next, Parker told them he was interested in doing a musical about Mormonism.

Stone and Parker were hooked. It was a subject they had explored in an episode of "South Park" - an animated adult show on Comedy Central that follows four elementary school kids and is known for crude language and satirical humor - and Mormonism held a special fascination for them.

Mormonism originated with Joseph Smith in upstate New York in 1830. This not-so-distant past was attractive to the writers, Lopez told CNN, because they thought it added to the far-fetchedness of the religion's claims that God had anointed Smith as an American prophet.

“A prophet who lived thousands and thousands of years ago in the Middle East is veiled in antiquity,” said Lopez. “But a prophet finding God’s word on golden plates just a few hours drive from New York City is ripe for satire.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a brief statement about the musical. “The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening," it said, "but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.”

Portrayals of Mormons or the LDS Church are abundant in pop culture today - from the HBO series "Big Love" to "South Park" - but the church usually stays out of these discussions.

The church has said objecting to such portrayals would only bring them more attention. But the strategy may also contribute to an aura of mystery around the religion.

Richard Bushman, a leading Mormon scholar, says the Mormon faith is an easy target for the entertainment industry.

“Mormonism does seem exotic," he said. "It’s exotic in its temple ceremonies, which are quite out of the ordinary, and it has its stories of angels and gold plates.

“That’s just part of being Mormon, that people will see these things as strange," said Bushman, who is Mormon. "The secrecy of the temple is critical to the temple. Mormons are trying to create a sacred space.”
"The Book of Mormon" follows two young Mormon men, Elder Price and Elder Cunningham, as they set off to complete their required two years as missionaries for the church. One of them has dreams of being dispatched to Orlando, Florida, but they are instead sent to Uganda. Reality there is worlds away from Disney World.

But the setting sometime seems just as fantastical. The small village where the two missionaries are based is terrorized by an obscenely named warlord who directs female genital mutilation and murder.

The musical weaves back and forth from reality to fantasy, as the two protagonists encounter AIDS, rape, war and dysentery as well as musical numbers with Darth Vader, Yoda, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Frodo Baggins of "Lord of the Rings" and human-sized cups of coffee (which Mormons are not supposed to drink).

The sometimes incomprehensible nature of reality forces the young Mormons to question their faith and their purpose in life.

Elder Price begins the musical with a song about how his life has been leading up to this moment and about his desire to do something “incredible.” But the reality of the world around him defeats his optimism. Price succumbs to his doubts about faith and God after having the Book of Mormon stuck in a very uncomfortable part of his anatomy.

His companion, Elder Cunningham, begins to bring converts to the church as he elaborates on the original story of Joseph Smith with allusions to favorite science fiction stories.

Where Elder Price’s blind faith in God seems to have failed him, Elder Cunningham’s embellished stories begin to resonate with the villagers as he relates the Book of Mormon to medical issues and problems in their daily lives. But his fabrications inevitably get him in trouble.

Lopez, who was raised as a Catholic, says the focus on Mormonism was more a vehicle to talk about religion than a desire to ridicule one particular faith tradition.

“When you strip away the need to have scripture make literal sense and stop worrying about whether God exists somewhere, the miracle is that true religion reveals itself," he said. "It’s made up of these wacky stories, but it has a purpose and faith that there is really something good.”

“What’s powerful is not a magical mythical corporeal thing called God," he said. "It’s the power of these ideas, and the power of the trust, and the power of the musical. That’s where the true miracle is. And the result of the miracle is that people are good to each other.”

Graceann Bennett, a strategic planning director in the advertising industry who grew up Mormon, said she was pleasantly surprised by the musical, which she caught in preview.

What resonated with Bennett was how the musical focused on the core beliefs of Mormonism and not the fringe elements that often get more attention, like polygamy.

“They were making fun of things that were true, not things that weren’t true. It was done in a loving way,” she said.

But Bennett is sure that the musical will offend more religious Mormons.

“I think it’s just about how much blasphemous and irreverence you can handle,” she said.

Bennett also said the musical’s message reaches far beyond Mormonism, speaking to those who see religion as “giving people purpose in life, helping them be a better person.”

That pretty well sums up the play's ending, during which Elder Price realizes that the “incredible” he has been striving for can be found in the happiness and faith of the villagers around him - even if their understanding of the Book of Mormon has more to do with the Death Star than with upstate New York.

Religion 'will be driven toward extinction' in 9 countries, experts predict

2011-03-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

From cnn.com.

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

Religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

It won't die out completely, but "religion will be driven toward extinction" in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

The mathematicians say it will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland.
They can't make a prediction about the United States because the U.S. census doesn't ask about religion, lead author Daniel Abrams told CNN.

But nine other countries provide enough data for detailed mathematical modelling, he said.

"If you look at the data, 'unaffiliated' is the fastest-growing group" in those countries, Abrams said.

"We start with two big assumptions based on sociology," he explained.

The first is that it's more attractive to be part of the majority than the minority, so as religious affiliation declines, it becomes more popular not to be a churchgoer than to be one, he said - what Abrams calls the majority effect.

"People are more likely to switch to groups with more members," he said.

Social networks can have a powerful influence, he said.

"Just a few connections to people who are (religiously) unaffiliated is enough to drive the effect," he said.
The other assumption underlying the prediction is that there are social, economic and political advantages to being unaffiliated with a religion in the countries where it's in decline - what Abrams calls the utility effect.

"The utility of being unaffiliated seems to be higher than affiliated in western democracies," he said.

Abrams and his co-authors are not passing any judgment on religion, he's quick to say - they're just modelling a prediction based on trends.

"We're not trying to make any commentary about religion or whether people should be religious or not," he said.

"I became interested in this because I saw survey data results for the U.S. and was surprised by how large the unaffiliated group was," he said, referring to a number of studies done by universities and think tanks on trends in religion.

Studies suggest that "unaffiliated" is the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, with about 15% of the population falling into a category experts call the "nones."

They're not necessarily atheists or non-believers, experts say, just people who do not associate themselves with a particular religion or house of worship at the time of the survey.

Abrams had done an earlier study looking into the extinction of languages spoken by small numbers of people.
When he saw the religion data, his co-author "Richard Wiener suggested we try to apply a similar technique to religious affiliation," Abrams said.

The paper, by Abrams, Wiener and Haley A. Yaple, is called "A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation." They presented it this week at the Dallas, Texas, meeting of the American Physical Society.

Only the Czech Republic already has a majority of people who are unaffiliated with religion, but the Netherlands, for example, will go from about 40% unaffiliated today to more than 70% by 2050, they expect.
Even deeply Catholic Ireland will see religion die out, the model predicts.

"They've gone from 0.04% unaffiliated in 1961 to 4.2% in 2006, our most recent data point," Abrams says.
He admits that the increase in Muslim immigration to Europe may throw off the model, but he thinks the trend is robust enough to withstand some challenges.

"Netherlands data goes back to 1860," he pointed out. "Every single data that we were able to find shows that people are moving from the affiliated to unaffiliated. I can't imagine that will change, but that's personal opinion, not what the data shows."

But Barry Kosmin, a demographer of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut, is doubtful.

"Religion relies on human beings. They aren't rational or predictable according to the laws of physics.

Religious fervor waxes and wanes in unpredictable ways," he said.

"The Jewish tradition that says prophecy is for fools and children is probably wise," he added.

And Abrams, Wiener and Yaple are not the first to predict the end of religion.

Peter Berger, a former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, once said that, "People will become so bored with what religious groups have to offer that they will look elsewhere."

He said Protestantism "has reached the strange state of self-liquidation," that Catholicism was in severe crisis, and anticipated that "religions are likely to survive in small enclaves and pockets" in the United States.

He made those predictions in February 1968.

How My 6-Year-Old-Boy Debunked Intelligent Design

2011-03-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

By "Bryan" from Atheist Nexus. Thank you for the permission to post this. As a parent myself, it means that much more.

____

I was attempting to explain to my son, Brance, who just turned six two weeks ago, why it was better to refrain from saying “Oh God!” especially around his grandparents. He didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to them and asked if “God” was a bad word.

This caught me off guard a bit. I had no reason to think that he should have known what or who God was. I half suspected that either the Mormon or Catholic set of grandparents had tried to explain it to him already. By the time I was his age I could tell you who God was and recite most of the common Bible stories chronologically. That’s what threw me off; he was never going to have to struggle with his faith and go through the anguish and torment that I did.

I had been spending so much time teaching him about evolution by natural selection that I forgot to tell him the lie he would be confronted with someday. Just a few weeks ago I had asked him what evolution was. He responded by saying, “It’s a gradual change in species that happens slowly over really long periods of time.” I couldn’t hope for a better answer from him. Talk about a proud poppa moment; almost made me cry.

I decided that it was time that he heard the creation story that I grew up with. I hopped on the internet and googled “childrens creation story.” In .2 seconds I was greeted with 2,230,000 results to choose from. I chose the top one from dltk-Bible.com. As soon as I got to “Let there be light,” he started giggling. By the time I got to the morning of the third day he was laughing quite a bit.

I read on, “So, he put all the water in one place and all the dry land in another.” He stopped laughing instantly so I asked him, “What?”

“Why do we have to save water then? Wouldn’t God make enough for everybody?” he asked. I smiled and nodded just a bit before reading on.

After I finished reading about the third day he was beginning to catch on. “So God made everything?” he asked.

“Well that’s what some people believe,” I stated, “but I don’t think so.” This sent him into hysterics.

“He made South America!” I wasn’t sure why this was so funny to him but he continued to laugh and list the things that God had “made.” Squirrels, Dr. Seuss, and cat butts had him laughing especially hard. “Doesn’t he have any brains? Cause he made some weird stuff in this world.” A six year old debunks Intelligent Design with a simple observational idea that ID proponents can’t even grasp. That had me chuckling for a moment before I read on.

When I told him about the creation of the sun on the fourth day he became serious again. He wrinkled up one eye and stated matter-of-factly, “Light has to be from the sun.” And I thought I was the only one in the room that would have a problem with light being created three days before the sun. My six year old was quickly demonstrating that he was a better critical thinker than people who believe the creation story.

“Then he made the stars to add a bit of sparkle to the night,” I read. Again the skeptical look so I waited for his comment.

“The sun is a star.” He seemed to be getting annoyed with the story now. He remained quiet as I finished through the fifth day. “Why did he make sharks?” He seemed repulsed by this idea. “And why did he even make the fish if the sharks are just going to eat them?” I laughed aloud but decided not to give him my opinion as he clearly was about to spout off another question. “How did they turn into octopuses?” - Brilliant. He had caught the fact that the bible considers everything in the ocean to be a fish and says nothing about the other phyla or classes. “Platypus, too?” He laughed hysterically when I nodded confirmation.

At this point he said, as he was running up the stairs and laughing through his words, that he had to get his animal books to see what other absurd creations God made. We read about some animals for a while before recapping and completing the Genesis story. When it was finally over he asked, “So he’s like a big daddy and we’re his children?” I mused at this observation for a moment before replying.

“A lot of people think that,” I said.

“So where’s our momma?”

“There is no momma in this story.”

“So we came out of his stomach?” I laughed again and shook my head. I could see that I was going to have to tell him the story of Adam and Eve.

After telling him that God breathed life into Adam I could see the skeptical look appear on his little face again so I waited. He clearly didn’t believe that Adam was made from molded clay but asked if he breathed life into all animals.

“No, Buddy, just Adam.”

“Not even us?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s stupid; only Adam. Why not us too? He hates us doesn’t he?” I just laughed at this query as I really didn’t feel like telling the snake and apple part of the story at this point. I continued on with the rib story. He winced and a pained look came over his face as he asked, “Ooh! Did he die?”

I chuckled once more and decided to end this conversation but he went into another rant on all the other things that God created. When he said, “And Uncle Dray, too, and the bad guys that shoot at him,” he stopped and shook his head. “Why would he create bad guy shooters?” He saw the absurdity of God allowing this. I didn’t answer (I don’t know, of course) but asked another question instead:

“So do you think this could have happened?”

“Yeah, I believe it now; I believe him,” he said, sort of reluctantly.

“Why?” I asked.

“Cause he’s such an idiot that he had to be the one that made all this killing and stuff.” I’ve never heard that one before! He decided he’d had enough of this conversation and wanted to go watch a movie upstairs. As he walked away he said, “That was a funny story though; made me laugh about four thousand times!”

Just a few moments later he returned from the stairwell and asked, “Wait; Is God invisible?” Again I chuckled and nodded. “That’s dumb. Why wouldn’t he show himself to us?” I shrugged my shoulders.

Why wouldn’t he, indeed?

We talked about the story of our beginnings that science has helped us put together for a while but he quickly became bored with this topic. Invisible sky daddies are more entertaining. He did laugh at the idea of the universe being so small at one point. I think he’s skeptical of that but he had some interesting questions about gasses and energy and what the earth was made of and how it got “painted.” After answering his questions he volunteered the following observation:

“I think the scientists are correct and the other guy sounds crazy. I think I want to be a scientist when I grow up and study water, animals, and space.” What an amusing array of choices. I had to inquire about them. “I want to find out where the water came from, for real, and dig up animal bones and put them together.”

“What about space?”

“I want to go there…”

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Bible in the Classroom

2011-03-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, Neil deGrasse Tyson, for being you. For bringing up excellent points. For shutting down those that would try to enforce their own agendas on our children in the classroom. If you want to learn about creation, go to Sunday School. That is what it's there for. If you want to learn about reality-about science-then go to Public School. It's really as simple as that.

Where is God in Japan?

2011-03-21T02:06:00.000-07:00

(Emy's Note: It has been my experience that people really need to find some kind of supernatural meaning when a major natural disaster hits. Hence the article below. I've come across some idiots-Glenn Beck of course included-who either say right out or imply that the Japan earthquake is God's punishment on us. It's hard for people to grasp that tectonic plates in the earth move... without some guy in the clouds pushing them. Such is nature. Such is the way of the world.)

Finding Faith Amid Disaster by Jessica Ravitz, CNN

Around the world, people are still struggling to come to terms with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which have left more than 8,000 dead, thousands more missing and hundreds of thousand others homeless. The threat of a nuclear crisis only adds to the uncertainty.

In times like these, many people find comfort in their faith. But disasters can also challenge long-held beliefs. The CNN Belief Blog asked some prominent voices with different views on religion how they make sense of such suffering, where they see inspiration amid destruction and how they respond to people who wonder, “How could God let this happen?”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author whose books include “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”

Whenever a disaster like this occurs, I go back to the Bible, to the First Book of Kings. Elijah, in despair over the situation in Israel, runs to the desert, back to Mt. Sinai to find the God of the Revelation to Moses.

"And lo, the Lord God passed by. There was a mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. There was an earthquake but the Lord was not in the earthquake."

To me, that is the key: the Lord was not in the earthquake.

Natural disasters are acts of nature, not acts of God. God cares about the well-being of good people;

Nature is blind, an equal-opportunity destroyer.

Where is God in Japan today? In the courage of people to carry on their lives after the tragedy. In the resilience of those whose lives have been destroyed, families swept away, homes lost, but they resolve to rebuild their lives. In the goodness and generosity of people all over the world to reach out and help strangers who live far from them, to contribute aid, to pray for them.

How can people do such things if God were not at work in them to lend a counterweight to a natural disaster?

The Rev. Tesshu Shaku, chief priest of Nyoraiji Temple, a Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land sect of Buddhism) temple in Ikeda City, Japan

Buddhism is called a religion with no god. So we don’t think God caused this, according to the Buddhist way of thinking. We think of the law of cause and effect, searching for a cause. It is the same approach as science. The cause of this earthquake is the friction between the North American plate and the Pacific plate.

The Japanese are more focused on relationships as opposed to faith, feeling the pain of others. I have witnessed this at the time of the Hanshin Awaji earthquake. [In 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake on the island of Awaji killed about 6,500 people.] There were many people who came to the affected area to help and volunteer.

There is a word, “earthquake children,” for people whose perspectives were affected by the disaster. They became very active in community service or became Buddhist monks. So people will be more spiritual, feeling the pains and joys of others.

The Rev. James Martin, Jesuit priest, culture editor of America magazine and author of “The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything”

For the believer, there is no satisfactory answer for why we suffer. Each person has to come to grips with that. It’s not as if some magic answer can be found. But the idea of God suffering along with us can be very helpful.

The Christian believes that God became human and that God underwent all the things we do. Jesus on the cross cried, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” Christians do not have an impersonal God, but a God who understands what it means to suffer. People can relate more easily to a God who understands them.

Where is God? God is right there with the people who are grieving and sorrowful. In my own life, when I have felt great sorrow I have trusted that God is with me in this and that I’m not facing my struggles alone.

Oftentimes people become more religious in times of sorrow. They find that they are able to meet God in new ways. Why? Because when our defenses are down and we’re more vulnerable, God can break into our lives more easily. It’s not that God is closer, it’s that we’re more open.

Dr. Sayyid Syeed, national director of the Islamic Society of North America’s Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances

These sort of natural disasters become the collective responsibility of all mankind to mobilize our compassion and resources to ease the pain of the people who have suffered.

This disaster is not the result of any sins of these people; we need to be clear that there is no belief that these victims “deserved” it for any of their actions. Rather, Muslims see these kinds of tragedies as a test from God. Muslims believe that God tests those he loves, and these tragedies also serve as a reminder to the rest of us to remain grateful to God for all our blessings and cognizant that we must support those in need.

These kinds of calamities should push us in positive ways. They should strengthen our faith in God and in his goodness. We attribute the things we don’t understand to his limitless wisdom and comfort ourselves that he is with us and he loves us, so there must be some meaning in what has happened, even if it is beyond our comprehension here at this time.

We are trained by our faith that every suffering, whether big or small, brings us closer to God’s mercy and forgiveness, to the extent that the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) said, if you are walking and feel a thorn pierce your foot, you should know that even this little bit of pain brings you divine blessing and God’s forgiveness. These times of suffering give us an opportunity to demonstrate patience and faith, and therefore, become closer to God.

Every natural phenomenon challenges us as God’s trustees on this Earth, showing us that we should continue to study and explore ways of safeguarding humankind and all creatures from being subjected to this kind of devastation. It is the collective duty of all humankind to put resources in this and advance our understanding of how to respond to these disasters in a scientific way.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writer and activist who founded the Unified Buddhist Church in France, and Plum Village, a Buddhist community in exile

As we contemplate the great number of people who have died in this tragedy, we may feel very strongly that we ourselves, in some part or manner, also have died.

The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.
An event such as this reminds us of the impermanent nature of our lives. It helps us remember that what’s most important is to love each other, to be there for each other, and to treasure each moment we have that we are alive. This is the best that we can do for those who have died: We can live in such a way that they can feel they are continuing to live in us, more mindfully, more profoundly, more beautifully, tasting every minute of life available to us, for them.

Sam Harris, author of books including “The End of Faith,” and co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion.

Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, “this might be all part of God’s plan,” or “there are no accidents in life,” or “everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves” - these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this.

Elizabeth Tinsley, ordained Buddhist nun and doctoral student of Buddhist culture at Otani University in Kyoto, Japan

Japanese religious life is characterized by the fusion of systems: aspects of Shinto, Buddhism and Christianity all have their place in the life of the average Japanese person, and there are numerous so-called 'new religions' too, many of which, incidentally, sprang up in the aftermath of World War II, which was another disaster (though not a natural one) for the Japanese and left great psychological scars. I expect to see an increased need for spiritual sustenance in the aftermath of the quake/tsunami.
One aspect of kami (deity) worship [in the Shinto religion] is the conception of kami as life-forces in nature which can be generative - kami of rice, of rivers, of the sun, and such. … Because of this quality [they] are equally capable of retracting their blessings and destroy.

One reason the Japanese have so many kami … is because they are so vulnerable to frequent earthquakes and typhoons, tsunami, and other extreme weather. So throughout their history they have known the ferocity and unpredictability of nature and thus have a strong relationship, often one of fear and respect, to kami. Though, perhaps this tells you something of how their geology and climate affect their religious convictions and expressions rather than how religion will relate to the earthquake/tsunami disaster.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief organization

I don’t believe God does want this to happen. I don’t think it was ever God’s intention.

We know that there are going to be storms in life. No matter what happens we need to keep our faith and trust in almighty God. And I want the people of Japan to know that God hasn’t forgotten them, that God does care for them and that he loves them.

We care and God cares, and we’re standing by them.

CNN's Carol Costello contributed to this report

Richard Dawkins on Absolute Morality

2011-03-15T15:46:00.000-07:00

Once more, Dawkins amazes me. Let us become a society of free thought.

God is Good because He Shook Japan??

2011-03-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

So let me get this straight... God is good because he picked Japan up, shook it and killed thousands of people? And this is his method for punishing atheists? Lady, I'm going to teach you a new word. It has two syllables: brainwashed. That's what you are. Poor thing.

If the Devil is Allowed in Our Schools, Why Not God?

2011-03-12T19:14:00.000-08:00

Another great article by HUGH KRAMER from the LA Atheism Examiner:

Each morning here in sunny California, I start my day looking for news and articles of interest I can pass on to my readers. Today (March 12th) I found an item from a paper in equally sunny Florida that I can't resist commenting on. It's an editorial by a pastor, Clayton A. Cowart of the Church of God the Bibleway in Winter Haven and it illustrates the interesting kind of logic some theists use to claim victimhood at the hands of atheists and their evil secular government.

In an article today (March 12, 2011) in NewsChief.com, Pastor Cowart expresses his unhappiness with how the battle over separation of church and state has been so unfair to God. "How is it," he says, "that Satan or the devil has been allowed to remain with no complaints from the Christian arena, the atheist or the government officials, but God has been taken out?" For evidence of this, Pastor Cowart points to the mascots of two local schools, the Kathleen High School Red Devils and Winter Haven High School Blue Devils (emphasis is mine).

Like God, Satan or the devil, is a biblical character and Pastor Cowart points out that the Bible is the very book being challenged by the atheists. "Have we really taken the time," the good pastor asks, "to consider that devil worship is also a religion? How can we reject the "God" of the Bible and except the "Devil" of the same Bible?"

"With this concept," Pastor Cowart goes on to say, "it seems as if the attitude towards the Devil is accepted. It is amazing that we have removed God from our schools in every way possible, but have allowed the devil to remain as a mascot without any opposition. With as much opposition as the atheist gives toward religion in public schools, many atheists proudly proclaim they are Blue Devils or Red Devils. Why can't the Christians proclaim God?"

He's not happy with Christians who don't have a problem with "devil" mascots but, even more importantly, he thinks it's time for atheists "to be realistic and admit to some degree that they have embraced biblical character (the Devil) and have supported him directly or indirectly."

"Let's be fair to God," Pastor Cowart concludes. "Either we kick Satan out. Bring God back in."

It's an interesting argument that Pastor Cowart presents. It includes the familiar fundamentalist talking point of presenting Christians as victims by being denied the "right" to push God in public schools and calls for apathetic Christians to reconsider their inactivity. It also offers them a potential villain. Atheists, he implies, are the driving force behind the current way separation of church and state is enforced (Christians like Reverend Barry Lynn, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, aren't mentioned) and are either witting or unwitting dupes of Satan.

And Pastor Cowart's arguments are pretty good... provided you accept the premise that having "devils" in a school mascot name is a religious usage the way having Jesus hanging from a cross in the school cafeteria would be.

But Pastor Cowart is comparing apples with oranges here. School sports teams don't call themselves "devils" to indicate an alignment with evil. They're just trying to sound tough and formidable. No football players are getting down on their knees before the game and praying to the devil for victory. No cheerleaders are waving their pom poms and trying to whip up the crowd with chants of "Hit 'em on the left! Hit 'em on the right! For Satan! Satan! Fight, fight, fight!"

Was the US Navy trying to push religion when it named its aerial acrobatics team "the Blue Angels" or was it a reference to their high-flying nature (actually the name was inspired by a New York night club - let me know if you can find religious significance in that)?

It's simply not the same thing as leading prayers in school or putting the Ten Commandments up in the hallways. Pastor Cowart's logic isn't bad but there's this funny thing about logic. You can make it serve just about any argument you want provided you don't question the assumptions that underlie it.

Love & Marriage

2011-03-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

Couple things on my mind today. One of them is is in regards to Rahna Reiko Rizutto, and how she chose to leave her children & husband in pursuit of her career. See the video below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now I have gotten a lot of heated responses from this story, most of them condemning this woman. And while I do see everyone's points, I have a hard time pointing fingers. Being a mother myself, I know how difficult it is to balance career/family. People who say you can do both either don't have the career I do or simply don't have children. Now I'm not advocating this, but I can't condemn her either.

In the news, lately, Mike Huckabee has been attacking Natalie Portman for having a child out of wedlock. Again, I don't understand what this has to do with politics? I had a child out of wedlock. And guess what? She's perfectly fine. To me, getting married wasn't about a commitment to God, it was about a commitment to each other. We'd made that commitment long before having our daughter. We just solidified it after shew as born, not before. I can only imagine Natalie Portman's fury at Mike Huckabee's old school religious conservative ignorance. What about all the people in unhappy marriages, Huckabee? What about abusive relationships? What about a million other scenarios? Why single out this one woman because she's not doing a process that you were taught to do? What makes your way so right, and hers so wrong?

What we should take from these stories is that everyone has a different way of doing things. What works for one might not work for another. But be careful of putting people in a category just because you were raised a different way.

Stephen Fry on Catholicism, from the Intelligence Squared debate

2011-03-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

This. Is. Brilliant. My favorite part? The Catholic Church is obsessed with sex much like an Anorexic or a Bulimic are obsessed with food.

My Take: The Bible really does condemn homosexuality

2011-03-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: The Bible also says we should stone adulterers. What do you have to say about that, RG?)

By Robert A. J. Gagnon, Special to CNN

Editor’s Note: Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D., is associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics and (with Dan Via) Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views.

In her recent CNN Belief Blog post “The Bible’s surprisingly mixed messages on sexuality,” Jennifer Wright Knust claims that Christians can’t appeal to the Bible to justify opposition to homosexual practice because the Bible provides no clear witness on the subject and is too flawed to serve as a moral guide.

As a scholar who has written books and articles on the Bible and homosexual practice, I can say that the reality is the opposite of her claim. It’s shocking that in her editorial and even her book, "Unprotected Texts," Knust ignores a mountain of evidence against her positions.

It raises a serious question: does the Left read significant works that disagree with pro-gay interpretations of Scripture and choose to simply ignore them?

Owing to space limitations I will focus on her two key arguments: the ideal of gender-neutral humanity and slavery arguments.

Knust's lead argument is that sexual differentiation in Genesis, Jesus and Paul is nothing more than an "afterthought" because "God's original intention for humanity was androgyny."

It’s true that Genesis presents the first human (Hebrew adam, from adamah, ground: “earthling”) as originally sexually undifferentiated. But what Knust misses is that once something is “taken from” the human to form a woman, the human, now differentiated as a man, finds his sexual other half in that missing element, a woman.

That’s why Genesis speaks of the woman as a “counterpart” or “complement,” using a Hebrew expression neged, which means both “corresponding to” and “opposite.” She is similar as regards humanity but different in terms of gender. If sexual relations are to be had, they are to be had with a sexual counterpart or complement.

Knust cites the apostle Paul’s remark about “no ‘male and female’” in Galatians. Yet Paul applies this dictum to establishing the equal worth of men and women before God, not to eliminating a male-female prerequisite for sex.

Applied to sexual relations, the phrase means “no sex,” not “acceptance of homosexual practice,” as is evident both from the consensus of the earliest interpreters of this phrase and from Jesus' own sayings about marriage in this age and the next.

All the earliest interpreters agreed that "no 'male and female,'" applied to sexual relations, meant "no sex."

That included Paul and the ascetic believers at Corinth in the mid-first century; and the church fathers and gnostics of the second to fourth centuries. Where they disagreed is over whether to postpone mandatory celibacy until the resurrection (the orthodox view) or to begin insisting on it now (the heretical view).

Jesus’ view

According to Jesus, “when (people) rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels” (Mark 12:25). Sexual relations and differentiation had only penultimate significance. The unmediated access to God that resurrection bodies bring would make sex look dull by comparison.

At the same time Jesus regarded the male-female paradigm as essential if sexual relations were to be had in this present age.

In rejecting a revolving door of divorce-and-remarriage and, implicitly, polygamy Jesus cited Genesis: “From the beginning of creation, ‘male and female he made them.’ ‘For this reason a man …will be joined to his woman and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:2-12; Matthew 19:3-12).

Jesus’ point was that God’s limiting of persons in a sexual union to two is evident in his creation of two (and only two) primary sexes: male and female, man and woman. The union of male and female completes the sexual spectrum, rendering a third partner both unnecessary and undesirable.

The sectarian Jewish group known as the Essenes similarly rejected polygamy on the grounds that God made us “male and female,” two sexual complements designed for a union consisting only of two.

Knust insinuates that Jesus wouldn’t have opposed homosexual relationships. Yet Jesus’ interpretation of Genesis demonstrates that he regarded a male-female prerequisite for marriage as the foundation on which other sexual standards could be predicated, including monogamy. Obviously the foundation is more important than anything predicated on it.

Jesus developed a principle of interpretation that Knust ignores: God’s “from the beginning” creation of “male and female” trumps some sexual behaviors permitted in the Old Testament. So there’s nothing unorthodox about recognizing change in Scripture’s sexual ethics. But note the direction of the change: toward less sexual license and greater conformity to the logic of the male-female requirement in Genesis. Knust is traveling in the opposite direction.

Knust’s slavery analogy and avoidance of closer analogies

Knust argues that an appeal to the Bible for opposing homosexual practice is as morally unjustifiable as pre-Civil War appeals to the Bible for supporting slavery. The analogy is a bad one.

The best analogy will be the comparison that shares the most points of substantive correspondence with the item being compared. How much does the Bible’s treatment of slavery resemble its treatment of homosexual practice? Very little.

Scripture shows no vested interest in preserving the institution of slavery but it does show a strong vested interest from Genesis to Revelation in preserving a male-female prerequisite. Unlike its treatment of the institution of slavery, Scripture treats a male-female prerequisite for sex as a pre-Fall structure.

The Bible accommodates to social systems where sometimes the only alternative to starvation is enslavement. But it clearly shows a critical edge by specifying mandatory release dates and the right of kinship buyback; requiring that Israelites not be treated as slaves; and reminding Israelites that God had redeemed them from slavery in Egypt.

Paul urged enslaved believers to use an opportunity for freedom to maximize service to God and encouraged a Christian master (Philemon) to free his slave (Onesimus).

How can changing up on the Bible’s male-female prerequisite for sex be analogous to the church’s revision of the slavery issue if the Bible encourages critique of slavery but discourages critique of a male-female paradigm for sex?

Much closer analogies to the Bible’s rejection of homosexual practice are the Bible’s rejection of incest and the New Testament’s rejection of polyamory (polygamy).

Homosexual practice, incest, and polyamory are all (1) forms of sexual behavior (2) able to be conducted as adult-committed relationships but (3) strongly proscribed because (4) they violate creation structures or natural law.

Like same-sex intercourse, incest is sex between persons too much structurally alike, here as regards kinship rather than gender. Polyamory is a violation of the foundational “twoness” of the sexes.

The fact that Knust chooses a distant analogue (slavery) over more proximate analogues (incest, polyamory) shows that her analogical reasoning is driven more by ideological biases than by fair use of analogies.

Knust’s other arguments are riddled with holes.

In claiming that David and Jonathan had a homosexual relationship she confuses kinship affection with erotic love. Her claim that “from the perspective of the New Testament” the Sodom story was about “the near rape of angels, not sex between men” makes an "either-or" out of Jude 7’s "both-and."

Her canard that only a few Bible texts reject homosexual practice overlooks other relevant texts and the fact that infrequent mention is often a sign of significance. It is disturbing to read what passes nowadays for expert “liberal” reflections on what the Bible says about homosexual practice.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Robert A. J. Gagnon.

Supreme Court Rules in Favor or Westboro Baptist Church

2011-03-02T08:08:00.001-08:00

John Dominic Crossan's 'blasphemous' portrait of Jesus

2011-02-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: After taking a few days off from blogging, having just moved across the country, I found this article on CNN and felt it had to be posted. Ultimately, I am interested in people who say something like, "What is remarkable about Jesus is not his death, but his life." And to think people call this man blasphemous and demonic. Wow. Currently, my family is trying to get me to join their local church choir. Now I've done church gigs for years. But it's important to set up boundaries. I'll go to a church if it's important to them. But no one asks if it's even something I want or believe in. I find that interesting. I'll let you know how that plays out.)

By John Blake, CNN

February 27, 2011 1:48 a.m. EST

(CNN) -- One of his first fan letters came from someone who declared:

"If Hell were not already created, it should be invented just for you."

Other critics have called him "demonic," "blasphemous" and a "schmuck."

When John Dominic Crossan was a teenager in Ireland, he dreamed of becoming a missionary priest. But the message he's spreading about Jesus today isn't the kind that would endear him to many church leaders.

Crossan says Jesus was an exploited "peasant with an attitude" who didn't perform many miracles, physically rise from the dead or die as punishment for humanity's sins.

Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died, says Crossan, one of the world's top scholars on the "historical Jesus," a field in which academics use historical evidence to reconstruct Jesus in his first-century setting.

"I cannot imagine a more miraculous life than nonviolent resistance to violence," Crossan says. "I cannot imagine a bigger miracle than a man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square."

In another time, Crossan's views would have been confined to scholarly journals. But he and his best-selling books, including the recent "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography," have changed how biblical scholars operate.
Crossan believes the public should be exposed to even the most divisive debates that scholars have had about Jesus and the Bible. He co-founded the Jesus Seminar, a controversial group of scholars who hold public forums that cast doubt on the authenticity of many sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus.

John Dominic Crossan says even the writers of the Bible disagreed about Jesus' message.

The 77-year-old Crossan has built on the seminar's mission by writing a series of best-selling books on Jesus and the Apostle Paul. With his silver Prince Valiant haircut and his pronounced Irish accent, he's also appeared on documentaries such as PBS's "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians" and A&E's "Mysteries of the Bible."

Crossan's overarching message is that you don't have to accept the Jesus of dogma. There's another Jesus hidden in Scripture and history who has been ignored.

"He's changed the way we look and think about Jesus," says Byron McCane, an archaeologist and professor of religion at Wofford College in South Carolina. "He's important in a way that few scholars are."

A reluctant scholar

Crossan is also reviled in a way that few scholars are.

Some critics say he's trying to debunk Christianity. Some question his personal faith. At a college lecture, Crossan says an audience member stood up and asked him if he had "received the Lord Jesus" as his savior.
Crossan said he had, but refused to repeat his questioner's evangelical language to describe his conversion.

"I wasn't going to give him the language; it's not my language," Crossan says. "I wasn't trying to denigrate him, but don't think you have the monopoly on the language of Christianity."

When asked if he is a Christian, Crossan doesn't hesitate.

"Absolutely."

Crossan says he never planned to be a Jesus scholar but was drafted to play that role -- by the Roman Catholic Church.

He had other plans. He grew up in a small town in Ireland reading adventure stories like "20,000 Leagues under The Sea" and reciting poetry with his father on long walks.

He wanted adventure and travel. The missionary priests who visited his boyhood school with stories of mission trips to Africa seemed to offer both.

Crossan says his father, a banker, and his mother, a housewife, didn't push religion on him. He was raised in a traditional Irish Catholic church where faith was "undiscussed, uninvestigated and uncriticized."

"I didn't grow up in an atmosphere where the Bible was stuffed down my throat."

John Dominic Crossan's parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, never pushed religion on him.

Yet Crossan immersed himself in the world of the Bible for the rest of his adult life. When he entered a monastery at 16, church leaders told him they wanted him to be a scholar because he had already taken five years of Latin and Greek.

He became a priestly prodigy: ordained by 23; a doctorate at 25. He studied in Rome and Jerusalem, and eventually became a New Testament scholar who became known as an authority on the parables of Jesus. (Crossan saw them as subversive literary gems.)

His days as a priest would end, though, because of the same forces that shaped the rest of his career: the clash between church dogma and scholarly truth.

Crossan says it was "bliss" being a priest and scholar in the mid-1960s because the Roman Catholic Church had instituted a series of modernizing reforms.

But conservative church leaders fought those reforms, and Crossan says they pressured him to steer his research toward conclusions that reinforced church doctrine.

"It's like you're a scientist in research and development, and you say that this drug is lethal, and they say, 'Find something good in it,' '' Crossan says.

He left the priesthood in 1969 after he angered church leaders by publicly questioning the church's ban on birth control. He married, and settled into a career of teaching and writing books that were read primarily by other scholars.

Later, however, Crossan would anger church leaders again.

Crossan takes on a public role

In 1985, Robert Funk, a New Testament scholar, asked Crossan to join him on a risky mission: Expose the public to academic debates about the historical Jesus.

The seminar was Crossan's first wide exposure to the public. The media gravitated to him because he was a scholar who didn't talk like a scholar.

Christianity both admits and subverts the historical Jesus.
--John Dominic Crossan, historic Jesus scholar

He became known for his sound bites -- inspired, he says, by Jesus' use of parables to distill complex truths in pithy but provocative sayings.

Explaining why America's reliance on military might was similar to Rome's, he told Time magazine:

"There's good news and bad news from the historical Jesus. The good news: God says Caesar sucks. The bad news: God says Caesar is us.

Crossan's public profile rose another notch in 1991 when The New York Times ran a front-page story two days before Christmas on his book, "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant."

The book became a bestseller, and Crossan followed up with more. He says people were anxious to embrace a faith with "brains and heart," and learn the history behind the text, not just its wording.

"When we started out, people thought we were out on the left wing," he says. "Now, I'm talking in about 30 churches a year. ... A lot of this is becoming mainstream."

Crossan's revolutionary Jesus

It's still controversial, though.

A casual search of Crossan's name online turns up plenty of insults and warnings not to read his books.
Crossan says, however, that he's "trying to understand the stories of Jesus, not refute them."

Still, his findings often end up challenging some of Christianity's most cherished beliefs.

Consider his understanding of the resurrection. Jesus didn't bodily rise from the dead, he says. The first Christians told Jesus' resurrection story as a parable, not as a fact.

"Crucifixion meant that imperial power had won," Crossan says. "Resurrection meant that divine justice had won. God is on the side of the crucified one. Rome's' values are a dead issue to me."

How about the stories of Jesus' miracles, like raising the dead or stilling the storm?

John Dominic Crossan wanted to be a missionary priest as an Irish schoolboy

Most were parables, too, Crossan says. But there were some exceptions.

"I'm completely convinced that Jesus was a major healer," he says. "I don't think anybody would talk about Jesus if all he did was talk."

People like to talk about Scripture, but Christians should also know history to understand Jesus, Crossan says.

In Jesus' time, Rome was forcing many Jewish families into destitution, with high taxes and land seizures. Some Jews advocated violent rebellion, but others opted for non-violent resistance.

Jesus called for nonviolent resistance to Rome and just distribution of land and food. He was crucified because he threatened Roman stability -- not as a sacrifice to God for humanity's sins, Crossan says.

If you believe in a God that uses violence to "save" humanity, you'll start believing that violence is permissible in certain circumstances, such as suicide bombing or invading other countries to spread democracy, Crossan says.

The human addiction to violence, though, is so ingrained that even the authors of the New Testament had trouble accepting Jesus' nonviolence, Crossan says.

So they did a little editing.

Crossan's proof: Jesus preaches nonviolence at the beginning of the New Testament. By the book of Revelation, he's leading armies through heaven to kill evildoers.

"Christianity both admits and subverts the historical Jesus," Crossan says.

Does Crossan subvert Christianity?

Is Crossan doing the same -- admitting and subverting Jesus, some wonder?

The words "brilliant," "keen mind" and someone who "loves the Bible" are often used by fellow scholars to describe Crossan. They say he is generous with his time, funny and personally warm.

"He has real depth of the soul," says McCane, the biblical scholar and archaeologist. "He's spiritual in the best sense of the word. He sees the world as a place where values matter."

Yet some also wonder if he unwittingly gives people an excuse to diminish Jesus' importance.

Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar who has written several books about the early Christian community, says Crossan's work allows people to sidestep questions like: Did he come to save the world? Is he the son of God?

"It's a user-friendly Jesus that doesn't make demands on someone," he says.

Witherington says Crossan is trying to find a nonsupernatural way to explain Jesus and Scripture, and "the shoe doesn't fit."

"The stories are inherently theological," he says. "They all suggest that God intervenes in history. If you have a problem with the supernatural, you have a problem with the Bible. It's on every page."

If you have a problem with the supernatural, you have a problem with the Bible. It's on every page.
--Ben Witherington, New Testament scholar

One of the most persistent criticisms of Crossan's work is that he's turned Jesus into a peasant insurrectionist because his Irish ancestors battled the British Empire.

Crossan says growing up Irish "makes you skeptical about empire." But he says he came of age in the first generation after Irish independence when hatred of the British was not pervasive.

Crossan once wrote in his memoir that he learned two things from Irish history: "One, the British did terrible things to the Irish. Two, the Irish, had they the power, would have done equally terrible things to the British (they did it to one another with the British gone)."

Supporters of Crossan's work say he's encouraged ordinary Bible readers to ask tough questions.

"He opened up space in popular culture for people to think about the history behind the biblical texts," says Timothy Beal, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book."

"He invited people back into the texts to question those authoritative sources that have been telling them, 'This is what the Bible says, and you don't need to read it to yourself,' " Beal says.

His Irish accent remains, but Crossan is now an American citizen. He lives near Orlando, Florida, and spends much of his time traveling to lectures and appearing in religious documentaries.

After spending much of his life in the Roman Catholic Church, Crossan is now an outsider.

He hasn't joined a church because he says a priest might deny him the sacraments because of his run-ins with church leaders.

"If I attend a local Roman Catholic Church, I would get sucked back into all the debates," he says. "I don't want to spend my life fighting Roman Catholicism."

Crossan has also broken with church tradition by marrying. He married Margaret Dagenais, a university art professor, soon after leaving the priesthood in 1969. She died of a heart attack in 1983.

Today, his current wife, Sarah, is a yoga teacher and photographer. She's also his partner in travel. Crossan wanted to see the world as a boy. Now he sees it as a man. The two often travel to holy sites, where she takes photos that Crossan later uses in church presentations.

Crossan's reputation among traditional Christians was so touchy that it initially affected his relationship with her parents, Sarah said.

"We didn't talk about his work with them," she says. "They couldn't handle it. They thought he was so wrong. They loved him as a person, but not his work."

Crossan is not worried that his work will shatter people's faith in Jesus. The closer one gets to the historical Jesus, Crossan says, the more extraordinary Jesus becomes.

"A lot of people in the first century thought Jesus was saying something so important that they were willing to die for it. If people finish with my books and now see why Pilate executed him and why people died for him, then I've done my job."

Obama Won't Go to Court Over Defense of Marriage Act

2011-02-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

By Marc Ambinder

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 | 12:47 p.m.

Updated at 1:36 p.m. on February 23.

CORRECTION: The original version of this report had an incorrect year for DOMA's signing by President Clinton.

President Obama believes that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and will no longer defend the 15-year-old law in federal court, the Justice Department announced today.

The decision, which stunned and delighted gay-rights activists, means that the administration will withdraw its defense of ongoing suits in two federal Appeals Courts and will leave it to Congress to defend the law, known as DOMA, against those challenges. It will remain a party to the lawsuits. The law itself remains in effect.

DOMA, signed by President Clinton in 1996, allows states not to recognize same-sex marriages preformed in other states and provides a federal definition for “marriage” that excludes same-sex couples.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that, given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.”

He said that Obama also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, which defines “spouse” as a member of the opposite sex, “fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”

Holder notified Congress of the president’s decision. Members can decide whether to pursue their own challenges.

The announcement by the Justice Department came just minutes before White House press secretary Jay Carney’s regular briefing. Carney took care to press upon reporters that the president’s personal view about DOMA -- that it is unfair to gays and lesbians -- is distinct from the decision. The announcement from the administration came because of a court-imposed deadline from the 2nd Circuit.

Carney also said that the U.S. government will still be a party to these cases to allow the courts to make a recommendation about constitutionality and to allow other interested parties, such as Congress, to defend the law if they wish.
“We recognize and respect that there are other points of view,” Carney said.

The decision means the Justice Department will cease to defend two suits brought against the law. The first was a summary judgment issued in Gill et al. v. Office of Personnel Management and Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services last May by the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. The plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of the law’s definition of “marriage” as a legal union between a man and a woman.

District Judge Joseph Louis Tauro ruled Section 3 of the act unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated states’ rights to set their own marriage policies and violated the rights of same-sex couples in the states that permitted marriages. But the president felt compelled to defend the law, reasoning that Congress had the ability to overturn it. The Justice Department entered into an appeal process on October 12, 2010. Tauro stayed implementation of his own ruling pending the appeal. The department filed its defense in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit on January 14.

The second lawsuit, involving the cases of Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management and Windsor v. United States, would have been appealed in the Appeals Court for the 2nd Circuit, which has no established standard for how to treat laws concerning sexual orientation.

The president has won favor with the gay community recently by pushing for and winning repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays serving in the military, which the lame-duck Congress passed in December. At that time, Obama reiterated his support for repealing DOMA but did not take further steps.

The administration has hinted, however, that its own legal strategy was evolving. According to an administration official, Robert Bauer has been reviewing the legal landscape since he became White House counsel in 2010. As the Justice Department noted today, in the 15 years since Congress passed the act, the Supreme Court has invalidated laws criminalizing gay sex, lower courts have ruled DOMA unconstitutional, and Congress agreed to abolish the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The announcement today does not overturn the law. That would take an act of Congress or a final finding by the judicial branch, probably the Supreme Court. But it changes the vector of the legal cases considerably. Privately, the administration believes that five justices of the Court, including Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, would find parts or most of DOMA invalid if the federal government withdrew its arguments in defense of it.

A spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay-rights advocacy group, said it was notified just after 11 a.m. ET today.

“This is a monumental decision for the thousands of same-sex couples and their families who want nothing more than the same rights and dignity afforded to other married couples,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “As the president has stated previously, DOMA unfairly discriminates against Americans and we applaud him for fulfilling his oath to defend critical constitutional principles.”

Rebecca Kaplan contributed

Bill O'Reilley Cries Over Atheist Display

2011-02-22T07:03:00.000-08:00

Another from The Atheist Experience

Jack Chick Anti Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon

2011-02-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

Jack Chick, evangelical Christian cartoonist, was famous for his anti Dungeons and Dragons cartoons, depicting those caught up in the game with devil worship and satanism. This strip is one of Chick's most satirized cartoon (can't imagine why). When I first came across them 10 years ago, I was horrified. Not just because this is a gross and farcical depiction of those who play Dungeons and Dragons, but that I, myself, had played it for years. Hell, I still do. I hosted an amazing game for two years while living in California (see The Age of Redemption link here), and created life-long friendships with those who joined me. We served food and desserts and had a grand old time. So to re-read this stuff again, I reminded of what an dumb boob Jack Chick was.

Exploring Famous Atheists: George Bernard Shaw

2011-02-20T03:55:00.000-08:00

By Gary Sloan, 2004

Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the world’s most celebrated playwrights. Via such plays as Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Arms and the Man, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Heartbreak House, Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma, The Devil’s Disciple, Back to Methuselah, and Pygmalion (an adaptation of which became the movie My Fair Lady), the expatriate Irishman forged a grand repertoire in English second only to Shakespeare’s. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, long after his days as a struggling artist, Shaw refused the £7000 prize, commenting that “the money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.” At his behest, the money was given to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Alliance.

“While Jesus fared better than Yahweh, Shaw impugned the doctrines of atonement and universal love. Atonement he deemed a demoralizing and unchristian doctrine...”

In his waning years, he became an international icon. In George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, Hesketh Pearson describes the adulation: “Whatever he said or did was treated with respect, tinged with awe. When he clowned people laughed dutifully, when he cut a caper they applauded reverentially. Every word he uttered was cabled across several continents. Every nonsensical joke he made was gratefully accepted as the garnered wisdom of a profound thinker.” Though Shaw was susceptible to bouts of megalomania, he was capable of viewing his apotheosis with amused detachment. “I am the most extraordinary man in London,” he informed writer Ernest Rhys, “and you are quite welcome to give this fact on my authority.”

Shaw was an indefatigable crusader for social amelioration. At a time when the English stage trafficked in romantic fripperies, he awakened complacent audiences to a host of social ills abetted by conventional morality, bourgeois respectability, and ossified institutions. “I was a social reformer and doctrinaire first, last, and all the time,” he wrote. “I saw a way through the Valley of the Shadow and believed that when men understood their predicament they could and would escape from it.” Enlivening didacticism with mordant wit, he dissected slum landlordism, prostitution, marriage, free love, politics, militarism, nationalism, jingoism, capitalism, evangelism, and other isms steeped in hypocrisy, cant, and deceit.

He was a lifelong socialist, vegetarian, and pacifist. His first public speech, made in 1885 before the Industrial Remuneration Conference in London, scorched capitalism. The speech opened: “I hope any shareholders and landlords who may be present will accept my assurance that I have no more desire to hurt their feelings than to give pain to burglars. I merely wish to point out that all three inflict on the community an injury of precisely the same nature.” As a leading pundit for the Fabian Society, Shaw was instrumental in the formation of the Labor Party, which assimilated the genteel form of Marxism espoused by Fabians.

His vegetarianism was actuated by an egalitarian view of species and concern for humanity. He envisioned a cortege of animals paying him posthumous homage: “My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the exception of the procession into Noah’s Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind ever seen.” A carnivorous lifestyle, he believed, coarsened sensibilities, squandered natural resources, and debased workers in the meat industry

Shaw was reviled for his intransigent pacifism. During the First World War, his Common Sense About the War earned him the epithet Most Hated Man in England. Having averred that the British were as crass and pugnacious as the Germans, he was ostracized throughout the land, even by erstwhile friends. On the eve of World War II, in a talk broadcast by the B.B.C., the octogenarian defended pacifism by citing the Gospels: “The pacifist movement against war takes as its charter the ancient document called ‘The Sermon on the Mount.’ The sermon is a very moving exhortation, and it gives you one first-rate tip, which is to do good to those who despitefully use you and persecute you. I, who am a much hated man, have been doing that all my life, and I can assure you that there is no better fun; whereas revenge and resentment make life miserable and the avenger hateful. The lesson we have to learn is that our dislike for a certain person, or even for the whole human race, does not give us any right to injure our fellow-creatures, however odious they may be.”

Until he was thirty or so, Shaw called himself an atheist. He became one, he later quipped, before he could think. He adjudged the doctrines of the Church of Ireland, which he attended as a child, unintelligible or absurd. Since the first of its Thirty-nine Articles describes God as “without body, parts, or passions,” he waggishly theorized that the church was atheistic. An incomprehensible god, he opined, was tantamount to no god. In 1875, he blazoned his atheism abroad. In a letter to Public Opinion, a Dublin newspaper, he “announced with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist.” In Immaturity, the first of five novels he wrote in his twenties, the young protagonist, obviously Shaw’s alter ego, walks pensively in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey: “His hushed step, impressive bearing, and reflective calm, marked him as a confirmed freethinker.”

At a bachelor party, when someone alleged that a local infidel had been slain by a wrathful god, Shaw proposed to demonstrate “the absurdity of the belief in violent interferences with the order of nature by a short-tempered and thin-skinned supernatural deity.” Pulling out his watch, he announced he would dare the Almighty to strike him dead within five minutes. “The effect,” he later recounted, “was electrical. Neither skeptics nor devotees were prepared to abide the result of the experiment. In vain did I urge the pious to trust in the accuracy of their deity’s aim with a thunderbolt, and the justice of his discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. In vain did I appeal to the sceptics to accept the logical outcome of their scepticism. It soon appeared that when thunderbolts were in question there were no sceptics.” The host, fearing the impious challenge would precipitate a stampede of guests, forbade the experiment.

To save Shaw from hell-fire, a friend prevailed on a Roman Catholic priest to catechize the upstart atheist. Having repaired with his catechumen to a church cell, the priest began:

“The universe exists; somebody must have made it.”

“If that somebody exists,” interposed Shaw, “somebody must have made him.”

“I grant that for the sake of argument,” said the priest. “I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you please; but an infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant; it is no harder to believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind him will remove your logical difficulty?”

“By your leave,” Shaw replied, “it is as easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that the maker of the universe made himself, in fact much easier; for the universe visibly exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a hypothesis.”

Fifty years later, Shaw stuck to his guns. He told an interviewer for a church magazine: “A First Cause is a contradiction in terms, because in causation every cause must have a cause; and therefore there can no more be a First Cause than a first inch in a circle. If you once admit a cause that is uncaused, you give up causation altogether. And if you do that, you may as well say that everything makes itself. I daresay every black beetle thinks it must have a complete explanation of the world as one of the indispensable qualifications of a respectable cockroach.”

Congenitally deprived, he liked to say, of the phrenologist’s “bump of veneration,” Shaw scoffed at superstition, churches, ecclesiastics, rituals, ceremonies, and creeds. In The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search for God, a sardonic tale published in 1933, he derided the myopic sectarianism that strews dissension among Christians. In an African forest, the girl meets a stooped and disheveled fisherman (St. Peter) bearing on his shoulders a huge paper cathedral. As he is leaving, several more bedraggled wayfarers appear, each carrying a smaller paper church. They implore the girl: “Do not believe the fisherman. Do not listen to those other fellows. Mine is the true church.” As the girl hastens away, the sojourners throw stones at one another.

Shaw favored parliamentary legislation to abrogate the Church of England. In “The Church Versus Religion,” he depicted the average rector as a bigoted toady of secular power and privilege: “He claims and exercises all the liberties of a country gentleman, and wallows openly in class prejudices. Often he snubs the poor and sides with the squire against them; he sees to it that servility and imperialist militarism are inculcated in the Church schools; he pitches the emblems of Christian peace into the cellar and waves the Union Jack the moment there is any question of war; he supports the way of the police as God’s appointed way of dealing with crime.”

Shaw depicted the god of Abraham and Moses as a boastful, imperious, and sanguinary fiend. When the black girl finds him, he commands: “Kneel down and worship me this very instant, or dread my wrath. I am the Lord of Hosts: I made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. I made the poison of the snake and the milk in your mother’s breast. In my hand are death and all the diseases, the thunder and the lightning, the storm and the pestilence. On your knees, girl; and when you next come before me, bring me your favorite child and slay it here before me as a sacrifice; for I love the smell of newly spilled blood.”

While Jesus fared better than Yahweh, Shaw impugned the doctrines of atonement and universal love. Atonement he deemed “a demoralizing and unchristian doctrine, a means by which we cheat our consciences, evade our moral responsibilities, and turn our shame into self-congratulations by loading all our infamies on to the scourged shoulders of Christ.” Vicarious remissions of guilt were inherently ignoble and unjust.

Notwithstanding his paean to “The Sermon on the Mount,” Shaw considered it psychologically impossible to obey “the commandment to love one another.” Humans weren’t lovable animals: “If you tell me to be perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect, I can only say that I wish I could. That is more politic than telling you to go to the zoo and advise the monkeys to become men and the cockatoos to become birds of paradise.”

Even when he no longer thought of himself as an atheist, Shaw lauded atheists for clearing minds of theological rubbish: “The real religion of today was made possible only by the materialistic-physicists and atheistic critics who performed the indispensable preliminary operation of purging us thoroughly of the ignorant and vicious superstitions which were thrust down our throats as religion in our helpless childhood.” Against an atheism born of despair and anger, Shaw counterposed “the youthful atheism with which every able modern mind begins, an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets in the light of heaven.”

In the 1890s, Shaw renounced atheism and repackaged himself as a mystic. He also tinkered with his past. Now, his atheism had not really been atheism. He had called himself an atheist only “because belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah; and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not.” While atheists still cleaned the Augean stables of superstition, they were now deemed “superficial and light-minded.” They overrated reason: “I exhausted rationalism at the age of twenty-four,” Shaw told his friend Dame Laurentia McLachlan, an abbess, “and should have come to a dead stop if I had not proceeded to purely mystical assumptions.” The roots of his mysticism stretched deeper and deeper: “I am, and I always have been, a mystic,” he informed an audience in 1911. As an Irish Protestant, he was born to the manner: “The true Protestant is a mystic, not an Institutionalist.”

Shaw’s renunciation of atheism was accompanied by sallies against scientific materialism. By undermining teleological conceptions of the cosmos, science eviscerated joy and hope: “If there is no purpose or design in the universe,” Shaw told an audience, “the sooner we all cut our throats the better, for it is not much of a place to live in.” At a toast to Einstein in 1930, Shaw polarized science and religion: “Religion gives us certainty, stability, peace. It gives us absolutes which we long for. Science is always wrong and never solves a problem without raising ten more problems.”

Shaw skewered Darwinism “When its whole significance dawns on you,” he wrote in the Preface to Back to Methuselah, “you heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure.” Darwinism sabotaged morality. It “proclaimed that our true relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere survival, and that every act of pity or loyalty is a vain and mischievous attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle and preserve inferior varieties from the efforts of nature to weed them out.” Apparently, it never occurred to Shaw that natural selection might favor altruism and cooperation.

To read the full article, click HERE.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier Gives the Smackdown Against Anti-Abortion Activists

2011-02-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

I just wish I could hug this woman. Please take a look at this video on the controversial topic of abortion. There is a vendetta out against Planned Parenthood and the good that it does.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bible Writers Intended to Deceive

2011-02-17T21:28:00.000-08:00

BY JOHN MURAWSKI - Staff writer

Scholars have long resisted using the term "forgery" to characterize Biblical writings made under false authorship, on the grounds that such concepts as forgery, plagiarism and intellectual property are modern legal constructs and don't apply to the ancients. But UNC-Chapel Hill religion professor Bart Ehrman - a nemesis of conservative Evangelical Christianity who repudiated his faith in his 20s - makes the forgery accusation without reservation in a new book of that name.

The forgers who wrote a half-dozen epistles and the Book of Acts, along with scores of other documents that never made it into the New Testament, acted with deliberate forethought, knowing exactly what they were doing, Ehrman contends. That makes the Bible a very dishonest book in Ehrman's estimation - rife not only with mistakes and untruths, but with deceptions and lies.

"The authors intended to deceive their readers, and their readers were all too easily deceived," Ehrman writes. "The use of deception to promote the truth may well be considered one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition."

After quoting a number of classical authorities to show the ancients disapproved of forgery - "even forgers condemned forgery" - Ehrman cites examples of the practice as it was used to advance the cause of the Christians and their opponents alike.

In the first several centuries after Jesus' ministry, the followers of the Nazarene engaged in fierce theological polemics with Jews, Gnostics, pagans and other Christians. They resorted to forgery, fabrication and character assassination to disparage their adversaries and bolster their own ranks, Ehrman writes.

Forgery, or writing under a false name, ultimately helped early Christians consolidate their fractured movement into a coherent theology. These letters, essays and treatises helped gloss over internal conflicts to discredit foes, to justify admitting non-Jews and to expand across the globe.

Most of these forgeries were not included in the New Testament and it's not hard to see why. Church fathers were wary of accounts steeped in magic and superstition, such as a text now known as Pseudo-Matthew that includes fantastical tales of dragons paying obeisance to a 2-year-old Jesus.

To read the rest of the article, just click HERE.

If I were still a Christian...

2011-02-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

I would not

Support a non-secular government.
Support teaching Intelligent Design in Public School Science Classes.
Indoctrinate my children with my own religious beliefs.
Vote for a candidate based on whether or not they shared my beliefs.
Vote for a candidate with a religious platform.
Judge someone else for following a different belief system or no belief system at all.
Try to change someone's belief system.

Just sayin'.

CBC Interview with 'Jesus Camp' Filmmakers

2011-02-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

"We're being trained to be God's Army." I need to see this film. Has anyone seen it yet?

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: Should Schools Teach the Controversy?

2011-02-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

Another great article by Hugh Kramer

Awhile back I wrote an article featuring a letter from a librarian in the UK who uncovered an attempt to get an Intelligent Design textbook into school libraries by donating it labeled as a science book. It generated a lot of comments which I've tried to address but the answer to a somewhat testy comment from "Ray" started to take on a life of its own and grew long enough to make an essay out of. I don't worry about the more irrelevant parts of his comment like, "why are you evolutionists so afraid of dissenting opinions that you would even prevent books being offered for private consumption?" (Hello? School libraries here - not private consumption) but I did want to address his first question. It, and my answer to it, start below.

Hello Ray? You ask, "Should it be illegal to teach anything?" Well, that depends on what you want to teach, doesn't it? You can teach about fascism in a history or political science class but should you be teaching fascism to the class? Can you imagine teachers telling their students, "fascism is a system that many people, some very well known in their fields, believe provides better explanations for human behavior and far more efficiently and happily harnesses that behavior toward societal goals than competing systems, like democracy. I'm not advocating replacing democracy with fascism, of course. I'm just teaching the controversy."

You know Ray, there's not a word in that imaginary lesson that's untrue... at least not until the last two sentences anyway. By using this language, the teacher has purposely planted doubts about democracy and promoted a controversy that exists only in the fevered minds of small political fringe groups.

The same is true of Intelligent Design. It may use the language of science but it's not science. It's Creationism dressed in a lab coat and used as a wedge to legitimize a place for religion in the science classroom.

That's not my verdict either. That's the verdict of the US District Court in the 2005 case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District where Judge John E. Jones III, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and that the school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (quote in Wikipedia).

That's also the verdict of The U.S. National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which terms it "pseudoscience"). Here's a little more from the ID entry in Wikipedia:

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.

So, do I think Intelligent Design should be illegal to teach about? Nope, not if it's treated in its context as a social and historical phenomenon. But teaching it as science in our public schools? I go along with the courts on that one. It's unConstitutional. And teaching it as a viable alternative to current science is as morally reprehensible as teaching that fascism is a viable alternative to systems based on individual civil liberties... like democracy.

Justin Bieber's Faith Based Film Released

2011-02-13T07:01:00.000-08:00

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never hits theaters this weekend, and, God willing, could be the topic of many conversations come Sunday — at least that’s what Paramount, the studio behind the 3-D documentary’s release, is hoping. Paramount has held 20 screenings in 20 markets at the end of January for Christian leaders, some of whom then offered written endorsements, arranged group ticket sales for their fellowship, or requested a copy of the study guide produced for the movie titled “Never Say Never: For Nothing Is Impossible With God.”

Execs recognized that the film’s message of hope and Bieber’s strong Christian beliefs, about which both he and his mother Pattie Mallette have spoken extensively, were an opportunity to reach out to the faith community. The study guide is a collaboration between Bieber’s mother and Allied Faith & Family, an arm of Allied Integrated Marketing. It’s the first time Paramount has worked with Allied to supplement its general publicity, but not the first time the studio has had a faith-based element to a movie campaign. (The studio had faith-based outreach programs for the documentaries Waiting for “Superman” and An Inconvenient Truth and the adaptation of The Kite Runner.) Indeed, marketing to Christian groups became quite popular post-The Passion of the Christ; like secular marketing campaigns, it’s about making sure people who may not think a film has something for them see that it does — like Bieber’s pre-performance ritual that includes a prayer introduced to him by his Jewish manager, or Bieber and his friends saying grace at a pizza parlor.

So how effective will Paramount’s efforts be for this film? The study guide made its way into the inbox of Sean Meade, who serves as the National Network of Youth Ministries‘ national coordinator for middle school groups and also runs an organization called Stuck in the Middle, which holds events for middle school-aged students in the U.S. and Canada and does training for youth pastors. ”Big picture, I know a lot of people are planning to use this movie within their ministry,” he tells EW. “I work specifically with middle school students and with youth pastors who focus on that age group, and if you have middle school girls in your group, they’re gonna go see the Justin Bieber movie, and they’re gonna be talking about it, and those themes are something that really resonates with that early adolescent age. Youth pastors want to be talkin’ about this with their kids.”

That said, Meade doesn’t exactly see the guide itself coming in handy with what one would assume would be the target demo. “It starts off with an introduction from Justin’s mom talking about his faith, which is awesome. But then the very first theme is ‘Discerning God’s Plan for Your Life’ and it goes into what I call Christianese, where it’s Christian language that unless you’ve been born and raised in the church, you have no idea what ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’ or ‘the lures of the flesh from the operations of the spirit’ means,” he says. “If I start talking like that to my 8th grade guys group, they’re gonna think I’m crazy.”

But while he thinks the application is “a little cheesy,” he believes the lesson is solid. “Overall, it helps to understand that Justin’s a kid who worked hard and did his best, and you can do those same things and help discern what maybe God wants you to do with your life. You’ve got a kid who’s had, I’m sure, every opportunity to just go crazy and live out any kind of teenage fantasy that he’s ever wanted to, and yet seems to be very grounded and not only just a good kid, but seems to make a lot of wise choices. I watched Diddy last night on [Jimmy Kimmel Live!], and the guy looked teary-eyed talking about Justin and the themes of the movie. And he actually said that Justin had a God-ordained talent. I thought Man, if you’ve got Diddy talking about your God-ordained talent and what a good kid you are, you gotta be doing something right.”

Diddy made a plea to Kimmel’s viewers to see the film as a human success story, one that appeals to all ages and both sexes. “I think it’s definitely a hard sell for young boys,” Meade says. “My home church weekend activity tonight has like 150 junior highers coming together. I threw it out to my 8th grade guys, half joking, ‘Are we gonna go see the Bieber movie tonight after the event?’ They’re just one, so tired of hearing about Bieber from all the girls. But two, I think there’s a macho element of ‘I’m a guy. I can’t go to the Justin Bieber movie.’ Except for the couple of wise ones who’ve figured out that all the girls will be at the Justin Bieber movie, and they’re excited,” Meade says. “But that’s a whole different story.”

Christopher McDougall on the Daily Show

2011-02-12T08:20:00.000-08:00

In an effort to steer away from religious talk for a moment and explore science, I'd like to continue exploring Christopher McDougall's theory that we were "Born to Run". If you have not yet read his book, check out this clip from The Daily Show where he discusses the Taraumara, or the "running people".

The Daily Show - Christopher McDougall
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

New app helps Catholics confess on the go

2011-02-11T07:30:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: I know some of you have seen this already, but I just had to re-post it because... well... it's hilarious.)

Written by Doug Gross, Cnn.com

(CNN) -- Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been 300 tweets since my last confession.
Whether you've been "borrowing" free Wi-Fi or coveting your neighbor's avatar -- or, heaven forbid, something worse -- a new mobile app is designed to help you atone for it.

Lame tech jokes aside, the makers of "Confession: A Roman Catholic App" say their software is seriously designed to help believers with the sacrament, and to help those who have left the church take a digital step back home.

Worry not, faithful Catholics: The $1.99 application, for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, is not intended to replace the confessional. Instead, it's designed to complement the act of confession, offering a "personal examination of conscience" (password-protected, of course) and a step-by-step guide to sin-confessing.

The app provides suggested acts of contrition and the "ability to add sins not listed in standard examination of conscience."

"Our desire is to invite Catholics to engage in their faith through digital technology," said Patrick Leinen, co-founder of Little iApps, developer of the Confession app.

And this one's got the church's seal of approval.

Little iApps claims "Confession" was created with the help of two Catholic priests. And it has been given the blessing of Bishop Kevin C. Rhodes of the Diocese of Fort Wayne - South Bend, Indiana -- marking the the Catholic church's first known imprimatur for a mobile app.

"Very cool; very useful," wrote Thomas Peters of catholicvote.org, an online community for Catholics. Peters praised the app as being "not like those other programs that claim to 'wash away sin' and are essentially mockeries of confession, not preparations for the sacrament."

Just Watched "The Passion of the Christ" (REVIEW)

2011-02-10T17:16:00.000-08:00

Overall critique: Odd.

It's an odd way to tell a story. Where Gibson chooses to start the story and where he chooses to end it really puzzled me. From a pure storytelling standpoint, he leaps right into the death of Jesus without us getting to know the character. And this is a character, my friends. It's a Hollywood portrayal of Jesus. I would have liked to figure out who Gibson wanted to portray him as before the persecution began. Then of course there's the, "Oh-the-movie's-over?" kind of ending? Love those. It leaves you with a feeling of... huh.

Let's talk about everything in between.

Seemed like Gibson mostly clung to the gospel of Luke, but not solely. He dramatically depicted an earthquake at Jesus's death, though that was only recorded in Matthew's gospel. According to John 19:17 Jesus carries his cross the whole way. But in this movie Mel went with the idea that the man named Simon assisted him.

As for the thieves that were supposedly convicted along with Jesus, they are mentioned in Mark's gospel but there is no conversation between the three men. In Matthew 27:44 - The two thieves taunt Jesus. In Luke 23:39-42 - One thief taunts Jesus and is criticized by the other. Jesus promises the 2nd thief that they would be in Paradise that day, though John and Acts say he did not ascend to heaven until 40 days after his resurrection. Yet in John the two men aren’t described as thieves. So it doesn't seem that Gibson sticks to one particular gospel in his telling of the story. He jumps from one to the other, and then adds his own interpretations, of course.

There were some things I learned, however. Watching a crucifixion, even a Hollywood one, really makes me realize that it's probably one of the worst ways to die. What a horrible thing to do to a human being. And though I grew up Catholic, I guess I never really realized how painful it would be to have a crown of thorns stuck into your head. Ouch. Throughout most of the movie, I just found myself cringing. It was definitely painful to watch.

Now whether or not these events really happened... well, I do think it's likely that Jesus existed. And that he did get whipped and crucified. The details of the event seem to be a little shady in the gospels. You'll get one guy saying one thing and another guy saying another thing. But I don't mind when directors piece that stuff together for a film. It is, after all, just a film. Not a documentary.

And while I love the actress who portrayed Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) I don't think she was written into this script very well. Again, Mel is assuming that you already know her story. Not everyone does. And from a storytelling point of view, I would have liked to understand her relationship to Jesus better. James Caviezel is a pretty darn good-lookin' Jesus. And I'm always a fan of his work. I suppose what I learned was that Pilate did not want the crucifixion to happen, but was goaded into it by the masses. And it was interesting to me how Jesus had become such a threat to society that they felt the need to crucify him at all. Amazing how one man can be elevated to such power.

Overall, the film was interesting, hard to watch, but definitely an overblown Hollywood portrayal. Oh, and let's not forget that Gibson is still a raving lunatic. :)

Are We Born To Run?

2011-02-09T06:02:00.000-08:00

Being a runner, I loved this book. Christopher McDougall's "Born to Run" brings up some very interesting insights into our own human evolution. He argues that we were born to run... long distances. Whereas a cheetah can run fast for short periods of time, once humans stood up straight, our lung capacity became far superior to our animal counterparts. Thus we can potentially run slower, but for extended periods of time... allowing us to hunt prey because eventually they will tire before we do.

Chick-Fil-A-Controversy Shines Light on Restaraunt's Christian DNA

2011-02-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: I'd heard about this years ago, but the older I get the harder it becomes to ignore what's right in front of my face. What am I trying to teach my children anyway? And here's another question: why is it so hard for a business just to be a business instead of taking on some political or religious platform?)

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

The ongoing Chick-fil-A flap - which has gay rights groups blasting the restaurant chain for donating food to an anti-gay marriage group - may be a fleeting controversy for a privately held company that is more accustomed to fiercely loyal patrons and generally positive press coverage.

But Lake Lambert, author of the book Spirituality Inc., says the flap may be a sign of more turbulence ahead for Chick-fil-A as it attempts to hold onto its conservative Christian business culture while expanding its chain beyond the Bible Belt.

“If you have a faith-based corporate identity and you want to function in the national marketplace, you’re going to continue to encounter resistance to those values because not everybody is going to share them,” says Lambert. “The only other option is some sort of secular identity and that’s not where Chick-fil-A is going.”

Lambert says Chick-fil-A is the most visible example of an American corporation trying to foster a specifically Christian identity. The company is privately held and family-run, making that task somewhat easier.

Lambert says Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy signed what Cathy describes as a “covenant” with his children when they took over the company, to help preserve its Christian DNA.

The current controversy erupted when some college campus and gay rights groups blasted the restaurant chain for donating free food to a Pennsylvania organization opposed to gay marriage.

The Human Rights Campaign, a major gay rights group, launched a letter writing campaign to the company, while the Indiana University South Bend went so far as to temporarily suspend Chick-fil-A service in its campus dining facilities.

The fallout provoked Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy to defend his company in a Facebook video and in a written statement.

“In recent weeks, we have been accused of being anti-gay,” Cathy said in a written statement last Saturday. “We have no agenda against anyone.”

“While my family and I believe in the Biblical definition of marriage,” the statement continued, “we love and respect anyone who disagrees.”

The gestures have not mollified many of the chain’s critics, some of whom are airing their grievances on Chick-fil-A’s Facebook page. The Human Rights Campaign is calling on the restaurant to begin participating in the Corporate Equality Index, which rates companies’ treatment of gays.

Christian culture pervades many aspects of Chick-fil-A’s operations, from its corporate purpose – which includes “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us” – to its policy of closing restaurants on Sundays to praying at restaurant openings.

According to a recent case study of the restaurant chain by the Yale School of Management, employees are encouraged to attend prayer services.

Chick-fil-A has over 1,500 locations and began moving beyond the Deep South in the last decade or so. Recently the company has expanded its number of restaurants in the Northeast, creating a more serious presence there.

According to its website, there is only one Chick-fil-A store in New York State, at New York University in downtown Manhattan.

Considering Chick-fil-A’s conservative Christian mission, perhaps the most striking feature of the recent controversy is how unusual it is for the company. As the chain continues to grow, they may find it more difficult to avoid the culture war.

The Average Salary of A Catholic Priest

2011-02-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: I stumbled upon this article and found this interesting. I suppose this was something I always wondered about. Now everyone together... a rabbi and a catholic priest walk into a bar....)

By Wilhelm Schnotz , eHow Contributor

updated: December 8, 2010

If you're looking for a career that provides an opportunity to stack up worldly wealth, any job in the clergy probably isn't your best option. If you've heard the call, however, you may be curious about your ability to support yourself should you become a Catholic priest, as you're bound to have expenses like any member of the laity. Before you dedicate your life to the church, investigate the financial impact of your decision.

Average Salary

As of Nov. 5, 2010, the average salary of a Catholic priest for advertised openings in the United States was $40,000, according to Simply Hired. Yearly compensation from area to area varies widely, however, swaying as wide as $29,211 in Phoenix to $44,566 in Miami during 2010, according to Salary Expert. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that a priest's take-home cash earnings may be significantly less--less than $20,000.

Other Earnings

The Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that a Roman Catholic Priests' compensation package offers a lot more than cash compensation. Housing in a rectory, a stipend for a vehicle and food and health care are frequently provided by the church, helping raise a priest's bottom-line compensation to levels more in line with salaries reported by salary-watching agencies.

Education

To become ordained as a Catholic priest, a man must obtain a significant level of education. A four-year college degree is required, which is then followed by a four-year period of study in seminaries following graduation from college. Although men must pay their way through college, the church provides scholarships and grants so that none are turned away from attending seminaries because of financial need.

Career Outlook

A declining number of men entering seminary and becoming ordained has increased the demand for priests, and a continued shortage of ordained priests is expected to continue, making employment opportunities for ordained Catholic priests abundant.

Variables

The amount of money a Catholic priest brings home at the end of the month varies widely by the size of his parish, the community in which he lives and the cost of living in his part of the country. Because of this, you should investigate local opportunities for a more accurate estimate of a priest's earning power in your area.

Fear-Mongering is Glenn Beck's Schtick

2011-02-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

So many times I've heard Glenn Beck state (seemingly humbly) that he is not a journalist.

He's more of a comedian like Jon Stewart. Except without the funny.

So here is what someone like Beck excels at: panic-mongering. Millions of viewers tune into his show and take him at his word. Never mind that this is the same guy who declared President Obama was going to take a trip to India for $200 million tax dollars a day (check your sources, Beck). I noticed he likes to talk about potential futures. He says, "Y is what will happen if X occurs." Yet the likelihood of X occurring is basically slim to none.

Beck, if you ever feel like taking an early retirement to a quiet, gated community in Utah, you won't hear any complaints from me.

TRENDING: Obama delivers major speech on personal faith

2011-02-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

(Emy's Note: So this is what gets me. Obama was a president who acknowledged people of all faiths in his inauguration speech... even people without faith. That floored me. He was also very private about his own religious beliefs, something that I respected. Because as a president, your platform should not be your religion. It should be your politics. Yet he's gotten tons of flack for not being "Christian" enough. Some people are convinced he's a Muslim. Others feel he's an atheist. Why should it matter what religious affiliation our president chooses? What does that have to do with his ability to govern? I can't understand why people are so concerned with this issue.

So it seems his advisers are encouraging him to be more open about his faith. He wants to get re-elected, right? Now I really like the guy. I'm a supporter of Obama. But this disappoints me. Because at the end of the day, I want to know that he knows the difference between governing our country and praying to his own personal god. Oil and water, my friends, oil and water.

Does he have a right to speak his mind about his faith? Absolutely. Is it a good idea? Well, aren't there more important things to be dealing with right now? Like... say... a crisis in Egypt? What do I care if he prays to Jesus every morning? If it helps him feel like he's making better decisions, then great. But I don't care if he feels like covering himself in butter and sliding through The White House corridors gets him focused. I care about his policies. I care about his choices. Maybe he wears blue underwear. Maybe red. Who cares? It's all personal preference. But it's not what matters, and really, if I only like blue underwear when he likes red, that might even affect my opinion of him.

So Obama is a Christian. He is not a Muslim. He was born in the United States and has a birth certificate to prove it. Are you happy now? Can we move on?)

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

President Barack Obama gave an unusually personal speech about his religious faith on Thursday, saying that "it is the biblical injunction to serve the least of these that keeps me going and keeps me from being overwhelmed," in address to a prayer breakfast in Washington.

The speech, delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast, comes on the heels of public opinion surveys that show only a minority of Americans know that Obama is a Christian and that a growing number believe he's a Muslim.

"My Christian faith has been sustaining for me over the last couple of years and even more so when Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to time," the president said Thursday, referring to his wife. "We are reminded that ultimately what matters is not what other people say about us but that we are true to our conscience and true to our God."

"When I wake in the morning, I wait on the Lord, I ask him to give me the strength to do right by our country and our people," Obama said later. "And when I go to bed at night, I wait on the Lord and I ask him to forgive me my sins and to look after my family and to make me an instrument of the Lord."

The address was televised and streamed live on the White House website.

The White House denied that the speech is a response to public misperceptions about Obama's religion.

"He's a committed Christian, one who takes his faith very seriously," said a White House official before the speech. "There may be misunderstanding and some folks who attack his faith, but at the end of the day the American people know who he is and where he stands."

A major survey last fall, however, showed that a substantial and growing number of Americans believes that Obama - a self-described Christian - is Muslim.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans believes Obama is a Muslim, up from about one in 10 Americans who said he was Muslim in 2009, according to the survey. It was conducted in July and August by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Fewer than half of Democrats and African-Americans, core components of Obama's political base, correctly identified Obama as Christian.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, a Florida minister who is close to the president and was consulted about parts of Obama's Thursday speech, says he has encouraged Obama to open up about his faith.

"He needs to openly declare himself a Christian and not settle for people's skepticism at that point," said Hunter, who leads an evangelical church in Orlando. "All of us ought to be able to say who we are and taken for our word. It's frustrating because he still has some people questioning his faith."

Hunter says that he and the White House were caught off-guard by the results of last year's Pew survey on Americans' views of Obama's religion.

On Thursday, Obama spoke at length about his prayer life, saying his prayers fall into three categories: for those who are struggling, for personal humility, and to be closer to God.

"Faith reminds me that in spite of being one very imperfect man I can still help whoever I can, however I can, wherever I can for as long as I can," Obama said of the first kind of prayer, "and that somehow God will buttress these efforts."

"The second recurring theme in my prayer is a prayer for humility," Obama said later. "God answered the prayer early on by having me marry Michelle."

"The challenge is to balance this uncertainty and humility with a need to fight for deeply held convictions," he continued. "I pray for this wisdom very day. I pray for God to show me and all us the limits of our understanding."

With regard to his third kind of prayer, Obama said the recurring theme "is that I might walk closer to God and make that walk my first and most important walk."

The White House believes that some of the ignorance about the president's faith is the result of a misinformation campaign against him.

"Under the radar there are of course those who would not tell the truth about him," said the White House official, who would not speak for attribution. "There are folks who have a misunderstanding of the president's faith and who repeat that misunderstanding."

But Hunter said that the speech was as much a product of Obama settling into office and feeling more comfortable about revealing his personal side.

The White House official echoed that point. "He's had a little over two years in office now and he's had some time to reflect on how his faith intersects with public work," the official said. "He's had the time to make those reflections."

The National Prayer Breakfast has been an annual Washington event for 58 years.

Obama had been a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago until spring 2008, when he left after videos surfaced showing his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, delivering controversial sermons about the United States.

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' husband will speak at the breakfast on the congresswoman's behalf, her office announced Wednesday.

Capt. Mark Kelly, a NASA astronaut, will deliver the closing prayer at the event, the Arizona congresswoman's office said in a statement.

Authorities say Giffords was the primary target of a shooting that left six people dead and 13 injured in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8.

It's Not All Luck

2011-02-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

Everything about natural selection is systematic, backed with a great deal of reason. It's not just "random luck". Anyone who believes that about evolution simply doesn't understand it. And I will still never understand the argument that it takes more "faith" to be a non-believer. How can that be? Why is it harder to believe science than a magical man in the sky creating our world in 7 days, sending his "son" down here to die for our sins. Why is THAT easy to believe?

Anderson Cooper Attacked in Egypt

2011-02-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

So journalists are now getting targeted in Egypt. If you haven't seen this yet... it made me nervous. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood is just waiting in the wings like vultures...