On Christians, atheists, and torture

By Frank Moraes 

I have this tendency to be most critical of the groups that I'm part of. You see this a lot in terms of my thinking about the Democratic Party. But I dare say you see it most of all with my thinking about atheists. And there is a lot to dislike about the modern atheist movement. I am an atheist in the Arthur Schopenhauer tradition. Much of modern atheism is intellectually vacuous. But as popular movements go, it is still pretty good. There isn't likely to be a mass movement that I have any less criticism of.

Probably the best aspect of modern atheism is that there is a strong current of humanism in it. I think it is the case that people like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are admired despite being torture proponents, not because of it. What's more, I don't so much see myself as part of the atheist community in the sense that I read atheist blogs and go to atheist conventions. I see myself as a member of the growing numbers of people who just aren't religious. And by and large, this is a mighty fine group.

I found the recent release of the torture report as upsetting as it was unsurprising. So I was somewhat pleased to read Steve Benen's "This Week in God" today. Its focus was on a new Washington Post/ABC News poll on attitudes about torture. It confirms the results of a 2009 poll by Pew. As you've probably heard, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of torture. Of those polled, 59% were just peachy with what the CIA did; only 31% had a problem with it. Obviously, that was not what pleased me.

This poll subdivided people by their religious affiliations. So Benen put together the following graph that sums up the main categories:

Benen pointed out that people with "no religion" were pretty much the only group in the report that were against torture. I wish the numbers were better than they are, but they are far better than average. And the major Christian groups are all worse than average. It's disgusting, but again, unsurprising. It goes along with my primary complaint against modern American Christians: their religion is all culture and no theology. The one thing they absolutely believe is that people like them are "good" and people not like them (e.g., Muslims) are "bad." Thus they don't really care. After all, it's not like anyone is suggesting burning the evildoers alive. (Not that they would be against that either.)

As much as I'm pleased that we non-believers demonstrate more humanity than average, this information is profoundly disturbing. We are, after all, an almost 80% Christian country. And the only takeaway from that is that Christianity is "right" and that Christians are oppressed whenever someone says "Happy holidays!" to them. We live in a sad world.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Exodus story reveals Bible's dishonesty

By Marc McDonald 

Although some might be loath to admit it, many educated adults (even non-fundamentalist Christians) are aware that the Bible is perhaps not the best source of history.

I mean, how many people still take the story of Adam and Eve seriously any more? But I suspect that most people are still unaware of just how totally wrong the Bible is as far as anything remotely approaching real history.

This wouldn't be that big a deal, except for the fact that so many people take the Bible very seriously as a profound book of wisdom. The massive and growing population of Fundamentalists continue to believe the Bible is nothing less than the divinely-inspired, inerrant Word of God.

But the Bible is profoundly wrong in its historical accuracy. The Exodus story (now the subject of a big-budget Hollywood movie by Ridley Scott) is a good example. Some people might question certain fantastic aspects of the story (like the parting of the Red Sea). But I think most people accept that there must be at least a kernel of truth to the story's main points (such as that there really was once a big enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt). Many people continue to believe that this has been confirmed in the archaeological record.

But there's a big problem to this belief: it's simply not true. Nothing in the Exodus story has ever been confirmed by any serious archaeologist, despite long quests to try to confirm anything remotely related to the Bible story.

The fact is, even many Bible apologists have quietly abandoned their quest to try to confirm the Exodus story. The problem is that there is simply not a shred of historical evidence that any of this really happened. Forget wild tales like the parting of the Red Sea -- there isn't even the slightest bit of evidence that there was an Exodus captivity in the first place.

This whole story is a fairy tale. The fact is, the story of Exodus is one big lie. And if this well-known Bible story is a lie, then, really, how truthful is any aspect of the Bible?

The Bible is a dishonest book, period.

A lot of agnostics spend their time attacking the absurdities, contradictions and sheer nonsense of the Bible's philosophical teachings. But if they're trying to convince believers, they're wasting their time. The Bible is so vague and archaic that the sort of people who take it seriously are never going to be dissuaded via that approach.

What agnostics should be doing is attacking the historicity of the Bible itself. People should be aware of just how many of these Bible tales lack the slightest shred of historical evidence to support them.

It's time for humanity to move beyond the fairy tales, nonsense and superstition of absurd books like the Bible.

In much of Europe, this is already taking place. Sadly, in America, large numbers of people continue to take the Bible seriously (and try to ram their twisted beliefs down the throats of other people).

(Cross-posted at BeggarsCanBeChoosers.)

The day we celebrate

By Capt. Fogg

Of course the paper this morning contained the usual happy crap about celebrating FREEDOM as though we had either more of it or a better kind than Canada or most of Europe who have embraced the principles of democracy and the rights of man we seem to reject every Sunday as we yearn for the Divine Right of Government. What the day is about is political independence and independence from a government that denied us the right to parliamentary representation it was legally obligated to provide while requiring us to identify the king's right to be king with a state church. It was about our right to fair representation as citizens, as equal participants in government regardless of wealth and importance and heredity, and not about a tea tax.

As you watch the sound and fury of the fireworks, remember that the people selling themselves as patriots, the people talking about freedom in saccharine tones, really mean control by a powerful aristocracy allied with a narrow, sectarian interpretation of a certain religion.

"Blessed is the nation whose god is the Lord"  begins the full page full color newspaper insert payed for by the Hobby Lobby. It leaves off the next stanza: "the people he chose for his inheritance," which of course in that context means the Jews. It also mistranslates אשר־יהוה,  asher-Yaveh, as the lord, so those who think "Jesus is Lord" will think it means them. The arrogance and the dishonesty would be amusing if the intent were not so insidious, because our friends at Hobby Lobby, glowing like the face of Moses in their victory over secular law, have asserted their commitment to and aspiration toward a government Dei Gratia. They assert their version of the Bible as the best source of normative morality.

The flag-bedecked page is packed with references to Supreme Court decisions from the 1830s supporting the public schools as the place to pray and teach Christianity and out-of-context quotes from the very anti-religious founding fathers like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson about the Christian Bible being the basis of all true morality. (No mention, of course, of the Bible-backed, God-tolerated institutions of wife beating and slavery and rape and genocide and banishment of non-Jewish people from the Holy Land.)

No religion is about freedom, they are all about orthodoxy and uniformity of belief to the exclusion of other ideas and practices. Freedom of worship is not freedom to enforce religious orthodoxy or religious law on others. No religion is about free choice, democracy, or the inherent rights of man. No one in America has claimed the right to dictate your thoughts about divinity but religious organizations. Your prayers, your right to congregate and worship, are guaranteed against the influence of Hobby Lobby and our Constitution forbids our government to do what they insist is the right thing to do: establish and enforce some form of Christian doctrine as the law of the land.

If this be freedom, then freedom is slavery and the American Revolution against a divinely-inspired Christian king we pretend to celebrate today was not only fought in vain, but was blasphemy and an unholy act.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

SCOTUS says not all religions are equal

By Frank Moraes

Last week, with the unanimous decisions, I thought, "Oh God! That was probably done to make the coming highly controversial 5-4 decisions more acceptable." That looks like it is the case. I assume that it is John Roberts who decides when decisions are released. And it should dispel any idea that you may have that the Supreme Court is anything but an extremely political organization. The most upsetting decisions today was Burwell v Hobby Lobby.

In it, by a 5-4 majority, the Court found that "closely held" companies that are owned by religious people have a right to not provide birth control as part of their employee healthcare coverage.

If you look at the logic of the case, this really should be applied to everything. The Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in blood transfusions. By the logic of this decision, a Jehovah's Witnesses employer ought to be able to withhold blood transfusions from the insurance coverage offered to their employees. But that's not what this decision (pdf) finds. Alito's decision even says, "This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, eg, for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer's religious beliefs." In Kennedy's concurrence, he begins, "At the outset it should be said that the Court's opinion does not have the breadth and sweep ascribed to it by the respectful and powerful dissent."

The question is, "Why?" There really is no reason. What seems to have been done is that the Supreme Court wanted to allow Christian conservatives to make their stand against birth control and so they worked back from that. It reminds me above all of Bush v Gore. In that case, the Court found that George W Bush's due process rights were being violated, but it was only George W Bush's rights who were being violated and if a similar case ever came up, Bush v Gore could not be used as a precedent. Just like in that case, in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the Court majority is doing what can only be call judicial legislation. It just created a law that more or less says, "Closely held religious companies have the right to discriminate against their female employees with regard to the existing law that says that all insurance policies must include contraceptive coverage." This is not "judging"; this is not calling balls and strikes; this is legislating, pure and simple.

The conservatives on the bench are not idiots. They know that they can't just say, "If an employer is religious, he doesn't have to follow any law that goes against his conscience." That would allow religions they don't like to gain more power. Rastafarian employers might claim that all of their employees ingest cannabis. But even those Jehovah's Witnesses: they can't be allowed to sully the important legislative work being done by the conservative Christians on the Court: creating a special theocracy for their religion and their religion alone.

Ginsburg's dissent is kind of amazing. Alito spent most of his decision arguing that the finding was minor. He said it wasn't a broad decision. Kennedy backed him up. They were using a scalpel, for God's sake! She brooks no such fantasy. Ginsburg goes right at the blood transfusion issue. She notes that this case doesn't apply to blood transfusions and other silly religious complaints against modernity, but that it also doesn't rule them out. The courts, apparently, are just supposed to deal with them as they come up. The majority decision certainly makes a Jehovah's Witnesses employer's contention that he shouldn't have to provide coverage for blood transfusions reasonable, even if it doesn't state that such exceptions should be made.

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In public prayer case, the Supreme Court strikes another blow against American democracy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The right-wing Republican majority on the Supreme Court has once again struck a blow against the very essence of American democracy, against the very idea of America itself.

When it's not handing democracy to the rich, effectively disenfranchising everyone else, or claiming that racial discrimination is no longer a problem, to name but two of its more prominent right-wing efforts of late, the Roberts Court, dominated by ideologues like Scalia but with the somewhat more pragmatic Kennedy often voting with the conservative majority, is tearing down the separation of church and state, that fundamental principle that guided the Founders and that is as essential as ever given fundamentalist efforts to theocratize America in stark contrast to its founding principles. And this effort was on display again today:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month" who was almost always Christian.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court's more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome.

"Ceremonial prayer," he wrote, "is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define."

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town's practices could not be reconciled "with the First Amendment's promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government."

Town officials in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some of their prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to "the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross."

Kennedy's argument isn't entirely crazy, but it makes less and less sense as you consider that what is just "ceremonial" from one perspective may be theocratic and proselytizing on the other, and it's that other perspective that is very much at the core of activist conservative efforts to turn America into a (right-wing) Christianist state.

What's more, offering the opportunity to minority groups (in this case Jews or atheists, mostly) to have their own prayers recited doesn't fix the problem of effectively granting primacy to one religion in particular -- and the fact that the prayers themselves weren't necessarily welcoming, as when they tout the primacy of Christianity and indeed of certain strains of Christianity, only proves that point. Really, how is a non-Christian supposed to feel welcome when a government opens its proceedings with a prayer that refers to "the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross"? Even if they wanted to offer their own prayer, how could non-Christians not feel excluded from their own government, from their own community, by their own fellow citizens?

No one is saying that organized religion, or spirituality generally, has no place in American life. While I personally abhor organized religion, what people choose to do in private, whatever "god" they choose to worship, is for the most part their own business, as long as no one gets hurt, as long as more fundamental rights are respected. But religion should have no place whatsoever in the public space except perhaps in some contexts when it is treated as history and anthropology -- it absolutely has no place where government, the self-governance of free and equal citizens, is considered. Just don't expect this deeply anti-American Supreme Court to defend what is fundamentally American.

Religious belief doesn't trump law

By Frank Moraes 

The United Church of Christ (UCC) has been performing same-sex marriages since 2005. So they decided to pursue a legal challenge to North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriages. They are arguing that the state is violating their freedom of religion. That is too delicious not to talk about.

But I think the case is very clear. People's rights to free expression do not trump laws. The Rastafarians believe very much that they should be allowed to ingest cannabis, but that has never stopped one of them from being imprisoned for that "crime." So I don't think that the UCC has a religious right that trumps North Carolina law. Of course, there may be details in the law that would push me in the UCC's direction. But as it stands, it seems pretty simple.

I am just being consistent here. I also think all of these religious based attacks on Obamacare should have been thrown scornfully out of court at the very beginning. And there are lots of similar cases, like where a Christian pharmacist claims he has the right not to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. The Rastafarians have a far better claim to their drug rights than do hobby stores who want to micromanage their employees' healthcare coverage.

But given all the time and efforts that conservative Christians have put into destroying Obamacare using such arguments, you would think that they would be in support of the UCC. After all, it is a matter of religious liberty. It shouldn't matter that it is in the name of a specific policy that they don't accept. But, of course, it does matter. North Carolina Values Coalition (NCVC) executive director Tami Fitzgerald said in a press release that because a majority of the voters in the state voted for the law, the UCC should have no rights. She then went on to talk about how she was the ultimate arbiter of what Christianity is and that the UCC is just wrong.

Of course, when Hobby Lobby was before the Supreme Court, Fitzgerald was firmly behind it, urging people to Pray for Hobby Lobby. But I'm sure that is not the only bit of hypocrisy that Fitzgerald and the NCVC have in store. Right now it is all about the fact that 61% of the electorate of North Carolina voted to ban same-sex marriage. As soon as the people become in favor of same-sex marriage, she will be using a different argument. And it won't be long. Last year, the people of North Carolina were against same-sex marriage by a tiny 45%-44% margin.

We'll see what happens to this case. I wouldn't be at all surprised if conservative judges find that a same-sex marriage ban did not violate the UCC's religious rights even while they find hitherto unknown religious rights of hobby stores. Luckily, the same-sex marriage issue will be resolved by the people very soon. 

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

British judge wants to know if Mormonism is a fraud

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Telegraph reports:

A British magistrate has issued an extraordinary summons to the worldwide leader of the Mormon church alleging that its teachings about mankind amount to fraud.

Thomas S. Monson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been ordered to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London next month to defend the church’s doctrines including beliefs about Adam and Eve and Native Americans.

A formal summons signed by District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe warns Mr Monson, who is recognised by Mormons as God’s prophet on Earth, that a warrant for his arrest could be issued if he fails to make the journey from Salt Lake City, Utah, for a hearing on March 14. 

It's an odd request, "issued in response to a private prosecution attempt by Tom Phillips, a disaffected former Mormon who now runs MormonThink a website highly critical of the church," and of course Monson won't show.

But still, wouldn't it be great if organized religious institutions were required to explain themselves, to tell us why their shit doesn't stink?

It's easy to target Mormonism, just like it's easy to target, say, Scientology, but such ridiculousness is hardly limited to these newer religions/cults. Have you ever actually thought about, oh, to take just one prominent example, mainstream Christianity? It's utter nonsense. The whole lot of it. And the only reason we don't think about it the same way we think about, say, Scientology is that it's very old, as if being so old somehow shields it even from the glare of Enlightenment. So it's Monson for now, but...

Next up: Pope Francis!

Craziest Republican of the Day: Ian Bayne (for comparing Phil Robertson to Rosa Parks)

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

Yes, seriously.

This idiot, who's running for the Republican nomination in Illinois's 11th Congressional District, said that Duck Dynasty's bigot-patriarch Phil Robertson is just like Rosa Parks:

Today, Ian Bayne called Phil Robertson, star of the A&E series "Duck Dynasty," the 'Rosa Parks' of our generation.

"In December 1955, Rosa Parks took a stand against an unjust societal persecution of black people, and in December 2013, Robertson took a stand against persecution of Christians," said Bayne.

"What Parks did was courageous," said Bayne. "What Mr. Robertson did was courageous too."

Right, because Christians today are facing totally the same situation that blacks were in the '50s. I mean, Christians can't vote, can't drink at non-Christians' water fountains, and face discrimination pretty much in every aspect of society. Plus, there are those anti-Christian lynch mobs roaming the countryside and terrorizing everyone, setting churches on fire and basically making sure that poor Christians live in abject fear every moment of their lives.

I mean, totally.

Except that, you know, Rosa Parks was fighting against bigotry and discrimination whereas Phil Robertson was identifying Christianity with bigotry and discrimination.

And of course Robertson didn't just say bigoted things about gays, he also said incredibly ignorant things about how blacks were supposedly all happy in pre-civil rights Louisiana, because apparently institutionalized bigotry and discrimination is some sort of panacea for him.

Obviously, Ian Bayne is too fucking stupid, his head stuck firmly up his right-wing ass, to get the point. 

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White Jesus, White Santa: Megyn Kelly nominates herself for title of stupidest person in the world

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, she went there, exposing herself as an ignoramus and, it would seem, a bigot:

On Wednesday night Megyn Kelly declared on her Fox News show that both Santa Claus and Jesus were white. Discussing a piece in Slate by Aisha Harris about a black versus white Santa, Kelly that "just because it makes you feel uncomfortable it doesn't mean it has to change." 

"You know, I've given her her due. Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change," Kelly said. "Jesus was a white man, too. It's like we have, he's a historical figure that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa, I just want kids to know that. How do you revise it in the middle of the legacy in the story and change Santa from white to black?"

Um... no:

Santa Claus can be traced to a real life monk named St. Nicholas who lived in what is today Turkey, according to the History Channel. Jesus Christ was born to a Jewish family around what is now Israel, and his race has long been debated with several scholars saying he likely looked like what many modern day people of Middle Eastern descent look like.

Exactly.

I get that there may be some confusion about Santa Claus, given that he's basically a Dutch cartoon character, but Jesus? Come on. Insofar as he was a real person, the guy was from Judea, basically the present-day West Bank. You know, because that's where Bethlehem is, and he was supposedly born in a manger there. I think the whole "Christ" story is bullshit, but who the hell doesn't know the story of Jesus's birth? Surely "God"-fearing Megyn does.

And, you know, people from that part of the world aren't "white," unless you stupidly think "white" is anything, oh, non-black. But maybe "fact"-based Megyn thinks just that. Or maybe thinks Jesus is the cartoon character of the right-wing Christian imagination.

Whatever the case, she's a fucking moron.

Jefferson, Christmas, and Sarah Palin's faux America; or, further evidence that Sarah Palin is a complete moron

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Raw Story:

If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, Sarah Palin said, he would probably go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas.

The former half-term governor of Alaska and failed vice presidential candidate appeared Thursday at Liberty University to promote her new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.

She told the audience of students that the U.S. Constitution was written by and for moral and religious people, and that nonreligious people probably were incapable of appreciating its principles.

*****

Palin said Jefferson would likely agree that secularists had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.

"He would recognize those who would want to try to ignore that Jesus is the reason for the season, those who would want to try to abort Christ from Christmas," she said. "He would recognize that, for the most part, these are angry atheists armed with an attorney. They are not the majority of Americans."

Palin said there was a double standard that protected atheists at the expense of the religious.

I was going to go through her incorrect statements one by one, but, really, everything she said is wrong. The woman has zero understanding of America, its Founders, and its Constitution, and it's simply ludicrous that she opens her mouth to suggest otherwise.

[Keep reading to see how Woody Allen fits into all this.]
 
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Bill O'Reilly kills Jesus

By Frank Moraes 

If there is one man alive I associate with the Prince of Peace, it is Bill O'Reilly. But I associate him as more the anti-Christ. I don't say that because he is such a bad guy, even though he is. It is just that he is the most prominent rageaholic in America. At the same time, I know he considers himself a good Catholic. So I was very interested to hear that he was writing a book on the life of Jesus. What would his take on the subject be?

For those who do not spend much time thinking about Christianity, a book on the life of Jesus probably sounds strange. After all, isn't that what the Bible is all about? Well, not really. First, there are only four books of the Bible that specifically talk about Jesus' life—the four Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. And they aren't exactly what you would call histories. To begin with, they build on each other. First came Mark, then Matthew rewrote Mark. Increasingly, it looks like the theoretical Q document that Matthew and Luke supposedly used in combination with Mark didn't exist after all. Instead, it looks like Luke is just a rewrite of Matthew. John, is mostly independent of those Gospels and comes out of the ongoing fight of the early Christian church to separate itself from the Jewish church. It is also the antisemitic Gospel, much beloved by Mel Gibson.

What's also true is that like most of the rest of the Bible, the Gospels contradict each other. For example, in one, Jesus was crucified next to two thieves. In another, it was one thief. In the other two, it was none of them. What's more, almost all of the stories in the Gospels are clearly didactic. They are little narrative designed to teach a lesson. This is why, for example, the apostles are such idiots. They never learn from one story to the next. As a result of this, there really is a need to have one story of the life of Jesus. The problem is, as Albert Schweitzer noted, pretty much everyone comes up with a "historical Jesus" that just so happens to be the Jesus they want.

So what would a truly awful person like Bill O'Reilly come up with in his new book, Killing Jesus: a History? I have no intention of reading the book, of course. I actually like these kinds of books. For example, The Historical Jesus: Five Views is an exceptional book, which presents views from the most liberal to the most conservative. But O'Reilly is no scholar and his book never would have been published if he weren't a famous guy with a lot of fans who will buy any nonsense he sells. Still, I wanted to know, even if I suspected that I had a good take on what he would have to say. O'Reilly wasn't going to present a hippy "love thy neighbor" Jesus; that was for sure.

Luckily, New Testament scholar Candida Moss, in an act similar to that of Jesus, suffered for the good of all of us: she read the book. Her review can be summed up in one sentence, "The single most consistent social teaching in the New Testament is that Christians must support the poor, widows, and orphans, but this hardly gets a mention in Killing Jesus."

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Only one "Messiah"; or, how Lu Ann Ballew may be the worst judge in America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Even in a country full of right-wing assaults on the separation of church and state, this one boggles the mind:

A legal fight over a Tennessee baby's last name took an unexpected turn late last week when a judge ruled that the parents of the seven-month-old boy must change his first name. The issue, at least as Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew saw it, was that the child's name was "Messiah," a moniker Ballew believes should be reserved only for Jesus Christ. Here's local NBC affiliate station WBIR-TV with more of the judge's logic:

"The word Messiah is a title and it's a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ," Judge Ballew said... According to Judge Ballew, it is the first time she has ordered a first name change. She said the decision is best for the child, especially while growing up in a county with a large Christian population. "It could put him at odds with a lot of people and at this point he has had no choice in what his name is," Judge Ballew said.

The judge's solution: Changing "Messiah DeShawn Martin" to "Martin DeShawn McCullough." But, as you would expect, that doesn't mean mother Jaleesa Martin is happy with the name change. Martin said she originally decided on Messiah for her son because it was a unique-sounding name that seemed to fit in nicely with her two older children's names, Micah and Mason. "I was shocked. I never intended on naming my son Messiah because it means God and I didn't think a judge could make me change my baby's name because of her religious beliefs," Martin told WBIR-TV. "Everybody believes what they want so I think I should be able to name my child what I want to name him, not someone else." She is now appealing Judge Ballew's decision. 

Yes, I would hope so. If only the Founders were around to throw the book at this ridiculous theocrat.

Fox zealot vs. mainstream Aslan

By Frank Moraes

The Fox News interview of Reza Aslan was interesting and fun. (For those who haven't seen it, it is embedded below.) He was on to hock his book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. And basically, the entire interview was about why a Muslim would write a book about Christianity. I understand why they approached Aslan and his book this way. The truth is that he was only being interviewed because according to conservative ideology the only interesting thing about the book was that Aslan is a Muslim. And really: who in the mainstream press is interested in New Testament scholarship?

What is sad about the current state of Biblical scholarship is that the field is overflowing with Christians. To me, there is no question that a Muslim can be a good Biblical scholar. But I have great questions as to whether any given Christian can be a good Biblical scholar. This isn't to say that there aren't Christian Biblical scholars who are good. In fact, there are great Christian biblical scholars. But there is a natural concern that these scholars will try to conform their scholarship to their religious beliefs. A Buddhist, for example, doesn't have that problem.


The attitude on view at Fox News is typical. It is also an indictment of modern American Christianity. The way I see it is that "believers" are so insecure about the truth of their belief that they can't brook any objective discussion of it. What's funny about it is that such people think they are protecting the religion. But any objective viewer can see the terror in their attacks.

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No such thing as bad publicity (for Reza Aslan)

By Mustang Bobby 

Reza Aslan is raking it in after the mega-cringe-inducing interview on Fox News:

Since then, the Buzzfeed page featuring the video has been viewed nearly four million times. Mr. Aslan quickly amassed an additional 5,000 Twitter followers. On Monday, Random House, Mr. Aslan's publisher, said the interview had clearly helped book sales: in two days, sales increased 35 percent.

On Friday, "Zealot" was in the No. 8 spot on Amazon.com, the nation's biggest seller of books; by Sunday, it had hit No. 1.

Random House is rushing to meet the surge in demand for the book. On Monday, the publisher ordered 50,000 copies, bringing the total to 150,000 copies in print by the end of the week.

An investigation of the historical Jesus, "Zealot" has been praised by many reviewers since its publication on July 16. In a review in Tablet magazine, Adam Kirsch called "Zealot" a "coherent and often convincing portrait of who Jesus was and what he wanted."

But some conservative critics have suggested that the book is not a work of scholarship, but merely "an educated Muslim's opinions about Jesus and the ancient Near East," as John S. Dickerson, an opinion columnist, wrote on FoxNews.com last week.

[...]

Mr. Aslan said that after reading Mr. Dickerson's essay on FoxNews.com, he was prepared for a similar line of attack from Ms. Green.

He was so eager to promote the book on Fox News that his publisher tried — in vain — to secure an interview spot on "Fox & Friends," a morning show.

"I'll be perfectly honest — I'm thrilled at the response that people have had to the interview," Mr. Aslan said. "You can't buy this kind of publicity."

Mr. Aslan should send Ms. Green a plate of baklava.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Church/State

By Mustang Bobby 

The Supreme Court will hear a case deciding whether or not a town council in upstate New York can open its meetings with a prayer:

For more than a decade starting in 1999, the Town Board began its public meetings with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month." Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer.

In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

"A substantial majority of the prayers in the record contained uniquely Christian language," Judge Guido Calabresi wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. "Roughly two-thirds contained references to 'Jesus Christ,' 'Jesus,' 'Your Son' or the 'Holy Spirit.'"

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment's prohibition of the government establishment of religion. The appeals court agreed. "The town's prayer practice must be viewed as an endorsement of a particular religious viewpoint," Judge Calabresi wrote.

Cue up the Chorus of The Poor Persecuted Majority who will tell us that there is no place safe in America for them to impose their faith and practice on the rest of us whether we want it or not.

Solution: put an imam in the rotation as "chaplain of the month" and see how quickly they decide to bag the whole thing.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Texas uses "Merry Christmas Bill" to push theocratic agenda

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What the hell's the matter with Texas? It's not just that it's batshit crazy, or at least in the hands of batshit crazy Republicans, it's that the craziness is deeply anti-American:

Christmas may be seven months away, but Texas is ready for it.

State lawmakers there waged their own battle against the so-called War on Christmas on Friday, passing legislation, House Bill 308, that allows public school teachers to say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" and display Christmas trees, nativity scenes or menorahs. Winter displays must represent more than one religion or include secular symbols.

But while the legislation specifies that schools may not constitutionally favor one religion over another, the bill is named for only one religion -- Christmas.

And that tells you all you need to know.

They've given themselves some cover by attaching Judaism to Christianity, which fundamentalists do these days, and by requiring that at least one other religion be represented, but come on, we all know what's going on here. (And it's not the war on Christmas, which doesn't exist. That "war" is made up by conservatives using fake victimhood to push their agenda.)

It's right-wing Christians pushing theocracy -- the Constitution, the very idea of America, be damned.

The mouth of the Lord

By Capt. Fogg

The "reverend" Phelps is at it again, twittering that God Bombed Boston for the same reason God does most of the horrible things he does like letting millions of children die miserably and needlessly and live miserably and hopelessly all over the world -- because they aren't actively persecuting gay people. So busy is the God of Rage and so obsessed with regulating love and sex that he's never had the time to do anything else. You'll notice that he never blew up Sobibor or Auschwitz or wasted his time with chastising the murderers of millions of children in Africa and Asia and, yes, even Europe. In fact he must have blown the budget on his flood since he hasn't done shit that looks anything like divine retribution since -- except for the odd bombing or two -- and a lot of threats.

No, what God, or at least Deus ex Westboro, is about is -- you should pardon the term -- "fags." God just hates 'em, the way Indiana Jones hates snakes or the way I hate preachers. He can't really do much about it, though, whether he's in the form of the old man or his son who's also himself or that bird that crept in sometime in the 4th century when they left the window open, other than to use an improvised explosive device against people who can hardly be blamed for not persecuting anyone. Little kids, for instance.

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North Carolina Republicans launch formal assault on the Constitution, seeking establishment of state religion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Just in case you weren't quite sure Republicans are the party of Christian theocracy:

A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The legislation grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian.

The First Amendment initially prohibited Congress from establishing a state religion at the federal level, but as a result of Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and other subsequent case law the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has come to apply to the Establishment Clause of the First, meaning that the prohibition against establishing a state religion applies not just federally but to the states as well. (It's called "Incorporation.") And there hasn't been a state religion since 1833 (Massachusetts).

The North Carolina proposal ignores all of this:

"The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people," the bill states.

"Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion," it states.

This is the "Nullification" argument that states' rights conservatives have frequently used to try to circumvent federal law, including with respect to slavery. Essentially, it posits the supremacy of the Tenth Amendment, and of course of the states themselves.

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Happy Easter 2013 -- or, just another day for a right-wing freak-out

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I hope you're all enjoying the long Easter weekend -- hopefully you get at least one day off.

Even if you're not much of a Christian, or not even a Christian at all, even if you don't believe in that silly story about that Jewish guy the Roman and Jewish establishment didn't much care for, Easter is still a statutory holiday in our Western liberal (and mostly secular) democracies, and that, I think, is a good reason to tip your cap to Christianity while your kids hunt for (chocolate) eggs and you prepare whatever special dinner you have planned, hopefully with loved ones, while chowing down on Cadbury Creme Eggs, or whatever else may tickle your gastronomic fancy.

Oh, but conservatives, mouth-frothers who need things to lash out at, are not amused today, not one bit, what with Internet behemoth Google deciding to celebrate not that guy today but instead famous labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, who was born this day in 1927.

Forget that honoring the life, death, and teachings of a religious figure probably isn't really a good idea for Google, a company that shouldn't be singling out one religion over others. Forget that this is Easter Sunday, just one day of the long weekend. And forget that Chavez was far more "Christian" than most, if not all, of these self-righteous (and deeply hypocritical) goons, that "Jesus," as the story goes (think Sermon on the Mount), would no doubt have found a great deal to like in Chavez's activism.

These people are outraged! And their outrage is going viral!

It's Google, it's Obama, it's the War on Easter!

This is all so very silly as well, and politically nefarious as well, the right's idiotic persecution complex mixed with its usual theocratic moralism: We're being persecuted, and that means we can't persecute everyone else!

Well, too fucking bad. Go stuff your faces with goo. Because your moronity really knows no bounds.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Christianity slows progress

By Frank Moraes 

Booman Tribune provides some useful information in its post "Religion and Gay Marriage in the Senate." What it shows is that the only ten Democratic senators who have not come out for gay marriage are all Christians. The article also presents a rundown of the religious affiliations of all the Senators. Other than Jewish and Buddhist, they all have a pretty bad record. I find this really telling.

Christianity is supposedly a forgiving religion, and yet, in the hands of most followers, it is just about bigotry and exclusion. So far from being edifying, Christianity warps its followers into being even worse than they normally would be. Think about it. Under normal circumstances, no one would really care about the sex lives of other people. But Christians are dragged back socially thousands of years by teachings of their religion that are not even primary.

Modern American Christianity seems focused on two issues that only have the vaguest of relation to spiritual matters: abortion and homosexuality. This is, sadly, what you get when you think that God wrote a book with a bunch of rules for you to follow. Or when you think that all you have to do is "believe in" Jesus and you are assured a seat next to God in the afterlife.

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