Letters to the Editor, December 15, 2010So let me see if I understand this: The Defense Department is proposing to let people who choose to live a homosexual lifestyle serve “openly” in the armed forces (per the Dec. 2 article “DADT study group: Full integration is best”), but won’t allow Christians such as myself the freedom to “openly” share the good news of Christ with our co-workers — as the faith we’ve chosen requires?

DOD officials plan to tell servicemembers who have a problem with those living a homosexual lifestyle to “learn to deal with it,” but they are prepared to counsel and/or slap Christians with paperwork if someone feels “offended” by our witness? Wearing sexual lifestyle choices on your sleeve is OK, but not your faith?

Military chaplains who teach that homosexuality is antithetical to and incompatible with Christianity (which it is) can either muzzle their objections or “leave,” but gays will be permitted to parade their lifestyle choices in front of all?

Bottom line: So I’m free to express myself if I’m a homosexual, but not if I’m a Christian? What disgraceful hypocrisy.

Here’s the truth: I will continue to witness to who I want, when I want and where I want. My commitment to my God supersedes my commitment to the DOD and, if officials are upset about that, then I guess they can “learn to deal with it.”

Department of Defense? More like the Department of Double Standards.

Lt. Col. Stacy L. Maxey
Afghanistan

I feel like writing back to the good colonel and clarifying one or two matters about which there seems to be some confusion.

Dear Col. Maxey;

Regarding your letter of Dec. 15 to the Stars and Stripes, it seems you are offended by the double standard involved in repealing DADT. I’m sure you will be delighted to find out that a fair compromise is easily available that removes all of the issues of double standards between Christians and gays in the military. All we need to do is apply the same standard to both. With the repeal of DADT, the following will be possible:

• If someone asks whether you are a Christian, you will not have to lie and say that you are not, just as gays will no longer have to lie when asked if they are gay.
• If the military discovers that you are Christian, you will not automatically be discharged, just as gays will no longer face immediate discharge upon discovery that they are gay.
• If you are seen openly participating in casual Christian activities, such as going to church or carrying a bible, you will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge, just as gays who are seen associating with others of the same sex will not need to fear immediate exposure and discharge.
• Any prayers, Bible studies, or other Christian activities which you engage in on your own time, in private, will not be any of the military’s business, just as it is none of the military’s business what homosexual soldiers do in private, on their own time.
• If you have a fellow soldier or superior officer who is pressuring you to engage in homosexual activities against your will, you will have the same freedom to file a complaint as a gay soldier has to complain about a fellow soldier who is pressuring them to engage in Christian activities against their will.
• If a superior officer unfairly penalizes you for failure to engage in homosexual activities, by giving you unfavorable performance reviews, withholding promotion, or giving you punitive work assignments, you will have the opportunity to apply for a redress of your grievances, just as gays will in the case of superior officers who penalize them similarly for failure to engage in Christian activities.
• Military chaplains who advocate Christian conduct, as well as those who advocate homosexual conduct, will be free to speak as their conscience demands when conducting designated services where attendance is voluntary, but may face pressure, reprimands, or even discharge if they abuse their position to advocate Christianity or homosexuality among those who do not wish to participate in such exchanges.

Granted, you may be required by regulations (if not by ordinary courtesy and professionalism) to make certain concessions. For example, to promote team cohesion and unit effectiveness, you may not be allowed to single out certain members of your team for public humiliation and harassment just because they are gay. But even here, the same standard works the other way: your team members will be required not to single you out for public humiliation and harassment just because you are a bigot and/or have chosen a bigoted religion.

You are right: there have been some serious and injurious double standards in the military. I’m sure that with your interest in justice, fairness, and service, you will be delighted now that these double standards are being ended, and the samel rules applied equally to all service members.

Sincerely,

Deacon Duncan.

Jason’s account makes it sound as if King was an uncompromising and iconoclastic leader. But that misreads King and the history of civil rights. Remember that it was Malcolm X, not Dr. King, who insisted on change “by any means necessary.” Indeed, Malcolm X criticized King using logic analogous to that Jason deploys against accommodationism.

Sounds like strong talk, though Josh immediately tempers it with one of the many disclaimers and caveats in his post:

(I repeat that this is an analogy. New Atheists aren’t Malcolm X, there aren’t atheist nationalists that would parallel Malcolm X’s black nationalism, neither I nor any other accommodationist would claim to be Martin Luther King reborn, etc. It’s an analogy, please don’t overinterpret it.)

He’s got a point to make and he’s going to make it, but he bends over backwards to be, well, accommodating to those who might disagree with him. He wants us to hear what he has to say, and I think we need to hear it. I wouldn’t call myself an accommodationist (and I don’t think many regular readers would accuse me of being overly accommodating to religion, at least in this blog), but right now, at this time and place in the history of church and state, I think we need to listen to both sides, and do some serious, open-minded thinking. And I think the MLK vs Malcolm X analogy gives us something really meaty to think about.

If you haven’t been following the discussion, the links are here, here, here and here. It’s worth taking the time to read the whole thing, even though the posts tend to be on the longish side. But what really sparked my interest is the analogy Josh draws between how Martin Luther King approached civil rights, and how Malcolm X did.

Malcolm X, of course, was famous for being fierce, uncompromising, and unapologetic. He had a style that might forgivably remind some readers of certain popular bearded bloggers on the New Atheist side. But, as Jason points out in the comments, Richard Dawkins, at least, is no Malcolm X, and his books (even The God Delusion) conspicuously fail to demand the end of religion “by any means necessary.”

That weakens the analogy, but doesn’t destroy it, which suggests that the parallels that Josh draws are close enough to be intriguing, but perhaps not as close as they could be. There may be a better fit, and one of the commenters raises an idea that might give us a clue.

The clue lies in realizing that Malcolm X’s approach was less successful because he not only refused to accommodate racism, he refused to accommodate white people. MLK was more successful because he attacked the racism rather than the racists. Josh calls this “framing,” which is a term that tends to excite knee-jerk responses in some people (myself included), but there’s really nothing terribly controversial in the observation. We could have called it “common courtesy” (or politics) just as easily—the tacit if sometimes unwarranted assumption that those present were excluded from the group being criticized.

Here’s what I see as being a point of interest relevant to this discussion. MLK did not do what so many of us do routinely: he did not single out and identify specific individuals, to ridicule and condemn their personal racism. He did not identify specific groups (e.g. Catholics) as bastions of racism, to be condemned and rejected. (Did he openly denounce the Klan? That I don’t know.)

Consequently, it’s not surprising that MLK was more successful than Malcolm X in effectively winning over the opposition. For white people, there would be no point in reconciling with Malcolm X, because Malcolm X won’t accept them unless they stop being white, which isn’t really an option. MLK gave white people a way to support equality for blacks without requiring that they stop being what they can’t help being.

The crucial question, then, is to ask how this strategy might apply to the ongoing debate between atheism and religion. The trivial answer would be to say that atheists ought to attack religion in the broad, general sense without singling out any particular groups or individuals. But would that work? And is it even possible to confront religion without referring, at least indirectly, to specifics that will obviously and immediately let everyone know exactly who you’re talking about? And, not to forget another important question, is accommodation sufficient to accomplish its goals without confrontation? Did Malcolm X contribute at least partially to MLK’s success by saying things that needed to be said, that were too harsh for MLK to say?

I tend to lean towards the view that both approaches—and the inevitable conflicts between the two approaches—are necessary. There are harsh things that need to be said that I don’t expect Josh to say, and there are (for want of a better word) “accommodating” things that I don’t expect Jason or PZ Myers to say, that also need to be said. And there are things that each side needs to say to the other, urging either temperance or zeal, as appropriate to the specific circumstances.

But here’s my last point, and I think it’s something both sides need to remember: religion is not racism. Racism is a relatively simple thing, no matter how devious it may be in how it expresses itself. Racism is the idea that one race is superior or inferior to another, and ought to be treated differently. Religion is not so simple. Religion encompasses both good things, like preaching the value of honesty and virtue, and bad things, like the failure to practice what you preach. It encompasses both good people and bad people. It promotes both community and divisiveness. It reflects both what’s good and what’s bad about the people who make it work, and leaves open the chicken-or-egg question of whether religion does more to define people’s attitudes and actions than people’s attitudes and actions do to define the religion.

You can’t just “outgrow” religion the way you can outgrow racism. Or at least, a lot of people can’t. People use religion as a conceptual framework within which they understand what is going on in the world around them. They don’t have the analytical skills to describe the complexities of real life in scientific terms. Beyond a certain point, none of us do—there’s too much data, coming in too fast, for a detailed and rigorous analysis to keep up. Conceptual symbologies like “God’s will” and “intelligent design” serve as rough approximations for the apparent “moods” of things too complicated to reduce to simple causes and effects. Religion works, as a rough, back-of-the-napkin approximation of what happening, and that’s enough for a lot of people. It has to be, because that’s all they have!

So here’s the dilemma: MLK had it easy, because all he had to overcome was racism, which is a prejudice that people can easily live without. Religion isn’t. Oh, for some of us it is, because some of us are able to see the world in objective, scientific, rational terms. Unfortunately, that ability tends to make it that much harder to understand why other people don’t find it as easy as we do. What we’ve got works better than what they’ve got, so why do they so stubbornly refuse to see things the way we do? The answer is that they don’t have our ability to see everything in such cold, analytical, rational terms. They think socially and see socially, and it just makes more sense to them to understand the world in social terms, as reflecting the motives and moods of intelligent supernatural beings.

Our job, then, is to try and wean them off of the more harmful aspects of religion, like superstition and intolerance, while intelligently recognizing that we can’t ask a fish to ride a bicycle. People won’t give up their last hope of making sense of life, so they won’t give up their religion unless and until something better comes along. And science, while better, is out of the reach of a lot of people. That’s the “intelligently recognizing” bit I just mentioned. It is neither possible nor necessarily even desirable to force everyone to think the same way scientifically-minded people do. Such a goal would indeed be a Malcolm X style strategy, doomed to failure.

So on the one hand we do need to confront the bad aspects of religion, like superstition and intolerance, but we need to do so without destroying the one tool most people rely on to get by in life as sentient beings. And I’m not sure how to accomplish that. I’ve toyed with the idea of offering people a reality-based religion (see my Patron Goddess link above), but I’m no messiah, let’s face it. I think that’s what we need, but I have no real clue how to get there.

Meanwhile, let’s encourage Josh and Jacob and PZ and Jerry Coyne and Chris Mooney and all the rest to continue their discussion, with as much civility as the market will bear (knock wood). We need both sides because I don’t think either side has found THE answer yet, nor do I expect either side to make much progress without the other. I’m going to continue making such critiques as I always have, because I think that’s important and necessary, but I strongly encourage people to disagree with me and try and change my mind. The time is ripe, let’s make the most of it.

Neither side should be lightly dismissed; each has something important to say, and a valid point to make. And of course, I have my own two cents to toss in.

My first penny is that I tend to agree with those who think this statistic is a telling point in favor of unbelief. Truth is consistent with itself, and the more you know about something that’s really true, the more you can see how well it fits with all the other facts. Conversely, of course, the more you know about something that isn’t true, the easier it is to find inconsistencies and contradictions. Since at most one of these religions can be The Truth, it makes sense that most religions would benefit from a higher degree of ignorance among their believers.

The second cent is this: faith is a belief, but you can’t just have a belief. You have to believe some thing. If most believers know little about what it is they’re believing, then what exactly does their faith consist of? They obviously don’t miss their beliefs if they don’t even know what they are, which implies that their faith is of little practical importance to them in their everyday lives. Oh, it’s important symbolically, as a kind of banner to rally around. But again, if it were really important enough to rally around, wouldn’t it be important enough for people to know what it is?

This is one of the things that greatly disturbed me when I was a believer, because I did believe that Christian beliefs were important, and I couldn’t understand why almost nobody, in any church, seemed to hold the faith in high enough regard to want to learn it. At least not in the pews. You could preach it, people expected you to preach it, but, well, tomorrow’s Monday, back to the real world, eh? That’s part of the reason I ultimately left my Christian faith behind. God doesn’t show up in real life, miracles are only rumors, exaggerations and superstitions, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to be doing much in people’s hearts. If the faith is hollow too, if the beliefs have no practical, meaningful content, then what’s really left to hang around for?

The milder type spreads fear by saying “Someone else is going to hurt you.”

You know, like “liberals.” Or better yet, “socialists.” Or gays. Or whoever it’s convenient to demonize at the moment.

Our biggest problem isn’t that we’re being terrorized by the violent guys. It’s all the “milder” types jumping on the terrorist bandwagon, working to maintain a continuous state of fear and paranoia in the general public. If we really want to help America by fighting terrorism, we ought to start by recognizing where it’s really coming from. It’s not being smuggled in from some Middle Eastern territory. It’s 100% home grown.

Just two cents worth, in observance of 9/11.

The Tea Partiers are the intellectual bastard children of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdock (and similar manipulators of public opinion). Bred from the innuendo and suspicion fostered by conservative political strategy, they have grown up unable to trust any authority, even the ones that created them.

The plan was that by using slander and demagoguery, conservatives could control what people believed and how they would vote. It even worked, for a while. But much to their current surprise and dismay, it’s turning out that the victories they’ve bought with their dishonest tactics are victories they’ve charged to a very expensive credit card. And it’s time to pay the bills.

The trouble with rabble-rousing is that you end up with a lot of roused rabble. And in this case it’s a lot of roused rabble with an inherent mistrust of authority. Is it a coincidence that they’re developing a taste for candidates like Sarah Palin and George Bush, whose popularity is based on their lack of “elite” leadership skills? If you don’t trust your leaders, why not put the incompetents in that position, so they’ll be less of a threat, eh?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s no cure short of waiting for the Tea Partiers to realize that denying reality is mostly self-destructive. The question is, can the RNC survive the monster they worked so hard to create?

According to Colson, the DC city council ought to be blamed for the decision freely (if intolerantly) made by the leadership of the Catholic Charities.

On March 3, same-sex “marriage” became legal in the District of Columbia. In connection with the new law, the D.C. Council insisted that, as a city contractor, Catholic Charities had to offer the same benefits to same-sex couples that it did to heterosexual ones.In other words, Catholic Charities had to choose between church teaching and ministering to the city’s neediest residents.

Really, Chuck? Respecting the equality and dignity of all men and women is against church teaching? Because the DC city council isn’t telling anyone in the Catholic Charities that they have to go out and engage in homosexual intercourse. Nor are they denying that the church is legally authorized to preach that homosexuality is a sin, bigoted as that doctrine may be. All they’re saying is that organizations that receive taxpayer dollars must not practice social injustice towards those whose taxes are paying to support them.

It’s really no different than the Biblical teaching of “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” and “Submit yourselves to those in authority over you”—words that were written in a culture that worshiped Caesar as a god and practiced both homosexual and heterosexual cult prostitution. Yes, you may live in a world whose moral standards are different from your own, but you still need to keep up with your social obligations, of which the first and foremost is your obligation to respect the rights of others.

Sadly, this New Testament attitude is once again completely ignored so that Colson and his fellow false martyrs can wallow in self-pity.

There’s no recognition that what the Washington Post called a “bitter debate” between the District and the Archdiocese was, in fact, a profound infringement of religious freedom–an infringement done at the behest of a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

And it’s so unfair to make people respect the human rights of minorities, isn’t it Chuck? After all, if you can’t oppress a tiny minority, who can you oppress?

Nor was there any acknowledgment that these kinds of infringements aren’t limited to government contractors. Ordinary people are being asked to choose between their livelihood and obedience to their faith-like photographers, landlords, and caterers.

You will also search in vain for mainstream media coverage of the indispensible role played by Christian institutions in caring for the vulnerable and marginalized. Almost 25 percent of the world’s AIDS patients are cared for in Catholic institutions alone. Christian hospitals in the U.S. serve a disproportionate percentage of the urban poor.

All we read about, however, is the Catholic Church’s “stubbornness” or “recalcitrance.”

That’s right, Chuck. Because you guys aren’t just being stubborn and recalcitrant, you’re being dishonest. It’s the Catholic Charities who are using their already underpaid workers as expendable pawns, deliberately mistreating them—voluntarily!—for mere propaganda purposes.

Nobody is denying that Catholic Charities has helped some of the DC area’s poor people. No one is even telling them they can’t continue to do so. The only “infringement” limiting the CC’s outreach is the same sort of “infringement” that disallows human sacrifice as a legal religious practice: our religious freedom is limited to those practices which do not cause material harm to others.

But no respectable religion should find that restriction inconvenient. There are plenty of good deeds that do not require us to practice social injustice, intolerance, or other human rights abuses. The Catholic Charities are perfectly free to continue serving the needy just as they always have. It’s their free choice whether to regard the needs of the poor above their desire for grandstanding and displaying their “righteousness” before men.

It may be that their religion does indeed insist that they display profound bigotry and prejudice towards certain minority groups. Shameful as that may be, it is protected by the Constitution, and they have the right to believe and preach that religion all they want. In many ways, it’s preferable that they do, so that the general public will plainly see the depths of their moral depravity. But should there be any sincere desire to do genuine good, the door remains open, as it always has. They are free to continue to serve.

It’s a black mark against Christianity that believers like Chuck Colson would treat basic respect for human rights as though it were such a terrible attack on the Christian faith. Yet that’s the substance of his long, petulant rant. Boo hoo, Christians aren’t being allowed to harm minorities they disapprove of, how unfair. That makes us so mad we’re going to harm our own people as well. So there.

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave.

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

Well, first things first: what is global warming? Are we talking about the average temperature going so high that in a mere 10 years snow would stop falling in England entirely? No. Climatologists are concerned about changes in average global temperatures of only a few degrees over many years, not the tens of degrees it would take to prevent frozen precipitation from occurring during England’s winters.

Granted, the original quote seems to have been made by a Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia. Colson chose not to cite the article he’s quoting from (perhaps to avoid having people find out that Dr. Viner also predicted occasional heavy snows that “will probably cause chaos” in the next decade or so?), but he is probably right to suggest that such dire predictions are unlikely in the short term. Maybe Dr. Viner was exaggerating or misquoted, but it seems a bit much to claim that global warming will make the snow stop falling any time soon.

But consider what happens if the average global temperature rises only a few degrees, say 3°F. Around where I live that might mean a winter where the temperature hovered around 24°F instead of 21°F (i.e. -4°C instead of -6°C for you metric folks). Too warm to snow? Of course not. But increased warmth can have other consequences…

What Colson is forgetting is that we don’t all have the same seasons at the same time. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere right now, but it’s summer for the other half of the planet. And in the warmer parts of the planet, weather is being driven by a number of factors, including one we call “evaporation.”

Evaporation is what puts water into the atmosphere so that it can return to the surface again as rain or snow. Warmer global temperatures mean increased evaporation, which means more moisture in the atmosphere, which means greater precipitation. If Colson had been watching his weather maps, he might have noticed that these unusually heavy snowfalls did not blow down on the east coast from the frigid reaches of northern Canada. They blew up from warmer regions around the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, it’s not climatologists who are ignoring the evidence in their driveways, it’s Colson. He even admits it, albeit indirectly and with exaggerated incredulity.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Um, yes, Chuck, really. As amazing as it may sound to you, people whose experience and expertise lie in areas of science that you don’t understand might just know more about what they’re saying than you on the topic of climatology. One snowstorm doesn’t prove global warming of course, but it’s hardly the refutation of science that Colson makes it out to be!

But Colson’s not stopping there, not by a long shot.

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

That sounds like a pretty damning admission if true. But notice that Colson once again omitted the citation that would let us track down the source of his quote. Could it be that he doesn’t want his readers to find out what Jones really said?

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Notice, the reason Dr. Jones is careful to say that there’s no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years is not because he failed to find a warming trend, but because in climatology a 15 year time span is too short. The temperature has been rising at a rate of about a tenth of a degree per decade, but in the interests of accuracy, he’s insisting that we ought to base our conclusions on trends measured over a longer period of time—trends which do show global warming.

That’s rather a different perspective than the spin Colson is trying to put on it, isn’t it? But he’s still not done yet. Here’s Colson’s next observation, based on Jones’ interview:

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995.

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period Length Trend (Degrees C per decade) Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes

So what Jones originally said was that there are four sizable time periods during which significant warming can be documented and that these trends are not significantly different from each other. Colson tries to make it sound like Jones is saying that there wasn’t any unusual warming between 1979 and 1998, but that’s not what Jones is saying at all.

One caveat: I’m assuming that Colson was making his claim in connection with the above quote from the original interview, though the dates don’t quite match. But perhaps he was referring to this question instead:

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

This, however, isn’t even remotely like the what Colson claims Jones is saying. Jones is saying that, if manmade causes were not contributing to global warming, we ought to have expected a cooling trend between 1975 and 1998, due to the shading effect of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere from two major volcanic eruptions. That cooling did not happen. Instead we observed a net increase in average global temperature between 1975 and 2009, per the chart above. So what the hell is Colson talking about?

Colson does do something I’ve never heard a denialist do before. Or at least, he tries to. The one thing I’ve never understood about all this global warming denialism is why all these professional climatologists and researchers would allegedly lie about it. Outside of cartoon villains, people don’t just spontaneously do evil things that involve large amounts of time and effort for no tangible reward. So what’s supposed to be motivating the scientists? Here’s Colson’s slanderous guess:

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Um, right. Only the thing is, Chuck, that there are lots of eager young grad students (let alone all the know-it-all denialists) who would just love to kick-start their scientific careers by coming up with an even more accurate model. If the old scientists were, you know, lying about global warming, that would make it easier for someone to come up with a model that worked better. Almost any car will go faster than one that won’t even start.

Real scientists are always checking each other’s work, and engaging in vigorous, (mostly) friendly competition. Anybody who resorts to fudging his or her results in front of the experts is just setting themselves up for failure. If you’re staking your career and reputation on the accuracy of your computer model, the last thing you want to do is get yourself entrenched in defending an obsolete and inadequate model!

Colson isn’t going to understand this, of course. Defending obsolete and inadequate models is what Christian apologetics is all about, so naturally he assumes that scientists must be doing the same thing. He needs a “worldview” to insulate him from facts that might otherwise lead him to reassess his conclusions, so in his mind that’s what scientists must be doing too.

The result is that conservative Christians like Colson are among the foremost of those who boldly and ignorantly declare that the experts must be wrong and that we must not interfere in the profits of the wealthy merely to prevent environmental disaster. Like Bush ignoring repeated warnings about Saddam’s lack of WMD’s, they proudly and smugly turn their backs on the advice of those who know more about it than they do. Anything else would be a failure to walk by faith. Or something.

Sigh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go do some more shoveling.

The study followed 662 African American sixth and seventh graders for two years. Some were placed in the abstinence program, others in a comprehensive course that included discussion of abstinence and condom use. Another group participated in a program that dealt only with safer sex, and a final group of control subjects did a workshop on nutrition…

Of 95 students who said they were virgins at the start of the abstinence training, 33 percent reported that they had sex within the next two years.

By comparison, 41 percent of the virgins in the comprehensive course went on to have sex in the two-year window. For the control group, the figure was 47 percent.

In a sample this size, the difference between the comprehensive class and the abstinence class – 33 percent vs. 41 percent – was not statistically significant, said Jemmott, so it is accurate to say they performed comparably.

And here’s Chuck Colson reporting the same story:

A landmark study on sex education draws a surprising conclusion. Well, you and I aren’t surprised, but the media and the educational establishments are. The study found that abstinence-based sex education works better than any other form of sex ed.

He’s right. I’m not surprised at all.

All right, I admit, what fails to surprise me is the disconnect between the facts of the story and the smugly triumphant way Colson tries to spin the story. But Colson wants to make it sound surprising that a scientific study actually produced evidence supporting (or allegedly supporting) abstinence-only sex education. And in a way he’s right: there have been a number of studies done, and they’ve all consistently failed to support the idea that abstinence-only sex ed does much good, if any. So it would be surprising if this study showed a result that was inconsistent with all the others.

What’s “landmark” about this study, then, is the fact that it’s the first time Christians like Colson have found one they can actually twist to suit their own purposes. The sample size is small enough, the margin of error large enough, and the difference in scores has the appearance, at least, of making abstinence ed look better. These days Christians like Colson are desperate enough that they’ll take any excuse they can get, jumping to the conclusions they favor, and ignoring the caveats of the professionals.

And that’s not all they’re ignoring. The author of the study, Penn sociologist John Jemmott, reports that what made his abstinence-ed program unique was that he deliberately removed the sect-friendly elements found in the abstinence programs pushed by evangelicals. According to Jemmott, the abstinence program he followed

would not have qualified for federal funding during the Bush administration. Those programs required an emphasis on abstaining until marriage, whereas Jemmott’s involved no preaching and no denigrating the effectiveness of contraception…

The abstinence class included a number of interactive exercises, Jemmott said. For example, the students were asked to think about their hopes five and 10 years in the future. Then they had to consider the consequences of a pregnancy on their plans.”It’s designed to be fun,” Jemmott said. “There are games where they can win points, and role-playing and other upbeat activities. There’s no preaching, and it’s not moralistic.”

Wow, a reality-based abstinence program? I like it myself (as long as it’s not the only material offered). The program wisely avoids the common evangelical trap of trying to persuade kids that they have to wait for marriage, and focuses instead on the much more realistic goal of convincing kids to merely delay sexual involvement. Not because sex is “sinful” or because some spoilsport deity wants to hold it just out of reach, but because the kids know what the consequences are, and decide for themselves that waiting will make them happier.

Of course, you’ll never hear Colson report that the study found a significant improvement in abstinence classes that eliminate Christian moral preaching! That may be one of the “landmark” distinctives of this particular study, but that’s not anything Colson is going to want just anyone to notice.

The Christian agenda for abstinence-only sex education is part of a bigger agenda for sexual control. Conservative Christians are trying to produce a government-enforced monopoly on sex, with Christians in control of who is and is not allowed to participate. God has decreed that there will be no sex outside of marriage, and He’s the only one Who can bestow the blessing of marriage on those He favors (as determined by…guess who).

The result is that, in the hopes and dreams of conservative Christians, people who want sex will have to submit to Christianity in order to obtain it. Christians control the supply by eliminating the competition of extramarital sex and by maintaining a monopoly on marriage. After all, since their God does not show up in real life, they have to have some motivation for people to turn to their religion!

Chuck Colson’s deceitful promotion of abstinence-only education is in no way motivated by any kind of concern for kids. What he and his cohorts are after is to harness the power of sex, and to use it as a tool to convert people. It may not be a conscious conspiracy, and in fact it’s highly likely that simple greed and selfishness are what motivate believers to want to monopolize sexual power. But there’s no question that they are seeking this monopoly, or that they consider themselves legitimately entitled to decide how, when, and with whom, everybody else is allowed to have sex.

[O]ver at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong.

Dr. Chu-Carroll proceeds to disassemble Luskin’s rather pathetic argument (as does Dr. Wesley Elsberry), and I recommend following the links and reading their analyses. What caught my eye, however, was the way Luskin not only bungles his case, but inadvertently pulls the rug out from under one of William Dembski’s main arguments.

Here’s a quick overview of Luskin’s argument:

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, working with the NCSE, successfully convinced Judge Jones to parrot Miller by stating in the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that Miller had “pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes.”

Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article, co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago. The article does not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic information”…

But are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations supported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological information? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is equivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that the NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new genetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary mechanisms.

So Luskin’s chief complaint here is that the peer-reviewed publications surveyed and reported by the Long paper are all scientific publications that do not discuss whatever it is that creationists mean by “new genetic information.” Instead, as Dr. Chu-Carroll and Dr. Elsberry point out, they discuss the evolution of new genes.

In other words, Luskin isn’t objecting to the scientific conclusions reached by these peer-reviewed papers. Given his lack of scientific expertise, he wisely avoids challenging the research that allows us to understand how new genes evolve. Instead, he simply asserts that this research is not studying whatever he means by “new genetic information.” “New genetic information,” whatever that is, does not play any significant role in the evolution of new genes.

Wow.

Just think about that for a minute. One of the core arguments of intelligent design creationism is that new species require “complex specified information” and that evolutionary processes are incapable of producing whatever they mean by “information.” But now here’s Luskin objecting to the evidence used in Kitzmiller on the grounds that “genetic information” is some topic unrelated to the study of how new genes evolved. New genes, it seems, can evolve without “genetic information” (as defined by creationists) playing any significant role.

That whooshing sound you just heard is Luskin pulling the rug out from under William Dembski and all the fine folks at the Disco ‘Tute, because once you can evolve new genes, it’s trivial to evolve new species specified by those genes. And here is Casey Luskin, official spokesweenie of the premier ID publicity and marketing organization, blithely assuring us that the new genes documented by the research in the Long paper were new genes produced without being in any way hindered by the complete absence of the “new genetic information.”

Whatever he means by that.

Seventeen years ago, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped formulate the policy that has come to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It allows women to serve in the armed forces, provided that they keep their gender to themselves.Today, Powell is in favor of repealing the policy he crafted and advocated. Well, he was right then, but wrong now.

According to Powell, “attitudes and circumstances have changed” since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted.

Sure, attitudes toward women have changed in the culture at large. But what hasn’t changed is the need for “order and discipline in the ranks,” to use Powell’s own phrase, and the possible impact of allowing openly female people to serve in the armed forces.

That impact was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a “marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.” Owens begins by stating what should be obvious: “Military organizations exist to win wars.”

I say “should be,” because the arguments for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are all about the status of women in American society and have nothing to do with military necessity.

A big part of winning wars, as Owens writes, is overcoming “the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier.” Military organizations accomplish this through an “ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion.” He’s right. These are the things I learned firsthand as a Marine platoon commander myself.

The “cohesion” Owens refers to is strictly non-sexual. Owens says it is the product of what the New Testament calls philia, friendship. In the military, it is the bond “among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together.”

I might go a step beyond Owens. The bond between men in a sound military unit is more like agape—the love that moves men to sacrifice their lives for their buddies.

When you read accounts of heroism and bravery, what motivated men wasn’t abstract ideals but their love for the man in the next foxhole. They didn’t want to let him down. This bond was beautifully captured in the book Joker One by Donovan Campbell. Campbell, a Christian and a Marine officer, served three tours in Iraq and captured the essential role of philia and agape on the battlefield. He wrote what I discovered when I was a platoon commander: What holds men together is love.

Allowing openly female women threatens this cohesion by raising the possibility of a different kind of love—eros—which is “individual and exclusive.” “All for one and one for all” could give way to “sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism,” with disastrous military consequences.

Nothing has happened in the last 17 years that makes this less possible or the possible consequences less dire. All that has changed is that many Americans now see everything through the prism of “rights.” For them, sexual rights and personal autonomy trump everything else. Thus, any opposition to changing military policy must be the result of “bigotry” or “misogyny.”

I suspect I’m not alone when I say a military unit which openly celebrates the female lifestyle in the trenches is not a military unit I want to serve in.

Ultimately, the change in circumstances behind the proposed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t military necessity, but the weakening of our moral will.

That’s the real difference between then and now.

Well said, Chuck. Clearly, if we want a military that can win wars, we cannot allow openly female soldiers to serve, because once women are admitted into military service (at least, without disguising their gender), then that opens up the possibility that (gasp) eros might taint the pure love that exists between men in a foxhole. And that possibility, of course, will destroy military cohesion and render all soldiers helpless victims to the paralyzing effects of fear.

Of course. Why didn’t I see that before?

Or for that matter, why haven’t we seen it throughout all the decades in which “openly female” women have served in the armed forces?

Obama wants us to believe that his motivation is to help the small number of Americans who do not have health insurance. Those who have no health insurance will receive better health care from almost any hospital than from having Obama Health Insurance. Our health care system is not perfect, but is still the best in the world. Obama wants to waste something like a trillion dollars to have a single provider. Very briefly, he wants to socialize medicine, to have total control over all health care and the lives of the elderly.

It starts off fairly well. Obama does want us to believe that the goal is to extend health care to those who are falling through the cracks under the current system. But it kind of goes downhill from there. To be fair, it’s not all that dissimilar to what you would hear coming from Limbaugh or Hannity on any given day of the week. It’s distorted, biased, provocative and misleading, but honestly, that’s pretty much par for the course with political rhetoric, right? Let’s keep reading.

A recent statement by Thomas Sowell (Reporter-News, July 29), fits Obama’s actions. “With race — as with campaign finance, transparency and the rest — Barack Obama knows what the public wants to hear and that is what he has said. But his policies as president have been the opposite of his rhetoric, with race as with other issues.”

Therefore, the public believes that Obama wants to destroy anything good our great country has to offer, such as the best health care system, the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

In addition, it has been reported that in the proposed health care plan, illegal aliens will get benefits.

Ok, now we’re starting to fragment a little. One guy claims that Obama is a hypocrite, and therefore Dr. Dukes concludes that “the public believes” that Obama is deliberately seeking to destroy health care, the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Maybe just a leeeeeeetle bit of an overdrawn conclusion, don’t you think? And the offhand cheap shot at illegal aliens? What’s that there for?

But Dr. Dukes isn’t just any wingnut blatherer: he’s a full PhD and a professor at Texas Tech. He’s got an intellect, and has demonstrated his ability to put his mind to good use when he chooses to do so. And yet, certain conditions seem to make him lose it, intellectually. Just a bit, anyway. But nevertheless, he at least tries to build a solid, reasonable case for his views, as when he cites statistics to back up his claims.

The National Center For Public Policy Research offers:

1. Fifty percent (50 percent) of women in Britain and New Zealand diagnosed with breast cancer die from it. By contrast, about one-fifth of American women diagnosed with breast cancer die from it.

2. In England the system decided to halt knee and hip replacements for overweight people.

3. In Australia a man has been on a 90-day waiting period for two years to get surgery to fix his hands, shoulder and ankle crippled by rheumatoid arthritis.

4. In Canada patients have been denied life-saving medicines that are standard treatment in the United States.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an organization that proudly declares itself a “conservative think tank.” In other words, these statistics are not being reported by an unbiased source, they’re being published specifically because the Center believes these claims will further a conservative agenda. Let’s take just the first claim as a representative sample.

The Center would like us to believe that in Britain and New Zealand (why those two countries, specifically?) the mortality rate from certain types of cancer is as high as 50,000 per 100,000 people. According to recent data from the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development, the mortality rate isn’t nearly that high. In New Zealand, the mortality rate from cancer in general stands at about 327 per 100,000, or slightly above the United States’ mortality rate of 321 per 100,000. Britain, meanwhile, has a significantly lower mortality rate, at only 253.5 deaths per 100,000. Even if we assume that the statistics for breast cancer are anomalous, and are strikingly worse than the statistics for cancer in general, it is clear that Britain’s health care system is not resulting in needless and preventable deaths from cancer. At best, the Center has cherry-picked its data, and at worst it may have fabricated it entirely.

Is Dr. Dukes deliberately spreading false and misleading information in order to deceive his readers into drawing false conclusions about health care in countries with more modern and civilized health care programs? We can’t say for sure, but it does seem that his biases are making him more prone to accept bad data uncritically and to promote it with an unwise degree of enthusiasm. But wait, we haven’t seen anything yet! Join me as we turn into the spin and begin our spiral downwards.

Obama does not like our Constitution and wants to destroy the Supreme Court. Obama is trying to destroy the effectiveness of the court with Sotomayor, who wants to break up the United States. Gary Kreep, director of the United States Justice Foundation, reports that “Sotomayor is part of the movement seeking to take over the entire southwestern United States, and make it part of Mexico. She was a member of La Raza, which is called a Latino KKK. Sotomayor was selected to destroy the Supreme Court.”

Yes, that’s right. Obama picked a Latina judge to be a Supreme Court Justice because it was all part of a plot to cede the entire southwest of the United States to Mexico! Isn’t that just like a megalomaniacal despot with ambitions of world domination? No sooner do they get elected to the supreme office in the land, but they immediately seek to shrink their area of control, hand over valuable natural and industrial resources, and weaken their base of power. So like Hitler! But we’re in the final, irretrievable death spiral now:

After the election, Obama said our country is no longer a Christian nation and is now a Muslim nation. Obama visits foreign countries and tells them how bad America is.

Please call your representatives and tell them how much you disagree with Obama’s attempt to destroy the best health care system and waste another trillion dollars.

Certification of Obama’s Kenya birth certificate could save our country, health care and avoid “Cap & Tax.”

Our country depends on you.

Yes, by his magical, demonic powers, Obama took an entire Christian nation and *poof* transformed it magically into a Muslim nation! He goes around to other countries and tries to convince them that America is terrible, which is pretty strange, since he is also secretly a Muslim himself and ought to be proud of what he has done with America. Um, yeah, so anyway, he’s trying to destroy health care, and waste a trillion dollars (which we could have spent paying for part of the war on Iraq). And he was born in Kenya (even though his mom was in Hawaii at the time)! Wake up America! Our country depends on you! Write to your congress critters and tell them tooooo… do…. something. Pass a law making President Obama an official Kenyan, or maybe revoke Hawaii’s statehood retroactively, or something. Anything! Halp!!!1!

Doctor Dukes starts off sounding like a reasonable, sane (if conservative) professor, and in the space of a few short paragraphs, launches himself deep into the loonisphere. The man has a mind, yet when confronted with one unpleasant fact—a liberal black man in the White House—he disconnects that mind from the real world, and plugs it into some hysterical and paranoid fantasy world dreamt up by the Limbaughs and Hannities and maybe even the profit-protecting insurance industry executives. And that becomes his new truth. Nothing can change his mind. Obamo delenda est!

A related news story makes it clear that Dr. Dukes is not an isolated case. People from all across the country, but especially from the conservative South, are firmly and unshakably convinced that they know that they know that they know, that Barack Obama was not born a U.S. citizen. As few as 24% of Republicans in North Carolina, for instance, believe that Obama is a legitimate U.S. citizen. The rest either claim to be unsure, or else they are sure (47%!) that he was not born in the US.  They weren’t there at the time. They haven’t a shred of evidence on which to base their conclusions. But they know it beyond all hope of persuading them otherwise, despite the fact that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate has been published and documented and verified beyond a reasonable doubt (notice I said reasonable doubt). Some 8% of them don’t even believe that Hawaii is a US state.

So here’s the kicker. Let’s suppose we take one of these “birthers,” and arrest them. Let’s tell them that unless they stop telling people that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, they will be convicted of treason and executed. Is there anyone here who has the slightest doubt that, among all the birthers, at least twelve people would take this as absolute proof that the birther accusations were true, and would willingly die rather than sell out their immortal souls to Satan Incarnate? That they would martyr themselves over a baseless slander about a duly elected President?

One of the most popular apologetics is to point to the testimony of the early Christians, and especially of the Christian martyrs, and to say that we cannot possibly impeach their testimony, because they believed it strongly enough to die for it. Yet when we look at the real world, we find that, in fact, it’s not all that hard to find people—even intelligent and educated individuals like Dr. Dukes—who simply plug their brains into an alternate “reality” whenever the real facts violate their cherished beliefs and ideals. The birthers have suffered nothing worse than a lost election, certainly not anything remotely like the public execution of their God, but they’re repeatedly (and vocally) going fricking nuts anyway!

When we read the stories in the New Testament, and we hear about how strong the “faith” of the early apostles and martyrs was, does that really mean they must have had something genuine? Not at all. Just look at the birthers. They have nothing, yet their faith in their dogmas is strong enough, and irrational enough, that death threats would only reinforce their convictions. Evidence doesn’t faze them, reason doesn’t faze them, experience does not change their minds. They know that they know that they know, and nothing outside their own head is important (except to the extent that it can be used to promote their delusional beliefs).

What does it take to explain the New Testament accounts, and the OT stories as well? All we need to suppose is that some people, back in Bible times, were like the people we see in the headlines today. They have faith. They have zeal. And nothing can drown out their witness—not even the truth.

Yet all they have to offer the rest of us is a chance to share in their delusion. Despite the strength of their convictions, the things they say don’t correspond to the things we actually find in the real world. So whether you’re reading the news or reading the Bible, beware. There’s more to the truth than being fanatical enough to die for something.

Let’s think back to our high school days. For some of us, that takes a bit more effort than for others, but I think we can all remember it fairly clearly. You go to a classroom, you sit and listen to a lecture, you read a textbook, you do some homework exercises, and then you take a test. Each test and homework assignment is graded, and your work is evaluated on a scale of A, B, C, D or F, where the “F” stands for “Fail.”

Our attitude towards academic work is inevitably shaped largely by the tremendous pressure we feel to get the best grades possible. Those who get straight A’s are praised and rewarded, by teachers and parents if not always by their peers. Those whose grades aren’t quite as good are told to work harder, because they’re not measuring up. Even if the grade they get isn’t quite as bad as an F, if they get less than an A, then have failed in some sense.

And let’s not kid ourselves: students are competitive. Even the ones with the “bad attitude,” who make a show of not caring, are responding to the peer pressure they feel regarding grades. They may have given up, they may be rebelling against the system and the whole concept of trying to measure up, but that’s only because they’ve concluded that they have no hope of succeeding, and are just trying to minimize the pain of failure.

So let’s apply a few exercises in Obvious Math. In a school system like ours, 80% of the students are going to perform less well than the top 20%. 90% will fall short of the top 10%. 99% will be “inferior” to the top 1%. For a relatively few people, academic achievement will be an area where their attitudes are shaped by the experience of success and of coming out on top, and for the rest of the class, for the vast majority of the class, the intellectual experiences of public schooling will leave them with attitudes shaped by years of coming in second place, or worse.

Science is hard. Math is hard. For 12 years of a kid’s life, and progressively more so as they near graduation, the feelings they associate with math and science and other hard subjects are feelings they feel in the context of working hard and still failing to compete as well as the honor role students, academically. The good feelings are more likely to arise through the cameraderie and fellowship of commiserating with their fellow average (and/or below-average) students. “The smart guys just make me feel stupid and look bad in front of the teacher, but my friends don’t care about that stuff because it’s not really important.”

And then they graduate, and become part of the voting public.

This isn’t something we can address by making textbooks better, or by improving teacher training. Nor will it feel much of an impact if scientists somehow become better at public relations. Our system of education is inherently going to create a context where most students’ experiences leave them feeling happier joining their friends (i.e. the majority) in denying the importance of something that’s hard and confusing and that has no apparent connection to the life they actually live after high school. What benefit would there be in admitting they tried, and failed, to do as well as the “good” students? Just tattoo the word “loser” across your forehead, eh?

The problem is that our approach to education is built on top of a foundation that was originally designed, not to promote a scientific approach to life, nor critical thinking, nor freedom of thought, but to preserve and promote religion. The first schools in colonial America were founded, not to turn children into skeptics and humanists and scientists, but to make sure that they could read the Bible, and would learn to obey its teachings. The basic model for American education thus is not the laboratory, where discoveries are made, but the catechism, where children learn to repeat stock answers to predefined questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-education. Far from it! My degree happens to be in French teaching, and I’ve always loved being in the classroom even though I’m not working there now. But I do feel that a lot of the problems in our educational system stem from the catechistic approach to teaching, where the goal is to repeat back to the teacher the things that the teacher will accept as being the right answer. This is an approach that is not only ineffective, but unnatural. The way we learn what we really know and believe is by discovery, not by rote indoctrination.

Richard Feynman once wrote that he spent a semester studying biology, just to see what all those biologists were up to, and concluded that much of biology education was a waste of time. The students spent most of their time and energy memorizing the names of things, and being tested on their ability to use the terms correctly. That’s not terribly surprising, and in fact it seems to me that a correct knowledge of the terminology would be very valuable to a biologist. But Feynman’s point was that you can look up stuff like that if you ever need to know it. Thus, as a physicist, it was a waste of time for him to memorize the vocabulary.

I got A’s and B’s in high school science, and I spent a fair amount of time memorizing technical vocabulary, but if you asked me to describe the Krebs cycle, I’d have to look it up. I’m not a biologist, so I rarely if ever need to apply that particular knowledge to my life. Much more important to me is acquiring the skills needed to understand how the Krebs cycle works. And that’s true for everyone. Your success or failure in public education should therefore depend, not on how well you memorize rote answers (the “what”), but on how well you learn to think and to apply what you know (the “how”). A discovery-based educational system would make it possible to make this kind of education possible.

But we can’t fix the current, catechistic educational system to provide this kind of educational experience. It’s fundamentally not the right kind of system, in the same sense that fish are fundamentally not mountain climbers. I haven’t figured out what all the technical details would be in a working discovery-based system, but this is where I’m looking. The old way is broken beyond repair, and until we replace it, we’re going to keep on publishing books about the pervasive anti-intellectualism that will continue to dominate American society.

President Barak H. Obama.

I just can’t concentrate on my writing today. I knew that Bush would soil his own bedsheets so badly that a Democrat would have to work hard to lose the White House this year. But Mr. Obama seems to be a president beyond anything I dared hope for. The mess Bush has left him is going to be virtually impossible to clean up in only two terms, let alone a mere year, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have standing outside the Augean stables with a shovel in his hand than Mr. Obama. Which would be rather a cruel wish if it were not for the fact that the rest of us are IN the stables and up to our necks (or worse).

Best of luck to you, sir. You’ll need it. We all will.

[W]hile the world becomes increasingly scrupulous to all sorts of rights, including the “rights” of animals and even plants (I’m not kidding), it largely ignores the ongoing assault on the most fundamental human right: religious freedom, freedom of conscience.

So while commentators were consumed with the results of California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, they missed what was going at a special assembly of the UN. There, Islamic nations led by Saudi Arabia made progress toward criminalizing blasphemy.

Bit of unconscious irony there: being “consumed” with the results of Proposition Hate is hardly the best example one could find for a world “ignoring the ongoing assault on freedom of conscience.” But he is right to be alarmed by the UN Resolution condemning free speech about religion.

Colson seems particularly concerned with this resolution’s impact on Christianity.

While the declaration urging “respect” for religion, places of worship, and symbols sounds good, Donald Argue and Leonard Leo remind us that appearances are deceiving. These members of the Commission on International Religious Freedom called the declaration a “cleverly coded way of granting religious leaders the right to criminalize speech and activities that they deem to insult religion”—say, like prohibiting conversion from Islam to Christianity.

Given Saudi Arabia’s role in promoting the declaration and the regime’s abysmal record concerning religious freedom, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. It’s difficult to imagine the Saudis making it easier for individuals to convert to and practice Christianity in their and other Islamic countries.

But while Colson doesn’t mention it, the same could be said for non-Christians seeking freedom of religious conscience in countries with predominantly Christian populations like, oh, say, the USA. One could, for example, take Proposition Hate, or the religious language inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, or the religious motto inscribed on American currency, or any number of state-supported displays of the Ten Commandments, or nativity scenes, or the so-called “war on Christmas,” and conclude that “it’s difficult to imagine America’s Christians making it easier for individuals to convert to and practice non-Christian beliefs in America.”

Substitute “Christian” for “Saudi” and “evangelical” for “Hindu” in Colson’s observation below:

What Saudi clerics and Hindu activists call “respect” is more properly called “religious persecution.” This confusion is the result of what scholar Thomas Farr describes as the failure “to advance religious freedom in any political or cultural sense” around the world.

Sounds familiar, don’t it? Particularly over the past 8 years or so, but going back a lot longer, we’ve had quite a bit of government sponsorship for the notion that “religious freedom” means freedom to submit to Christ as your Savior whenever you want, and for the notion that “respect for religion” means declaring the Christian faith to be superior to all other belief systems, including reality-based beliefs.

Let’s have a look at some of the best stuff Colson has ever written:

What’s needed, as Farr writes in his new book World of Faith and Freedom, is the message that religious freedom is a “precondition for stable self-government.” Government doesn’t give it; government can’t take it away. It “lies at the heart of human dignity” because it recognizes that there are areas where government has no place intruding.

Beams, motes and eyes, Chuck. Let’s start by repealing Proposition Hate and the other Mandatory Fornication Amendments, and move on from there to a government that is truly religiously neutral and which does not endorse or promote Christianity above all else. Then maybe we can presume to lecture other nations on their shoddy support for religious liberty.

But Colson is right about so-called “respect” laws. They’re mega-bad juju, and we need to speak out against them, while we still can.

Most of us have been badly shaken by the tumultuous events of the last 48 hours in Wall Street. If you have an IRA or some kind of retirement plan, no doubt you’re licking your wounds. You may even be fearful. I understand. I’ve experienced those apprehensions myself.

As an influential Christian leader, however, Colson has to remain focused on the really important issues, like “How can I use this crisis to persuade even more people to trust Christianity?”…

But as I told a worried young man on our team today, we need to remember that fear is always the enemy of faith. A few months ago, in the midst of fervent prayer during my devotions, I had an especially strong realization that my life was completely in God’s hands. To live is Christ, to die is gain. I’ve known that intellectually, but for the first time in my life, it is now engraved in my soul. Now, when things go wrong, I turn to God, pray, trust Him, and feel an amazing peace. I’m His.

Don’t think of it as a major economic crisis brought about through greed, gullibility, and failure of government oversight. Think of it as a clever technique God uses to help us grow more trusting and to be less concerned with real-world consequences. After all, if we worried too much about preventing such crises, we might deprive God of valuable opportunities to lead us into disasters that will force us to cry, “God help us all, because sure as hell nobody else can!”

Colson seems to realize, at least, Who is ultimately responsible for the current mess.

And you know what else? The financial markets are His. The world is His. I don’t know why it took me 35 years to get this, but I finally have.

Ok, sure, to those of us who aren’t in on God’s wonderful and mysterious plan, it looks like God’s management of His financial markets has led to wealth for a few greedy individuals and major financial hardships (to say nothing of financial ruin) for many others. At least He means well, right?

But wait, even though the markets are supposedly in God’s control, their current state is not really God’s fault after all:

What’s more, there’s a great opportunity for you to explain the importance of a biblical worldview to your friends. Because these financial troubles are the direct result of our nation turning its back on God.

No, Chuck, these financial troubles are the result of a lot of people gullibly believing whatever men tell them, just like you want them to merely take your word for it that God is in control and is making everything good no matter how bad the real world evidence shows it to be. And of course this crisis is also the result of government policies that emphasize promoting the profits of big business even at the cost of important consumer safeguards. That’s something our born-again conservative Christian president is real big on, isn’t it?

Colson ignores the financial and legal factors that led to this crisis in favor of blaming one of his favorite scapegoats: “moral relativism.”

Simply put, the rise of relativism in postmodern Western life has led to the collapse of a moral consensus. With everyone making up his own rules when it comes to right and wrong, is it any wonder our economic system is under stress?

The problem isn’t that everyone is making up their own rules, it’s that too many people (and people in high places no less) are making up their own facts, so-called, and are using the power of talking points to push an alternative “worldview” that doesn’t match reality. Any time this happens, there are going to be consequences. You can stretch the truth only so far before it snaps back into place. And woe betide those who get caught in the backlash.

Colson’s “solution” to the financial crisis is to work even harder to reinforce the same absence of skepticism, the same focus on spiritual (i.e. subjective) values, and the same “God is in control” fatalism that gave business the green light to inflate their own profits at the expense of consumer safety. For all that Colson complains about an alleged loss of “moral concensus,” he only treats greed as “immoral” when it leads to (yet another) major crisis. And this moral ambivalence about greed is also a contributing factor in the current financial mess, and not a solution to it.

My wife and I were talking about finances a few years ago, and she was telling me about what great deals all her friends were getting (some as low as only $200/month payments on a 4-bedroom single-family home). It sounded too good to be true, and my Skept-a-larm was clanging like crazy. “There’s no way the banks can be making a profit at those rates,” I said, and we decided not to refinance. Because of that, our home is still on a fixed-rate, low-interest mortgage, and our payments are fairly constant (plus or minus property taxes and what-not). The same skepticism that makes me suspicious of Colson’s bland don’t-worry-be-happy faith in Jesus also made me suspicious of these too-good financial promises.

So to all you faithful, financially-troubled Christians out there, who followed your born-again administration’s policies into financial ruin, I have a small word of hope: it’s not too late to begin to exercise a little less gullibility and a little more healthy skepticism. Really, it’s in your own best interests to take a grain of salt when men start making unsubstantiated promises that offer too much while showing too little. And that’s true whether we’re talking mammon or God.

A popular Christian claim is that God is the source of all morality. In other words, things like shooting rampages are not wrong in and of themselves, they’re only wrong because God forbids them. Or, as Vox Day puts it, “God’s game, God’s rules.” There’s no power greater than God that can force some external moral standard on the Almighty, therefore God is free to define morality however He sees fit. Who is to say, then, that God cannot make a special set of rules, for this one deranged shooter, that commands him to go on a shooting spree and kill people? Sure, he’s insane, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not telling the truth about God. So how do we know?

Someone might say, “Of course he’s lying; God would never order anyone to commit wholesale murder.” But how do we know that? If murder is not wrong in and of itself, what’s to prevent God from defining mass murder as morally good in this specific case? It wouldn’t be the first time, right?

“But,” someone will object, “we know that murder is wrong because it says so in the Ten Commandments.” That’s true as far as it goes, but there’s all kinds of loopholes. Obviously so, otherwise all divinely-ordained killings would be morally wrong, and there’s plenty of them in the Bible. Besides, if it’s “God’s game, God’s rules,” then He’s obviously free to define whatever exceptions and special cases He likes. So long as murder is not wrong in and of itself, so long as God is the sole source for moral authority, then we have no guarantee that He could not and did not order the Washington shooting spree just like He allegedly ordered killings in the Old Testament.

“But,” someone might say, “you’re making a false assumption. Murder is wrong, in and of itself, because it kills innocent people.” I think we can agree that it’s a false assumption, but it’s not our assumption. Christians, and particularly Christian supremacists like James Dobson and Roy Moore, are the ones pushing the idea that all morality comes from God. If there’s a secular basis for morality, if we can examine murder itself and determine that it is wrong because of the consequences it produces, then those Christians are wrong, and we can discover a valid, objective, universal moral code without needing some divine Lawgiver to define it for us.

There’s a compromise position: I once heard an apologist on Christian talk radio who argued that, yes, God is the source of moral authority, but it’s not arbitrary because it springs from God’s nature. That way God does not have the freedom to arbitrarily define murder as “good,” but at the same time He’s still the source for universal morality. Whatever is consistent with God’s nature is “good” and whatever is contrary to God’s nature is “bad.”

There are a number of problems with this approach, however. When God allegedly ordered the slaughter of the Amalekites, was He being consistent with His own nature, or was He sinning? The OT killings make it difficult to maintain that God’s unchanging nature is the source for eternal moral standards, especially regarding killing, slavery, and a multitude of lesser sins that somehow don’t seem to apply today. And if “good” is defined relative to God’s inherent nature, over which He has no control, it becomes essentially meaningless to call God “good,” since all you’re really saying is that God behaves in a certain way because that’s how God behaves. It’s not good or bad per se, it’s just how God is.

And why should our morality be judged by whether or not our behavior is consistent with God’s nature? God’s “good” behavior is automatic, not a matter of willful choice, so why should we be guilty of immorality if our behavior springs just as spontaneously from our own nature?

There are more problems with this position, but the above is a fair sample. It’s a clever answer, but even this approach can’t quite pull off the kind of self-consistency we ought to be finding in a real-world truth. And even if it could, it clearly has to be consistent with God’s will (and thus God’s nature) for people to die, sometimes violently and senselessly. If, by hastening their deaths, God ushers them into a new and endless life of bliss and blessing, free from the toils and suffering of mortal existence, is that really so contrary to His benevolent and loving nature?

We come back, thus, to the original question: how do we know the insane shooter is not telling the truth when he claims to kill for God? God does not show up in real life to give us an objective standard against which to compare the shooter’s testimony, nor does the Bible support the contention that God never orders His servants to kill. And if believers claim to have some sort of immaterial, inner witness, some kind of direct, spiritual connection with God, such that they alone can hear what God is telling them, then how can we know the shooter didn’t have the same connection, and that God didn’t use that channel to send out a command to kill?

There’s only one answer: we know God would not murder because we would not murder, and God’s morality is just a projection of our own. We declare that our own moral standards come from God just because we want to lend God’s authority to our own moral opinions, not only for obvious cases like murder, but for more controversial cases as well, like equal rights for gays. But in practice, using God as the source of moral authority doesn’t work, because He does not show up in real life to exercise that authority, and because His own track record, as recorded in the OT, is somewhat murky. We start with what morality is (at least in our own eyes), and then ascribe that morality to God. And not the other way around.

Jackson’s wardrobe is not the only thing that malfunctioned; so did the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Last Monday the court threw out a $550,000 fine the Federal Communications Commission assessed against CBS. The three-judge panel ruled that the FCC fine was “arbitrary” and “capricious.” Apparently, exposing oneself no longer qualifies as broadcast indecency.

That’s right: the proper function of our criminal justice system is to protect Americans from seeing other people nude. Or partially nude.

In Colson’s eyes, the human body is “filthy” and unwholesome, especially if it’s a female body.

While many Americans are angry at the court, they ought to understand this story is not just about activist judges second guessing the FCC: It is also about a willingness to corrupt. It is not enough, it seems, to make strippers available to those who seek them out in seedy clubs. It is about a desire to expose everyone to filth, whether they want to be exposed to it or not—even innocent children.

In this case, pop performers considered shocking adults and corrupting kids an acceptable price to pay for the publicity and career enhancement. And, indeed, if it did not enhance their careers, it must have amused them to force vulgarity before millions of innocent eyes.

Yep, nothing corrupts a kid like seeing a breast.

Well, frankly, I think Chuck is overreacting just a tad, and so did the people who tried to make CBS pay a half-million-dollar-plus fine just because they were the ones running the cameras at the time. Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” was more an issue of poor taste than some nefarious scheme to “corrupt” innocent children. And “career enhancement”? Please. Jackson and Timberlake have spent a good deal of time and effort since then on damage control and career rescue. If anything, the reaction to the halftime show has made it less likely that we’ll see future repeats of that kind of performance. It’s a self-punishing embarrassment, no legal or judicial penalties needed.

In fact, Colson’s reaction is more likely to corrupt America’s youth than Jackson’s original offense. By portraying the female body as “filth,” and suggesting that the mere sight of a breast is bad for children, Colson is sending a message of rejection and inferiority to women everywhere. Get out your burkas, ladies, some man might be corrupted by the sight of your skin!

Oh, and did I mention? Colson wants his minions to do something:

First, call Senator Harry Reid and ask him to schedule a vote now on Senate Bill 1780, the Protecting Children from Indecent Programming Act. It would cover instances of “fleeting nudity” like the one that so disgusted Super Bowl fans, and caused the Muslim world to mock Western decadence. Then call Senator Jay Rockefeller. He authored the bill, but has showed no willingness to move it. Third, call your own two senators and ask them not only to support the bill, but to urge Senators Reid and Rockefeller to move the bill. It has been passed out of committee; they could vote on it today if they wanted to! We need to let senators know that lip service to traditional values is not enough. Lastly, email FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, and thank him for his strong stand; urge him to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Isn’t that nice? I especially like the part where he links Janet Jackson to 9/11. “You know, the Muslims think our women are too loose, so really 9/11 is the ladies fault for not wearing their burkas.”  Yeah, and they’re not circumcised either. But let me ask this: why would we want American women to have to live up to Muslim standards for “proper” handling of females? Is Saudi Arabia really the moral standard that Colson wants Senators Reid and Rockefeller to establish in this country?

This is America, a Judeo-Christian nation. Why should any employer accommodate the religious preferences of Muslims? Where is the call for separation of church and state in this situation? If these Muslims are not content with the American holidays that their employers offer, they are free to go back to whatever Muslim nation they came from. And you know what, we won’t miss them or their whining for Islamic religious rights or all their lawsuits.

If you were wondering why it’s important to stand up against Christian Supremacists and to fight for our First Amendment freedoms, this is why. All this nonsense about “respecting America’s historical heritage” and such, is just a smoke screen. The real, practical intent of making America a “Christian nation” is so that the power of government can be used to discriminate against those deemed to be non-Christians. Like Muslims, for instance. Or gays.

The problem with this sort of Christian nation is that it turns democracy into a kind of mob rule, and if you belong to a minority, then brother, it sucks to be you. Except that we’re all members of some minority or other. There are more non-Catholics than Catholics, more non-Baptists than Baptists, more non-charismatics than charismatics. Ultimately, every individual is a minority of one.

Besides, if the government is really going to promote Christian supremacy over other religions, it must first decide what Christianity is so that it knows what to promote. Do conservatives really want the Christian faith to be defined for them by Congress? By Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank?

Christians have been toying with spiritualizing their government for 2,000 years, and in 2,000 years the attempt has never succeeded in improving the spirituality of the state and never failed to corrupt and secularize the religion behind the effort. According to the Pentateuch, it took the Israelites 40 years to catch on to God’s will well enough that they were fit to enter the Promised Land and become His chosen nation. Those ancient Jews were downright prodigies compared to those who still haven’t caught on, despite 2,000 years experience of God refusing to bless the mingling of church and state.

Our founding fathers did catch on, fortunately, which is why the very first amendment to the Constitution is an amendment telling the government to make no law either for or against religion. America has a pretty spotty track record as far as actually respecting that prohibition (as witness the motto on our currency and the theistic interpolation into the Pledge). But that commitment to liberty and to religious neutrality, even though only partially enforced, has enabled us to benefit from the talent and hard work of people from all cultures, faiths, and ethnic backgrounds, and thus to become a great nation.

Sadly, that neutrality has been seriously eroded lately, and we’re paying the price. But we can recover, provided we speak up and stand up to oppose the Christian Supremacy movement wherever it rears its ugly head. State-sponsored (and thus state-defined) religion is a great detriment to any nation, and even believers ought to be eager to keep themselves unstained by it.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, Americans United and allied religious leaders and organizations take issue with a federal court decision allowing Utah officials to place crosses along highways to memorialize state highway patrol officers who have died in the line of duty.

State officials insisted that the Christian symbol is a secular symbol and can be used regardless of the personal religious beliefs of the officer being honored.

Did you catch that? The state of Utah is telling mainstream Christians that the Cross is no longer their symbol. Nope, it’s been secularized. It has nothing to do with the Gospel, or with paying the penalty for sin, or even with anticipating the Resurrection. All a cross means is death. You walk into a Christian church, you see a big cross up front, and according to the state of Utah, all it means is that someone died in church.

We saw this earlier with the Supreme Court decision upholding the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. According to Justice O’Connor, the reference to America as “one nation under God” is mere “ceremonial deism.” Officially, by declaration of the U. S. Supreme Court, the God we are all under is an absentee God, completely irrelevant to our lives except to the degree that we make Him relevant by constructing patriotic ceremonies that refer to Him in some way. There is no heaven, nor any hell to be saved from, thus no need for a savior or for forgiveness of sins.

It’s easy to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. All you need to do is abandon your religious beliefs, and turn your faith into a hollow and meaningless fossil. If you think that’s a bad thing, then you should remember that, based on 2,000 years of experience mingling church and state, our founding fathers thought we needed that wall. It’s there to protect the church.

You hear the same argument from people in real life. Suppose there is no God (or at least no Christian God). Suppose the Gospel really is just a myth. But it’s such a nice story. What’s wrong with just believing in it anyway? If the fable is pleasant and comfortable, and the truth seems unappealing, why not go ahead and believe the fable anyway? What’s the harm?

I’m always a bit aghast at the attitude behind such questions. I like fantasy games as much as the next geek, and when my kids were little, my wife and I taught them the story of Santa Claus and told them it was a game we play at Christmas. They got just as much “magic” and fun out of the game as they would have if we’d lied to them and told them Santa was real, just like I enjoy a good role-playing session even knowing that it’s all a fake. But I would never for a moment suggest that the pleasurable qualities of fiction should be a reason to deceive yourself and/or others into thinking the fiction were real.

Truth is when what’s in your head matches what’s in the world around you. Any time there’s a disconnect between belief and reality, you have a blind spot, a vulnerability. And if you have to constantly train yourself not to notice your own blind spots (in order to protect your beliefs), then you’re even more vulnerable. In the story I linked to above, an elderly millionaire was robbed and eventually murdered by a pastor, not suddenly, but over the course of a long relationship. Does it really matter whether we know the truth or not? I think it matters a great deal.

Any time you systematically lie to yourself, you train yourself to overlook the little inconsistencies that ought to be telling you there’s a problem. By repeatedly defending what you wish were true, and justifying it in your own mind, you impair your own ability to respond appropriately to the objective reality of the situation you are facing. Your pleasant and comfortable faith might just be lulling you into complacency on your way to disaster. Faith turns off the fire alarms instead of putting out the fire.

“Oh,” some people will say, “but that’s a rare case. There is usually no harm in believing.” The thing is, you don’t know, do you? Maybe you’re the next rare case, maybe you aren’t. But wouldn’t it be better not to voluntarily cripple your own ability to tell the difference? If your future happiness and well-being depends on knowing the truth about your situation, isn’t it better to have a clear and unbiased knowledge of what the truth is?

You don’t need to drive yourself to abject gullibility in order to experience the benefits of faith. My kids got everything out of the Santa game that the true believers did except the big disappointment at the end. If you like the God game, you can play that game too. If you feel like praying, pray to Alethea—you’ll get the same answers as Christians do, only you’ll have a better understanding of why God “works in mysterious ways” and seems to favor the prayers that are accompanied by hard work, careful timing, and wise planning.

Belief is not a bad thing, provided it is based on the real world. But belief based on denying reality is always harmful, even if it doesn’t lead directly to overt disaster. You may have been lucky thus far, but you’re walking into the future with one eye closed and the other eye blurry. That kind of cognitive handicap is too high a price to pay for the pleasures and comforts of mere fiction.

August 24, 2006

Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a “dialogue.”

By blood and faith, Jews are God’s chosen, and have no need for “dialogue” with any gentile. End of “dialogue.”

And there’s more.

November 21, 2004

I would like to comment on the letter to the editor, “Wants off Christian Nation Express,” of Nov. 12.

I am certainly pleased that the writer is dedicated to service in the love of God, even though I find her theological focus on agony and suffering rather than the hope, joy and salvation of the resurrection to be puzzling.

Whether Americans like it or not, the results of the presidential election have propelled charismatic and evangelical Christians into new heights of political power. Many of those individuals would agree that the laws of this nation should be compatible with the Gospel, if not actually based upon it…

November 09, 2004

I read Deborah Carter’s column of Nov. 7, “Election blues,” and I have three comments for the good woman, and for everybody else, as well.

First, it’s clear that views like hers would put Jesus on that cross again. Second, thy loom and churn best be still, come the Sabbath. Third, you can get on board or get left behind, because that Christian Nation Express is pulling out of the station!

Ivins doesn’t come right out and say that he’s an evangelical Christian, but he sure doesn’t sound too unhappy with the prospect of an imminent theocracy. And while he does take a properly scientific view of the biological causes of homosexuality, he nevertheless shares a common conservative Christian conviction regarding Christian morality and its authority over non-Christians.

March 5, 1998

…Even before America was a nation, there was strong opposition to slavery from the religious group known as the Quakers, or the “Society of Friends.” They were steadfast in their belief that slavery was a sin, and this belief led them to be actively involved in the Abolitionist Movement and the “Underground Railroad” in this country.

We should all be thankful that these religious opponents were quite willing to “impose their moral views on others.”

In more recent times we need look no further than those ministers, rabbis and priests whose beliefs brought them to the forefront in the battle against forced, racial segregation in America. Despite real threats to life and limb, they persisted in their efforts to “impose their moral views on others.”

Today we frequently admonish people who oppose abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide or capital punishment to keep their religious, moral, and philosophical beliefs to themselves.

Before dispensing such admonishments in the future, perhaps we should gratefully consider some of our country’s most courageous, historical figures who refused to do so.

Something to keep in mind should you hear any snide remarks about atheistic scientists, eh?

A blanket of prayer for America is being proposed for Sept. 11, 2008, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, because it no longer is the Christian nation it once was, according to a coalition of organizations.

Yeah, prayer, that’s it. If Almighty God can’t make believers out of us, who can? It’s the obvious solution to the “problem” of unchristian America. So obvious, in fact, that you have to wonder why they didn’t think of praying sooner, right? Oh wait, they did.

“In 2001 extremist enemies assaulted America with the terrorists attacks of 9/11. These acts of aggression signaled a physical wake up call for our nation as we entered the new millennium. Our lives were changed forever—millions of Americans fell to their knees in prayer,” the organization said. “Now seven years later, as part of the Awakening America Alliance, Christians are issuing a spiritual wake call through a historical, nationwide prayer gathering on Sept. 11, 2008.

Hmm, so Christians have been praying for the past seven years, and it hasn’t worked yet. What could the problem be?

“CRY OUT AMERICA claims this day of prayer to fully awaken America to return to the Lord and to mark this significant day in its history with POWERFUL prayer for EVERY STATE, EVERY COUNTY, and EVERY HEART. “

Ah, yes, that must be it. We need MORE CAPITAL LETTERS. God’s getting up there, you know. The old eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Write bigger, so He can hear you.

“D.L. Moody once said, ‘Every great movement of God can be traced to a kneeling figure,”” the group said.

But you and I know what it really takes to make prayer work, right? That’s right: people.

“If you believe that extraordinary prayer is needed to awaken our nation and you are willing to be used of God to make this happen, then I encourage you to please visit the CRY OUT AMERICA section of Awakening America, find your county and apply to serve today,” Wilson said.

After all, with enough people helping, plus a little bit of luck, even God can work “miracles.”

State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe issued a statement on Thursday publicly renouncing his nomination for the Christian Soldier award from the Christian Nation-Community of Christ Church.

The Butler County Republican also sent a letter to the group, telling its leaders to stop using his name to publicize a rally planned for August at the Adams Township Community Park.

The problem?

In his statement, Metcalfe said the organization sent him letters claiming it was affiliated with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

“As an Army veteran who had the privilege and honor of serving the United States alongside extremely dedicated men and women of all races, religions and national ancestries, I will not allow my office or my name to be compromised,” Metcalfe wrote in his letter to the Church.

He undoubtedly has served alongside gays and immigrants too, though this doesn’t stop him from promoting laws designed to discriminate against both groups. So it’s not that his goals are really so dissimilar from the Christian Nation’s. It’s just that those darn white supremacists are an embarrassment to the Christian supremacists. “Keep your mouth shut, guys, you’re gonna blow my cover.” And send those campaign contributions anonymously, please.

It is all about equal rights, the gay “marriage” lobby keeps telling us. We just want the right to marry, like everyone else.

That is what they are telling us. But that is not what they mean. If same-sex “marriage” becomes the law of the land, we can expect massive persecution of the Church.

And therefore the oppression of gays must be allowed to continue unopposed.

Remember how they used to tell us that gays weren’t really being persecuted, and that separate-but-equal “civil unions” were a fair compromise that gave gays the same domestic benefits as an official marriage? Well that was a lie, as Colson explains to us now. Civil unions are not even close to being marriage, and upgrading gay relationships from civil unions to full marriages is going to involve some major and significant differences. Quoting his friend Jennifer Roback Morse, Colson writes:

“Legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ is not a stand-alone policy . . . Once governments assert that same-sex unions are the equivalent of marriage, those governments must defend and enforce a whole host of other social changes.”

The bad news is these changes affect other liberties we take for granted, such as religious freedom and private property rights. Several recent cases give us a sobering picture of what we can expect if we do not actively embrace—and even promote—same-sex “marriage.”

Clearly, civil unions are nowhere near what legal marriage is, and Christians like Colson want to keep it that way. They’re afraid that if we ever stop discriminating against gays, Christians will lose liberties they’ve been taking for granted. Like the freedom to discriminate against gays. And, according to Colson, these liberties are already under assault.

For instance, a Methodist retreat center recently refused to allow two lesbian couples to use a campground pavilion for a civil union ceremony. The state of New Jersey punished the Methodists by revoking the center’s tax-exempt status—a vindictive attack on the Methodists’ religious liberty.

Hmm, the state revoking a church’s tax exempt status for refusing to allow a lesbian civil union? Oh wait, it wasn’t a church, it was a Methodist “retreat center”—a separate institution affiliated with the Methodists, but not a church in and of itself. And, as the NY Times reports, Colson isn’t telling the whole story here.

Since 1989, Ocean Grove’s beach, boardwalk and oceanfront road have received tax-exempt status under the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres Program, which was created to encourage use of privately owned space for public recreation and conservation. In its original application for the exemption — which saves the group about $500,000 a year and is up for renewal on Sept. 15, according to Bernard Haney, the Neptune Township tax assessor — the association noted that the properties were open to the public and that the pavilion had been used by outside groups.

Some see an inherent conflict between the association seeking tax-exempt status as a public open space with one state agency while suing another state agency for violating its rights as a private religious group.

Gee, ya think? So here’s a cherished Christian liberty that is being threatened by gay rights: the freedom to defraud the government by claiming to provide open, public access to facilities while simultaneously denying access to groups they disapprove of for religious reasons. Let’s look at the next outrage being perpetrated against those poor, docile believers.

In Massachusetts, where judges imposed gay marriage a few years ago, Catholic Charities was ordered to accept homosexual couples as candidates for adoption. Rather than comply with an order that would be harmful to children, Catholic Charities closed down its adoption program.

Seriously, he said that Massachusetts judges imposed gay marriage. He doesn’t mention exactly which men were forced to marry each other against their will, or which women were ordered to take each other to bed, but perhaps that’s because nothing like that ever happened. And meanwhile, what does this have to do with adoption? Again, Colson fails to tell the whole story.

In compliance with the commonwealth’s so-called antidiscrimination laws, the Catholic adoption agency, Catholic Charities of Boston, has already placed children with same-sex couples over the past 20 years.

The above quote, from a pro-Christian, anti-gay web site (notice the “so-called” in front of the word “antidiscrimination”), shows quite clearly that the Catholic Charities decision had nothing to do with the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. They have been legally obligated to provide non-discriminatory adoption services for two decades, because of laws passed long before gay marriage was legalized there.

So Christian liberty number two, the freedom to make innocent children pay for Christian bigotry, and to use them as mere pawns in a political struggle over the right to discriminate, is also at risk. Christian liberty number three, the freedom to promote anti-gay prejudice in public schools, is also under attack, in California. Colson, however, mentions this only briefly on his way to Canada, where the next example of anti-Christian “persecution” comes from. (Evidently he ran out of American examples and had to import some from other countries.)

Just north of the border in Quebec, the government told a Mennonite school that it must conform to provincial law regarding curriculum—a curriculum that teaches children that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle. How long will it be before the U.S. government goes after private schools?

Yeah, imagine the government telling a private Muslim school it wasn’t allowed to teach that God wants Jews and Christians to be converted to Islam by force, or killed if they refuse. Christian liberty number four, the freedom to promote intolerance and discrimination through private education, is definitely in danger in America, because of what Quebec is telling Mennonite schools. Next?

Even speaking out against homosexuality can get you fired. Crystal Dixon, an associate vice president at the University of Toledo, was fired after writing an opinion piece in the Toledo Free Press in support of traditional marriage . . . Fired—for exercising her First Amendment rights!

Um, yeah, “support of traditional marriage.” What she actually wrote was that she could never wake up one morning and decide not to be black, but gays (she claimed) can stop being gay any time they want, and therefore do not deserve to have their civil rights protected. If that’s “traditional marriage” then traditional marriage is just a code phrase for discrimination, intolerance, and outright lying.

Now, as to whether this did indeed violate her First Amendment rights, I can’t say. People say stupid stuff all the time, and (as Don Imus found out) sometimes have to bear the consequences of intolerant speech. But as a general, liberal principle, I have to say that Colson finally got one right: the Christian freedom to say hateful and untrue things against gays is indeed at risk and deserves to be protected. What it needs to be protected from, however, is not gay rights, but a more general disdain for individual liberty, as expressed in the First Amendment and as threatened by anti-gay Christians like Dixon (and Colson).

Promoters of same-sex “marriage” seem to go out of their way to target Christian businesses and churches. Their goal, it seems, is not the right to “marry,” but to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

No, Chuck, they’re targeting those who are actively engaged in practicing discrimination and oppression against them. The only “rights” that are being threatened are the “right” to be bigoted, oppressive, and intransigent. If you feel punished whenever anybody won’t let you deny others the same freedoms you yourself enjoy, then perhaps you should be punished. If you can’t take it, then don’t dish it out.

Christians Launch Campaign against Global Warming Hype | Christianpost.com
WASHINGTON – While it may seem like everyone believes in global warming and the impending catastrophe it will bring, a group of conservative Christians countered that message Thursday by launching a national campaign to gather one million signatures for a statement that says Christians must not believe in all the hype about global warming.

The “We Get It!” declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

What supporters of the statement seek is to inform Christians about the biblical perspective on the environment and the poor, and to encourage them to look at the hard evidence, which they say does not support the devastating degree of climate change claimed by mainstream society.

Ok, maybe just one comment: are these the same people who claim to be able to see “signs” of the imminent return of Christ? Any bets on which signs we’re going to see fulfilled first?

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way…Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.

Hmm, wonder how this is going to go over with the fine folks at Expelled?

What D’Souza objects to is statements by evolutionists that imply God is not necessary as an explanation for life. For example,

Douglas Futuyma asserts in his textbook Evolutionary Biology: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”

D’Souza’s response to this is to propose a policy against such statements on constitutional grounds.

[T]he First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching or promoting atheism in any way… If you are fired from your government job because you are an atheist, your First Amendment rights have been violated. In other words, the term “religion” means not only “religion” but also “atheism.”

Yet if the free exercise clause defines religion in a way that includes atheism, then the no-establishment clause must define religion in the same way… This means that just as a public school teacher cannot advocate Christianity or hand out Bibles to his students, so too public school textbooks and science teachers cannot advocate atheism.

I agree, with one slight caveat: if you point out that God is superfluous to a scientific understanding of origins, you are simply stating a fact. “In the beginning God created…” is no longer the sole available option. If an atheist professor in the public school system states tells his students science has proven that God does not exist, then he’s promoting atheism, and has crossed the line into territory forbidden by the First Amendment. If, however, he merely points out that God is not the only possible explanation, he’s only stating objective, verifiable fact, and has not crossed the line.

So I agree with D’Souza to a point. Public school classrooms should, in fact, not be venues for promoting atheism, though if your religion is such that merely stating the facts counts as an argument against it, well, you need a better religion. The educational mission of the public schools includes giving students access to real-world facts about the world around them, and respect for the First Amendment should not involve censoring these facts so as to create a false impression that a Creator is still needed.

If you have heard of the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening April 18, chances are you have heard all kinds of distortions and myths about it. So let me set the record straight about some of the most common myths.

Yes, that’s Chuck Colson’s name in the by-line. Apparently, he’s concerned about all the bad publicity that Expelled is getting, and he’s trying to improve things by appealing to people to ignore it all. (Hey, I thought this publicity was supposed to be good for the movie? Why is an expert framer like Colson trying to get people not to listen to it? But I digress.)

So what are these “myths” that Colson doesn’t want people to listen to?

Myth #1: Darwinists interviewed for this film were tricked into participating.

Not so. Each scientist interviewed for Expelled, on both sides of the evolution debate, knew who would do the interview and what it was for. Each of them signed a release, allowing the producers to use the footage of their interviews.

Uh, right Chuck. The fact that they signed releases proves that they weren’t tricked into signing the releases. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the producers of Expelled registered the domain name expelledthemovie.com on March 2, 2007, as a simple WHOIS lookup will show:

 Domain name: EXPELLEDTHEMOVIE.COM

Administrative Contact:

contactprivacy.com,   expelledthemovie.com@contactprivacy.com

96 Mowat Ave

Toronto, ON M6K 3M1

CA

+1.4165385457

Technical Contact:

contactprivacy.com,   expelledthemovie.com@contactprivacy.com

96 Mowat Ave

Toronto, ON M6K 3M1

CA

+1.4165385457

Registration Service Provider:

FatCow, support@fatcow.com

888-278-9780

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.

Record last updated on 16-Feb-2008.

Record expires on 02-Mar-2009. Record created on 02-Mar-2007.

The following April, they sent PZ Myers an innocuous looking letter, which he posted on his web site.

My name is Mark Mathis. I am a Producer for Rampant Films. We are currently in production of the documentary film, “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion”…

We are interested in asking you a number of questions about the disconnect/controversy that exists in America between Evolution, Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.

Notice, Mathis does not say, “Hello, I’m doing a movie called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed that tries to make Darwinists look like crypto-nazis out to destroy all that is good and holy by oppressing and censoring the truth about Intelligent Design.” He fed Myers a carefully crafted description that alluded to certain things that were something similar to the truth, while concealing the fact that he was working on Expelled and intended to use the Myers footage to make Darwinists look bad.

In fact, Colson’s own report shows that Mark Mathis is lying when he claims that the movie started out neutral and gradually became hostile. This was intended to be a movie about alleged “censorship” and “oppression” right from the beginning:

The original idea for Expelled, said co-producer and software engineer Walt Ruloff, came to him when he was working on a project with a group of biotechnologists and learned “that there was a whole series of questions that could not be asked.”The prevailing ideology among many scientists—it turned out—he concluded, was keep your mouth shut, take the research money, and publish only the data that fits with “the party line.” The issue that concerns Ruloff and the others behind Expelled is whether the scientific establishment in this country is going to allow genuine “freedom of inquiry,” or simply shut up—and slander—those who do not toe the line.

Given all this, Ben Stein states, “As long as the cause is right, I’m happy to be in an uphill struggle.”

So the producers knew from the start that they were making a movie called Expelled about “the scientific establishment” allegedly trying to stifle freedom of inquiry. But they wouldn’t let PZ Myers know about any of that stuff. Not until it was too late. Muahahahah.

There’s tons of stuff over at ScienceBlogs about the various unethical and dishonest stunts that Ben Stein and company have been pulling in connection with this movie, so suffice it to say that when Colson calls it a “myth,” he’s only adding his own name to the Hall of Shame this movie is building around itself.

Myth #2: The film is anti-science.

Wrong again. Many distinguished scientists were interviewed for this film and given the chance to express their views. Just like their Darwinist counterparts, the advocates of intelligent design and their supporters who are interviewed are there to talk about science, not to dismiss it.

Or more precisely, they’re there to subvert it, not to dismiss it. The goal of creationism, including ID, is to try to appropriate scientific validity for their own superstitious arguments, so naturally they’re not going to try and undermine the authority and credibility of science per se. They want to make science into a yes-man for whatever doctrines they care to preach, but they want it to be an authoritative yes-man, so that it will give believers another reason to believe.

There’s no question, however, that this movie seeks to destroy what science actually does, which is to discern between the things we would like to believe and the things which are actually true. No matter how many Nazi film clips you play while talking about Darwin, the theory of evolution still accurately describes the way in which new species arise via descent with modification from common ancestors. By attacking evolution, Stein and company are most definitely attacking science. But more importantly, by saying you should attack science whenever it contradicts your preconceived ideas, and by calling such attacks a righteous cause, Stein and company are assaulting the very freedom of inquiry that he claims to be defending. It’s hard to be much more anti-science than that!

Having exhausted his list of things he can call “myth” with a straight face, Colson next turns to a bit of jocularity.

Myth #3: Ben Stein, the actor and writer who hosts the movie, has lost his mind.

…I have known Stein well for years, and he is as bright as a button and anything but out of his mind.

“Bright as a button”? Maybe so, but as Forrest Gump’s mama used to tell him, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Maybe he just hasn’t caught on to the Internet yet, or maybe he’s expecting God to divinely intervene to protect him from the consequences of all the lying and deception which he and his associates are busily spreading as part of the meta-plot of the movie. Then again, considering how notoriously gullible Christians are about that whole persecution thing, maybe it’s not so stupid after all.

On a serious note, Stein and his film’s producers explained that the mud that people are flinging at him is just one small example of what happens to people who question Darwinian orthodoxy.

Ah, right on cue. Mud-slinging usually involves slander, which is saying things that are unkind and untrue. The criticisms of the Expelled movie, however, are not untrue, they are documented reports of actual misconduct and dishonesty by the producers and host. Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them,” but apparently that’s not the case if they’re crafty enough to pull the “only Darwinists say bad things about my fruit” ploy. The voice of the prophetic watchdog, who rebukes believers for their sins, has apparently been silenced in today’s Christian church. Gullibility and tribalism reign.

Myth #4: Popular author and atheist Richard Dawkins tells Ben Stein in this film that there could have been a designer of life on earth, but it would have had to have been “a higher intelligence” that had itself evolved “to a very high level . . . and seeded some form of life on this planet.”

Well, actually . . . that one is not a myth. He really did say it—striking admission, though it is.

And out of context, though it is. Here is Richard Dawkins’ re-telling of the incident, with the omitted details re-included:

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It’s the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots (“oh NOOOOO, of course we aren’t talking about God, this is SCIENCE”) and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn’t rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar — semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such ‘Directed Panspermia’ was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent ‘crane’ (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists’ whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity — and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently — comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

As a myth-buster, Colson fails so badly that he not only fails to debunk the first three of his chosen “myths,” but he’s even guilty of helping to create a new myth in the fourth example. Amazing how this little movie project seems to taint everyone who tries to defend it, isn’t it?

This semester, I learned that one of my colleagues is teaching our Sociology of Religion course with two supplemental texts, neither of which could be characterized as sociological in nature. One is The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. The other is God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens.

Hmm, the course is called Sociology of Religion, and the professor has chosen to include two supplemental texts, “neither of which could be characterized as sociological.” Say, you don’t suppose they might have something to do with religion, do you? What on earth could the sociology prof be thinking, including books that talk about the impact of religion on society, in a class called Sociology of Religion?

Adams goes on to whine about how he tried different ways to defend students against this blatant exposure to atheistic perspectives, with dissatisfying results.

Specifically, I wanted to deal with the following question: “Which worldview requires more faith; a) Christianity or b) Atheism?”

So I invited my colleague to join me in a panel addressing the issue…

Unfortunately, our invitation to join a four-person panel was declined. Since my colleague has had some health concerns in recent months I understood and respected his decision.

Or at least, he claims he understood and respected the decision. That does not stop him, however, from implying that the professor violated at least two “rights” that Adams says UNC students ought to be entitled to.

Christians at UNCW are entitled to expect:

1. In courses raising the controversial topic of religion the professor has every right to assign readings arguing that Christians and religious folks in general are stupid. But the professor should also make some effort to assign readings that reflect a contrary view.

2. When professors are either unwilling or unable to abide by #1, they should be willing to defend their views in a debate or on a panel – especially one that equally represents both sides.

3. When professors are unwilling or unable to abide by #1 or #2, the university should not compound the problem by engaging in violations of the requirement that they exercise viewpoint neutrality in the management of public forums.

Point #3 refers to Adams’ other complaint: that the university was censoring the Christian perspective on the New Atheists. But what did this “censorship” consist of?

I decided to proceed with an event that would begin with my introduction of Frank Turek. He would then give a lecture outlining the reasons why he has concluded that atheism requires more faith than Christianity. We would then open up the microphone for an extended Q and A session.

As we approach the date of that lecture (March 24th, 2008 in the UNC-Wilmington Warwick Center Ballroom) we began to advertise. Unfortunately, our six requests for help from the university were ignored altogether. Two of those requests were directed towards the folks who run the “Faculty and Staff News” link on www.UNCW.edu. The folks who run that source of information claim to have a right to decline postings because they are “political” or, for that matter, to decline to post for any reason they choose.

At first, I thought the decision to ignore our requests was due to the fact that the College Republicans are sponsoring Frank Turek’s talk. Then, I scrolled down the page and saw that the university had advertised a recent voter registration drive sponsored by the College Democrats.

Big scandal, eh? Adams brought in a big-name Christian apologist for the express purpose of promoting Christianity on campus, and the university stood up and in a very loud voice permitted him to hold the event in a suitable campus facility. Wow, you don’t get much harsher than that, right? Ok, they declined to officially endorse and promote this frankly evangelical outreach, but seriously, so what? You’d think the jackbooted thugs had stormed in tear-gassed the place, the way Adams pouts and sulks about it.

Last week, I decided to write a letter directly to Chancellor Rosemary DePaolo to assert that the UNC-Wilmington website is a public forum and that, therefore, they really do not enjoy a right to engage in unbridled discrimination. Unsurprisingly, DePaolo did not give me the courtesy of a response.

And so today I write publicly – in a forum far more widely read than www.UNCW.edu – with a simple list of things I think Christians at UNCW are entitled to expect.

And he has every right to do so, of course, even if his verbal tantrum only serves to make himself look bad. But wait, there’s more! Check out the sour grapes he indulges in because he didn’t get his way:

I think I understand why these three simple requests are met with such resistance at our institutions of higher learning. Because I am a former atheist I know that atheists are often very angry at the God they claim does not exist…

I also understand why atheist professors would be unwilling to debate their reasons for rejecting religions like Christianity. Back in my days as an atheist, speaking truthfully on a panel would have required a public admission that I rejected Christianity largely because it would not have allowed me to continue getting drunk and high every night while splitting time between four girlfriends.

And I think I understand why the university will not help us in our efforts to advertise a talk by Frank Turek. In an age of political correctness there is no greater fear than that somewhere, somehow, someone may be offended. And they are probably correct (not just politically, but factually) to assume that most atheists will be offended by the very title of Frank Turek’s speech.

This need to protect atheists from hurt feelings may lead some to believe that they don’t make atheists like they used to. But I know from experience that the correlation between faith and fear has always been significant, strong, and inverse.

Yeah, um, take that you big mean atheists. You’re just a bunch of alcoholics and drug addicts, and…and…you know what? and you probably have sex a lot too. Yeah. And I’m just right and you’re wrong, so there. Teach you not to let me have my own way. So there.

Gosh, am I feeling spanked right now. Ok, not really. What’s really funny is the way he projects “hurt feelings” and “fears” onto atheists, as though he’s not the one who is deeply upset about students reading The God Delusion and deeply worried about what they might start thinking about if they’re exposed to the atheist side of the debate.

For all his brave talk, Adams is acutely aware of one thing, on at least a subconscious level: God does not show up in real life, and therefore faith in God is always the product of human efforts. He wouldn’t be nearly as upset if Dawkins and Hitchens were trying to argue for the non-existence of, say, the moon, because the moon does exist in real life, and can easily be confirmed by anyone interested enough to do a little astronomy (if one can call such a trivial effort “astronomy”).

But Adams knows that men, and men alone, are responsible for what people do and do not believe about God, and therefore he’s very upset and worried about which men have which advantages. If God actually showed up in the real world, it would be easy to study The God Delusion and point out all the ways in which it would be out of touch with the real world. Adams would have nothing whatsoever to worry about; any doubts could be answered by simply saying, “Look, God,” the same way you would say, “Look, the moon.” But because God is the product of human superstition, hearsay, and wishful thinking, he knows he can’t really do that. That makes him unhappy. And scared enough to throw a public tantrum over it.

I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled!

Seriously. They had a uniformed guard pull him out of line and tell him he could not watch the movie that Ben Stein had made about him. But that wasn’t enough. Not only was he not allowed to see the movie, they evicted him from the theater completely, apparently just for being PZ Myers!

But wait, there’s more. Apparently the Ben Stein people are equal opportunity ignoramuses who apply their “No Intelligence” policy to themselves as well as imposing it on others. While they kicked out PZ, they failed to bar his guest: Richard Dawkins. So here they are, making a movie that accuses others of oppression and censorship, which they won’t let the “wrong” people see, a movie accusing scientists of unfairly excluding intelligent design, which they unfairly exclude scientists from seeing—and they can’t even get that right!

They need to put up a big sign out front, with a picture of some drooling moron (played by Ben Stein), that says “Attention patrons: Your IQ must be at least this low in order to watch this movie.” That way it will be clear just who is and is not allowed to be there.

A few months ago, I was talking with Mom about her eventual departure. Because we both knew she was soon going to meet the Creator of the universe, we concluded there was a special opportunity for her to convey a special message. We agreed that when she met the Lord, she would ask Him to bless Rapture Ready.

It’s not that God would say, “Bless Rapture Ready? What’s that?” There is nothing that He is not aware of. However, I believe it expresses a special level of determination to have God’s divine guidance that we would send someone in “person” to appeal for the continued blessing on this site.

Christians know. They know that their relationship with God somehow falls short of what it should be. If God actually showed up in real life, there would be no need to make a special effort to contact Him via real death. The reason the dead are thought to be closer to God is because He is clearly nowhere near the living—not even for sincere, fervent believers like Todd. And it’s not a failure on their part. God is not here for anyone to get close to. Only the dead are (supposedly) close enough to convey an in-person request to Him. Because God is somewhere over there, out of reach, beyond the Veil. In the next world, not this one.

No matter how much you claim God loves you, no matter how much you claim God has done to eliminate the barriers to fellowship, you just can’t get past the fact that He is manifestly and universally not here spending time with us, the way a genuinely loving God would do once He had solved that old sin problem. In a thousand and one ways, Christians bear witness to God’s absence, not the least being their frustration-driven zeal to try and argue otherwise, and to set up a government-subsidized program for lending an appearance of reality to God.

A real God would not need that. My real God does not need that. But man-made gods, the stuff of myths and superstitions, can’t avoid it.

While the chief atheists write beautifully, their works share a telling defect. They seethe with disapproval of God. Dawkins captures this trend in describing the YHWH of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Such invective clings like chewing gum to atheist polemics and raises the question of why these people are so worked up about a creator they don’t believe exists. [Links added.]

Ironically, he does not try and claim that such accusations are wrong, exactly. He just thinks its somehow wrong of the New Atheists to mention it.

Obviously, of course, atheists don’t object to fictional characters per se, they object to the idea that sane people in the world should be required to obey the “divine will” and “moral” teachings of an alleged god who reflects such low standards. In God’s defense, however, Snow cites Dinesh D’Souza’s attempts to give Christianity credit for everything Western civilization has accomplished in the past 2,000 years.

He describes how Christian principles of free choice and human dignity laid the groundwork for democratic political systems built on inalienable human rights. They inspired free markets in economics and intellectual pursuit. Christian theologians fathered modern science. The world even now takes for granted America’s uncommon generosity, especially in times of disaster and crisis. These traits spring directly from our faith.

Oddly, though Christianity has been around for a couple millennia, it never quite realized it was promoting inalienable human rights, free choice, human dignity (serfs anyone?), and so on, until after the rise of humanism and the Enlightenment. Likewise with science. And though Snow (and D’Souza) want to give the Church credit for “fathering” modern science, there’s little doubt that many Christians prefer religion’s firstborn son, Superstition. How else can we explain conservative Christianity’s suspicion and reluctance to embrace the conclusions that science leads to? If they really think “fathering” science is such a great accomplishment, shouldn’t they be doing more with it than just claiming credit for it?

D’Souza also refutes the common charge that Christianity has unleashed humankind’s most murderous impulses. The most-cited atrocities are either overblown or misrepresented: the Inquisition claimed 2,000 lives over three and a half centuries. The Salem witch trials produced fewer than 25 executions.

He goes on to use the same tactic as Vox Day, in arguing that if any other factors are involved in religious conflicts, religion is thereby automatically off the hook, regardless of what role it might play in provoking and sustaining hostilities in (e.g.) Ireland, Palestine, the Holocaust, etc. The assumption is that a certain amount of religiously-inspired violence is quite ordinary and acceptable: sure, it did play a significant role in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and so on, but it didn’t produce an unreasonable amount of violence. Silly me, I thought that the Body of Christ (who is supposedly the Prince of Peace) ought to be more involved in preventing violence than in causing it. Snow’s standards are apparently a lot lower than mine.

D’Souza takes up a second major tenet of the New Atheism—that religion and science cannot coexist. He defangs Darwinists by demonstrating the compatibility of evolutionary theory and Christian doctrine, and reiterates Aquinas’s assertion that reason and faith complement each other.

I bet Dembski is saying, “With friends like Dinesh…”! Snow seems to have overlooked the fact that this argument only supports the claims of true science supporters like Ken Miller and shoots down the arguments of Ben Stein and the Discovery Institute folks. Thanks Dinesh! Snow dismisses the atheistic rebuttal with a very strange argument.

It also dodges the big question: If reason can explain everything, why can’t it explain where things come from?

That’s like saying “If Christianity can explain everything, why can’t it explain where sin comes from?” Science explains where things come from all the time, unlike ID arguments which simply attribute things to God without explaining how God actually got them there. And since we know that both time and the material universe began at the same Big Bang, it logically follows that there has never been a time when the material universe did not exist. Consequently, questions about how the universe got here are meaningless, since it has been here for all time. But if you think that Snow’s argument above was odd, check this one out:

Ethics produces an even greater quandary. Moral laws have changed less over the millennia than the recognized laws of physics and mathematics. The ethical principles that undergird the Ten Commandments’ prohibitions against stealing and murder are recognized by people in New York, New Guinea, Timbuktu, and even bin Laden’s cave, while scientific theory has undergone numerous revolutions—and will continue to do so.

I know I for one just wish that the Law of Gravity would settle down and pick some, oh I don’t know, “gravitational constant” so that we could know where planets and spacecraft and stuff were really going to go instead of just wandering randomly around like that. It ought to be more predictable, like the moral principles about slavery and genocide, which were ok in Biblical times, but are wrong today (unless God decides to allow it again).

To listen to Snow, Christianity deserves credit for creating a “science” that is always changes its mind and can’t be trusted to tell you anything. Or maybe he’s already forgotten that he tried to give Christianity credit for fathering science? At the very least, this should dispel any rumors implying that Snow thinks fathering science was a good thing.

Whopper follows whopper:

D’Souza states the obvious: “Religious faith is not in opposition to reason. The purpose of faith is to discover truths that are of the highest importance to us through purely natural means.”

You would think, if that were the case, that faith might have noticed by now that God does not show up in real life, and that everything people believe about God, they get from the purely human sources of fantasy, intuition, superstition and hearsay. If we could give D’Souza a good dose of truth serum, though, he might want to rephrase the above claim into something more along the lines of “The purpose of faith is to convince people that our dogmas are scientifically valid.”

Snow rambles on about how atheism fails as a creed (duh, not believing in god(s) fails as a creed for the same reason not eating broccoli fails as an eating plan), and blames atheism for everything from the Reign of Terror to Stalinist Russia (as though there weren’t other political, economic, and ethnic factors involved in these periods just as much as in the Crusades, Inquisitions, and other religious conflicts). His arguments in favor of Christianity are no less propagandistic.

Christianity, in contrast, offers the divine “I Am”—God, speaking through Scripture, saying what he means and meaning what he says. In the person of Jesus Christ, he taught. He ministered. He saved. He chased away the moneychangers and wept at the news of Lazarus’s death. He lived so boldly that he had to be killed—yet did not stay in the tomb.

Snow’s argument is that Christianity has what atheism lacks: an argument from experience. Yet the evidence he cites is not any experience of God that any of us can share in. Rather, he offers only words, the stories men tell about a God who, despite His allegedly great love for us, never shows up in real life to tell us He even cares enough to say hi—a point that even Snow cannot deny.

Every child has felt a shiver of God as night closes and the world grows quiet. Adults, amid the bustle and din, know he’s there. When trouble comes, we whisper his name. We cannot see, hear, or yet walk with him.

“But,” claims Snow. There’s always a but, and it’s a pretty feeble one: “But from time to time we experience a presence that defies description.” In other words, a vague, subjective feeling that is totally unlike what the Bible presents to us as being what an authentic experience of God ought to be like, with pillars of cloud by day and columns of fire by night and so on. Spooky, superstitious feelings are not “discover[ing] truths that are of the highest importance to us through purely natural means,” as D’Souza claimed about faith.

And that gives us a pretty good example of the fundamental problem with Christianity. Tony Snow, defender of Christianity, gives us what he considers to be “perhaps the strongest argument against atheism,” and it boils down to gullibility about the Gospel, and a superstitious experience so vague that even Snow has to agree that it “defies description.” Snow makes a good case for the subjective, irrational, and impervious nature of Christian faith, but given the distortions and double standards he has to invoke in order to defend the content of his faith, I can’t say he’s given us any reason to doubt the conclusions of Dawkins, Harris, and company.

Religiously motivated violence, including arson, threats and intimidation, has been escalating unchecked in the volatile eastern district of Ampara for some time. On 17 February 2008 Pastor Neil Edirisinghe (37), who was leader of The House of the Lord fellowship in Ampara, was fatally shot in the chest while his wife Shiromi (31) was shot in the stomach and critically wounded. Their young son received minor injuries and shock. Investigations exposed this as a contract killing organised by a local Buddhist nationalist angered by Pastor Edirisinghe’s ministry.Also on 17 February, a mob of some 50 angry locals attacked believers attending Sunday worship at King’s Revival Church, Mathugama (in the south-west), with Tamil Christians singled out for more severe treatment. The following Sunday the attackers returned and stopped the believers meeting. On the evening of 2 March, ten students of the Believers Church Bible College, Lunuwila (north-west), were walking from the railway station when they were ambushed by a group of about 10 masked men who kicked and bashed them mercilessly. On 3 March, Zion Mount Prayer House in Mulaitivu District (south-west) was set on fire while the pastor, his family and guests were inside — fortunately they all escaped.

This of course has to be wrong, after all, Vox Day has already proved that the violence in Sri Lanka is purely secular. Or at least, that’s what he says in The Irrational Atheist, in the course of trying to make Harris and Dawkins look ignorant for suggesting that religion has a role in violence and war. Perhaps TIA isn’t yet a real big seller down in Sri Lanka?

If the producers of Expelled are so confident that they can make a strong case of conspiracy against scientists, then before they start showing this to uninformed politicians, they ought to screen it before scientists and historians and philosophers of science, who will be able to judge it on its merits.

Vox’s answer?

Because, PZ, as we’ve already seen with TIA, whenever someone does make a strong case against secular scientists or atheists, these self-proclaimed champions of intellectual discourse suddenly go silent and try to pretend they’ve never heard of it.

Um, yeah. The reason Ben Stein refuses to let qualified scientists review his film is because doing so would silence his critics.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

As Dawkins himself admits, the overwhelming majority of scientists throughout centuries in which the scientific process was developed were religious, or at least claimed to be:

Newton did indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until—significantly I think—the nineteenth century, when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it.

What’s significant about this statement is the way it contradicts the notion that the Catholic Church had been dogmatically opposing Science, as evidenced by its notorious trial of Galileo Galilee, all throughout the Dark Ages and the Renaissance and well into the eighteenth century.

Notice, the contrary position is set up as being the view that the Church was opposing science, and not just trying to assert ultimate authority over science (including veto power over any conclusions deemed heretical). The conflict between religion and reason has always been over the issue of authority, and has not been (until recently) an attempt by religion to openly oppose scientific facts. Even in the Dark Ages, they weren’t that dumb.

But it suits Vox’s purposes to pretend that “the other guys” are trying to claim a more overt hostility than was actually the case. Just give an example of a scientist with Christian beliefs and voilà, he’s proven that “the other guys” are wrong. But just in case that’s not enough “proof” for you, he has some more ad hominem arguments that ought to convince you.

Edward Gibbon, the author of the classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire famously describes them as “priest-ridden, superstitious, dark times.” Of course, it can be reasonably suggested that anyone who is fascinated enough with the Roman Empire to write a million-and-a-half words in six volumes about it, and is blindly prejudiced enough to blame its ultimate collapse on a religion that did not become commonplace until centuries after Juvenal was satirizing the mad decadence of imperial Roman society, is perhaps unlikely to be the most accurate guide in these matters.

Call this the “Judge Jones Response.” Anytime someone comes to a conclusion that is unfavorable to Christianity, it’s safe to say that they must be unreasonably biased against religion, and therefore you can consider yourself justified in rejecting their conclusions without even needing to look at the evidence (no matter how well-documented that evidence may be). It’s all about personalities, about Us versus Them. Gibbon was clearly one of Them (even though his book does not claim that Christianity is solely responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire), and therefore if he says that religion played a role in the downfall of Rome, that just goes to show that Christianity was innocent, and might even have been a positive influence. And never mind the actual history of the Middle Ages.

What is fascinating is that this modern misconception of medieval times is at least partly based upon the romantic perspective of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca, a Christian humanist better known in English as Petrarch, who is considered to have created the very concept of the Dark Ages…

Theodore Mommsen, whose essay on Petrarch was recently selected as one of the thirteen most important critical essays on the Italian Renaissance, makes a convincing case of how it was Petrarch’s fixation on Rome’s past glories and his awe of its grandiose ruins led him to conclude, mostly on the basis of his nationalistic contempt for Germanic domination of what had once been an Italian empire, that he lived in an age of tenebrae, or darkness.

The Dark Ages, you see, were invented by a disappointed Italian nationalist who was upset that the Holy Roman Empire was actually German and not really Roman at all. Never mind that, for example, religious superstitions stifled the study of human anatomy for 1500 years after Galen (except in Arabic countries), or that the history of medieval astronomy is a history of what the Arabs were doing. The Arabs were also making significant advances in chemistry centuries before medieval Christians began to turn from superstitious alchemy into more scientific approaches. The early Greeks dabbled in many sciences, including geology, but Christian Europe in the Middle Ages is remarkably slow to pick up where the Greeks left off, looking into geology only in the 17th century (again, preceded centuries earlier by Arabs).

Not that I blame Vox for taking the ad hominem approach to defending the idea of Church and science. I know I certainly wouldn’t want to try and undertake the task of producing evidence that the medieval Church supported and encouraged free scientific inquiry and a rational approach to understanding the world around us. There’s just not that much material to work with. Certainly, some interesting technical advances were made, such as the heavy plow and the artesian well, but Christian Europe lagged noticeably behind the Arabs and even the previous Greek civilizations in terms of real scientific progress.

What makes medieval history a particularly touchy subject is not just that it was a period of Dark Ages, but that it ought to have been a Golden Age. The influence of the Christian Church over the State under Constantine was something modern conservative Christians have wet dreams about. America never has been and never will be as emphatically Christian as the Roman Empire under Constantine. Yes, the people weren’t all Christians (and if Rome couldn’t make them all Christians, Washington surely never will). But that doesn’t matter. The theme we hear time and time again is that God will bless the nation that turns to Him, and that’s exactly what Constantine did do. The Middle Ages ought to be an example to us of the great prosperity, cultural advances, and general well-being that ought to exist when God is allowed to lead the State. Instead, it’s an example of stifled scientific inquiry and the collapse of an advanced imperial civilization into a fractured feudal society. And don’t get me started on Byzantine history! The nation-state-empire that embodies the ideal of church-state fusion has become the by-word for political intrigue, corruption, and all-around sneakiness.

Small wonder, then, that Vox prefers to imply that those who point out such things are icky people. You know, intellectuals and Marxists and stuff.

It is not within the scope of this book to consider why many Enlightenment intellectuals were opposed to Christianity in general and the Church in particular, it is enough to simply note that this was the case…

This was particularly true of the French Encyclopédistes, and the influence of their landmark Encyclopédie paved the way for modern rationalism and the French Revolution, as well as firmly fixing the notion of the irrationality, superstition, and tyranny of the previous millennium in the public consciousness. By waging a fierce intellectual war against Religion in the name of Reason and by defining the two concepts in inherent opposition to each other, it was the philosophes who were responsible for weakening that pre-nineteenth century social and judicial pressure to which Richard Dawkins referred…

Thomas Riggins, in the Marxist journal Political Affairs, notes that many Enlightenment intellectuals were not opposed to religion in itself, but rather to religion being used by “dictatorial religious elements using religion for their own selfish purposes.” In a variant on this theme, I suggest that the New Atheists are not actually particularly interested in defending science in itself, but are deeply afraid of science reaching a friendly rapprochement with religion.

Since we have already established that the opposition of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris to religion does not stem from any rational fears for science as a body of knowledge, a profession, or a process, and that there was no significant historical enmity between science and religion, it is apparent that the New Atheists’ stated desire to destroy religion must stem from another source.

What Vox is establishing, far better than he intends, is that Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris have very good reason to sound a warning. The Dark Ages happened once before, and by arguing that they really weren’t all that bad, Vox is demonstrating that he wouldn’t be too unhappy to see them happen again. Nor is he alone in this attitude. Be concerned, America. Be very concerned.

What we are getting… is not religious craziness but liberal craziness, not theological error but multicultural reductio ad absurdum. The multicultural premise is that classical liberal rules that apply equally to everyone nevertheless discriminate against racial and cultural minorities that don’t want to play by those rules. Consequently equality of rights for individuals must give way to equality of consideration for groups. Otherwise minorities will feel disenfranchised even in a society where there is equal treatment for individuals under the law.

Having written so much about how the secular government is “oppressing” the Christian minority by refusing to allow them to incorporate their religious views into our nation’s laws and policies, what has happened to convince D’Souza that government accommodation of religion is “liberal craziness”?

It’s simple: this time the religion happens to be someone else’s.

Atheists can break out the champagne: there really are some wacky religious people out there. One of them seems to be Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury,. In a recent speech, Williams ruffled a lot of feathers… when he said it “seems unavoidable” that Muslim holy law or sharia is coming to Britain. Not only that, but our bearded, bespectacled cleric even thought that this would be a good thing because it would foster social cohesion.

D’Souza finds this outrageous, but is it really so remarkable? Let’s take a paragraph from his anti-Muslim screed, and substitute the word “Christian.”

Christians don’t just want to live in the West, they want to live in the West as Christians. This requires preserving Christian practices in Western society; otherwise, Christians must give up their religious identity for national integration. This is the context for Williams’ claim that Christians should not have to sacrifice cultural loyalty in order to be loyal to Britain.

Hmm, that sounds a lot like the kind of thing D’Souza would be cheerleading for instead of denouncing it as “liberal craziness.” But that would imply that D’Souza is a man of integrity and principle, who applied the same standards to all, equally. And sadly, his behavior is not entirely consistent with that conclusion. He’s only opposed to religious accommodations when it’s someone else’s religion; he heartily favors government accommodation, not to say open endorsement, of his own religion.

What makes this even more egregious is that Williams is only proposing that sharia be allowed among Muslims, not that it be imposed upon every Briton regardless of religion. Contrast that with the kind of religious accommodations D’Souza favors for American government: gay rights suppressed for all Americans regardless of religious preference, religion-based bans on abortion, religious veto power over the contents of public school curricula, etc, etc. It’s “liberal craziness” to let Muslims live as Muslims, but it would suit D’Souza just fine to force all Americans to live as Christians regardless of their personal beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Williams’ idea is bad craziness too. Society is made up of different people who need to live together and get along, and that means we need to find some common basis for our rules and practices. The one thing we all have in common is secular reality, and that’s what our laws, our public education, and our government programs need to be based on. Believe what you like in your own head, but if you want the benefits of secular society, you need to live by secular rules.

To a Darwinist, you see, there is no distinction between human beings and animals. We all came about by chance; we are made of the same “stuff,” and we all end up as nothing more than dust. Instead of recognizing humans as bearers of God’s image, Darwinism sees us as nothing more than competitively successful bipeds with opposable thumbs. Forget any talk of human dignity.

Oops, little slip there: it wasn’t Darwin who said man was made of the dust of the earth. That was Genesis 1. But that’s not the Big Lie.

Colson claims that Darwinists see no distinction between human beings and animals. Lie number one. Did Colson actually research what “Darwinists” claim about the distinctiveness of the human species? Of course not. There are indeed some people who see humans as being worth no more than any other animal, and yes, usually they do believe in evolution (just like they believe in gravity and atoms and other well-documented scientific conclusions). Such people, however, are not in the majority, and in fact most evolutionists have no problem at all with the idea that man is more significant than other animals.

If you check up on who’s actually making what claims, you’ll find that it is creationists, and not evolutionists, who are the most vocal and insistent about claiming that evolution implies an inferior view of human value. And that’s not too surprising, because if you look at what the creationists say, and what it implies, you can see that they do indeed have an inferior view of human worth.

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, for instance, will pay lip service to the idea of human worth, as Colson does, based on “bearing God’s image.” In other words, we aren’t valuable in and of ourselves, we’re simply assigned a value based on someone else’s worth. And what does this assigned value count for? Not much, since according to conservative Christian teaching, the great majority of those who “bear God’s image” are going to bear it all the way down to Hell, where that image will be subjected to cruel, relentless, and unceasing torture. So much for human dignity!

There’s nothing undignified or disrespectful about embracing the truth concerning ourselves, nor does it in any way diminish the worth of man to say that his dignity and worth are intrinsic rather than being arbitrarily loaned to him by Someone else. Indeed, the theistic view of man is the one that sees less value in a person, because it always holds out the caveat that God loaned you your human worth, and He can withdraw it at any time if you fail to live up to His standards of faith and obedience.

In conservative Christian theology, the ideal role (and thus the inherent value) of man is that of a slave. “Freedom doesn’t mean doing what you want, it means doing what God wants,” as many a New-Speaking pastor has proclaimed. But more than just being a slave, man is called to be a joyful slave—not only is he bound to serve with “all his heart, all his mind, all his soul and all his strength,” he is bound to enjoy his servitude!

We don’t treat our animals that way. Hopefully we treat them humanely, and if we put them to work, at least we keep them well-fed and healthy as a reward for their contribution. But we don’t demand that they must always enjoy obeying us. So please don’t lecture me about how understanding evolution puts man into a role that’s worse than what theists imagine man is worth relative to God. It does not dignify man to make him a slave in both mind and body.

Last month, the president announced his intention to sell Saudi Arabia some of our most sophisticated weapons. This is a bad idea, and you should let your representative know it right away…

[T]he Saudis do not need this kind of “persuasion.” They already have a good reason: Their oil is controlled by a Shiite minority that Iran, also Shiite, could exploit.

Then there is the nature and actions of the Saudi regime. Defense expert Frank Gaffney, Jr. reminded Washington Times readers this week of what the deal’s proponents hope they will forget: The Saudis are not a “reliable ally” of the United States.

The Saudi government funds and operates “mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centers” in the United States and elsewhere. These institutions spread the Salafist, or Wahabi, version of Islam practiced in the kingdom—the same kind that prohibits the practice of Christianity, that lets girls burn to death rather than letting them exit a burning building in their pajamas.

What’s more, it is the version of Islam that inspires bin Laden and other extremists and seeks to dominate other, more moderate, versions of Islam and destroy non-Muslim nations like ours. Without Saudi petro-dollars, Salafism would be confined to the Arabian peninsula.

We ought to recall also that Saudi Arabia has never recognized Israel’s right to exist. While it is difficult to imagine what good JDAMs would do against al Qaeda or the kingdom’s restive Shiites, it is easy to imagine how they could be used against Israel.

Or us, for that matter. It is common knowledge that Saudi security and intelligence forces contain al Qaeda sympathizers. Saudi intelligence files were found on al Qaeda computers in Afghanistan. It is not a stretch to imagine some of these weapons finding their way into terrorists’ hands and not unreasonable to fear that these weapons might one day be used against us.

But what’s a little terrorism between oil buddies like Bush and the Saudis, eh?

Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we’ve heard that one before.

And of course, if people have known since 2002 that Bush was not telling the truth about Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” why, that must mean we’ve already debunked the people who were saying so. Yeah, that’s it, we’ve heard this one before, so it’s OK to ignore. We’ll just assume that it’s been dealt with.

But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn’t Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out?

I have yet to see any evidence that the Bush administration gave any serious thought at all to the real-world consequences of Mr. Bush’s hell-bent drive to conquest. Asking whether Bush wouldn’t have expected to be found out after the invasion is like asking a horny teenager if she didn’t expect to get pregnant from having unprotected sex. Bush’s short-sightedness and failure to consider the consequences are why we are still stuck in a quagmire in Iraq almost 5 years after he blithely declared the mission to be “accomplished.”

If Bush knew anything, it was that being found out wouldn’t matter. He knew he could count on his right-wing, Christian support base to back him up no matter what the facts were. And in that much, at least, he managed to get something right—as D’Souza himself demonstrates.

D’Souza’s version of history would have us believe that Bush was simply making the best decision he could given the intelligence he had at his disposal, just as FDR did when he decided to start the atomic bomb project out of a fear that the Nazi’s might build one first. It turns out that the Nazi’s didn’t really have an atomic bomb, though they were indeed trying to build one, and therefore (according to D’Souza) it makes the situation analogous to Bush’s rush to invade Iraq.

But no one goes around saying, “Einstein lied” or “FDR lied.” They didn’t lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.

The difference, of course, is that FDR used all the information and arrived at a careful, reasonably objective decision, whereas it has been fairly well documented that the Bush administration cherry-picked its “intel,” assigned inappropriate confidence to a highly questionable source, and retaliated against those (Plame) whose family members returned intel that cast doubts on the administration’s claims, all the while more experienced members of the intelligence community were trying to get the administration to acknowledge that things weren’t as cut-and-dried as he claimed.

To those leftist pundits who say, “Knowing what we know now, President Bush, why did you do what you did then?” Bush’s answer is, “Obviously I didn’t know what we know now.”

Isn’t the president lucky that he’s got Dinesh D’Souza to put words in his mouth for him? In other words, “The buck stops, um, over there in the intel community, somewhere. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.” But the President clearly did know, or at least had access to information which should have told him, that Iraq had been under embargo since the 1990′s, that its imports and exports were highly scrutinized, that the resources available to Saddam were materially inconsistent with him being able to threaten the United States with a “mushroom cloud.” He knew that there was no information linking Saddam to Al Qaeda in any significant way. He knew that the only real “evidence” he had against Saddam was that Saddam was “evil,” and therefore if he denied having WMD’s, that must mean he had WMD’s.

He knew that his invasion of Iraq was an unprovoked attack against an already-defeated and helpless enemy.

What we’re talking about here is a reckless disregard for the truth, under circumstances that ended up overthrowing another sovereign nation, and causing uncounted loss of human life, violent (and ongoing) disruption of society for millions of innocent people, and a very costly and pointless war that not only is difficult to extricate ourselves from, but that also saps our ability to deal with other, more genuine problems like the Taliban. It really matters very little whether Bush’s false statements were bald-faced, intentional lies or whether they were merely criminally incompetent and negligent. Our born-again, God-fearing president had a chance to listen to the informed and experienced professionals who tried to warn him, and he chose to brand them as terrorist-sympathizers instead of heeding their good advice. Morally and ethically, at least, he is fully responsible for the consequences of his deliberate choices, and no amount of toadying by D’Souza and his ilk can absolve him of it.

The Green family plan would infuse ORU with $62 million, adding to the family’s unconditional $8 million donation in November, and it would usher in shared governance, in which professors would weigh in on university decisions and direct the academic aspects of the school.

When the Green family believes the conditions of the proposal have been met, amended bylaws and articles of incorporation will be filed with the secretary of state, the news release said. That is when a new board of trustees will become ORU’s governing body, replacing the board of regents.

Whether this will fix the holes in the walls, or merely paper over them, remains to be seen. This could, however, be the first step in yet another conservative religious school’s long, slow slide into liberalism, objectivity, and enlightenment. Honest scholarship and open accountability have ever been the bane of conservative attempts at higher education.

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. “And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P.”

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff’s officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.

What a great idea! It’s especially telling that Caskey’s “offense” consisted of questioning the pastor’s authority. Christianity is for gullible people, and it’s nice to seem some churches honestly enforcing this policy. Now if we could just get them to kick out all the sinners…

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

The Bush administration, not surprisingly, is trying to pass the buck, and to claim that other intelligence agencies made the same “mistakes.” (They don’t mention, of course, their own role in inducing those agencies to commit those “errors.”) But that’s rather beside the point. The responsible course of action would have been to investigate these suspicions more thoroughly, and uncover their inconsistencies and fallacies before diving headfirst into the quagmire–a course of action that the administration specifically forbade, on the grounds that we “can’t afford to wait for Chicago to disappear under a mushroom cloud.”

What I find interesting is that George W. Bush was elected by a Christian majority (i.e. most of his supporters have been conservative Christians), who assumed that a Christian president would be better than a non-Christian president because he would have the benefit of God’s blessing, guidance, and wisdom. And yet, throughout this whole, long, predictable Iraq fiasco, it has been the Christians in general and Bush in particular who have been the very last to acknowledge the facts and who have made the least contribution to trying to stop screwing things up, let alone trying to recover a reasonable sense of order and stability.

This factor, among others, was one of the more significant factors leading to my realization that God does not show up in the real world, not even in the hard-to-measure realm of sociological trends. The intangible, sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit, which ought to have produced a significant improvement in things, simply does not show up in real life. Bush has become infamous precisely for his lack of inspired insight into foreign policy issues, not to mention environmental issues, economic issues, and fundamental human rights. At best, he’s come up with some “inspired” rationalizations for why torture is ok when “the good guys” do it.

All this could be dismissed as the failings of a weak and fallible believer. But George W. Bush is not an isolated anomaly. His Christian followers still support and defend him. They even deny that he’s making any missteps. Not one “prophetic voice” is being raised to rebuke him with a “Thou art the man.” The conservative Christian church has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Republican Committee, and they recite the party “Talking Points” like it was their creed. They are moved by secular political power, and there is no sign of the power of God anywhere.

In 1999, I was a Bible-believing, church-going, seminary-studying Christian whose principle goal in life was to know Christ and to make him known. My seminary studies had raised some doubts, but it was the Bush presidency (and the shenanigans his team pulled to get him into office) that was the final straw that broke the back of my faith. I could not watch the events taking place in the real world, and God’s manifest lack of any influence whatsoever, even among His believers, without realizing that I’d been duped all along. The real world had been witnessing against my gullible trust in men, but it took George W. Bush to make a genuine unbeliever out of me. I suppose, in a way, I should be grateful.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins portrayed the Christian God as a wicked, avaricious, capricious, genocidal maniac. Dawkins even blasted Jesus for such offenses as speaking harshly to his mother. Yet if the Jewish and Christian God was such a monster, what sense does it make for Dawkins to embrace the cultural influence of that deity? It would be like someone saying, “Hitler was a murderous maniac, but I am a cultural Nazi. No, I don’t embrace the specifics of Nazi doctrine, but I appreciate what fascism has done to shape German culture. Let’s give up the specifics of the Hitler program, but let’s also keep Nazi culture along with the fuhrer’s imagery on our coins and monuments.”

Now, as anybody with a passable aptitude for reading comprehension can tell, Dawkins isn’t embracing the cultural influence of any deity. Christian people (who really exist, by the way) have picked up a number of cultural customs over the years, many of them from pagan sources. Things like Christmas trees, gift exchanges, songs, and so on. Things that they picked up because they found them enjoyable and because they enhance one’s experience of family and culture. The fact that Christians have “re-branded” these things with Christian marketing concepts doesn’t change the fact that these once-pagan practices originally became popular because of their own intrinsic value, apart from any particular deity. It is these things which Dawkins embraces, and he embraces them for their largely secular value, Christian marketing efforts notwithstanding.

What’s really funny about D’Souza’s petulant snipe is that when he goes hunting around for something comparable to Christianity and its influence on Western culture, he decides that the best match is Nazi totalitarianism! Wow. Whose side is D’Souza on, anyway?

He goes on to speculate about various unsavory things that might have motivated Dawkins’s remarks, ignoring the most obvious motivation, which is that Dawkins was simply telling the truth about having always enjoyed the basic customs that Christianity has adopted from other cultures over the years. Then D’Souza plops this one on us:

I suspect that these two factors may have played a role, but the main reason for Dawkins’ remarkable self-identification as a cultural Christian is that he has slowly come to realize that even the values that he cherishes–values such as individual dignity, science as an autonomous enterprise, the equal dignity of women, the abolition of slavery, and compassion as a social virtue–came into the West because of Christianity.

Oh yes, that must be it. D’Souza is such a brilliant debater that he has–tada!–converted Richard Dawkins to Christianity. More or less.

That’s a pretty remarkable achievement, considering the bullshit he’s using to back up his point. Individual dignity? Autonomous science? The equal dignity (not rights, just “dignity”) of women? Abolition of slavery? Where, precisely, are any of those things in the Bible?

Christians did, eventually, come to support those things–after the rise of secular humanism. Ironically, D’Souza is partially correct: Christians have been involved in debates in which the values of one side were absorbed by the other. But the humanistic values that D’Souza cites are values that Christians have only lately, and sometimes reluctantly, embraced. Individual dignity, for example, arose as a rebellion against Church-dictated submission to those in political and ecclesiastical authority (Rom. 12, I Pet. 5). Autonomous science (another recent innovation) acquired its power because it kept demonstrating that the scientific approach is more successful than the dogmatic approach, contra the traditional Christian view that every thought needed to be taken captive to obedience to Christ (II Cor. 10: 5). And why does D’Souza have to waffle about “equal dignity” for women instead of claiming that Christianity is a leader in the effort to gain equal rights for women? Oh yeah, that’s right, Christians still aren’t 100% behind that one.

If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do. If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights. If he will not do these three things for her, then she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money. (Ex. 21:7-9–God demonstrates his support for the abolition of slavery and the “equal dignity” of women!)

Ironically, D’Souza’s argument exposes us to the fact that pretty much all of Christianity’s worthwhile “contributions” to Western culture are things that were brought into Christianity from the outside: holidays that early Christians conquered via “squatter’s rights,” customs re-branded and re-marketed as Christian, values that individuals (including some individual Christians) discovered in the secular world rather than in the pages of the Bible, and that Christianity, once again, appropriated the credit for, even in cases where Christians initially opposed them. Dawkins rightly appreciates the good things that the real world has made available to us. Fictitious gods have not contributed anything worthwhile.

Josh Rosenau, a spokesman for the California-based National Center for Science Education, which supports the teaching of evolution, said the new report is important because the debate over evolution in school is not going away.

Casey Luskin, program officer for the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports teaching students about the criticism of evolution, was critical of the document.

“Students should learn about the evidence for and against evolution,” he said.

I agree with Luskin: students should indeed learn about the evidence. Superstitious attempts to create bias against science, however, are not evidence against evolution.

Evolution is a fact, first of all. John Scalzi visited the Creation Museum–tens of millions of dollars spent trying to convince an unsuspecting public, via glitz and glitter, that evolution was wrong. And he took pictures.

Notice the diagram on the right showing various modern-day mammalian species evolving from common ancestors that were supposedly aboard the ark. New species arising through descent with modification from common ancestors, just like Darwin said. The people who are working the hardest to deny evolution, who are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade people that new species do not arise by descent with modification from common ancestors, the creationists themselves, have to admit that new species arise and have arisen via Darwinian descent with modification from common ancestors.

Creationists have taken to making a distinction between “micro” evolution and “macro” evolution, as though one were possible and the other were not. But even if you make such distinctions, the “micro” evolution still includes the evolution of new species via descent with modifications from common ancestors. And that’s all evolution needs. Some scientists may make a distinction between micro vs. macro, in terms of the rate at which evolutionary changes occur, but that’s not the same distinction as the one creationists are making. And as long as evolution can produce new species out of common ancestors, evolution is still a fact. So there’s two ways in which creationists admit that evolution is true. If evolution didn’t happen, creationists wouldn’t need to create a special label to apply to the kind of evolution which does happen.

And yet, despite the fact that evolution is true, creationists still attempt to deny it. The latest attempt is Intelligent Design, which perpetuates previous creationist attempts at evolution denial even though leading members of the ID movement like Behe and Nelson concede that at least most modern species did arise over millions of years of descent with modifications from common ancestors.

So the evidence we ought to be teaching in public schools is this: evolution is a fact, and people who try to deny it and discredit it are doing so despite knowing that species do arise via descent with modification from common ancestors. That’s the whole truth of the matter, it’s simple enough for high school students to understand, and it tells them everything they really need to know about the “controversy.”

(Photo excerpt used under a Creative Commons license, with thanks to John Scalzi.)

If religion, and Christianity in particular, is responsible for the bulk of this world’s woes as some claim, then why would they commemorate the birth of its founder? I guess it’s the parties, the booze and the presents.

I think Pastor Scott is either forgetting a few things, or else he is reluctant to admit that non-Christians might have reasons for participating in the festivities too. Reasons like family, tradition, and celebrating the human spirit of peace, charity, and togetherness. Perhaps he’s forgetting that non-Christians have been celebrating the mid-winter season for a lot longer than the Christians have been parking their holy day there in hopes of appropriating the credit for the celebration. Or maybe he just wants a chance to renew the traditional Christian insinuation that all non-Christians are selfish drunkards reveling in debauchery.

Well Pastor Scott, let me just wish you, in the best traditions that custom has associated with the season, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year anyway.

Wood said she is living proof for anyone who does not believe God does miracles today. For those who do not believe God still works miracles, Smith had encouragement to offer.“First of all, read the Bible. It’s full of miracles from front to back, and God is a God of miracles; in fact, everything that God does is a miracle. People say, ‘Well I wish God could do a miracle for me,’ well He’s done miracles for everybody. Just saving us from sin and eternal damnation is a miracle, probably the greatest miracle,” said Smith.

If Wood’s story checks out, she is clearly eligible for James Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which would let her drop a nice fat tithe into the offering plate at the North Cleveland COG if she can actually document her claims. There are some aspects of her story, however, which might suggest that she won’t be cashing that million-dollar prize check any time soon.

The first little red flag comes in the second paragraph of the article.

Thirty-year-old Jennifer Wood of Cleveland, Tenn. has been sick her entire life with a rare, incurable blood disease known as Porphyria type EPP. According to the Web site, www.wrongdiagnosis.com, one of the world’s leading providers of online medical health information, Porphyria is a disorder that causes the body to produce too much of the chemical Porphyrin and accumulates in toxic amounts in the body. Two of the main side effects are extreme sensitivity to sunlight and muscle pain.

Actually, there are two or three little red flags in this one paragraph. First of all, there are a number of Internet resources one can turn to for information about porphyria EPP, such as the Merck web site or the web site of the American Porphyria Foundation. The article doesn’t use these sources, however. Instead, it turns to wrongdiagnosis.com–a site whose very name appeals to people who think laymen with little or no medical training can diagnose themselves more reliably than experienced physicians.

Not that the site itself is disreputable or unreliable, of course. An informed patient can be something of a mixed blessing, due to his or her lack of comprehensive medical training, but overall it’s beneficial to have web sites that provide patients with in-depth information on health-related topics, including diseases that the average family doctor might not be too familiar with. At the same time, however, the wrongdiagnosis.com web site provides a rich shopping cart of diseases to choose from, should one be inclined to go looking for symptoms to complain about.

And, unfortunately, the site is not terribly-well organized. Browsing the web site, and searching for porphyria EPP, returns a vast slew of snippets of information, not all of which are strictly relevant. Muscle cramps and muscle weakness, for example, show up under “Porphyria Symptoms,” but if we review the information at the Merck site or in the handy guide (PDF file) produced by the American Porphyria Foundation, there’s no mention of porphyria EPP producing symptoms of muscle pain or weakness. Each different type of porphyria is a genetic malfunction related to a specific enzyme, and the symptoms are different depending on which enzyme is affected. Porphyrias in general may include symptoms of both photosensitivity and muscle pain, but EPP is not one of the porphyrias that produce muscle problems. And according to the American Porphyria Foundation, “it is

very unlikely that … someone with one type of porphyria will go on to develop another.”

Muscle problems, however, are a big part of Wood’s dramatic testimony.

That Sunday morning, Wood said she woke up before the alarm went off and spent time praying for God to give her strength. By the time she was ready for the service, her body was in so much pain she had to fight the urge to crawl back in bed.

“My brother showed up, and he picked me up and had to help me get to the car,” Wood said. “Once we got to church, he had to help me get in to sit down. I had to walk with a cane, and I was dressed in my typical garb; I had on long skirts, long sleeves, gloves, hat, veil and a hooded cape that kept the sun off of me.”

…[At the end of the church service] “I picked up my cane, and I hobbled down to the front, and I laid my cane down on the altar. I took my gloves off. I took my veil, I took off the hat, and I laid them all down, and I knew something was different.

I was so photosensitive that I couldn’t even be exposed to the spotlights that they had at the front of the church. “People don’t think about them, but those spotlights would cause such burning pain on my skin, and when I didn’t feel anything, I knew something was different,” said Wood.

We might expect that a person who found sunlight painful would take steps to ensure that her bedroom, at least, was dark. According to her testimony, however, she was in severe pain in bed, in the dark, when she woke up that morning. She had to be helped to move around as she “hobbled” on her cane, swathed in long skirts, long sleeves, gloves, hat, veil, and a hooded cape. She must have made quite a spectacle!

In any case, her story doesn’t quite match up with the symptoms of the disease as described in the professional resources. Nor do some of her other symptoms match those described by Merck and the APF. For example, Wood says:

“It’s really hard for someone that’s normal to understand that being exposed to sunlight is physically painful,” Wood explained. “It’s like my skin is literally lit on fire—a million beestings at once. And anytime I would get any prolonged exposure, I would blister, and I would swell up and turn purple.”

The name “porphyria” comes from the Greek word for “purple,” however the APF informs us that this is because of the effect the disease has on the color of the urine, not the color of the skin. “Urine from some porphyria patients may be reddish in color due to the presence of excess porphyrins and related substances in the urine, and the urine may darken after exposure to light.” And contrary to Wood’s testimony, Merck tells us that

In childhood, crusting may develop around the lips and on the back of the hands after prolonged sun exposure. Blistering and scarring do not occur. If skin protection is neglected chronically, rough, thickened, and leathery skin may develop, especially over the knuckles. Linear perioral furrows (carp mouth) may develop.

No mention in Wood’s testimony of crusting, leathery skin, or “carp mouth,” and no mention in the Merck article of blistering, swelling, or turning purple. In fact, Merck specifically states that in the EPP variety of porphyria, blistering and scarring do not occur.

Nor, by the way, is porphyria EPP a blood disease, as the trunews article claims. It’s a deficiency of the enzyme ferrochelatase in the tissues of the bone marrow, leading to a buildup of phototoxic protoporphyrins in the bone marrow and erythrocytes, which are then carried by the blood and deposited in the skin or filtered out by the liver and excreted in the bile. The ultimate cause is a defective EPP gene, coupled with an unusually low-output variant from the other parent. Thus, any miraculous cure would need to involve changing Wood’s genetic makeup.

Conventional treatment of EPP involves avoiding exposure to sunlight and fluorescent lights, taking beta carotene, and avoiding alcohol and fasting. According to Merck,

?-Carotene 120 to 180 mg po once/day in children or 300 mg once/day in adults produces a slightly yellow protective coloration of the skin and neutralizes the toxic radicals in the skin that cause symptoms. Another antioxidant, cysteine, may also lessen photosensitivity. The brown protective skin color obtained with topically applied dihydroxyacetone-3 is generally cosmetically preferable to the yellowish tint produced by ?-carotene.

If the above measures are ineffective (eg, increasing photosensitivity, rising porphyrin concentrations, progressive jaundice), erythrocyte hypertransfusion (ie, to above-normal Hb levels) can reduce the production rate of porphyrin-loaded RBCs. Administration of bile acids facilitates biliary excretion of protoporphyrin. Oral cholestyramine (Drug Information) or charcoal can interrupt the enterohepatic circulation, which increases fecal excretion. Liver failure may require immediate liver transplant.

Wood’s testimony mentions “blood transfusions,” but also implies that she had to endure serious dietary restrictions.

It was not until over two years ago doctors have been able to put a name to Wood’s condition as she became more ill and even came close to dying in the hospital. Because of this disorder, her diet was heavily restricted; she slept during the day and stayed awake at night to avoid sunlight; she experienced severe pain and muscle spasms and had to cover her body from head to toe if she was to be exposed to light.

Though painful and incurable, porphyria is not usually a fatal disease. There is the possibility of damage to the liver if the protoporphyrin levels are consistently too high, in which case the patient might suffer a liver failure that would be fatal in the absence of a transplant. Wood’s testimony, however, mentions nothing about any liver problems or jaundice or other symptoms normally associated with liver failure.

Can we rule out Wood’s testimony? Possibly, if we could get access to her medical records, and could do a 6-month follow-up to see how her cure was holding up. These same records, naturally, would also document the veracity of her claims, should she be telling the truth. All she needs to do is sign some release forms and turn those records over to the press, and one million dollars can be hers, compliments of James Randi. Assuming, of course, that she really did have an incurable genetic disease that was genuinely cured.

One final quote, though, comparing the beginning of the article with something Wood said at the end:

After the service was over, Wood spent time outside in the sun.

“I went outside, and I actually got to do what was fun for me. I had to go look at my dad’s car. He’d had a little coolant leak, and before I got sick I used to be a mechanic, so I went out and rolled up my sleeves and got down in his car—out in the sunlight and it didn’t burn. It felt good; it felt warm. I’ve never felt in my life the warmth of sunshine without feeling pain,” said Wood. [emphasis added]

Now look at the first line of the second paragraph again:

Thirty-year-old Jennifer Wood of Cleveland, Tenn. has been sick her entire life with a rare, incurable blood disease known as Porphyria type EPP.

So she’s been sick her entire life, but before that, she was a mechanic.

Call me skeptical.

The female security guard who shot and stopped a gunman at a Colorado Springs church yesterday is crediting God for helping her to resolve the threat by killing the assailant.

Jeanne Assam was hailed by Pastor Brady Boyd with saving many lives in her quick response to gunshots fired at the New Life Church.

“I give the credit to God, and I mean that, I say that very humbly, God was with me the whole time I was behind cover,” she told reporters. “It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God.”

Armed Christian security guards, Christian militias, Christians infiltrating and taking over the Air Force Academy–maybe David Koresh was just ahead of his time.

Of course, there are certain other details, which WND conveniently neglects to mention:

Assam is a former police officer who worked in Minneapolis from 1993 to 1997, but was fired from the department for lying during an internal investigation, Minneapolis police Sgt. Jesse Garcia said Tuesday.

Sgt. John Delmonico, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, said police were investigating a complaint that Assam swore at a bus driver while she was handling an incident on a city bus.

“In giving a statement about the incident, she was untruthful and she was fired,” Delmonico said. Assam denied that she swore at the driver, but her actions were caught on tape, he said.

The union arbitrated the case and the arbitrator upheld the termination, he said.

And what about Proverbs 22:6?

Matthew Murray [the gunman] attended a home-based computer school and worked at his computer for three to five hours a day for the past two years.

A neighbor, Cody Askeland, 19, said the brothers were home-schooled, describing the whole family as “very, very religious.”

Christopher Murray studied for a semester at Colorado Christian University before transferring to Oral Roberts, said Ronald Rex, dean of admissions and marketing at Colorado Christian. He said Matthew Murray had been in contact with school officials this summer about attending the school but decided he wasn’t interested because he thought the school was too expensive.

And lastly, which armed person was God really with?

The man who killed four people at a church and missionary training center died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound, police said Tuesday.

Matthew Murray, 24, was struck multiple times by a security officer at New Life Church Sunday but died after firing a single shot at himself, the El Paso County Coroner’s Office concluded after an autopsy.

The sad end of a life spent surrounded by God’s “love.”

Here’s why Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech is backfiring: Bullies don’t respect their toadies.The speech includes some decent stretches, but it was not, primarily, a courageous plea for religious tolerance and mutual respect. It was, instead, primarily an obsequious bit of sucking up by an outsider hoping to curry favor with the in crowd by parroting their condemnation of other outsiders.

He has some interesting things to say about the fruit Romney is likely to reap from what he is sowing here, especially as a Mormon. Recommended Reading.

Conceit by proxy is a simple 1-2-3 process. First, you take your own values, beliefs, and agenda, and ascribe them to someone else. God works best for this purpose, both because of His assumed authority and because He never spoils things for you by showing up in real life to express an independent opinion.

Second, you swap roles: instead of admitting that you are ascribing your worldview to God, you claim that you are merely obtaining it from God. Finally, you praise God for having such a really, really swell worldview. Of course, this implies that people (such as yourself) who share this worldview are also really really great, BUT you’re not bragging. Oh no, you’re humbly submitting yourself to God and giving God the glory. So even though you’re really bragging about your own values, beliefs and agenda, you’re doing it in a way that allows you to pose as being humbly submissive.

Chuck Colson gives us a good example of this, in a post on townhall.com, ostensibly sharing an inspiring story of Jacob DeShazer, an American ex-POW from WWII who became a missionary and went back to “share the Gospel” with his former captors in Japan.

He remembers, “suddenly . . . when I looked at the enemy officers and guards . . ., I realized that … if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel. . . . [M]y bitter hatred . . . changed to loving pity.”…

Learning to love our enemies is so important, something every Christian must strive for. But when we’re fighting deadly enemies, as our nation is today at war, doing so is a miracle—a miracle of restoration and healing that can come only through faith in Christ.

Did you catch that? Jesus, the “divine” proxy for Colson’s own beliefs, values, and agenda, is the sole source of things that Colson admires, like loving your enemies and forgiving them. Those who do not have Jesus in their heart (i.e. those who do not share the same proxy) are naturally evil, cruel, and likely to torture the innocent. Jesus (Colson’s proxy) is purely good, and thus those who embrace the beliefs and values Colson projects onto Jesus are, by implication, good also. And anyone who fails to share the worldview Colson projects onto Christ is by nature bad, cruel, etc.

This is conceit, plain and simple. Other religions preach and practice forgiveness too. Nor does “having Christ in your heart” mean you can’t or won’t be cruel. One of the tortures used by the Japanese against American POW’s, for instance, was waterboarding, an extremely nasty practice that conservative Christian leaders have been curiously reluctant to acknowledge as torture, let alone denounce. Or read Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World for a sample of some of the things Christians used to do to “test” old women suspected of being witches. Was Jesus not in people’s hearts back then? Plus, how many Christian leaders have you heard lately who’ve been inspired by Jesus to proclaim their love for Osama and their forgiveness of 9/11?

Colson’s bragging is just that: bragging. Christians are no more (or less) forgiving than any other group, and like most people they are far more likely to forgive their own (e.g. conservatives) than those they oppose (e.g. liberals). Nor does “having Christ in your heart” make you any more or less cruel than any other group. It just means that when you are cruel, other Christians will claim that you’re not really a Christian. Colson talks as though the “saved” were better than other people, but it’s simple conceit, nothing more–conceit by proxy.

It feels good to boast. It’s very satisfying to stand up and say “My ideals and my opinions are the best there is, and anyone who disagrees with me sucks.” But there’s a social cost for boasting: people look down on you if you openly expose your own conceit. By projecting their beliefs onto an absent-but-still-”authoritative” God, believers get to have their cake and eat it too: they get to boast about their own views, while claiming to act out of pure humility. Plus they get the added benefit of being able to claim that anyone who disagrees with them is not denouncing believers, but God! Small wonder, then, that religion remains popular no matter what science learns about the real world.