Religion

Somehow I figured the first side I read that brought Nazis — or, in this case, Holocaust denial — into the Intelligent Design debate would be the ID proponents, not the opponents. Guess I was naive. Oh well, Godwin’s law wouldn’t exist if Nazi analogies weren’t useful across the political spectrum. And, by the way, darn those “techniques of rhetoric and debate”. If we just didn’t have those, we’d be in a much better…Oh wait, he doesn’t say what those are, does he? ;) ...

I grew up in Baptist churches…and watched them split. We went to a string of churches on four consecutive Sundays where the pastor resigned while we were there. This is pretty typical, and has been so for a long time. The issues may have been politics, divorce, smoking, church funds, the pastor’s wife, pants on women, sports on Sunday, you name it, but what it usually came down to was a control-freak pastor who couldn’t see past his own nose, and it sounds like East Waynesville Baptist got themselves a real winner last October. ...

I hope people aren’t just so complacent as to easily accept unfavorable comparison of our system of government to Al Qaeda…even if that comparison was made by Pat Robertson and the Family Research Council. (And it gets worse, if you scroll down to the links near the end of the article.)

…as illustrated by gummi bears. Great pictures. Link courtesy of Boing Boing

Jack Hitt in the LA Times: “How quickly it has all happened — that the media, particularly television, has convinced itself that Christianity is little more than a Republican political action committee.” Link courtesy of This Modern World

Interesting analysis of the security considerations behind a small-group voting process, plus much more information than I’d ever heard about Papal elections. Update: I like this quote. “…when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good.”

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Dagger of Forgiveness. Get yours. Link courtesy of intertwingly

A review of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, from The Revealer. Sample quote: In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: “Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings.” And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy. ...

“84-year-old Pontiff ‘serene and calm’ after suffering heart failure.” “Pope John Paul II suffered heart failure and is in ‘very grave’ condition, the Vatican said Friday, but it said he was lucid and spent the morning celebrating Mass and receiving top aides, asking one to read him the biblical account of Christ’s crucifixion and burial.” One figures that resuscitation might fit in there somewhere, but he’s a tough old guy, so maybe he’s just soldiering on. ...

From the inimitable Fafblog…