Give all the fundamentalist Christians a copy of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, then sit back and wait for them to kill each other. I’m amused that the article calls it a “theological argument”: the guy gets upset at the movie, sees his wife, calls her evil, and tries to strangle her. Yep, that’s a “theological argument” in a nutshell.
(via Andrew Brown)
The Vatican has a chief exorcist. There is an International Association of Exorcists. They believe Hitler was possessed by a demon and tried a long-distance exorcism. Oh, and Harry Potter is evil.
Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican’s chief exorcist has claimed.
Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘caster out of demons’ made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.
Father Amorth said: “Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.”
Shouldn’t people be ashamed of being, for instance, the official Vatican astronomer, and having to be in the same category with these witch doctors?
(via The Indigestible)
Wow, it’s only Monday, but I think it’ll be awfully unlikely that we see anyone limbo under the bar of sucky vileness set by Sylvia Browne this week. Watch her lie to a grieving woman. It’ll make you want to take a loofah to your eyeballs.
Oh, wait…am I being stupid in my certainty that Browne is a despicable con artist?
The Florida Baptist Witness got various candidates for office to answer a few questions. They’re bad questions, almost entirely focused on the issues of the religious right, but Katherine Harris clasped them to her bosom and ran with them. It’s actually kind of creepy.
Perhaps this is redundant, since Jon Swift has already taken care of it, but how could I possibly resist an article titled “The Death of Science,” posted on a “Blogs for Bush” site? It’s got wingnuts, it’s got irony, it’s got dizzyingly inane interpretations of science. It’s like everything that’s wrong with the Bush approach to science, all in one short article.
What reasons could a blinkered Bush supporter with a petrified brain and no background in science possibly advance to support the claim that science is dead?
Corruption and wingnut Christianity seem to go hand in hand. Case in point: Vox Day, misogynist Christian freak, is the son of Robert Beale, Minnesota millionaire, founder of both a computer products company and the Minnesota Christian Coalition. The elder Beale is on the lam from The Man for tax evasion.
“He fundamentally believes, and has stuck to his belief since this case started, that the federal income tax is illegal,” said Bradford Beale, his son and vice president of Comtrol Corp., the firm that his father founded.
“It was common knowledge at Comtrol,” wrote Rank, “that Beale was opposed to paying taxes as Beale had begun encouraging people at Comtrol not to pay their taxes and had even placed a poster in the Comtrol lunchroom advising people not to pay taxes.”
Theodore Beale, AKA Vox Day, tries to pretend it’s all a minor misunderstanding.
“He is a highly intelligent, highly educated man,” Theodore Beale said of his father. “My sense is that he believes the tax laws are being applied improperly by agents who either don’t understand that or have gone rogue.”
Daddy makes several million dollars a year, and refuses to pay any income tax. I don’t think there’s a misunderstanding or bad IRS agents trying to persecute him: he thinks he’s above the law.
Oh, and Theodore Beale was contacted at his home in Italy—no doubt enjoying the fruits of his family’s wealth.
(via Blog of the Moderate Left)
I’ve been linked to by WorldNetDaily. Hoo-weee, you should see the sewage in my mailbox now.
People, people, people. There is far too much attention being paid to a pair of obnoxious trolls in the comments. Ignore them. Do not call them out. Do not pester them with questions. Just let ’em rot.
I’m going to have to start disemvoweling the stuff from Bres Mac Elatha/Robert O’Brien and Jason, as well as the posts that refer to them, if you can’t leave them be. I get cranky when I have to start hacking up annoying comments, you know.
Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.
I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian….
I asked a question to my calculus professor: “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before…
He said, “Okay, I’m a Christian you’re a Christian.”
I said, “That’s not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular university. Are we using the same text? Yes. Are you teaching it the same way? Yes. Then why is this called a Christian college and that one a non-Christian college?”
So the fact that taking a derivative isn’t accompanied by a few hallelujahs mean it isn’t Christian? Would it help if they wrote out “dχ / d†”? Maybe he needed to take this course, a calculus with bible verses, instead.
Or just maybe, that mathematics stuff is hellbound anyway.
The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.
St Augustine
So what’s a professing Christian doing going to school as a math major, hmmm?
Lots of sources are telling me about Pat Robertson’s sudden acceptance of the fact of global warming. I’m sorry, but it’s no cause for rejoicing. He accepts it for the wrong reasons.
This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time.”
If there’s one broad, overall message I wish everyone would get from this blog and from my teaching, it’s that science isn’t about getting the right answers—it’s about how you arrive at your answers, by verifiable, testable, repeatable methods and logic and good evidence. Deciding that global warming occurs because you’re having a hot, sticky, uncomfortable summer: bad and unscientific. Deciding that global warming occurs because the climate research community has evaluated multiple lines of evidence and documented an anomalous pattern: smart.
I’m sorry, Jake, but while getting the religious right on the side of conservation is a good thing, doing so on the say-so of an incompetent authority like Pat Robertson who uses an anecdote about the weather to justify it is a bad thing. What are we going to do if Colorado has a blizzard in January, and James Dobson uses that to argue that an Ice Age is on the way? Or if Jerry Falwell has a bout of incontinence, so he prophesies great floods?
