The scene above is from a Pentecostal church in Detroit, where workers are rightfully concerned about their economic future. The religious approach, however, seems to be to put a couple of big ol’ dinosaur SUVs (at least they’re hybrids in this case) on stage, streak people’s foreheads with oil, and pray for a big bailout.

I hope they don’t get a dime.

Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time.

There was a protest against the atheist sign in the Washington state capitol this weekend. These people don’t seem to pay much attention to what comes out of their mouths.

“The No. 1 thing is, we want the state of Washington and the governor to represent everyone in the state,” said the Rev. Kenneth Hutcherson, the pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond. “But just because you must represent everyone in the state doesn’t mean that you put up with intolerance from the people that you represent.”

So please tear down the sign representing the views of atheists in Washington! Silly man. And if he’s complaining that the atheist sign says mean things about religion, how does he explain this information from a little later in the story?

After being stolen and returned, the atheists’ sign is now cordoned off in an upstairs hallway next to the bust of George Washington, a sign from Hutcherson’s church mocking the atheists’ sign, a traditional nativity display and two other religious signs.

It sounds like the signs are proliferating. With any luck, the state will realize that all this noise about a holiday is entirely inappropriate, and kick the whole bickering lot of them out. I’d be fine with that — keep the government secular.

Let’s leave the final word in tolerance and fair representation of all view to State Rep. Jim Dunn, who also spoke out at the rally.

“It is time to chase out of the house of God all the unbelievers and evildoers,” Dunn said.

Sometimes the Christian death cult really creeps me out. There is a museum exhibit called Celebrating the Lives and Deaths of the Popes that seems to be particularly heavy on the “death” part. It’s got exhibits to give you the “true sense of attending a Pope’s funeral”, replicas of the geegaws dead popes are dressed up in, and crypt and coffin reproductions. All very morbid and intensely repulsive — do good Catholics actually savor the rituals wrapped around the corpses of their popes?

The conventional wisdom is that it was Vladimir Lenin, but officers in our military have access to secret knowledge, thanks to Rick Warren: it was actually Charles Darwin. We learn this from one of those ghastly power point presentations the military churns up, this one from Air Force Chaplain Christian Biscotti, who argues that the way to prevent suicide is to throw away the facts. At least, that’s the impression I get from the twisted history he serves up to justify his thesis, that Warren’s vacuous little book provides the way to make troops combat ready. It might even be true, if turning soldiers into misinformed and ignorant morons makes them better warriors.

A Catholic abbot is accusing Disney of corrupting children. It’s not because they are transmitting bad ideas, but that they are all tied to Disney’s corporate motives.

While he acknowledges that Disney stories carry messages showing good triumphing over evil, he argues this is part of a ploy to persuade people that they should buy Disney products in order to be “a good and happy family”.
He cites films such as Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians that feature moral battles, but get into children’s imaginations and make them greedy for the merchandise that goes with them.

Now I can sympathize to some extent — Disney’s be-all and end-all is profit, after all — but … it’s coming from a high-ranking member of the Catholic church. You could say exactly the same things about the church: they are promoting high-minded moral values, but at the same time they are tying them to the exclusivity of their church. Why should I think Disneyism is any worse than Catholicism or Lutheranism or the Baptist church?

There’s also another little matter of hypocrisy here, since the Catholic church is one of the last organizations that ought to be complaining about the corruption of children. In another piece of news, a document explaining the Catholic church’s official policy in response to child-abuse allegations has come up. Guess what the message is?

The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of ‘strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.

They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to ‘be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.’

You got it — the concern is not for the well-being of children, but for an immediate clamp-down of information and maintenance of internal secrecy. Disney and the Vatican may both be evil organizations, but only one shows a world-wide pattern of child molestation and a policy of protection of serial child abusers.

Americans United has put up a story of religious discrimination from its files. Two women had a little problem with institutionalized religiosity in an Oklahoma public school district.

In 1981, Bell had just moved to Little Axe and enrolled her children in the local public school system. At that time, school officials were allowing a teacher-sponsored student group called the Son Shine Club to gather before school to pray.

Though the fundamentalist Baptist meetings were supposedly voluntary, the school buses dropped students off 30 minutes before classes started. Those who were not attending the religious meetings had to wait outside the building, sometimes in the rain or cold. The Son Shine sessions also extended into first-hour class time, Bell said.

This is typical: public schools aren’t supposed to endorse sectarian religion, but what they’ll often do is give certain religions a few extra privileges, and be a bit more accommodating…and the boundaries get pushed back a bit. It’s smooth and easy to do that, but trying to roll back those unwarranted privileges isn’t so pleasant.

After contacting the ACLU and filing a lawsuit, Bell and McCord became the subjects of hatred and even violence. Bell’s house was burned down by a firebomb. McCord’s 12-year-old son’s prize goats were slashed and mutilated with a knife. Bell was assaulted by a school cafeteria worker who smashed her head repeatedly against a car door. (School authorities praised the cafeteria worker, and she was forced to pay a $10 fine and Bell’s hospital bills, community residents raised donations on the assailant’s behalf.) McCord and Bell were both mailed their own obituaries.

Don’t make assumptions though: McCord and Bell were not atheists, although they were accused of being atheists. They just belonged to Christian churches that weren’t part of the dominant Baptist sect in the area. They still came to a rather reasonable conclusion.

“When I began the suit, I just wanted to stop the religious services at school, but I supported the idea of nonsectarian prayer in the classroom during school,” McCord told the National Catholic Reporter. “Since I’ve seen what religion can do to a community, I don’t support any religious observance in school.”

Amen, sister.

The US 6th Circut Court has just handed down a big decision: victims of abuse can sue the Vatican, and the Catholic church can be held liable for other claims against them as well. Ouch. Bleed ’em dry, I say.

Since a Wall Street Journal editorialist has denounced secularism as the source of all of society’s ills, it’s only fair to get another opinion. Like, say, of a social scientist who has actually done a comparative study of different nations, looking for correlations between religiosity and superior moral values or stability or whatever. Surely, faith-based societies will have some virtues, won’t they?

Uh-oh. The results don’t look good for believers.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

Some of the problems that the religious most strenuously deplore are ones that are exacerbated by the beliefs they advocate.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Now to be fair, these aren’t causal relationships, and this is only a study of correlations, so religion might not be directly responsible — you aren’t likely to catch gonorrhea by going to church. But with the state of American religion, you are very likely to catch a kind of pernicious ignorance by going to church, and that disability might make it more likely that you will make bad decisions with unfortunate consequences that will add to the roster of dismaying statistics.