Why would anyone trust a bill from those two Texans?

Texans should be concerned about Texas H.B. No. 3678, an act “relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools.” It’s authored by Charlie Howard, an overly cheerful and zealous member of the far religious right, and Warren Chisum, who will be known forever as the bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa, and it plays the pious fairmindedness card perfectly, while hiding the fact that it emerged from the sleeve of a pair of notorious liars for Christ. It is an underhanded and sneaky bill that, under the guise of promoting religious tolerance, actually has the purpose of stripping protection from minority views and allowing a Christian majority to run roughshod over secular institutions.

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Hank Fox WANTS!

Coral Ridge Ministries is pushing hard to promote their pet causes, and Hank Fox suggests that they give him a few goodies from their list of crazy literature and DVDs. They say they’ll send it out in return for a voluntary donation, but so far, it looks like the “donation” is less than voluntary.

I recall taking a stab at this a year or so ago with another Christian organization that was trying to sell creationist books while calling it a giveaway, with a completely independent and entirely optional opportunity to donate a few dollars to a worthy religious cause. I never got my books.

Fear of comics

Fanaticism and oppression work! The latest editions of the comic strip Opus are being censored by at least 25 newspapers around the country. I have to concede that Breathed’s work doesn’t have quite the quality it had during the glory years of Bloom County, but that’s not the reason it’s being dropped: it’s because it mocks Muslim dress, and
newspapers are afraid to make fun of Islam.

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. “They just don’t want to touch that,” she said.

It’s not really much of a sex joke — more of a tepid innuendo — and even the joke about Islamic dress is much more about the shallow faddishness of some Americans than anything about religion. Why shouldn’t we be as free to make jokes about religion as we do about politics or sex or entertainment or bodily excretions?

The Holy Eggplant of Boothwyn

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If Pastor Drake’s curses are fizzling, I know exactly what he needs: a blessed medallion made from an eggplant to potentiate his jebus-power. It’s true: this miracle occurred spontaneously, and is exactly the holy artifact any righteous smiter would want on his side.

I will also call your attention to an important and obvious fact: this eggplant did not say “Gott” or “Dieu” or “Dios” or “Бог” or “Deus” or “Dio” or “神” or “الله” — no, it says “God”. Therefore, God chooses to speak in English.

Either that, or it’s the natural language of eggplants.

Lightning bolts? Boils? Sour beer? We must know the details!

Uh-oh. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is in trouble now: some wrathful priest is cursing them in the name of God and has used the power of imprecatory prayer to ask the Lord to smite them.

Oooooh. There hasn’t been any detectable lordly smiting in millennia, or even longer. This could be impressive. You can catch Pastor Wiley Drake on streaming Christian radio tomorrow morning at 9am PST — I’m sure he’ll be calling down hellfire in a most entertaining way. I’ll be traveling, unfortunately, so someone will have to tune in and report back.

Heh. “Imprecatory prayer.” These guys are so old-school medieval, aren’t they?

I need one of these

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Some outfit called the Christian Outdoorsman is selling bibles with camouflaged covers, which seems so appropriate — after all, when you’re sneaking up on the Christ you wouldn’t want to alarm him.

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And why, you might ask, should we sneak up on the Messiah? The clue is in the company’s logo. You want to line him up in your sights. This is brilliant — we don’t do crucifixions anymore, but if we take out Jesus II with a sniper rifle, the Vatican won’t have to change the monograms on their towels.

(via SEB)

Keep doing this!

I am so pleased to learn that Focus on the Family is freaking out a little bit.

The trend is known as the “Great Evacuation,” and the statistics are startling to youth ministers.

Studies have shown at least 50 percent — and possibly as much as 85 percent — of kids involved in church groups will abandon their faith during their first year in college.

The best part of this statistic is that college professors and administrators don’t even try to divorce students from religion — despite my evil reputation, I don’t say a word about religion in any of my classes. All we do is open students’ eyes and expose them to a world of the mind where they are free to question and doubt … and presto, many of them suddenly realize that they can disagree with those obnoxious religious authorities back home.

Well, and to be perfectly fair, they also discover friends and parties and beer and sex. Those are pretty persuasive, too. It’s not an entirely intellectual voyage of discovery.

In an attempt to reverse those numbers, Focus on the Family on Saturday hosted “The Big Dig,” a conference aimed at teens and youth leaders. The goal was not just to celebrate participants’ Christian faith but also to give them the tools to defend their beliefs against questions they will face.

Such apologetics conferences fly in the face of a long-held belief that the way to minister to teens is to wow them with hipness, said Alex McFarland, organizer of the event. But, as 1,600 kids and leaders from as far as Jamaica learned historical evidence of Jesus and defense of the Bible, he said this more academic method seemed to be working.

This is absolutely wonderful. Teach them to value academic methods, and I suspect they’ll be even more vulnerable to academic criticism when they get into college. FoF isn’t inoculating these students against argument, they’re punching little holes in their close-mindedness.

It’s about the principle

Christian charity and love has clear limits.

A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

Yeah, a 5,000 member megachurch spurned a dead man because they didn’t care for who he chose to love. The pastor’s excuse is terrific:

“We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle,” Simons told The Associated Press. “Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it — yes, we would have declined then. It’s not that we didn’t love the family.”

Part of that is wrong: it’s based on hatred of gays and on discrimination against gay people. Part is right: that is clearly the basic operating principle of this church.

People of Arlington, Texas, Rejoice! This church has exposed its hateful foundations, and you can now boycott it in good conscience … on principle.