Mac Hammond and his cheesy Prosperity Gospel scam

Minnesota has its own Christian ministry scandal, but it probably won’t get that much national attention, since there’s no sex and it’s just the usual “minister fleeces flock” story. Mac Hammond runs one of those mega-scam mega-churches in a Minneapolis suburb, where he preaches and practices his Prosperity Gospel. It’s a story to make an atheist or a Christian retch.

“Noah was the first investment banker,” he said at the start of one recent sermon, which was filled with folksy charm, biblical references and business jargon. “He was buying stock when the rest of the world was liquidating.”

He’s a smug little bastard, too.

He got one of many laughs when he said the Star Tribune story had “left out” his two motorcycles. He also quipped that his Porsche has been “an expensive ministry tool” because a State Patrol officer who gave him one of four speeding tickets he has gotten in it went through church membership classes. He said he buys expensive clothes because “if I look decent, I preach better, so I’m really doing it for you, amen.”

He’s in trouble right now because he has been using his church for political purposes (to promote Michele Bachmann, of course, who else?) and he’s been skimming the cream off the church to hand him sweetheart loans for his personal real estate games and for his own plane. Jesus really wants him to have that plane. Here’s hoping there’s enough dirt on him to shut this con artist down.

There’s also a little tidbit to completely sour you on “Christian” charity:

The congregation was presented with the annual report, which said the church had $34 million in gross revenues last year and gave $3 million to charitable causes and evangelism.

There’s much more—Jeff Fecke and Andy Birkey have been covering this story well over at Minnesota Monitor.

Evolution Sunday?

Today is Evolution Sunday. It’s that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.

As you might guess, I’m not exactly against the event, but I definitely do not support it. I’m sure a few readers are going to complain that I should be praising these efforts to get people to take baby steps in the right direction, but I just can’t do it.

I’m sorry, but when I see people in chains shuffle a few steps at the behest of their jailer, my heart isn’t in to shouting, “Hooray! You’re free!” You have a choice. You can go to church today, and among the hymns and prayers and magic rituals and chants to nonexistent beings, you can hear a few words in support of science; or you can refuse to support the whole rotten edifice of religion and stay home and read a good book. Which alternative do you think I would support?

Instead, I’m going to encourage you all to participate in my Enlightenment Sunday project. Skip church every week. Ignore the pleas of your priests. Donate money and time to charities of your choice directly, rather than through the intermediary of the church bureaucracy. Improve your brain with books and videos and conversations about science. Think skeptically. I’m sure the participants in Evolution Sunday mean well and are sincere in their wish to reconcile faith with science, but we’ll do far more to promote reason in this country if we withdraw from all participation in the church and let religion wither away from disuse, than we will by encouraging these modern day witch-doctors to spread their delusions.

Oops. That complaint backfired.

I am deeply amused. I’m no fan of “faith & religion” sections of newspapers—axe them and expand the funny pages, I say—but here’s one editor with smarts who gets the thumbs up from me. He gets lots of complaints that those dang non-Christians are being over-represented on the religion page; some of them are typical bigotry of the dominant delusion:

A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these “false” beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having “that Islam religion … shoved in my face.”

Now here’s what I like: the editor decided to apply some common sense and science to the complaint. He looks at the demographics of the region his paper serves. He tallies up the content of the articles published in his section of the paper. He compares them. He comes to a conclusion.

Although Faith & Values isn’t ignoring Christians, my tally does suggest that we are giving nonreligious people less attention than they deserve. We’re already taking steps to correct that.

Whoa. Now there’s a demonstration of commendable Values (I note, though, that it wasn’t driven by Faith, but by evidence and social consciousness). I’m already impressed, but the guy goes a step further and does even better.

Some might argue that the religion section is meant for religious people, just as the Sports section is intended for sports fans. (Because I myself have little interest in sports, I don’t expect that section to cater to me.)

But this analogy is faulty. Nonreligious people have their own codes of ethics and explanations for the meaning of life. Many pursue independent spiritual paths; others are happily secular.

I think these people deserve more coverage in F&V. What do you think?

He’s asking for input. Go ahead, say nice things to Mark Fisher ([email protected]) of the Columbus Dispatch about his sensible and fair attitude. I guess I won’t lobby to have his pages replaced with double-sized copies of Cathy, Garfield, Marmaduke, and Family Circus.

Dangerous criminal safely behind bars at last

Man, this Keith Henson character is a fearsome dude. He was convicted of a crime, fled the state, has been on the lam for 6 years, and was finally caught and thrown in jail, with bail initially set at half a million dollars. What heinous act won him such a nefarious reputation?

He posted a joke on usenet. A joke that made fun of a religion.

Henson was convicted in 2001 under a California law (Sec. 422.6) that criminalizes any threat to interfere with someone else’s “free exercise” of religion. One Usenet post that was introduced at his trial included jokes about sending a “Tom Cruise” missile against a Scientology compound (the actor is a prominent Scientologist). Picketing Scientology buildings and other “odd behavior” were also part of the charges, Deputy District Attorney Robert Schwarz said at the time.

We’re in a sad state when making a joke about a religion is regarded as interference with free exercise of that religion. Especially when the religion itself is a colossal joke.

Although one could also argue that it is no joke that Scientology is populated with such scumbag losers, and has successfully convinced the apparatus of the state to do their dirty work for them.

Despicable D’Souza gets it all wrong

That third-rate right-wing wanker, Dinesh D’Souza, had a article in the Washington Post, in which he attempted to defend himself from accusations of appalling stupidity in trying to blame radical Muslim attacks on the US on liberal culture. Of course, he failed. Instead, he just repeated his crazy claim that it’s all godless Hollywood’s fault.

The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

David Neiwert ably rips that apart on matters of fact—it’s simply absurd that anyone would associate the chosen targets as symbols of atheism and immorality.

Funny that D’Souza would assume that the “pagan depravity” that angers Muslims and radicalizes them has something to do with hip-hop music and the Oscars, when the only real “pagan depravity” that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represents is the willingness of entrenched American powers to readily oppress and blithely murder thousands of Arabs in the sake of a nonexistent threat from “weapons of mass destruction.”

I was thinking, though, that D’Souza is also wrong in principle. If extremists and jihadists despise our culture and are using violence and threats to try and compel us to change, isn’t it the grossest kind of cowardice to throw up our hands and say “they’re right, we need to align our culture with that of our enemies”? That’s basically what D’Souza is suggesting—not a military retreat, but instead the abject, unresisting abandonment of portions of Western culture, simply because terrorists demand it.

It seems to me that instead of surrendering, we ought to be celebrating those aspects of our culture that they find most objectionable: things like diversity, secularism, atheism, sex, independent women, and irreverence. And I thought of someone representative of those ideals, who’d also piss off the right wing as much as she would the Muslim freaks.

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Colorado crazy

A Colorado state senator (a Republican from Colorado Springs, of course), Dave Schultheis, is pushing a draft of an absurd bill to open public schools wide to religious indoctrination, all in the name of the first amendment to the constitution. It’s a demand to create a “Public School Religious Bill Of Rights”, with a long list of religious privileges. Some of them are trivial: it ought to be OK for students to give each other holiday cards with religious sentiments (and of course, they already can), or greet each other with religious slogans (like, say, “Merry Christmas”…hasn’t the war on Christmas been done to death already?). Some sound innocuous but are prohibited for good reason; he wants teachers to be allowed to wear religious jewelry and decorate their classrooms to celebrate their religious holidays. That may be reasonable in moderation, like someone wearing a discreet necklace with a cross on it, but just wait until some fanatic demands the right to hang bloody crucifixes and portraits of Jesus all around the room — then it becomes a repressive sectarian doctrine to allow teachers to promote superstitions that are hostile to some of their students.

The general intent of the document is to clearly prioritize religion as the number one privileged subject of the school, which may not under any circumstances be gainsaid. The rah-rah for god is bad enough, but what I found most disturbing was the way it encouraged the use of religion to undermine good teaching. Here are examples:

Teachers may:

(VII) NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

School boards must set up policies that allow:

(a) A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO OPT OUT OF ANY CLASS OR THE USE OF SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS; OR

(b) A PARENT OR GUARDIAN OF AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MIDDLE SCHOOL, OR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO EXCUSE HIS OR HER CHILD FROM ANY CLASS OR THE USE OF SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.

In other words, if someone follows a religion that says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, you are not allowed to hand them a compass and take them outdoors early in the morning, and if you are a teacher with such a belief you can ignore basic astronomy, even if you are supposed to be teaching earth science. This is a common belief among these loons, that religious freedom means you are not allowed to confront them with reality. You can see where that has gotten this country so far.

Fortunately, other members of the Colorado senate say the bill doesn’t stand a chance of passing. That’s good, and not too surprising, but take heed: this is another strategy for getting creationism and who-knows-what into the schools, by cloaking it under the veil of first amendment religious freedoms.

I had no idea…

D. James Kennedy, head mackerel of Coral Ridge Ministries, had a very serious heart attack last month. He seems to be recovering now, and let’s all wish him well and encourage him to relax, enjoy the rest of his life, and stop standing up in pulpits and lying.

Strangely enough, though, this opponent of godless naturalism and materialism didn’t trust in prayer and faith when physiological catastrophe struck—instead, he took advantage of the best and latest medical care. Funny, that…do you think he had a deathbed conversion? There are no theistic heart attack patients—they’re all clutching for the defibrillator, the pills, the expert medical assistance before they’ll rely on that ineffectual immaterial ghost in the sky.

I do like maps, even of horrible things

Well…here’s an interesting atlas of religion from Spiegel. I’m not entirely convinced of its reliability, though; the majority of Scandinavia is mapped as Protestant, but I have my suspicions that it should be listed as nominally Protestant. By using solid colors and labeling whole populations as being of one religion or another, it’s going to over-represent the importance of religion, which may actually be one of their goals.

(More below the fold)

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More education is always a wonderful idea

Some might be surprised to hear that I’m actually in favor of this change in the British school standards:

Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.

In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has for the first time recommended that pupils be taught about atheism and creationism in RE classes.

The all-important qualifying phrase is “in their religious education classes“. It’s not science, so I’ll always oppose the inclusion of ID in the science curriculum, but I think that exposure to religious beliefs in a critical and secular context is a very good idea. That they’ll also discuss atheism is a significant bonus.

I also wouldn’t mind if the US schools included a comparative religion requirement — as long as a comparative perspective were actually enforced, and they weren’t used to indoctrinate kids into specific faiths.

Here’s a short summary of the new standards:

Pupils will be expected to understand terms such as creation, God as creator of the universe, intelligent design, the Big Bang theory, the sacred story and purposeful design, as well as words that are specific to a religion, such as Bible, Rig Veda, and Qur’an.

The new guidelines for key stage 3 (11 to 14-year-olds), published yesterday, say: “This unit focuses on creation and origins of the universe and human life and the relationship between religion and science. It aims to deepen pupils’ awareness of ultimate questions through argument, discussion, debate and reflection and enable them to learn from a variety of ideas of religious traditions and other world views.

“It explores Christianity, Hinduism and Islam and also considers the perspective of those who do not believe there is a god (atheists). It considers beliefs and concepts related to authority, religion and science as well as expressions of spirituality.”

There would be an epidemic of Head-Asplodey Syndrome if such a course were taught in US schools, I fear.