An Anglican church in Canada welcomed pets to attend their services and Donald Keith, a new parishioner, took his dog Trapper with him. Since he was a newcomer, the vicar singled Keith out and invited him up in person to receive what is known as Holy Communion where you receive and wafer (and sometimes some wine or other beverage) to symbolize the body and blood of Jesus. (Catholics are told that the wafer and the wine actually become transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, but I am not getting into that here.)

When Keith went up, Trapper naturally followed him and the interim vicar said a small prayer and gave communion to Trapper too.

I thought that this was a nice story about a spontaneous friendly gesture on the vicar’s part. When you are handing out what seems like treats to everyone and there is a dog waiting expectantly in line, it is hard to say no. Apparently almost every member of the congregation found the gesture to be heartwarming. But one person took umbrage and went straight to the archbishop and as a result Trapper has been banned from receiving communion. And of course, the Jesus lovers are incensed. Former Watergate felon and now crazy-for-Jesus evangelical Chuck Colson says that this is the result of the dangerous trend of thinking that humans are not special in the eyes of his god.

If I believed in heaven, my guess would be that Trapper is more worthy of going there than the parishioner who complained about him.

This will be my last post. I expect to be taken up to heaven shortly at 6:00 pm eastern time with all the other true believers.

Some of you will be surprised that I will be among the select few, since I have been making the case for atheism and making fun of all religions, including Christianity, and thus would have seemed a sure bet for hell. It is time to reveal the truth. This was all a ruse on my part. I was deliberately trying to drive people away from Jesus because I was working as a double agent for the CIA (Christ Indoctrination Agency). Jesus wanted to weed out all those whose faith was weak enough that they could be swayed by atheist arguments. Jesus wanted only the truest of the true believers, those who are willing to completely abandon all evidence and reason and logic, and instead put their complete trust in the words in an old book of dubious origin and so he and Melvin and Harvey created this agency to carry out this task. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and most other atheists also work for the CIA and are in the top ranks of the organization, so you will have the seeming paradox that heaven is going to filled with people who were considered dyed-in-the-wool atheists on Earth. Life is full of these little ironies.

Some people say that 2% of the world’s population, or about 130 million, will be saved but they are wrong. There aren’t that many true Jesus lovers and heaven would not want to admit any riff-raff. We are a pretty exclusive community and only 144,000 people will be saved in the Rapture.

So I will soon be off to get my wings and harp and enjoy the delights of heaven, such as singing hosannas and hanging out with the Cherubim and Seraphim, whatever the hell they are, because the Rapture manual they gave all CIA agents doesn’t say. I am guessing that they are a comedy duo like Laurel and Hardy who perform their act between the hosanna sessions.

So goodbye and remember that the world actually ends on October 21. Until then you will experience five month of tribulation, which is not going to be a walk in the park. But cheer up. However bad the tribulation period is, remember that when it ends, it will be even worse in hell. And don’t forget to wear clean underwear for the underworld, ha, ha! (Just a little Rapture humor.)

There is a person named David Barton who has been pushing the idea that the US was founded as a Christian country and that the separation of church and state was not intended to be a guiding principle. He is widely quoted in evangelical circles as an authority on this topic and has been influential in setting guidelines for high school textbooks.

In early May, Jon Stewart invited him to The Daily Show which is where I first saw him. Barton struck me as a fast talking snake oil salesman who knows how to impress people with seemingly erudite knowledge and to my irritation managed to steamroll Stewart.

To his credit, Stewart realized that he had been snowed so last week he brought on a genuine constitutional historian, Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania, author of the book Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, to set the record straight. (The book is on my list of things to read.)

You can see all the interviews.

David Barton part 1:

David Barton part 2:

Richard Beeman part 1:

Richard Beeman part 2:

Today’s Doonesbury cartoon continues his series on the Rapture

I also received this link from reader FuDaYi about people having fun with the Rapture with parties planned for the big day tomorrow. One person (an atheist, of course) is even offering pet care insurance for people who want to make sure that the pets that are left behind when their owners get taken to heaven will be looked after. This raises the serious theological question: Why don’t pets get to go to heaven? What kind of god would deny people the company of their beloved pets? I personally wouldn’t want to spend eternity without Baxter.

Not everyone is enjoying the publicity this event is garnering. “When we engage in this kind of wild speculation, it’s irresponsible,” said the Rev. Daniel Akin, president of the Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. “It can do damage to naive believers who can be easily caught up and it runs the risk of causing the church to receive sort of a black eye.”

Of course it does. The church deserves to get a black eye because they are the enablers of these people. His concern about ‘naïve believers’ being misled is hilarious since that group constitutes his entire base. If you encourage people to believe in nonsense, you shouldn’t complain if they believe in nonsense that is different from the nonsense that you believe in.

One of the key cases involving church-state separation (discussed in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom) was McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) which involved a challenge to the practice of public schools granting “release time” for the teaching of religion in school buildings during the school day to those students and parents who agreed to it. The U.S. Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote ruled the policy unconstitutional. This was the first time that religious instruction in public schools had been explicitly ruled to be unconstitutional under the U.S. constitution.

It turns out that Vashti McCollum, the feisty mother who brought the case objecting to this practice and braved the wrath of the religious people in her small town in Illinois, is still alive died only in 2006 (thanks to reader George for pointing out the error) and some PBS stations will be broadcasting a new award-winning documentary The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today that deals with her case. Here is a preview.

If your local PBS station is not listed on that site, you can call them and ask them to consider showing it.

I have heard reports that a caravan of vehicles with billboards announcing the end of the world on May 21 passed through Cleveland a couple of weeks ago. When May 22 dawns and no Rapture has occurred, there will be a lot of disappointed people. This will not be the first time that such hopes have been dashed. There was a major event actually called The Great Disappointment that occurred on October 22, 1844 [date corrected thanks to commenter Robert] when a widely believed end times prophesy failed to materialize.

While Christianity has always had its end-times fanatics, it was the creation of the state of Israel that spawned a huge amount of end-times theorizing because these people believe that Jesus will only return to Earth after the Jews returned to Israel. This is also why there is such a weird symbiotic relationship between Christian and Jewish extremist groups. The expansionist policies of Israel that have ruined the lives of so many Palestinians is supported by the Christian end-timers because they think it is a sign that Jesus has packed his bags and is about to make the return trip to Earth.

I have been having some fun with the whole Rapture thing, because the idea is so absurd. But there is a dark side to it, in that many of the people who take it seriously are making foolish decisions and could ruin their lives. NPR ran a story on some of the people who are waiting to be raptured. One couple with an infant daughter and another baby due in June have abandoned plans for the mother to go to medical school and are spending all their money down so that they will be left with nothing on May 21, arguing that there is no point since it will all come to an end. In another story, NPR described a person who sold off his house and gave up his job to await the event. A colleague of mine described how her former sister-in-law believed in an earlier rapture prediction of 1994 and ran up huge credit card bills that then took a long time to pay off. These people refuse to consider that they might be wrong because to do so would be a sign of lack of faith and cause god to not select them for heaven.

If no Rapture occurs, the people responsible for the predictions will use the standard excuse that the calculations were faulty and go back to the drawing board. This is what current Rapture predictor Harold Camping said in 1994 when his earlier prediction did not pan out. He said it was because he had not read the book of Jeremiah that contained some important clues. That seems a little irresponsible to me. If you are basing a major prediction such as the end of the world on the Bible, and people are taking you seriously, you should at least have had the decency to do your homework and read the whole thing.

In a comment to a previous post, Scott jokingly suggested that it might be fun on May 21 to leave little piles of clothes around because that would be a sign to the believers that people have been suddenly raptured up to heaven. That would be funny except that we have to remember that we are dealing with seriously deluded people who do not think rationally. If these people think that the Rapture had actually occurred and they were not selected and were headed for hell, there is no saying what they will do and it is quite possible that they will go berserk.

Richard Dawkins was asked by the Washington Post to comment on the latest Rapture frenzy and said: “Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon?” He then has a good discussion of how the word ‘tradition’ used as in ‘religious tradition’ tends to bestow respectability on a set of nonsensical myths that have no foundation.

I disagree with Dawkins. We should publicize as widely as possible the crazy and evil things that religions cause people to do. Mainstream religions provide the soil in which the crazies can take root and flourish. We need more and more people to realize that these deluded people are deeply misguided because they are connected organically to mainstream religion, not separate from it. Having a public relations fiasco like the Rapture can only help the cause of skepticism.

Someone has had the fortitude to go through the Bible and tabulate all the people killed by this particular god. The problem is that while sometimes the numbers are given precisely, on other occasions the figures have to be estimated.

The result? 2,476,636 if you count up the actual numbers and, if you include those killings for which no precise numbers are provided, an estimated 25 million.

(via Jerry Coyne.)

Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was asked at a press conference if he believes in evolution or creationism and he replied with his characteristic rudeness and arrogance “That’s none of your business”.

While I would not have said it the way he did, I do agree with him on the substance. There is no reason why elected officials should have to publicly state what they privately believe on any issue that a reporter might be interested in. We are only entitled to know what they do in their official capacities and the reasons they advance for doing it. Issues should be debated on the merits of the competing proposals and on publicly stated arguments in favor of the options and their underlying beliefs are not a necessary part of the discussion.

Having said all that, I was curious as to the implications Christie’s reluctance to answer the question. If he truly believes it is none of the reporter’s business, I agree with him. But what if he instead felt that giving an honest answer might cause him embarrassment or political difficulties? There are two options here. One is that he believes in evolution but felt that saying so would alienate a major bloc of his supporters. The other option is that he believes in creationism but felt that denying the fact of evolution would make him look like an anachronism in this modern scientific age.

The former represents crass political calculation, the latter demonstrates that to deny evolution is no longer something that is intellectually respectable. Both options are signs of science’s progress.