Religion

Maybe we can be saved as a nation. A new Pew Research poll finds more Americans now believe churches should be kept out of politics.

I wonder how much the Bush reign had to do with this? His eight years has really muddled the divider between church and state that our founding fathers felt imperative to the survival of our nation.Still it is troubling that the poll is this close. It shows that so many Americans do not understand our nation's history or what our founding fathers were trying to protect us from.

I just noticed this comment posted on Malkin's blog about the Tennessee shootings:

Remember - Malkin's community is a closed community. People have to register to post there, and that's only when she offers these very little windows to actually register. It's not like us on the left, how lets anyone register and/or post comments. If the tables were reversed on this tragedy, and someone posted the same type comment on Huffington Post or Daily Kos, the right wing would be in an uproar.

Also - Blue Texan has an interesting post up about the silence from the right on this tragedy. It's short, but gets right to the point; where's the outrage from the right like we saw when a Muslim shot up a church? Yup - their silence speaks volumes.

Turns out the man who went on the shooting rampage in that Tennessee church yesterday, did so because of the church's liberal views. I had a feeling that was the case once I heard the church was Unitarian, but wanted to wait to hear the facts.

Hypocrisy knows no end:

A house mother and teacher at a Christian group home was arrested Monday on six counts of sexual battery after she became pregnant by a 16-year-old Butler County boy who was under her care.

Carolynn Hatcher, 25, allegedly carried on a two-month affair with the boy at Mid-Western Children's Home in Pleasant Plain, said Warren County Prosecutor Rachel Hutzel.

The affair ended after another child living at the home reported it in May, Hutzel said.

I wonder how hard the court's will slap her wrists?

That's what happens when you get candidates from both parties out there wearing their religion on their shoulders.

Hypocrites - all of them!

The 80-year-old leader of a megachurch pleaded guilty Wednesday to lying under oath about his sexual affairs and was sentenced to 10 years' probation. Archbishop Earl Paulk, who has been in ill health, was also fined $1,000 on a single felony count.

The charges stem from a 2006 deposition Paulk gave in a lawsuit against him, his brother Don and the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church by former church employee Mona Brewer, who said she was coerced into an affair.

Yup lying - that's the way of Jesus.

Who Would Jesus Lie To?

A Roman Catholic priest was arrested on perjury charges Wednesday, accused of lying about his relationship with a mobster in testimony to a grand jury investigating a casino owner's possible ties to organized crime.

The Rev. Joseph Sica, 52, was arrested outside his home in Scranton and taken to a court hearing in Harrisburg, where he was released on $20,000 unsecured bail. He is an adviser to Mount Airy Casino Resort owner Louis DeNaples, who is the subject of the grand jury investigation.

And you wonder why so many think churches are full of hypocrites.

Don't they know God said to ignore our laws and constitution?

A rural school district's long-standing practice of allowing the distribution of Bibles to grade school students is unconstitutional, a federal judge has ruled.
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An attorney for the southeastern Missouri school district said Wednesday he will appeal the judge's injunction against the practice.

For more than three decades, the South Iron School District in Annapolis, 120 miles southwest of St. Louis in the heart of the Bible Belt, allowed representatives of Gideons International to give away Bibles in fifth-grade classrooms.

That's the results of a new poll:

A new survey of U.S. adults who don't go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." But just as many (72%) also say the church is "full of hypocrites."

Indeed, 44% agree with the statement "Christians get on my nerves."

LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 "unchurched" adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Considering the state of America, with it's Ted Haggards running around, is this really a surprise?

And all other religions, along with their associated holidays. That is essentially what Congress just said by an overwhelming vote. They have passed a resolution identifying the importance of Christianity and Christmas. What about the Jewish religion and Hanukkah? View vote details here.

Religion has to be the most corrupt part of our society. I don't blame the people who follow it, I just blame the people who lead it.Here is the latest scandal surrounding Oral Roberts University:

Now, his son, Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts, says God is speaking again, telling him to deny lurid allegations in a lawsuit that threatens to engulf this 44-year-old Bible Belt college in scandal.

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males."

If this is what Christianity is defined as, and we are a "Christian Nation", then it's no wonder people hate us. Perhaps people that call us a Christian Nation should now be attacked for insulting the United States.

While the gun debate is at the top of the list, another debate is not far behind - violence in movies, TV and music. As people struggle to figure out what happened at Virginia Tech, they now have a source of frustration, one Cho Seung-Hui, a 23 year old South Korean national. Luckily we have more evidence to go by with a note found in Cho's dorm, but the details of that note are still shady.

So what pushed Cho to this extreme? Could it be related to an increase in violence in our media? To clarify - I say media because we can not only blame Hollywood, but must also include other media, such as cable news, in this group.

Watchdog groups have said violence in television has raised by astonishing numbers over the past several years. The same is true for movies and songs. True those are all fiction and our greatest source of violence comes from the not so obvious source.

Within hours of the massacre yesterday, CNN was playing a cell phone video of the scene. While the video was shot outside the building, you could still hear 27 distinctive shots. Of course all news outlets rushed to get this same footage on their airwaves. What good does that do the people in this country? Even more importantly - what good does it do to the loved ones of those who perished? Not a single thing, but in a world of 24 hour news cycles we now see CNN, MSNBC, FOX, as well as network news rushing to get that shock value.

It is time to look at the Catholic League's president, Bill Donahue. On Friday night, Donahue was on Anderson Cooper arguing why the chocolate Jesus should not be allowed. Here is his exchange with the artist who created the tasty tribute, Cosimo Cavallaro.

Donahue was in great form. He was handing out threats to Cavallaro, like talking about a beheading. He then resorted to the holiest of thou art of name calling. These are all things that Jesus preached about (intolerance, violence, hate).

Yeah right.

Donahue is a disgrace to any religion. Any person who has read the Bible, or even gone to a real church, would know that Jesus would not want to be associated with Donahue. In other words - Donahue is everything Jesus preached against. This is not a man of God, but rather a man of greed. All Catholics should denounce this man. True if he really believes in the Bible and Jesus, then he is facing an eternity burning in hell for his sins. Of course if he believed that, he would not be acting the way he does.

Reverend Ted has been healed!

One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is "completely heterosexual."

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday's edition.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

The lord does work in mysterious ways. Perhaps we should start this kind of "intense counseling" for prisoners? Think about it. All the money we spend on inmates - this would make the Christian Conservatives thrilled!

OR!

Perhaps this is just more typical bullshit from the right wing maniacs. I am sure Reverend Ted has been healed - his sins of being caught have been flushed from his soul (bet he don't make that mistake again). I would not be shocked to hear his name again in the future, and this time the story will sound more like one of Mark Foley.

Oh well - at least Reverend Ted can go back to some of his good ol' fashioned sex talk with the buds at church.

The right wing loons are at it again. Aravosis has a complete run down of their latest attack and this time it is on the Capital Police. Here is a prime example, but please read the entire thing:

1. ALLEGATION: The Capitol Police "allowed" the protesters to spray paint the US Capitol - the police saw the protesters defacing the property and did nothing about it because the chief of police ordered his fellow officers to let the evil protesters do whatever they wanted.

TRUTH: The Police had no idea that a small group was defacing anything, and had they seen the defacement, there would have been immediate arrests. And I quote the chief of police:

Some members of this group did covertly mark the pavement on the Lower West Terrace during their confrontation with us. Had this been observed, I would have directed arrests to be made. However, the size and continual movement of the crowd provided concealment and made detection of their actions impossible. Once the crowd dispersed, I was appalled and disgusted that any individual, whatever their cause, would deface the grounds of the Capitol. Fortunately, due to the notable efforts of the staff of the Architect of the Capitol, their signs of disrespect were quickly washed away.

Now the war bloggers are up in arms over this and wanting to "jam" the switchboards at the Capital Police:

And now, the right wing blogs are getting involved, spurred on by the religious right groups, and they're asking their readers to harass the Capitol Police. Imagine that, trying to close down the phone lines of a police department - and not just any police department, but the police department in charge of protecting our members of Congress from the terrorists.

So in this post-9/11 world, the answer is to jam the switchboards of first responders (and not any first responders - the Capital's first responders)? I know that interfering with emergency response is a criminal activity and I hope they pursue it as such if these idiots go this route. True al Qaeda could be asking them to do this. Isn't that what they would say if this was some "moonbat" calling for this action?

Another thought. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say these right wing bloggers are in some coordinated effort to make the blogosphere so vial that our law makers have no option but to regulate them heavily. Between this and Malkin's totally idiotic rants and the threats of outing anonymous sources for the media, it could easily seem this way. That of course is only if I were a conspiracy theorist.