I know criticizing a column at WorldNetDaily is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this guy’s asking for it. In “Welcome to my first column”¹, the author argues that Christianity is going to take over the entire world and in the process wipe out secular humanism and “liberal Christianity, whose basic tenets are the opposite of the Bible”². In order to prove his case, he resorts to hackish extrapolation like this :

In 1900, there were 2 million evangelical or charismatic Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 200 million. In Latin America during that period, the born-again population zoomed from 1 million to 170 million. And in China, just since 1950, Christianity has exploded from fewer than a million to almost 120 million.
. . .
Now, straight-line projections are silly because nothing ever goes in a straight line. But just to give you a comically precise picture of our current momentum: At 8 percent growth a year, the world would have more Christians than people by the fall of 2032!

If you really think straight-line projections are “silly”, why build an entire article around them?? Maybe he believes that by 2032, Christianity will be so popular, it’ll start spreading to domesticated animals, inanimate objects, or reanimated corpses.

My research for my new book, “Megashift,” has found 52 countries where God has brought people back from the dead, mostly in the last 20 years. And these are not near-death experiences, where someone on an operating-room table passes out and sees himself going down a long tunnel. These are stone-dead corpses.

Also, for what it’s worth, I have zero interest in flying saucers, crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, the anti-Christ, or the sexual preference of Spongebob Squarepants.

Whew! Glad we cleared that one up. For a minute there I thought he might be kinda crazy.

^{1 : Yeah, that’s really the name of the column.}

2 : Personally, I blame all those liberal women who insist on wearing pants.

Dubya’s been acting like a tough guy all week with promises to veto bills on highway spending…

The senate overwhelmingly passed a transportation bill Tuesday that would plow billions into highway and transit projects through the end of the decade, but states say that isn’t enough to keep pace with growing traffic congestion.

Approval of the $295 billion measure sets up a showdown with the House, which has passed a $284 billion bill. The administration is threatening to veto any bill authorizing more than that amount.

…and stem cell research.

President George W. Bush said he would veto legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives that would ease restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

“I have made very clear to the Congress that the use of taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against that,” Bush told reporters in at the White House before meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. “If the bill does that, I will veto it.”

Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it. Bush hasn’t issued a single veto during his presidency, so why should we believe him now? As you can tell from this speech he made two years ago, he’s fond of patting himself on the back, but rarely follows through.

“I can assure you I will work with Congress to control excessive federal spending. One reason they give the President the veto power is to make sure the Congress doesn’t over-spend. Over-spending could serve as an anchor on economic vitality and growth.”

Even after bragging that he’d use his power to control spending, he’s earned the wrath of conservative think tanks for out of control budgets and he’s done nothing about record levels of pork-barrel spending. This can really lead us to one of two conclusions : He doesn’t really care about the things he claims to or he’s a spineless coward who’s unwilling to stand up to special interests. Either way, Little George’s veto threats are toothless and should be ignored.

It’s heartening to read the letter that Tom Tomorrow printed in this post from Scott in Nashville. I’ve received plenty of letters and comments along these lines in response to the religious posts I’ve done in the past and it leads me to this question : Are you also saying those things to your fellow Christians or just smartass atheists like me¹ who to like to take cheap shots at the religious wrong? I’m grateful that there are Christians who are willing to fight the stereotype that conservative fundamentalists represent all of Christianity, but correcting misconceptions is only one piece of the puzzle². As Bruce Bawer explains in his excellent book “Stealing Jesus”³, Christians need to reclaim their religion from the radical right :

In recent years, [conservative] Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the [conservative] variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from : The God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative.
. . .
[Conservative Christianity] has warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism. And, quite often, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus-yoked his name and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.

And let’s face it, it’s not too hard to jump to the conclusion that Jesus would have been appalled by fundamentalists’ devotion to “God’s Official Party”. This excerpt for the book of Luke is a perfect example of what I’m talking about :

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good?except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I doubt there are many religious leaders who would advocate giving up everything you own and giving it to the poor, but even with a loose interpretation of this passage, it’s not to difficult to infer how Jesus would react to the men and women on both sides of the aisle who accumulate great wealth while people around the world are literally starving to death. Or leaders who are more concerned with giving tax breaks to the rich while children are dying of preventable diseases due to a lack of healthcare. Or a president who ignores the plight of millions of men and women who work multiple jobs to make a decent living because his highest priority is to destroy the safety net that keeps those same people from spending the last years of their lives as paupers.

I hope this doesn’t come off as preachy or patronizing when I say that it’s time for Christians to take back Jesus from the theological kidnappers of of the far-right. The conservative extremist brand of Christianity is an aberration that doesn’t represent the mainstream and makes a mockery of the teachings of Jesus, who warned :

“Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”

You can be proud of your religion without proselytizing. There’s nothing pushy about saying “I voted against Bush because I’m a Christian” or reminding people that Jesus had more to say about compassion for the poor than he did about abortion, homosexuality, or judicial activism. Considering how much our President is fond of telling the public how much he loves Jesus, it’s fair game to point out how skewed his priorities are when held up to the teachings in the gospels.

But the perception that Christianity is an exclusively right-wing religion isn’t going to go away until the silent majority of Christians stand up and take their religion back. Yes, you should correct people on the far left who make the mistake of assuming everyone who reads the Bible is in league with Fred Phelps, but you should be equally vigilant in regards to the mainstream press. If an AP article uses the word “Christian” to describe Pat Robertson without qualifying it with an adjective like “evangelical”, write a letter to the editor. If CNN implies that someone is conservative because they’re religious, flood their switchboard with complaints. Most of all, don’t let anyone get away with implying that you’re betraying your own faith just because you disagree with the Republican party.

^{1 : I’m describing myself here, not accusing anyone of labeling me as such.}

2 : But it’s an important piece. I often try to be sensitive to these sorts of things, which is why I make an effort to never use the word “Christianity” when referring to the extreme-right without qualifying it with terms like “conservative”, “fundamentalist”, or “lunatic”.

3 : You can read an excerpt of the book here.

Regulars have probably already noticed this, but due to my current residency at This Modern World, there will be a number of posts that will appear on both sites, though I don’t plan to label them as such. There’s a few reasons you’ll find posts appearing in both places :

Tom Tomorrow’s site enjoys a larger audience than mine does and I’d like the things I’ve written that I’m particularly proud of to be seen by as many people as possible.

The readership of his site is different than my own and I enjoy the feedback.

My site has comments and his doesn’t. I’ve said many times before that comments are one of the biggest reasons I do this blogging thing. While I can understand why he doesn’t have comments (bandwidth bills are a bitch and his high profile attracts tolls by the thousands), I still love the instant response from the loose-knit community that appears in the comments section here.

For readers who have loyally supported this site for the past 2+ years, I want to make sure you can still read what I’ve written right here.

In his invitation to join the group blog, Tom said that cross-posting was cool, so most of my favorite posts will show up on both sites. That said, there will be plenty of posts that appear exclusively on one site or the other, so if you don’t read that site regularly for whatever reason, you’re totally missing out.

Haven’t seen the movie yet, but that didn’t stop me from checking out the spectacle at the Arclight in Hollywood last night :

Who’s crazier? Religious people protesting a sci-fi movie¹ or the stormtrooper costume-wearing people who argue with them?

^{1 : Unfortunately, this was a well-executed prank. I was fooled until I saw their website.}

Warning : I’ll be taking a cheap shot in 5…4…3…2…

The judge in Michael Jackson’s child sex trial on Thursday barred US talk-show host Larry King from taking the witness stand for the superstar, saying his testimony was irrelevant.

If you think his testimony is irrelevant, you should see his show. Not only is Larry King the world’s biggest ass kisser, but his choice of topics (like the five shows he’s done on psychics since Aug. 2000) does as much damage to the term “news” than anything on Fox.

Josh Marshall does a great job of explaining the severity of the Republican “constitutional” option :

Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.
. . .
For that to be true stands not only the simple logic of the constitution, but two hundred years of our constitutional history, on its head. You don’t even need to go into the fact that other judicial nominations have been filibustered, or that many others have been prevented from coming to a vote by invocation of various other senate rules, both formal and informal, or that almost countless numbers of presidential nominees of all kinds have simply never made it out of committee. Indeed, the whole senate committee system probably cannot withstand this novel and outlandish interpretation of the constitution, since one of its main functions is to review presidential appointees before passing them on to the full senate.

Quite simply, the senate is empowered by the constitution to enact its own rules.

You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries.

I’m not usually one for slippery slope arguments, but this certainly looks like it would pour a can of oil on our proverbial slope. Would this abrupt decision to declare the senate rules unconstitutional undermine the entire committee system? That would pretty much grind the senate to a halt. What would this mean in regards to everything else the senate has accomplished over the last 200 years? What would this mean for the thousands of pieces of legislation that have been killed in committee over the last two centuries? Is there anything in this precedent that would compell the senate to reconsider bills that had previously been discarded under the “unconstitutional” rules? Are these few judges really worth opening up this can of worms for?

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the people who are supposed to keep the President safe. First there was the potential terrorist attack that wasn’t as important as Bush’s bicycle ride :

The White House launched an investigation Thursday into the 47- minute delay in notifying President Bush about the intrusion of a single- engine aircraft into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital that provoked emergency evacuations.

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute-long “red alert” at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn’t told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50 p.m. — 47 minutes after the “red alert” was issued and 36 minutes after an all-clear.
. . .
McClellan said Secret Service agents accompanying Bush to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., and the uniformed military aide who accompanies the president with the nuclear warfare launch codes had been in touch with authorities at the White House during the scare.

And now we find out that the “dud” grenade in Georgia was an assassination attempt :

The FBI said on Wednesday a grenade thrown at President George W. Bush during a visit to Georgia last week had been a threat to the American leader and had only failed to explode because of a malfunction.

In a statement, a Federal Bureau of Investigation official at the U.S. embassy said the grenade, thrown while Bush made a keynote speech in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square on May 10, had been live and landed within 30 metres (100 feet) of the president.
. . .
The FBI’s statement contradicted an account by Georgian police at the time who said the grenade was a dud, left at the spot to sow panic among the tens of thousands who turned out to greet Bush.

A White House spokesman also said then that Bush, who had visited the ex-Soviet republic to show support for its pro-Western government, had never been in danger.

These security guys had better watch their backs. If they continue screwing up this bad they might end up getting nominated for an ambassadorship or something.

For the last week or so, I’ve been putting together an article about the new trilogy of Star Wars films that I’ve been shopping around based partially on this post. Ultimately I think it’s a little too political for the pop culture press and too geeky (or not hipster-ish enough) for the political mags. Either way, I’m really proud of how the latest draft turned out, so I’m going to include it in the extended entry. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I hope you like it.
(more…)

George Galloway is destroying the senate comittee investegating the oil-for-food scandal live on CNN. I’ll post a transcript when I get a chance.

UPDATE : I’ve posted a transcript of the best parts over at This Modern World.