Christmas at the White House

These guys just amaze me.

The invitation sent to American Jewish leaders on behalf of the President and First Lady, requesting "the pleasure of your company at a Hanukkah reception," bore an image of a Clydesdale horse-drawn cart, carrying the White House Christmas tree, with a Christmas wreath-adorned White House in the background.

A lot of Christians, and the Bush White House seems to have more than it's share of such Christians, think Hanukkah is just the Jewish word for Christmas.

Education

While not actually a teacher, this woman is a member of the Texas Board of Education.

In a column posted on the Christian Worldview Network Web site, Dunbar wrote that a terrorist attack on America during the first six months of an Obama administration "will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny."

She also suggests Obama would seek to expand his power by declaring martial law throughout the country.

She is actually part of the process of determining education policy in the State of Texas.

The State Board of Education will begin revising public school social studies curriculum standards after adopting rules for science next year. Those standards will determine the content in new public school textbooks.

I went to grade school through a couple of years of high school in Texas and this sort of thing is really sad to see.

Cults, Sex, Texas, and Catholics

I haven't said anything about the Texas raid on the families in Texas, to prevent children being raised in a non-traditional religion, because the whole thing is just so stunning that I don't know where to start.

So, I'll just start streaming a post together.

Start with the number. 416 kids. Some of them infants. Texas is claiming that they were being sexually molested? Not even the State of Texas is insane enough to claim that. So what are they claiming? What is the justification for raiding the homes and seizing the children?

That's just not clear at all.

They seem to be claiming that a few of them either have been molested or might be molested in the future. And they can't identify which ones are actually at risk. So they have to kill kidnap seize them all to protect the few.

So far what they've accomplished is to have created a mess. That's probably a good thing if it's important to misdirect attention away from the actual lack of any legal justification on the part of the State of Texas.

That's a start.

Church brands

This is an article about a Tennesee church that changed it's affiliation from Episcopal to Angilican. The article points out that this is a form of branding as if it's something new in the church business.

The only thing new about it is the use of the term branding is new. It's always been part of the whole thing. When I was a kid we were Lutherans. Not just Lutherans but Missouri Synod Lutherans. That was our brand. Like Coke has Pepsi we had other guys who were American Synod Lutherans. There may have been some deep theological differece between the two, but the only important difference was that were Missouri Synod and they weren't. Us good. Them bad.

What do they think of us?

If you want to get a picture of what the rest of the industrial world thinks of the United States read through the comments on this blog post.

Basically they think we're the Christian version of Islamic nutcases.

Bible verse for today

Teaching children the importance of obedience.

God's Grace

"We were blessed by God's grace and saved from harm" says a survivor of the recent Pensacola tornadoes being interviewed on MSNBC.

I guess the Devil sends the tornadoes and God saves you from the Devil's wrath.

Teaching them how to put a list in rank order

Patterico has a blog post about some high school student who is being denied a diploma unless she apologizes to the school district for making an unauthorized reference to Jesus in her valedictorian speech.

The school, of course, is simply run by idiots. The student either fulfilled the requirements for a degree or she didn't. I don't think that giving an approved valedictorian speech is listed somewhere as a requirement for a degree. I think the requirements were fulfilled long before the offending speech, they owe her a degree, she doesn't owe them anything.

But after looking at it more closely, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe giving an approved valedictorian speech is requirement for a high school diploma in Denver.

Erica Corder was one of 15 valedictorians at Lewis-Palmer High School in 2006.

Fifteen. Fifteen v valedictorians? What does valedictorian mean in Denver? Does it mean student? Were there 15 students in the graduating class?

What the hell is the matter with these people?

Hypocrites

The hypocrisy of the catholic church is just amazing. To call them hypocrites might be too polite.

It seems that the catholic church, a large operator of gambling games nationwide (church bingo) has a history of organized opposition to casino gambling in Massachusetts. They claim it's been for "moral reasons" rather than just a boldfaced attempt to limit competition.

But they've somehow lost their political influence with all the little problems with priests and little boys. Not quite the pretense of moral authority they once were.

Pretense is all they've ever been, and now that they've lost that we can only hope they just dry up and blow away.

Jesus loves you, with some conditions

He won't love you if you can't keep up.

BANQUETE, Texas — The director of a Christian boot camp and an employee were arrested Friday for allegedly dragging a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell behind the group during a morning run, authorities said.

Charles Eugene Flowers and Stephanie Bassitt of San Antonio-based Love Demonstrated Ministries, a 32-day boot camp, were arrested on aggravated assault charges for the alleged June 12 incident.

The two are accused of tying the girl to the van with a rope then dragging her, according to an arrest affidavit filed Wednesday by the Nueces County Sheriff's Department.

Both remained in Nueces County Jail late Friday on $100,000 bond each.

A call to Love Demonstrated Ministries was not immediately returned Friday. No listing was found for Bassitt. An answering machine at a listing for Flowers cut off during an attempt to leave a message Friday.

Flowers, the camp's director, allegedly ordered Bassitt to run alongside the girl after she fell behind, the affidavit said. When the girl stopped running, Bassitt allegedly yelled at her and pinned her to the ground while Flowers tied the rope to her, according to the affidavit.

The girl's mother gave investigators photos of her daughter's injuries that were taken at a hospital where the girl was treated and a sworn statement from a witness who claimed to see the girl being dragged on her stomach at least three times.

I know where that camp is, it's just outside of Corpus Christi and it's like an armed camp, with fences and barricades at the gate. It's a camp for wayward girls.

Good Catholics

Hat tip to RaiderFan of rec.gambling.poker for this one.

The Catholic Church in Los Angeles is paying for their sins.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles reached a settlement agreement Saturday with more than 500 people who allege they were sexually abused by clergy, the main plaintiff's attorney said.

RaiderFan noted that it doesn't say anything about anybody getting fired.

Of course nobody will get fired. The only reason those boys were abused is that God used the abuse to show them the consequences of failing to be good Catholics. If they'd been good Catholics to start with then it never would have happened. Priests are simply the instrument of God.

If our courts hadn't been taken over by secular humanists none of this would be happening to the Church. We need more Catholic judges to give a layer of protection to these Men of God.

I like the Landover Baptist Church approach to the problem.

Update:
The pope seems to agree with me. He thinks people who aren't good catholics suffer from defects.

Is there actually a reason to put up with these people? Are we afraid that they'll burn us at the stake if we laugh at them?

Betty Bowers mourns Jerry's passing

Betty Bowers, American's Best Christian, mourns the death of Jerry Falwell.

Verily, I am crying as I type. You can imagine my shock in hearing that Reverend Jerry Falwell had been found dead, lying in a pool of his own gravy. First Anna Nicole, now Jerry. Frankly, the Lord seems to be on a fat, attention-whore killing spree! I’d stay indoors if I were Rosie O’Donnell. Well, on second thought, if I looked like Rosie O'Donnell, I'd be running through the streets screaming, "Here I am Lord! Come and get me!"

Read the whole thing.

Why did Gonzales fire them?

Terry Frank quotes a comment by the non-candidate, Fred Thompson (the other Thompson) on why he thinks the assistant attorney generals were fired --

There was nothing wrong with firing eight U.S. attorneys. Of course the Department of Justice was inept in the way they did it, trying to conceal things that didn’t need to be concealed but the U.S. attorneys, like innumerable other public officials serve at the pleasure of the president. He fired eight of his own appointees apparently because they we not aggressive enough in pursuing voting fraud cases.

That could be the reason they were fired. That was the original best guess by a lot of people.

But the problem is that we don't know why they were fired, and whatever that reason is, we were lied to about what it was. We were told they were fired for poor performance. That turns out to have been a lie -- Gonzales now says that's not the reason they were fired. But he also seems to be saying he doesn't know why they were fired.

This just isn't making sense. It's actually starting to look like they were fired because they didn't accept the Regent Law School dogma that George was sent to us by God to protect us from the infidels and the queers. There's as much evidence for that explanation as for any other.

Soldiers in the Army of God

I watched Soldiers in the Army of God tonite. Scary stuff Some scary dudes.

One guy had found God in prison, when he was doing 20 years for murder during an armed robbery. God told him to take a razor blade and circumsize himself. So he did it.

These are the people going around killing oby/gyns and bombing women's clinics.

If we need to be in a war on terror this documentary pinpoints who the targets of that war need to be.

Debates

I was just watching a re-run of the MSNBC Republican debates and was struck at how much Chris Matthews asked them questions about Republican nonsense -- evolution, Terry Shavio, pardon of Scooter Libby, Roe v. Wade.

These are Republican hot buttons that have had a history of being trotted out to distract the faithful from incompetence.

At least we know for sure that 3 of the 10 (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo) simply don't have the intellectual capacity to run the United States government.

Atheism

Atheism is a religious concept.

When I was 11/12 I took confirmation classes in the Lutheran Church every Saturday morning. It kind of had the opposite effect of what was intended. Those classes managed to convince me that religion was just nonsense.

I was never a favorite of teachers, I had a habit of questioning almost anything they told me. Our preacher taught the confirmation classes and the first think I started seriously question was his explanation for why we should memorize various bible passages.

He said that then we'd be able to quote the bible in any debates with unbelievers we might have in our lifetime. What?

Someone who doesn't believe the truth of the bible will change their mind if you argue using vague quotes from the bible?

Somehow that just translated into nonsense. Believing that was some kind of winning debate strategy just seemed delusional to this 11 year old.

The idea of the reality of a God is so central to the thinking of Christians that they just can't get past the idea that believe in something isn't sufficient to make that something true. Wanting something isn't evidence of the existence of that something.

And since the reality of a God is central to their own thinking, they just assume it's central to the thinking of everyone. They even think that the reality of God is central to the way of thinking of those who don't believe in the reality of God.

That's how they come up with definitions of atheists and agnostics. The typical definitions of those terms had to have been developed by religious believers.

The real atheist doesn't believe there is no God. The real atheist doesn't think about God at all, doesn't have any belief about the reality of God.

Atheists who try to defend atheism are simply letting some religious nutcase set the terms of a debate. Why? That makes about as much sense as quoting the bible to prove the existence of God.

Some Christians are Very Scary

This is scary stuff.

The old-time revival preachers have moved from tents to auditoriums and are enlisting teenagers into an Army for God.

His Christian code requires a "wartime mentality": a "survival orientation" and a readiness to face "real enemies." The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the "techno-terrorists" of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers.

Marxism is basically a cultural model based on class conflict. What we have here is a bunch of teenage Marxist Christians. That's a hell of a force.

In the hall outside the arena, kids line up to buy BattleCry T-shirts and hoodies and trucker caps, a dozen designs scrolled with goth and skater patterns. A brown tee for boys features a white silhouette of a kid with a baseball bat, a devil behind him rubbing his horns after a beat down

Just what this country needs -- more angry, uneducated teenage boys roaming the streets with baseball bats.

Luce recruits the politically powerless -- kids too young to vote. "That makes 'em want to fight," he tells me backstage after one of his events. "They get so livid. They're mad.

Read the article.

Bush wields the Sword of God

I was reading this article from Harper's on the world view of fundamentalist nutcases by Jeff Sharlet and had some thoughts that partially explains Bush's thinking. (Or at least I think it does.)

Talking of the fundamentalist God, he says:

His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed.

Discussing how their thoughts of God relate to their thoughts of America, Sharlet says,

The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future.

I'm not sure why those passages struck me, and maybe I'm just making a trite observation, but thinking about those statements it occurs to me that Bush actually thinks that his decisons don't affect the future, that outcomes are determined by God, not by his actions. His actions are just a way to implement God's will.

Free will to him is just the ability to choose to do God's will or to not do God's will. God controls the outcomes of his acts.

To Bush The Rapture is coming no matter what he does. His role is to simply do God's will so that he's on the right side when The Rapture does come. Bush thinks he doesn't have a role in whether or not the Middle East explodes and so there's no reason to think about the earthly consequences of his acts.

For some reason that line of thinking comforts me. It provides me an explanation of who that guy thinks, something I've struggle with and havn't been able to come to any conclusion about.

Even insane people have some sort of internal rationality. Their insanity is about their world view, not about their behavior. Their behavior is usually perfectly rational within thier irrational world view. Having a history of bipolar thinking I'm aware of this in a way most people probably aren't. So it's never been satisfactory to me to just write off nutcases like Bush as insane and irrational. That's not really an explanation.