This may be the worst bastardization of Christianity on the internet to date. Since Stephen Baldwin is such a great Christian and all, why does he need millions of dollars to be donated to him instead of say, someone who’s just a poor suffering everyman (or a 100,000 everymen?) or perhaps to a mission for some famine ravaged country? Oh, right here’s why:

Q- Why does Stephen need personal wealth?
A- Stephen’s influence is in Hollywood. Hollywood worships money and without it you are seen as a loser and cannot be an effective influence to this group.

IMHO, declaring bankruptcy after all the film and TV works he’s done does basically make him a loser. He ain’t no Job. This is the antithesis of Christianity.

h/t Daily Dish

Protesters From Kansas Take Aim at Miners – NYTimes.com.

relevant to your interests.

Pope Benedict, facing one of the gravest crises of his pontificate as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Church, indicated on Sunday that his faith would give him the courage not to be intimidated by critics.

via On Palm Sunday, Pope Says He Won’t Be Intimidated by Abuse Critics – NYTimes.com.

Enjoy “God Hates the World” sang to the music of “We Are the World” by America’s sickest “church”. Sadly it’s not a parody, it’s normal fare for the Westboro Baptist Church.

Crooks and Liars » Putting abstinence-only funding on the chopping block
House Republicans and Bush administration officials are prepared to fight to keep the funding for ineffective programs in place .

One wonders just how many more studies it will take.

It was never about the using funds wisely, studies, science or any of your fancy book learnin’. It was purely about throwing wads of cash at political allies.

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Doubt is useful, it leads to questions and perhaps a bit of curiosity. Without doubt there’s nothing at all intellectually that would prevent moving forward with an idea to it’s logical conclusion, no matter how wrong headed the underlying assumptions were. I claim my place as a proud member of the “reality-based community”.

A degree in Creation Science? Other than creation science totally being an oxymoron, how can you teach a science course if you can’t differentiate between the word theory in common usage vs. theory in scientific usage? Then there’s the nasty little fact that obviously this degree could only be open to young Earth evangelical Christians. Separation of curch and state much? Perhaps Texas should rename their capital Wingnuttia.

I have no problem with leader who turn to prayer in making their decisions. But I don’t think that membership or leadership as a minister in any religion qualifies anyone to be a better President. I don’t want war and peace decisions to be made with an eye towards bringing about the apocalypse, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for example. Not a roll model in my mind, even if he believes he’s just logically following the precepts of his faith. No thanks.

Religion does not elevate politics, rather politics degrades religion.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
It is eloquent in many parts, stirring in its defense of religious liberty, with only a couple of notes off-key:

Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.

Ahem. But it has two deep flaws. The first is the absence of any notion that religious freedom includes the freedom to have no religion whatever. A president of the United States does not just represent people of all faiths, he also represents those who have none. There is a lacuna in Romneys vision of religious tolerance, and it is a deliberate lacuna. In order to appeal to evangelicals, he places himself on their side against the other: the secularists. But that is simply another form of the religious test. By insisting on faith – any faith – as the proper criterion for public office, Romney draws the line, oh-so-conveniently, so as to include Mormonism but exclude atheism and agnosticism. And so he side-steps the critical issue in the debates over religion in public life: what if there is no unifying faith for a nation? What if faith itself cannot unify a nation – and, in fact, can divide it more deeply than any other subject? That is our reality. An intelligent and wise conservative would try to find a path to a common discourse that does not rest on religious foundations.

On the effort paper over serious divisions between politically powerful evangelicals and Mormonism:

if you are appealing to religious people, especially fundamentalists, on the basis of faith, you cannot logically then ask them to ignore the content of the faith. The religious right have tried to do this with the absurd neologism, the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” as if the truth-claims of Christianity and Judaism are not, at bottom, contradictory. But the “Mormon-Judeo-Christian tradition” is a step too far even for those who have almost no principles in using religion for political purposes.

I wonder why CNN wanted to give this person airtime? All he did was make an ass out of himself and never even attempted to address any questions in an intelligible way.

Father Awarded Millions for Funeral Protest – New York Times

Crooks and Liars » Coulter just wants Jews to be “Perfected”

Inside every Jew there’s Christian just dying to get out? Most Jews I know might be kinda pissed off by the breath taking parochialism of that statement. It would be difficult to formulate something more offensive without resorting to tired stereotypes.

Jews respond.

Crooks and Liars » Nuns call for impeachment of Bush/Cheney
“The National Coalition of American Nuns is impelled by conscience to call you to act promptly to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for … high crimes and misdemeanors,” the group wrote in a letter written on behalf of its board members.

George and Dick, the Mother Superior has a ruler with your name on it.

Best comment:

“Is it possible they could build the museum like a roach motel? If so, I suspect we could trap the remaining 28% of Bush supporters.”
Now that’s a project I could get behind.

No matter what the evidence says Christians will continue to believe. It’s a matter a of faith not acheology, statistics or DNA.  Still it does have some interesting implications.

The St. Pete Times report that some school staffers at a middle school anonited the desks with prayer oil in an effort help the students do better on the FCAT test. Would it be wrong to suggest that perhaps studying the material and learning something would be better than asking Jesus to miracle up some better test scores? The school proinciple sees nothing wrong with forcing their particularly odd form of christianity on the students and teachers. Gimme a friggin’ break…

Especially the part where he says we need “a person of faith” to lead the country. I’ll take a secular humanist any day over a religious ideologue any day, thank you very much Gov Romney. I’m with Bill Maher on this one, I’d rather not have a president who believes in magic underwear. And it’s not about Mormons, it’s about anyone who would defer to religious authority. I’d rather not have the Prophet, Pope, Ayatollah, Dali Lama, Pat Roberts, Billy Graham or any other religious authority be the final decision maker for the president.