That rug really tied the room together

Last updated on: May 3, 2016 at 7:25 pm By Fred Clark

When a New Jersey school board member posts Facebook diatribes railing against immigrants and saying "America needs to get rid of people like you," the main problem isn't that she's being "offensive." The main problem is that she's forcefully declaring that she is unwilling and unable to serve the students and families in the school district. Also: A "top evangelical school;" biblical dudehood; killing a neighborhood for profit; and "Mercy Ministries" is neither merciful nor a ministry. Read more

NRA: Everyone dies, rocks fall

Last updated on: May 2, 2016 at 5:58 pm By Fred Clark

It was poor planning on Bruce's part not to inform his congregation about the first five of the Seal Judgments until after they had already begun. It seems like that bit would have been both more impressive and more practical if he'd shared this information before the war and famine and mass-martyrdom began. But there's still just barely time to foretell the next big calamity in the sequence -- the massive earthquake that John's Apocalypse describes as the sixth seal. Read more

RIP Daniel Berrigan

Last updated on: May 2, 2016 at 11:24 am By Fred Clark

"One may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that his basic aims were anti-human: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!" Read more

Sunday favorites

Last updated on: May 1, 2016 at 9:43 am By Fred Clark

"It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever -- This is true: For unto us a child is born, and unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of Peace." Read more

Relitigating the Golden Rule

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 5:41 pm By Fred Clark

Protect religious groups you admire by protecting religious groups you do not admire. Otherwise you're just trying to find a loophole in the Golden Rule -- trying to compel others to do unto us as we would have them do while exempting ourselves from any obligation to do unto them as they would have us do. And that's not good. Read more

Things I Have Learned Due to My Google News Alert for the Word ‘Satanic’

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 5:42 pm By Fred Clark

Several years ago I set up an RSS subscription for a Google News Alert for the word "Satanic." This has served me well by keeping me up to speed on the latest witches and enemies and such being accused of being Satanic baby-killers. But it's also led me to read hundreds of other articles simply because they popped into my RSS reader due to their containing the word "Satanic." Here's what I've learned from those articles. Read more

Left Behind Classic Fridays, No. 79: ‘Grace and greed’

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 6:03 pm By Fred Clark

We're told about all this debauchery and chaos not because our heroes encounter any of it, but because the authors want us to know that "Rayford was worried about his and Chloe's safety." Because Rayford was desperate to get himself and his daughter saved "before anything happened to them." That pretty much sums up the golden-ticket understanding of "salvation" that shapes Left Behind's version of Christianity. Read more

OotGOism: ‘Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it …’

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 5:20 pm By Fred Clark

Mychal Denzel Smith: "When your self-conception is centered on the idea of your own goodness, it prevents you from hearing any critique of your ideology/behavior. Thinking of yourself as 'good' allows you to justify harmful words and actions, since anything you do, in your mind, is 'good.' ... We will have to create new selves." Read more

Seems like a thousand years to go

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 12:58 pm By Fred Clark

I'm not saying that everybody needs to heap praise on Beyonce's new album "Lemonade," but if you're a married man and you're freaking out condemning it, then we're all going to have to assume you're cheating on your wife. Also: A Pennsylvania primary roundup; Bad Jackie in the news; the ignoble history of guns in church; and more. Read more

White evangelicals and ‘the social upheaval of the ’60s’

Last updated on: April 27, 2016 at 6:34 pm By Fred Clark

Usually, this is stated with a polite euphemism. We don't name all of these things specifically but, instead, we just say that white evangelicalism arose in response to "the social upheavals of the 1960s." That allows us to pretend that this is about something else -- about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, rather than about the backlash to increased legal equality for people of color and for women. Read more

True or False: Deborah was a prophetess and judge who led Israel to victory over the Canaanites.