“That’s not so much outrageous as just so wildly ignorant that you wonder whether someone like that has any business on the local school board let alone in Congress. But even this turns out to be a commonly held belief within the pro-life movement.” “The tubes are spastic.” “Willke claims that he got a private meeting with Romney as recently as late last year and told Willke ‘we agree on almost everything’ about the pro-life cause.” “Seventeenth-century forensic medicine is... Read more
Kevin Miller: “Talking to Christians About Hell: It’s Not as Easy as You’d Think” Experience has shown me that too many Christians have a strong emotional investment in a doctrine of hell they’re unable to articulate, much less defend against rival interpretations. Worse, they’re not even aware such interpretations exist. And then they treat their subjective, ill-informed beliefs about hell as the litmus test for orthodoxy. For example, another common question I get after someone watches our teaser trailer [for... Read more
The Left Behind novels are Very Bad. But they are also very influential. From classrooms, to courtrooms, to the U.S. Senate and all ships at sea, these horrible, heretical books are shaping American public policy. Tim LaHaye is changing your world. Item No. 1: Louisiana parents fear “mark of the beast” in school cafeteria. “A Louisiana school district is trying out a new biometrics device in the hopes of speeding up the lunch line,” vorjack reports. Uh-oh, here it comes:... Read more
“Look Look what that human being just did! UNBELIEVABLE!” What has NASA done to make your life awesome? “Its giddy language games and its cultivated diction, as much as its lightweight adolescent backdrop and its steady exploration of what it means to be ethical, to be human, to find meaning in being — perhaps calls into question the idea that slight and substantial, ephemera and art, language and content are mutually exclusive just because we tend to treat them as... Read more
Moralism is an expression of self-righteous pride. That’s where it always winds up. Always. But it doesn’t always start there. Sometimes it starts in fear. Think back to those archetypal moralists: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite. Job’s three friends, it is often noted, are good friends to him right up until the point when they start talking. Then things go downhill pretty fast and they make themselves out to be such fools that thousands of... Read more
“In the years since the collapse of 2008, the existence of mass unemployment has stopped being something the economic powers that be even pretend to regard as a crisis.” “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.” “Why are these wealthy white guys so angry at the middle class and poor? Where does this deep-seated anger come from?” “So today, please pass the word on to all of your contacts that... Read more
Here’s a headline from Christianity Today: “Religious States Donate More to Charity Than Secular States.” It’s about a new report from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The problem with that headline is that, well, that’s not actually what the study says. From CT’s Melissa Steffan: According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans in Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina gave the highest percentages of their discretionary income to charity. Of these, only Utah averaged more than 10 percent. The correlation... Read more
Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s future as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate may be decided today. It seems to come down to a clash between the party establishment — campaign strategists and party officials — and the religious right. The politicos view Akin as damaged goods and want him to withdraw from the race in order to improve the GOP’s chances at picking up the Senate seat. The religious right views Akin as a faithful warrior whose only misstep... Read more
So right now there’s a political and media firestorm over a creepy white Southern man after he said some appalling and untrue things about the victims of rape. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., was caught off-guard by the response to his comments, because he wasn’t saying anything new. He was simply repeating things he’d heard said, for years and years, by his fellow “pro-lifers,” his fellow Republicans, and his fellow leaders in the Presbyterian Church in America. Todd Akin is not... Read more
Jamelle Bouie: “Why Romney keeps lying about Obama and welfare” It’s been three weeks since Mitt Romney first took fire for asserting that the Obama administration “gutted” work requirements in welfare. When the first ad was released, PolitiFact took the lead in debunking its claim that under Obama’s plan, “they just send you your welfare check,” giving it the highest rating of “Pants on Fire.” FactCheck.org followed suit, and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler offered a similar denunciation, giving the... Read more
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