‘Stuff that you long ago forgot isn’t general public knowledge’

Last updated on: August 11, 2012 at 2:29 pm By Fred Clark

“What do Christian fundamentalists have against set theory?” asks Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing. She goes on to answer why — basically for the same reason that Christian fundamentalists do everything: Us-vs.-Them tribalism. But don’t let me spoil the ending, go read the whole thing (the kicker is terrific). What I want to highlight here, though, is her introduction, which I may plagiarize if I ever decide to write my own memoirs because it so closely parallels my own experience: I’ve... Read more

Smart people saying smart things

Last updated on: August 11, 2012 at 12:57 pm By Fred Clark

David Brin, interview with Wired magazine The notion of self-righteous indignation being a drug high seems to develop naturally out of recent scientific results that show that addiction is actually the most natural of human processes. You’ve heard the phrase “addicted to love.” Well, you can deliberately enter less salubrious mental states. You can deliberately go to Las Vegas, and the slot machines are now tuned to track the pattern of your behavior at the slot machine and change their... Read more

Close enough

Last updated on: August 11, 2012 at 2:11 am By Fred Clark

“Well, the Barth, Theology, Philosophy and Barth. That’s not got much Barth in it.” “Getting together to sing and listen to a long sermon has never been the attraction.” “Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes — at least in the minds of its followers — all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.” “Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled... Read more

Religious right groups jump at chance to shield members from seeing books

Last updated on: August 10, 2012 at 8:19 pm By Fred Clark

Concerned Women for America and the American Family Association are both urging their followers to think twice about shopping at Amazon.com. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos upset the anti-gay activist groups by donating $2.5 million to protect marriage equality in Washington State. “So long Amazon” was the message from “One Million Moms” (which David Badash, accurately, describes as “the low-cost fundraising and email-harvesting arm of the certified anti-gay hate group, American Family Association”). And CWA noted that its supporters may be... Read more

NRA: No one’s gonna save you from the Beast about to strike

Last updated on: August 10, 2012 at 3:59 pm By Fred Clark

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist, pp. 37-43 Jerry Jenkins wants to write a thriller. That’s not what this book is. Nor can this series accommodate having a thriller subplot shoehorned into it. Yet every little bit Jenkins makes a kind of spastic feint in the direction of the thriller he seems to wish he were writing instead of this. In the first book in the series, we encountered to the oddly disconnected interlude of Buck’s trip to London. He flew... Read more

‘Pro-life’ groups still silent on protecting pregnant workers

Last updated on: August 10, 2012 at 10:27 am By Fred Clark

A few weeks ago we looked at the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (HR 5647), a promising and necessary piece of legislation currently stalled in Congress. You can download a fact sheet on the bill from the National Women’s Law Center, which explains that the PWFA would “let pregnant women continue to do their jobs and support their families by requiring employers to make the same sorts of accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions that they do for disabilities.”... Read more

The Way to A Ways to Go

Last updated on: August 8, 2012 at 11:53 pm By Fred Clark

Light a candle for the world war torn “The Way,” Billy Crockett “Way Down in the Hole,” Tom Waits “Way Down Now,” World Party “The Way I Was Made,” Griffin House “The Way of Love,” Charlie Peacock “The Way of Men,” Mark Heard “The Way We Make a Broken Heart,” John Hiatt “The Way You Look Tonight,” Ella Fitzgerald “The Way You Look Tonight,” Frank Sinatra “The Way You Look Tonight,” Fred Astaire “The Way You Make Me Feel,” Michael... Read more

Religious right pretends that Obama has a ‘God-talk’ problem

Last updated on: August 10, 2012 at 1:00 am By Fred Clark

So here’s a common urban legend on the religious right, stated here by Phyllis Schlafly: Every time [President Obama] recites the Declaration of Independence, he omits the word “Creator.” Now we all know what’s in the Declaration and it’s very strange, you can’t blame it on a slip of the tongue or blame it on the teleprompter because he does it all the time. It’s terrible that the president keeps misquoting the Declaration. And it’s especially terrible that the word... Read more

Re: The ToJo God-blogging challenge

Last updated on: August 9, 2012 at 3:25 pm By Fred Clark

Tony Jones taps his foot impatiently, muttering that much of the response to his challenge, thus far, has been “throat-clearing” and “prolegomena.” And he grumbles that “poetry is something of a cop-out.” That’s a fair cop w/r/t the two posts I’ve written subsequent to his challenge and explicitly in response to them. But it also ignores the odd and misleading aspect of this challenge in the first place — the assumption that those of us lumped in here as “progressive... Read more

God, Part 2: The problem with pronouns

Last updated on: August 9, 2012 at 11:27 am By Fred Clark

(This is the second piece of my response to Tony Jones’ “Challenge to Progressive Theo-bloggers.” The first piece is here.) Whenever possible, I try to avoid gendered pronouns for God. Admittedly, this can sometimes make for clumsy syntax, but that clumsiness is a feature, not a bug. Because the main point of this exercise is to force myself to be conscious of that word, “God,” and not to use it casually and thereby to risk forgetting or confusing or failing... Read more

What does 1 John say the world and its desires are doing?