“I’m very grateful to Commodore and Jack Tramiel.” “It is unclear at this point whether God will even bother to offer anyone his apparently useless endorsement in the general election.” “The US report said the teen birth rate was down across all racial groups and all areas of the country.” “The 275 newly ordained diocesan priests in the US outnumbered the number of newly accused child sex offender priests by only five.” “The church has made a spectacle of itself... Read more

Social Darwinism? Perfectly mainstream, respectable, perceived as compatible with the Bible. Actual Darwinism? “Controversial,” only marginally acceptable, perceived as disrespectful of the Bible. And there you have it. Read more

1. The ignorant claim. This isn’t specifically from Rick Warren’s appearance Sunday on ABC’s This Week, but from a tweet following that depressing interview: The Church has helped the poor far more than any govt, & for 2000 yrs longer! In 2011 our 1 church fed 70,000 unemployed. OK, first, let’s say yes, good, yay, bravo for feeding 70,000 people. That’s an unqualified Good Thing for this 20,000-member church to be doing. If every median-sized American church did the same... Read more

So the Rev. Rick Warren was on TV. It didn’t go well. Warren, who was interviewd by Jake Tapper on ABC’s This Week, spent much of his time attempting to reconcile right-wing hostility to the social safety net with his Christian faith — an effort that earned him the Tea Party Jesus treatment borrowed here. Actually, I’m probably overstating things to say that Warren tried to reconcile these two irreconcilable things. Really what he did was state a bunch of... Read more

Those with a high view of the authority of the inerrant, infallible scriptures can’t be wishy-washy about the status of Canaanites. Those people are unclean, unwanted, excluded. The Bible is very clear on this point. Jesus knew that. He knew what the scriptures said about Canaanites. But that didn’t matter to him as much as the person in front of him: Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman... Read more

“Four months ago we couldn’t even get a gig in our own home town.” “People are commemorating Mike Wallace’s death at 93 by quoting his entertainingly rude questions. But unlike many askers of rude questions, Wallace often got pretty interesting answers.” “Using Satan as an explanation for everything you personally do not like is not only theologically problematic, it is also terribly dangerous. It opens the door to the rampant demonization of other people …” “Two Latino immigrants … were... Read more

Tony Jones recently invited Scot Miller to blog about Robert A.K. Gagnon’s massive, circle-the-wagons text on The Bible and Homosexual Practice. The link above there is to Tony’s wrap-up, which links back to all six parts of Miller’s review, which is thorough and incisive. Miller gets to the heart of his disagreement with Gagnon — and to the fact that the heart of that disagreement is not at all what Gagnon seems to imagine it to be — a conflict... Read more

The reason I make fun of this stuff is because, as ridiculous as the lies and the posturing of these folks are, their fever-dreams and the false witness they bear have real-world consequences. And I don’t just mean the obvious political consequences — like for example 130,000 low-income women in Texas losing their access to health care (“I was sick, and you cut off funding for my health care”). This literal demonizing of others can also provoke actual violence when... Read more