In "What is Conservative Culture?" (July 3, 2006 issue of The New Republic), Rick Perlstein reports that a new kind of prom has spung up in some fundamentalist communities. It's not for high school seniors but for prepubescent girls. They dress up in party dresses and take their fathers as…
It’s time to dispel the notion that theists all believe “in the same God.” Based on my experience, they don’t all believe in the same God. Yes, they use the same label, “God,” but that label hides the numerous striking and intense disagreements believers have with each other.
From now on, when anyone claims that all believers believe in the same God, I’m going to ask that person to answer this handy list of twenty questions with regard to their God:
This happened some time ago, but it’s taken me a while to “process” it and come up with a cogent observation. Sometimes, certain things are just too unbelievable to take. But this is by no means the first, nor shall it be the last, time someone from the frothing-at-the-mouth christian right has said something which leaves most reasonable (and reasoning) people flatfooted.
Partly, this is about not knowing history, which is something all of us could do with a little more intimate acquaintance.
The right Reverand Pat Robertson, who spews forth on the 700 Club–a televised ministry previously notable for bad hair, excessive eye makeup, and monetary and sexual hypocrisy that ran off the scales–let the public know what he thought was behind Ariel Sharon’s massive cerebral hemhorrage. Seems God did it.
If there is a more ideologically corrupt pundit currently mouthing off, I am unaware of him or her. Mona Charen might qualify, except her observations are so fecklessly ill-formed that she poses no serious challenge to reason, and Ann Coulter seems to have turned purely to a Limbaugh-esque “don’t confuse me with the facts, my numbers are more important than truth” kind of screeding moronity.
According to Robertson, God struck Sharon down because he was about to give God’s land to the Palestinians. He said:
“God considers this land to be his…You read the Bible and he says, ‘This is my land,’ and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up …
A woman was recently elected as the first Episcopal presiding bishop and it's causing quite a ruckus. As reported by MSNBC, The situation has been complicated by Sunday’s election of Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as the first Episcopal presiding bishop — the first woman ever to lead an Anglican…
A few years ago, in his State of the Union speech, President Bush called for a massive increase in federal spending to help fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa. At the time, I was suprised that Bush -- who is not known as a friend of AIDS victims, people of…