Scary News from the Christian Coalition

I did not opt out of the Christian Coalition newsletter mailing list that someone unknown signed me up for some months ago. It helps to keep an eye on what the other side is up to. The Aug 5, 2011 issue includes the following scary observation:

"Critics and supporters of the Budget Control Act ... agree that the Tea Party now controls the agenda in Washington D.C. As one who attended Glenn Beck's Tea Party event last August -- along with over a half million other Tea Party supporters -- when looking at the hundreds of thousands of families near the Lincoln Memorial on Washington D.C.'s Mall, I realized that those families represent the large majority of the American people, as anyone with any kind of commonsense would.

Why in particular do I find this scary?
  • Open admission that The Tea Party (not even an official political party) controls the actions of our legislature. This group is a powerful vocal minority, arguably smaller but richer than the 1980's "Moral Majority."
  • Lack of fact checking: The attendance of the Glen Beck event is well established by several independent sources. They range from Beck's hopeful "300,000 to 600,000" and Michelle Bachman's "at least a million" to several actual counts from aerial photos between 60,000 and 87,000.
  • The massive innumeracy that equates "thousands of families" with "large majority of the American people." Please divide several thousand by hundreds of millions and show that this is somehow more than half. 87,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00026 or somewhat less than a majority, however you massage it.
  • The implication that the openly theocratic ideals of the Tea Party are somehow related to common sense. Even Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" argued against a government supported by the church (as is England's).
  • And in totality, the tone that says that the oddball ideals of this group are somehow mainstream. They seem hopeful about Lenin's maxim that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. And the Christian Coalition is all about The Truth.

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How would Jesus fight a nuclear war?

CNN reports that the U.S. Air Force has just scrapped a long-running program that taught nuclear missile launching officers that the Bible is OK with nuclear war:

The Air Force has suspended an ethics briefing for new missile launch officers after concerns were raised about the briefing's heavy focus on religion. The briefing, taught for nearly 20 years by military chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, is intended to train Air Force personnel to consider the ethics and morality of launching nuclear weapons - the ultimate doomsday machine. Many of the slides in the 43 page presentation use a Christian justification for war, displaying pictures of saints like Saint Augustine and using biblical references.
This program had been taught for two decades before the recent change.

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Sacred things are tearing us apart

We human animals are an irrepressibly symbolic species. So much so that any thing can represent almost anything else. A cloth flag, a firecracker or a slogan can represent a social order. A piece of bread or an animal can represent a god. The bottom of a shoe can represent a harsh put-down. We endow some of our things with a special significance, such that we deem them “sacred.” I struggle to define what is sacred, but Jonathan Haidt gives us a big clue: sacred things seem to be the opposite of things that disgust us. But there usually seems to be something more to those thing that are the most sacred; there usually seems to be a public declaration or at least an implicit group acquiescence that the thing is sacred. By recognizing things to be sacred, we seem to endow them with other-worldly significance; with heavenly significant. Once a thing is declared “sacred,” it would be disgusting and, indeed, immoral to consider compromising with regard to that thing. [More . . . ]

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Catholic clergy still doesn’t get it.

What? It's not proper to expose children to priests with a well-documented track record of abusing children? Money quote from MSNBC:

"We would have assumed," said the grand jury in a report, "by the year 2011, after all the revelations both here and around the world, that the church would not risk its youth by leaving them in the presence of priests subject to substantial evidence of abuse. That is not the case."
The authorities should throw Justin Rigali into prison for reckless endangerment.

Continue ReadingCatholic clergy still doesn’t get it.