God bless us, with material things

This much should be obvious to anyone attending most big American churches:  on Sunday mornings, those lots are covered with expensive vehicles.  If you doubt me, just go out and check them; most American churches, any Sunday.  Do we need expensive vehicles to get from here to there?  Absolutely not. 

Is there hypocrisy in the air?  Most churches are “country clubs with steeples,” according to a friend of mine who believes deeply in God but deals with his God privately, not as part of an organized religion. 

Hey, why am I picking on churches?  Well, maybe it’s because church-goers repeatedly claim to me that they are morally superior to me because they are church-goers.  They also tell me that it’s the teachings of Jesus that make them morally superior.  Now I am quite aware that a teaching often attributed to Jesus is that one needs to first sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor before following Him.  This passage makes me think:  “Hey, church-goers, if you are all so morally superior, show it.”  That’s what I think when I see all those unnecessarily fancy vehicles on the church parking lot.

Where do all those church-goers park those vehicles?  Here’s where: in their big garages attached to their expensive houses.   Here’s the issue then:  these holders of substantial wealth are often the same people who profess to believe literally in Biblical scripture. Yet the New Testament isn’t known for encouraging people to acquire wealth.  Or is …

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House Intelligence Committee report in Iran

The U.S. House Intelligence Committee has issued this report on the strategic threat from Iran.  It doesn't contain much beyond what you've probably already seen in the news -- in fact, it contains many accusations that are similar to those the Bush Administration made about Iraq before the invasion, though without the…

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Intelligent Design, Inschmelligent Design: my first encounter with uncyclopedia.org

Maybe I’m the last to find out, but I just today stumbled upon an incredibly . . . well . . . provocative . . . wiki site: uncyclopedia.org.  How I got there I can’t actually recall.  Perhaps I stepped into a space-time warp. The article I first encountered was an official-looking article about that well-known scientific theory, “malevolent design.”  I hadn’t before encountered this theory, so I eagerly read the article:

Malevolent Design (or M.D.) is one of the leading theories in micro-miracology, the division of Creation Science which deals with the origin and development of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses and fungal parasites. Beginning with the fundamental insight of Creation Science that the complexity of life is such that it must be the result of divine intervention, and employing the micro-miracological observation that pathogenic organisms change rapidly in order to defeat or circumvent the human immune system, the theory of Malevolent Design posits that the adaptation of human pathogens is the result of malevolent actions taken by an intelligent designer. Put simply, the theory explains that humans continue to become sick because God hates us.

Quite interesting, I thought.  I’ll have to tell mention this to grumpypilgrim, who thinks he is well read.  But why stop there?  I moved on to another topic that theory grumpy often does discuss, Intelligent Design: 

Intelligent Design, or as the French would say, L’Intelligent Design, is the absolutely true and totally scientific theory that the Universe is so gee-whizzy fantastic and

…

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U.S. govt again caught journalist-pimping.

Letting the media just do its job just isn't enough for the Bush administration.  It's hard enough to find honest aggressive media when only FIVE corporations now control the majority of all forms of the media in this country (this includes ALL the media: TV, movies, music, newspapers, magazines). So…

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Iraq: the Democrats don’t have a plan or a clue

What does it meant to “lead”?  According to dictionary.com, to “lead” means “to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort: to lead a group on a cross-country hike.” 

Based on this criterion, the websites of prominent Democrats display a stark lack of leadership on Iraq.  A review of the websites of these Democrat “leaders” shows that they have no plan for dealing with the current occupation of Iraq. 

I’ll cut to the chase.  It seems as though we are headed for a repeat performance of the November 2004 election, where the plan of Democrats was to attack Bush as incompetent.  That strategy will work even less in 2006 than 2004, because Bush is a lame duck, already thinking about packing his cowboy boots to retire to Crawford.  Who cares about your concerns about a guy who is already on the way out?

The Democrats have certainly had lots of time to develop a plan on Iraq. After all, the war has been going as long as WWII, as indicated by this article from the Chicago Tribune:  

The United States has been fighting in Iraq since March 19, 2003, when President Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom with air strikes against Baghdad. Monday marks the 1,245th day of the Iraqi conflict. By that reckoning, Americans troops will have fought in Iraq for as long as they fought Germany in World War II.

But back to the failure of prominent Democrats to develop any plan.  A “plan”…

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