Rowan Williams has an argument which at least on front page contributor would agree with:
Dr Rowan Williams said it was right to be suspicious of proselytism that involves “bullying, insensitive approaches” to other faiths.
Latest Updates: evangelicals RSS
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thabet
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johnpi
Here’s the meat of Pat Robertson’s shameful comment about Haiti that you’ve probably already heard so much about:
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”
I took this excerpt from an article titled, ‘Christian fundamentalists bring shame to America,’ which also makes this observation:
The Muslim world deals with this all the time. With 1.3 billion Muslims in the world over, even if only 3% are radical fundamentalists, their numbers are in the millions and they have come to represent the other 97%.
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johnpi
[Author Tom] Krattenmaker says the problem is that they’re reaching a sporting public with increasingly pluralistic religious convictions, or no religion at all.
“There are many secular fans who really feel annoyed by that kind of religious expression,” he said in an interview. “Even people who are religious themselves often resent this situation where athletes talk about God in this big moment of victory, sometimes seeming to imply God gave them the victory.”
But Tennessee Titans All-Pro center Kevin Mawae said his Christianity is part of who he is, and he can’t separate it from his life as an athlete or anywhere else.
“The fact that some people are jaded toward religion or faith shouldn’t stop a player from expressing his faith in public,” Mawae said.
There’s no intent to alienate people, only to share Biblical truth, said Vince Nauss, president of Baseball Chapel, which provides chaplains to every major league baseball team.
“If there’s an exclusivity, it’s because Jesus put it out there,” Nauss said. “So I don’t think there’s anything to apologize for, or to dance around in a politically correct environment.”
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buzz
Terry Gross interviews the author of a new book on a secretive Christian Fundamentalist group and its connections to government and foreign policy. I could not believe the reach these whackjobs have into congress nor their warped ideas of Christianity. They rival any terrorist group in their belligerent activities.
You may recognize these names from recent headlines: Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Stupak and Pitts have become familiar names through the media’s health care overhaul coverage; their abortion funding amendment introduced an 11th-hour twist as the House of Representatives approached a vote on a landmark health care bill.
Ensign was the focus of media attention over his affair with a campaign staffer. Just last night, a Nevada man disclosed that he found out about his wife’s affair with the state’s junior senator — his best friend — via a text message.
The common factor among these political players is their involvement with the Family, a secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians that centers on a Washington, D.C., townhouse. Investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet has written extensively about the influential group in his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
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johnpi
The liberal blogosphere is abloom with trenchant insight (and jokes) about the conservative Bible. I post this here for the mortification of the ever-vigilant Christianist stalkers who troll the Islamic blogs, awaiting an opportunity to wallow in their keenly felt sense of victimization.
Suggested conservative revisions from Salon:
Matthew 5:3-5: Blessed are the GOP, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn the death of Christmas, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the children of the rich, for — once Congress finally eliminates the Death Tax — they will inherit the earth.
Matthew 5:17: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come to force trial lawyers to stop filing trivial lawsuits every time someone gets hurt and won’t take responsibility for themselves.
Matthew 5:21-22: You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” But I tell you that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, so git ‘er done.
What a wonderful way to throw light on the hypocrisy and religious distortions that have resulted from mixing right-wing politics with religion in America.
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johnpi
Some more suggestions for the new conservative bible:
“And Sampson slew the Philistines with a jawbone of a stegosaurus”
“Jesus turned the water into napalm and laid waste to the Samaritans for what the Egyptians hath done”
“Woe be unto the Nazareth Post, for we countethed 13 million people at the Sermon on the Mount.”
“Go thou now and bomb the shit out of the swarthy”
“Jesus spake, ‘I hope those foreign bastards don’t translate my English into Greek.’
“And the Holy Spirit spake unto Mary, ‘Hast thou seen mine bald eagle etchings?’”
“Suffer the little children so their detained parents will talk.”
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buzz
Some red meat for Shams: In the news cycle today is word of a bible project to eliminate ‘liberal bias.’ The Conservative Bible Project sets forth the following guidelines:
1.Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2.Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3.Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4.Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5.Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6.Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7.Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8.Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9.Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10.Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”[Insert pithy quip here]
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johnpi
Christian Action Network sues the state of Maine after it revokes permission for the group to fundraise there, citing a letter the group sent out that was inflammatory against Muslims.
Today the Christian Action Network (CAN) filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Maine for censoring a fundraising letter state officials claimed contained “an inflammatory anti-Muslim message.” Maine officials fined and banned CAN from mailing any future letters under the threat of criminal prosecution. Liberty Counsel represents CAN.
CAN was in good standing with a valid license for prior years in Maine, authorizing the group to mail letters in the state. CAN filed to renew its license in March 2009, prior to sending the letter, and the check for the annual license was deposited and cashed by the state. In April, CAN mailed a letter exposing how some public schools were promoting Islam by providing instruction on the Five Pillars of Islam and the Koran. The letter pointed out that some schools have provided a “prayer room” for Muslims and one textbook that told seventh grade students they “will become Muslim.” The letter listed Governor John Baldacci as a person who is over the public schools and someone to whom the recipients of the letter should voice their opinion.
CAN was informed in May 2009 that its application was now being denied, and a $4,000 fine was imposed for three reasons: (1) the state alleged CAN’s letter contained “an inflammatory anti-Muslim message;” (2) the letter used Gov. John Baldacci’s name without his approval; and (3) the registration was allegedly “incomplete.”
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Shams al-Nahar
For those of you in Oz or GB that think I am needlessly exercised about the distillation of the GOP into the purely religious Rightwing Christianist Republican Party, I have prepared a few links.
Baptist Minister prays for President Obama’s death, sermon attended by gunnut that carried AK-47 to presidential rally.
Conservative publication Newsmax advocates military coup.
GOP leadership astroturfing and lies.
Mormon Glenn Beck channels insane conspiracy theorist Skousen.
Mormons don’t believe in the separation of church and state.UPDATE: Newsmax has pulled the rant. Josh Marshall has the fulltext.
Banana Republicans.
Isn’t advocating sedition grounds for execution by the State as treasonous? -
johnpi
Anti-Islam events to counter “Jummah on the Hill” go national.
Christian activists have scheduled a national prayer/conference call for tomorrow (Thursday) evening across four time zones to counter Muslims “dark spiritual intent” and the “rising tide of Islamic boldness being manifested.”
…we are calling Christians all over America to join Lou Engle, Shirley Dobson, Tony Perkins, David Barton, and many other major leaders in America to a national conference call to pray for America. Please join us on Thursday, September 24th from 7:30PM to 9:00PM Eastern Time for possibly one of the greatest moments in American history.
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johnpi
Former religious right activist rips on the religious right.
We are several generations into the progeny of leaders such as James Dobson and his radio show Focus On The Family. These offspring extol the virtues of corporal punishment, patriarchy, applying biblical law to public governance and so forth. Millions of evangelicals have been raised in homes where they’ve been isolated from the wider culture, home schooled and/or sent to “Christian schools” where they have been indoctrinated to believe that the Federal Government is the enemy of all true believers, that the “End” is near, that secular society is their enemy as is art, learning and culture.
They now form a Fifth Column of the deliberately intellectually disenfranchised. They know they are out of the loop and hate the rest of us for their own self-imposed isolation. I’m afraid they will soon turn to violence.
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johnpi
The arrogance of ‘God’s tool,’ former actor Stephen Baldwin.
Baldwin has the number 330 tattooed on the back of his neck. “John 3:30,” he says. “I must decrease so that God may increase in my life. It’s about humility.”
That’s one way of looking at it: to declare yourself a tool of God is to suggest that you’re merely a tool of God. There’s also another way: to declare yourself a tool of God is to say, I’m a tool of freaking God. Everything I do is meant to be. This seems to be Baldwin’s way. “I believe it’s by the grace of God and God’s perfect will that we’ve all had this success,” he told an audience Friday afternoon, referring to his and his brothers’ careers. “For me, in retrospect, it’s completely understandable that the Lord would use me now with that platform to do his work in these times. I’m very grateful for that opportunity; it’s a privilege.”
Baldwin and his co-host Kevin McCullough want Obama to draw “a stronger distinction” with Islam.
McCullough elaborated: “The president could help himself by not going to Cairo University and saying America is a Muslim nation. By not saying that our values are the same as Islam. He could help himself in those areas by making a stronger distinction.”
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johnpi
A high school football coach in Kentucky loaded 20 members of the team onto a school bus and drove them to his evangelical Baptist church, where about half of them were cajoled (free steak dinner!) and pressured into being baptized.
One mother is outraged because parents were not informed, though some of the parents who were members of the church knew of it and attended the ceremony. The school’s district superintendent attended too.
Rob Boston writes:
The bottom line here is that public schools have no business meddling in the private religious lives of students… I don’t blame [parent] Michelle Ammons for being angry. She rightly believes that she and her husband can oversee the religious life of their son. No school official should be interfering in that relationship. As an aside, imagine the uproar that would have erupted in Breckenridge County had the coach taken the players to a mosque where they were pressured to adopt Islam.
Evangelical Baptist Christianity – it’s all about the free steak dinner…
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johnpi
Three nationally recognized pastors have declared they are praying for Obama’s death.
A third, and perhaps even more menacing anti-Obama “death prayer pastor” is Peter Peters of the LaPorte, Colorado Church of Christ. During the 1980’s, members of the white supremacist militia group The Order attended Peters’ church and four months after Pastor Pete Peters and his parishioner Colonel Jack Mohr appeared on Jewish talk show host Alan Berg’s Denver radio show, during which the radio show host confronted Peters and Mohr about their views, Berg was machine-gunned to death. Members of The Order were later convicted of the murder.
Peters went on to host an October 1992 planning meeting, with white supremacist and NeoNazi leaders, during which an organizing strategy for a national paramilitary network was hammered out. Former Aryan Nations member Floyd Cochran said of Peters, “He doesn’t espouse Hitler. He doesn’t use the swastika or Klan robes. Instead he uses the Bible and the American flag. Peters talks in a language we’re used to hearing. His hatred is masked in God.”
Amazing. And to think people are worried about Muslim religious violence…
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johnpi
Recently, Fathima Rifqa Bary met a strange evangelical Christian on the Internet. There are other strange evangelical Christians on the Internet.
A rising star in South Carolina’s evangelical social conservative community, Kristen Maguire, who is the chairwoman of the South Carolina Board of Education, an executive committeewoman of the S.C. Republican Party, and a strong supporter of “abstinence only” education – has been discovered to be the “prolific author of hardcore erotic fiction on the Internet” under the pen name “Bridget Keeney” who writes freely about her interest in sexual adventurism.
I’ll spare you the details, but there are now also reports about her behavior off-line too.
Another South Carolina blogger writes:
I guess if Dominionism is one’s vocation and gettin’ jiggy wit it is that same individual’s avocation, then I guess I can see where a massive conflict could raise its ugly head at an inconvenient juncture, as it were.
Of course our religious community has its own Kristen Maguire’s – perhaps they should meet and get married for an evening…
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johnpi
Talk Islam commenter Mirele puts on a display of reportorial super-sleuthing and zeros in on a boldface lie told by one Ergun Mehmet Caner, a Baptist minister and president of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va.
First some background: Caner is a self-described ‘former Muslim who converted to Christianity’ and offers himself as a expert witness with insider knowledge of Islam. Caner has written a book “Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs” with an image of a woman with a sheet or a blanket or something wrapped around her head and face, not anything an actual Muslim woman would wear, as Mirele observes. He piques interest for having been raised in Columbus, Ohio, where Fathima Rifqa Bary lived until a few weeks ago, claiming affiliation with her mosque community – probably in a bid to ride the coattails of her media frenzy.
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thabet
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johnpi
A new Zionist American organization formed two months ago called Z Street – a play off the name of the successful liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street – and its first foray into the media has been to publish press releases and editorials supporting Rifqa Bary.
The material is mostly pablum and ‘fire for effect’ not worthy of excerpt. They seem to value Rifqa Bary for her effect on their Christian extremist allies. In the effort to gin up the Xians, Z Street announces:
they [us, the monolithic Muslims] ‘religiously’ condemn prayer in school and other non-Muslim religious expressions.”
I’m interested to know how Z Street leaders envision Christian prayer in schools affecting Jewish students? Perhaps they’re such big zionists that they think all the Jews will be ingathered to Israel in a few short years so it doesn’t matter. Or perhaps Christian prayer in the schools would prompt more Jewish emigration, so all’s the better.
Once again, in the over-eager alliance of Zionists and Christian extremists, the Zionists are supporting a movement that is predicated on harming Jewish interests in the long term (another example being that the Christian vision of armageddon has all the Jews being slain or converted to Christians).
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johnpi
Mohamed Bary is a doting Muslim father, intent on giving his daughter the best education he can. But he says he made a terrible mistake last October: He bought her a laptop computer.
Because of that laptop and access to the Internet, he says he lost his daughter to Christian extremists.
….In the weeks before she fled, her parents noticed she would sleep all day and stay up all night exploring the Internet.
Until this spring, Rifqa was a model student, an obedient daughter. She earned good grades, worked part-time at a Chinese restaurant and called home even if she were running just 10 minutes late.
But about the time school ended in May, she began all-night Facebook sessions. She started withdrawing from family members and longtime friends, her parents said.
Many of her chats were with evangelical Christians, her father said. They turned her against him, he said.
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johnpi
Secret Service interviewed pastor who prays for Obama’s death.
Steven Anderson is the Arizona pastor who prayed for Barack Obama’s death the day before one of his parishioners, who attended the sermon, brought an AR-15 rifle to an Obama event.
Here is his now infamous “pisseth against the wall” sermon (‘Men’ stand up, anyone who uses the word ‘male’ doesn’t). Seems like there is a rule for everything in Christianity…
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thabet
Breakaway conservative Anglicans start new project to ‘educate’ people about Islam:
Called the Church and Islam Project, the new initiative includes educational seminars, reading materials, and information made available at a new Web site, http://www.ChurchandIslam.com.
“As Christians, we are called to reach out to the world around us to spread the love of Christ and that includes learning how to respond to other religions,” said the Rev. Canon Julian Dobbs, Canon Missioner of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).
He said the group will provide its members with “honest” and “respectful” information, while “exposing the truth about so-called moderate Islam and encouraging evangelism to Muslims.”
Oh, good. Just what was needed; another website “exposing the truth about so-called moderate Islam”.
Julian Dobbs was part of the Barnabas Fund, headed by Patrick Sookhdeo.
Sookhdeo gets a free pass in the media for his stupid claims because he is a brown ‘expert on Islam’.
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johnpi
Bary is the teen who ran away from her Muslim family in Ohio to live with a preacher in Florida, and who claims her family may kill her for converting to Christianity. The case has prompted an Islamophobic political frenzy.
Before the hearing, Rifqa and her lawyers met with George Sheldon, secretary of Florida’s Department of Children & Families, the agency now in charge of her safekeeping.
He sat through the 50-minute hearing next to Gov. Charlie Crist’s top lawyer, Rob Wheeler.
“I have one concern. The governor has one concern,” Sheldon said afterward. “That’s the safety of the child.” Sheldon and Wheeler, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, demonstrated the extraordinary amount of attention the case has drawn. It has prompted a flood of support for the girl and a backlash against Islam.
More than 400 people have sent e-mails to Crist demanding that he save the girl from what some describe as certain death. Crist has made no public statement — but Friday other politicians began to weigh in.
Bary’s lawyer, an evangelical Christian activist, couldn’t resist smearing the entire Muslim community of Columbus, Ohio.
Stemberger told the judge Rifqa’s father wasn’t the real threat. It’s radical Muslims in Columbus, where the family lives, he said. The community is a center for suspected terrorists, he said, and Rifqa is now their target.
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buzz
What happens when an idiot alcoholic evangelical gets elected president by lies and deceit and then mobilized by fear and panic? The answer at Council for Secular Humanism (h/t: eteraz )
Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
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razib, murtad fitri
there were some comments below which i took objection to about evangelicals…which strikes me as a peculiar position to be placed in since i’m no particular friend of evangelicals. but let’s compare the attitudes of evangelicals, muslims and mainline protestants in the religious landscape survey.
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thabet
“Latinos are changing the nature of American religion”:
The main reason, he thinks, is ethnic identity. Evangelical services are not only in Spanish, as many Catholic sermons are nowadays, but are performed by Latinos rather than Irish or Polish-American priests, with the cadences, rhythms, innuendos and flow familiar from the mother country. The evangelical services tend to be livelier than Catholic liturgy and to last longer, often turning into an outing lasting the whole day. Women play greater roles, and there are fewer parishioners for each pastor than in the Catholic church.
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thabet
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thabet
Defining evangelicals.
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thabet
Christians say the word “evangelical” has become too politicised.
