This Week in God

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 11:40 AM on July 19, 2008.

A round-up of religious news.

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First up from the God machine this week is a poll that didn’t get a lot of attention, but was actually pretty important.

A Quinnipiac University national poll released on Thursday covered quite a bit of ground when it came to “culture war” issues, and perhaps most importantly given the recent campaign discussion, produced some interesting data on faith-based federal funding.

American voters support 53 - 41 percent giving money to faith-based organizations to help them run social programs. But voters say 77 - 16 percent groups which receive federal funds cannot discriminate by hiring only members of their own faith.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that 41% of Americans don’t want faith-based groups to get social-service grants is a surprisingly high number. There’s a perception, which I’ll admit to buying into on occasion, that these kinds of partnerships and contracts — which have been around for years — are overwhelmingly popular. A poll like this suggests there remains some discomfort about mixing church and state, which I find encouraging.

But that second part of the question is even more striking.

The NYT’s Bob Herbert, in a misguided attack on Barack Obama recently, argued that Obama is “promising not just to maintain the Bush program of investing taxpayer dollars in religious-based initiatives, but to expand it.” That’s simply not true — Obama’s policy is premised on key safeguards that Bush’s program intentionally sought to remove.

And at the top of this list was religious discrimination. Obama believes groups that receive public funds can’t discriminate when hiring employees to do the social service work. John McCain, just a week ago, said the exact opposite, insisting that faith-based organizations should get funding and discriminate in hiring with tax-dollars.

So, on this issue, 77% of Americans prefer Obama’s approach, while 16% prefer McCain’s.

Also from The God Machine this week:

* More religious trouble for McCain: “A Catholic group has written to John McCain to ask him to remove Deal Hudson from the Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee because of allegations that, in 1994, Hudson solicited sex from an 18-year-old woman who was a student in one of his classes at Fordham University. ”

* Guns & God: “An Oklahoma church canceled a controversial gun giveaway for teenagers at a weekend youth conference. Windsor Hills Baptist had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event’s organizers was unable to attend. The church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, said it’s a way of trying to encourage young people to attend the event.”

* As if the dispute in South Carolina weren’t enough, now license-plate controversies are spreading to Kentucky: “The official Kentucky state motto is ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall.’ But that’s not the slogan that Gov. Steve Beshear is proposing for a new alternative license plate. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Beshear will push for legislation next year authorizing a special ‘In God We Trust’ plate for vehicles in the Commonwealth.”

Tagged as: religion

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From Indian country [Report this comment] Posted by: Lauren on Jul 19, 2008 11:59 AM Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096417163 link Indian scholars, too, are concerned that Pope Benedict's most recent words about indigenous people seem to contradict statements he made just last year when speaking to Latin American bishops in Brazil. On May 13, 2007, the pope said the ancestors of contemporary Indians were ''silently longing'' for Christ and seeking God ''without realizing it.'' ''In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures,'' the pope said, ''nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.'' He added that a return to indigenous religions ''would be a step back.'' Soon after his speech, many Indians in both South and North America expressed concern that the pope's statements ignored the historically violent religious and cultural oppression of indigenous peoples on this continent by European Christians. They noted that the conversion of many Natives to Christianity was anything but civil, and many lost their lives trying to maintain their own cultural identities. ''His comments from a year ago showed his absolute lack of historical knowledge,'' Miller said. ''His words indicated a continued ethnocentric viewpoint that the Catholic religion is better for Indian people than their own religions.'' Research from Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate estimates that there are between 650,000 and 1 million contemporary Indians who practice Catholicism - a substantial percentage of the overall Indian population. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] » RE: From Indian country Posted by: Lauren » Religion is bad for everybody, regardless of religion. Posted by: AsteroidMiner My oldest Sister, she's 61 now, went Evangelical on me for about 8 years.... [Report this comment] Posted by: Turiye on Jul 19, 2008 12:41 PM Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] ...all of this homeschooling for her children, church was beat into their young heads, no socialization whatsoever and about all she did she did for, "GOD"[yes, that's angels singing on high],and since she was quite the pot smoker and very care free I was taken aback when she said to me, "I don't care what or how long my husband works, it's his job to bring home the money, pay the bills and mine to stay in the home and raise my children." We were raised to work, work much. The deal here with many of these ?Religions? is the reason an enormous percentage want Zero government Funding is so high is because they do NOT WANT ANY OUTSIDE INFLUENCE especially the, ARGHHH government entering into their business. Well she cheated on her husband, divorced him, started messing with younger guys, drinking like a fish and is a Yogi now. Ain't life grand, when we don't have this GOD pushing us around anymore. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] » Your oldest Sister was a case alright, but "god" was just a symptom Posted by: AsteroidMiner The truth about religion [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 8:54 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] Religion is caused by any one or more of about half a dozen mental illnesses. The truth about religion can be found in these books: "The Neuropsychological bases of god beliefs" Dr. Michael A. Persinger MD, psychiatrist 1987 "Religious people are just like my temporal lobe patients" "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind" Julian Jaynes Professor, Harvard University 1976 "Religious people are just like schizophrenic patients" "The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice" Roger A. MacKinnon, M.D., Robert Michels, M.D. W. B. Saunders Co. 1971 "Religiosity is a common symptom [of] schizophrenic patients" "The God delusion" by Richard Dawkins. "Religion is caused by a kind of computer virus that infects the living computer, the human brain." "The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer, 2004 "Morality and Ethics are now in the jurisdiction of Science and greatly improved thereby." Many books in the new science called "Sociobiology": Morals and ethics are instinctive and they evolved. "God: The Failed Hypothesis" by Victor Stenger. Scientific proof that god does not exist. "The God Part of the Brain" by Matthew Alper 1996. "The USA is anomolusly religious because many early founder groups were religiously insane and fleeing prosecution in Europe. Religion is a genetic disorder." "The Accidental Mind" by David J. Linden, 2007 Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Religion is caused by the extreme klugeyness of the "designed" by evolution brain. In particular, the narrative creation system cannot be turned off. It generates false narratives that are believed by the generating person. This is seen in experiments done in the laboratory. This book has the best explanation of resistance to evolution: "There has also been an assumption that if one accepts the idea that life developed without divine intervention, it necessarily follows that all aspects of religious thought must be rejected. Those who take this line of argument to extremes argue that when religious thought is rejected moral and social codes will degenerate and "the law of the jungle" will be all that is left. It is imagined by religious fundamentalists that those who do not share their particular religious faith are incapable of leading moral lives." These suppositions are not true many times over. Linden later mentions that the creationists [intelligent design advocates] are exactly 180 degrees wrong rather than just a little wrong. Being exactly wrong, they are unable to unlearn their error. See Sociobiology or Sciobio. "Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" edited by Petto & Godfrey, 2007. The ID and creationist crowd are trying to do away with science. They see science as a "godless religion." Science is a process, not a religion. "Manufacturing Belief" by Lewis Wolpert http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/15/lewis_wolpert/ "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon", by Daniel Dennett Let's do scientific research on religion and find out what causes it. "Origins of the Modern Mind" by Merlin Donald 1991 "So what did you expect from a brain that is based on the Chimpanzee brain? "Atheism, A Case Against God" by George Smith "God is not Great; how religion poisons everything" by Christopher Hitchens, 2007 [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] Religion is grand theft [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 8:58 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] As a sophomore undergraduate student in Physics, your homework in Probability and Statistics class may include figuring out when the second coming would be required, assuming that the bible was 100% true in the year zero. That is, when would the bible be down to 50% true? The popular and professors' answer in 1965 was the year 500. The true answer: A friend of mine was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. As an adult, he came here and stayed. After 25 years, he visited his home town of Budapest. He was unable to communicate with his high school classmates because the Hungarian language had changed so much. The correct answer is less than 25 years. The first gospel was not written down until 50 years after the alleged events and then in a different language. The people who told the story were at about the same level of civilization as "wild Indians", I mean Native Americans before Columbus got here. We have all played or seen played the game called "Telephone" in which a story is passed down a line of re-tellers. By the Sixth re-telling, the story has no resemblance to the original. The gospel story had to have been re-told at least 6 times before it was mis-translated the first time. [Note that whoever wrote it down the first time was free to write whatever he wanted to. The storytellers were illiterate and unable to check his written text by reading it. Besides that, he wrote in Greek rather than Aramaic.] Conclusion: There is no truth anywhere in the bible, and there never was. There is no way to know what "jesus" or "mohammed" or any other such character actually said or did. ALL of the jurisdictions that were formerly in the jurisdiction of religion have been taken over by Science. There is no longer a need to debate the issue. Religion is an unfortunate side effect of having evolved from a chimpanzee-like animal in a very brief 6 or 7 million years. "God" will not save us from the consequences of global warming or an asteroid impact or a tornado because there is no such critter as "god.". Ethics and morality are instinctive, not derived from religion. Female instinct has greater force in morality than male instinct because the female is in command of the sexual encounter. Look up "Sociobiology". The origin of the Universe is the subject of Cosmology which is part of astronomy which is part of the science of physics. Religion is a SCAM. ANY religion, there are 10,000 to choose from at any one time. People keep inventing new religions [for the benefit of the "prophet," of course] and forgetting other religions. ALL preachers, priests, imams, rabbis, iatolas, etc. belong in jail for "grand theft, bunko type". [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] Some more good books on religion [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 9:03 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] http://secweb.infidels.org /?kiosk=featuredBooks The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J. Linden Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy David Ramsay Steele The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus Arthur Drews God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life Austin Dacey Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine Richard P. Sloan Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up by John Allen Paulos The Top 10 Myths about Evolution Charles Sullivan, Cameron Smith A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America Anouar Majid Science and Nonbelief Taner Edis An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam Taner Edis The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever Christopher Hitchens Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? Paul Kurtz No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe by Matt Young [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] MARK TWAIN WAS WIDELY CRITICISIZED FOR SAYING THAT THE SECOND COMING WOULD [Report this comment] Posted by: Raymond Emerson on Jul 21, 2008 9:18 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] not be in Palestine. He contended that Jesus Christ was way too smart to ever go back to a place like that. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] Faith based fedreal funding is war against science [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 9:39 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] The Bush Administration's War On Science By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2008. http://www.alternet.org/environment/78056/ Our government is waging a war against science, endangering millions of lives in the U.S. and beyond. Over the past eight years, the lives of millions of people in the United States and beyond have been endangered by the US government. No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about the quiet, systematic war the government has been waging against science. You may have heard about gross examples of the government censoring scientific documents. For example, it was widely reported last year that a government regulatory group excised at least half of the statements Centers for Disease Control director Julie Gerberding was set to make at a congressional hearing about how climate change will affect public health. You may also have heard about the scandal in 2004 when a whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that five of the seven members on a panel of "independent experts" stood to gain financially from shutting down a scientific investigation of a controversial mining technique called "hydraulic fracturing." The panel claimed that in its expert opinion, the technique didn't require regulation, despite many scientists' concerns that it might pollute groundwater. But these are the stories that hit the headlines. There are hundreds more where they came from, and many of them are documented meticulously in a study released earlier this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) called "Federal Science and the Public Good." http://www.ucsusa.org/ scientific_integrity/ restoring/federal-science.html The UCS report documents, in chilling detail, how agencies have fired scientists who disagreed with government policies. For example, in 2003, experts in nuclear physics were dismissed from a panel within the National Nuclear Security Administration because some of them had published about how the George W. Bush administration's beloved "bunker buster" weapons weren't very effective. And scientists who spoke out against the administration's stem cell policy were booted from the President's Council on Bioethics. Worse, the government has falsified scientific studies to bolster its policies and undergird its ideological positions. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was when the EPA lied outright to Americans that the air around ground zero directly after Sept. 11 was safe to breathe. In fact, according to the UCS report, the EPA made this statement without even testing the air. As a result, the authors of the report write, "thousands of rescue workers now plagued by crippling lung ailments continue to feel the impact of this public deception." There's also an example of the Food and Drug Administration inventing a fake study to support its decision to approve the drug Ketek, along with many others. Most intriguing, though, is the UCS report's suggestion that many federal regulatory agencies may in fact be breaking the law by cutting real science out of government policy decisions. Both the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act require the EPA and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to base their decisions on "the best scientific data available." And yet the UCS has documented countless examples of both agencies, as well as others, refusing to take into account the latest research on climate change,.............the article continues......... [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] Defeat religion now [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 9:43 PM Current rating: 5 [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] It is time to stop merely defending. Forget the taboo against attacking religion. That taboo was created by preachers for their own monetary benefit. It is time to attack back. Religion needs to be defeated, not contained. There are growing atheist and secularist groups in the US now. Join them. Religion has been superseded by science, not just paralleled by science. Tax religion as a business. Push for teaching that science has replaced religion. Push for teaching that religion is nonsense. Demand laws that put preachers in jail for grand theft. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] the Republican/Religionist war on science [Report this comment] Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Jul 21, 2008 9:55 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] Reference: "The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney, 2005, Basic Books. It has the following URLs: http://www.waronscience.com/home.php http://www.chriscmooney.com/ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05268/576883.stm See also: "Undermining Science, suppression and distortion in the Bush Administration" by Seth Shulman, 2006 www,ropercenter.uconn.edu "The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney says: Because Trofim Lysenko convinced Josef Stalin that genetics is wrong, 12 million people died of starvation. The coal companies convinced President George W. Bush [and Senator Inohe] that global warming hasn't happened and 12 hundred people died in hurricanes in 2005. For the same reason, people died in the wildfires in Oklahoma. 12 hundred is less than 12 million, but GWB is still comparable to Stalin. Both adopted anti-science policies for ideological reasons and thereby murdered large numbers of their own citizens. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] DO YOU WANT TO KNOW SOMETHING WORSE? INHOFE WILL PROBABLY [Report this comment] Posted by: Raymond Emerson on Jul 24, 2008 6:35 PM Current rating: Not yet rated [1 = poor; 5 = excellent] be reelected. Its a win-win situation. If he loses he goes on an oil company payroll. If he wins he stays on the oil company payroll. [« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: From Indian country Posted by: Lauren

» Religion is bad for everybody, regardless of religion. Posted by: AsteroidMiner

» Your oldest Sister was a case alright, but "god" was just a symptom Posted by: AsteroidMiner

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» RE: From Indian country Posted by: Lauren

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» Your oldest Sister was a case alright, but "god" was just a symptom Posted by: AsteroidMiner