Tag Archives: bible

If You Wonder Why I’m Always in a Bad Mood…

Here are a few of the things that make me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. (H/T to Juanita Jean and the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Parlor).

Furious parents and citizens of Oklahoma took to the streets early Thursday, protesting against Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.  Protesters allege the show is blatantly promoting an anti-Creationist agenda and is ‘standing against the Judeo-Christian moors and values of the Saddleback Township community and others nationwide.”

The fact that they can’t spell “mores” is the least of it…The fact that they can’t tell the difference between science and religion is infinitely depressing.

And another “Christian” heard from, this time from Virginia.

Virginia GOP state delegate and congressional candidate Bob Marshall is standing by his claim that disabled children are God’s punishment for women who have an abortion. “Nature takes its vengeance on subsequent children,” Marshall said in 2010. “It’s a special punishment, Christians would suggest.”

I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, the kind of God who would get back at “sinful” women by punishing innocent children really doesn’t seem worth worshipping…

Impressively crazy as those entrants are, South Carolina isn’t about to give up its hopes of winning the All-batshit competition.

On Thursday, a Senate committee in South Carolina voted to expand the state’s so-called “Stand Your Ground” law to approve the use of deadly force to protect a fetus. The proposal would grant pregnant women protection from prosecution if they were defending their “unborn children,” defined as “the offspring of human beings from conception until birth.”

At least they didn’t vote to arm each fetus. They must be libruls…

South Carolina’s legislature is also having a heated debate over a proposal–triggered by a third-grader who is clearly more scientifically literate than many S.C. lawmakers–to name the wooly mammoth the “State Fossil.”

Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.

The proposal has subsequently been bogged down as legislators debate the additional language.

Meanwhile, Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports that the Louisiana legislature wants to pass a law making the King James Version of the Bible the official state book, and Miami-Dade County in Florida is closing all the bathrooms in polling places. And then there’s this.

And Indiana Governor Mike Pence really thinks he could be President.

We’re doomed. Really.

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Seeing What We Want to See

I’ve decided that people don’t really read for information–instead, we (and I include myself in that “we”) read for validation. We look for evidence that supports what we already believe. It is one of those all-too-human tendencies we need to fight.

We see this selective approach most clearly in the way people read the bible. It amazes me how often we hear about men ‘lying with’ other men, and how seldom we hear about caring for the poor or ‘least of us,” although the ratio of the latter to the former in the actual bible is something like 30 to 1. We also see it in the ways people approach the Constitution–it never ceases to amaze me how many people are ‘purists’ when it comes to the Second Amendment but are perfectly willing to ignore, say, the Establishment Clause.

Currently, the left and right are again doing battle over Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. The left fails to recognize the context of Rand’s philosophy; she was reacting against the excesses of Stalinism and Marxism that she had experienced first-hand. Her anger with the injustice of a system where everyone was supposed to live for the proletariat led her to exalt a somewhat exaggerated individualism. Viewed from our own time–where individualism, greed and selfishness have run amok–her prescriptions can seem excessive and inhuman.

But it is the selective reading of Rand by the right that is most instructive–and amusing. As Martin Marty recently pointed out in his newsletter, Sightings, the right has embraced Rand’s unrestrained capitalism and conveniently overlooked the fact that she was an equally ardent pro-choice atheist.

Rand created a world with two types of human: productive supermen, and venal looters. She didn’t deal with the foibles of real humans, who tend to be neither. What I find ironic is the number of people who think they are John Galt (productive superman) when Rand–with her pitiless, black-and-white worldview– would rather clearly have categorized them as James Taggert (‘sniveling looters’).

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