I think the biggest thing that God gets angry about is injustice: when poor people are being oppressed, when widows are not being cared for, when orphans are not being provided for. And those are really good things to get angry about. And let’s face it: When people are angry, it gets our attention.

Right. God gets angry about injustice. That’s why he killed the firstborn children of Egypt. You know how unjust kids can be.

Onto the charges of sexism:

The very first thing we learn in the Bible is that women are divine – they are God-like. Now, men are too, but I think most men think this already. The man and the woman, when God creates them in Genesis 1, they are made in his image. And there’s nothing more positive you could say.

Did you get that, ladies? There’s nothing more positive that can be said to you than, “you were made in the image of God”. Now, excuse me while I kick my menstruating wife out of the house for a week.

Onto racism:

We need to go to Genesis 12, where we encounter God first talking to Abraham. He is calling the father of the nations. He wants to bless them, but he wants to bless them to be a blessing to all nations. God gets angry when foreigners are not being cared for. God wants his people to be concerned about people that are different from them.

God gets angry when foreigners are not being cared for? Terrific news! Let me go tell the Canaanites… oh, wait.

This, however, takes the cake:

I sent an email to Richard Dawkins and got no response, which is perhaps not surprising. I’ve had some great interactions with atheists, and they love to talk about this. Some of them feel very strongly about it, which I think has been fantastic.

A lot of Christians, we do the same thing that Dawkins is doing – Dawkins just focuses on the negative texts, and Christians just focus on the positive texts. And I think Dawkins needs to acknowledge the positive texts in the same way that Christians need to not ignore these negative texts.

Yes, it is intellectually dishonest for Christians to focus only on “positive” Biblical texts, but is this any less honest than trying to negate the litany of bad texts with a few good? Sure, Genesis 12 calls Abraham the “father of nations”, but a few chapters before God cursed Ham and all of his descendants to servitude and submission. A good action does not negate a bad. It doesn’t matter that God wants everyone to come to his party, cursing people for the sins of their fathers is a dick move. End of story.

Still, kudos to Prof. Lamb for not being a dick himself. A note to Christians looking for “civil” debate, this is more or less how you do it.

The reason, we would later learn, is because of an order that filtered down through the various intelligence agencies in the months leading up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The order, put simply, was to review all documentation on Iraq, and find evidence of WMDs and dealings with Al Qaeda. It turns out, this a bit like poisoning the well. If you tell somebody to read a document and then tell them what you expect them to find therein, they are going to find it whether or not it is really there.

If you were to take out “WMD” and “Iraq” from the equation and substitute instead “anti-religious bias” and “mainstream media”, you would get the Patheos-hosted blog Get Religion.

Imagine two or three embittered ex-journalists holed up in their offices at night, poring over every conceivable mainstream news media outlet, actively searching for examples of what they call “anti-religious bias” subliminally encoded therein. Bear in mind they must find anti-religious bias in the news, otherwise the prospect of maintaining a daily-content, high-profile blog becomes somewhat untenable. The results are sadly predictable.

Here are a few examples.

New York Times publishes ‘news story’ on pregnancy centers.

Let’s start at the top (boldface emphasis mine):

WACO, Tex. — With free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, along with diapers, parenting classes and even temporary housing, pregnancy centers are playing an increasingly influential role in the anti-abortion movement. While most attention has focused on scores of new state laws restricting abortion, the centers have been growing in numbers and gaining state financing and support.

Largely run by conservative Christians, the centers say they offer what Roland Warren, head of Care Net, one of the largest pregnancy center organizations, described as “a compassionate approach to this issue.”

As they expand, they are adding on-call or on-site medical personnel and employing sophisticated strategies to attract women, including Internet search optimization and mobile units near Planned Parenthood clinics.

Is that double attribution really needed? Does putting “a compassionate approach to this issue” inside quote marks intentionally call the description into question? What do we have here: simple journalistic attribution (that’s a good thing) or scare quotes (that’s not)?

Everyone get that? Direct quotation is evidence of anti-religious bias in the media!

So what did Cardinal Mahoney Believe, really?

For example, remember the recent scandal involving a conservative hero — Father Benedict Groeschel — who calmly stated his belief that older teen-agers have been known to seduce weak priests? He also stated that priests who are first-time offenders could be rehabilitated and may not need to be jailed.

As I wrote in a post about that case:

For better and for worse, it appears that Groeschel was attempting to draw a line between two kinds of abuse, a line that is often blurred in mainstream news coverage throughout the three decades of these scandals in the Catholic Church (and other religious bodies, as well). The press often writes about the abuse of children without noting that the vast majority of the cases have involved “ephebophilia” — sex with teens and under-aged children — not “pedophilia,” with prepubescent children. In the past, Catholic officials have been tempted to believe that that priests involved in ephebophilia should be treated with more leniency than those wrestling with pedophilia.

Is this, once again, what Mahony and his staff believed, that the many clergy who were acting out with teen-agers needed to be handled in a more lenient manner than the few who were stalking and abusing very young children?

Everyone on the same page here? News media calls child-abusing rapist priests “pedophiles”, when in reality priests who use their positions of authority to fuck teenagers who are nonetheless under the legal age of consent should be called “ephebopiles”. Bias!

Sydney Morning Herald has a problem with religious freedom.

It is only two weeks into the new year, but I believe we may have a winner in the worst newspaper article of 2013 contest. A Sydney Morning Herald story entitled “Anti-gay rights to stay” is so awful, I am just about at a loss for words. Were I to say this story was anti-Christian, boorish, ignorant, and aggressively offensive I would only be scratching the surface. It takes a non-story — Prime Minister Julia Gillard will maintain religious freedoms in the new bill of rights under construction — and turns it into a gay bashing extravaganza.

It begins:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has assured religious groups they will have the ”freedom” under a new rights bill to discriminate against homosexuals and others they deem sinners, according to the head of the Australian Christian Lobby.

Under current law, faith-based organisations, including schools and hospitals, can refuse to hire those they view as sinners if they consider it ”is necessary to avoid injury to the religious sensitivities of adherents of that religion”.

Notice the quotation marks around the word “freedom”? What is that telling us? Read further into the story and you will find that there is nothing here other than the reporter’s indignation. There is no story. The prime minister has assured the leader of a lobbying group that the current rules governing the “freedom of religion” will not be changed.

Is discrimination permissible if hung on the hook of religious dogma? Not everyone agrees. Nevertheless, quotations! Bias!

Finding bias in quotation marks. Excusing rape. These clowns make Joe McCarthy look like a picture of mental fucking health.

Still, it gets worse. Yesterday, I had the misfortune of reading this drivel:

Footlong subs vs. March for Life

The Associated Press has a Twitter feed with nearly 1.6 million followers. Those followers received two tweets about a gun control rally and march in Washington, D.C. this weekend.

“Gun control march in Washington to feature Newtown residents, pastors, parents and survivors of gun violence,” read one.

“PHOTOS: Thousands march for gun control on National Mall in Washington,” read another.

Considering the relatively small size of the march (Some said “nearly 1,000.” Others, as noted above, said “thousands.”), it makes one wonder how many links to stories and photo collections were sent out for the massive 40th anniversary March for Life.

The answer, of course, would be zero. Really, the AP Twitter feed never found it worthwhile, in its steady stream of tweets, to even mention the March for Life, much less link to a photo gallery of it.

Pardon me?

The Sandy Hook march was “small”, the March for Life was “massive”. Why did the news media focus on one and not the other?

Obviously, it is because the news media hates Christians, and especially pro-life Christians. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Sandy Hook march having a much more profound relation to the national discourse given that gun control legislation is once again on table, while Roe v. Wade has been decided for forty years now with no sign of judicial reversal in sight. No, nothing at all. BIAS!

My family and I participated in the March For Life and, smack dab in the middle of it, we didn’t really have much of a perspective of its size. It was extremely cold — just brutal conditions — so I kept my head down and my hands in my pocket. I knew that the number of Lutherans for Life, which was our contingent, was significantly larger than any previous year. If you watch the video above, which comes not from a mainstream media source but from Roman Catholic broadcast network EWTN, you can get something of a feel for how many people move past one bend in the march over the course of 8 minutes.

Our Lutherans started marching at 1:20 PM and we didn’t make it past the Supreme Court until 3:30 or so. The march goes on at that pace for quite some time.

And yet while only giving the briefest coverage to this massive march — or neglecting to give any at all! — many networks gave tremendous coverage to that gun control rally. Both rallies were described by some outlets as featuring the exact same number of attendees — “thousands” — even though the pro-life rally was exponentially larger

Awwww, somebody call the whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaambulance!

You stood outside in the cold and marched for the little fetuses? And it looked to you like there were a lot of other people there, too? And because there were a lot of people there, it warranted front page coverage? Apparently, so.

But it didn’t. Why? Because those goddamn families of murder victims! How dare they, with their puny 1,000-person contingent, piss all over your parade!

(I don’t quite know what it means, but perhaps it’s worth considering that people who seek protection for unborn children are called “anti-abortion” while people who seek to limit 2nd Amendment protections are called “supporters of gun control” or “advocates of gun control.”)

More subliminal anti-religious hate speech, it would seem.

How, then, would these clowns prefer we address them? Obviously, they prefer “pro-life”, but as they–as a general demographic–oppose health care, gun control, and because they throw their support behind wars of aggression and political candidates who uphold the death penalty, it would be irresponsible to call them what they are not.

I, for one, prefer “anti-choice”, but that one really seems to chafe their undergarments. Bill Hicks once suggested “evil, annoying fucks”, but I doubt that would be better. Really, “anti-abortion” is probably the nicest way of putting it.

But this paragraph cuts to the heart of what makes Get Religion an utterly deplorable publication.

while people who seek to limit 2nd Amendment protections

The way she disparages the Sandy Hook protestors as people seeking to “limit 2nd Amendment protections” to justify her martyrdom complex goes beyond the hypersensitive outrage so typical of the mainstream religious right. She doesn’t merely observe the lack of attention paid to the March for Life, she proposes a media conspiracy to cover it up by giving a “few thousand” freedom-stealing murder victims more press than they rightly deserve.

I knew Lauren Rousseau and Victoria Soto personally. Both were riddled with bullets trying to save six-year-old children from a man who had no business owning a weapon. I suppose in that regard I am not an unbiased observer. But for this I make no apologies. Minimizing tragedy for the purpose of railing against abortion is objectively sick. End of story.

I can’t say I expected more from the blog which considers the rape of teenagers a lesser offense than the rape of children, or the blog who every other day seeks to justify bigotry by dressing it up in an alb and miter, but I can’t say I expected them to stoop this low.

“We must stop being the stupid party.” “We must stop looking backward.” “We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Superb advice, but how would the Republican Party go about accomplishing these ends?

Firing Bobby Jindal would be a good start.

After all, is this not the same Bobby Jindal who signed into a law a bill that allows creationism to be taught in public schools as an academically equal alternative to evolution, the same Bobby Jindal whose school voucher system is being used to teach kids the Loch Ness Monster is proof man and dinosaur lived side-by-side? The same Governor Bobby Jindal who warns against “looking backward”, yet supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples? The same Bobby Jindal who warns agains “insulting the intelligence of voters”, while this whole “I have a plan for the Republican Party” schtick is clearly a ploy to test the waters for a potential presidential run in 2016?

Yes, he is that Bobby Jindal.

To be fair, when Jindal says “We need to stop being the stupid party”, he doesn’t really mean Republicans should stop being stupid. Rather, he means Republicans should stop sounding stupid.

We must compete for every single vote: the 47 percent and the 53 percent and any other combination of numbers that adds up to 100 percent,” he said, notably invoking comments 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made at a closed door fundraiser about a bloc of voters who would not consider GOP candidates.

He also spoke out against those and other “completely unhelpful” comments from Romney in a November interview with CNN. In that interview, he signaled one of the seven points for the Republican Party’s future which he laid out Thursday: “The first step in getting the voters to like you is to demonstrate that you like them,” he explained Thursday.

Republicans “must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior. We must treat all people as individuals rather than as members of special interest groups,” he said.

Remember: it wasn’t the lies that killed the Romney/Ryan campaign. It wasn’t the Jeep factory in China, nonexistent deficit spending, or medicare cuts that never happened. Nor was it the policy. Millions of workaday Americans have in times past lined up around the block to vote against their own financial interests, and would no doubt do so again for the right candidate. No, what killed the Romney/Ryan campaign was a few short minutes of candid honesty.

So, please, insult voters’ intelligence all you want. Deny climate change and evolution. Make up some crazy shit about Social Security running out of money. Say “Greece” a lot. Just don’t insult them. They take that shit personally.

The NRA released this video in response to the proposed legislation they haven’t yet seen.

It’s humorous on a very base level, I know, but I can’t help but chuckle.

Why, after all, do the President and his family require armed protection? Because there are armed, violent anti-government extremists out there, many of whom no doubt funded this video through their NRA membership dues.  In a sense, the NRA is calling Obama a hypocrite for protecting himself from them. How dare he!

I won’t go into detail regarding what Rev. Giglio said. It doesn’t really matter. It’s more of the same “Gays don’t go to heaven/Love the sinner, hate the sin” crap that is typical of nice-guy preachers who try to distance themselves from the fire and brimstone crowd. Still, if you are interested, you can listen for yourself:

Louie Giglio – In Search of a Standard Christian Response to Homosexuality

Honestly, I’m flabbergasted. Not because a Christian pastor made homophobic comments, but because a significant number of liberals are actually surprised a Christian pastor made homophobic comments.

The problem isn’t the pastors. It’s the religion. President Obama may be a good politician, but he’d have better luck pulling a tax increase out of Ron Paul than he would finding a mainstream Christian pastor who hasn’t said something disparaging of homosexuals.

EDIT: Louie Giglio has officially withdrawn from the inauguration program.

Business Insider explains:

The campaign to circumvent the debt ceiling by having the Treasury mint a trillion dollar platinum coin continues to infiltrate the minds of elite thinkers in Washington.

Paul Krugman has come out in favor of it. Congressman Jerry Nadler is in favor of it. Pretty much every major news organization is discussing it. Even Stephen Colbert talked about it last night.

…

Almost everyone talking about fiscal policy imagines money to be a commodity of sorts that we can “run out” of if we don’t spend it carefully. In this sense, although we’ve long gotten rid of the gold standard, we’re still shackled with a gold standard mentality, where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully, lest one day the bond vigilantes show up at our door, causing us to go broke.

…

But these complaints actually get at the crux of the matter. Creating money is exactly what government does. What’s absurd for a private business is not absurd for the government.

As John Maynard Keynes simply put it a long time ago: “Money is the creation of the state.”

That the state creates the money we use is actually known to just about everyone, but people have a hard time making the key leap, which is that once the state is in the business of creating money, then the old gold standard notions of monetary scarcity don’t apply in the same way.

You can see this flawed thinking all the time.

It’s because people think that money is scarce that they think that gigantic government debts and deficits will lead to surging interest rates, because our lenders worry that we might not be good for it.

And it’s because people think that money is a finite good (the gold standard mentality) that many people assumed that the Fed “creating money” (by expanding the money supply through quantitative easing) would cause hyperinflation to happen.

Money is not a finite resource. Printing more or less does not affect value. Minting a a trillion-dollar tender is not a controversial proposition insofar as the creation of money is the job of government.

The most important implication here that our debt crisis–the crisis rendering our legislature inert–is self-imposed, and can go away with the mere wave of a hand.

I’m no economist, but it sounds like a good idea. And because it sounds like a good idea, it probably won’t pass.

CAUGHT RED HANDED

Reuter’s reports:

The independent study, examining church files sometimes dating back to 1945, was meant to shed light on undiscovered cases of abuse after about 600 people filed claims against molesting priests in 2010 following a wave of revelations there.

The German scandals were part of a series of abuse scandals that also shook the Catholic Church in Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands and forced Pope Benedict to issue a public apology.

Bishop Stephan Ackermann, spokesman on abuse issues for the German Bishops Conference, said the hierarchy had lost confidence in the researcher, criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, and would look for another specialist to take up the study.

“We regret that this project … cannot be continued and we will have to find a new partner,” Ackermann said in a statement that blamed Pfeiffer’s “communications behaviour with church officials” for the breakdown.

Pfeiffer told German Radio the bishops wanted to change previously agreed guidelines for the project to include a final veto over publishing its results, which he could not accept.

“Everything was settled reasonably and then suddenly came … an attempt to turn the whole contract towards censorship and stronger control by the church,” said Pfeiffer, head of the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute.

…

The critical lay Catholic movement We Are Church called the decision “a devastating signal for the credibility of the church leadership” that showed the bishops could not accept an independent inquiry into the scandals.

The mainstream Central Committee of German Catholics expressed regret that the study “cannot be carried out in the agreed way” and said any new study should be up to the standards of independent academic research.

…

Speaking to German Radio, Ackermann accused Pfeiffer of reinterpreting his research contract and said the bishops had tried to clarify some points in the agreement because they feared he would publish results without their permission.

“We weren’t trying to hold things back,” he said. “We want a similar project to go ahead and we will look for a new partner.”

Ackermann noted that another researcher had produced a parallel report into the abuse crisis without any problem.

That study, which concluded most priests accused of sexual abuse were psychologically normal, was lambasted as a whitewash by victims’ support groups.

Pfeiffer also said he found out after starting his study, which was supposed to study files for nine dioceses since 1945 and 18 dioceses for the period 2000 to 2010, that files on priests convicted of sexual abuse could be destroyed 10 years after the verdict.

He said his team of researchers would continue its work without church support, appealing to victims to report their cases to them so they can produce a report on their experiences.

You heard it. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

They aren’t trying to hold anything back. There’s just some information they don’t want published. They’re interested in going forward with the study, so they’ll keep looking for a researcher who is willing to fudge the numbers in their favor. No doubt they’ll find one.

Were it not so vindicating, watching the church impale itself upon its self-ascribed infallibility would almost seem sad. Once again, they’ve been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Once again, they’ve looked us right in the eye and lied. Once again, the deception hasn’t worked.

The correct course of action–nay, the moral course of action–couldn’t be clearer. All the church need do is admit instances of past sexual abuse, stop obstructing investigations into sexual abuse, and take appropriate action to prevent future instances of sexual abuse. But they can’t, and they won’t. Doing so would be an admission of moral failing. Carrying on the pretense of supreme moral authority is far more important to them than the truth, than protecting children, than actually being moral.

Let them have their delusions; they will be their undoing.

Two men enter. One man leaves.

The giant inflatable ball containing the bodies of two thrill-seekers rolled down a mountainside, into a rocky ravine, and then onto a frozen lake. One of them–a father of two–is dead, his neck broken in the fall. The other is seriously injured.

Fingers have been pointed, and it would appear the operator who sold these two men their Zorb ride was somewhat unlearned in the finer points of physics. The manufacturer of this inflatable thrill ride, Zorb, LTD, is now calling for safety regulations that, they hope, would weed out such “cowboy operators”.

And that’s that.

No one is screaming bloody-murder about the freedom to own Zorbs. No one is defending their liberty to roll a Zorb down whatever mountain they damn well please. No one feels their fundamental liberty will be violated if the government requires licensing for and registration of Zorbs.

There is a recognized danger. There is a plan to fix it. And we’ve all gone about our day.

Enter Pope Benedict XVI, ostensibly the drowning man’s man age-addled, senile brain. The issue of gay marriage, the rising tide. With every passing day, the church’s response to criticisms and accusations of homophobia become less and less sensible, now to the point where they barely resemble cogent thoughts.

The mathematics involved aren’t difficult. The church supports an unpopular idea; therefore, the church has become unpopular. If the relationship between opposing gay marriage and positive public opinion are inversely related, it stands to reason the church may fix its image problems were it to reverse its position on gay marriage.

And let’s be clear. The church needn’t approve the sacrament of matrimony for homosexual couples. All they need do is cease their opposition to civil marriages for gay people, to acknowledge that they, as a religious institution, should have no say in matters of public policy not directly affecting them.

But Papa Joe has, yet again, misplaced his calculator. Who is to blame for the church’s declining attendance? Why, “intolerant agnostics”, of course!

FaithWorld reports:

In a homily to about 10,000 people in St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, he firmly rejected suggestions the Church should change to suit public opinion.

“Anyone who lives and proclaims the faith of the Church is on many points out of step with the prevalent way of thinking,” he said. “The approval of the prevailing wisdom, however, is not the criterion to which we submit.”

In the United States, a group last month started a petition on the White House website asking the administration of President Barack Obama to list the Catholic Church as a “hate group” because of its opposition to gay marriage.

“Today’s regnant agnosticism has its own dogmas and is extremely intolerant regarding anything that would question it and the criteria it employs,” the pope said.

“Therefore the courage to contradict the prevailing mindset is particularly urgent for a bishop today. He must be courageous,” he said.

Papa Joe would very much like to bash gays without the inconvenience of being labeled a bigot. How to do this? Why, accuse bigotry of those who accuse him of the same! Sheer brilliance!

The old man clearly feels religious tradition is sufficient enough reason to tolerate a bigoted argument amidst the public discourse. I wonder if he would make the same argument about, say, slavery, which his own infallible office once itself supported, or to which it was least indifferent.

Religion News Service reports:

At a time when the ideals of compromise and collegiality seem like a distant dream in the nation’s capital, an unusually diverse coalition of religious leaders is asking Americans to pray for civility.

“Through daily prayer, we are calling on the ‘better angels of our nature’ needed to sustain our nation and solve problems,” said the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, immediate past president of the National Council of Churches and one of the faith leaders taking part in “18 days of Prayer for the Nation.”

Prayers begin Thursday (Jan. 3), the first day of the new Congress, and end on Jan. 21, the day of President Obama’s second inauguration.

Faith leaders from left, right and center have signed on, including Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Richard Land of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.

The Faith & Politics Institute, a nonpartisan group that nurtures the spiritual life of members of Congress and their staffs, and presses political foes toward civil debate, organized the days of prayer and an online “commitment to prayer” page to document participation.

It lists 27 clergy and others on day one, including Eboo Patel, a Muslim American who founded the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, and Rabbi Steve Gutow, president and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Why eighteen days and not nineteen? Hell, why not simply one? Does the Lord relish in repetition? Moreover, can’t he, in his omnibenevolence, act without first being asked? If God wanted civility in politics, wouldn’t politics simply be civil?

That people who live in an ostensibly democratic society feel compelled to band together to pray for political change is absolutely mind-boggling. Our very political system provides a mechanism for bottom-up political change. It’s called the ballot box, and if citizens spent more time properly evaluating political candidates than they do uselessly pleading to the absentee landlord upstairs, perhaps the national discourse would be less acrimonious.