LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kengr)

Looks like they are really worried or something

( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

twistedchick found a very interesting quote that pretty much encapsulates how totally divorced from reality some hard-right Christians are:

"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."
-- Glenn Beck, October 22, 2007

This guy is one of those right-wing hate radio bloviators, who apparently has it in for anyone who lives in the state of California.

Twistedchick continues:

The comment above doesn't surprise me at all. It's part and parcel of a specific aspect of neoCon/Religious Right ideology -- the Social Darwinist idea that financial profit and material benefits accrue to those who are considered holy by God. If God rewards those who are rightious with material goods, then those who are afflicted by natural disasters are (by definition) unholy, unworthy and not 'right with God.' You may remember something similar from the neoCon reaction to Hurricane Katrina, and the lack of helpful Republican response to those who were dying, starving and drowning -- but the same attitude carried over as well into Adminstration officials' statements that elderly people who had paid into Medicare were not worthy to receive its benefits because they were "stealing from the rich" by being financially eligible to receive them.

It appears not to have registered with Beck that those houses burning in San Diego are in one of the richest, most Republican and conservative areas of the country. To him, if they're burning it's because the owners aren't worthy.

Last time I checked, God does not care about what you have in the bank. It's what is inside your mind and heart that truly count, not how many Mercedes you own. I feel for those who lost their homes- even those who can afford to rebuild out of their pocket change. Losing a home is a very terrible thing. So is losing a life.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY wyldraven)

Time: Huckabee's Bid for the Christian Right

The conflict has been brewing underneath the surface, but the results of the straw poll at Saturday's Values Voters Summit made it official: the real struggle in the 2008 Republican primaries will be not between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney or social conservatives and fiscal conservatives but between Christian Right leaders and the conservatives in the pews.

( Excerpt. Click Headline for full story. )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY star_cabaret)

because Dumbledore is not Gay, which is a lesson in "Taking Stories More Seriously than the Author," written by John Mark Reynolds, a professor at Biola University who's known as a proponent of Intelligent Design. This article was found through Pharyngula. This ties in in a way with the curricula challenges and the whole Christian second culture that tries to function separately from secular culture. I must say, though, that if I tried to analyze something like this in my literature courses, I would've been laughed out of the department.

Recently, J.K. Rowling announced to the world that one of her characters, the heroic mentor of Harry Potter, Dumbledore was gay.

Nonsense. There is no evidence of it in the books and the books (at this point) are all that matter. I have always thought the books deeply Christian not because Rowling told me so (which she recently confirmed), but because the text is full of Christian images and ideas. She had a chance to give Dumbledore a boyfriend, but she muffed it. I refuse to denigrate friendship by reading every close one as sexual . . . and she gave us nothing else.

No offense to an excellent author, but Dumbledore no longer belongs only to Rowling. He also belongs to her readers who have been given a series of books in which Rowling was free to say what she wanted to say. She wrote about Christianity openly by Book Seven, but if Dumbledore was gay, she decided to hide it. She hid it so well that there is no evidence of it.

[...]

Rowling chose to hide her “opinion” of Dumbledore’s sexuality until the story arc was done, Dumbledore dead, and his life written. Now her opinions no longer matter, just her text. If she could point to anything in that text that suggests something greater than friendship, mentoring, or a professional relationship, then that would matter. She has not and cannot. She carefully hid the “fact” and now it is too late to introduce it.

[...]

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter...

I do not react this way because Rowling has said something I find personally distasteful. I do find homosexual behavior contrary to nature and the laws of God. However, I do not find the tendency to homosexual behavior shocking or particularly distasteful. We live in an imperfect world and if Dumbledore lived a celibate life giving himself to his work, then he is a perfect (fictional) model of how to deal with disordered affections.

[...]

It does not matter if she had Dumbledore’s failings in mind as she wrote, since she censored it out so heavily as to be of no use in understanding her novel. Unless we are give word’s new meaning, she chose words like “friendship” to describe Dumbledore’s relationships.

This is something of a follow-up to dogemperor's post about waiting for the apoplectic fit. Just to reiterate: there have been basically two extremely-socially-conservative responses to the Harry Potter series: 1) it's evil or, much more rarely, 2) it has Christian themes and we should look for these and ignore the rest. The author of this was one of those "Christian themes" people, and this is his response to the author's latest statement about her character.