LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Talk To Action article talks about the growing wave of people speaking out about the rising influence of the religious right in teaching science:

[Hunter] Rawlings said, "I.D. [intelligent design] is not valid as science... I.D. is a subjective concept.... a religious belief masquerading as a secular idea. It is neither clearly identified as a proposition of faith nor supported by other rationally based arguments." Advocates of I.D. voice a creationist argument that some features of the natural world are so "irreducibly complex" that they must have required a creator, or an "intelligent designer."( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Check out Holier Than Thou: When the Christian Right Goes Wrong. It's a blog written by Greg Spring, who says:

I am a television producer, journalist and award-winning political columnist. My work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Playboy and Los Angeles Magazine, among others. My political columns have been honored by Art Buchwald and the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

And the preface of the blog is interesting too:

“Holier Than Thou” is our weekly quiz to test how well you’ve been keeping up with what the Religious Right is really up to. When they screw up, we’re there to note it. When their feet of clay start to crumble, we’re there to chip away a bit more. And when they serve as president of their church while leading a double life as the nation’s most feared serial killer…well, you get the idea.

Looks like fun reading ahead!

Project Tocsin has a very interesting article on their blog page regarding godcasters that is in reference to a recent article on the main group in the US coordinating "godcasting" groups, televangelists and the like. (The original Harper's article is available here as part of their "Soldiers of Christ" collection on dominionism.)

Specifically, the Tocsin article details a national conference of "godcasting" broadcasters by the National Religious Broadcasters, which included an awards ceremony at which an FCC employee received an award:

The convention opened on Saturday evening with an awards ceremony highlighted by the prestigious Chairman’s Award which was something of a paradox as it was “for serving the Christian community in a distinguished and exemplary manner,” but it was given to a nonbeliever, homophobic talk radio host, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who received a standing ovation. She acknowledged the award by saying she was “just a Jewish girl from the Bronx,” and that “we both serve the same God.”

Another award which one would think raises conflict-of-interest issues was given to Federal Communications Commission Chief of Media, Roy Stewart, the senior staff person who handles all broadcast matters. He accepted his award saying, “It is you who should be honored.”

FCC spokesperson David Sisk said the bureau had no policy about FCC employees receiving awards from those whom they regulate that everyone including the FCC commissioners receive awards all the time. Also honored as TV program of the year was Pat Robertson’s 700 Club.

This so far makes two confirmed dominionist-friendly regulators in the FCC--the other being advisor Penny Nance (whose connections to dominionist groups are thoroughly documented here.

The really worrying thing, however, is that Roy Stewart is head of the Media Bureau of the FCC (which is the division that regulates both radio and television stations, including LPFM stations). Per the FCC Phonebook he is still employed there, and per the Media Bureau's bureau chief listing he is Senior Deputy Media Chief of the Media Bureau. Roy Stewart is also--notably--Chief, Office of Broadcast License Policy. (In other words, the very guy who accepted the award from the National Religious Broadcasters is the very guy who sets official FCC policy for who gets and who doesn't get an FCC broadcast license.)

Disturbingly, the FCC also apparently sees no conflict of interest in receiving awards from dominionist "godcasters" (many of whom are blatantly hijacking LPFM licenses to set up barely regulated "godcasting" networks and would in fact be applying for LPFM and translator licenses from the Media Bureau itself).

We may have just found direct evidence of collusion between dominionists (and the hijacking of LPFM licenses) and the FCC itself. I'll keep you all posted.

( References for NRB and dominionist links )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY iniswitryn)

(Poster's comment: I found this article thought-provoking, a look at the pros and cons of religious inspiration's intersection with the sociopolitical sphere, without gratuitous attack on religious belief.)

Better Off Without Him?

By George Monbiot, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2005.

"Christian fundamentalists claim religion is associated with lower rates of violence, teen pregnancy and divorce. A new study says they couldn't be more wrong."

Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer.

Most of those now seeking to blow people up -- whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes -- do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting fire to human beings. A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalization of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the non-religious infidel.

But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, Germans and Belgians in Africa, and the British in Australia and India could be said to have done their best). It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "If God does not exist, then everything is permissible."

Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." (We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).

The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?

for the full article see http://www.alternet.org/story/26721

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY zarq)

The prosecution’s lawyers for the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, “Intelligent” Design trial deserve a fee raise. They have elicited testimony from Michael Behe in which he counters his own theory of Irreducible Complexity, raised in his deeply-flawed 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. The theory states that G-d must have designed the universe because there are biochemical systems which cannot be broken down into smaller functioning systems infinitely. Wikipedia tears that apart nicely, and so does Talk Design. TD’s Behe faq is here.

“Dispatches from the Culture Wars” explains what happened quite eloquently. Transcript is here. (pdf) The good bits start on page 42.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kiji_kat)

This just...wow. There are no words. None.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY cheap_laugh)

Video Channel scroll down the page...
This is from http://www.sky.com:
The Sky Report at 7pm
Inside The Church of Hate
Updated: 20:01, Tuesday October 25, 2005
The Sky Report has secretly filmed one of America's most controversial Christian ministers praising the London bombings.

Fred Phelps says that terrorist outrages and natural disasters such as Hurricane Rita are examples of God's wrath against countries such as America and Britain for tolerating homosexuals and homosexuality.

Fred Phelps, who set up the controversial Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, told our undercover reporter about the attacks, which killed 52 people:

"Oh I am so thankful that happened. My only regret is that they didn't kill about million of them. England deserves that kind of punishment, as does this country (America)"

Listen carefully. He is PRAISING the Terrorists. We are at War. Why is he preaching his Fifth Column diatribe(s) Phelps is a Traitor to America.... oh, wait... he's a White Christian... never mind....

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Time Magazine article connects a player in the spreading White House scandal, Jack Abramoff, with former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed.( Read more... )