LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY shawnsmalley)

My mom, always trying to reach out to my non-churchgoing lifestyle and freethinker uppityness, e-mailed me a Snopes article about a movie called "The Golden Compass, which is due out on December 7 of this year:

There will be a new Children's movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis's Chronical's of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won't hear on the regular TV. (Full article here...)

This is honestly the first I've heard about the themes of this movie. I saw the trailer the last time I went to the movies, and they had a large display for it in the lobby as well, but I've not been aware of this author previously.
In all honesty, as an agnostic and as one who's always interested in digesting something new and contraversial, I'm interested even moreso in the film now.
What is everyone else's take on this movie, the books, and the backlash they are causing among the dominionist crowd? Could this top Harry Potter as the most hated childrens' series in history?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY idragosani)

"As Muslim students and their supporters protested outside, commentator Ann Coulter told a USC audience Wednesday night that Americans should get tough on terrorists and "stop genuflecting before Islam."

Coulter's speech to a supportive audience of about 230 in Annenberg Auditorium was part of a nationwide series of events on college campuses that has been dubbed "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" by its organizer, Los Angeles author and activist David Horowitz. Another 100 or so watched on screens in the auditorium lobby, not far from about 150 protesters from Muslim, Jewish and Christian student and community groups."

Read More

I read somewhere (maybe it was here on dark_christian?) that next week should be "Christo-Fascism Awareness Week" -- except we don't need just a week, it's something we need to be aware of all the time.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY idragosani)

Article about The Watchmen, an active group of gay bashing street thugs:

"There's been a flood of movement conservatives accusing liberals of being Nazis lately, most recently Debbie Schlussel and Michael Savage. Most of it has been barely concealed projection. We can hardly wait, of course, for Jonah Goldberg's contribution to the meme, though it looks we may be waiting awhile. Newspeak can be tricky, after all.

But the most striking use of the "liberal Nazis" meme I've yet heard -- striking, that is, for the Bizzaro World inversion of reality it reflected -- came this weekend from Vlad Kusakin, the Sacramento-based editor of a Russian-language newspaper called The Speaker. Kusakin went on a rant about the "liberal media" and the 120 or so people gathered in protest outside the convention hall in Lynnwood, Wash., where he was speaking to a group calling itself the Watchmen on the Walls."

...

And the scariest quote: "I don't believe all discrimination is wrong," he said. "I discriminate based on what is right. God discriminates too."

Read More

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dagoski)

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but a scientific paper widely used as evidence in the creationist community has been retracted. Does here know how much creationists have relied on this paper?

( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY soapinha)

Since dogemperor has posted some investigations on various Dominionist Bible translations, I think I've found another one; The Recovery Bible.

The website links (and the Bible itself seems to be a product of) This ministry. Their statement of faith seems fairly Dominionist/Fundmentalist; the Bible first, then doctrines about God. Apparently this ministry also has a radio programme.

This Bible seems as if was published specifically for the 'Living Stream' ministry. The ministry leaders have their own websites: 'Witness Lee' and 'Watchmen Nee'. It looks as if their partners in ministry, cute.
They even publish a magazine. and a series of books.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY idragosani)

A couple of nice videos of Eugenie Scott of the NCSE speaking on Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism and some of the political motivations behind it all (among other things):

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1777,n,n

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

Once JK Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore. Is anyone surprised that Bill O'Reilly objects?

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.

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 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 kengr)

Looks like they are really worried or something

( Read more... )

It seems the more things happen re the "Warriors for Innocence" censorship fiasco, the more Livejournal seems to bungle things.

Namely, it seems now that people can flag any entries to LJ Abuse for "adult content":

(from LJ Herald)

A 'Flag content' icon/link will be added to the icons/links found in every entry (Leave a Comment, Add to Memories, Tell a Friend, Track Comments, etc.).

ETA (on Oct. 20 @ 11:45pm GMT): Users won't be able to "flag anything if their account isn't at least one month old". Logged-out users won't be able to flag content. Editor's Note: thanks to worldserpent for the heads-up.

ETA (on Oct. 20 @ 7:55pm GMT): developer janinedog tells us that users won't be able to flag their own entries via the Flag icon. However, they will be able to flag their entries when posting or editing them and, of course, flag their journals via Manage Settings or Manage Communities (we already knew that). The Flag icon will therefore be used by other users to report content to the Abuse team who will then review the content and decide to flag it as containing adult content or not. Janine also tells us that these changes will go live next Thursday. Thanks again, Janine.

More info here:

Users can't flag their own stuff via the flag icon. They can flag their own stuff via the Manage Settings page option (which flags the whole journal) or while posting/editing an entry (which will flag just that entry).

The flag icon is used to submit the journal or entry to the Abuse Team for review. The settings are used for the account owner or journal poster to self-police themselves.

So to summarise: You can mark your own stuff as "adult" and this is okay, but the flag button used by other people auto-generates an LJ Abuse request.

Seeing as Livejournal has in fact admitted they have no formal training in regards to abuse issues and in particular abuse issues that may have legal aspects--as exhibited in defense of communities promoting religiously motivated child abuse, among other things whilst removing adult Harry Potter fanfiction (technically, Dumbledore x Grindenwald fanfic can result in an abuse complaint even though the creator of the series herself has admitted that this is not only canonical but she is interested in seeing what slash fanfic will result)--I am, shall we say, a bit nervous about this.

Among other things, one of my real worries about this is that dominionist groups like Warriors for Innocence will start "astro-turfing" targets for mass complaints with LJ Abuse. DMCA SLAPPs and similar stunts are well known as a method of silencing critics that dominionists have used; another method they occasionally have used is by filing massive numbers of complaints claiming a target is in violation of the rules (for example, the Parent's Television Council and the AFA's "complaint-spamming" of the FCC claiming shows are violating indecency rules; PTC's complaints total up to over 99 percent total of indecency complaints sent to the FCC, for things as minor as a woman being in a bikini before the "Threshold Hour" of 11pm), and I can very easily see dominionist groups targeting entire communities (including this one).

I do wish to assure our readers that--in the event we do get "Abuse-bombed" by a critic who takes umbrage to the writing here--we have precautions to not only back up the archives but to keep the community going elsewhere, if necessary. Still, though, we will want to keep a careful eye on this (including a careful eye at the "usual suspects").

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY 1400scale)

This oughta ping Dogemporer's dommie-dar:

http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2772.htm

For those of you who don't know "The Voice of the White House" is an alleged insider in Dubya's admin. I've been reading him for years, and a lot of his revelations turned out to be confirmed months later. I'd pay attention, despite any reservations that members here might have.

Comments?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

From Professor Kim's News Notes, several links and this quote:
' Mc Clurkin is a Grammy-winning Gospel artist who will be performing at next week's Republican National Convention. Mc Clurkin has been an outspoken for a number of years about his belief, born of his personal experience, that people choose to be homosexual after experiences of childhood abuse and neglect. Mc Clurkin's argument is consistent with that of groups such as the National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality and ex-gay ministries such as Exodus International.

The commenter (quoted in the linked piece) cites sources from the 700 Club and elsewhere that say Mc Clurkin is organizing black churches to support Pres. Bush's push for a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage. '

And here's Ex-GayWatch's links on him, including this gem of a quote from youth 'leader Scott Davis responding to McClurkin's (unavailable online) testimonial':

"Donnie’s story of abuse and confused sexual identity is a reminder
of God’s call on Exodus to be part of preventing homosexuality among
youth. We cannot merely help those who have developed homosexuality; we
must help prevent the development of homosexuality among our youth. Fore
the sake of our children, we need to vote for civic leaders who defend
sexual morality and who work to build up American families instead of
tearing them down."

Sounds Dominionist enough for me...

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

From the NYT, via americablog:

As religious conservatives gather in Washington this weekend for the “Values Voters Summit,” Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced its latest effort to attract people of faith to the campaign: a gospel concert tour.

"All three of the dates of the “Embrace the Change” tour are in South Carolina, where Mr. Obama is locked in battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for black voters.
Gospel acts including Mary Mary, Donnie McClurkin and Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage and the Mighty Clouds of Joy are scheduled to appear."

Is there a single US presidential hopeful *without* Dominionist ties or connections of some kind? Hilary's campaign team, Ron Paul's KKK and other friends... is there anyone you'd want to vote for?

(Except - maybe - Stephen Colbert? Wouldn't be the first joker in the job.)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY alfrecht)

All things considered, it was pretty successful!

( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY roseross)

"It seems only fair. From Europe we have received Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, to name but a few and to Europe we are now exporting the learning of the illustrious members of today’s equivalent of yesterday’s Flat Earth Society. News of the exportation of their beliefs comes at an inopportune time coinciding, as it does, with news that one of its leading exponents and the head of one of the institutions of lower education associated with it, has just been charged with bilking the institution of millions of dollars in the furtherance of the Lord’s work.

According to a suit filed by three former professors of Oral Roberts, University, Richard Roberts, the offspring of its founder, spent lavishly from the institution’s coffers in order to remodel his Dwelling Place and repeatedly took private trips on a university plane and engaged in assorted other activities that ill become one occupying as exalted a position as he. But this is not about him and anyway, those are simply allegations in a civil suit that may or may not be proven when the trial occurs. This is about exportation... Read More

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY devilindupriest)

Nothing big, just an invite from a website called www.injesus.com from someone named Brad Reiches.

Invitation to Join GodThoughts Wired!
Brad Reiches
Oct 20, 2007


Brad Reiches has invited you to join GodThoughts Wired!.

You have 2 options to subscribe to this list:

1. You may send an email to this address:

OR

2. Or you may click on this link to log into the group located at inJesus.com.

TO D ECLINE this invitation: Do nothing. You have not been subscribed to anything, and you will not receive any emails.

You will only receive emails from GodThoughts Wired! if you choose to accept this invitation.

Here is a Message From Brad Reiches:

Please accept this invitation to join one of the fastest growing Christian ministries in the world. GodThoughtsWired! is an inspiration/discipleship ministry serving thousands of people in 104 countries around the world.

In addition to the FREE daily email you will receive, GodThoughtsWired! provides you with FREE access to sermons, worship songs and significant discipleship resources that will greatly enhance your walk with God.

Do you desire to grow in your relationship with God? Then GodThoughtsWired! Is for you. (Please click on “view Archives” above, to review all previous GodThoughtsWired! entries).

This is kind of a first for me as far as spam goes. I don't think I've ever gotten religiously based spam before. Admittedly I have a username that's probably begging for it, but it just hasn't happened. The account that got it is my spam catcher that I use for signing up for things, so it's possible I suppose that something I signed up for recently sold my name to them. But to be honest I usually don't get much random spam that gets through the filters. So I'm kind of wondering if either, A) Someone I know signed me up for their mailers, or B) They harvested my name/email adress from livejournal.

Also, at first glace they appear to have successfully google-bombed themselves by setting up a billion @injesus.com e-mail/blog pages. I'm not sure if that was on purpose or not, but if so it's the first moderately technically savvy religious group I've seen. I'm almost afraid to go to their website directly. If it doesn't look like a mid 90's geocities site my entire worldview will have been rocked.

It is probably no secret to any of you that dominionists--and especially neopentecostal dominionists--have absolutely no love lost for the Harry Potter series (as it is, the Assemblies churches that conduct Harry Potter book-burnings think C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia flirt too much with things magickal for their liking, much less the crew at Hogwart's School for Wizards).

However, I have a sense that the dominionists are now going to be weaving the anti-LGBT hate machine (a la "Watchmen On The Walls") into their Hate Of The Boy Who Lived.

You see...it appears that the dear Mrs. Rowling publically outed no less than the head of Hogwarts as being flaming in an entirely different sense than his Patronus taking form of a phoenix....

( Yes, it's true. Albus Dumbledore is, canonically, about as straight as George Takei. Which is to say, he has '3:00pm--welcome new students to Hogwarts for new term, perform Sortings on new students, stare wistfully at pictures of naughty, naughty Grindenwald whilst cursing the fact he had to turn to the Dark Arts' pencilled into his Gay Agenda (tm). Slashers, start your fanfics )

In relation to dominionism, this IS definitely something we will need to keep an eye on--seriously, with media sources all over the Internet carrying this news now, I will eat my hat (not necessarily a Sorting Hat) if dominionist groups don't start challenging the Harry Potter books on the basis of Dumbledore being canonically gay. Sadly, this may expand book challenges even further as well (and, even more disturbingly, they may have a greater chance of success--there are school boards that will remove works friendly to LGBT people who will not remove works claimed to be "Satanic" for merely containing depictions of wizards in a not-burning-at-the-stake light). Those of you who do monitor the dominionist groups re propoganda may want to keep a close ear.

At least one article has noted the real possibility this could increase book challenges by dominionists against the Harry Potter series:

Rowling is likely to face criticism on another front. The news that a major character is gay, in what is likely the most popular children's book series of all time, is almost certain to inflame the author's critics in some corners of the Christian community. Indeed, the Harry Potter books have already faced frequent criticism and calls to be banned for their use of magic. No doubt those critics will only take this news as more ammunition in their fight against the books.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY alfrecht)

As those of you who have been following the threads in this community lately know, Watchmen on the Walls is having a little convention in Lynnwood, WA this weekend (a suburb north of Seattle). A protest is going to be mounted against their violent and hateful messages on Saturday morning, October 20, at 9:30 AM. Their convention begins at 11:00 AM that day, so hopefully a huge showing of people will be there to indicate (in a peaceful manner!) that their rhetoric is neither agreed with nor welcome in our community.

Further details are available at the following link:

http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/10/official_protest_notice_for_lynnwood_wat