The new Pope talks like a socialist. Let’s see him put the church’s money where his mouth is.

Now that the Boston bombers turned out not to be white, Tea Party or militia nuts, the news media twits are trying themselves in knots trying to be reasonable.

Powerline has a great post on the subject. Here’s a taste:

This piece in The Atlantic is a good exemplar of the mushy liberal commentary that has proliferated in recent days. Authored by one Megan Garber, it is titled: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” Before taking a close look at Ms. Garber’s article, let’s advise The Atlantic not to put away that headline. It could come in handy so often. “The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

Bob Stock comments

Rule #1: If, say, a cell of some ideologically motivated, foreign-trained jihadists launch a deadly attack and kill some innocent kids as part of a long-running global conspiracy, the best response is for us to simply go about our business as if nothing happened — if we change our laws or way of life, they win! The less we know about these terrorists, the better. Above all, we MUST NOT PROFILE over what must surely be just a few bad apples.

Rule #2: If, say, a lone, insane, suicidal nutcase shoots up a school, breaking dozens of existing laws in the process, the best response is to call for sweeping national cultural changes, dig deeply to discover the root causes for the acts of a madman, and above all, scapegoat millions of law-abiding gun-owners through punitive new regulations with no other purpose than to simply PUNISH them for their COLLECTIVE GUILT.

Wait, what?

Yesterday, someone on the radio said he hoped there would be no repeat of the rash of anti-Muslim hate crimes after 9/11.

Was there such a rash or is it just an urban myth?

Looking at the FBI stats for hate crimes in 2002, a year I chose because 2001 was three-quarters over when the Twin Towers were destroyed.

Some highlights:

• A review of the 7,459 single-bias hate crime incidents showed that 48.8 percent were racially motivated, 19.1 percent were based on a bias against a religious group, 16.7 percent were motivated by a bias against a sexual orientation, 14.8 percent resulted from an ethnicity/national origin bias, and 0.6 percent were based on a disability bias.
• Eleven of the hate crime victims in 2002 were murdered. Four of these murders were associated with a racial bias, four with a sexual-orientation bias, two with an ethnicity/national origin bias, and one with a religious bias.
• A breakdown of the data regarding victims in single-bias incidents [I guess that means only one bias, which would exclude beatings of black gay men, for example] revealed that 49.7 percent were victims of racial bias, 18.0 percent were victims of religious bias, 16.4 percent were victims of sexual-orientation bias, 15.3 percent were victims of ethnicity/national origin bias, and less than 1 percent were victims of disability bias.

Let’s jump ahead to 2011 stats: of the 1,480 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 63.2 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 12.5 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
• 5.7 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
• 4.4 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
• 3.4 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.3 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 10.5 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).

Michael Walsh at The Corner

Holy cow. Kathryn has already pointed out this instant-classic NYT correction, but even with the comments topping 150, I don’t think it’s received quite the requisite amount of obloquy and derision, so let me help. First, the correction to an article by Elisabetta Povoledo, datelined Vatican City:

Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

Glad they told us Easter was a Christian holiday, lest unwary readers, encountering it for the first time, think it a Hindu feast. And “mischaracterized” is letting Ms. Povoledo off far too easily. What the hell does “resurrection into heaven” even mean? And I mean hell in the sense of this passage from the Apostles’ Creed, which she might have consulted, eschatologically speaking, for a basic Catholic primer:

. . . suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Since when in the history of the English language has anyone ever spoken of a “resurrection into heaven”? The phrase itself makes no sense; one resurrects from something — the tomb, Death — and then goes on to other things: “ascension,” for example, which is coming right up. As for the Assumption, that’s another miracle altogether. And don’t get me started on the confusion attending the Immaculate Conception.

They say you tend to believe what you read in the newspaper until the story concerns something you actually know about. The Times has just proven to 1.2 billion Catholics around the world that it knows nothing about their religion. Read it on all subjects accordingly.

Mark Steyn asks: “How could any expensively credentialed J-school grad type those words?

..but they sure love all the cool photo ops.

Jim Geraghty:

You don’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out what the U.S. media think are the most important issues before the pope:

Francis’ ascension, however, will not be without its controversies. Francis firmly opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception, the last being a particularly significant position as the Church continues to expand in Africa, where contraception is seen as a vital tool to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Was there any cardinal in the mix who, upon assuming the papacy, would step out onto the balcony, and declare, “Oh, hey, abortion, homosexuality and contraception are cool now”?

A couple times a year, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne writes a column that says basically, “The Vatican has a big problem, because lots of American Catholics don’t agree with the pope.” It never seems to cross his mind that each pope and the Vatican collectively don’t really care that lots of American Catholics don’t agree with them. Or, more specifically, they would like American Catholics to agree with them, but they’re not willing to change what they teach as right and wrong based upon what the Gallup organization says American Catholics think. They think they get that material from the Man Upstairs. You may or may not agree with that assessment of Divine leadership, but the point is that the pope and the cardinals believe it, and they’re not going to be talked out of it by some pundit.

This is an institution that weathered the storms of the schism with the Orthodox and the Protestant Reformation. They’re not going to suddenly abandon their positions in the face of criticism from Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, or Andrew Sullivan.

The Nazi party strives to take Christ out of Christmas.

1937 ‘Neo-Pagans’ Target Carols

BERLIN — De-Christianization of famous German Christmas hymns, such as “Silent Night, Holy Night,” is the outstanding contribution to the current holiday season of the rapidly spreading German faith movement or “religion” of National Socialism.

In the new versions of the old songs reference to Nazi tenets of race, blood and soil replace familiar words concerning Christ, Child and the like. The accepted English translation of Mohr’s “Silent Night,” stanza three lines two and three is: “The Son of God loves pure light, radiant beams from thy Holy faith.” Equivalent lines in the Nazified version are “German blood, O how laugh the lips of thy children, blessed with joy.”

…as depicted by the children of St Paul’s Church, Auckland, New Zealand.

HT: Susan Gertson

A Christian group has been effectively banned from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) has lost its recognition as an official campus group because it discriminates by requiring the group leaders to be Christians and adhere to a set of values.

The group is the Tufts chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which describes itself as “an evangelical campus mission serving students and faculty on college and university campuses nationwide.”

So basically Tufts said that it wasn’t fair to require the leaders of the Christian group to actually be Christians. One has to wonder if they went to every other religiously affiliated group on campus to make sure that none of them were requiring their leaders to follow the tenants of their faiths.

Let’s hope Bill Maher lives in an atheist neighborhood.

Religions are thought to serve as bulwarks against unethical behaviors. However, when it comes to predicting criminal behavior, the specific religious beliefs one holds is the determining factor, says a University of Oregon psychologist.

The study, appearing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, found that criminal activity is higher in societies where people’s religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent. A country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell, for example, is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal. The finding surfaced from a comprehensive analysis of 26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries.

As someone noted, only one of them is a convicted felon.

Dan Quayle gets ridiculed in the media, while scum like Snoop Dog — drugs, pornography, true misogyny– is celebrated.

Snoop’s life example is poison to those in the ghetto.

It’s amusing that progressives think a cross or a Christmas creche on public property violates the 1st Amendment, yet stand by silently as Obama’s Big Government treads on religious freedom.

Jonathan Tobin in Commentary

…This week, as Alana noted yesterday, Roman Catholic dioceses, schools, social service agencies and other institutions filed lawsuits in 12 federal courts, challenging the Obama administration’s dictate that they provide coverage for contraception in their health insurance policies. If they were to protect their rights, they had no choice but to go to court. The challenge will be affected by the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of ObamaCare, but if all or parts of that legislation are upheld, the plaintiffs will be asking the courts to uphold their rights under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forces the government to provide a compelling reason to force believers to violate their faith.

The administration has sought to marginalize the church’s position by launching a political campaign aimed at portraying the Republicans as waging a war on women because of conservative support for the church’s position. That has enabled some to claim that backing for the church is a partisan stand against the president. But this is looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope. It is not the administration that sought by means of ObamaCare to compel church institutions to pay for contraception that started this unnecessary fight, nor the bishops who would be quite happy to stay out of the political line of fire.

Having framed the issue as one in which backing for the church is tantamount to voicing opposition to the president or as being opposed to contraception — something the vast majority of Americans, including most Catholics, support–the administration may think it can defend its stance with impunity. But it is important for groups that would under other circumstances not hesitate to defend religious institutions from government compulsion not to leave the church to face the might of the government alone.

One needn’t oppose the president’s re-election or endorse the Vatican’s stance on contraception in order to understand that a ruling against the church would grant the government nearly unlimited power to restrict religious freedom. In the weeks and months ahead as this issue continues to be debated, it is vital that more faith groups rally around the church and make it clear to the administration and the courts that when it comes to protecting First Amendment rights, the church does not stand alone.

The editors at the Washington Post are so transparent it’s comical.

Religion is supposed to be off limits in presidential campaigns. And God knows, don’t dare bring up Jeremiah Wright in polite company.

Yet, they manage to write this:

Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith tangles with a quirk of Arkansas history

On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”

Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”

“There have been Fancher family reunions for 150 years, and the massacre comes up at every one of them,” said Scott Fancher, 58, who traces his lineage back to 26 members of the wagon train, which was known as the Fancher-Baker party. “The more whiskey we drunk, the more resentful we got.”

There aren’t many places in America more likely to be suspicious of Mormonism — and potentially more problematic for Mitt Romney, who is seeking to become the country’s first Mormon president. Not only do many here retain a personal antipathy toward the religion and its followers, but they also tend to be Christian evangelicals, many of whom view Mormonism as a cult.

And yet, there is scant evidence that Romney’s religion is making much difference in how voters here are thinking about the presidential election and whether they are willing to back the former Massachusetts governor.

“I think the situation right now is more anti-Obama than any other situation,” said Dave Hoover, chairman of the Carroll County Republicans.

It is impossible to know how Romney’s faith will play out in the November election. Polls point to a persistent skepticism about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and not just among evangelical Christians. Thirty-five percent of Americans in a Bloomberg News poll in March said they had an unfavorable view of the church, while 29 percent had a favorable view…

What I know about Mormons is that they are very organized.

From PBS:

The efficiency of the Mormon welfare apparatus is really legendary. As early as the beginnings of the 20th century, an American writer said, “The Mormon Church operates with the efficiency of the German Weirmacht.” This efficiency is seen at its best in moments of natural disasters such as the Teton Dam disaster of 1976 when over a billion dollars’ worth of damage occurred, and almost overnight almost 35,000, 45,000 Latter-day Saints were marshaled into forces and deployed to make order out of chaos and provide emergency relief.

When Hurricane Andrew struck [in Miami-Dade County] in 2002, the stories went around that the Mormon relief trucks were on the way to Florida before the hurricane had even made landfall. In the Hurricane Katrina of 2005 we know that once again the trucks were there before the National Guard was even allowing relief through. So the response is incredibly fast, incredibly efficient.

In recent years especially, those relief efforts have been extended to not just members of the church, but anybody who’s in the midst of a disaster or crisis. In the past 20 years alone, the church has responded to over 150 major humanitarian crises around the world. They have provided relief and funds in locations as disparate as Kosovo, North Korea, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There’s hardly a place on the earth where they haven’t been seen, providing relief and assistance, and it’s often through other, more established channels, like the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, but very often, as was the case in Africa, renting their own helicopters to speed relief to areas that were remote and hard to reach…

Isn’t being organized a good feature in a President?

Just imagine if Rush Limbaugh had said something similar.

In an interview with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), TIME magazine asks if she will tip Sikh taxi drivers more during her visit to New York City.

Haley, who was born into a Sikh family, now identifies herself as a Christian.

“In New York City, which you’re visiting for a couple of days, a lot of our taxi drivers are Sikhs. If you get one, are you going to give them a slightly bigger tip?” Belinda Luscombe, a TIME editor, asked Haley.

“I give the same tip to everyone,” Haley responded.

Video at the link.

Jim Treacher asks:

Question for Ms. Luscombe: A lot of cab drivers are idiots. Do you give them a slightly bigger tip?

Maybe Luscombe thinks she’s auditioning for The Daily Show or something. Ha ha! Just imagine the firestorm if a reporter asked Obama whether he tips black people more because they’re black.

But it’s okay to be a bigot toward Nikki Haley because she’s a Republican.

Which brings to mind an email recently received.

The Muslims are not happy!
They’re not happy in Gaza.
They’re not happy in Egypt.
They’re not happy in Libya.
They’re not happy in Morocco.
They’re not happy in Iran.
They’re not happy in Iraq.
They’re not happy in Yemen.
They’re not happy in Afghanistan.
They’re not happy in Pakistan.
They’re not happy in Syria.
They’re not happy in Lebanon.

So, where are they happy?

They’re happy in England.
They’re happy in France.
They’re happy in Italy.
They’re happy in Germany.
They’re happy in Sweden.
They’re happy in the USA.
They’re happy in Norway.
They’re happy in every country that is not run by Muslims.
And who do they blame?
Not Islam.
Not their leadership.
Not themselves.
THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN!

Michelangelo’s masterpiece — see it up close.

Navigate in all directions with your mouse or arrow keys. Use your + and – keys to zoom in and out.

Zoomed in, you can see details, such as the wear on the marble steps.

See it here at the Vatican website.

She should have seen this coming.

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.

“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,” Dahlkemper said in a press release sent out by Democrats for Life in November. “We worked hard to prevent abortion funding in health care and to include clear conscience protections for those with moral objections to abortion and contraceptive devices that cause abortion. I trust that the President will honor the commitment he made to those of us who supported final passage.”

For what it’s worth, you need not agree with Catholic doctrine to be offended by the Big Government intrusion.

The One at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Obama maintained that his call for the wealthiest to give up their tax breaks, he’s doing so out of economic necessity, but also in line with biblical teachings.

“And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense. But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,’” Obama said, noting Jewish and Islamic teachings say much the same thing.

Must one always render unto Caesar?

Cannot a wealthy person give back via private charity? Or can a wealthy person’s achievment of wealth enrich others along the way?

“And so when I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody. But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

How about unscrupulous borrowers not paying back what they owe? Amen.

Grace-Marie Turner at The Corner

The Obama administration announced today it will wait for a year (coincidentally until after the elections) before requiring religious organizations to comply with an Obamacare mandate that they provide coverage for contraception — including controversial drugs that can abort an early pregnancy.

This started with a decision by the Obama administration last summer listing the “preventive” services that must be covered by health plans under Obamacare without charge to patients, and the list included contraception.

This is another assault on the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) called the federal regulation an “unprecedented threat to individual and institutional religious freedom.”

The Obamacare regulation gives faith-based institutions, like Catholic universities and hospitals, the choice of violating the fundamental tenets of their faith by covering the federally mandated coverage in their employee health plans, or of dropping health insurance for their employees — in which case they would be fined for violating the employer mandate.

I’m not Catholic and I believe in birth control, but this is government forgetting its place. Again.

…the secular religionists are bad enough without bringing creationists into the fray.

Neela Banerjee in the LA Times

A flash point has emerged in American science education that echoes the battle over evolution, as scientists and educators report mounting resistance to the study of man-made climate change in middle and high schools.

Although scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly, the issue has grown so politicized that skepticism of the broad scientific consensus has seeped into classrooms.

Actually, new science shows the theory to be weaker that advertised.

Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.

That sounds good — science should be vigorously debated, not marketed by the Global Warming Industrial Complex composed of legitimate scientists, hack scientists, hack politicians, watermelons (green on outside, red inside), rent-seeking crony capitalists and vacuous media twits.

Alas, the impetus for opwn debate is being pushed by those who insist on teaching creationism. This will stain those who believe AGW science is far from settled.

AGW should not be engulfed in the culture war. The arguments should be science, pure science.

Against this backdrop, the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based watchdog group that supports the teaching of evolution through advocacy and educational materials, plans to announce on Monday that it will begin an initiative to monitor the teaching of climate science and evaluate the sources of resistance to it.

NCSE, a small, nonpartisan group of scientists, teachers, clergy and concerned individuals, rose to prominence in the last decade defending evolution in the curriculum.

The controversy around “climate change education is where evolution was 20 years ago,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of NCSE.

At that time, evolution — the long-tested scientific theory that varieties of life forms emerged through biological processes like natural selection and mutation — was patchily taught. Teaching standards have been developed since then, but it’s unclear how widely evolution is taught, given teachers’ fear of controversy.

Long-tested? Evolution makes sense to me (and I don’t think conflicts with religious teaching) but how does anyone test the theory? That’s nonsense.

Studies show that teachers often set aside evolution for fear of a backlash. Scott worries this could happen with climate science too.

“The question is self-censorship and intimidation. What you have to watch for is the ‘hecklers’ veto,’ ” she said. “If a teacher ignores a particular topic, it will likely go unnoticed.”

Please. Al Gore compares those who disagree with his goofy science to Holocaust deniers. That’s quite a heckler’s veto, no?

Newt’s smart comment below dovetails with something I heard on NPR on Saturday.

NPR newsman Eric Weiner was interviewed about his book Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Weiner had a medical emergency that frightened him deeply. At one point, a nurse leaned in close and asked, “Have you found your God yet?”

Weiner noted that he hold none of his colleagues in the Beltway media corps about his spiritual search because he said (my paraphrase) “Most think religious people are naive.”

Considering that the GOP is the more religious of the two parties (unless you count environmentalism and worship of big government), that sets the tone for a lot of media bias. And yes, bigotry.

Jennifer Howard in The Chronical of Higher Education

Generations of Protestant Christians have heard God speaking through the language of the King James Bible. Four hundred years after it was first published, in 1611, it still has an unrivalled reputation as a shaper of English prose, its phrases a lasting contribution to how we use the language. It’s given us such expressions as “out of the mouth of babes,” “suffer fools gladly,” “seek, and ye shall find,” and “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Yet the 50 or so learned men who labored in teams to create the King James Bible did not set out to create a literary masterpiece. They wanted to establish as direct a connection as they could to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments. And it’s not a miracle that this monumental exercise in translation-by-committee turned out as well as it did. By the time they set to work, in 1604, the King James translators had a hundred years of pioneering work on which to draw. They leaned heavily on texts and translations put together by theologians and linguists such as Erasmus and William Tyndale.

In recent decades, scholarship on the making of the King James Bible has made it plain just how much cumulative human labor and debate went into its creation. “The King James Bible didn’t drop from the sky in 1611,” says Helen Moore, a fellow and tutor in English at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. Moore led the curatorial committee that put together “Manifold Greatness,” an anniversary exhibit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library devoted to the making of the King James Bible. The most famous Bible in English, she says, was “made by many different people in many different places using many different people’s words and many reference texts.”

The King James Bible got its immediate start at a gathering called by Britain’s King James I in January 1604. The Hampton Court Conference brought together high-ranking clergymen and courtiers to discuss the calls for religious reform made in the Millenary Petition, which the Puritans had submitted to the new monarch the previous year…

And then there was Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, which he assembled from pieces of KJ.

Via Tigerhawk

Have You Been Left Behind? from Rem Lezar on Vimeo.

Wesley Pruden:

We’re getting close to the beginning of the new presidential election cycle, so we must get back to Sunday school. The pundits are parsing religion again. Somebody has to pose the liberal’s religious test for public office.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, thinks the nation is in peril because several Republican candidates—and the incumbent president as well—are men and women of religious faith. Mr. Keller likens religious faith to claims “that space aliens dwell among us,” and presidential candidates should be put to a faith test to determine whether they’re fit to hold public office. A belief that extraterrestrial creatures have visited Earth doesn’t necessarily disqualify a “candidate out of hand,” he says, but a careful voter “would certainly want to ask a few questions.”

It’s not easy for liberals like Mr. Keller to live in a corrupt, rotten society like ours, where every four years right-thinking citizens who read the New York Times, vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and eat their organic peas have to take a primer on what the crazy church folk, with whom they’re doomed to share the planet, believe is important. This year it’s Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry who populate the worst nightmares of good and worthy folk. Four years ago it was President Obama and whether he shared the kooky racist beliefs of his Chicago pastor. He said he didn’t, and gave a Christian testimony that would satisfy a fundamentalist test of faith. Eight years ago Joe Lieberman had to demonstrate that his Orthodox Judaism wouldn’t prevent his getting the lights turned on at the White House on a Saturday. Before that it was Jimmy Carter’s born-again faith, a straightforward description of spiritual conversion that the chattering class never could quite get straight (though they did sympathize with the lust Mr. Jimmy said he held in his heart).

Religion just doesn’t frighten Americans who live south and west of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Three of four Americans tell pollsters they pray, a majority attend religious (more…)

The busybodies have decided to try and outlaw circumcision in San Francisco and in the Peoples’ Republic of Santa Monica.

Matthew Hess, the man behind the effort, may have shot himself in the crotch with his grotesquely anti-Semitic comic book, Foreskin Man.

A politically motivated comic book pitting a blond superhero called “Foreskin Man” against a sinister-looking “Monster Mohel” is causing a serious flap in California.

The colorful series was created by the “intactivist” group MGMBill.org as part of its campaign to ban circumcision through ballot initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is blasting it as overtly anti-Semitic.

“‘Foreskin Man,’ with its grotesque anti-Semitic imagery and themes, reaches a new low and is disrespectful and deeply offensive,” Nancy J. Appel, ADL Associate Regional Director, said in a statement Friday.

The online series portrays a menacing-looking mohel – someone specially trained to perform the traditional Jewish circumcision ceremony – waving bloody scissors over a screaming baby laid out on a pool table.

Will liberals who typically vote for this kind of intrusive government be turned off by the blatant anti-Semitic images?

Let’s hope so, for their sake.

Mark Steyn notes that:

In America, over 90 per cent of circumcised men are non-Jewish.

Around the world, 70 per cent of circumcised men are Muslim.

Wouldn’t it be more statistically representative for Mr Hess to show his, er, Caped Crusader zapping the minaret of the nearest mosque? Or would that risk attracting the attention of Fatwa Man?

Matthew Hess…any relation to Rudolf Hess?

How daring is it to mock Jesus in today’s America? Not very. Which makes this art exhibit in LA.

The R&R Gallery is celebrating it’s very first trip around the sun with a salute to The Man. That’s right, we’re pulling out the big guns…it’s The JESUS SHOW. Whether you’re a believer or an unrepentant sinner, come out and give props to the O.G. Badass. We may not be turning water into wine, but we’ll be trying our damndest, with original works by some of the finest of God’s children. Holy Shit.

Here’s an example of their work, combing two mockeries in one:

All this does is prove how conventional they are.

It takes real guts to mock Mohammed because you can actually lose your head over that. Or be forced to give up your identity and hide.

That’s what happened to Molly Norris, a Seattle artist who was forced into hiding because of the Everybody Draw Mohammed contest. She broke a real taboo and is paying the price.

Why not an art exhibit about the silence of the “arts community” about Norris?

This is the flip side of jocks thanking God for winning a game. As if God cares

“Archbishop Cranmer”:

It is widely reported (at least by the BBC and The Daily Mail and the New Statesman) that a 15-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of ‘inciting religious hatred’ for burning a copy of the Qur’an.

Yes, a 15-year-old girl: a child.

Contrast the response of the police over this girl’s decision to burn a copy of the Qur’an with their complete indifference to the decision taken by Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art to desecrate the Bible.

The response to that ‘exhibit’ was measured, but the offence to many Christians was no less palpable.

Yet the state permits freedom of artistic expression, and the Bible is considered fair game. One cannot coerce the non-believer to revere that to which he or she is completely indifferent and, in an increasingly post-Christian and secular context, the Bible is perhaps no different to the Conservative Party’s last manifesto.

They vie equally in a public library for the bottom shelf.

But Cathrerine Heseltine of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee reminds us that the burning of the Qur’an is one of the most offensive acts to Muslims that she could imagine. She said: “The Qur’an is the most sacred thing to over a billion Muslims worldwide. You can see that in the way Muslims treat the Qur’an – washing before touching it and in many Muslim homes you will find it on the top shelf above all other books. We will never destroy the quranic texts. We believe it is the word of God. God’s guidance for us in this life.”

And so in public libraries it must sit on the top shelf.

Even though not everyone agrees that it is ‘God’s guidance’ on any matter whatsoever.

His Grace has said many times that he is not one to condone the burning of books; that is, unless he is cold and has run out of logs. And he certainly would never condone causing gratuitous offence.

But there is an emerging state coercion here which is moving perilously close to the need for an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment: not, in any sense, to cause offence to Muslims; but to stick two fingers up to the ubiquitous, illiberal totalitarianism which denies freedom of expression by negating the right to offend against the supposed sensibilities of minorities. The doctrine of the state is compelling respect and enforcing reverence for that which the majority may consider profane. That is not only an offence against democracy: it is an offence against the conscience and a negation of the religious liberties for which (inter alia) His Grace laid down his life.

Righteous indignation once belonged to the righteous. But now…

As the largest organization of American atheists, agnostics and other religious skeptics gathered in Los Angeles this weekend, there was a predictable amount of scorn heaped on Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Religion was dismissed as “nonsense” and “superstition”; those who believe were described variously as “ignorant” and “stupid.”

Fellow nonbelievers were not spared, however, as lines were drawn between “new atheists,” who encourage open confrontation with the devout, and “accommodationists,” who prefer a subtler, more tactical approach.

Such a debate “would have been incomprehensible 10 years ago,” said Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, which held its 30th anniversary meeting at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. But the 9/11 attacks and a growing interest in atheism have emboldened the in-your-face wing of the movement and led to internal debate and dissension.

Logically speaking, one cannot prove a negative. Thus atheists betray a faith (or anti-faith) to fuel their fervor.

These are good days, generally speaking, for the nonreligious, who feel emboldened by the success of books on atheism by authors such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Surveys put the percentage of atheists and agnostics in the United States at anywhere from 5% to 12%, with the total of all the nonreligious at about 15%. Nonbelievers see them as potential converts.

All together now: “Onward atheist soldiers, marching as to war, with a cross demeanor,  agnostic we’re no more!”

Among the stars of the conference were Dawkins, Harris and a third bestselling author, Victor Stenger. Stenger, a physicist, said that there was a “very real” war between science and religion and that nonbelievers would make headway only by directly challenging the devout.

War between science and religion?

You betcha, those man-made global warming, uh climate change fanatics are waging war on science (and our wallets.)

by J.C. Phillips

I am curious to see what happens when President Obama invites Molly Norris to the White House for a beer. Oh, Wait…Molly Norris can’t go to the White House for beer because Molly Norris no longer exists; any trace of her has been wiped clean.

Norris, a Seattle cartoonist, was the unfortunate, creative mind who conceived of “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Ironically, her satirical comment on the demise of free speech in America led to protests and death threats from fundamentalists Muslims, who apparently take cartooning very seriously. Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who became an al-Qaida leader, then issued a fatwa. According to this man of God, the mere suggestion that people should draw Muhammad was cause for assassination. The FBI then suggested that Norris “go ghost,” which is to say, move from her home, change her name, stop drawing her cartoon—essentially wipe away any trace of her existence. Molly Norris is dead! So too, apparently is the American notion of freedom of speech as well as any vestige of American back-bone. Since when can those living in other parts of the world threaten American citizens with impunity?

It’s too bad that Norris didn’t pick-on Christians. Imagine if, instead of encouraging her fellow cartoonists to draw Muhammad, Norris had implored them to draw Jesus Christ. Sure, she would have been the subject of a few fiery Sunday sermons, received some nasty letters, and even been the object of some loud protests, but she would still have her life. In fact, there are even those Christians that would have prayed for her, rejoicing that drawing Christ might be the first step in coming to Christ.

Moreover, she may have even become a star in the artistic community, celebrated as a “provocative, post modernist, commentator on contemporary religious life.” But, alas, she chose to throw a punch at Islam and practitioners of the “religion of peace” threatened to kill her.

And the guardians of free speech—those same good folks that expressed such indignation at protesters of the Ground Zero mosque, that would have hailed her as a hero had she pointed her pencil at born-again Christians—have simply shrugged their shoulders and whispered, “what a shame. I knew Molly when.”

Clifford May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, notes that: “The saga of Molly Norris has elicited hardly any notice from political leaders, elite journalists, and celebrities. Nor has it stirred to action [among] those who claim to represent America’s Islamic community. Nor have I seen anything from Human Rights Watch. The ACLU is actually defending al-Awlaki. At the UN, Islamic countries are pushing to ban criticism of Islam under international law.”

Indeed, there has been no outrage expressed by the moderate Muslim community. Other than the remarks of the Seattle area executive director of CAIR, the organization has had little to say. Celebrities have not turned out in mass to decry the injustice. And sadly, this president, who felt compelled to lecture Americans about the constitutional rights of Muslims to build a mosque anywhere they desired (a right NO ONE was questioning), has not felt moved to rhetorically defend the right of Molly Norris to her life. Ironically, rather than defend Norris, celebrities, journalists, and politicians are still choosing to lecture Americans about the increase in Islamaphobia.

There should now be little doubt that the cultural elites are in fact cultural bullies and like most bullies, deep down they are cowards. The proof is discovered in the silence with which they have greeted the death of Norris and in the fact that as of yet, no artist has deigned to toss elephant dung on a Muslim icon or have sex with the Koran. No. They stick to the easier fare of fundamentalist Christianity.

In some sense, it makes perfect sense. The fact is that we Christians can be annoying. Christians tend to consult God about, well, everything. We all know Christians who have consulted the Lord about everything from their health to which shoes to purchase on sale. And there is all the moralizing! Christians have a habit of preaching about “living the right way,” and warning all within ear-shot to get right with God.

For some, this behavior can be downright bothersome. Who are all these smiling, flawed people to comment on the behavior of others? It is therefore little wonder that Christians take so much abuse and criticism. It might also be because Christians tend to pray for those that persecute them, not assassinate them.

by Burt Prelutsky

When I read that Americans had responded to the earthquake in Haiti by donating over a billion dollars to relief efforts, I was amazed once again at the generosity of my fellow citizens.  Even though they, themselves, are suffering through an economic meltdown, they once again opened their purses, their wallets and their hearts, in order to help out suffering strangers.  Even though at least half of the donors were conservatives, those very folks that left-wingers deride as bigots, the recipients were black men, women and children.

Speaking of bigotry, I have no idea if I’ll be supporting Mitt Romney in 2012, but I do wish that everyone could get past his religion.  Those people who have a different faith should understand that the tenets, symbols and traditions, of every religion appear odd, to say the least, to outsiders.  In some cases, they can seem absolutely daffy.  But this is America; we’re entitled to be odd or at least appear that way to others.  But unless someone is an Islamic fundamentalist or a Satanist — or do I repeat myself? — one’s religion shouldn’t preclude a decent person’s being elected president.

            That brings me to the current resident of the White House.  I am still somewhat mystified as to how someone who climbed out of the sewer of Chicago politics by standing on the shoulders of Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright, ever made it to the Oval Office.  Granted, Hillary Clinton was caught flat-footed and John McCain ran such a terrible race that if he’d been a racehorse, they would have had him undergo a urine test.

            Still, in what parallel universe would a guy who boasted that the high point of his career was that he’d been a community organizer be elected the leader of the free world?  After stating that the trouble with the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights movement was that they didn’t deal with the redistribution of the nation’s wealth, I wonder how is it that he got a thousand votes, let alone 62 million.  He was also the chowder-head who, after saying that America was the greatest nation on earth, insisted that it was his mission to radically transform it! 

            Frankly, I think it was a classic case of Pygmalionism.  Americans, thanks in great part to the most rancid media this side of China, were mesmerized by the mantra of Hope and Change.  Voters were encouraged to think of politics in terms of a fairy tale, as if Obama was Prince Charming and that empty slogan was code for “And they all lived happily ever after.”

            The more Obama talked, the more, it seemed, poor, ugly men were lulled into thinking they’d become rich and handsome, while homely women came away believing they’d become beautiful and be pursued by rich, handsome men.

            Pygmalionism, as you probably guessed, is the state of being in love with an object of one’s own making.  These days, it’s also known as Obamaism.

            The confounding aspect of all this is how so many people who regard religion as a sham, and who have nothing but contempt for Christianity and Judaism, continue to believe that Obama is the messiah.

            That brings us to Rev. Franklin Graham, who was first invited to address the Pentagon on the National Day of Prayer, and then was uninvited after a couple of Muslims complained.

            I am not a Christian and I have never met Rev. Graham, but I was outraged after hearing about this.  Since when does the intolerance of a few nullify the wishes of the many?  This is not to suggest that a minority should be deprived of their say, but nowhere is it written that they are entitled to the final say.

            From my vantage point, it appears that even after the Pentagon’s cowardly policy of political correctness led directly to the murders of 13 innocent Americans at Fort Hood, the military still hasn’t learned its lesson.

            Under Bill Clinton, homosexuals in the service were advised not to tell and the brass was ordered not to ask.

            Under Barack Obama, it seems that the policy is still in place, except now it’s being directed at Christians.