Deep down inside they really aren't that different

Right-Wing Christians, Radical Islamic Fundamentalists – They’re Pretty Much Exactly the Same

Though I don’t talk about it much, I find it kind of interesting that the primary “enemy” of the right-wing conservative Christian is a radical Islamic fundamentalist.

Think about it. Both of these groups of people live their lives based on hand-picked sections of their religious books. Neither follows every rule written inside because it’s essentially impossible to do so. Even within each of these faiths there are many denominations created by humans who basically interpret parts of each of these books by how they feel they should be followed.

They both believe that they’re right and everyone else will surely burn in hell. They both tend to want to force their views on others – even if those others don’t agree with what they believe in. Each of these groups, if they had their way, would have theocratic governments based on their religions.

Both right-wing Christians and Islamic radicals feel women should be subservient to men, abortion is murder and homosexuality is an abomination and should be illegal. They both believe education should be based on faith instead of science. Neither group supports contraceptives.

They’re both completely intolerant of those who believe differently than they do and only believe ...

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Don't know what it means but I got maybe eight or ten "Happy Easters" from various people, today. Strange thing is all of them came from Muslims. Not a single one from a Christian. Stranger yet, most of them were chain greetings from Muslim to Muslim.

Half of Americans say Bible should influence US laws

The U.S. Constitution does not mention the Bible, God, Jesus or Christianity. Even the First Amendment clarifies that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Still, conservative Christians constantly claim that God wrote the Constitution or that it was divinely inspired.

In a new poll by Pew Research Center almost half of Americans say the Bible should influence laws in the United States to some degree – and almost a quarter say it should have significant sway.


Startling statistics from a 2017 study by Pew Research found that nearly a third of Americans say that being “truly American” means subscribing to the Christian faith. In a country that is majority Christian, the researchers said, “The public is divided over whether one has to be Christian in order to be considered American, with roughly a third saying it is very important and another third saying it is not at all important.”













SOURCE

Having self identified as people who will believe anything, fundamentalist Christians are naturally a large component of Trump’s base.

The Conservative Crusade to Establish Theocracy in America

It’s not just the fringe anymore. Mainstream conservatives are trying to turn Christian scriptures and beliefs into American law.

The Daily Beast reports:


Under the title, “Sharia Law has Come to America!”, Mediaite warns:


The Christian right, which secured Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016, unites around common causes such as anti-abortion activism, opposition to gay rights and sex education classes. They also speak out in favour of the promotion of prayer in schools and the teaching of creationism (or intelligent design), the fight against euthanasia and the safeguarding of what they call religious freedom.

According to The Guardian, there are few signs that Trump’s evangelical supporters are abandoning him:

The Christian right, which secured Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016, unites around common causes such as anti-abortion activism, opposition to gay rights and sex education classes. They also speak out in favour of the promotion of prayer in schools and the teaching of creationism (or intelligent design), the fight against euthanasia and the safeguarding of what they call religious freedom.

According to The Guardian, there are few signs that Trump’s evangelical supporters are abandoning him:


The Roots of Evangelicals’ Political Fervor | Retro Report



The Man Who Mobilized The Evangelical Vote | AJ+



Evangelicals keep faith in Trump to advance religious agenda



Chris Hedges: “AMERICAN FASCISTS” The Christian Right vs USA



SOURCE

Opinion: Barr uses the Justice Department for an evangelical Crusade and Inquisition

Last week Trump’s yes-man running the DOJ issued instructions to federal attorneys detailing their new job entailed serving as Inquisitors for the religious right in their Crusade to rule America. In this case the Crusade officially begins by using the Federal government, in concert with fundamentalist Christian conservatives, to punish state officials who dare to hold churches and religious leaders accountable to rules meant to preserve American lives.

Over the past four decades Christian fundamentalists have complained bitterly that the U.S. Constitution prevents them from forcing the rest of the population to comply with evangelicals’ religious edicts. Now that they have a so-called “god anointed” criminal in the Oval Office, and an honest-to-dog evangelical sleaze-bag running the Department of Justice, Christian fundamentalists are closer than ever to their goal of ruling America by Christian theocracy.

Although it is still in its infancy, the current iteration of American theocracy is ...

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This dates back to 2014

Constitutional horror: Clarence Thomas argues states can establish official religion
BY MICHAEL STONE

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argues states may establish an official state religion, and sees no problem with an individual state making Christianity the official state religion.

Thomas believes the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause does not apply to the states. The Establishment Clause is that part of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Establishment Clause not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, or none.

While Thomas believes that the Establishment Clause “probably” prohibits the federal government from establishing an official, national religion, he sees no problem with individual state establishing an official state religion.

In the recent, disastrous Supreme Court ruling that found Christian prayers used to open government meetings to be constitutional, Thomas went further than his other conservative colleagues in condoning ...

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Yikes!

"I’ve been unabashed in my role as Secretary of State to talk about the fact that I swore an oath to the Constitution, but that my first calling is to my Savior."

In other words - he lied when he took his oath to the Constitution

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “My first calling is to my Savior”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined a conference call with conservative pastors hosted by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins last month, reports Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery.

Pompeo told the pastors that he is working on two big projects: the high-level international conferences he has hosted to promote worldwide religious liberty, and the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The Commission on Unalienable Rights is worrying civil rights advocates but generating excitement among anti-LGBTQ Christian-right groups.

Pompeo has been a Christian-right favourite since his time in the House of Representatives. According to Montgomery, “Pompeo has helped open doors in other countries to allow Ralph Drollinger, who runs Bible studies for members of Trump’s cabinet and conservative members of Congress, to take his fundamentalist ideology into the upper echelons of other governments, where he teaches public officials that the Bible requires them to support a range of right-wing public policies.”

Pompeo’s remarks during the conference call strongly suggest that ...

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His saviour better get on with it and call him.

TN Bill Will Let Kids Skip an Hour of School Each Day to Go to Church
BY HEMANT MEHTA

The Tennessee legislature passed a bill yesterday, House Bill 2542/Senate Bill 2473, that would force public schools to allow kids to miss class for up to one hour each day in order to attend church. (They would also allow school buses to transport those kids, as long as the churches paid for it.)

Previously, schools boards were allowed to adopt such policies, but this law would mandate it, meaning the districts could not punish any kids who participated. Just last December, the Knox County School Board rejected the policy after giving it a trial run. Even then, they only let kids skip one hour of school per month. It was still a disaster.

If the governor signs this bill into law, it would go into effect beginning this fall. And it will very likely become law since the State Senate passed it 31-0 on Friday, and the State House passed it 94-0 yesterday. No one wants in power wants to oppose this.

But here’s why it’s a bad idea, anyway: If kids can miss an hour of school every day, there’s a chance they’re missing the same classes on those days. For all we know, these kids won’t learn the scientific method, but they’ll be taught that Noah’s Ark is real. It’s even more bizarre given that kids can always go to Sunday School or read the Bible on their own. There’s no reason to allow them to skip school in order to learn less.

There’s also the potential for bullying or coercion if many kids ditch school for church, putting their non-Christian classmates in an awkward position. Also, many of the kids who are in these programs are encouraged to preach to their friends, in part by using the toys and candy that they get at the church.

But when your state legislature is dominated by Republicans, replacing academics with mythology isn’t just a viable public policy, it’s a winning campaign strategy.

American Atheists is sounding the alarms about this bill and they’re doing it by drawing attention to the numbers involved:


Think about that. Either students who take advantage of this policy would lose 22.5 days’ worth of instruction… or, if a lot of students ditch school, the district itself would be forced to change its schedule by cutting 22.5 full days out of its curriculum in order to accommodate everyone. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
AA also noted the inopportune timing:


There’s just no need for this program at all, much less a program that’s forced upon every district whether the communities want it or not. Tennessee students will suffer if and when this bill passes. They will be academically behind their peers in other states. And for what purpose?! Churches have all kinds of ways to indoctrinate children; they don’t need to interrupt the school day to do it.

If parents feel so strongly about forcing religion onto their kids, they can always choose home-schooling. Instead, legislators are helping them out by sending a wrecking ball at the public schools.

If there’s any silver lining to this bill, it’s that the Satanic Children’s Ministry of Tennessee is preparing to launch programs throughout the state so that kids can learn all about how awesome Satan is:



Thanks for that, Christians!

SOURCE

live links at source

Well there's your unintended consequences, eh?

As nonsensical as the claim is, he says that like it would be a bad thing

Trump: Under a Liberal Supreme Court, Religion Will Be “Almost Wiped Out”
BY HEMANT MEHTA

During an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody tonight, Donald Trump went back to the only campaign strategy that ever works for him: Scaring white evangelical Christians into backing away from their alleged morality to vote for him because the alternative is UTTER CHAOS.

In the clip below, he says that if he’s not in office nominating extreme right-wing judges to the Supreme Court, religion will be “almost wiped out.”

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vid at source

I hope god really appreciates their concern.

I called Woden last night. He said,"No comment".

I've noticed that his entire campaign so far this year has simply been a rehash of the 2016 campaign - just to much smaller crowds.

"Let this be a lesson to everyone: You, too, can become a lawyer without having to know a thing about logic or reason."

Trump Legal Adviser: I Will NOT Back Down “If They Try to Cancel Christianity”
BY HEMANT MEHTA

Donald Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis has been roundly condemned in the past for her anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, but it turns out she’s also remarkably gullible, too.

Last night, apropos of nothing substantive (except maybe this tweet), she insisted she would not bend if anyone tried to “cancel Christianity.”

[url=https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/23/trump-legal-adviser-i-will-not-back-down-if-they-try-to-cancel-christianity/]MORE>[/irl]

And they say this like it's a bad thing. After all, isn't this part of God's plan?

Church donations have plunged because of the coronavirus. Some churches won’t survive.
Michelle Boorstein

Pastor J. Artie Stuckey has cut or eliminated every staff salary at his small Mississippi church. He is nervously watching the payments for the building where Restoration Baptist meets. He reminds his congregation to keep tithing, but he knows many of them — the barber, the electrician, the musician — have also seen their finances rocked by the pandemic shutdown.

Stuckey, a 42-year-old who sold cars until the ministry called him 15 years ago, is sympathetic to being cash-strapped. Restoration wasn’t in great financial shape even before the virus wiped out more than 50 percent of its weekly offerings.

But now the 65-member evangelical church outside Jackson is in survival mode. Which, to Stuckey, feels like a test of faith.

“I made a commitment to God, to my people. We’ve been teaching and preaching faith. Anyone can be a leader, but if you’re a faith leader, what do we do?” he asked. “Do we fold, or do we become a living example of what we’ve preached for so many years?”

The novel coronavirus is pressing painfully on the soft underbelly of U.S. houses of worship: their finances. About a third of all congregations have no savings, according to the 2018-2019 National Congregations Study. Just 20 percent streamed their services and 48 percent were able to accept donations electronically, the study found, making it more challenging to serve the faithful and gather their donations during the virus shutdown.

The blow has been hardest on the nation’s many small congregations (about half of U.S. congregations are the size of Stuckey’s or smaller). Some experts think the coronavirus could ...

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Thoughts and prayers!

If you've never heard of Ken Ham you owe it to yourself to head over to The Sensuous Curmudgeon to read all about him. In the process you'll learn that every word in the Bible is the literal truth. Evolution is a lie. The earth is only a few thousand years old. There are no aliens (and if there are they're all going to hell).

Having said that, the blog is well worth reading - whoever writes it has an "interesting" sense of humor.

But turning to evolution, this is Ken Ham's latest (not from the blog I linked above)



Ken Ham Calls on “Cancel Culture” to Scrub Darwin (and Evolution) from Science
BY VAL WILDE

Say what you will about Answers in Genesis — and there’s a lot to say — but its infamous frontman Ken Ham has a knack for jumping headlong into any and every cultural moment and twisting it to make it about Creationism.

Now, as people grapple with racism as a fundamental part of America’s historical legacy, Ham is harnessing the power of what he calls “cancel culture” to take a shot at evolution by asking: Should we “cancel” Charles Darwin?



He raised the question in a recent episode of Answers News, discussing the issue with co-hosts Bodie Hodge and Avery Foley, and followed it up with a written piece on his own Answers in Genesis blog.

In the discussion between Ham, Hodge, and Foley, it becomes clear that what they mean when they say “cancel Charles Darwin” is actually “discard the theory of evolution altogether.”



Consider Foley’s complaint:


But no one has argued that the history of the Civil War should be removed from textbooks or erased from the American history curriculum — just that it shouldn’t be commemorated in statues that depict efforts to preserve the institution of slavery as heroic. Here, Foley complains that the work of Darwin continues to appear in schools at all.

Once again, Ham and his colleagues have failed to distinguish between the well-documented scientific phenomenon of evolution and the man who first publicized his observations on the subject.

It is a classic ad hominem attack, pointing to genuinely racist things Darwin said to invalidate the theory of evolution without ever having to address the merits of the theory itself.

The Answers in Genesis response is itself based on a June 23 opinion piece written by Peter Heck for conservative Christian outlet Disrn. Just like Answers in Genesis, Heck fails to differentiate between Charles Darwin’s racist beliefs and his well-tested observations about natural selection:


In addition to conflating Darwin the man with the scientific observations he made, Heck argues that because the theory of natural selection has been used to justify racist projects, such as slavery and eugenics, the entire enterprise is tainted and the very concept of evolution must be discarded.

If that’s how he feels about ideologies that have been used to justify historic atrocities… well, have I got some news for him about Christianity.

But what sets science apart from so many other fields of inquiry — philosophy or literature or religion, to name just a few — is that the scientific method allows other people to test and examine a hypothesis such as Darwin’s, to see if further observation confirms or disproves Darwin’s claims. Over time, the ideas advanced by Darwin have become divorced from their origins as more and more people make observations and confirm that, whatever he believed, his hypothesis remains consistent with what we observe of the natural world.

Even if we did collectively decide to “cancel” Darwin, the theory of evolution would still be a scientific reality — one that Answers in Genesis and other creationists desperately want to avoid engaging, by any means necessary, precisely because it has been so fundamental to our scientific progress.

But neither Heck nor Ham is really interested in scientific progress; they’re here with a religious agenda. Ham makes that very clear when he attributes motives to the people who are failing to cancel Charles Darwin:


Nobody thinks Charles Darwin is a god. But failure to teach students about evolution by natural selection leaves them with a massive gap in their knowledge that hamstrings their basic scientific literacy.

Look, Charles Darwin undoubtedly held racist beliefs. He was a product of Imperial Britain, and his writings show that he took for granted many of the era’s unexamined assumptions, including the spurious racial hierarchies used to justify British dominion over other people — the same hierarchies that justified slavery in America and across the British Commonwealth.

But whatever he believed about race, and even though his theory has been misused to advance racist agendas, the science of evolution doesn’t support racism. (That phrase doesn’t even make sense.) Our understanding of the subject has, yes, evolved since the 1800s, no matter how much organizations like Answers in Genesis would rather pretend that our science — like their dogma — remains frozen in time, unchanging, and easy to pick apart.

SOURCE

18 (if memory serves) US presidents were slave owners, Washington and Jefferson among them. At what point does one statue become more acceptable than another?

That's a very good question. After all



But slavery (and white supremacy in general) was intrinsic to Southern culture and religion.



But back to statues

How 'bout a statue of Bibi in the Gaza strip?

Washington and Jefferson be darned! Right in the heart of Washington there's this massive statue of Abe Lincoln sitting there looking all august and righteous. Supposedly he's there because of his decision to free the slaves (well, most of them anyway). But how many of you have read what he actually thought about blacks.

Have a read of some of his comments (particularly during the 1858 election campaign) and you'll quickly get the hammer and chisel out to demolish that particular statue.