Tag: christianists

People who talk about our “materialistic society” and about getting back to “spiritual values” strike me as having a right sense of indignation and a poor sense of analysis. The delusion of our society is not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism, its desire to make a heaven on earth, not as a place free of needless suffering and full of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “collective joy,” but as one in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn.

Garret Keizer in Harper’s

The central question raised by this controversy is the same one raised by countless similar controversies throughout American history: whether the irrational fears and prejudices of the majority should be honored and validated or emphatically confronted.

Glenn Greenwald nailing it. Also worth checking out for Dean’s more nuanced explanation of himself.
If only we had a rhetorically skilled President that could go out there and make a powerful case for this. Of course, a growing fraction of Americans think he’s a Muslim. Probably better to wait until September 2012 to start pushing back on that too.

If the purpose of this mosque, as we are lead to believe, is to create this tolerant environment, to avoid anything like a 9/11 ever repeating, you have to ask why didn’t one of those 100 [existing] mosques already accomplish such a thing.

Sarah Palin politico (via brooklynmutt, liberalsarecool, robot-heart-politics)
You know which country has a lot of churches and cathedrals? Germany. If the supposed purpose of all those structures is spreading the word of this supposed Jesus who supposedly is all about loving thy neighbor and whatnot, then why did those churches fail to prevent the rise of Hitler and this Holocaust thing that never actually happened anyway? Why!?!? I ask you WHY?!?!?!

(via squashed)

You know, God gave us rights. Our Founding Fathers recognized that. It’s in our Declaration. It’s the foundational document of America. And God made all nations on Earth and decided when and where each nation would be. And that’s out of the book of Acts; it’s in other places.
So, we can’t be a nation if [we] don’t have a border, and if we grant amnesty, we can’t define it as a border any longer, or ourselves as a nation any longer.

Steve King (R, Iowa), setting a new bar for the most batshit insane thing I’ve seen uttered by a public official. It’s been a while since I read the book of Acts, but I’m pretty sure the United States of America and 54’40 or fight figured nowhere in it. Must’ve been towards the back.

So Glenn Beck is apparently going blind.

jasencomstock:

jhnbrssndn:

(via number-six)

[REDACTED]

masturbation?

Keep in mind that Glenn Beck is, above all, a TV evangelist and huckster. Part of the routine is to periodically go blind, lose the use of limbs, simply refuse to continue “the teachings”, receive the dreaded “call home” from an angry God, and etc…; these seemingly unrelated conditions are united by being fantastically responsive to treatment with generous infusions of money from the poor saps out there in teeveeland.
That the “fuck yeah!” response makes the smelly hippies look bad is a salutary side effect. Just sayin’.

Yet Another Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
Sharon Angle: Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted on church and state.

Some other Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: The priests of the different religious sects dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter […] we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this
Sharon Angle: Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted on church and state.

The New Word

Theodidiocy: [noun ( pl. -cies)]

1) The vindication of the utter foolhardiness of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil by way of exquisitely weak, poorly argued, or flatly lunatic logic.

2) Poorly written theodicies, often excreted in the guise of rank popular “fiction.”