Religious Extremism
stcynic | July 20, 2006Ralph Barker is back with the conclusion of his 2-part series on UFOs. And he's about to reveal to us what UFOs really are:
Even the greatest skeptic would have to admit that there are still unexplained UFO sightings. So, what are they? Are they alien spaceships? Are they visitors from the future? Or, are they something else.
Personally, I think they are something else. In my youth I held to the idea that they were truly alien visitors. Today, I still think they are alien visitors but not visitors from another planet. I am convinced they are visitors from another dimension, a spiritual…
stcynic | July 6, 2006Those good folks at Worldview Weekend have given me yet another gift in the form of this column by Ralph Barker, the first in a two part series entitled UFOs and the Gospel of Christ. Barker claims to have seen his first UFO when he was 10 and that it "flew at very high altitudes and performed almost instant, high speed, ninety-degree turns. Nothing flying, then or now, with the exception of Superman, can do this." So he believes in them, apparently. Then he launches into a tirade about new agers and anti-Christian conspiracies:
There exists throughout the world various "gifted" people who…
stcynic | January 2, 2006As I've mentioned before, I am on the ReligionLaw mailing list run by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy. It's a valuable resource for many reasons, but especially because I get to interact with and hear the views of some of the preeminent legal scholars on church/state issues, including Doug Laycock, Marci Hamilton. Sandy Levinson and many others, in almost immediate response to new cases and controversies. The list also includes a few folks I consider cranks and they are generally tolerated (as am I, an opinionated non-lawyer type). One of those cranks has been the source of some…
stcynic | December 1, 2005From Agape Press, via Bartholemew:
Some parents with students at Illinois State University want the school to reverse its policy permitting professional staff to engage in unmarried cohabitation in student dormitories.
One father, Greg Myers, says he was outraged to learn that the school's Student Affairs Office allowed his daughter's dorm supervisor to cohabitate with his girlfriend in ISU's Watterson Hall.
Myers' daughter, a senior at ISU, is a resident assistant in the dorm. Like her father, she objects to the staff cohabitation policy because of her Christian beliefs. The university's…
stcynic | November 27, 2005According to Agape Press, the Texas State Board of Education has severed its ties to the National Association of State School Boards because its policies, in their view, "continue to gravitate to liberal left."
Last week, the Texas State Board of Education voted 10-5 to remove itself from membership in the National Association of State School Boards, or NASBE. The motion was put forth by board member Terri Leo of Spring, Texas. She believes many of NASBE's policies are out of touch with mainstream America.
For example, says Leo, NASBE holds to the notion that the phrase "separation of church…
stcynic | November 20, 2005A Northern Ireland politician named Maurice MIlls has weighed in and claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God as punishment for homosexuality. God, as usual, could not be reached for comment.
stcynic | November 12, 2005Juan Non-Volokh and Ann Althouse have both written of Tom Monaghan's plan to move his Ave Maria Law School to a town in Florida - a town where he owns everything. Monaghan, you may remember, is not only the founder of Domino's Pizza, he is also the founder of the Thomas More Law Center, which is attached at least informally to the Ave Maria Law School. He is from Ann Arbor and these operations are currently located there, but he plans to move them to a new town outside of Naples, Florida, which he will call Ave Maria Town. I'm with them, this sounds downright creepy and cult-like:
"We'll own…
stcynic | November 11, 2005Here's an amusing exchange between Bill O'Reilly and a guest on his show about this mythical war on Christmas at department stores:
O'REILLY: See, I think you're, I think you're crazy. And here's why. I think the backlash against stores that don't say "Merry Christmas" is enormous because now people are aware of the issue. There's going to be -- it's like the third or fourth year that we've reported it. I know everybody's hypersensitive about are they going to say "Merry Christmas"? Are they going to say "Happy Holidays"? What are they going to say? Are there decorations that say "Merry…
stcynic | November 10, 2005November's Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month Award) will, for the first time, be awarded to a group of people rather than to a specific person. In fact, it will be awarded not to a specific organization or group, but to a rather amorphous and undefined group of people who seem to be everywhere these days. I'll call them the Paranoid and Righteous Defenders of Christmas (PRDC). These are the folks who are screaming bloody murder over the alleged plot to destroy Christmas in America, a plot that appears to exist primarily in their delusions.
The ridiculous…
stcynic | October 13, 2005Hal Lindsey is back with his tried and true lie about the USGS and earthquakes. Writing in - where else? - the Worldnutdaily, he says:
My friend Tom Ambrose of WorldNetDaily did a little research on the subject on Monday. He found the three largest-magnitude earthquakes recorded in recent history took place in this generation.
The 1960 Chilean earthquake measured 9.5; the 1964 Alaskan quake and the Sumatra quake last Christmas both measured 9.0. The Sumatra temblor was so powerful it moved the island off its former GPS coordinates.
It shook the entire earth like a tuning fork, making the…
stcynic | October 4, 2005The uber-nut Judge Roy Moore has announced that he is running for governor of Alabama next year. This should be fun to watch, but naturally the polls show that he's likely to win. Which just reinforces what I said about Alabama before. It's our looniest state.
stcynic | October 3, 2005From the "I ain't never had no need for book learnin'" department:
As for the pastor, after four days of listening to science experts dismantling the case for intelligent design, he was unimpressed.
"They're babblers," said the pastor, the Rev. Jim Grove, who leads a 40-member independent Baptist church outside of Dover. "The more Ph.D.'s you get, it seems like the further away from God you get."
stcynic | September 30, 2005In the race for the designation of American's dumbest state, Alabama is Carl Lewis and the other 49 might as well be Stephen Hawking. Already home to the cosmically ridiculous Judge Roy Moore and the outrageously stupid Gerald Allen (the state senator who wants to ban all books that even mention gay people), now they've got state Senator Hank Erwin as well. And Erwin is joining the ranks of cretins and halfwits claiming that hurricane Katrina was sent by God as punishment for our sins:
"New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness," wrote…
stcynic | September 23, 2005A Christian school in California has expelled a 14 year old student because she has two lesbian parents:
Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship," The Los Angeles Times reported in Friday's edition.
I dare say they'll be hard pressed to find any set of parents - or people in general - who do not engage in immoral practices by their standards. The school, of course, is well within their rights to do this. They…
stcynic | September 16, 2005One of my favorite nutballs, Don Feder, has now chimed in with his divine conspiracy theory of Katrina and he's firmly on the side of the Christian whackos and the Jewish whackos. Katrina, you see, was God's punishment for sodomy and for Israel pulling out of Gaza. He lists all of those "coincidences" between the pullout from Gaza and the hurricane aftermath in New Orleans that were cited in the Worldnutdaily last week, including mystical numerology:
Numerology is important in traditional Judaism. Each Hebrew letter is assigned a number value. Many scholars believe the Bible has hidden codes…
stcynic | September 8, 2005Well you knew that Hal Lindsey couldn't stop himself from jumping in to join the wingnuts' parade of stupidity on the hurricane. And you knew that the Worldnutdaily would be the ones to publish it. Here he is, in all his glory:
But I believe there is another essential point being missed. Since America has forsaken the Christian principles on which our country was founded and on which all our founding documents were based, God's gracious protection that is so evident in American history is being withdrawn. We are also forcing God's people, Israel, into indefensible positions in the land God…
stcynic | September 7, 2005Not content to allow the raving moonbats of Christianity to have all the attention, a group of Jewish moonbats have decided to throw their tinfoil hats into the ring and make their case. Their argument? The hurricane was sent by God as punishment for our support of the Israeli pullout from Gaza. And who's reporting it? The Worldnutdaily, of course:
"Katrina is a consequence of the destruction of [Gaza's] Gush Katif [slate of Jewish communities] with America's urging and encouragement," Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Lewin, executive director of the Rabbinic Congress for Peace, told WND. "The U.S.…
stcynic | September 6, 2005The Worldnutdaily has this piece by Greg Laurie giving the usual "the end is near" screed that we hear after every major disaster. Laurie is a regular WND contributor and is the pastor of one of the largest churches in America, Harvest Christian Fellowship. So naturally, he can be relied upon to pass along a good bit of nonsense and false scientific claims to his followers while he's peddling his end-times theology:
As we prepare to remember the horrific attack on American soil on 9-11, we may wonder could it be that all these things that are happening in our world today are actually signs of…
stcynic | September 6, 2005Disasters do bring the whackos out of the woodwork. I've already cited a few of them, but how about these guys? I can't get my head wrapped around this kind of reasoning. Here's the first one:
Chuck Kelley is president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, with facilities located near the southern banks of Lake Pontchartrain and in Chalmette, east of the city. Baptist Press reports that Kelley now finds himself homeless and with only a few personal belongings following Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow to the New Orleans area. But the seminary leader says he is able to discern God's…
stcynic | September 2, 2005I'm still not ready to return to full time posting, since I'm still buried in boxes to unpack and beginning the smoking of ribs for tomorrow, but I wanted to note a few posts about the response of certain nutballs to the hurricane and aftermath that people have sent me. I'm sure by now we've all heard about the loony group Repent America, who are claiming that God sent the hurricane to destroy Nawlins because of gays:
Just days before "Southern Decadence", an annual homosexual celebration attracting tens of thousands of people to the French Quarters section of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina…