Federal District Court Judge Clarence Cooper has ruled that a Georgia school district cannot put “evolution is a theory, not a fact” stickers on their high school biology textbooks, ruling that “the stickers were contrary to the first amendment’s promise to separate church and state because the stickers ‘convey a message of endorsement of religion’”: Georgia schools to remove creationist stickers from textbooks.

This was suggested to me a long time ago, and it slipped through the cracks until now: Theocracy Watch is an excellent sight about the rise of the Religious Riech, including interesting stuff about the transformation of the G.O.P. into the party of theocracy. I’ve added it to the fixed links.

Gotta love the classic “these people are suffering and dying in order to teach us a lesson” theodicy:

Donohue called tsunami “poor Asian people['s] … gift to the world”

So, I think we have to look at this in a positive sense. In one strange sense, then, what’s happening to these poor Asian people is their gift to the world. It makes us think about our mortality and about salvation and about redemption. That’s what we should be thinking about.

The fact that very few people see this as obvious and moral really disturbs me. “Oh, I’ll keep killing you and your kids and your friends and making you suffer — until you finally understand how much I love you.” Killing the kids in order to teach the parents a lesson? Didn’t work for Augustine, Sparky, and it doesn’t work here either.

Something I came across in the files on logic examples. I think this one (paraphrased, of course) comes from David Hume, either from the Treatise, Enquiry, or Dialogues (I forget exactly where):

If there is justice in this life, then no afterlife is necessary. But if there is no justice in this life, then one has no reason to believe God is just. However, if one has no reason to believe that God is just, then we have no reason to believe He will provide us with an afterlife. So, either no afterlife is needed, or else we have no reason to think God will provide one.

Hume really cracks me up.credit usa alasak union federalcredit protection 21 tips fraud forlimit credit card 5000credit one card accept capitol websiteaccredited in education georgia programsschools accredited of health publicservice campaign active credit duty monthscredit ag mortgages country Map

I haven’t seen this much God-media-coverage in a long time, although it’s mostly from the Brits: God is Not the Puppet Master

The idea of an omnipotent God who can calm the sea and defeat our enemies turns out to be a part of that great fantasy of power that has corrupted the Christian imagination for centuries. Instead, Christians are called to recognise that the essence of the divine being is not power but compassion and love. And it’s this love, and this love only, that whispers to me in defiance of the darkness: all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

So now we have another claim to deny omnipotence, and if one wants to do that, it now seems odd how the last sentence of this quote could ever make any sense. That is, why would anyone ever believe that things would be well in the end (or ever), if God can’t control anything in the first place?

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Nice shot against the religious right from Ameriblog.

Seems like the more religious you are, the less you really care about what happens to people. Hey, it’s all in God’s hands in the end anyway. And 155K+ dead means nothing compared to two guys kissing each other in public.

An interesting Op/Ed piece from the Wall Street Journal: Tremors of Doubt

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God. [...]

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God’s glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

I think a couple of things can be gotten from this perspective. First, there seems to be a clear attitude of nihilism, presented in the form of a godless world with no meaning attached to it. But I also find the second attitude interesting, because it seems to downplay (considerably, in my view) God’s supposed omnipotence. God, according to this view, doesn’t have the power to do whatever it takes to make the world any better or lessen the scope of its presence of unnecessary suffering. (And the game-aspect of the whole thing is also kinda disturbing, when you think about it.)