Obama tossed what we perceived to be a “crumb” to non-believers during his inauguration address when he said:

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers,” Obama said. “We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth….”

But, apparently that tiny mention was enough to get the Religious Right cry-babying again:

Carping Crusaders: Religious Right Whines About Obama Shout Out To Non-Believers

Bishop Earl W. Jackson of Exodus Faith Ministries in Chesapeake, Va., said Obama, “seems to be trying to redefine American culture, which is distinctively Christian. The overwhelming majority of Americans identify as Christians, and what disturbs me is that he seems to be trying to redefine who we are.”

In agreement with Rob Boston of Americans United, Obama simply stated the fact that some Americans are non-believers. It doesn’t redefine anything about America itself with that statement of fact. The fact is that America has always been a diverse nation, with diverse beliefs and those of no beliefs at all. To shut us out along with other minority groups would then be trying to redefine America.

Boston continues:

Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, complained that Obama’s reference “puzzled” him because there are more Christians in the country than non-believers. (I’m puzzled by Mohler’s puzzlement. Does the fact that there are more Christians mean that members of minority views should never be mentioned?)

Another right-wing minister, the Rev. Cecil Blye of More Grace Ministries Church in Louisville, Ky., also criticized the Obama reference.

“It’s important to understand the heritage of our country, and it’s a Judeo-Christian tradition,” Blye said.

I would dispute that claim, but even if it were true, does that mean the president is wrong to acknowledge – even in passing – the many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, etc., that live here?

I know what’s going on here. The Religious Right is so desperate to start attacking Obama that it will latch on to any reed, no matter how weak.

While Obama works to bring people together in a united America, the folks on the Religious Right are using their bigoted religious views as a divisive wedge.

Boston then writes a nice sentiment, but I doubt if the religious right will ever accept this fact about America:

It’s time for the Religious Right to grow up and realize that Americans believe lots of different things about God, and some don’t believe at all.

School can expel lesbian students, court rules: An appeals panel finds California Lutheran High School in Riverside County is not a business and therefore doesn’t have to comply with a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Reporting from San Francisco — After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having “a bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship,” the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law. In response to that suit, an appeals court decided this week that the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating. A lawyer for the girls said Tuesday that he would ask the California Supreme Court to overturn the unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal. The appeals court called its decision “narrow,” but lawyers on both sides of the case said it would protect private religious schools across California from such discrimination suits. Kirk D. Hanson, who represented the girls, said the “very troubling” ruling would permit private schools to discriminate against anyone, as long as the schools used their religious beliefs as justification. [...] The girls were expelled in their junior year for “conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians,” said McKay, who added that the girls never disclosed their sexual orientation during the litigation. Hanson said the girls had been “best friends” and, citing their privacy, declined to discuss their sexual orientation. They are now in college, he said. [...] The school also did not break the law when it disclosed the girls’ “suspected sexual orientation” to their parents, the court said. The parents, “in light of their right to control their children’s upbringing and education, had a right to know why” they were being expelled, the court said. Hanson said the entire episode was “very traumatic” and “humiliating” for the girls.

So, not only did they kick them out of school — but they also told their parents.

And all of it was protected behavior — through an appeal to religious belief.

How nice.

This guy has to be one of the biggest asshats on the planet, and is interviewing another superstitious asshat, Jim Dobson. Dobson’s take on the constitution is outrageous! Our “rights”, he says, come from Gawd, not government because he says Gawd doesn’t take our rights away, but the state can. Beck says that atheists are “stealing America” and that even though (he claims) 90% of the country believes in a magical sky boss, we atheists are “pushing around” Xians and “forcing our beliefs on Xians”. Boy does this dude have things ass-backwards! And while we atheists and secular humanists are merely upholding the Constitution and the Separation of Church and State, he says that we are the ones “boo-hooing” about god beliefs being expressed in public. Beck conveniently leaves out the fact that judges who are god botherers who understand the laws of the land are the ones upholding the Constitution and the ones making the rulings in favor of Separation of Church and State, as they should.

Interesting how a caption at the bottom of the screen in the video says “Progressives want to remove God from America”. Well, most progressives are god believers so how does that add up to only 10% of people who are persecuting the poor Xians and wanting their own way, as Beck claims? The judge he refers to in Illinois who struck down the moment of silence in public schools is a god believer who understands separation of church and state.

Beck also states, “Are children of atheists so fragile that the idea of prayer could actually warp their minds?” I have a question for Beck…Is the faith of Christians so weak that they cannot just pray their prayers without public display and government endorsement? And it really pissed me off that he is reporting that atheists get violent when asked to pray. Beck is a fool and a number-one idiot and a liar.

Warning to those who have high blood pressure problems!

Glenn Beck Attacks Atheists and Interviews James Dobson on School Prayer

H/T to The Perplexed Observer

By MALCOLM RITTER
Thursday, January 22, 2009 6:03 PM CST

NEW YORK (AP) ? A U.S. biotech company says it plans to start this summer the world’s first study of a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells ? a long-awaited project aimed at spinal cord injury.

The company gained federal permission this week to inject eight to 10 patients with cells derived from embryonic cells, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif.

The patients will be paraplegics, who can use their arms but can’t walk. They will receive a single injection within two weeks of their injury.

The study is aimed at testing the safety of the procedure, but doctors will also look for signs of improvement like return of sensation or movement in the legs, Okarma said.

Whatever its outcome, the study will mark a new chapter in the contentious history of embryonic stem cell research in the United States ? a field where debate spilled out of the laboratory long ago and into national politics.

While some overseas doctors claim to use human embryonic stem cells in their clinics, stem cell experts said they knew of no previous human studies that use such cells.

“It’s a milestone and it’s a breakthrough for the field” because Geron passed the safety hurdles for getting federal clearance to launch the study, said Ed Baetge, chief scientific officer of Novocell Inc. His company hopes to begin a similar human study for treating diabetes in a few years.

In addition, said spinal cord injury researcher Dr. Wise Young of Rutgers University, “a lot of hope of the spinal cord injury community is riding on this trial.”

The full report can be found HERE

And just what we expect of the fantasy driven and illogical. The Catholic Church regards embryonic stem cells to be human beings and consider it murder to treat them the way that is needed for stem cell research. Although there is going to be a time in the not so distant future where cures are to be had from ESC. I wonder what their position will be when Catholics can be cured. I am hopeful that the church does not bend.Then as we progress through this century the churches all will find themselves becoming extinct. ….It could happen.

What pisses me off most about this is their threat to our lawmakers. Possible excommunication blither blah blither. I wonder if any are afraid of that? When they vote to pass the Freedom Of Choice Act (FOCA) they will be violating core Catholic doctrine. Until then however the little bastards are doing everything they can to unduly influence our lawmakers.

Catholic Bishops Set Pro-Life Duel With Obama

Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:31 PM

By: Mike Tighe
The pro-life duel started quickly, with U.S. Catholic bishops and President Barack Obama crossing swords on abortion and stem-cell research issues.
…..
Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, Ore., published on Jan. 19 in this diocesan newspaper an essay discussing Christians’ duties to the unborn and a warning about FOCA.

” …I do not see how any Catholic senator or representative could vote for the passage of FOCA without recognizing that such a vote would constitute a direct and intentional declaration of their distain for Catholic teaching,” Bishop Vasa wrote. “Such a vote would be tantamount to a public declaration of their intention to abandon the Catholic faith.”

Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto also has said that he would not rule out excommunication for pro-abortion Catholic politicians.

Father Cronin said the last such campaign that he was involved in took place 14 years ago as partial-birth abortion was being debated.

“The response to that was awesome. It had virtually crippled the Capitol’s post office,” he said.

Information about the “Fight FOCA Postcard Campaign is available online at :http://www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/FOCA/postcard.shtml.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 22 January 2009 )

And that article can be found HERE

We have some small hope in all this and that is that President Obama has signalled an end to Bush era policies regarding reproductive rights and stem cell research.
Obama lifts Bush abortion bans

Opposition to slavery was the origin of Darwin’s theories

Private notes and letters uncovered by the pair show that Darwin’s opinions on slavery were far stronger than had previously been believed. Notebooks from his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, during which Darwin first began to form his theories on natural selection, detail his revulsion at the slavery he witnessed in South America. The historians have also discovered letters by Darwin’s sisters, cousins and aunts that show the family to have been highly active abolitionists. The pair say in a new book that Darwin partly chose to highlight the common descent of man from apes to show that all races were equal, as a rebuttal to those who insisted black people were a different, and inferior, species. They say Darwin tried to show that his theory of sexual selection, where traits seen as desirable but which give no competitive advantage to a species are passed down through generations, was responsible for differences in appearance between races. [...] “We are not trying to explain away all of Darwin’s work as being due to his passion for emancipation, but our argument is that his passion for racial unity is what drove him to touch this untouchable and treacherous subject,” he said. “Darwin was finally goaded into starting his work on the origins of man in 1865 by a rising tide of scientific belief that the races were separate species.”

Darwin was passionately against slavery and thought that the socio-political distinctions between races were an artificial boundary (which, I might add, is alive and well even today). Just read Voyage and you’ll see some of the best observations penned against the slave trade. In the end, of course, Darwin’s theory stands or falls because of the evidence and explanatory power it provides, not because of his attitudes toward slavery.

It’s also important to note that Darwin’s attitudes obviously fly in the face of that pop-bullshit-Nazi objection to evolution (found in Expelled)…

I have always been intrigued at the myths of humanity – how they weave the fantasy of an afterlife from simple to complex over imagination. A mixture of blood and thew, heart and mind, walking the strange labyrinths of allegory drawn from the complexities of nature and stretched like a canvas over the metaphor of death.

One of these older cults was for a time a rival of Christianity (and as we all know from history – these things end in tears).

Orphism blends a fairly unique and diverse degree of symbology:

According to legend Orpheus founded these mysteries and was the author of the sacred poems from which the Orphic doctrines were drawn. The rites were based on the myth of Dionysus Zagreus, the son of Zeus and Persephone. When Zeus proposed to make Zagreus the ruler of the universe, the Titans were so enraged that they dismembered the boy and devoured him. Athena saved Zagreus’ heart and gave it to Zeus, who thereupon swallowed the heart (from which was born the second Dionysus Zagreus) and destroyed the Titans with lightning. From the ashes of the Titans sprang the human race, who were part divine (Dionysus) and part evil (Titan). This double aspect of human nature, the Dionysian and the Titanic, is essential to the understanding of Orphism. The Orphics affirmed the divine origin of the soul, but it was through initiation into the Orphic Mysteries and through the process of transmigration that the soul could be liberated from its Titanic inheritance and could achieve eternal blessedness. Orphism stressed a strict standard of ethical and moral conduct. Initiates purified themselves and adopted ascetic practices (e.g., abstinence from eating animal flesh) for the purpose of purging evil and cultivating the Dionysian side of the human character.

 So, here we have an all-father giving his son the ownership, son gets killed, son gets resurrected. Along with the concept of dualism (which Judaism rejects, but Christianity embraces), and we can liberally interpret ‘Titanic inheritance’ to mean ‘original sin’.

What is of particular interest, is the influence it had upon fellows like Plato and Pythagoras, as stated by the Philosophy dictionary:

Mystical Greek religious and philosophical cult derived from the myth of Orpheus and the so-called ‘Orphic literature’. It involved stories of creation, reincarnation, and punishment after death, and had a large influence on Pythagoras and Plato. The mysteries of Eleusis were the initiation into Orphism.

The story of Dionysus’ mother, Semele, is also of interest:

Zeus’ wife, Hera, a goddess jealous of usurpers, discovered his affair with Semele when she later became pregnant. Appearing as an old crone, Hera befriended Semele, who confided in her that her lover was actually Zeus. Hera pretended not to believe her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele’s mind. Curious, Semele demanded of Zeus that he reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he agreed. Mortals, however, cannot look upon Zeus without dying, and she perished, consumed in lightning-ignited flame.

For those of you familiar with the Christian mythology, recall that it was said that no mortal could look upon Yahweh and live (Exodus 33:18-23).

It’s easy to see how the ancient Israelites borrowed symbology from their neighbors. It’s what people do – we borrow from others, and tailor it to suit ourselves and our environments.

I happen to be a Jebus-myther - how about you?

Till the next post, then.

A Prayer for Archimedes: A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus.

For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes. An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized. Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes’ book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

Can’t help but do the facepalm on this one…

Okay, just try to follow the logic on this one:

The Pope is declaring a ‘holy war’ against people who claim falsely that the Virgin Mary is appearing to them. He will attempt to snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions with new guidelines to help bishops root out frauds. Benedict XVI plans to publish criteria to help them distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata – the appearances of the five wounds of Christ – and weeping or bleeding statues. In some cases exorcists will be used to determine if a credible apparition is ‘divine’ origin or ‘demonic’. The guidelines will be published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

I’d like to comment, but I think all that needs to be said is here:

To begin with, the Church will tell the alleged witnesses to simply shut up. If they don’t comply, this will be taken as evidence that their claims are false. If you don’t follow the logic, don’t worry, it gets worse. Next, the Vatican will call in some psychiatrists — interestingly, either Catholic or atheists (what about Muslim or Jewish ones?) — to certify that the visionaries are not nuts or hallucinating. (Good luck.) Then the Church task force will consider the subject’s education. You see, if they are too educated they may have had access to reports of previous apparitions, which would have given them the know-how for effective fakery. This essentially eliminates anyone with a computer that can do google or wiki searches. If the alleged visionary has successfully passed the preliminary tests, then he or she will be questioned by, I kid you not, demonologists and exorcists — just to make sure that the apparition is divine, and not a dirty trick perpetrated by good old Satan. The implication, of course, is that a relatively well educated person like the Pope actually believes in the literal existence of an actively plotting Satan. Oh boy. Just in case you were wondering, by the way, today is not April 1st, and the above material is not taken from the Onion.

It’s just SO weird to see people embracing this shit.

I’m like, “You’re kidding, right?”

(Well, I think all of us here are thinking that. But anyhoo…)