Jesus Take the Wheel

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thank, d, for posting this. I'll be curious to hear any repercussions from this interview. And I wish I could be projected back in time to throw on an appendix to my dissertation. This bit was categorically so unlike everything I ever followed on Christian radio and TV for all those years, let alone what I was able to get into the final sample.

I wonder if this guy's ever run into Tony Campolo, or somebody like that who does the same kind of thing, but rather less adroitly (and yes, contrarily).

"You two are like the Ken and Barbie of Jesus television in Canada, here " - !! [glad he was able to qualify that in some way afterwards]

His hit on spiritual arrogance was pretty powerful stuff - getting his hosts to say they were 100% sure of faith before going on to say that people who were absolutely convinced of faith suffered from spiritual arrogance. I listened to that radio show for years waiting to hear a moment like that, to see how that host would manage it.

And the last point he could get in - "Why don't we ask the Wiccans why they do what they do, instead of only asking other Christians?"

Beautiful.

And then, again, Norm at the end. Norm, what's your role on this show, again? Oh right - hustling for money! Telling this guy to get a life? That's just rich.

His website has some observations from the encounter that are interesting reading. I'm glad he went back over the point about all the narcissism. The posts that follow, though, are also interesting in their own way.

A Message From Drew

Hi folks,

Just wanted to take this opportunity to clear up a few things as a result of the overwhelming response we've had to the 100 Huntley debut.

The hosts who interviewed me, Reyn & Kathy Mainse, I have great respect for. They are definitely not one of the many "Jesus Salesman" on TV who live lifestyles of opulence! I felt they handled the interview quite well considering the fact that I pretty much used that time to vent 25-years of frustration with "Victories Only - Jesus TV" which has left the rest of us "messy losers" a tad alienated and utterly bewildered at our spiritual ineptness. My "Ken & Barbie" comment was meant to only illustrate just how good looking they are - NOT how fake & plastic they are!

As for Norm's comments at the end - "Get a life Drew. The Howard Stern of Christian Radio" - I'm pretty sure he felt a little flustered after my interview, having just assaulted many of his traditions and beliefs, and he tried to recover with "funny." Hey, if anyone knows about trying to be funny and it not working... it's me! As for being called the "Howard Stern Of Christian Radio"... if that means that I talk about things others are thinking but don't have the guts to bring up... no worries. God knows, that if the Church had actually been talking about some of the stuff we talk about on our show, my spiritual life might have been a whole lot healthier along the way!

A few people were surprised at how intense or even angry I came across during this interview. Some have said that maybe I just need to take a break and "get healed" or "filled." Maybe my emotions just stood out so much because no one is EVER encouraged to be that vulnerable or honest on these types of God shows? I AM FRUSTRATED and actually, YES... I AM angry. Very angry, at how Christian leaders have been allowed to consistently get away with selling a North American, narcissistic, materialistic, "what's in it for me", squeaky clean, sterile Christianity. The Christianity I see being sold (You can't actually sell something unless people buy it - so wake up people and stop empowering these Princely Pawns) is quite simply, getting in the way of people finding Jesus, following Jesus, being in a relationship with Jesus. I think I actually hate "Christianity!"

Cultural Christianity is KILLING US!

There is so much more to discuss, and that's what our show is about. It's about provoking discussion in a numb and desensitized culture, begging for authenticity! Our show is NOT a ministry! Yes, it has "ministry' like qualities, but I am not a spiritual leader nor am I a leader of a "ministry." I just don't have the integrity for that at this point in my life. And the main purpose of our show is NOT to sell Jesus! TDMS exists to pull the curtain on "spoon fed spirituality!"

So, will you join with me as we spiritually bumble forward, together? I know that there are 7-Steps to fix me, that I should be Purpose Driven and praying like Jabez with my Spirit Filled Bible! But I also know that there's a massive underground church out there of people like you and I who yearn for something more, something real, tangible, genuine. But we make the "Permission-Givers" and the "Kingdom Monitors" feel uncomfortable. We are the messy ones! The Unpretenders, The Unfinished, The Spiritually Incompetent, The Awkwardly Desperate, The Unqualified, The Whosoevers and the Just Anyones... Who Would Jesus Reject? Well according to donor based Jesus TV - ME!

There are multitudes who are just flat out "pissed off" with Christianity and her church. (And then there are those who are just pissed off that I said "pissed off.") And herein lies the problem. It shouldn't be HER church. It belongs to Christ. I want Him to take it back, because right now it sucks. St. Augustine had it right when he said, "The church is a whore, but she's your mother!" As sick of her as I am though, she still gave birth to me and I will be forever grateful.

Look, I'm not trying to re-invent another product to sell. There is truly nothing new under the Son. Maybe what I yearn for will only be fulfilled when my passport expires. Maybe it's just my soul crying out, much like Creation does, for the return of the Master? (Starting to sound like a tree hugger from B.C.)

As a side note, to all of those non-conformists out there who simply gravitate to the latest and loudest rebel, I am NOT your Pied Piper! Hang around long enough and I'll offend you too! I'm simply on my own awkward and somewhat elusive quest to have my own built in spiritual thirst quenched. The Plastic Jesus you have sold me, the one we worship here in our fatally comfortable backyards of life... it just hasn't done it for me. The Jesus I'm desperately and awkwardly trying to follow is definitely the Lord of The Losers!

As the Huntley host told me, "Drew, we just ran out of time to show people the rest of your heart." Well there it is... sorry it ain't exactly a Hallmark Moment!

Edited February 22, 2007 by Guest

[hamilton]

"holy hand grenades up their butt and pull the pin"

I also thought it was funny that right after he said that, the host pointed out that they were on live television so the remark couldn't be edited or deleted. I didn't realize that "butt" could be such an offensive word...

[briguy]

Check out the banner link that was running at the top of this thread/page while I was reading this.

http://www.xianz.com/?gclid=CPOJs9KfwYoCFQlaPgodODWMkQ

or click here

Edited February 22, 2007 by Guest

[briguy]

Holy spy bots

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

In unrelated news, check out the Christian Adult Movie Awards .

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

And check out this very, very good article on secularisation (and its opposite) in Britain.

As much as I enjoy people like Richard Dawkins, I think this piece nails exactly what's wrong with his approach.

Faith

Faith

Britain's new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not. Stuart Jeffries reports on the vicious and uncompromising battle between believers and non-believers

Monday February 26, 2007

The Guardian

The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." In Britain today, such wry tolerance is diminishing. Today, it's the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other's most dearly held beliefs.

"We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism," says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. "Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

"You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths - and, indeed, thinking atheists - in the other corner. " says Slee. Why does he think the other two groups are so vociferous? "When there was a cold war, we knew who the enemy was. Now it could be anybody. From this feeling of vulnerability comes hysteria."

"We live together but we don't know each other," says Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar and senior research fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. "And this is something not just true of secularists, but of people of faith. I moved to Britain shortly after the July 7 2005 bombings in London and since then things have changed radically. Everyone treats the perceived 'other' as a threat."

Or so one might be forgiven for thinking if one listens to the most vocal of dogmatic believers and non-believers.

For example, Richard Dawkins, the British scientist and chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, whose perhaps timely insistence on the hideousness of the other fellow's wife and fatuousness of his offspring made his book, The God Delusion, sell 180,000 in hardback - a figure that rivals sales of Jordan's memoirs, thus demonstrating what an appetite there is for unapologetically militant atheism. This is the man so voguishly intemperate that when speaking to the Times recently about Nadia Eweida, the British Airways worker whose employer refused to allow her to wear a Christian cross openly to work, said: "I saw a picture of this woman. She had one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen."

Before The God Delusion was published, Dawkins wrote about something called Gerin oil that was poisoning human society. "Gerin oil (or Geriniol, to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug that acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self-damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions that have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11 were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time." Gerin oil, of course, was an anagram of religion. His bestseller charged that God was a "psychotic delinquent", invented by mad, deluded people.

The backlash against Dawkins' abusiveness, as well as his arguments, has started. Oxford theologian Alister McGrath has just published The Dawkins Delusion?. He argues: "We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them - as Dawkins does - as liars, knaves and charlatans. Many atheists have been disturbed by Dawkins' crude stereotypes and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. In fact, The God Delusion might turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer."

It is worth noting that The God Delusion included an appendix entitled "a partial list of addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". In this Dawkins offers a similar service to the National Secular Society whose certificate of de-baptism is downloadable from www.secularism.org.uk. "Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had," urges the site.

Dawkins and the National Secular Society, though, are no match for Christopher Hitchens in their hostility to religion. His new book, God Is Not Great: the Case Against Religion, is to be published by Atlantic Books in May. Its first chapter, drolly entitled Putting it Mildly, concludes: "As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." (Hitchens' italics.)

John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, whose book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be published later this year, detects parallels between dogmatic believers and dogmatic unbelievers such as Hitchens and Dawkins. "It is not just in the rigidity of their unbelief that atheists mimic dogmatic believers. It is in their fixation on belief itself."

Gray argues that this fixation misses the point of religions: "The core of most religions is not doctrinal. In non-western traditions and even some strands of western monotheism, the spiritual life is not a matter of subscribing to a set of propositions. Its heart is in practice, in ritual, observance and (sometimes) mystical experience . . . When they dissect arguments for the existence of God, atheists parody the rationalistic theologies of western Christianity."

The intolerance for people of faith, though, might not seem to be the preserve of only angry atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Instead, there is a widespread fear that religion is being treated as a problem to British society, best solved by airbrushing it from the public sphere. British Airways' insistence that employee Nadia Eweida remove her Christian cross, and Jack Straw's plea to Muslim women constituents to remove their veils at his surgery, have helped bring a sense of mutual persecution to many people of different faiths (including yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs) - and a sense of solidarity. Many people of faith share a concern that Britain may be following secularist France, where 2004 reforms meant that "conspicuous religious symbols" could not be worn in public places, such as schools.

One particularly fraught current issue creating inter-faith solidarity is gay adoptions. Many Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims and Jews last month united against the government's sexual orientation regulations that would mean all adoption agencies could not discriminate against gay couples in placing children with adoptive parents.

Catholic leaders warned that their seven adoption agencies could not breach Vatican guidelines against allowing gay couples to adopt. Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, supported the Catholics' stand, as did the Federation of Synagogues. And, of course, the issue of homosexuality is also dividing the Anglican communion. For evangelical groups such as Reform, the C of E is polarising into two churches, one "submitting to God's revelation", the other "shaped primarily by western secular culture". Again, western secular culture - if not of Dawkins' stamp - is seen as the worm in the apple, corrupting not just British society but the church itself. By contrast, for liberals in the church, whose number includes many gay vicars, the evangelicals' hostility to homosexuality seems unChristian, as does their stance on gay adoption.

The gay adoption issue also outraged many non-believers, among them philosopher AC Grayling, author of Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God. "These groups are trying to be exempt from the effort to be a fair society, and we are faced with the threat of a possible return to the dark ages. We are trying to keep a pluralistic society, and elements in the Christian church and other religions are trying to destroy it."

Why this departure from tolerant, if nicely ironic, Menckenism? Why the increasing division of Britain into shrill camps shouting unedifyingly at each other? One thing is certain: we've been here before. In 1860, one year after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and TH Huxley, the naturalist described as "Darwin's bulldog", went toe-to-toe at Oxford's Natural History Museum. According to a contemporary report in McMillan's magazine, "The bishop turned to his antagonist with smiling insolence. He begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? Huxley rose to reply ... He [said he] was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth ... One lady fainted and had to be carried out."

"At that time the church was feeling very threatened and uncomfortable with non-religious society," says Hanne Stinson, executive director of the British Humanist Association. "There is a parallel with today - the church is feeling very threatened." Hence, perhaps, the nature of a dispute at Exeter University where the Christian Union was banned from using student union facilities after the Students' Guild charged that the CU was breaking equal opportunities policy by asking members to sign up to a list of beliefs that were discriminatory against non-Christians and gay people. The CU accused the guild of threatening its right to freedom of expression by imposing the ban: as in the gay adoption issue, anti-discrimination policy was running up against religious conviction. The Exeter ban has been repeated at other universities, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to argue that the bans threaten "the integrity of the whole educational process".

But today everyone is feeling threatened. Not just religious groups, but also pressure groups seeking to represent those without faith (who Stinson, citing last December's Ipsos Mori poll, suggests amount to 36% of Britons). Slee argues that low (below 7%) church attendance is a result of Christians being revolted by "the church presenting itself as narrow and non-inclusive".

In any event, the British Humanist Association campaigns against the existence of religious privileges in public life. Its symbolic struggle is BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot, which the BHA argues unfairly excludes humanists and other non-faith people. But Radio 4 isn't the chief culprit: "We believe that the church having privileged access to government is not good," says Stinson. "The government has had this whole thing about giving a voice to religion, which was connected to the aim of building links with minority groups. But religions have become more and more dominating . It does connect to the whole multiculturalism debate because the government is funding faith schools in order to bind British minority ethnic groups to British society. But in so doing they are paying for people to be indoctrinated, to put it bluntly."

The role of religion in education raises a terrifying spectre for Grayling. "People who cherish tolerant argument are fighting back against the teaching of creationism in schools." Last November the Guardian revealed that 59 British schools were using teaching materials promoting a creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution, called intelligent design. At the same time Dawkins, nicknamed "Darwin's rottweiler", announced he was setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.

Atheists such as Dawkins and Grayling fear that Britain may become more like the US, where creationism has more than a foothold. "In the US, two and half million people are educated at home because their parents don't want them exposed to Darwinian thinking," says Grayling. "Instead, they are often exposed to fundamentalist educational literature such as the A Beka books that maintain the world was created in 6,000 BC and that tyrannosaurus rex was a vegetarian. These developments worry intelligent people when the faith school issue comes up."

Indeed, only last week such intelligent people were worrying when the Tory leader, David Cameron, said he would be sending his daughter to a Church of England primary school instead of one of the many non-faith state schools in his area.

Children's author Philip Pullman argues that atheism should be taught in schools. "What I fear and deplore in the 'faith school' camp is their desire to close argument down and put some things beyond question or debate. It's vital to get clear in young minds what is a faith position and what is not, so that, for instance, they won't be taken in by religious people claiming that science is a faith position no different in kind from Christianity. Science is not a matter of faith, and too many people are being allowed to get away with claiming that it is."

Others argue that faith schools should be abolished and religion have no role in public life. Such is the Dawkins-Hitchens position. Why such hatred for religion and the proselytisation for its removal from the public sphere? One answer comes from Rabbi Julia Neuberger: "I think they're so angry about Muslims being so strident," she says. "And then they become angry about the Church of England wading into the issue of gays and adoption."

Neuberger is to take on Hitchens, Dawkins and Grayling when she speaks at a debate against the motion We'd Be Better Off Without Religion next month. The debate has been moved to a bigger venue. "What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt," she says. "No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don't accept there's doubt in all things, you're being intellectually dishonest. "

This is a thought taken up by Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought. "I refer to secular fundamentalism. The problem is that these people believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it."

Tamimi's words also resonate with what the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said last November: "The aggressive secularists pervert and abuse any notion of diversity for the sake of promoting a narrow agenda." They also parallel the chilling remarks of Richard Chartres, Bishop of London: "If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow."

Another reason for secularist rage at people of faith, one might think, is exasperation on the part of militant atheists that religion has not died out as they hoped. "It has taken centuries and centuries to wrestle away from the churches the levers of power," says Grayling.

Tamimi contends that this was not quite what happened. Rather, he suggests that Christians were complicit in their marginalisation from power. "Christians did that to themselves - they allowed religion to move to the private sphere. That would be intolerable for Muslims." Why? "Partly because secularism doesn't mean the same for Muslims from the Middle East. The story of secularism in the Middle East is not one of democracy, as we are always told it was in the west. Instead, it is associated with tyranny - with Ataturk in Turkey, for instance. Islam is compatible with democracy, but not with this secular fundamentalism we are witnessing."

Grayling contends that during the late 20th century, Islam became more militant and assertive and this has changed British society radically. "In Britain we have seen Muslims burn Salman Rushdie's book. And to an extent other religions wanted to get a bit of the action - hence the protests against Jerry Springer: the Opera." When Stewart Lee, one of the writers of Jerry Springer, was interviewed amid protests against the allegedly blasphemous work being screened on TV, he suggested that Islamic culture had been more careful in protecting itself than Christian culture: "In the west, Christianity relinquished the right to be protective of its icons the day Virgin Mary snow globes were put up for sale at the Vatican. But in Islamic culture it is very different. To use a corporate image, Islam has always been a lot more conscientious about protecting its brand." Now other religions are becoming more publicly conscientious.

One example of this growing conscientiousness is a recent paper for the new public theology think-tank Theos, in which Nick Spencer concluded that in the 21st century, liberal humanism would face a challenge from an "old man" - God. "The feeble and slightly embarrassing old man who had been pacing about the house quietly mumbling to himself suddenly wanted to participate in family conversation and, what's more, to be taken seriously." Indeed, in Britain's ethically repellent consumerist society, even some atheists might consider it would be good to hear from the old man again, if only to provide a moral framework beyond shopping.

The refrain of Christians like Spencer is that unless religion is a part of public-policy debates, then society will be impoverished. Last November the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a lecture in which he distinguished between programmatic and procedural secularism. The former meant that in the public domain, everybody had to silence their fundamental convictions and debate in a value-free atmosphere of public neutrality. For Williams, this was a hopeless way of carrying on public discourse in a bewildering society that embraced not only many faiths but many anti-faith positions, and in which real disputes over very different values needed to take place. Better was procedural secularism, which promised that different groups could at least converse with each other in public discussions over sensitive questions of value and policy. This would involve, said Williams, "a crowded and argumentative public square that acknowledges the authority of a legal mediator or broker whose job it is to balance and manage real difference".

It is an idea similar to one set out by Yahya Birt, research fellow at The Islamic Foundation. "One form of secularism suggests that religion should be kept in the private sphere. That's Dawkins' position. Another form, expressed by philosophers suc has Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, is to do with establishing a modus vivendi. It accepts that you come to the public debate with baggage that will inform your arguments. In this, the government tries to find common ground and the best possible consensus, which can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. Of course, there will be real clashes over issues such as gay adoption, but it's not clear to me that that's a problem per se."

What should such a public square be like? It might not be Menckian, but it could be based on respectful understanding of others' most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: "We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres." It is, at least, a hope, albeit one, given our current climate, in which it would be foolish to place too much faith.

[d_rawk]

That was a good one, thanks!

There were a few points I wanted to hit on, but it was a pretty long article, and most of them have escaped me now that I've reached the end.

Man, though, is it just me or hasn't Hitchens become completely beligerrent and unbearable since Sept. 11, 2001? He's always been something of a contrarian, of course (taking on Mother Teresa was ballsy and cute) but dammit, he's difficult to bear these days and seems somewhere along the way to have stopped thinking things through.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

From the "A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing" files,

Americans Get an "F" in Religion

(see short quiz at link)

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world religions — their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and now says he's a spiritually "confused Christian." He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.

"More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected," he says, citing President Bush's speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson's Quran.

"If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they're both Muslim, and you've been told Islam is about peace, you won't understand what's happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it's so?

"If you want to be involved, you need to know what they're saying. We're doomed if we don't understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can't outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda."

Scholars and theologians who agree with him say Americans' woeful level of religious illiteracy damages more than democracy.

"You're going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they're going to make assumptions about you," says Philip Goff of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Quran foretold American intervention in the Middle East, based on a supposed passage "that simply isn't there. It's an entire argument for war based on religious ignorance."

"We're impoverished by ignorance," says the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. "You can't draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings."

But if people don't know Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed for their sinful ways, Campbell blames Sunday schools that "trivialized religious education. If we want people to have serious knowledge, we have to get serious about teaching our own faith."

Prothero's solution is to require middle-schoolers to take a course in world religions and high schoolers to take one on the Bible. Biblical knowledge also should be melded into history and literature courses where relevant. He wants all college undergrads to take at least one course in religious studies.

He calls for time-pressed adults to sample holy books and history texts. His book includes a 90-page dictionary of key words and concepts from Abraham to Zen. There's also a 15-question quiz — which his students fail every year.

But it's the controversial, though constitutional, push into schools that draws the most attention.

In theory, everyone favors children knowing more. The National Education Association handbook says religious instruction "in doctrines and practices belongs at home or religious institutions," while schools should teach world religions' history, heritage, diversity and influence.

Only 8% of public high schools offer an elective Bible course, according to a study in 2005 by the Bible Literacy Project, which promotes academic Bible study in public schools. The project is supported by Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, a Washington, D.C., non-profit that promotes free speech.

The study surveyed 1,000 high schoolers and found that just 36% know Ramadan is the Islamic holy month; 17% said it was the Jewish day of atonement.

Goff says schools are not wholly to blame for religious illiteracy. "There are simply more groups, more players. Students didn't know Ramadan any better in 1965, but now there are as many Muslims as Jews in America. It's more important to know who's who."

Also today, "there is more emphasis on religious experience as a mark of true religion and less emphasis on doctrine and knowledge of the faith."

Still, it's the widely misunderstood 1963 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that may have been the tipping point: It removed devotional Bible reading from the schools but spelled out that it should not have been removed from literature and history.

"The decision clearly states you can't be educated without it, but it scared schools so much they dropped it all," Goff says.

"Schools are terrified of this," says Joy Hakim, author of several U.S. history textbooks. She's in her 70s but remembers well as a Jewish child how she felt like an outsider in schools that pushed Christianity in the curriculum.

But she says the backlash went too far. "Now, you can't use biblical characters or narrative in anything. We've stopped teaching stories. We teach facts, and the characters are lost."

Religion, like the arts, has become an afterthought in an education climate driven by "the fixation on literacy and numeracy — math and reading," says Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a group critical of the standards-based education movement. "If the ways schools, teachers, principals and superintendents are judged all depend on math and reading scores, that's what you're going to teach," he says.

Still, it's a tough tightrope to walk between those who say the Bible can be just another book, albeit a valuable one, and those who say it is inherently devotional.

The First Amendment Center also published a guide to "The Bible and the Public Schools," which praised a ninth-grade world religions course in Modesto, Calif., and cited a study finding students were able to learn about other faiths without altering their own beliefs. But it also said the class may not be easily replicated and required knowledgeable, unbiased teachers.

Leland Ryken, an English professor at evangelical Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., tested a 2006 textbook, The Bible and Its Influence, underwritten by the Bible Literacy Project. Ryken favors adding classes in the Bible and literature and social studies. But he cautions, "Religious literacy and world religions are not the same as the Bible as literature. It's a much more loaded subject, and I really question if high school students can get much knowledge beyond a sense of the importance of religion."

The Bible and Its Influence has been blasted by conservative Christians such as the Rev. John Hagee, pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Hagee calls it "a masterful work of deception, distortion and outright falsehoods" planting "concepts in the minds of children which are contrary to biblical teaching."

Hagee wrote to the Alabama legislature opposing adoption of the text, citing points such as discussion questions that could lead children away from a belief in God. Example: Asking students to ponder if Adam and Eve got "a fair deal as described in Genesis" would plant the seed that "since God is the author of the deal, God is unfair."

Hagee prefers the Bible itself as a textbook for Bible classes, used with a curriculum created by a group of conservative evangelicals, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, based in Greensboro, N.C. The council says its curriculum is being offered in more than 300 schools.

Sheila Weber, a spokeswoman for The Bible Literacy project, says their textbook has been revised in the second printing issued last month with the examples cited by Hagee removed. The teachers' edition was reissued in August. The first printing was approved by numerous Christian scholars and seminaries and is already in use in 82 school districts.

Mark Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, looked last year at how Texas public school districts taught Bible classes. His two studies, sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group, found only 25 of more than 1,000 districts offered such a class.

"And 22 of them, including several using the Greensboro group's curriculum, were clearly over the line," teaching Christianity as the norm, and the Bible as inspired by God, says Chancey. One teacher even showed students a proselytizing Power Point titled, "God's road map for your life" that was clearly unconstitutional, he says.

The controversies, costs and competing demands in the schools have prompted many to turn instead to character education.

But classes promoting pluralism and tolerance fail on the religious literacy front because they "reduce religion to morality," Prothero says, or they promote a call for universal compassion as if it were the only value that matters.

"We are not all on the same one path to the same one God," he says. "Religions aren't all saying the same thing. That's presumptuous and wrong. They start with different problems, solve the problems in different ways, and they have different goals."

Contributing: Greg Toppo

Interesting closing comments, I thought. "Religion" really is all things to all people.

And for folks like John Hagee, who seem so determined to ground their religion in paranoia, insecurity, and contempt for difference, universal compassion is precisely the furthest thing down the list of values. The widespread ignorance about religion that this article points to serves that perfectly: people need religion like this to keep hate and self-indulgence alive.

Sad and frightening, imo, when people not only lack the security to love, but are hell-bent on institutionalising it.

[phishtaper]

The widespread ignorance about religion that this article points to serves that perfectly: people need religion like this to keep hate and self-indulgence alive.

dont forget about hypocrisy ... haggard, swaggart, baker, roberts ... big sale on glass houses and stones, ya know.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I don't think they allow themselves to remember those stories.

Here's an interesting bit I just ran across. I absolutely loathe the Left Behind phenomenon, btw. I've seen Tim LaHaye in action, too, and he's a scary fella, the way he hypnotises his audience.

Moderate Christians fight rapture with Sunday school

By Andrea Hopkins

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Real estate agent Dave Eschenbach is an active member of his church, but he feels uncomfortable around a sizable portion of U.S. Christians -- those who believe they could be transported to heaven at any moment.

Several years ago, Eschenbach had a boss who scheduled meetings around the rapture, the term for an event that around 20 percent of U.S. Christians believe is imminent.

"One day he announced to the employees that they probably wouldn't be there next week because of the rapture," Eschenbach said of his former boss. "His church had decided that the rapture would happen that week."

The belief has been fueled by the bestselling "Left Behind" novels, which tell how Christian believers will soon be whisked to heaven -- leaving clothes, dental fillings and eye-glasses behind -- while others are left behind to fight the anti-Christ in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ.

Eschenbach is a member of Cincinnati's Episcopal Christ Church Cathedral, a mainstream Protestant church. When it hosted a Webcast of a New York conference on rapture theology, he and about 50 others signed up to participate.

Speakers at the conference, organized by the Episcopal Church's Trinity Institute, minced no words in their attempt to turn a tide that has swept much of middle America.

"The rapture is a racket," said Barbara Rossing, whose 2004 book, "The Rapture Exposed," criticizes rapture theology as unbiblical.

Rossing, a Lutheran minister and teacher at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, said fiction that focuses on Armageddon -- the ultimate battle between good and evil that follows rapture -- is popular in the United States because it plays into American fear.

"The (Iraq) war isn't going well, there is great anxiety about oil, the economy, the sense that jobs are going overseas," Rossing said in an interview. "The specter of more events like Hurricane Katrina ... is terrifying."

"LIBERAL BRAINWASHING"

In Cincinnati, Rev. Canon Joanna Leiserson said members of her Episcopal congregation started asking about the rapture when "Left Behind" books, movies and games flooded onto the market.

Before the books, Leiserson said, mainstream Christians paid little attention to the Book of Revelation, the part of the Bible that mentions Armageddon.

"The mainstream churches haven't avoided (Revelation) as much as we just didn't think it was that big of a thing, until the fundamentalist churches started making a big production out of it," she said.

For Leiserson, Revelation is a story about Jesus confronting the evils of the Roman Empire. To help counter the rapture tide, she is developing a Sunday school curriculum to teach kids that Jesus loves everyone and would not leave anyone behind.

"We were asleep at the switch for too long, and fundamentalists rushed in to speak to this vacuum. Now we've got to reclaim it," said Rossing, the Lutheran minister.

Rossing called on fellow moderates to write their own novels about God's love -- though she admits that story might not sell as well as the violent plot of the "Left Behind" books, which have sold more than 43 million copies.

Tim LaHaye, co-author of the "Left Behind" series, said Americans like his books not because of the violence, but because they believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

"Surprisingly enough with all the liberal brainwashing they've got in public education, most people that claim to be Christians have a tendency to believe the Bible," LaHaye said in an interview.

Moderate Christians will never come up with a story that can compare, he said.

"They are just liberal, socialists, really, and they don't believe the Bible," LaHaye said. "What they probably will come up with is a plausible explanation from their liberal standpoint to satisfy their adherents that are reading our series and liked it. But it will be inferior because the story will be inferior."

The success of the graphic novels is just one indication of the strength of belief in rapture, Armageddon, and the subsequent second coming of Jesus Christ. A 2006 survey for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 79 percent of American Christians believe in the second coming, with 20 percent believing it will happen in their lifetime.

Skeptical Christians at the Cincinnati conference said they don't always know how to respond when confronted by those who swear the rapture is imminent.

"Because one of our goals is to be very tolerant, it is sometimes hard to go to the public. There is limited means to get the message out," said Shirley Wang.

Christian moderates also tend to view their fundamentalist cousins with an indulgent wink, more comfortable joking about the rapture than trying to change their minds.

Rossing said her students once left piles of clothes on their chairs to make her think they'd been raptured.

A popular bumper sticker reads "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned." Skeptics counter with an irreverent "Come the Rapture, can I have your car?"

Interesting bind brought up there at the end, I thought. How are you to tolerate the intolerant, or intolerance itself? Is the answer to default to the no-holds-barred approach like Richard Dawkins?

There's a good interview with Barbara Rossing (author of The Rapture Exposed) here.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

One from the Richard Dawkins School of Dealing with Religious Conservatives. I haven't seen Bill Maher do his thing in a while; it's nice to see he hasn't lost any of his steam.

Bill Maher on Scarborough Country


--Insert details here--

[djmelbatoast]

I heart Bill Maher.

[d_rawk]

Moderate Christians fight rapture with Sunday school

Awesome. I'm still deeply uncomfortable with Sunday schools (and youth ministries, for that matter ...), but this is positive.

DEM, I often come across bits of audio/interviews that I think may entertain you, but can't share them publicly as they are from a subscription service. You should drop me your email in a PM.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Done and done .

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the deep, cheesy sea of international evangelicalism...

Brazilian Pentecostal Leaders Caught in Scandal

SÃO PAULO: Only a few months ago, Estevam and Sônia Hernandes were on television preaching a gospel of material success and living a life to match.

But that was before they were arrested in Miami in January and charged with illegally smuggling cash into the United States, including $9,000 concealed in a Bible.

All told, the U.S. authorities seized $56,467 that the couple and other family members had hidden on their bodies and in luggage, according to the U.S. indictment. The Brazilian authorities, who have charged the couple with money laundering and fraud, are seeking their extradition.

Because the Hernandeses are prominent and controversial in Brazil, their travails have focused new attention, not just on their own church, but also on the growing wealth and power of the religious movement they are part of, the fastest-growing in Brazil: Pentecostalism, many of whose fundamentalist Protestant denominations stress speaking in tongues or other visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

Hernandes, originally a marketing executive, and his wife, formerly a boutique manager, founded the Rebirth in Christ Church in the mid-1980s. They now preside over a religious and business structure that includes more than 1,000 churches, a television and radio network, a recording company, real estate in Brazil and the United States and, according to Brazilian news reports, a horse-breeding ranch and a trademark on the word "gospel" in Brazil.

On television and at their home church in São Paulo — which has been defaced with graffiti saying "You don't carry money in the Bible, thief!" and other insulting slogans — Hernandes, 52, and his wife, 48, preached a "theology of prosperity," often accompanied by her singing and sometimes by his saxophone playing.

Each year, the Rebirth in Christ Church sponsored a March for Jesus down the main avenue of São Paulo, the largest city in South America, mobilizing as many as three million people.

One of the couple's three children, Fernanda, is also a pastor and has asserted that the charges against her parents are part of a campaign of religious persecution against Pentecostals and the larger group they count themselves members of, evangelicals. She has complained that prosecutors in Brazil, the country with the largest Roman Catholic population in the world, are conducting "a new Inquisition."

"Brazil is still Catholic, but evangelicals are already 30 percent of the population," she said in a recent televised sermon. "That's why they want to destroy us and refer to us in a pejorative manner."

Coverage of the Hernandeses and the charges against them has been uniformly negative in the Brazilian news media, with many newspapers and magazines belittling their denomination as a "sect."

One newspaper regularly puts "bishop" in quotation marks when it refers to the couple and other church leaders.

"This is not just a religious issue, but one that involves media, political and commercial interests," said Luiz Flávio Borges D'Urso, a lawyer for the Hernandeses who is president of the bar association in São Paulo. "The truth is that television is very competitive and, since the church has a network of its own, the growth of their Gospel Network has generated antagonisms and confrontations with other media organizations whose interests are affected."

According to the nondenominational World Christian Database, Brazil has overtaken the United States as the country with the largest Pentecostal population. The survey, based on figures that churches provide, calculated that 24 million Brazilians belong to Pentecostal denominations and 138 million are Roman Catholics.

As the wealth and influence of Pentecostal and allied denominations in Brazil have grown, so have their involvement in politics. More than 10 percent of the members of Brazil's Congress belong to an evangelical caucus, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva chose his vice president from a party dominated by Pentecostal groups.

The Hernandeses' troubles became public late last year when prosecutors, who had been investigating complaints from former church members, froze several bank accounts. When the Hernandeses failed to appear at a hearing — because of medical problems, their lawyer says — an order to detain them was granted.

In early January, after a judge set aside the detention decree, they left for the United States.

They have several churches in southern Florida and a home in Boca Raton, but they were stopped at customs because the Brazilian authorities had issued an alert in their names for "suspicion of money laundering and fraud related to Brazilian organized crime," according to an affidavit filed by an agent of the U.S. Bulk Currency Smuggling Task Force.

Etc. Nice and messy.

Interesting, esp. as it's in the South that Christianity - particularly evangelical brands - is growing the fastest around the world. They've been overdue for a big scandal along these lines.

[d_rawk]

Only a few months ago, Estevam and Sônia Hernandes were on television preaching a gospel of material success and living a life to match.

But that was before they were arrested in Miami in January and charged with illegally smuggling cash into the United States, including $9,000 concealed in a Bible.

Same thing, no? :laugh:

I love to watch people like, say, Creflo Dollar (awesome name, too) preaching their prosperity gospel, and get a big kick out of how people judge their credibility by how expensive their homes and cars are. It's seen as a sign of legitimacy.

Theologically bankrupt, mind you. But charismatic as fuck.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I think that was Max Weber's point, too - just how did those Puritans move from the total mystery of predestination to seeing their growing businesses as signs of favour from God?

[d_rawk]

Indeed! The history of the glorification of the protestant "work ethic" demands analysis and introspection.

Seems to me that contemporary prosperity gospel messages go beyond this, though, too, and suggest that some sort of cognitive assent of faith leads invariably towards material reward from on high. Or should, and that lack of material payoff is evidence only of the insincerity of that confessed assent. This is a bit different, I think, from what the puritans were after (though maybe a natural extension of the same).

I admire the heck out of Benjamin Franklin, but think he is probably a good example of the way and the point in time where these things took a turn. Is that too off the wall?

This is what the Creflo Dollar's seem to do -- suggest that if you haven't gotten it, it's because you're not "working" it right. The bible is a manual to be "worked", and you just need to follow its steps correctly and the riches (spiritual riches implied only loosely, but the material suggested strongly) shall be yours.

I suspect that Jesus would be anxious to turn over the tables in those particular ministries. But I probably make out of that character what I want to see, the same way that they do.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

This is what the Creflo Dollar's seem to do -- suggest that if you haven't gotten it, it's because you're not "working" it right. The bible is a manual to be "worked", and you just need to follow its steps correctly and the riches (spiritual riches implied only loosely, but the material suggested strongly) shall be yours.

Funny, that sounds like magic, doesn't it? I mean, in the traditional sociological sense of the word - attempts to manipulate the world through spells and formulas.

Why do evangelicals waste their time attacking the Harry Potter books, which scream out "I am only fiction!", when they have people like these in their ranks claiming that their kind of magic actually works?

[d_rawk]

Haha, but it's not magic you see, it is God's plan and he has given you the instructions to follow His plan. It is in fact the natural way of things that you should be healthy, wealthy, and prosperous. There is no magic, there is only a need to follow the Word. All you need to do is to accept it, live it, and "sow a seed" [tithe] into the ministry.

"The seed I sow is towards debts I won't owe."

This is precarious ground, because I worry that my intellectual disagreement starts to spill over into self-gratifying teasing or ridicule. So I'll stop ..

[djmelbatoast]

Meanwhile, a little closer to home...

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

. Yep, same old same old.

d-rawk - very true - though isn't the old adage about magic that you have to believe before it works?

You were right before, too, I think - that it's all about cognitive assent - acceptance of a set of propositions. Anything to get them away from direct experience of the world, which might risk undermining any of those propositions as they're given.

[phishtaper]

Meanwhile, a little closer to home...

i think the spaceship-shaped church should have been the first clue.

this is a photo of the "pastor's" home in King City, a super wealthy northern suburb of Toronto ...

i say, if people are stupid enough to give to jokers like this, even after they have been shown evidence of his theft, then they deserve to be fleeced.