Lesbian pagan Amy Phillips testifies that a conservative Catholic school saved her daughter, after the public high school experience had left her suicidal.

David Gibson, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, shared some facts about life in today’s America which caused my jaw to drop.

Nearly 10% of Protestant churches will be closed on Christmas Sunday this year, according to LifeWay Research, and most pastors who are opening up say they expect far fewer people than on other Sundays. Other reports suggest that churches across the board are scaling down their services in anticipation of fewer worshipers.

“We have to face the reality of families who don’t want to struggle to get kids dressed and come to church,” Brad Jernberg of Dallas’s Cliff Temple Baptist Church told the Associated Baptist Press. Similarly, Beth Car Baptist Church in Halifax, Va., is planning a short service featuring bluegrass riffs on Christmas music. “I’ll do a brief sermon, and then we’re going home,” said Pastor Mike Parnell.

Even in denominations organized around the liturgical calendar and sacramental worship, like the Catholic, Episcopal and Orthodox churches, kid-friendly Christmas Eve services (actually held in the late afternoon) are proliferating—the “Jingle Bell Mass,” one Catholic priest dubbed them—while “Midnight Mass” is often a term of art, ending rather than starting at the stroke of midnight.

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Strange and bizarre as this sounds, USA Today reports the same story.

Among the nation’s top 20 largest Protestant churches — as ranked by Outreach Magazine — three will be closed on Christmas, and 10 will be having only one service, The Tennessean reports.

LifeChurch.tv, an Oklahoma-based megachurch with 14 locations in five states, says it will be closed on Christmas, but it plans to hold Christmas Eve services.

In Atlanta, First Baptist Church will hold morning services on Christmas Eve but close on Sunday.

Life Research, based in Nashville, says its national survey of Protestant churches found that 91% would hold at least one service Christmas morning, while about 9% will not worship on Sunday at all. Some plan Christmas Eve services instead.

Wow! I would say myself that there is something seriously wrong with the perspective and priorities of churches and denominations adopting this particular policy.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The goofballs running the Air Force Academy spent $80,000 to construct an outdoor circle of boulders around a propane-fueled fire pit to accommodate the spiritual needs of infinitesimally small numbers of cadets self-described as “pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths.”

What exactly people who like extinct religions and imaginary religions have in common is unclear, but the Air Force classifies all of the former schools of metaphysical opinion as “Earth-based,” whatever that means.

If one were a Grecian pagan worshipping Zeus or a Nordic pagan worshipping Odin, wouldn’t that make one’s religion “Sky-based?”

And why exactly do these nonconformist cadets need boulders and propane? Couldn’t they sit even more comfortably on ordinary teakwood lawn furniture? Is the Academy planning to supply pious pagan undergraduates with chickens, sheep, and the occasional ox to be sacrificed on major holy days? Will worshippers of Baal or Quetzalcoatl be immunized from the common law and permitted to sacrifice unwanted children or enemy combatants to their bloodthirsty divinities? Will the usual Academy prohibitions on sexual fraternization be suspended for Wiccans to conduct Black Masses? It’s not easy to see how the officials in Colorado Springs think they can conveniently draw the line once they’ve committed themselves to honoring diversity of opinion on such a scale.

LA Times story.

Princeton Professor Russell H. Nieli offers a serious critique of the establishment of AGW as orthodoxy on American university campuses and in the MSM. His list of issues is quite good, and so is his conclusion.

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, a long-time skeptic of the Gore-Hansen Model of global warming, has explained how the serious challenge to American scientific and military dominance posed by the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite in the 1950s sent a clear message to the American scientific community that has stuck with it ever since. After Sputnik, says Lindzen, it became clear that the way to gain status, prestige, and, above all, government funding for one’s scientific research, was through the medium of public fear and crisis creation. A similar dynamic was at work earlier, he says, in the creation of the Manhattan Project, which was originally established as a counterweight to what was believed to be an advanced Nazi atom bomb project. The threats and crises for which the government will shell out big money may be entirely real, of course, and not in need of any exaggeration or hype. But they may also be bogus or grossly inflated, a condition that Lindzen thinks accurately describes current global-warming concerns of the Gore-Hansen variety.

The New York Times science editor John Tierney offers a similar take on the global warming issue, stressing both the self-interest of scientists involved in crisis mongering and the more general, herd-like conformism that afflicts scientists along with everyone else. “I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research,” Tierney writes, “is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the ‘consensus’ about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in ‘informational cascades,’ and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem—and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it. … Given the huge stakes in this debate—the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions—it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?” (John Tierney).

The last sentence was an oblique reference to attempts by many climate scientists to suppress skeptical voices, which was so clearly in evidence in the scandalous Climategate emails. A commentator on Tierney’s blog adds the following valuable insight: “To survive, most workers in scientific fields must follow the grant money. If all the grants this year are for work on the crisis du jour, then that’s the work which gets done. The annoying fact is that somebody pays for science. The ‘somebody’ may be an Evil Oil Company, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, or anyone else with bags of money. We shouldn’t be too amazed when we find that the ‘somebody’ tends to get the science he or it wants to see.”

That money, power, vanity, and prestige may influence a scientific debate—or non-debate in the case of global warming—should not be very surprising. As I have said, scientists and scholars are human beings and prone to all the foibles and distortions of the human condition. This was the great insight of the mid-20th century “sociologists of knowledge,” and before them of most Calvinists and other discerning Christians (including most notably James Madison in Federalist No. 10).

But I think there is an additional element here that is less talked about but probably as important as the kinds of issues Lindzen and Tierney bring up. This is the attraction of global-warming orthodoxy not as a falsifiable scientific theory or source of research funding but as a substitute religion that engages all the energies and capacities to enhance meaning in life that an earlier generation of secular scholars and scientists often found in various brands of socialism or psychoanalysis. With the general decline and discrediting of both Marxism and Freudianism over the past thirty years radical environmentalism in various forms has taken their place in the lives of many secular intellectuals as a source of existential meaning and purpose. The insular, defensive, cult-like behavior displayed by so many global warming advocates when they are confronted with the concerns of informed skeptics reinforces such an interpretation and explains their refusal to debate dissenters. True believers have no converse with heretics. And such cult-like behavior reinforces one final suspicion: like socialism and Freudianism, global-warming alarmism may prove in time to be a God that failed.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

The Rapture is apparently scheduled to begin at 6:00 PM this evening.

Will you be raptured out of here? This handy flowchart is intended to help you predict your fate.

Hat tip to Jane Ragan.

Bryan Preston reports on the lengths that the Episcopal Church has been willing to go to punish parishes attempting to break away as the result of the ordination of an avowedly practicing homosexual as bishop.

I’m not at all religious and this story makes my blood boil. It must be seriously annoying to actual believing Christians.

The town of Falls Church, VA, gets its name from the beautiful historic church at its heart. The Falls Church was built in the time of George Washington, who was himself a vestryman at the church, and the original chapel still stands amid a far larger and more modern campus, and today boasts about 2,500 members. According to a historical marker nearby, the Falls Church was a recruiting station for the fledgling army that Washington led. But today the Falls Church is the target of a scorched earth campaign that the Episcopal Church USA, now called The Episcopal Church (TEC) is waging against several of its own congregations.

The Falls Church’s differences with TEC began over doctrinal issues in the 1970s, but came to a head in 2003 with the Episcopal Church’s ordination of the first non-celibate gay bishop. Many Episcopal churches, including the Falls Church and seven others in northern Virginia, elected to separate from TEC and created a parallel church network aligned with the Anglican Communion. But TEC claimed ownership of the Falls Church’s sprawling campus, and a lawsuit soon followed to wrest the property away from the congregation. Claiming alienation of property, the Episcopal Church went to courtroom war against its breakaway flocks.

The TEC’s lawsuit against the eight churches hinges on property ownership: Who owns the buildings and lands where the congregations meet? What would seem to be a straightforward issue, isn’t, thanks in part to how Episcopal churches are governed. Episcopal churches exist somewhere between Catholic parishes, the properties of which rest solely in the hands of bishops, and most Protestant churches, which own their own properties independent of their denomination or larger structural organization. Unlike Catholic churches, Episcopal churches exercise some independence from the larger church and have the power to vote on whether to sever ties with TEC. These churches did just that. But unlike other Protestant churches, Episcopal churches exercise somewhat less independence from their larger church. But the deeds to the properties in question are in the names of the local trustees, not the TEC itself.

These churches also predate the founding of the Episcopal diocese in Virginia itself. In fact, they are among its founding churches. Falls Church itself dates back to 1734. The diocese that is suing it is three decades its junior.

Nevertheless, the Episcopal Church has continued to wage a very expensive war in court. Jim Oakes, chairman of the Anglican Division of Virginia, estimates that the case has cost the local churches and TEC between $5 million and $8 million on both sides, or between $10 million to $16 million total. For churches that exist to provide ministry to families and towns, those millions could have surely been put to much better use than hiring lawyers and engaging in legal proceedings that have now lasted five years.

As the years have worn on, the churches have offered to settle out of court at each stage, only to be rejected by the Episcopal Church, and then have prevailed over TEC in court. That changed when the case made it all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, which handed the case back down to the circuit level after finding that the law at the heart of the case – called the division statute – did not apply in this case.

That trial is now set for the end of April, and is expected to take about six weeks. One Falls Church congregant I spoke with worries not just about the eventual ownership of the properties, but about the eventual intentions of the Episcopal Church itself. When I asked what was the worst case scenario, he pointed me to the outcome of a similar case in Binghamton, New York. The Episcopal Church’s victory over a breakaway church there led to this:

The Church of the Good Shepherd, which has stood at #79 Conklin Avenue since 1879, has been willingly turned over to a Muslim entity by the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, rather than have it remain in the hands of traditional Anglicans who practice the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

The death knell for the structure as a Christian house of worship was delivered on February 9, 2010, when it was sold to Imam Muhammad Affify, doing business as the Islamic Awareness Center, for a mere $50,000, a fraction of the church’s assessed $386,400 value.

Now, two months later, the classic red Anglican doors have been repainted green, the simple cross on top of the steeply peaked bell tower has been lopped off, and a windowpane cross in the side door has been disfigured leaving only narrow vertical glass with the cross beam being painted over to hide it. The Muslims consider the cross a pagan symbol.

Meanwhile the Rev. Matt Kennedy, his wife and partner in ministry Anne, their young family and congregation were sent packing in the bitter cold and deep snow in January 2008 when the New York Supreme Court ordered them to relinquish the 130-year-old church building which stands overlooking the meandering Susquehanna River.

Good Shepherd had offered to purchase the property before any legal proceedings began, but TEC refused, just as it has refused to settle with the majority of the Virginia churches. After winning the Binghamton suit, TEC sold the historic church to the Islamic group for about a third of what the congregation had offered. ...

[An Episcopalian source describing a similar case in Leesburg, VA, notes:]

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is on record saying she would sooner see fleeing parishes sold for saloons than see them affiliate with African and Southern Cone dioceses that uphold “the faith once delivered for all to the saints.”

Saloons rather than traditional churches? That is why the word “jihad” is in the title of this article. The Episcopal Church’s actions in Binghamton and elsewhere defy reason, unless they were intended to send a very strong and unmistakable message to traditional congregants who might be thinking of breaking away: Defy us, and we will not only hound and possibly crush your congregation through expensive lawsuits, we will see that your cherished houses of worship are desecrated. And we will go to any lengths to send this message, even if we must turn your houses of worship into saloons, or mosques. Even if George Washington himself once worshiped there.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Palm Beach Post

From The Deacon’s Bench via The Anchoress.

Amusing to heathens like myself.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Mosques in Italy will not receive a share of income tax revenue the Italian government allocates to religious faiths each year. Hindu and Buddhist temples, Greek Orthodox churches and Jehovah’s Witnesses will be eligible for the funds, according to a bill approved by the Italian cabinet in May and still must be approved by parliament.

Until now, the government had earmarked 8 percent of income tax revenue for Italy’s established churches. The great majority of these funds go to the Catholic Church, although if they wish, individual tax payers may elect to give the money to charities and cultural projects instead.

The head of COREIS, one of Italy’s largest Muslim groups, Yahya Pallavicini, said he was bitter that Islam had been denied the revenue from Italian income tax.

“Work should be begun on legally recognising those moderate Muslims who have for years shown themselves to be reliable interlocutors who are free of and fundamentalist ideology,” he said.

Islam is not an established religion in Italy and there is only one official mosque in the country, Rome’s Grand Mosque (photo). Politicians from the ruling coalition cite radical imams, polygamy and failure to uphold women’s rights by Muslims immigrants as obstacles to recognising Islam as an official religion in Italy.

Obviously, we are not Italy, and the US framers ruled out any federally established churches in 1787, but the Italian government’s decision is interesting because it demonstrates that some countries within Christendom do recognize that the differences between the culture of Islam and our own are gravely important and Islamic intransigence and pretensions to supremacy inevitably lead to conflict.

Islam is not just another, alternative mode of religious expression like Zen Buddhism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Church of Latter Day Saints. Muslims cannot be assumed to be willing to attend their own services, raise their children in their faith, hold the occasional fund-raising bazaar or annual parade and be content.

Muslims typically attempt to prevent, even to punish, criticism or mockery of Islam. Muslims refuse to recognize the equality of other religious faiths or of unfaith. Muslims commonly decline to assimilate. And Muslims reject fundamentally the principle of separation of church and state.

As long as Islam aspires to replace our culture and politics with its own; as long as Islam refuses to criticize itself, reform, or accommodate itself to modern pluralist societies; as long as Islam is both a religion and a political adversary of the West; Islam is not entitled to claim the immunities and privileges associated with being just another religion.

Remind me why the civilized world stopped practicing Colonialism again.

CNN:

A Lebanese man charged with sorcery and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be beheaded on Friday, the man’s lawyer said Wednesday.

May El Khansa, the attorney for Ali Hussain Sibat, told CNN that she and Sibat’s family were informed about the upcoming execution. She said she heard from a source in Saudi Arabia with knowledge of the case and the proceedings that Saudi authorities “will carry out the execution.”...

Sibat is the former host of a popular call-in show that aired on Beirut-based satellite TV channel “Sheherazade.” According to his lawyer, Sibat would predict the future on his show and give out advice to his audience.

El Khansa told CNN her client was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police (known as the Mutawa’een) and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008. Sibat was in Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic religious pilgrimage known as Umra.

Sibat was then put on trial, and in November 2009, a court in the Saudi city of Medina found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

According to El Khansa, Sibat appealed the verdict. The case was taken up by the Court of Appeal in the Saudi city of Mecca on the grounds that the initial verdict was “premature.”

El Khansa tells CNN that the Mecca appeals court then sent the case back to the original court for reconsideration, stipulating that all charges made against Sibat needed to be verified and that he should be given a chance to repent.

On March 10, judges in Medina upheld their initial verdict, meaning Sibat is once again sentenced to be executed.

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Technological tour de force: Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque 6:20 video of virtual choir performance, 185 performers from 12 countries recorded on 243 tracks.

Audition videos (link).

How it was organized (link).

How it was made (link).

Via Kottke.
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What American states & cities have the best-equipped male residents? Condomania has the list. New Hampshire and New Orleans win.
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Why do I walk like that?

Detail of Megan Jaegerman police graphic discussed by Edward Tufte.

Via Cory Doctorow.

The Venerable Glynn Cardy, Vicar of St. Matthew-in-the-city an Anglican parish in Aukland, New Zealand, is undoubtedly a happy camper this holiday season, having attracted round the world news coverage to the “Progressive” statement made by the above billboard he erected in his city’s downtown just in time for Christmas.

The Guardian (Manchester, UK) reports that within five hours of the billboard’s appearance, someone actually connected with Christianity was seen attempting to paint over the billboard.

In the characteristically triumphant and self-congratulatory manner of leftists like himself who have infiltrated their way into roles representing a faith they actually despise, Glynn Cardy dismisses conventional Christianity as fundamentalism and its religious message as “mush.”

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just needs to question the literalness of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do however is remove the supernatural obfuscation and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival.

Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and literal resurrection 33 years later. The importance of this literal resurrection is the belief that it was a cosmic transaction whereby the male God embraced humanity only after being satiated by Jesus’ innocent blood.

The Christmas billboard on a local fundamentalist church sums up this thesis. It reads: “Jesus born 2 die 4 u!” His birth was just an h’orderve (sic) before the main Calvary course.

No doubt on Christmas Eve when papers print the messages of Church leaders a few of them will serve up this fundamentalist thesis wrapped in a nice story.

Progressive Christianity believes the Christmas stories are fictitious accounts designed to introduce the radical nature of the adult Jesus. They contrast the Lord and Saviour Caesar with the anomaly of a new ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’ born illegitimate in a squalid barn. At Bethlehem low-life shepherds and heathen travelers are welcome while the powerful and the priests aren’t. The stories introduce the topsy-turvy way of God, where the outsiders are invited in and the insiders ushered out.

Progressive Christianity doesn’t overlook Jesus’ life and rush to his death. Rather it sees the radical hospitality he offered to the poor, the despised, women, children, and the sick, and says: ‘this is the essence of God’. His death was a consequence of the offensive nature of that hospitality and his resurrection a symbolic vindication.

The Christmas billboard outside St Matthew-in-the-City lampoons literalism and invites people to think again about what a miracle is. Is the miracle a male God sending forth his divine sperm, or is the miracle that God is and always has been among the poor?

Mr. Cardy claims to be lampooning literalism, but he is obviously really using a coarse image to mock and deride the central articles of faith of Christianity, as part of an ongoing project in which Christian beliefs are systematically replaced by those of a 19th century heresy called Marxism.

Dies Irae 7:41 video

As the New York Times so convincingly demonstrates, the most dangerous hazard mankind faces is human stupidity.

If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits.

So what is all this going to cost?

The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output. In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions that delegates to the United Nations climate change conference are expected to set in the coming days will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment from 2010 to 2030, according to a new estimate from the International Energy Agency.

As scary as that number sounds, the agency said that the costs would ramp up relatively slowly and be largely offset by economic benefits in new jobs, improved lives, more secure energy supplies and a reduced danger of climate catastrophe. Most of the investment will come from private rather than public funds, the agency contends.

“People often ask about the costs,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management, who tracks climate policy for the bank. “But the figures people tend to cite don’t take into account conservation and efficiency measures that are easily available. And they don’t look at the cost of inaction, which is the extinction of the human race. Period.

When high school football players run through a banner with Bible verses on it, does that violate the US Constitution?

The school board attorney stopped them from doing that in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, telling them they were “violating federal law.”

2:15 video

It is remarkable how the Constitution’s prohibition of a federally established church (state established churches still existed when the Constitution was adopted) has evolved first into a wall of separation between church and state, and ultimately into widespread bans on public expression of religious sentiment.

Washington Post story.

You thought teaching small childen to sing Obama’s praises was ridiculous? Well…

Community organizers attending a Gamaliel Foundation International Leadership Assembly held December 4, 2008 in Washington, D.C. conducted a mock funeral of existing American health care, and a large portion of the crowd during a litany actually prayed to Barack Obama (who once worked for Gamaliel in Chicago).

2:00 video

Addressing delegates at a recent triennial meeting of Episcopalians in Anaheim, California, Katherine Jefferts-Schori won this month’s Rand villain award by arguing passionately that the Christian doctrine of individual salvation was all wrong.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told delegates to the group’s triennial meeting July 8 in Anaheim, Calif., that the overarching connection to problems facing Episcopalians has to do with “the great Western heresy—that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.”

“It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” Jefferts Schori, the first woman to be elected as a primate in the worldwide Anglican Communion three years ago, said. “That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.”

Schori said countering individualistic faith was one reason the theme chosen for the meeting was “Ubuntu,” an African word that describes humaneness, caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation.

“Ubuntu doesn’t have any ‘I’s in it,” she said. “The ‘I’ only emerges as we connect—and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no ‘I’ without ‘you,’ and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the One who created us.”

Jefferts Schori said “heretical and individualistic understanding” contributes to problems like neglect for the environment and the current worldwide economic recession.

“The sins of a few have wreaked havoc with the lives of many, as greed and dishonesty have destroyed livelihoods, educational possibilities, care for the aged, and multiple forms of creativity,” she said. “And that’s just the aftermath of Ponzi schemes for which a handful will go to jail.”

She said in order to be faithful, “we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones.”

“Ubuntu implies that selfishness and self-centeredness cannot long survive,” she said. “We are our siblings’ knowers and their keepers, and we cannot be known without them.”

“We have no meaning, no true existence in isolation,” she said. “We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality.”

A strange thrill was again running up the legs of Chris Matthews in the MSNBC studio, but joining him in tumescence this time listening to the sweet baritone of the Chosen One was Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. As Newsbusters describes it, the two commentators had what grateful women always describe to me as “a religious experience.”

Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

Matthews discussed Obama’s upcoming speech marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day and compared it to that of Ronald Reagan. He then turned to Thomas and asked: “Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?” Thomas replied: “Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial.”

Thomas elaborated on Obama as God, patronizingly explaining: “He’s going to bring all different sides together…Obama is trying to sort of tamper everything down. He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he – he can – he can do that.”

Georgetown University complied with a White House request to cover up the IHS on a pediment on the stage of the university’s Gaston Hall.

IHS is a monogram of the Holy Name of Jesus Christ and appears in the seal of the Jesuit Order which founded and operates Georgetown University.

News reports fail to indicate whether Georgetown was asked to cover up mirrors and crucifixes as well.

CNS

Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall stage prepared for Barack Obama

SB1098 was a “raised bill,” meaning no individual member took the responsibility for sponsoring it, but rather a legislative committee (in this case the Judiciary Committee) discussed the idea and the committee then voted in favor of drafting a bill.

A bookstore in Texas has sparked some comments – and criticisms – for having displayed a number of books about Barack and Michelle Obama under a “Religion” sign in the children’s section of its facility.

One thousand Christians were today (11/26) trapped inside the Coptic Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary in West Ain Shams,Cairo, after more than twenty thousand Muslims attacked them with stones and butane gas cylinders. The Church’s priest Father Antonious said that the situation is extremely dangerous.

The Muslim mob that attacked the church blocked both sides of the street and encircled the church building, broke its doors and demolished its entire first floor. The mob were chanting Jihad verses as well as slogans saying “we will demolish the church” and “We sacrifice our blood and souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Islam”, while the entrapped Christians chanted “Lord have mercy”.

The incident started on the occasion of the inauguration of the Church today, when the Muslims hastily established a Mosque in the early hours of this morning, by taking over the first floor of a newly-built building facing the Church and started praying there.

When the security forces tried to disperse the mob, they went to nearby homes and shops owned by Christians, and were armed with sticks, butane, knives and other sharp objects. Witnesses said the mob included children from as young as 8-years old to men of over 50-years old, in addition to women.

The Church building was originally a factory that was adapted into its present state, the matter which took over five years to complete and to get the necessary permissions from the authorities to have a Church established.

Human rights organizations and lawyers were refused entry into the besieged Church.

2 videos
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In response to all this, the head of the Coptic Church ordered Christians to stop praying in the converted site.

Christian Post:

The Coptic Pope Shenuda III barred Egyptian Christians from praying in a church building in Cairo Tuesday after sectarian violence broke out this past weekend over the building’s use as a Christian prayer hall.

At least eight men were arrested on Sunday night when Muslims clashed with Coptic Christians in the neighborhood of Ein Shams to protest the use of the property for prayer, according to state news agency MENA.

Muslims reportedly threw stones and burned two cars during the riot.

In response to the clash, Pope Shenuda III ordered Copts to cease praying in the church-owned building that was previously an unused factory.

Following the clash, Copts complained about the unfair law that requires them to be granted presidential permission before building a church or expanding an existing church. The authorization is difficult to near impossible to get and many Christians feel the law exists only to oppress the Christian minority community in a country where 90 percent or more of the population is Muslim.

I wonder if this program is as obtrusive and controlling as Vista.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Bardol Thodol also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the human consciousness’s experience after death leading to enlightenment and liberation or (uh oh!) rebirth.

Thomas Scoville explicates this challenging text for the Western reader by delivering it in comics form.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”). ...

Let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific “consensus” warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to “patriarchal” science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you’re inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature’s great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, “morbid-minded” religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

Baldilocks, unlike myself, is religious, and has produced an impressive rant from her own genuinely Christian perspective.

Guys like Jeremiah Wright care about self-centric totems of race, culture and vengeance more than they care about leading their flocks down the straight and narrow path. They need these totems to fill the void of self-doubt and that need is filled by navel-gazing religions like Black Liberation Theology and one of its parents, the Nation of Islam. Yes, BLT is a progeny of the NOI, Christianity and Marxism—a bastard child, to be sure. It’s an I-deology all right and Wright has sacrificed the eternal souls of those who believe his lies and are grateful for his good works. He has sacrificed these upon the altar of race and culture. (My own pastor says that God has special plans for shepherds—pastors—who mislead their flocks.)

Wright’s megalomania is such that he couldn’t even bring himself to hold his peace for Obama’s sake—that’s one of problems inherent in allying oneself with narcissists—and even had the nerve to be guarded by the Fruit of Islam, Daddy’s the Nation of Islam’s security force.

The most infuriating thing about Wright is his attempt to cover himself using other black people, black Christians, by saying that attacks on him weren’t really about him but about the ‘black church.’ And then he wants to fling around epithets like “Uncle Tom.”

Let’s be clear. Neither blackness, African, American or European origin, American nationality or American allegiance need a defense because such a defense would inherently be just as erroneously-focused as Jeremiah Wright’s jeremiad. Ethnic origins aren’t things to be defended, denigrated or repudiated or sworn allegiance to—my own heritage stems from this continent and two other continents—these things simply are; these facts are existential. Nationality is special: it’s existential but can also be voluntarily retained or released. And allegiance to any entity is entirely voluntary, but no one has to prove his/her allegiance to this country as part and parcel of a repudiation of an ethnicity or heritage. Those days went out with FDR.

Here’s what I do come to defend, to stand in defense of: Christianity and Christians who are black. Jeremiah Wright defames both and speaks for neither and little obscure me will not let him use either as fig leaf. Yes, our ancestors in this country and our kinsmen across the water fought to be just as Christian as other Christians—as Christian as our brothers who are white. And many of the latter stood for us and side-by-side with us—not because of us primarily but because of the One Who is Primary. Has that particular battle been won? I say yes, though the war continues. But Wright not only continues to fight the battle, he willfully misunderstands the nature of the War and identity of the Enemy. And by doing that, he becomes the tool of the Enemy. That’s his choice, but not mine and not that of those who focus on the Redemption offered by Christ instead of getting upon the Cross themselves.

To quote myself, there is no “black church.” There is only the Church.

Word to Obama: thanks a lot, “brotha.” Nice pastor you have there.