recoverynation.com

While the architects of AA should forever be in everyone’s gratitude for such a revolutionary approach, and a pure desire to make themselves and their society better… do keep in mind that what they wrote back in the 30’s was cutting edge — back in the 30’s. With all sociological theories, an evolution must take place–and this is especially true in addiction recovery. So much has been learned about the human condition over the past seventy years that it is unfair to compare today’s approaches to then. Not saying that some of their earlier hypotheses were wrong (well yes, some were absolutely wrong… but many continue to form the basis for today’s recovery community) — only saying that the authors were at a significant disadvantage due to not having the benefit of knowing “what we know now”. They were making things up as they went, based on their own intuition and experience. Well, that and a recovery model loosely based from another created in the late 1800’s. But they did good. Not perfect, but good.

You’ve heard the mantra, “Once an addict, always an addict”… Well, while such a statement is not technically a “lie” — as a lie implies deception — such statements are not accurate, either. Not with what we know today to be true of addiction. They may be accurate on the surface, offering a sense of temporary stability and identity… but they are offering the WRONG identity for permanent change to occur.

There’s a backlash growing in our society against the 12 step model — it’s about 20 years too late — but it’s happening. Here’s the stats:

45% of the people who attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings never return after their first meeting

95% never return after the first year.

Based on Alcoholics Anonymous World Services’ own statistics Alcoholics Anonymous has only a 5% retention rate.

and here’s the research to back them.

If you are an addict in the USA with no money to spend, you will be subjected to a 12 step program. On the other hand, if you have a few (As in up to 9) K a week to spend, you will never see a 12 step model brought anywhere near you. Apparently, when someone is spending almost $1300.00/day, you have to actually help them…;-)

Of course, isn’t it interesting that the church is notably absent from any of the above links and, without a doubt, one of the biggest promoters of the 12 step model… Do we actually want people sick?

demonbaby.com

If you’re not familiar with Oink, here’s a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site – to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away. Oink’s extremely strict quality standards ensured that everything on the site was at pristine quality – 192kbps MP3 was their bare minimum, and they championed much higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC lossless downloads. They encouraged logs to verify that the music had been ripped from the CD without any errors. Transcodes – files encoded from other encoded files, resulting in lower quality – were strictly forbidden. You were always guaranteed higher quality music than iTunes or any other legal MP3 store. Oink’s strict download/share ratio ensured that every album in their vast database was always well-seeded, resulting in downloads faster than anywhere else on the internet. A 100mb album would download in mere seconds on even an average broadband connection. Oink was known for getting pre-release albums before anyone else on the internet, often months before they hit retail – but they also had an extensive catalogue of music dating back decades, fueled by music lovers who took pride in uploading rare gems from their collection that other users were seeking out. If there was an album you couldn’t find on Oink, you only had to post a request for it, and wait for someone who had it to fill your request. Even if the request was extremely rare, Oink’s vast network of hundreds of thousands of music-lovers eager to contribute to the site usually ensured you wouldn’t have to wait long.

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world’s largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn’t make Oink illegal, the site’s creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he’s a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink – but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

Probably one of the most complete and well thought out assessment of the current state of the record industry — with some strong suggestions about how to take them completely out. Very well worth the read.

TIME

The Bible and Its Influence has a fascinating constellation of supporters and critics. Some of its more liberal champions, such as the American Jewish Congress’s counsel Marc Stern, feel that the republic can not only survive but will actually benefit from public school courses on a document as culturally central as the Bible — as long as the classes avoid being devotional. Evangelical heavyweight Chuck Colson hopes that God will speak to students even through a class that is secular in intent. Those opposed to the book include secularists who argue that it already violates the First Amendment and fundamentalists who see its approach as secular and therefore diluting the value of what they see as God’s inspired word.

What’s striking about this article is not that you can get a group of Christians, Jews, Secular intellectuals and even a fundamentalist like Colson to agree on a textbook. That’s really not too hard. All you have to do is create a work that is objective, accurate and clearly demonstrates the incredible effect Christianity has on culture and even many atheists will support it.

It’s not even striking that there are fundamentalists out there like this. It takes only the briefest research to discover that it’s not just Islam that has grown more fundamentalist. Evangelical Christianity and other faiths all over the world are all moving towards greater and greater extremism at alarming rates.

What is striking is the degraded nature of thinking process among these Evangelical-Fascist subgroupings. It goes something like this:

Spirituality is a magic thing we get from following rules and jumping through hoops — it is, by definition, good.

Spirituality is as different from the rest of life as outer space is from an atmosphere.

That which is not spiritual is of little value — should be suspect and combated.

Therefore, because it is not about rules and hoops, life and learning can not be spiritual.

Because life and learning is not spiritual, we must fight it.

Seems to me we’ve seen this thinking before — we saw it in and near the end of the dark ages when the religious leadership was trying to burn astronomers at the stake. The Roman Catholic church — in part due to reformers like Luther — was forced to finally cancel this absurdist distinction and embrace all of life as an encounter with the Divine.

For years, Evangelicalism has worn the label of Protestant. We protested an institution and a structure, yes, but really we protested the idea of a human mediator between us and God, the idea of the separation between the clergy and the laity and a split between the secular and the spiritual. We protested magic crystal ball spirituality and demanded that the truth of intimate relationship with God again be taught.

We were right — the release of a document called Vatican II finally even had the Roman Catholic Church agreeing. (Thank God)

The irony is, once we finally get the Roman Catholic Church to agree with us, we then adopt what they just rejected. Now that’s ecumenicism at it’s finest…

FOXNews.com

I was intrigued and excited to meet and interview Alexander Roy, who, with a co-driver, claims to have broken the unofficial transcontinental driving record, racing from New York City to the Santa Monica Pier in 31 hours and four minutes in a 2000 BMW M5.

Ok, I can’t resist.

After all my 7 years of driving ambulances and fully understanding that a couple of lines of Cocaine have absolutely nothing on the high that results from doing 100kmh through rush hour traffic, I’m still trying really hard to condemn these guys — I’m trying, I’m still trying… Really trying… SOOOOOO hard… Really…

And then to get to do it with a chase aircraft overhead to watch for radar traps… No! {SLAP} Bad Cal!

OK, so I give up. Seems like God has some significant regeneration He’s not quite yet accomplished with my right foot…

USATODAY.com

“I don’t know how long this leave of absence will last, but I fully trust the members of the Board of Regents,” Roberts said in a statement released by the university. “I pray and believe that in God’s timing, and when the Board feels that it is appropriate, I will be back at my post as president.”

Well, the son of the man God wanted to nuke for being short on cash has spoken. First, God thundered from the clouds and told him to stand and fight to the end. Oh, now wait a sec, God just thundered again — now our good friend the Oral Roberts prez has to step aside. (Or maybe his indigestion went gurgle in the night…)

But, only temporarily — and on a deadline — as a negotiating tactic — because he needs one — because he’s innocent — and his wife is sure she isn’t into little boys — (and since God, of course, doesn’t speak to impure people, you can definitely trust him on this one) because, “GOD hath SPOKEN…”

There’s a little psychological trick known as, “Divorcing your own voice and receiving it back as thunder.” It works like this:

(1). You figure out what you want.
(2). Tell the world it’s not your decision; you are just waiting on God.
(3). Claim that God told you to do what it is you wanted to do in the first place.
(4). Profit from the gullible.

It works really well — until you suddenly figure out that you are not the Almighty, that your desires, unlike God’s, have changed and you are now stuck. Then the world and even your own throughly brainwashed followers can suddenly see that either your are your own god, your god is psychotic, and/or you are schizophrenic.

And then there are the thousands of those followers who have now seen the truth that they no longer need priests to stand between them and God and are fleeing to a real relationship with the God who is really there (and isn’t short on cash?) Umm, oh, never mind…

But… But… But, oh, let’s follow him anyway.

Dutch News, Expatica

If you find this bookkeeping mentality hard to accept in the face of the threats she faces, you’re in good company. Salman Rushdie has warned the Dutch prime Minister that this could turn into an international scandal for The Netherlands. TIME Magazine has nominated Ayaan as one of the world’s most influential people. She has become an international icon in the fight to liberate women, whether you like her or not.

Yes, she is very outspoken and critical of her former religion. I am sure that some Muslims found her film ‘Submission’ extremely upsetting. But many Christians found ‘Life of Brian’ or the ‘Last Temptation of Christ’ deeply insulting. They did not however murder the producer or try to assassinate the writer. Violence, or the threat of it, undermines everything we hold dear. When we allow terrorists to dictate what a person can say, they win.

One of the most striking things about this article is not what is said but what is not said. Here you have a government (ostensibly a democratic one that claims to stand for freedom of speech and the rights of women) which is home to a woman who has vocally supported such against incredible odds and at the potential cost of her life. It’s also a government that is busy debating the limits of it’s responsibilities to defend those who actually exercise that responsibility from those who would assassinate her for doing so.

What exactly does a government exist for to begin with? Yes, it may do wonderful social services but a government fundamentally exists to define and defend a free society based on the rule of law wherein there is the potential for virtue to be grown by the unifying forces of that society — usually religion or education/philosophy. This government is busy debating if the cost of defending a free person from an islamofascist tyrant takes away from other programs it would rather spend the money on.

What is striking about this story is that the one question which is never asked is if a government that would seriously debate whether there are time limits on the protection of freedom against tyranny isn’t, in and of itself, proof positive that post-modern stupidity has already ensured that the fundamentalist psychos will win in that country?

MapsOfWar.com

Ok, this is brilliant. From a technical point of view, this is the best use of multimedia technologies to teach history I’ve seen in a long time. Learn more in a few min then you have ever understood about world religions.

From a religious/geo-political point of view, this is one of the fastest ways to gain understanding of the entire Middle East and European situation (with respect to Islam) ever produced. Once you understand the development patterns, all that is further needed to grasp the tension is a minimalist awareness of a religion that teaches that those who fail to convert must be killed and the entire mess makes sense.

Note: Will require Flash plug-in.

BTW: anyone who is going to email to tell me that Islam is a religion of peace should take note of the following:

“Islam spread by means of proof and evidence to those who listened to the message and responded to it, and it spread by means of force and the sword to those who were stubborn and arrogant, until they were overwhelmed and became no longer stubborn, and submitted to that reality.” Sayed Qutb: Fiqh Al-Da’wa, 217-220 – Fatawa Al-Lajnah Al-Daaimah 12/14

“Know that paradise is under the shades of swords.,” Narrated by Bukhari, Vol.4, book 52, 73

“I have been ordered to fight people till they say, “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah”, and whoever says, “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah”, his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his reckoning will be with Allah, (either to punish him or forgive him). Narrated by Abu Huraira, Buchari, Vol.4, book 52, 196

wikiHow

How to Live a Good Christian Life This article will guide you in living a good Christian life. You will read about ways you can grow closer to God, ways to spread the faith, and some basic morals and ethics that God wants us to live by.

1. Follow Jesus’ greatest commandment: Love God, love your neighbor and love yourself.

2. Acknowledge you’re a sinner and then repent. Realize that conversion is not simply one act but the beginning of a life-long struggle. Don’t be hard on yourself if and when you fail, pick yourself up and trust in God.

Little problem here, the Greek word for Repent means to experience a change of mind — it’s not about your behavior.

3. Read your Bible. You can really learn a lot from this.

Like the apostles read their Bibles — which were not yet written… When they talked about the, “Word of God,” they were talking about God talking, and them listening.

4. Spend time in prayer.

Nope — Jesus doesn’t want you on your knees — He wants to walk and talk with you all day every day — as a friend, not as a religious experience.

5. Try to see the perspectives of others, even if you personally disagree with them.

Now it’s starting to sound like a cross between a Miss Manners guide and Post-modernist ramblings — where is this in the Bible?

6. Be patient with people who anger you; work on trying to forgive those who may have hurt you. You must learn to love your enemies. God loves everyone, and we need to, also. Say farewell to selective loving. If you have a hard time loving your enemies, pray to God for help.

[Sarcasm]Yep, ’cause it’s all about my effort — rather then about what Christ does in me…[/Sarcasm]

7. Work and pray to the best of your abilities to help others.

That sentence doesn’t even make sense.

8. Treat others kindly as you would like to be treated. Even simple acts of kindness like holding a door open for someone are good deeds.

Nothing more then a restatement of #1 — and under the same heading.

9. Volunteer to help people. For example, you could take a shift at a soup kitchen near you, help with a Christmas effort to give gifts to the poor on Christmas, or visit a people staying in a nursing home.

Why oh why do we consider Mormons, J.W.’s and the like cults — we teach the same performance based religion… If Jesus doesn’t do it in me — then forget it. It ain’t happening…

10. Remain modest and remember that pride can be dangerous. Pride is said to be the mother of all sins, because pride resides in each one of us and the source of all of our sin is ourselves.

Oh, except, it seems there is a little problem of being given a new heart in place of the old one (which, yes, was desperately wicked) — and Paul was rather fond of calling us saints — not sinners…

11. Share your beliefs and spread the good news. Remember, living the Christian life through your actions will make others want to follow God. Always stick up for your beliefs.

So, let me get this straight: Being good — however I define that — and arguing with others (Who presumably don’t meet my expectations) is going to make people want to hang out with Jesus? (This is too easy — it’s like shooting fish in a barrel…)

12. Understand that Christians believe God said they would be persecuted for their beliefs, so do not allow others’ attacks to weaken your faith.

Truer words have never been spoken — freedom is always under persecution — from religion.

I think Steve McVey said it best in his book Grace Land when he said:

“The underlying foundation of all religion is performance – whether it’s a tribal dance around a campfire to satisfy the fire god, or a dead religious activity performed week after week by an evangelical Christian with the intent of impressing his God. It’s all religious performance, and God isn’t impressed by our performance. What impresses Him is faith.”

Blog-o-Fascists

Here’s something American media are virtually guaranteed to not report: a British court has determined that Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” contains at least eleven material falsehoods.

After all the years of any detractor to his Majesty Al Gore being burned at the stake of, “How dare you refuse to believe real scientists,” it seems that it has finally taken a court of law in England to force said scientific experts to hand over the real evidence. Considering DDT, the ozone hole (Based on a software glitch), global cooling, spotted owls, lizard protection (simply because of the 49th parallel makes them rare on one side) and other raw idiocy that defines environmental activism’s track record, it’s not surprising that Gore’s indisputable science also, inconveniently, turns out to be mostly fiction. The court has now forced English schools that wish to show this work of speculative fiction to their students to define it as such before and after showing it.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from being given a Nobel peace prize. It’s beginning to look a lot like none of these scientists really care at all about science — though they wrap themselves in it by the hour. They now have a champion and, not even proving him a liar can cancel his personality cult.

(Just remember this the next time someone tells you that, “Science says…”)

But, on to bigger things. We’re facing a crisis — if we do nothing, Al may continue torturing us with junk science movies for years to come — something must be done — the sanity of the free world rests on it. Any ideas?

Wait, I’ve got it — let’s make him president!

womensenews.org

Now, Davis and other local sex workers have banded together to establish Canada’s first cooperative brothel in an attempt to offer women a safe place to work.

The group, formed by a sex workers’ alliance based here, called the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Women, will incorporate next month and is already setting the groundwork to open the co-op brothel.

Members have begun scouting for a location and are enlisting the backing of local businesses, police and labor organizations.

Faced with the task of cleaning up the city to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver authorities said they are open to the idea.

“We would be willing to explore anything that . . . would be helping the situation of sex trade workers, and make it safer for them and make it better for the community,” said Vancouver police spokesperson Howard Chow. He noted one requirement: “It has to be something that is lawful.”

So, let’s see: we’ll take an abuse of women that clearly is also a social blight, mix in the idea of creating a central edifice for it and then ice it with a thin veneer of socialist yammering about cooperative business being a wonderful thing. Take this lovely cake and get an idiot police spokesman to endorse it — now there, don’t we have a warm fuzzy story to tell our children about social progress?

Or, we could endorse the idea, get all the sex trade workers in there and arrest them. Then put in a whole raft of plain cloths officers posing as hookers and arrest all the Johns too. Get a judge to sentence the lot of them to treatment. Find two deserted patches of forest somewhere, set up a bunch of oilfield camp trailers, bring in the therapists and get to work on actually fixing the problem.

Naw, the warm fuzzy stories are more fun…

Canada.com

CALGARY – Officials at a Calgary church have admitted they were aware of an allegation of wrongdoing against an adult volunteer at his previous church but allowed him to continue working in youth programs under increased supervision for two years.

Police have charged the volunteer with sexually abusing three girls under the age of 14 at Centre Street Church.

According to a statement made by Brian Spiers of Westview Baptist Church during Sunday morning services, church staff investigated the allegations against the volunteer but found no corroborating evidence. As a result, the man was permitted to continue working in church programs.

“Unproven allegations are very difficult for a church to deal with,” said Dayle Medgett, senior pastor of Westview church, after the service.

Although officials declined to comment on the nature of the allegation or how they learned about it, they said the man worked for three years as a missions co-ordinator and parent volunteer in the youth program – but was never alone with children.

Medgett said upon learning of the allegation the church placed the volunteer under “increased accountability conditions.”

This happens to be going on in Calgary — but it could be anywhere. If it’s happened once, it’s happened a thousand times:

Person is in, “Ministry,” in a church, so many are creeped out by his actions, church does some sort of due dilligence via. police checks, nothing is found, person continues ministry/abusing until there is a huge blast radius, everyone pleads innocent claiming there was no proof and the lawyers pick over the remains.

Of course, for years I’ve spoken in one church after another addressing so many different areas of brokenness — and so many of them have responded with the same assumption, “It’s so good someone is helping the sexually broken — but we don’t have that problem here.” (Many times I’ve actually had a couple of their members in one program or another at that very instant…)

Problem is, few of those broken ones stayed in their churches. It’s not that they abandoned their faiths — but it is a departure from church. Not just that church — the institutional church in general. They have become part of the emerging or emergent church and their church is now a home group somewhere. And, the pollsters are very clear on this one: They are NOT coming back.

With their departure, the institutional church lost their first and last line of defense — a broken-and-now-healed-one who can move in on a clear and present danger like the above mentioned individual and bust them — hard. The old saying that it, “Takes one to know one,” has never been more accurate.

It’s kinda like the gun argument in the USA. (When you finally outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.) When we finally get the last broken-and-seeking-to-be-healed person out of your church, you will only have the predators remaining.

“But wait,” you say, “We never ran the broken out of our church.” Yes, you did.

When the Gospel of grace and freedom was exchanged for a gospel of rules, when ethics became the standard and control became the means, when you embraced some 12 step model of performance in place of the healing Christ has to offer, when fear and shame was allowed to sneak back into the one place on Earth Christ created to be free from it, when you allowed your 50yr veteran little-old-lady-babes-of-legalism-in-Christ to stand in condemnation of one broken heart (thus letting it stand as a warning to others), when you allowed some paranoid lawyer on your church board to tie the entire group up in a knot over the liability issues surrounding having a program of healing in your church, when you had the stunning arrogance to forget that your job was to introduce people to Jesus and then teach them to listen to His voice alone, you ran the broken out.

To Center Street’s rather significant credit, they seem to have had at least enough wounded healers remaining to eventually make it hot enough for the abuser in question — so he left. That’s remarkable for a church these days. Perhaps it was soon enough to keep the wolves from gathering.

In most other cases, the only hope is that lawyer…

Frederica.com

The idea of returning to an era of young marriage still seems daunting, for good reason. It is not just a matter of tying the knot between dreamy-eyed 18-year-olds and tossing them out into world. Our ancestors were able to marry young because they were surrounded by a network of support enabling that step.

Young people are not intrinsically incompetent, but they do still have lots of learning to do, just like newly-weds of any age. In generations past a young couple would be surrounded by family and friends who could guide and support them, not just in navigating the shoals of new marriage, but also in the practical skills of making a family work, keeping a budget, repairing a leaky roof, changing a leaky diaper.It is not good for man to be alone; it’s not good for a young couple to be isolated, either.

In this era of extended education, couples who marry young will likely do so before finishing college, and that will require some sacrifices. They can’t expect to “have it all.” Of the three factors—living on their own, having babies, and both partners going to school full-time—something is going to have to give. But young marriage can succeed, as it always has, with the support of family and friends.

A rather refreshing example of rational thought in the rather polarized abstinence vs. contraception debate. Perhaps it’s finally time to admit that they both have failed, that (Barring forcible physical segregation) sex is going to happen and that our options are either young marriage or abortion?

I was 25 when we married and neither I nor Ros had yet finished Graduate school. It wasn’t easy — in fact it was the hardest thing I have ever done. I discovered just how fun it was to experience panic attacks and stress induced skin rashes — and, I’d do it again. I had to grow up in one all-fired hurry — but it eventually had to happen. It could have been a lot easier if our society didn’t think I was 5-7 years too young and actually had some supports in place.

My kids will likely be out of the house and in college before I’m 50 and, with the current progress of modern medicine, I might actually still be around by the time their kids have children. Show me the down side of that…

AOL News

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

First we have Daddy telling them that God told him that he needs $8 million for Roberts’ university, or else he would be, “Called home.” Now we have his son and his son’s wife spending it — and they apparently are catching up… The apple truly has landed in a nice shady spot — right under the tree.

What is most striking to me is that this insane show should have been shut down twenty years ago when the first 8 million dollar lie was told. All the believers of North America would have had to do is stop giving. Roberts would have lived — and his little corner of a false gospel would have died.

Instead believers continued to flood this charlatan with money. Now they point in horror at the fruit of their refusal to think for themselves — aghast at the possibility that a man who so obviously serves a false god could violate their hearts and pocketbooks.

News flash Church: If the god you serve is leading you through fear, shame, judgment, condemnation, guilt, rejection or the iron fisted control of the law the real God died to free you from, then you are serving a false god and living under what Paul called, “Another gospel.” Not even the prophecies of the Old Testament (Jer 31:31 –> for example) would have endorsed this.

Bonno put it well when he stated, “The God I believe in is not short on cash…”

P.S.: Dr. Roberts, it’s time for you to meet again (For the very first time) the fruit of your loins and the fruit of an evil that would dare to defraud God — they’re now a package deal…

Random Musings:

Finally something happened. The Scriptures began to penetrate my heart. My eyes were opened to the fact that I hadn’t been falling—the Everlasting Arms had held me all along. The fear vanished. I began to taste and understand grace. It was glorious, amazing, indescribable.

Theological and doctrinal shifts, it seems to me, shouldn’t be so emotional. I don’t do theology by experience, by throwing myself off imaginary cliffs. But this was more than just the “mind-y” way I had approached my Christianity for the past six years. This truth penetrated to the core of my being. It captured my heart and laid me bare.

Grace—wow! It wasn’t a matter of me saying, “Oh, cool, the doctrines of grace. What a wonderful theology. To think that my salvation was God’s idea all along—amazing!” No, this was much, much more than that. It was so personal. So intense, so intimate. Grace—God’s grace—for me!

This is a stunning story of transformation from a Bill Gothard driven theology of lies to a theology of freedom and grace. Well worth the read.

The Calgary Sun

Every Canadian-made green paintball that stings you like the end of a wet towel, does so with the grace of tiny Christian fish symbols printed on their shell.

“I’ve looked in the Bible, and can’t find anything wrong with paintball,” reasons Andy Leong, a 48-year-old Chicago marketing executive who’s come to celebrate the birthday of his 13-year-old son, Luke. “In fact, the Bible is filled with combat as a topic.”

A number of months ago, a columnist noted that Evangelical Christianity has succeeded in creating a parallel culture of such magnitude it has totally lost touch with the culture that actually is and seriously believes that this parallel culture is the real thing. If this isn’t the most clear example of such ever created, I have no idea what could top it.

We ultimately have become neither, “In the world,” nor, “Of it,” and, thus, mostly irrelevant to it.

In the process, we’ve become a joke to it.

WORLD: An appeal to Muslim scholars throughout the world

This case concerns Naffeek Rizana who is facing the death sentence in Saudi Arabia, allegedly for the strangulation of a four month old baby. Through close study of the case the Asian Human Rights Commission is satisfied that, in fact, what has taken place was the tragic death of a baby in the process of being fed by an inexperienced teenager.

Let’s hear it for the stunning wisdom of Sharia law the, “Religion of Peace,” would like to impose on us all.

Articles Detail:

“Michael Novak, the highly-esteemed Catholic economist and social thinker, has argued that the next great national awakening will come from the affluent. I would have doubted that conclusion until I began to study wealth, economics and social theory more closely. I now agree with him. We are living in a different age, an age of incredible productivity. We must understand that we are the most affluent people, at least the vast majority of us, who have ever walked this planet. Feeling guilty about this will not work repentance. If we are to see a true spiritual awakening it will necessarily come from people who have the means to make a huge contribution to great good in the world. We ought to encourage even greater wealth production, protect personal freedoms and foster the spirit of the entrepreneur in every possible way. If the church can learn to preach the gospel well, teach spiritual formation as it ought to teach it, rebuild truly transcendent worshiping communities, and help businessmen and women to understand that they have a vocation from God, then we just might see the awakening Novak is talking about.”

This article stands by itself.

BBC NEWS

A B-person – as opposed to an A-person – genetically pre-disposed to operate better and to be more alert later in the day.

Denmark it seems is full of B-people. So where better to form the B-society?

Six months after it was set up, it already boasts several thousand members.

Now it is campaigning hard for businesses to sign up to its B-certification list.

These guys — and especially the software company that allows you to show up to work whenever you want — are officially my new heroes. I’m almost ready to renounce my citizenship and move overseas… I just knew that someone, somewhere, had to understand that morning people need help and that it’s PERFECTLY normal to find the sun a significant and soothing contributor to the urge to sleep!

(BTW: for all you morning people among us — there is drug treatment available for the problem…)[GRIN]

The Beaumont Enterprise

Helped by aggressive marketing and a new generation of conservative Roman Catholics, convents around the country say they are experiencing an increase in applicants for the first time in decades. The women are inspired by Pope John Paul II and his defense of Catholic orthodoxy, and are seeking a life that draws them closer to God.

Anecdotal evidence about the increase has convinced the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which analyzes church trends, that it should start a formal study of the growth.

“It’s not a huge increase, but for a while there was hardly anybody and now there are some, so something is going on,” said Mary Bendyna, executive director of CARA, based at Georgetown University.

Their founders would tell them to “go to the edges,” embrace technology, says Sister Arlene Scott, assistant vice president of mission at this coed Catholic school in Miami.

That attitude has helped their order, the Adrian Dominican Sisters in Michigan, attract a handful of new candidates in their 20s and 30s this year. They used billboards and hired an ad agency to research what would appeal to younger women.

“We’re not selling ourselves like we’re worried we’re gonna die out,” Scott said. “We’re evolving into something else.”

“A number of religious communities are finding that the Internet is where people are gathering,” said Vieira.

“We’re realizing that we need to have a presence there as well.”

Cool — smashing idea… How about some social networking sites — maybe a means of allowing the learning of the public with respect to Scripture and the voice of God to be shared and interacted with? How about a realization that a batch of celibate lily white priests probably need some online assistance in their interaction with sexuality from the rank and file Catholics who are actually doing it? How about a message board admitting that they don’t have a corner on theology, that some of the people they allowed to write it were basically twisted and weird and that they need to start over from the ground up?

Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, the largest religious order in the United States, hired an outside ad agency to design ads for secular magazines like People, along with Internet banner ads.

Oh, wait… Never mind. [SIGH]

“It’s a radical way of living,” says Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins, of The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation in Nashville, Tenn.

“When you used to put the habit on, it was conventional. Now it’s radical and I think people want to do something radical with their lives.”

Apparently, even the Roman Catholic church isn’t above spin-doctoring. That being said, they definitely need MUCH more practice…

In Massachusetts, the Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield is hoping to appeal to the broader public by restructuring memberships to include roles for married women and those with no formal connection to the congregation.

Ok, basically this is the first sign of real hope so far. Finally an organization willing to admit that their long dead human ideas about one organization lead by a dude in a strange hat (The hat loosely derived from the worship of the god Daggon) having the right to arbitrarily decide that 52% of the human race are second class church leadership and that married ones pretty much should sit down, shut up and get pregnant — yep, those ideas are starting to die. Thank God!

They have extended their roles to include people with different levels of commitment to the religious order, said Sister Natalie Cain, coordinator of membership and association for the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Even more hope: The dude’s proclamation that only faithful members of his little club get God’s stamp of approval is even slipping. Now, if only we could get them to admit that God just isn’t that big of a fan of political systems…

Yes, revolutionary change has finally arrived. It’s time for these fine sisters to party like it’s 1997.

Perhaps when they sober up someone can let them know that was a decade ago…

AlterNet:

In the Netherlands people can be naked in their gardens, the beach and recently the gym. But in America, even chocolate sculptures cant be without clothes. What gives?

Another, perhaps sobering, reality: America has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the industrialized world, according to the American Association of Pediatrics, and a rate that exceeds the Dutch by nine-fold. A healthy attitude to nudity as well as sex, something the Dutch are regaled for, might have a positive impact as more exposure typically leads to greater information.

You know, some questions just beg to be asked. Of course, they still missed addressing the obvious rant fundamentalist Christianity has been on for years by asking: What makes anyone think nudity is in any way required for lust anyhow?

www.kansascity.com

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem. You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality. You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor. Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred. The bigots win again.

Finally,somebody says it. Ironically, it took a sports writer — not the most likely suspect as the last hold out of sanity — but hey, he’ll do.

libido-pill.com

It’s funny how sex factors into the way people describe the state of their relationships. Studies show that, when things are going well, sex contributes only 15 percent to the overall satisfaction of a relationship. But if things aren’t going well, it contributes 85 percent to the overall dissatisfaction.

Sex has many advantages to both people involved. Here are just a few.

Strange, a few years ago, only the ancients could be counted on to state the obvious — finally the rest of the human race is waking up. Forget about if it feels good — just do it anyway. Yes, fix it if it doesn’t feel good — but don’t stop.

Sultan Knish

When we take someone else’s responsibility on ourselves, two things happen.

First by taking responsibility for something we cannot control, we waste our energies and do nothing to address or resolve the problem.

Secondly, we remove responsibility from the only person who can control it, we give him absolute freedom from his responsibilities. He becomes free to rob and kill and do as he likes, because his victims are responsible now, not him.

All totalitarian systems remove individual responsibility, replacing it with obligation. Responsibility requires informed individual judgment. Obligation simply means doing what you’re told.

A very well written comment about why liberal aversion to responsibility ultimately creates oppression.

The Psychopathic School by John Taylor Gatto

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which the only “successful” people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that, as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago, we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework.”

Ok, some rants just need to be posted — even if written by others.

Think this is the rantings of a cynical lunatic? Think again. This is taken from John Taylor Gatto’s book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. This speech was given by Gatto on January 31/1990 in accepting an award from the New York State Senate naming him New York City Teacher of the Year. Yes, he’s a teacher.

I just wish we could find another few hundred thousand teachers to stand up and scream the same message…

osu.edu

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain. (See figure for a representation of the network.)

Ok, let’s cut through to the core of this: Researchers have finally mapped out the sexual connections of an entire school — proving once and for all it’s not the, “Bad kids,” who are having sex. It’s everyone’s kids. No, they are not doing the whole school and, no, they may or may not even be having full on vaginal intercourse (not that that makes much difference to a virus.) In fact, these teens are so limited in their exploration they are each likely only having sex with two different partners — but they are having sex and it’s strikingly well organized.

In my mind, this is a serious assault on the whole silver-ring-thing movement that regularly claims that teens who take their pledge avoid sex or at least limit sex to a very small number of partners. (Though I fully admit it’s never going to be taken notice of…) Reality check: They are all having sex with limited partners.

Not-In-My-Back-Yard thinking is as prevalent today as it ever was. We have a lot of good luck charms we use to convince ourselves that it makes sense — even in the face of research. One of the most common responses to this is simply, “Oh yes, but that’s not my kid — s/he wears a purity ring — and must be numbered in the smaller percentage of students who were not sexually involved.” It’s usually these same parents who are then fighting against the HPV vaccine being administered to their kids or having their kids taught about condoms. (For a brief synopsis of how well purity rings work — not at all — see a recent study published by Medical News Today.)

It’s really easy to believe it will not be your child — and easier still for the teens to believe it won’t be them considering they are bound to know one of the two or three in the entire school who has MANY sexual partners. Trouble is, with the social pressure not to be seen as taking a friend’s, “Leftovers,” there is a self organizing nature to the sexual networks that ensures that whatever diseases one student has are likely to be systematically distributed to the whole works of them.

Sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner (Columbia and Yale, respectively) found that when virginity pledgers do have sex, they are less likely to use a condom that could save their lives than non-pledgers. So, if they are having sex and it is always with limited numbers, then two questions arise: How can we keep kids from even the limited sex they are having (Seeing as the rings are not working) and/or at least keep them from the unsafe sex the rings are CAUSING. Interestingly enough, these same researchers also found that found that adolescents who make an informal promise to themselves not to have sex WILL delay sex, but adolescents who take a formal virginity pledge DO NOT delay sex.

In my mind, that last sentence is key in answering those two questions:

Parental ignorance, acculturated shame (A.K.A: Purity Balls) and the absence of freedom leads to rebellion — stupid rebellion that gets teens pregnant or dead.

Parental knowledge, shame free involvement, the presence of freedom and the provision of options, when coupled with direct and clear teaching about God’s best for your life, leads children to make decisions for themselves and deeply embed those decisions within their own hearts. Strangely enough, they actually manage to stick to those decisions or at least fail to do so in less dangerous ways.

The number of Christian organizations presenting totally false statistics to back up their ring sales, purity balls and opposition to teens being taught about condoms is staggering. (No, I will not link to them.) Apparently, it’s better to go on marketing the same fictions then to admit that our rather macabre little road show hasn’t worked — and then actually parent our kids.

For me, the final irony is that the purity ring was initially a beautiful original creation of Jack McLemore, a Mississippi jeweler, who actually did love, engage and teach his daughter and intended it as a special symbol meant only for her. He never intended it to become a mass marketed control tactic or a quick-fix Bandaid that allows parents to hide their heads in the sand.

Libertarian party of Canada.

“The best government is one which shall restrain men from injuring one another, but leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.” – Thomas Jefferson

Probably not a political philosophy that will ever run a country but having them as a solid opposition party could really help…

TimesOnline

But this time, we know what it’s all about, don’t we? Not joyful, simplified Christianity but a pulling-up of drawbridges. Anglican archbishops in Dar es Salaam are struggling to avoid “schism” in their vast communion over the issue of ordaining, or indeed tolerating, Christians whose unsought orientation is to pair up with others of their own gender. And it will be the illiberal, genitally-fixated wing of Anglicanism that sidles towards unity with Rome. It will do this because it thinks — accurately, more’s the pity — that Rome is where you find the most intolerant attitudes towards homosexuality.

It always intrigues me to watch liberal/postmodernist columnists going to war against fundamentalism on issues of sexuality. They start out with all the fire and fury of their supposed passionate love for the broken hearts of others and their desire for, well, something or other… They then vent their frustrated rage at the Churches’ incurable obsession with genital sexuality which, they hold, “Cripples every good intention, impedes every good work,” as though it were definitively the core of the problem that is causing the pain of those they claim to defend. Then, they present their solution:

The irony is, their solution is simply, “Let’s not talk about it.” They state that, “Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting,” ignoring, for a moment, that these voices may actually have noticed something real. (Not that sexuality is innately toxic, but that there may actually be some seriously broken hearts resulting from the misuse of sexuality…) How do they substantiate this position of willful obliviousness?

The present Pope’s use of expressions such as “objectively disordered” is not only cruel, but unfounded in any solid fact. Nor is real homosexuality, as evangelicals love to claim, “curable”. You can persuade, inspire or bully people out of committing crimes, but not out of perceiving a particular kind of beauty, loveability, caressability and companionableness more in one sex than another. You can condemn people for doing bad things, but you cannot dictate where they will see beauty, a reflection of divinity.

Well, never mind that the very man that removed Homosexuality from the DSM has released his studies stating rather conclusively that homosexuality can be changed. Never mind that there are thousands of persons world wide who’s personal journeys beg to differ with this position. Let’s ignore all the research and just make a raw batch of categorical statements about your own opinions. In other words — they just don’t substantiate it — in fact, they don’t even engage any research that disagrees with them while upholding research as that which will vindicate them.

Ironically, the solution they offer — just ignoring the broken hearts of those trapped in this lifestyle — is exactly the same solution actually being currently practiced in the fundamentalist churches they rail against. In fact, it’s the solution nearly exclusively practiced on both sides (except for a very few.) While one side rails against behaviors and the other side praises the same, the real problem is that neither side is prepared to engage the broken at a level that actually matters.

And, what would engaging them look like? It would start with reading Romans and Galatians again for the very first time, walking away from the idiocy of our ethical revision of Christianity and figuring out that there is no other way to describe Christianity but with the word, “Freedom.” It would continue with the recognition of the dignity and sonship/daughtership of every child of God (regardless of their behavior) and a reexamination of the radical nature of both love itself as well as the call of Christ to do so. It would continue with an honest recognition of the reality of human broken hearts — especially in the case of those who are settling for so much less then what they were created for. Then it would require figuring out that love doesn’t tell a person who is settling for such that that’s all they can expect for their lives.

Just maybe, somewhere in there, the church might discover the point Paul was making back there: That love, grace, freedom and an intimate relationship with God/others can heal what no amount of hiding our heads in the sand or shouting our judgments at the broken will ever even touch.

But then, that would require us to actually go into the dark places of the human heart that Jesus hung out in — instead of acting like the damage is beautiful or, conversely, too evil to do anything but mark the person as fuel for the fires of hell…

Oh wait… Never mind… That would cut into the stained glass window budget…

www.kget.com

BAKERSFIELD – A family is turned away by a local pediatrician, they say because of the way they look.

The doctor said he is just following his beliefs, creating a Christian atmosphere for his patients.

Tasha Childress said it’s discrimination.

She said Dr. Gary Merrill wouldn’t treat her daughter for an ear infection because Tasha, the mother, has tattoos.

The AMA backs this character and, one one level, I have to agree. It is a free country and the USA has some things figured out here as to freedom that Canada is in grave danger of loosing.

That being said, perhaps he would like to hang another few verses on his wall:

“First, do no harm.” (Hippocrates)
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” (Jesus)
“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Jesus) (If, even under Old Covenant theology, you can somehow make a bit of ink on your hide into a sin.)

It’s totally amazing what we will manage to rationalize under the law. You would think a “Christian” rulekeeper would AT LEAST feel like he was sinning if he failed to love a child — apparently not though. It seems that the Gospel somehow teaches it’s OK to let a child suffer. Really, that’s what irks me about him — he has the nerve to try blame it all on Jesus.

Yes, the same Jesus that turned water into wine and spent so much time hanging out with hookers, thieves and sinners that he got a reputation as a drunk. (This simple fact alone should nominate him as everyone’s a personal Hero…)

Ok, seriously, this is one incredibly weird guy’s personal bias. This Doctor’s logic goes against every teaching in the Christian faith and his idiocy is similar to what fuels much of the strife in the world today. If he wants to treat people like this — fine. It’s a free country and he’s free to be an ass. Just grow a spine, take responsibility for your own stupidity and DON’T TRY TO BLAME IT ON JESUS.

I just hope his Christian patients also stand up in their own free country and vote with their feet by walking out the door.

FrontPagemagazine.com

Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin — but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst.

The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted to men. Women’s sexuality and social independence represent major threats to male supremacy and are tightly controlled. Thus, as the Moroccan feminist Fitna Sabbah reveals in her book Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, there is a disturbing conflict in the Middle East between sexual libido and repression. A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny.

Ok, this is a disturbing article. Jamie Glazov writes about how deeply embedded same sex sexual abuse is within fundamentalist Islamic cultures identifying how the seeds of rage and fear combine to produce a hyper-masculinization (based upon conformity) that renders the affected male both powerless and controllable — even to the point of death.

His contention is that this damage is both legitimized and then rationalized by a society that teaches that the damage is nonexistent and understands the inflicting of such as a need.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male’s achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

I am unsure of the accuracy of this, though the author is rather prestigious. It has had me reeling intellectually for most of the day — first to assess, then to evaluate this info (and previous experience living in a predominantly Islamic culture) and finally to rethink the implications of such. I’ve run this past a number of evaluators this afternoon and all have — disturbingly — either confirmed or been unable to deny it. Additionally, those who have posted against it seem to be limited to nothing more substantive then mocking the author. (It sickens me to admit it but I have to wonder if Bush was right to invade Iraq — even if his stated reasons were nothing more then an attempt at thought control…)

Given the work I have done with the victims of the damage therein described, this article has a strange ring of truth. We know even from Biblical history that this twisting of sexuality and culture was well under way thousands of years ago. History has a way of repeating itself…

So many authors have recognized that negotiation with the Islamofascist world is nothing more then, “Allowing both sides to reload.” Perhaps it has something to do with an internal sense that to negotiate is to be penetrated again — and nothing will stand in the way of defending against that abuse. War driven by this deeply embedded of a wounding is irrevocable, nonnegotiable and to the death.

The spread of Islam across most of Africa was done under the banner of:

“Know that paradise is under the shades of swords.,” Narrated by Bukhari, Vol.4, book 52, 73

If so, democracy and North American culture/civilization is very possibly not going to stand against Islam for we clearly lack the backbone to exercise the only option we have: All out war to take out a culture (and likely, with it, a religion) and then hold it (as we did with Nazi Germany) for at least a generation to stop this abuse and, thus, the insanity.

*****************************************************
BTW: anyone who is going to email to tell me that Islam is a religion of peace should take note of the following:

“Islam spread by means of proof and evidence to those who listened to the message and responded to it, and it spread by means of force and the sword to those who were stubborn and arrogant, until they were overwhelmed and became no longer stubborn, and submitted to that reality.” Sayed Qutb: Fiqh Al-Da’wa, 217-220 – Fatawa Al-Lajnah Al-Daaimah 12/14

“I have been ordered to fight people till they say, “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah”, and whoever says, “None has the right to be worshipped but Allah”, his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his reckoning will be with Allah, (either to punish him or forgive him). Narrated by Abu Huraira, Buchari, Vol.4, book 52, 196

All anyone has to do is watch his or her television to figure out that this, “Religion of peace,” will only be at peace when they have killed or subjugated everyone who disagrees with them.

calgary.ctv.ca

“There is somebody right now watching, and God is speaking to them about RRSPs. They’ve got RRSPs, and they’ve got a sizable amount, and it’s a security thing. Well, it’s not a security thing; your security is in God. And God’s speaking to you to cash those in. And I dare you to do it,” the host said.

Owners of the station have applied for the right to set up transmitters in Calgary and Edmonton that would broadcast the channel over the air for free, an important move that would allow it to reach more viewers.

A CRTC hearing starting Monday will consider the application to expand the station’s broadcasting power. But the regulator will also look into whether The Miracle Channel has adequately responded to complaints about high-pressure tactics and promises of a windfall after money is given.

The CRTC has just discovered a slight problem with our current Christian push to avoid evil… We are it. Evil doesn’t look like a thug in a back ally — it dresses in a business suit, chants, “Thank you Jesus,” promises healings for money and holds meetings with the CRTC.

I just hope the CRTC has enough sense to do what the churches of our nation have failed to do — shoot this scam dead.

FrontPagemagazine.com

We in the Western world did not reason our way to religious freedom. We accepted it (often very reluctantly) because we got tired of fighting religious wars. In his Letter on Toleration in 1689, the philosopher John Locke did not talk about the right of free inquiry or the beauty of diversity. He founded his argument for toleration on one promise: social peace.

“[It is] the common disposition of all mankind, who when they groan under any heavy burden endeavor naturally to shake off the yoke that galls their necks. . . . There is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotions, and that is oppression.”

The Western world learned its lesson the hard way, but we learned. Over the years, many had hoped that the Islamic world and the Middle East could profit from the ghastly example of the West: that peace and justice are achieved not by “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” but by establishing equal laws and respecting all who live by them.

This article is post-worthy for three reasons:

Firstly, it is as clean and accurate of an assessment of what is going on in Bush’s little holy war as I’ve ever found. (Read it if you like.)
Secondly, it is an unintended but brilliant commentary on the state of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism in North America.
Thirdly, it is just as relevant a commentary upon the liberal left and their endless political correctness.

For nearly the past decade, the political landscape of North America has been reduced to a battle between the liberal left and the fundamentalist Christian right — often to the near total obscuring of any real issues. This single minded and rather absurdist battle has been waged for one simple goal: Control.

On the left we have the social liberals. Their goal is simple — the legitimization of nearly anything (Multi-species polyamorous love anyone?) — coupled with the censure of anyone who would stand in the path of said legitimization (Read, “Christians.”) Political correctness and the climate of hatred for Christianity in the universities of today are the pulpit from which this gospel is preached. They seek to command right and forbid wrong — the, “Right,” of a philosophy that says, “If I wanna do it, it’s good for society,” and the, “Wrong,” of believing that anything is wrong. Their enforcement agencies include the courts and human rights tribunals.

On the right we have the nearly endless comedy gold of Fundamentalist Christianity which includes everything from throwing perfectly competent teachers who also happen to be authors who write stories of vampires (which happen to include sex) out of classrooms, charging teens who email naked pictures of themselves to another teen as child abusers/child pornographers (Apparently you can sexually abuse yourself) and almost twilight zone commentary out of Jerry Fallwell who insists that Sept 11th was God’s judgment on America for Porn. Their pulpit is the church and the caricatures of her we know as televangelism. They too seek to command right and forbid wrong — the, “Right,” of the abysmal and (increasingly creepy) failure we call abstinence education and the, “Wrong,” of homosexuality and gay marriage {www dot godhatesfags dot com}. (No, I will not even offer a live link’s worth of support to this order of evil.) Their mechanism of enforcement is aggressive activism at the community level as well as political pressure through funding (hence the Republican party.)

Sadly, both sides seem to have lost the core understanding of what makes a democracy function: Good people uniting to establish good, fair and egalitarian laws which create safety and justice for all. When they lost such, they embarked on a path of attempting to enforce, not justice, but values on others.

Values have a place in the discourse of a society. They are to be promoted, debated, encouraged and even advocated for the betterment of those who would experience increased quality of life should they chose to freely align their lives and decisions within the parameters of such. They are always a function of some order of religion — yes, secular humanism is very arguably a religion — and are usually promoted along with that set of beliefs which seek to provide a rationale for such. None of the above has any business being enforced. By anyone!

Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity and the Liberal Left both agree on one key point: Islam’s, “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” will never create justice or peace for anyone. But yet, they still somehow manage to believe that their own versions of the same will.

In the last part of the above quoted article, the author laments the fact that the foundational ideals of American democracy have not been absorbed by Islam. He’s right. Perhaps it has something to do with the reality that we have so forgotten those foundational principles that Islam is unable to look across the ocean and see anything different…

Guardian Unlimited

Busch is suing Robertson for what he says is misappropriation of his image to promote Robertson’s protein diet shake.

Robertson has been touting his “age-defying” weight-loss shake for five years on his Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network talk show “The 700 Club,”

And also:

This is not the first time Robertson has been accused of threatening an adversary.

After the failure of an earlier Robertson commercial venture featuring Bible study courses and discount coupon books, the broadcaster fired Mark Peterson, the venture’s top executive.

The two feuded publicly, blaming each other for the failure. Peterson sued Robertson in 1995, alleging that Robertson made a veiled death threat in a telephone conversation with Peterson’s sister.

Apparently the whole turning, “My Father’s house into a den of thieves,” selling health food milkshakes routine just isn’t twisted enough — without adding in the drama of a death threat or two for marketing purposes.

Isn’t it delightful to hear the thunderous roar of his former followers now shouting for his removal from the airwaves — oh, uhh, wait… Never mind.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Look, I’m an evangelical Christian who firmly believes that sex should be reserved for marriage. But I just can’t imagine going about it this way with any of my four kids, son or daughters.

For starters, something like a ”purity ball” essentially minimizes a young woman’s very humanity. But, of course, if we value her we know that her sexuality and the choices she makes about it as an adult are hers.

Besides, I can’t help but wonder if a single-minded focus on virginity is an ironic, and unintended way, of sexualizing youth in a different way.

In any event, what bothers me most is that these dads and daughters may be falling for the misperception that ”the sin is in the thing” instead of the heart, or conversely, that some sort of righteousness is inherent in the status of virgin, or any outward appearance of propriety.

But what if that same virginal girl has a heart full of bitterness, envy, lust, greed? Would her dad still be proud? Would she? Should they be?

Somehow, I just feel this is worth a little recognition: The stunning emergence of common sense from an evangelical columnist — and in the Times no less.

USATODAY.com

Our young friend, in a moment of teenage brilliance, decided to post some naked pictures of herself to the internet and (GASP) kept copies of said pictures on her computer.

She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.

Puritan ethics and the American legal system unite in stunning wisdom to create this heart warming example of common sense guidance for a child. (I’d assign 10:1 odds they are also going to add her name to the sexual offender’s list and force her to continually report her address for life.)

For one thing, I can’t help but wonder where we as a society finally lost our collective mind and our ability to differentiate between the stupid pranks of a kid and real criminal behavior. Reality is, by charging her, we have reduced the charges and likely the sex offender registry to an absurdity. Next stop, let’s ban mirrors from homes…

Darker then that though, our sex negative society has finally spoken — her naked body was so evil and offensive that taking self portraits of such is abusive. Even simply owning (forget looking at) those pictures of herself must be charged as a crime.

All things considered, the sexual revolution appears to have been a bust: It managed to take a society where the human body was evil and dirty and sex wasn’t done and make it into a society where the human body is evil and dirty and sex IS being done (By evil and dirty people). Then, we taught our little girls that sex was all they had to offer and that the same freaked out shame is modesty — all the while telling them an inverted flaunting of such is normal. The sexual revolution totally ignored the shame based core of the problem.

This little girl has a problem: her parent’s modeling (and inability to monitor her internet usage) appears to have conspired with society at large to create a hyper sexualized child. She’s a kid who’s obviously hungry for love and is willing to settle for so much less. All of them — especially her parents — need to get help before it’s too late.

Oh, I forgot. Never mind. That would require dealing in reality. It’s more fun to charge her as a child abuser anyway…

Denver Post

Mike Jones, who has a forthcoming book, told The Denver Post that several people shook his hand and told him, “God bless you.”

“I had read a lot about the church, but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself,” Jones told the newspaper. “It wasn’t to rub anyone’s face in it by any means. I was wanting to get some perspective, to see where they are coming from, what the magnet is.”

Haggard resigned last year as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after Jones alleged Haggard paid him over a three-year period for sex and sometimes took methamphetamine during the encounters.

Interesting how we have a double standard for grace isn’t it. We talk about grace and even (Correctly) show such along with strikingly unconditional love to the non-Christian broken in a welcoming of Haggard’s accuser to his home church. (The same church that just fired Haggard because — like all of us — he couldn’t perform…)

On the one hand, the entire story has stunningly ironic elements of, “You made your [legalism and performance based] bed, now lay in it…” Not that two wrongs make a right or anything but, maybe the experience will finally break his heart of legalism and heal him. (In any case, we can always hope that the new pastor will actually get the Gospel and rescue the congregation.) That being said though, it is a useful case study of our true beliefs here in the church so we can proclaim them to the world:

So, after all these years of mistakenly listening to Paul, let’s get this message of the Gospel straight once and for all: Now that grace and freedom has touched your life and brought you to Christ, the Jesus who died to set you free from the law now (apparently) wants you to get off your butt and perform to measure up to it?

I think the technical term for that is, “Bait and switch.” Trouble is, it’s not even that simple:

On the other hand though, Haggard has obvious talents given to him by God to do what he was doing. I’d love to see Haggard finally get the Gospel and, with all of his broken heart, be restored to ministering to others — but that’s not gonna happen either. Here in the church, we shoot our wounded; then keep them on life support so we can demand they perform anyway.

He’s as good as dead: Dead as in an outcast forever and dead as in forever consigned to the ongoing legalism (as penance and proof of a heart change) that will keep him trapped in the brokenness which was wreaking his life in first place. (Kinda like a wounded soldier being required to shoot himself dead as proof he is still alive…)

Now, we’d like to welcome Haggard’s accuser to join the same system? Do we really think Jones is that crazy? Are we???

Jason Upton Lyrics
Freedom Lyrics


Freedom!!

Back in the bible there was that old Pharaoh
Who ruled over Egypt and Israel
God spoke to Moses through fired up bushes
Said kick off your shoes and stay awhile

All of humanity was made to worship me
Pharaoh get outta my way
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Freedom to dance
Freedom to sing
Freedom to grow
I’m telling you Pharaoh let Gods people go!

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

Well, we live in a country supposedly Pharaohless
But all over town and in churches abide
Powerful weeklings who practice they’re politics
Stealing from Jesus his beutiful bride
Whether you’re Pharisees, Sadducees, heresies
You best get outta God’s way!
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

Well, we live in a country supposedly Pharaohless
But all over town and in churches abide
Powerful weeklings who practice they’re politics
Stealing from Jesus his beutiful bride
Whether you’re Pharisees, Sadducees, heresies
You best get outta God’s way!
(God is sayin’)

Chorus

Worship now
Worship now
Worship your God (x4)
(let ‘em go)

I just ran into these lyrics this weekend and I’ve played it over a number of times. All I can add is that we need a lot more artists calling our church leadership just as clearly.

It’s time we faced the reality that the Gospel really is Jesus plus nothing. Worship is not praise — it is coming with open hands longing to be filled just as the people of old came to idols to try and get their longing for fertility etc. filled.

We worship when we come with nothing (No performance, no goods deeds, no wild eyed strategies to be good in the future, no plans to impress God and none of our irrational beliefs in our own ethical progress) and ask for everything (Someone to love us, transform us, heal us, to free us from even the demand to be good and the cognitive dissonance all of us experience when confronted with our obvious inability to measure up.)

Any one that preaches anything other then this is a human reflection of all three: Pharisee, Sadducee, Heresy. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when the growing wave of believers (who have finally had enough of all of the above) reaches critical mass and most of our pulpits stand almost empty — because the congregation has emptied them.

“Almost,” because there will still be people in those churches capable of filling those pulpits — I think a little girl out of the sunday school class singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” will fill it nicely.

Mainichi Daily News

If theta waves are taken as a criterion, the entire brain emits theta waves when women reach an orgasm that are close on 10 times stronger than when men climax. So, if theta waves are an indication of an orgasm’s strength, then women experience an orgasm that is physically impossible for men to go through. Putting it a little crudely, if the intensity of a woman’s orgasm was played through a man’s brain, there’s a danger that the shock to his system would kill him. That risk makes it impossible to experiment on a man at the moment. And men can never become women. But my co-author, Kaneko, used the experience of people who have undergone a sex change (either a woman born with a man’s brain or vice versa) to explain the pleasure women feel.

Just in case you ever bought into the myth that women hate sex because they get little out of it and thus avoid it, step back from your preconceptions and observe what nothing more then our shame based (and highly sex negative) socialization can do to those who biologically are clearly the beneficiaries of God’s greatest gift in terms of desire for and capacity to experience sexual pleasure.

VirtueOnline

“The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. … Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child.”

Personally, “I couldn’t be happier. I think that’s the best revenge,” he said.

He said his 15,000-member diocese was healthy, but the news he seemed most eager to relay was that immediately after the luncheon he was leaving for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, has been nominated for a grand jury prize.

Titled “For the Bible Tells Me So,” it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. He said his own parents talked more openly to the filmmaker than they had to him after his own announcement at age 39 that he was gay and getting divorced.

Well, it’s happened again. This time it comes via the Sundance Film Festival. A new movie is released about the lives of a number of families who have had their children come out of the closet. The same tired, thirty-four year old arguments have yet again been trotted out by the left (E.g., Paul was only talking about homosexual prostitution) to try and make the Bible say God thinks homosexual sex is a wonderful idea and the same well worn rebuttal (Original design) issued by the right. The media is all over it with CNN devoting almost 20min to it.

Honestly, I wonder what’s next? “Gays can sneeze; details on channel four news at 11:00pm,” perhaps?

Frankly, it isn’t news and it hasn’t shifted anyone’s mind. It’s more of a tactic — a tactic to, yet again, pit two sides of evangelicals against each other. On the one side is the fundamentalist right ranting about how Gays are breaking the law of God. On the other is the liberal left trying to show how the law of God is actually not being broken. Strangely, neither side seems to see that they are both on the same side — and it’s the wrong one — and it’s making them both look like idiots.

Even more strangely, neither side has figured out that making them look like idiots was the whole point. As long as they are debating their respective standing as to the rules, they are essentially neutralized and the message of the Gospel is going nowhere.

A message that would clearly say:

God loves you regardless of what you have ever done or failed to do, He just loves you for no good reason and so do we.

He has set you free from the law — and that freedom is total — so that you would no longer have to run from relationship with Him based on your obvious inability to be good as measured by such.

He knows what it means to be fully human and fully alive and longs for you to move closer to such and thus closer to the fulfillment you were created for.

The gay life is so much less then what you can have — can we walk with you and love you towards all that God has for you?

But, of course, it’s just so much more fun to measure ourselves with the wrong measuring stick that the, “Healing of the nations,” can wait…

barna.org

The research found that there are two types of people being attracted to house churches. The older participants, largely drawn from the Boomer population, are devout Christians who are seeking a deeper and more intense experience with God and other believers. The other substantial segment is young adults who are interested in faith and spirituality but have little interest in the traditional forms of church. Their quest is largely one of escaping outdated structures and institutions.

The survey also indicated that there is likely to be more change in the house church environment in the years to come. The ideas of worshiping in homes rather than church buildings, and being led by group members rather than religious professionals, are new to most Americans. The survey suggested that many people are just beginning to think about, and get comfortable with, the idea of homes being the dominant place for shared faith experiences.

Interestingly enough, Rick Warren (Pretty much the epicenter of the problem) has even noticed — though his solutions are, as yet, pretty much the same drivel:

The truth is many people are very open to learning about God and spiritual issues, they just don’t feel welcome at church or feel that it has anything to offer them. That is our problem.

Barna isn’t telling most of us anything new really — he’s just got numbers to back him. Anyone who hasn’t figured out that the members of the evangelical church are rather rapidly draining out the door has been living under a rock.

There’s both an ironic difference and similarity between the two of them though: Barna has figured out that the traditional bricks and mortar church is already facing a tidal wave and it isn’t going to end. Warren still thinks that if he just hypes up the same-old-same-old a little, people will be back. Neither of them, however, has seemed to figure out what is causing it.

Truth is, it isn’t that the young people are really trying to escape institutions — they are basically agnostic towards the existence and validity of those structures. It isn’t that the adults are seeking something deeper — they are fleeing a place where depth is impossible because it is fundamentally opposed to the core message of the Gospel. Somewhere along the line, the unthinkable happened. These people sat down and reread for the very first time those little known books called Romans, Galatians and some other weird names — much, I suspect, to the horror of their church leaders.

They discovered the unmentionable: That the ethical rantings of the evangelical church have been delivered by pastors who had actually been taught the Gospel — but preferred to use legalism to control their flock. They discovered that those people Paul calls, “The Judizers,” or “Those who are of the circumcision,” were at the helm. They discovered that a Church that should have been leading people to maturity preferred to keep them in infancy — because it made a lot of money to build big buildings. They discovered it — and they wanted more. The sad part of this is that all of those churches could keep their members and gain thousands more — if they would just put aside their power, fear and control issues and listen (for a change) to what we have known for hundreds of years.

Father Hughes, in his work God of Surprises, comments on von Hugel’s critical analysis in his two volume work called The Mystical Element in Religion, saying:

Von Hugel takes the three main stages in human development – infancy, adolescence and adulthood – describing the predominant needs and activities which characterize each stage. He shows that religion must take account of and nurture the predominant needs and activities of each stage, and so concludes that religion must include three essential elements, an institutional element corresponding to the needs and activities of infancy, a critical element corresponding to adolescence, and a mystical element corresponding to adulthood. As he analyzes each stage of growth, he is careful to show that the needs and activities of infancy do not disappear in adolescence, nor do the needs and activities of adolescence disappear in adulthood, but they should cease to be predominant if we are to grow into the following stage.

The Institutional: People need structure to get a life of broken chaos under control.

The Critical: People need to be allowed to think for themselves and to do the necessary questioning of the idea that the rules are even relevant in a Gospel of Grace and Freedom.

The Mystical: People are walked into a deep and intimate relationship with Jesus and the entirety of their faith comes down to listening to the voice of God and following.

The key reality that none of these people get is that ethics based religion barely is even useful for those in the Institutional stage of their faith. It is clearly an insult to God Himself at any other stage and considerably offensive to a person in such. People are finally tired of being spoon fed the past Words of God — and a very edited set at that — and are longing to hear the current Word of God deep in their own hearts.

What’s happening? The church is finally waking up and seeking the face of God instead of religion — which, rather ironically, is what Jesus came to suggest in the first place. The operators of those multi-million dollar religious structures are going to have to do with Jesus what the Jews also had to do with Him 2000yrs ago if they want to keep the same control focused, ethics driven and Institutional religion based structures going.

But hey, probably no one will even notice — it’s not like that’s a change or anything… Galatians 3:1-9 (Well, except for the nearly 50% of Evangelical believers whom researchers suggest are already out the door…)

blessitt.com

To open today’s round up of Titans of the Faith, we have a genius who thinks that enough money to feed who knows how many hungry people would better serve the cause of Christ if it were spent launching space junk. (It’s getting way too easy to find this nonsense…)

News Flash, launch date set for Spring 2007! Glory

The cross will be over You personally! The Cross will be over every Nation on earth! Over Afghanistan! Saudi Arabia! Jerusalem! America! The cross in Space Satellite will be in a Polar orbit from pole to pole. As the earth turns it will pass over every inch of the earth like peeling an apple. The cross will circle the earth every one and a half hours. After launch we can tell you on our site when it will be over you and your nation. We have carried the cross in Every nation. Now we will, God willing have it flying above Every nation! We wave the cross in the face of Satan and proclaim that Jesus is Lord over All the Earth. All glory to God.

As if this psychotic attempt at space graffiti isn’t enough, we move onto another fellow brother in Christ who believes God has called the church to a new ministry of eating her own young — I mean sending government agencies to harass fellow churches:

ratoutachurch.org

Our immediate purpose is to fight back against vicious left-wing attempts to silence conservative, Bible believing pastors. Every election year, liberal groups have a field day intimidating and harassing conservative pastors into silence.

Er, could this be the Republican National Convention pot calling the Democratic National Convention kettle black??? Um, never mind… Of course, if you have a problem with this, they have, in the spirit of Matt 18, offered a convenient means to discuss it with them:

DON’T AGREE WITH US?

If you don’t like who we are or what we do please place a note in a sealed container and toss it into the Boston Harbor the next time you are there. At some time in the future we are sure it will drift up the Potomac River toward our office.

All things considered though, who really would want to hang around for this anyway…

ChristianExodus.org

Finally, we have the rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship genius of ChristianExodus.org who have decided that the best way they can be salt and light in a broken world is to simply run away.

ChristianExodus.org is moving thousands of Christians to South Carolina to reestablish constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian principles. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christian Constitutionalists to protect our liberties in a State like South Carolina by interposing the State’s sovereign authority retained under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Something tells me that the world they are fleeing is going to follow them there — because it is them…

After careful consideration, I’ve decided that it’s time to get ordained and start my own church: (From here on, refer to me as Reverend…) ;-}

themonastery.org

You are about to become an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church. For information regarding the legal aspects of this in your state or province, view the FAQ page on the site.

Before proceeding with your information, please make sure you have complied with the following instructions:

* Please only ordain others with their permission. (This includes public figures as well as cartoon and other fictional characters.”)
* Please only put your true and legal name. Nicknames will invalidate your ordination.
* Please use only factual information in this serious religious rite.
* Please double check your name and email address.
* Please capitalize where appropriate, as this is how our records will show from here on out.

Your privacy is carefully guarded. We maintain this information only for our own uses and for legal reasons.

Finally, the peace and tranquility of having a place to worship the God who actually is there instead of the one we’ve made up — supported by a denomination who’s statement of faith is at least both internally consistent and reasonably palatable.

The Universal Life Church has only two tenets (beliefs/doctrine):

To promote freedom of religion and
To do that which is right.

Sadly, I really wish I were totally kidding…

Friedrich Nietzsche commented that:

God made man in His own image, and man returned the favor.

In case you had any doubt, it wasn’t exactly a compliment to God…

Rick Warren’s latest thoughts/musings/curiosities seem to finally be focusing on why half of evangelical Christians won’t darken the door of a church any more — while still retaining their faith. Considering his own thinly veiled attempt at the insertion of ethics based legalism into the church and the total insanity that seems to define the church in general, it’s highly curious to me that he still seems legitimately puzzled by the phenomenon…

I just have one simple question though: Exactly what are these charlatans going to have to do? How low will they have to sink before millions of real Christians world wide rise up in rage and drown them in hundreds of thousands of emails, phone calls, faxes, blog postings and personal appearances — all demanding that they shut down and do it now?

As long as we stand by silently, we condone them — and are painted with the same brush.

JunkScience.com

The guesses of significantly larger warming are dependent on “feedback” (supplementary) mechanisms programmed into climate models. The existence of these “feedback” mechanisms is uncertain and the cumulative sign of which is unknown (they may add to warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or, equally likely, might suppress it).

The total warming since measurements have been attempted is thought to be about 0.6 degrees Centigrade. At least half of the estimated temperature increment occurred before 1950, prior to significant change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Assuming the unlikely case that all the natural drivers of planetary temperature change ceased to operate at the time of measured atmospheric change then a 30% increment in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused about one-third of one degree temperature increment since and thus provides empirical support for less than one degree increment due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

There is no linear relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide change and global mean temperature or global mean temperature trend — global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising.

Ok, I just finally sat down and watched it. Strangely, I also feel sick — though not for the standard reasons. It’s a sick feeling that comes from realizing we are dealing with the death of rational thought and the ability to understand information by the scientists of North America (in favor of pure hype and federal science grant chasing.) Al Gore can divorce his own voice and receive it back as thunder a thousand times by referring to, “Scientists,” but the facts simply do not always march in unison with his shrill rhetoric.

I wish I could have just ignored it (like I also do with everything Michael Moore presents…) However, after dealing with a number of clients (And their raw anxiety) who have watched Al Gore’s pathetic little piece of propaganda, I figured it was time to watch it. It’s now clear it’s also time to post some real science from real scientists who can actually do math and who manage to comprehend some basic concepts of statistical analysis (Like: correlation does not prove causation for example…).

BTW: No one is questioning that global warming is happening. What is in question is the degree of such (Remember, most readings from any more then 45yrs ago came from fishermen with buckets/thermometers), whether we have much of anything to do with it and whether it’s effects will actually be any sort of disaster. Geological reality states that for Greenland to do what Gore is predicting we would have to experience a seismic event capable of destroying at least one entire mountain range — so disastrous we’d mostly be dead anyway. (Also, remember, Greenland used to host vineyards in the time of the Vikings and the rest of the world somehow managed to keep on functioning.) Somehow global cooling managed to happen without our help — perhaps we have had as much of an impact on the opposite effect…

The Acton Institute also has a brilliant philosophical commentary on the subject.

Update: Someone also sent me thisand this. They are a much more comprehensive (And less mathematical) debunking of Gore’s static.

American Lung Association

41. Be flexible. Some things are not worth perfection.


43. Change pace on weekends. If your week was slow, be active. If you felt nothing was accomplished during the week, do a weekend project.

Worth the read.

www.lewrockwell.com

At the beginning of the scientific era, men had the hope that the ability to discover truth would free mankind from superstition, dogma, and the service of power. The belief in truth was powerful. Truth would deliver justice and bring an end to status-based privileges and the falsehoods propagated by privilege. The faith in truth was short-lived. Today propaganda is everywhere in the ascendancy.

All I can add is that it’s about time someone stood up and said it.

Sometimes, when no one will listen to truth in any other way, all that remains is mockery…

[Full resolution image]

Times Online

Priests are being torn by the pressure of having to be nice all the time to everyone, even when confronted with extremes of nastiness, she says.

It is worse in the suburbs, where Christians can choose between a variety of “gathered” churches, all offering different styles, from tambourines to High Mass with incense. Here, troublemakers indulge in “church hopping”, moving on to the next church once they have had enough of the one they are in.

Dr Savage says that these people suffer from neurotic personality disorders bordering on the psychotic.

The clinical definition for these individuals is, “Corporate antagonism.” It is a sub-clinically significant combination of paranoia and delusionality.

Antagonists are individuals who, on the basis of nonsubstantive evidence, go out of their way to make insatiable demands, usually attacking the person or performance of others. These attacks are selfish in nature, tearing down rather then building up, and are frequently directed against those in a leadership capacity.

The primary effects of antagonism lie in their ability to obliterate community, to create doubt, to instill fear and to create a climate of dishonor such that even natural allies can begin to doubt, without cause or sensibility, the character and values of their leader.

In short, this is real, it’s hardly limited to England and it can be dealt with via a concentrated strategy of knowledge for the clergy, education for the church leadership (Board level) and a pattern of strategic hardening of the entire church culture that makes such repellent to these individuals.

Henze & Associates offers this educational and strategic hardening service to companies, churches and community organizations — really any body of people who have had enough.

Charleston Daily Mail

Why doesn’t the manger scene have a baby Jesus?

“We try to explain that by law we can’t do that. We have been advised by (city) council not to get into that,” said David Cunningham, superintendent of St. Albans City Park.

Instead, there is a scene that looks remarkably like depictions of the night Jesus Christ was born. There’s a star, a couple of sheep, some camels and a structure that could be taken for the barn where Mary and Joseph had their baby.

“You could call it a manger,” he said. “We call it a place for the animals. It looks like two things coming up on the sides with a roof-like structure. What it looks like depends on your imagination.

A rather brilliant observation posted via Fark.com seems to sum it up better then I ever could:

2006-11-30 04:45:09 PM IdBeCrazyIf

Number40: And to remove Christ from the mix? You gotta be kidding me!

Well… to be fair. It’s not like Christians were using Christ for anything important anyway.

Lord knows they certainly don’t actually listen to what he says.

Isn’t it interesting that a secular society can more clearly see the teachings of Jesus then the church can? Jesus came, he basically took on a religious system that controlled people’s lives (While robbing them blind) and called people to love each other while, moment by moment, listening to and following the voice of God. His disciples demanded to be put at the helm of a new system — and Jesus refused to even name the president or define it’s structure.

He was barely gone before we had a new religious system — run by a dude we call the pope, an organization we call the synod or whatever — and a new set of rules to back an organization that, once again, is usually about money. Worst of all, it’s not about love, grace or freedom.

“It’s not like Christians were using Christ for anything important anyway. Lord knows they certainly don’t actually listen to what he says.”

Yep — Guilty as charged.

BTW: The town officials are using the law to hide their real addenda. The Supreme Court long ago ruled that creches, complete with baby Jesus, do not violate the constitution, so long as they are part of an otherwise secular holiday display. The ruling basically said that Christmas is a secular shopping holiday and that cities have an interest in promoting secular shopping holidays via holiday displays.

A letter from a son who left
The Capital-Journal/May 19, 1993
By Mark W. Phelps

“Many people have been asking me, over the past several weeks, about my father. They want to know what I think about him and ‘What is he really like?’ People’s interest in what I think baffles me, but after careful consideration, I decided to respond.

What is he like? Well, it’s been 19 years since I left home, but his behavior still appears to be the same. He considers his environment to be against him without admitting, acknowledging or taking responsibility for how he contributes to that. He likes to show himself as being moral, pro-family, pro-Bible, but his actions just don’t add up to that. I believe in God and the Bible, and my father’s behavior doesn’t fit the description of behavior that would show in the life of one who loves God; behavior characteristics such as Love, Joy, Peace, Longsuffering, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control. Instead, my father’s behavior characterizes, I believe, Hate, Outbursts of Wrath, Contention, Jealousy, Vengefulness, Misery, Harshness, and Selfish ambition. He mis-states the truth about his own behavior, about others, about the Bible, with apparent ease and regularity. He behaves with a viciousness the likes of which I have never seen. He accepts no genuine accountability in his life and is subject to no one. His lifestyle betrays the sacred trust of what a pastor, husband, father and grandfather should be. I suppose if a comparison were made between the life of Jesus Christ and my father, there would not be much to compare.

I also realize that my father is a very unstable person who is determined to hurt people. And because he is so bound to be hateful and hurtful, and because he’s so untrustworthy, I believe it’s a good idea to respond to him with caution much like the caution used when dealing with a rattlesnake or a mad dog. You see, the causes that he crusades for, including the Bible, are not the issue here. He simply wants to hate and to have a forum for his hate. If the causes he focuses on were the issue, that is, if they really meant something to him in his heart and he meant for the things he does to be for the good, his behavior would not be what it is. He would not betray his message with his behavior. But, when he needs to, to vent his hate, he readily goes outside the bounds of any previously stated ‘value’ or ’cause’ he may have supported. He experiences no moral dilemma when it comes to doing what he wants to do. If it weren’t the homosexuals, it would be something else.

Yet checks and balances on his behavior are appropriate, on the part of the community, in order to at least confine his destructive behaviors and to limit his influence. I believe that Topekans are making a good effort to try and stop him and should continue to do so. He can seem very intimidating. He can use foul language and come across with a booming voice to the community, but the truth is, like the Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls the curtain back, instead of this big powerful individual, it’s only a small, pathetic old man. I feel sorry for my father as I would for anyone who displays this kind of hate and evil viciousness. These can only be the manifestations of tortured, injured and agonizing souls.”

Westboro Baptist Church is a U.S. religious organization headed by Fred Phelps and based in Topeka, Kansas. It runs the website GodHatesFags.com, and GodHatesAmerica.com, and other websites expressing condemnation of homosexuals, Catholics, Muslims and other groups. The organization is monitored by the Anti-Defamation League, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

While its members identify themselves as Baptists, the church is an independent Baptist church not affiliated with any known Baptist conventions or associations. The church describes itself as following Primitive Baptist and Calvinist principles, though it has been accused by others of Hyper-Calvinism.

This is a letter Fred’s son Mark Phelps wrote to citizens of Topeka and northeast Kansas. As of July 7, 1994, Mark Phelps said the letter still represents his feelings. He also cautioned people against taking the letter out of context, saying there is “gentleness” in the context of the letter and a hope that the community can better understand Fred Phelps based on what the letter contains.

Note: I refuse to link to the waste of digital space web site I got this from.

Mens Health

Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

“So much subliminal information is conveyed in those first seconds of contact,” says Carol Kauffman, Ph.D., a relationship therapist and psychology instructor at Harvard medical school. Okay, so you’re on the clock. Make every second count. Below are 10 ways – in rough chronological order – a woman judges your fitness to be her proverbial daddy.

OK, so, it’s crass, cynical and the entire site is largely focused on presenting a fraudulent image of yourself so you can get into a woman’s pants — but it’s also true. Men who desire marriage would do well to actually look at their hearts and lives and ask whether what is being faked here is actually true for them — and if not, why not?

BBC NEWS

Sir Elton John has said he would like to see all organised religion banned and accused it of trying to “turn hatred towards gay people”.

Ok, first of all, he’s talking about Christianity, Judaism and Islam. (The rest of the religions mostly don’t care…) As Judaism has a firm policy of not proselytizing and Islam has a much bigger spread of antagonisms then just homosexuality, he’s basically talking about Christianity.

It’s always fascinating to me how those who would ban Christianity for intolerance fail to notice that it is, in fact, from within Christianity that the idea of tolerance was itself conceived.

It’s even more entertaining how, in the absence of that foundation, that their version of tolerance is actually so intolerant it would attempt to ban the freedom of religious practice of the largest belief systems/world views in the world for the sake of the rights of one of the smallest minority groups in the world to perform a particular sexual behavior without someone disagreeing with it. (Note: not controlling or arresting it — just disagreeing…)

However, what is most stunning about their logic is that they would see the stripping of religious freedom from billions as at least a lesser evil if not a blessing to humanity. Here we reach the tyrannical summit of postmodern egocentricity: Because you disagree with what I am doing, I must crush you so the world can finally be free.

Stuff.co.nz

Hell Pizza has outraged family groups and morals campaigners by delivering innuendo-laden condom packets to letterboxes.

The controversial fast-food chain is promoting its meat-lovers’ pizza – named “Lust” – with a mail drop of 170,000 branded condoms.

But it has provoked criticism from groups who say it is indecent to link pizza with sex and inappropriate to distribute condoms where young children might find them.

The packet includes explicit instructions for condom usage.

I wonder when the fundamentalist Christian right is finally going to figure out marketing firms regard their pathetic moral outrage as the best source of free advertising to ever be invented?

I mean, [GASP] what if a child discovered a contraceptive and [SHUDDER] his or her parent had to actually sit down and talk with him or her about [SOB] sex???

11Alive.com

“These groups offer promises they can’t deliver, and deliver disasters they didn’t promise,” said Wayne Besen of Truthwinsout.org. “The destroy families in the name of family values.”

Hattie Ellis’ 25-year-old son is gay. She has a message for the hundreds of parents who signed their children up for the church group’s conference.

“Don’t do it,” she said. “If you try to change your child, you will lose your child. You will break their spirit and you may never get them back.”

Well, Focus on the Family is barely out of the gate with their latest Love Won Out conference (a conference seeking to connect GBLT individuals who deeply long to change their sexual orientation with resources to do so) and, predictably enough, the fur is already flying.

Forget about the reality that one of the key individuals involved in getting Homosexuality removed from the DSM as a disorder (Dr. Spitzer) has published evidence that homosexual individuals can change their sexual orientation to heterosexual and are remarkably better off emotionally for having done such, the strident cries against this supposed bigotry, homophobia and, most importantly, the imposition of beliefs on innocent victims still ring out.

It’s all strangely myopic from where I sit: Christians trying to turn gay people straight is no worse than secular humanists trying to make male children act like female children (because, well, all boys are just nicer on Ritalin…) Everybody has an idea of how to, “Improve,” their fellow man. The difference here is that Christians have to get people to volunteer for the effort, while secular humanism generally uses the public school system to force their more politically correct viewpoint of acceptable behavior on their victims.

Apparently though, they still need to rally against those who would simply invite those volunteers? Seems like a little too much in the way of smoke and fury here for this to really be about freedom…

Rocky Mountain News

Embattled minister Ted Haggard this morning admitted receiving a massage from the Denver man who claims to have exchanged sex for money with the Colorado Springs church leader for three years.

After years of pushing the White House to crack down on gays and to fight gay marriage, Ted again proves the above title is still as true today as the day the great play-write penned it.

More and more, the most vocal and aggressive voices of condemnation for same sex brokenness are beginning to be discovered as actually being the broken ones. Men who wear the cover of judgment and condemnation as a cover for their broken hearts.

Why won’t the broken ones willingly pursue healing? After all, no one is buying their religious fervor anymore — it’s too obviously a cover. It’s only a matter of time before they are forced into healing anyway — maybe it’s time for the church to rise up en-mass and tell these people to:

(A). Shut-up.
(B). Take the log outa yer own eye.
(C). Get healing so you can actually be of some real use to the kingdom.
(D). At least stop smearing egg on your own face and the collective face of Christianity by trying to act like you are holy.

Some of us are just plain tired of people playing out this pathetic parody we call holiness theology. (At least those of us who’ve figured out that the only righteousness we’re ever gonna have has got to be a gift.) The rest are tired of trying to play it out and desperately could use a rest — whether or not they know it yet.

Either way, no one except the press is listening — and they are doubled over laughing.

Slate Magazine

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that’s because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they’re at the movies, they’re not out causing mischief. They’d rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they’d rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit.

A brief but interesting rebuttal of the idea that what people watch makes any difference in the crimes that they commit. Apparently what we have always known is still true: Contrary to the screeches of the fundamentalist right, art still imitates life — and not the other way around.

MoralArmor.com

Imagine if you could achieve perfect moral clarity, rid yourself of fear, guilt and moral hesitation, pass down traits of the greatest advantage, take total control and live a life filled with invigoration and inner calm. If that interests you, then this is the most important book you’ll ever read.

My name is Ronald E. Springer. As a child, I experienced firsthand, the nightmare of dishonest people abusing others through a dishonest moral code. I endured, grew strong and broke free, but continued to run into problems in life, caused by mass moral confusion in society. With a philosophy background, I set out to change things. Someone has to stand up and fight for us.

As a result, I’ve developed an organic moral code that will show you exactly how to move through life with complete moral certainty. It will show you how to secure better relationships, safeguard your family, reform our country’s moral drift, and send evil packing.

Funny how we humans still are so convinced we know better then God. We are so sure that if we just figure it all out, we will come up with the perfect strategy to make life work for us — that of course we can then sell to others.

Trouble with that theory is, we end up creating just another set of rules — rules that Paul made very clear will kill us (2 Cor 3:6) and rules that place us firmly under the wrath of God (Rom 4:15). We think we are finally figuring life out — but we are actually just joining up with a lie. It’s a lie that will kill us as we will never manage to live up to even our own expectations.

If the life to which Christ has called us is based upon a seeking of acceptance in Christ through our moral efforts (which of course will never work) so that our continued following Him only proves how unacceptable we are, then Christ would be nothing but a dealer or an enforcer of sin. (Which is totally absurd since Christ is the one who did away with sin.) If I rebuild another “gospel” that re-establishes a relationship with God, myself or anyone else through some form of legality, then I am the one proving myself to be a law-breaker, or sinner.

BTW: This article was originally posted on Fark under the heading of, “Every time a batshiat crazy person learns HTML, God kills a network admin.”

SFGATE.COM

“The preponderance of research clearly shows that homework for elementary students does not make a difference in student achievement. It is hard to believe that a strategy used so extensively has no foundation,” principal David Ackerman of Oak Knoll Elementary in Menlo Park wrote in a letter to parents this autumn as he put the brakes on homework.

Two new books read like manifestos against what authors consider an avalanche of unproductive take-home assignments. Their titles lay their beliefs on the line: the research critique “The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing” by Alfie Kohn, and the more anecdotal “The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It” by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish.

At the same time, an international comparison by two Penn State professors has concluded that junior high students who scored highest in math tended to come from countries where teachers assign relatively little homework — including Denmark, the Czech Republic and (take note) Japan. Conversely, the lowest-scoring students came from countries where teachers assign tons of homework, such as Iran, Thailand and Greece.

“It almost seems as though the more homework a nation’s teachers assign, the worse the nation’s students do,” concluded researchers Gerald LeTendre and David Baker, who found Americans in the mid-range in the amount of homework assigned and in achievement.

Someone finally had to say it.

With 6 hours of classtime per day for 180 days per year for 12 years, we cannot teach our children what they need to know? We need higher expectations for our teachers — not more busy work for our students.

Perhaps canceling classes on what and who to have sex with may be a start at freeing up time for learning things that actually matter — like skateboarding and building tree forts?

FARK.com

2006-09-26 12:23:29 PM Tatsuma [TotalFark]

muninsfire: It’s on account of those people who believe their way is best, and refuse to compromise, or even think of talking over their differences.

Definitely. I heard a rabbi once on Talk Rabbi that struck me. A man called to talk about how JC was the son of G-d and he said

“Listen, I’m trying to turn Jews into better Jews, into observant Jews. You go on into making Christians good Christians, I make Jews good Jews, someone tries to make Muslims good Muslims and we’ll all live in peace. Deal?”

I wish more people thought like that.

Stop trying to impose your values
Stop trying to convert the world

Work on your own house. Make Christians and Christianity better. If all Christians acted like JC, you can be sure they currently dominate the planet and people would flock to them.

The above comment is written by a young Canadian Jewish man from Montreal. He is a devote Jew who has memorized the entire OT law and is a stunningly brilliant debater. He is currently in Israel in training to join her military — voluntarily.

While I can’t agree with all of it (the second last and the last line are completely contradictory for example), the last line caught my attention. Even a Jewish person can recognize that Jesus had it right — so right that if we simply did what He called us to do (to love others as He did), Christianity would be the only world religion.

Isn’t it interesting how the Church seems to have been the last to get the potential we are sitting on???

Pastors.com

Most people assume that men are just less religious than women, but this is untrue. Other religions have little trouble attracting males. Jesus was a magnet to men. But today, few men are living for Christ, even as many are dying for Allah. Why do rival faiths inspire male allegiance, while ours breeds male indifference?

A business guru once said, “Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting.” Christianity’s primary delivery system, the local church, is perfectly designed to reach women and older folks. That’s why our pews are filled with them. But this church system fails to stir men’s hearts, so men (especially masculine ones) stay away.

What do I mean? Most churches offer a safe, nurturing community, an oasis of stability and predictability. Studies show that women and seniors are the groups most likely to seek these things. Our comforting congregations provide women with what they long for, so naturally they show up in large numbers.

On the other hand, men and young adults are drawn to risk, challenge, and daring. While our official mission is one of adventure, the actual mission of most congregations is making people feel comfortable and safe – especially longtime members (Pastors, can I have an amen?) Church insiders routinely block anything challenging or innovative because it might make people feel uncomfortable or unsafe. This caution keeps the peace in the short term, but it drives men and young adults away over the long term.

You know, someone had to say it…

Faithnet.org

Aquinas believed it was possible to discern truths about God based on reason (human rationality) and revelation (divinely revealed truths not available to reason). Aquinas lived at a time when Aristotle’s teachings were popular and so used this as basis for his theological writings.

This is a foundational piece of philosophy for much of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Church today in that it details the fundamental premise that existence implies origin.

Later philosophers have disputed this — thinking that it is just as easy to postulate an eternal universe as an eternal God. However, such can be easily addressed through the realization that our assumptions about the cosmology and it’s functionality may, themselves, be limited to that universe and, as such, incomplete. In such, an eternal origin (AKA. God) is only slightly more plausible — but enough to make the examination of nature for signs of created (as opposed to random) origin a worthy pursuit.

As such, this is a critical piece of philosophy that everyone in the church should understand for it forms the philosophical fork in the road between Christianity and atheism.

Hell’s handmaiden

Really, these “Marriage = One Man One Woman” people need a lesson in cultural anthropology.

Much of the evangelical church today is obsessed with ethics. The basic strategy usually used in creating such is simply a searching of the writings of Paul and then a subsequent codification of his statements into a law seen as, “The way it always was.”

The irony is that, as this blogger so clearly points out, it really never was. In fact, usually what was is stunningly different from what Paul had to say for himself.

So, should we punt any sort of ethical standard and rush off into a three-some, a gay marriage or maybe a sexually open relationship? No. But, we do have to pull our non-thinking heads out of the sand and start to engage our worlds instead of our simplistic presuppositions. In case it isn’t already clear, the rest of the world responds to a line of logic that starts with, “Well the Bible says…” with a well deserved sneer. While it may be a mental starting point, if that’s all we got, we are already dead in the water.

There is a place in Christianity for ethics — but it is not the starting point nor is it ever a self contained entity. Ethics must always start from the solid foundation of Grace and total freedom to, for example, engage in that three-some and know that God’s heart has not changed towards you (for we are totally free from the law) though tears are running down His face. Not tears of rage — but tears of love for your heart has been smashed by the decision to engage in such.

In other words, ethics must always start from our anthropology. Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. It is an assessment of our hearts, minds, souls and bodies that determines how we function — or don’t function as the case may be. It is the core of an assessment of what is good for us or for a society.

Yes, it almost goes without saying that Paul’s writings are a study in great wisdom in this area — but they are, at least to some degree, culturally specific and require generalization to present day life. That generalization is, by it’s very nature anthropological.

A marriage between one man and one woman is the best idea — but not just because the Bible (Or for that matter the Koran) says so. It is a good idea because there is clear evidence of design (Or, if addressing a secular audience, evolutionary programming) present in the hearts of men and women that enables each to meet the needs of the other and offers critical developmental resources to any children present in ways that no other combination (Say two men) allows.

We have further found that a high degree of security and intimacy is required for such to occur and this is why most cultures have instituted the rite (and thus the standard definition) of marriage. While other combinations may have varying degrees of success, they are less then optimal and are less worthy of protection/promotion then that which is optimal.

Once we have actually thought out why we would state that marriage between one man and one woman is the best idea, we can then go back to Paul as a credible voice of historical thought who arrived at the same conclusion.

Otherwise, we just end up looking like idiots…

(Just for the record, I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution…)

local6.com

Researchers found that only 10.8 percent of Americans have no ties to a congregation, denomination or faith group. Previous surveys had put that figure at 14 percent, overlooking about 10 million people involved in some form of organized religion, the Baylor report said. Other surveys have also overlooked millions of evangelicals because respondents who belonged to nondenominational groups or megachurches would often report that they had no denomination and were wrongly counted as unaffiliated, the study’s authors say.

Among the more religiously observant Christians, the term “evangelical” is unpopular, according to the study. Nearly 70 percent of evangelical and black Protestants say “Bible-believing” better describes their views. Nearly as many liked the term “born-again.” Only 15 percent of all respondents called themselves “evangelical” and within that group just 2 percent said it was the best description.

So much for the death of Christianity…

Psychology Custody Issues

Custody/access evaluations (also called psychological parenting evaluations) assist parents and courts in determining the best plan for their children with respect to the division of parenting time and parenting responsibilities.

Mostly self promotion — but solid info.

The daily record :

One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus.

“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat.

“He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

The church seems to have divided itself up into two categories:

1. Those who pretty much ignore the voice of God except as it is written in Scripture.
2. Those who seem to think that they can hear whatever from God, do not need to proof check it against Scripture, the voice of their own God implanted deep longings or the voice of community.
   

NewswireToday

Strange religious groups (or cults) are in vogue in today’s Hollywood. But when it comes to bizarre rituals and crackpot beliefs, even Scientology can’t hold a candle to the Church of the SubGenius, a new religious movement set to take Hollywood by storm.

The Church of the SubGenius is a popular organization often seen as a “parody” of religious cults, including Scientology, the Raelians, the Unification Church, and racist hate groups such as Christian Identity. The organization is widely seen as a satire that mocks organized religion, or as the church describes itself, “a cynisacreligion.”

Hummm… Did we have it coming???

The Big Religion Comparison Chart – ReligionFacts

The ReligionFacts “Big Religion Chart” is an attempt to summarize all the complexities of religions and belief systems into tiny little boxes on a single, quick-reference comparison chart. Yes, this is impossible. As we always warn with our comparison charts, this is no substitute for reading about religions in greater detail, talking with religious adherents, etc.

While not from a Christian perspective, this chart is an incredibly well written quick summary of major world religions.

In particular, note the comment about Christianity. The authors were astute enough to realize that Christianity, as practiced by those who actually get it, has no requirement for doing anything. It is by faith alone. (They do mention that some have added works in as well.) Look over the rest of the chart — Christianity stands alone in that respect.

Though I can’t say much for the Current Lutheran church, Luther got it at a deeper level then 95% of the church today with his four pillars of the reformation:

(1). By Christ alone.
(2). By the Word alone.
(3). By Faith alone.
(4). By Grace alone.

Christianity is truly a gift of grace, received by faith, not through any performance you may have put on to impress others. Anything more than that, any demand that you clean up your act or perform some set of rituals or good deeds — well, that’s not the Gospel.

Armor of God PJs

The Armor of God PJ’s were inspired by a mother reading Ephesians 6:10-18 every night to her daughter to give her a safe and secure feeling in the dark.

Some days I suspect Paul forgot one of the critical spiritual gifts when he made his list: The gift of mindlessly shaming the Body of Christ so no one will take Her seriously and She stays a manageable size.

BTW: No, this IS NOT, “Becoming a fool for Christ.” This is being a fool for money — at the expense of Christ.

Jennifer Saginor’s father was Hugh Hefner’s doctor and best friend. In the ’80s, he lived at the Playboy Mansion, where his main job was to give diet pills and boob jobs to all the girls, then have sex with them. Jennifer lived there with him, and while a hired tutor did her homework, Jennifer sampled her dad’s drugs and Hef’s girlfriends.

My childhood was remarkably similar, except that instead of being surrounded by a cream-of-the-crop harem at mansion parties, I spent my youth amidst elderly alcoholic ladies passing out shirtless in our bushes at barbecues. And while I walked in on some random hippies having sex on my bedroom floor when I was six, young Jennifer swam in on John Belushi and a Playmate doing it in the pool. Which is probably why Jennifer’s tell-all daddy book, Playground, was picked up by HarperCollins and mine was published by Soft Skull Press.

We compared notes, a couple of mid-thirties women trained by our strangely compelling, overly naked dads how to seduce pretty women and lie to our mothers. — Lisa Carver

You say Hugh Hefner was the one person who treated you kindly growing up.
He was always gracious and welcoming. He always allowed me to have friends over and gave me free reign of the property. He never tried to keep me away from anything or lure me into anything. He just let me be. And he never got upset with me.

Don’t you think someone needed to get upset with you, young lady?
[laughs] Yeah, probably. Hef was just always really nice, really cheerful. The mansion was a stable environment for me, in this dysfunctional family where I didn’t really have a mother or a father.

Do you think your father might not have gone so far off the deep end if his best friend Hef hadn’t created this artificial culture where women are like food — you eat them up, and there’s always more?

Later, my father got into a different culture of nightclubs and parties up in the Hollywood hills, and that was gross and those guys were disgusting. I never looked at Hef as seedy. He was never in that category. His place was always fun and everyone was in a good mood and it was positive.

A girl named Paulina died in front of you on one last bump of cocaine while sucking some guy off at one of these parties. She was nineteen. You were sixteen or seventeen. You tried to get someone to call 911, but instead “security” took her body off and the party went on. Where did they take her body?
I don’t know. That’s just one of the things I’ll never know.

Did you look for the obituary in the paper?

No. I wasn’t reading the newspaper back then. And there was so much of that going on at the time — so much chaos in my father’s house with all the young girls in and out and the drug use and his mobster girlfriend Vicki. Everything was taken so lightly and loosely. Paulina was just one girl who died.

Your dad was always giving the Playboy girls free plastic surgery. Did he offer it to you?

He would make comments all the time, that I should get my boobs done or, “If you want to go get a spray tan, I know this person who owns a salon.” When I was sixteen, I got my nose done, but it didn’t really work. It wasn’t a fun experience. The doctor was on drugs when he did it, and he messed up my nose.

Was he a friend of your dad’s?

Yeah.

He was probably on your dad’s drugs.
Yeah. So was I. [laughs] But that was the end of [physical alteration] for me. I never cared what I looked like. I thought if I was smart and I aligned myself with the guys. I wouldn’t be put in the category of the stupid girls. I wished that I didn’t have any breasts, not bigger ones.

You write a lot about Carrie Leigh, Hef’s main girlfriend in the ’80s, who was often in the news for her extra-exhibitionist antics, though you had to change names for legal reasons.

I pretty much just refer to her as Kendall in print.

Was she the great love of your life?

She pretty much took the role of my mother. Living in the Playboy Mansion with my father was a surreal world where I could sort of pick out my new, fake mommy.

But you had sex with her.

I know.

That’s a weird mommy.

I agree. I was very young. I was fifteen when it started, and she was eight years older. I was starving for affection and attention and nurturing and guidance, and she took on that role and manipulated the situation. I’m sure I filled a void in her as well. We had to meet clandestinely. At the time it seemed like a huge love affair where we struggled to be together against all odds.

Your father forbade the relationship and threatened you. Did Hef ever find out?

I’m not sure.

Do you think Kendall loved Hef and Hef loved her?

I think she was using him, but I think he loved her. All the adoring nicknames and all the affection he showered on her — I think it was real for him.

At the end of the book, you write that you still love your father. Why? Both your parents basically left you to die. You were a teenager having car wrecks and drug addictions, and no one cared.

He loved me, he just had a different way of showing it. He showed his love through materialism and spoiling me and having me sit in the front seat while his girlfriends — these dumb hookers that were always around — sat in the back. He was showing me more respect than he did these girls. I was treated better.

But he was training you purely for his own benefit, wasn’t he? When you told his one nice girlfriend about his other girlfriends, he threw the dictionary at you and made you memorize the definition of loyalty.

He definitely socialized me like a boy.

More like a predator. Your dad showed you how to manipulate people. He’d pick out girls at nightclubs and make you go get their numbers, and you had to feel her out and find the right lie to get her to go with him, whether it was pretending he was going to get her a modeling gig or that he was a broken-hearted new divorcé.

Right.

So, were you good at preying on people?

No.

You weren’t? All his hard work training you, and you failed him!

[laughs] I’m still learning to differentiate between how I was socialized and how other, normal people think. It’s difficult for people I’m involved with, because they have to be the recipient of what I went through. I constantly feel like I live with the voices of my mother and father in my head. It’s terrible. I’m still searching for this love that only a parent can give. Meanwhile I’m distrustful and jealous and controlling, always on the defensive. I push people away.

How has your upbringing affected your sex life?

It’s difficult to be intimate. Very difficult. Sex is over here, and being emotionally dependent is over here.

Like, it’s really good not to know somebody’s name.

[laughs] Right.

Do you think you’re bisexual because of your experiences, or were you born bi?

In my case, lacking a mother and needing that kind of connection caused me to keep recreating these maternal figures. And it’s never enough. I’m never satisfied. I’m constantly longing for more affection, more attention. The needs of a child.

Do you feel safest alone in your own home?

Yes.

Do you have to be totally alone for a while every day, or you’re just really irritable and angry? And you think other people are actually doing something irritating, but in fact it’s just that they’re alive, and in your house.

Definitely. Unbelievable. Where did you get this?

From my shrink. This is how Vietnam vets and people with our kind of dads are. I get really happy around people, and I like them, but I’m about to crawl out of my skin after a couple hours. Which can be exasperating for the people who have to live with me.

It’s good if you’re a writer, that you have to seek out solitude.

Good if you’re a writer. Bad if you’re a human being.

Yeah.

This was sent to me. I have no idea where it came from but it is worth a read. Here’s what living the Playboy fantasy is actually like.

Carbohydrate-Guide.com

Here’s a list of specific foods that raise your metabolism and help burn body fat. Weight loss that actually makes sense.

Edit: If you ever wanted to totally gross yourself out with exactly how bad your favorite fast food actually is for you, look no further then the Calorie King website.

Wired News:

I don’t write much about religion, although in college I minored in the history of Christianity. But I do know that most Americans have sex, most Americans believe in God or a higher power, and most Americans identify with some sort of religion. Of those, the majority are Christian.

It stands to reason that some Christians already know all about adult products while others secretly long to know more but don’t know who to ask.

Those are the customers that Book22 seeks to attract. Book22, named for the twenty-second book in the Bible, “Song of Solomon,” is a new adult novelty store positioning itself as a Christian source of intimacy products for married couples.

Book22 might be the catalyst for more conservative types to stop viewing sexual accoutrements with so much suspicion and fear. Through the “permission” of Christian sex toys, they might realize that what they formerly thought of as deviant or alternate is actually as normal as using utensils to eat pizza. Not necessary to enjoying the task at hand, but a legitimate option nonetheless.

Might that more relaxed attitude filter out to other aspects of their lives?

For the truly shy who can not go anywhere near a marital aid store, this may just do the trick. Sadly though, I highly doubt that this will manage to avoid being viciously slandered by some brand of self-righteous fundamentalist.

My main reason for posting it though is as a result of so many couples finding themselves unable to locate a product I have repeatedly recommended. This store is one of the few online stores that take the time to stock one of the most well researched/designed lubricants — what I consider the best lubricant on the market: Frixion.

BTW: In NO way can I endorse their reading list though… It contains some of the most deluded christian misinformation about sex ever written. (Small case, “C,” intentional.)

AFA Journal liberalism

In his book University of Destruction, David Wheaton cites research by Dr. Gary Railsback and the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. Wheaton wrote, “Depending on the type of college attended, as many as 51% of students who claimed to be ‘born-again Christians’ as freshmen said they were no longer born-again Christians four years later.”

What is striking to me is not the presence of this article or the stats that it presents — it’s the solutions it offers: Just believe, don’t think about yourself as inferior and maybe read about your faith — but not too much — just enough so you know who to ask if you get into trouble…

Christianity is the most logically consistent and defensible faith in the world and the best advice that can be offered to students is to not think of themselves as second class students? How about sending students to read the collected works of the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, Dr. James Sire and C.S. Lewis? (Or at least a somewhat lame compilation like Josh McDowell’s work, “Evidence that demands a verdict?”) How about teaching them how to take on a philosophy professor, to think beneath the arguments presented and attack the faulty thinking that allows philosophy professors to do the damage they do? How about, at the very least, getting these students to read Schaeffer’s work, “The God who is there?”

These students are victims because they do not know how to think. They fail to grasp basic logic and they lack the knowledge base to back any skills in logic anyway. Continuing to present hayseed-simple answers like this only serves to convince students that they really just believe old fairy tales. These schools are not stripping faith from our children — they are just exposing that we have so failed to love God with all of our minds that (In the absence of that foundation) the faith wasn’t really there to begin with.

Transterrestrial Musings

“Now Sunera, let’s try this again. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore…?”

Sunera frowns, and sweat appears on her forehead. Hesitantly, she ventures, “Therefore…Socrates is the basis of male-centered western patriarchal violence that continues to brutalize women and grind them under its bootheels…?”

“No, Sunera,” the therapist explains patiently. “We’re practicing logic here. Lo-gic. Remember what I told you about logic?”

I close the door quietly. It will indeed be a long and hard road.

As I leave, I see a general at the entrance with a doctor, staring at the row of beds.

“Where do they find people like this?,” he asks in amazement.

The doctor answers, quietly, “As long as there are schools of journalism, we will never run out…”

One of the most striking effects the advent of personal publishing platforms/blogging and other less then million-dollar mass market publishing strategies has created is the inability of mass media to any longer expect that they represent the only voice. No one has summed it up any better then this author.

The rest of the articles on this site are brilliant as well.

CBS News

For the first time since members of Westboro began protesting at military funerals, someone is using the courts to stop them. A distraught father has filed suit in Maryland against what he views as a gross violation of privacy and intentional emotional abuse.

And further down in the article:

At Arlington, Pastor David Foote of Franklin, Penn., saw the protest and attempted to engage the demonstrators. He told them that “God loves everyone,” prompting church members to descend upon him in a hail of insults.

“A lying, false prophet — that’s what this is,” Phelps-Roper told CBSNews.com, and dismissed him as a “dumb-ass” and a liar.

Though he will never win, all I can say is that it is about time someone at least tried to tie them up in court.

The ACLU has backed Phelps — correctly — arguing that this is an attempt to take away the right to protest. The law must fall on the side of this church (If I dare even call it that…)

However, I also hope that every single family thus treated sues them in civil court and eventually forces them into bankruptcy through legal bills. Freedom of speech laws were designed to control governments — not the actions of private individuals. A similar strategy was used against the KKK. They were and still are free to spread their crazed philosophy — but they were also free to be held liable in civil court for the deaths of the black people they incited.

It’s a bit more of a trick here but Phelps could easily be granted the freedom to speak that he wants — and then held liable for the direct psychological harm it caused. (In a general sense, His freedom to speak and cause harm in the public square is generally protected because those who wish not to hear him can walk away without suffering any further harm.) In this case, his freedom to speak is also protected but the people spoken to could not walk away — thus the harm was direct and intensified. Unlike with the KKK, it’s still probably not provable harm (unless they can prove slander — which is very possible) but it’s credible enough to create serial (And very expensive) court cases. Perhaps legal pressure will force him to come upon a new interpretation of Jesus’ words…

If these people ever actually read their Bibles, they would discover that while Jesus attacked legalistic religious institutions (Um, er, sorta like… THEM???) and leaders with a vengeance, He never once condemned sin in an individual. (The closest he ever came is with the woman caught in adultery — where He told her that He did not condemn her.)

Calling a fellow paster a “A lying, false prophet,” and a, “Dumb-ass.” Can’t you just feel the non-condemning love of Christ here???

Update:
Possibly one of the funniest videos I have ever watched. (Not Safe for Dial-up)

Pure Freedom (Massive PDF locker poster download — must be seen to be believed…)

About ten years ago (& in another province) I had the opportunity to work with a convicted sex offender. He had been convicted of fondling young girls in shopping malls — a career of sexual assault that had spanned 19.5yrs. Initially, I didn’t even believe him as he claimed to have been doing so nearly daily for that entire time and had not been caught. However, over time and research, I came to realize that he was telling me the truth. It was a glimpse into the life of an incredibly sophisticated and TOTALLY unrepentant sexual predator that I value to this day.

I can clearly remember one conversation I had with him as he described how he selected his victims. He stated:

I’d walk the length of the mall a few times — maybe even eight or ten times. Just looking. It was easiest in the summer when all the girls were wearing skimpy clothing. The marks stood out like sore thumbs — they were wearing track pants and sweat shirts. (Anything to hide their bodies.)

I’d look to see which of the girls were alone. Not alone and doing something — just alone and hanging out there. The ones who are alone usually have no one to tell. I’d watch her for a long time too — to make sure she was not looking and waiting for someone…

Then I’d bump into her — not hard — just enough so she would know they were bumped. Then I’d pause and look right at her. I’d wait and see if she would apologize to me for running into her. (The easy one always blame themselves.)

If she apologized, I’d give her a big compliment and very carefully watch her eyes to see if she would look down. (If a woman thinks she’s garbage, she will never be able to maintain eye contact.) Then I’d wander off again.

I’d come back in a few minutes though — this time I’d make another comment. It would be a double entendre — something that sounded innocent but the way I’d be looking at her would remove all doubt. Something suggestive enough to see how she would react. The easy ones would just look away and turn red or stammer something.

I’d walk away again — I’d watch to see how she carried herself after that. Most of the time, she would kinda turn in on her self and slump over. She wouldn’t leave — she thought she deserved it.

That’s when I knew I had one who would never tell. Eventually, she would have to go to the bathroom or something where she was out of sight — you know the rest.

As I listened to this man’s chilling boast, I suddenly realized something: His victim was the perfect Christian girl. We tell our young girls:

“Don’t wear that, it makes you look slutty.”
“Don’t you let your friends run your life — you must serve Jesus only — not friends.”
“It doesn’t matter if it was X person’s fault — you be the bigger person and apologize.”
“Good girls don’t make a fuss.”
“Don’t you be arrogant — pride is a sin you know — and God hates the proud.”
“Always think the best of people — he couldn’t possibly have meant that.”
“Turn the other cheek anyway.”
“Dressing like that will get you raped — you cause men to lust after you and it will be all your fault.”

Whatever that is, it’s not modesty…

Reality is, if that young girl had turned, glared at the man and snapped, “Hey!” at him, he would have quietly vanished knowing that this young lady would not be silent. He would have never even noticed her if she had solid friends and had been dressed in a revealing manner. If she had slapped him silly after he made that sexual comment, he would have fled into the afternoon sun. But, she was too well trained… We as a society and a church will someday answer for her sexual assault.

The above ministry is a well funded organization capable of paid Goggle ad placement running conferences and seminars all over the place. Apparently, having the misguided little old ladies of the church heap guilt and body shame on our little girls was not good enough — we need to put a marketing engine behind it and sell books while convincing young girls to judge themselves every time they open their locker door.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

C.S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory (1949)

Think that’s a weird statement? Think again. Mother Teresa once stated that, “Humility is that which remains when all illusions have been stripped away.” In other words, humility is all about standing in nothing more and nothing less then the truth. By the time a woman has come to the place where she is deciding what to hide and what to reveal on a given day with respect to her body or any other part of her, she has already lost the war.

A woman who knows who she truly is in Christ will reflect the incredible beauty, the sensuality, the sexuality, the innocence, the purity, the passion, the power, the intelligence, the vision and the welcoming nurture that God created her to convey. She will do so through a stance of active and passionate engagement with and a moment by moment listening to the Living Word of God in her heart (No, not the past Words of God in Scripture) that will guide her into the fullness of who God created her to be.

You know, that’s just got to be jaw droopingly devastating and sexy in a divinely innocent way. Anything less is an insult to our Creator who made her that way — and placed her naked in the garden (sans Burqa.)

BTW: God gave women clothing later as a concession — to her…

Agape Press

Williamson says the “crazy” goings-on at the General Assembly did not end there. “Someone had made a resolution to declare suicide bombing a crime against humanity,” he notes.

“Now, you’d think that would be approved rather quickly, wouldn’t you? I mean, suicide bombing is not exactly a godly act,” the Lay Committee spokesman says. But against all expectation, he observes, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, one of the denomination’s official agencies — along with its Advocacy Committee on Racial Ethnic Concerns — lobbied against approval of the resolution.

Committee members “came in and recommended that that thing not be passed because it might offend the Muslims,” Williamson says.

At the same convention, PC(USA) commissioners voted to allow the denomination’s churches to use the phrase, “compassionate mother, beloved child, and life-giving womb” (Yes, all lower case…) instead of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when referring to the Trinity (One delegate greeted this news by suggesting that, “Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” would also do…) and approved the ordination of practicing Homosexuals.

At some level, this is totally irrelevant — it’s not like your average member of Hamas really cares what the Presbyterians have to say for themselves. On the other hand, it’s a great example of what happens when a denomination looses their focus on grace (And by default on what it means to be fully human and fully alive) and instead focuses their attention upon tolerance.

Legitimate grace has its foundation in our anthropology. In other words, Grace was offered to us by God because His righteous judgment was separating us from Him. That judgment was keeping us in fear, preventing us from really living and drowning us with shame — the status quo was unacceptable to God so He took radical action so we could be free to be what we were created to be.

Tolerance isn’t concerned with anthropology — it’s obsessed with feelings. The highest good is not a full life — it’s keeping the feelings of others from being hurt (Even if they are destroying everything else about their own or other’s lives.) Tolerance is at war with the good on grounds of momentary happiness.

We were released from Judgment such that nothing we could ever do would separate us from our intimate relationship with God. But, just because we were released from judgment, the absence of judgment does not automatically assert the wisdom of a given set of behaviors. Actually, the absence of judgment throws the insanity of many behaviors into sharp contrast because it removes the reason for such — numbing the pain of rejection.

Love never judges others — but it can tell them the truth about how their choices are making them less human and more dead. Love sometimes has to tell people that God loves them regardless of anything they have ever done or failed to do — with tears running down His face as He sees them wreaking their lives and abandoning what they were created to enjoy. C.S. Lewis said it well when he commented:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The Weight of Glory (1949)

Salon

Her name is Christina Silvas, a 24-year-old single mother of a 5-year-old in Rancho Cordova, Calif. And as is often the case with vessels of divine intervention, these last few days have not been easy for her. Less than a month before the end of school, Silvas was told by her pastor — Rick Cole of the Capital Christian Center — that her daughter could no longer attend the church kindergarten and that she and her daughter were no longer welcome at the Assembly of God church where they have been loyal parishioners. The problem? Silvas’ job as a dancer at Gold Club Centerfolds.

“If you choose to do the wrong thing willfully, then God’s word instructs me as to what my responsibility is,” Cole told the Sacramento Bee newspaper. “I need to be faithful to my calling.”

Stories like this make my blood boil. The heart of a man who could judge a single mother trying to pay for Christian School for her daughter, throw her out of the only place where her heart could change, offer no other solutions and then toss her little girl out of kindergarten (cutting her off from her little friends) over her mother’s violation of his code of ethics is a heart that is so far from the heart of Jesus I wonder if he ever met the Guy. It’s like throwing someone out of Chemotherapy because they speed on the way to the hospital to get their next treatment — and we don’t want our hospital to be associated with speeders.

But hey — we gotta keep up our image after all… We wouldn’t want any real sinners to mess up our velvet pews now would we? After all, don’t we wanna have our Church be holy — just like Jesus???

Matt. 11:19 “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Think about it — under every nasty rumor lies a kernel of truth. I’m thinking there is a distinct possibility that Jesus went to a LOT of really wild parties with some pretty rough people — and fit in rather nicely. They needed love — and he went in to love them. Oh ya, and he probably tossed back a few too…

He didn’t ask whether they would be getting drunk, whether there would be peelers present, whether the town hookers would be recruiting, whether gluttony would be practiced or whether he could say a flowery prayer before dinner. He came, partied and wrapped his arms of love around them equally — no strings attached.

The religious leaders were convinced: somehow Jesus just didn’t get it. After all, we have to avoid even the appearance of evil. 2000 years later, we’re just as sure they were right as we fix Jesus’ methods and toss the sinners out of our pews. He’s pretty clear on his assessment of His methods too when he states, “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” Translation: Entering people’s worlds and just loving them works.

And you know, Paul clearly records that people’s hearts changed. (Cor 6:11) Their hearts changed because of love — not a good stiff threat of excommunication…

Oh yes, and the Rev. Cole? I’d suggest that if he doesn’t haul his sorry excuse for a ministry down to JC’s Girls and learn how to really love the broken, then his parishioners should make sure he is run out of that church on a rail — tared and feathered.

It’s the only way they will ever get Christina (Read Jesus Himself) back into that church. (Matt. 25:35)

ManyBooks.net

But see, there is our friend of the dancing academy just entering on the arm of her devoted father. Three months have passed since we first met her. She is much changed, yet one can scarcely see in what the change consists. The face is the same, yet not the same. There is just the shadow of coarseness in it, a little less of frank innocence and true refinement, and a trace, not exactly of ill-health, but a want of freshness. This last is, however, well concealed by the use of cosmetics, and she is still a very beautiful girl, and the fond father’s heart swells with pride as he sees the handsomest and most fashionable gentlemen of the ball-room press eagerly forward to ask her hand for the different dances of the evening.

Her father remains for a few of the square dances, but soon retires, knowing that his fair daughter will not want for attention from–gentlemen whose attentions he is sure muster desirable, certainly desirable, why not? Are these admirers not rich and handsome, and do they not move in the highest society. Ah, foolish father, how little he knows of the ways of ball-room society.

But let us turn our attention again to the dancers, at two o’clock next morning. This is the favorite waltz, and the last and most furious of the night, as well as the most disgusting. Let us notice, as an example, our fair friend once more.

She is now in the vile embrace of the Apollo of the evening. Her head rests upon his shoulder, her face is upturned to his, her bare arm is almost around his neck, her partly nude swelling breast heaves tumultuously against his, face to face they whirl on, his limbs interwoven with hers, his strong right arm around her yielding form, he presses her to him until every curve in the contour of her body thrills with the amorous contact. Her eyes look into his, but she sees nothing; the soft music fills the room, but she hears it not; he bends her body to and fro, but she knows it not; his hot breath, tainted with strong drink, is on her hair and cheek, his lips almost touch her forehead, yet she does not shrink; his eyes, gleaming with a fierce, intolerable lust, gloat over her, yet she does not quail. She is filled with the rapture of sin in its intensity; her spirit is inflamed with passion and lust is gratified in thought. With a last low wail the music ceases, and the dance for the night is ended, but not the evil work of the night.

T.A. Faulkner, former owner of the Los Angeles Dancing Academy and ex-President of Dancing Masters’ Association of the Pacific Coast, in his anti-dance crusade from 1892 wrote a 40 page tract (From the Ball-Room to Hell) filled with a rather amusing and obsessive relish for describing the carnal urges that get stirred up in people when they dance. If you are a dancer, be warned: Your life is spiraling down into a twisted pit of sin and perversion.

Welcome to the heart of the legalist. It’s a heart of shame that sees it’s own human desires and despises them. It’s a heart that sees it’s needs and takes pride in suppressing them. It’s a heart that sees the joy of others, and in it’s own loveless state, seeks to crush them. It’s a heart that sees beauty and passionate romantic desire in another and longs to profane it. It’s a heart that longs for such control over another that the death of the other is better then the other’s freedom. It is a heart of death.

In 2006, many Churches have actually hosted dancing classes and dancing only remains an issue in the most aggressively fundamentalist churches — thankfully a dying breed. While this is no longer an issue, the pattern still remains — now simply focused around other areas of life such as clothing or video games. We label these areas, define the evil present within them and then vilify the participants in such as a precursor to attempting to save them from their sin…

Those who would dispute the obvious accuracy of our judgments are subjected to our withering stare and a the rather rhetorical question: “If we do everything they [the world] do, how will they ever know we are different???” Apparently the world will know we are Christians if, as the old saying goes,

“We don’t drink, smoke, dance or screw and won’t go out with girls who do…”

Somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing that, if we avoid the issue du jour, our society will fall to their knees in repentance. Where in the world did we get the idea that telling people how we plan to put them in bondage (Much less doing it) will make them long for Jesus???

It seems to me that somewhere back in the time of the early Church, believers were known for having all of their possessions in common and displaying such an intense love for one another that thousands joined up daily.

It’s been a long time since that happened — I wonder why???

Medical News Today

The word soon got around of a nursing mother with a similar problem at another Victoria’s Secret store in Massachusetts.

Nursing mothers began to protest. 15 mothers breast-fed their babies outside a store in Westlake, Cleveland, Ohio. Breast-feeding in public places has been legal in Ohio since last year.

The mothers’ message is a simple one – breast-feeding is not dirty, it is not something that has to be done in a toilet.

The company said posters will be placed in all stores reminding employees of a nursing mother’s right to breast-feed her child at the store.

It is ironic that a company that promotes many of its products using posters of scantily-clad women with large breasts should squirm at the thought of the breast’s natural function – feeding a child.

I find it rather interesting how the thought process of North America is so bound up within its own Puritan roots that it is unable to see itself.

There are two protests really being waged here: (Both of these protests are founded upon idiocy — to say the least. )

The first is a protest by a group of activist mothers who demand the right to breast feed their children anywhere — in spite of the fact that there’s probably a sign at the front of that store that says the adults can’t have food or drink in that store either… (Yes Sherlock, newly fed infants do vomit…)

It is some sort of crusade for the rights of a woman, mothers and the appropriateness of breasts. The claim seems to be that a woman who is not permitted to feed her child in a particular location is being discriminated against for being a mother and a woman when it is really no different then the women herself being told to leave her soft-drink outside the store to protect the merchandise.

The second is over the exposure of breasts (Which the authors obviously regard as sexual/taboo) and a demand that a place where they are regularly, “Featured,” as sexual accept the exposure of those breasts under other, feared similar, terms if that store is to be consistent. The logic is then that we should accept one taboo behavior because we tolerate another taboo one.

Why are breasts sexual/taboo exactly? Well, we as a society decided to cover them up — though nearly all of the rest of the non-Islamo-fascist world is already topless or at least gets topless at the beach. (Many get totally naked with no real harm done to the society…) In other words, we created a sexual fetish by hiding something that isn’t sexual in the first place. It almost goes without saying that often the least sexual attention gets paid to genitalia proper anyway — and those other parts are usually freely exposed in our society anyway. Complete nudity on clothing optional beaches is usually also completely de-sexualized for all present in only a few minutes.

In reality, this entire story is about control. One side is defending what they see as their divine right to do whatever they want with their children wherever they want to do it — really it’s more about baby vomit on lingerie (though in our civil rights based fervor few will ever be capable of grasping that.) The other is trying to control the public display of those nasty breasts — those twin evil paragons of sexuality that will defile all viewers — out of their strange fetishistic North American world view that has decided which parts of the body are more sexual then others.

It would all be harmlessly stupid except that it’s this sort of insanity that is keeping people locked up in belief systems that teach them that their physical bodies and their sexualities (as well as their status as mothers) are shameful. Both sides do equal damage — ironically one side does it in the name of fixing that same damage. One side teaches women that their rights and status as women depend on where they can feed their children while the other simply teaches them that their bodies are sexual and, therefore, bad. Is this supposed to make us holy???

In some strange way, there’s something refreshing about clothing optional countries like Jamaica — at least people there can just live instead of continually struggling under the shame generated by both those who would repress as well as the misguided efforts of those who would rescue from that repression. At least there you can just forget about the whole absurd game…

Col. 2:20-23 ¶ If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” (which all refer to things destined to perish with the using) — in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

“New American Standard Bible®, by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission.”

Blogcritics.org

On Easter Sunday 2005, ABC’s Extreme Makeover Home Edition aired an especially poignant episode. Five children, ages 14-21, from the Higgins family were orphaned. A couple from their church, with three children of their own, took them in. The result was 10 people living in cramped quarters….

The ending segment is designed to be as heart-tugging as the first. The rebuilt home is always astonishingly beautiful and completely furnished. In the Easter Sunday special, the rebuilt home had nine bedrooms, including one for each child. The show also paid off the mortgage.

The Higgins’ happy ending did not last. The family that took them in asked them to leave the beautiful nine-bedroom home because it did not belong to the Higgins.

I wonder why the Government had to take over charity and make it into welfare — seeing as we’re doing such a great job and all… Wouldn’t Jesus be proud???

News from Agape Press

Cohen’s methods have raised some questions, however; and he has lately taken sharp criticism over a May 23 appearance on Cable News Network (CNN), in which he demonstrated a technique that involves cuddling a male client in his lap. Another of the unusual therapy techniques depicted involved a client hitting a pillow with a tennis racket while shouting the name of a parent or other individual who elicits painful childhood memories.

Cohen, who refers to himself as a reorientation therapist, explained the “holding therapy” exercise as a means of using “healthy touch” on clients, who very often were “touch deprived” as children. He says this technique is one of the most effective ways to help men and women leave homosexuality.

“They’re hungering for that intimacy and that bonding that they didn’t experience in primary relationships with parents and/or same-gender peers,” the psychotherapist asserts. “So what we have to provide then, in the Christian community, is really mentoring these men and women,” he says, “and a lot of them need healthy touch — hugging, holding, just palling around, buddying around.”

You know, some ideas are so colossally dumb nothing more needs to be said except to mention that this is not reparative therapy in any sense of the term and this is NOT PRACTICED HERE!!!!!

Insomnia

Are you dissatisfied with your sleep? Do you routinely become sleepy during the day? Does your bed partner notice any unusual behavior while you sleep? Answering “yes” to any of these questions may mean that you have a sleep disorder. Before considering non-prescription or prescription sleep medications, try the following:

Seems like good advice…

The Register

This study therefore provides no evidence for the claim that female-pattern cerebral functional lateralisation is likely in gay males.”

Hot on the heals of the discredited, “Gay gene,” comes the theory of the, “Gay mind.” Seems the research can’t back that one either…

BTW: To date, with over a decade of fruitless searching, there has never been discovered credible evidence of a direct causal relationship between biology and sexual orientation. But hey, the search must always continue.

Admitting that same sex orientation is developmental would raise the very real and present specter of healing same sex orientation for those who desire such…

DesMoinesRegister.com

A Des Moines pastor shot a mentally disabled boy with a BB gun after he ignored the pastor’s warning not to knock on his door, police said Tuesday.

No more sissy pastors for Idaho — oh no — mess with this Full Gospel pastor and your hide gets ventilated. Onward Christian soldiers — oh, wait…

Truth is so much more fun then fiction…

Probably the most richly government funded and the most poorly researched program in existence is AA. It is a program that claims to bring freedom to millions — whom it tells will always be alcoholics, must attend meetings for the rest of their natural life and must spend such, “Working their program.” Not surprisingly, it has a failure rate of at least 80% and probably is failing at a rate of 95%. For the curious, here are some references:

There are so many voices it is difficult to determine the original source but the information was initially (Quite accidently) released from AA’s own internal studies — which they have been aggressively working to suppress ever since. The most public airing of the data occurred August 20/2004 at 11:00pm and September 12/2004 at 9:00pm on the Showtime original show called, “Penn & Teller: Bullshit.”
    Due to AA’s efforts, the documents are not widely available so Penn & Teller showed them onscreen during their broadcast. They detail a 95% failure (to cease drinking) rate at 5yrs from date of entry.

In my mind, one of the best secular treatment programs out there is St. Jude . A different but parallel retention statistic is right on their home page as well which states that 95% of people don’t even last a year in the program… Do the math: If 97% of programs are AA based, then it comes out even worse then 95% unless there is some hidden program out there with 10 million people in it… St. Jude runs a treatment program that sounds a lot like a secular Living Water’s/Regeneration Ministries program for chemical addictions.
    This is the future of secular level treatment. They have an independently verified 70% success rate — the best in the industry.

Another voice has been Dr. Jeffrey Schaler (Author of, “Addiction is a choice.”) who solidly disputes both that Alcoholism is a disease or that disease related models (Like AA) have any success in treating the disorder. His claim is that while AA appears to help 5% of people who go through it, 5% of people who undertake no treatment manage to get well on their own.

A third has been Jim Christopher — SOS Sobriety — who is willing to give AA only an 80% failure rate at 2yrs from entry. He then disputes the success of such through a detailed assessment of the group think, thought control, cloning, mystique, self-confessions, group speak, fear of judgment, increasing codependency, unhealthy identification and veneration of texts/leaders as being identical to the functioning of a cult. He questions whether the persons have simply exchanged one addiction — alcohol — for another — thought control.
    He is making a critical assessment here in that he understands that addiction is addiction. Just because the socially unacceptable behavior has stopped does not mean that you suddenly have a fully functional person able to live the fully human lives they were created to enjoy.

A fourth is a gentleman by the name of Dr. Lance Dodes MD (The author of, “The heart of addiction.”) who again disputes the idea that alcoholism is in any way related to a disease. He believes that the root of addiction is emotional pain and the practice of an addiction is a maladaptive strategy of coping with such.
    He, by implication, is probably one of the more aggressive in this area as the entire thrust of his argument is that AA is treating symptoms (The behavior of drinking) — not the problem. Thus, any apparent healing seen can not be legitimate — it’s a mask for the problem that just makes it look good but further shatters the person. (He would probably even dispute the 5%…)

S.M.A.R.T. Recovery program’s web site notes that, to date, the effectiveness of AA and related programs is essentially unproven. S.M.A.R.T is a secular humanist treatment program. They are somewhat less then effective but they are a very interesting read as an option…

It just takes common sense really. Clients who have been in AA tell me that they never wanted to drink more then when they were in the program. By the time you label people addicts, then judge people for their failures and then tell those who are already at the end of their rope to work harder (while holding their wounded feet to the fire), it’s only logical that they need a pain killer…

Here’s the bottom line: Statistically, people will always have a better chance of recovering if they have never been exposed to AA’s alcoholism and drug addiction treatment programs.

Just in case it isn’t already clear, we do not and will not use 12 step programs of any sort.

Strike the root — Newman

In his classic book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes “the real snag” in creating a Christian society: “Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: We are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party . . . . A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and most of us are not going to want it until we become fully Christian.” This will not happen until enough individuals choose to become Christians. Even then, while our social ills may abate, they will not disappear.

“Now hold on there, Newman,” you are saying. “Wait just a cottonpickin’ minute. Aren’t you cherry picking from Christianity to find support for the views of your party.” Well, my party is unique among political parties in that it is consistent in its commitment to a philosophy which says, among other things, that government cannot solve problems, and that we should therefore not count on it to do so. Jesus, likewise, never suggested that we look to the government to solve our problems.

Paul stated many times that the law existed to teach us about how broken we are as people. It was a schoolmaster, to teach us what it was to be good — and how poor we are at such. The law was simply there to be some sort of standard while we were not yet ready for anything else.

The Law never died. Paul is very clear that we died to the law and that the law is still very much alive to those who are or chose to be under such. It exists for those who have not yet embraced grace.Those who still need such based on their old heart and their lack of ability to hear God which is a direct result of the presence of that old heart.

Libertarianism postulates a society that is largely governed by an extremely limited set of rules — the constitution and the associated violations of person and property. The rest is left up to the person/company as the Government has just walked away. Presumably, in the absence of government control, the public will vote to walk away from the products of abusive companies, band together in unions to fight them and generally orchestrate their lives in the most effective ways possible. There is a lot of truth there for it at least admits that the government is remarkably poor at solving anything other then wars — often not even those. (Reality is that whenever the Church goes looking for the law to assist in the eradication of evil, she always receives a law bent upon controlling her.)

However, Libertarianism is not some postulation of an endless class struggle. It also includes an assumption of the natural goodness of people for it assumes that the poor will be taken care of by private charity etc. It assumes that our delinquent churches will step up and resume their natural and long abdicated role in ministering to the broken — using the funds the now de-taxed society will have to give them for this purpose.

To be sure, the strength of the Libertarian case largely rests on the failure of other forms of government — not it’s own merits… It’s own merits rest on some critical assumptions (the goodness of other people for example) that may or may not be real. Its purpose is the very well justified counter balancing of Big-Brother style thought policing that both Republican and Democrat governments have aggressively pursued — not any reasonable chance of undoing +200yrs of federalism. However, it still begs the question: Would it work better?

My suspicion is that, if Paul was correct in his assessment of the law being a necessary schoolmaster, then Libertarianism is, as it’s proponents assume, the most effective form of government — but only for a society of believers. (The rest still need to be under the law for their hearts are bent upon destruction.)

It would, in either case, certainly bring a level of honesty to society: You would either have a society of class struggle or you will have a society that looks a lot like Acts 2:42-45 which describes First Century Christians who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship of the breaking of the bread and to prayer . . . . All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as they had need.”

If Paul was correct, then Libertarianism will likely succeed to the degree that the society governed by such is Christian enough to cope with total freedom and fail to the degree that we are still bound up in avarice and control. Which one are we?

How Do People Get Saved if They Are Not Permitted to Attend Our Church?

If an unsaved person thinks they can spend the whole year having fun at God’s expense and tiptoe into our Bible believing church on Easter Sunday morning thinking that everything is just a-ok with Jesus, they are in for a big surprise! If our Deacons don’t smack ‘em upside their hell bound heads, they’ll at least call the police and have them arrested for trespassing and trying to break an entering into God’s Holy House! Praise Jesus! Friends, You and I both know that modernism has crept into almost every single church in this country except for ours. We put our foot down in 1952 and said NO! to the foolish modern idea of allowing the enemies of the cross – the unsaved – to fellowship with us. It’s unbiblical, anti-Christian, and downright dangerous to allow unsaved people into God’s house. God doesn’t allow it in Heaven, and as it is in Heaven, SO BE IT ON EARTH! Amen!”

Support our ministry: Click here to purchase your, “What would Jesus do thong.”

Landoverbaptist is a well deserved parody of a fictitious church.

Ok, yes I know I’m totally evil for posting anything from this guy/site — but I can’t resist — it’s just too true for so many churches.

Think about it:

What would happen tomorrow morning at your church’s 11:00am service if your local wino/street person decided to attend? He walks in the door and manages to offend at least one little old lady by telling her that she, “Surrr is Purdy,” in his overly loud and slurred voice. He stumbles his way into the sanctuary and collapses in the tenth pew from the front where he begins to hum some old hymn in an out of tune manner. The service starts and he decides to move closer to the front. Half way there, he stumbles, falls face first in the aisle and passes out there for the remainder of the service — snoring loudly.

Ok, what’s the likelihood that the police would be called to remove him — thus adding another Drunk and Disorderly charge to his rap sheet?

Matt 25:40 “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.”

I think he summarizes it best himself on a banner ad on the bottom of one of his pages where he states:

“The real Jesus forgives your jesus for being a greedy Republican warmonger.”

“New American Standard Bible®, The Lockman Foundation Used by permission.”

Talk To Action (Updated)

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old.

Isn’t it interesting how fundamentalist railing against the evils of your local video game retailer can so suddenly turn to embrace the same when it fits their self righteousness??? These same people would rise up en mass to decry the Palestinian’s video game which trains suicide bombers to kill the most — then Left Behind publishes this???

Let’s convert the world this weekend — by killing people who don’t agree with us.

U2 LYRICS

“Pride (In The Name Of Love)”

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come, he to justify
One man to overthrow

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach.
One man betrayed with a kiss

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

(nobody like you…)

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love…

Bono had it so right…

Yahoo! News

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage.

A slippery slope argument is an argument that states that, “Though _____ is not that bad, it will result in damage to society based on what it will allow to be legitimized in the long run.”

Every time someone has the nerve to speak out against a society giving public blessing to a disordered behavior using a so-called, “Slippery slope,” argument, that person is usually subjected to public mockery and a series of case studies which claim to show that the slope doesn’t exist.

Ironically, the usual case study cited is Holland which, in the proponent’s mind, proves you can legitimize all sorts of things and see no further disintegration of society or abuse of children.

Where are all those stridently confident voices now that a recognized political party in Holland would like you to be able to have a threesome with your neighbor’s 12yr old kid

— and her pet dog?

U.S. Life – MSNBC.com

A small group of members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., who have been demonstrating around the country at military funerals, sang “God hates America” to the tune of “God Bless America” and held signs that read “God is America’s terror”, “Thank God for dead soldiers”, “You’re going to hell”, and “Bush killed them.”

…Margie Phelps, spokeswoman for the Westboro church group, said the group was protesting because “Congress doesn’t have the power and can’t pass enough laws to stop the wrath of God” against homosexuals.

“America is doomed because she has institutionalized sin and exalted homosexuality,” she said.

Ahh, the love of Christ and a warm call to the healing He offers — delivered in the most gentle of terms by the most loving of people — rings out across a cemetery. (It’s too bad HTML doesn’t have a sarcasm tag…)

Of course, at least the context is correct: A bunch of dead people preaching to, well, a bunch of dead people. If only they were the only ones around…

It’s rather ironic to me that Bush (Who at least claims to be a Christian) has been forced to specially pass a bill to make protesting at funerals a crime — just to keep these passionate lovers of Jesus and their fellow man from destroying the hearts of grieving mothers in their insane crusade.

Isn’t it amazing how those who claim to know the love of Christ can fall so blissfully in love with the idea of savaging the broken — instead of running the field hospital they were called to operate???

How to Have Great Sex Every Time

Sexual response was measured in couples involved in committed relationships — before and after receiving CAT training. Prior to learning CAT, only 23% of the women reported achieving orgasm during intercourse on a regular basis. After CAT, that figure jumped to 77%. Before CAT, no women reported having regular simultaneous orgasms with their partners. Afterward, one-third of the women reported doing so.

Almost all participants reported at least some improvement in their sex lives following CAT training. In fact, the only participants who failed to benefit were those whose relationships were already jeopardized by nonsexual factors.

We in the church should be having the best sex on earth — sadly, it is more often then not a guilt ridden and bumbling affair.

The vast majority of women never experience orgasm through penetrative sex. For most, it is not the result of an inconsiderate husband such as is so often parodied on television. It is usually the result of ignorance (on the part of both husband and wife) of sexual techniques and skills.

This article is a solid explanation of one such skill set called the Coital Alignment Technique. (CAT) CAT is a clinically researched sexual position that allows clitoral stimulation during penetrative intercourse.

Someone you love will thank you tonight — once you get it figured out.

Virginity or Death!

…all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty… in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer — goes poof.

Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

As usual, the Christian Right comes out in favor of — well — not much of anything. Completely ignoring the reality that sex is not the only way to get HPV, they apparently don’t want to vaccinate the population in fear that — yes, you guessed it — people might have more sex…

I wonder what Jesus would have to say about those who fail to heal the sick because it violates their sense of ethics? Oh wait: seems he already registered His opinion on such when He healed on the Sabbath…

Well, obviously we can ignore that — because it wasn’t about {GASP}

SEX!!!!

SBCPRAY.NET

Personal

Before we pray for others, we should pray for ourselves, that we would be right with God and in fellowship with Him.

* Ask God to bring to mind any sins in your life and heart.
* Confess those sins God has brought to your mind and receive His forgiveness and cleansing.
* To confess is to agree together with God’s verdict upon sin (Greek-homologeo-to say the same thing as another.) To agree with God about sin is specific, not general.
* When we confess our sin to God, we have assurance He will cleanse us of it. It is His promise; He will not break His Word. See I John 1:9 above.

Once again, the Church launches it’s pathetic crusade against sin in Her members — this time in the guise of a call to pray for America. The formula is simple: First purge all of the sin out of your heart — then God will listen to you. Insert the right number of quarters into the cosmic vending machine and God will give you what you want.

(It’s the perfect fall back plan really: “Since I have a direct line to God and He always does what I say, if God doesn’t give me what I want, I obviously have failed to purge sin out of my life.” I guess my sin is such an awful shock to God He turns away in nausea and obviously can’t hear my prayer…)

Scripture is emphatically clear in so many places that absolutely NOTHING can ever separate us from God. Yet, it is this whole serial repentance teaching/system that causes so many people to be so concerned about sin. It builds theologies that produce the illusion of holiness because they rank violations of the law from mostly OK to downright nasty and then try to avoid/confess the nasty ones believing that, once they have done so, God is again their buddy. It’s a pity the list is ever shifting…

This is so common in our churches today. It’s like the pastor stands up at the front and there is a dividing line down the center of the stage. On the one side are sins like gossip, judgment, eating bacon double cheeseburgers (And other dietary laws) and all of them are under the blood of Christ. On the other side are real sins like homosexuality, adultery, abortion etc. and each seems to come with the demand that the practitioners of such be railed against and condemned. The pastor stands on one side with the pardoned sins and rails against the rest demanding that they stop and RIGHT NOW!!! It’s idiocy and it cheapens what Christ did for us. Without a grasp of how terribly and totally broken we are as a flawed species, we can never experience a holy excitement about how loved we really are.

You will somehow manage to violate the law of God in the next thirty seconds. Want me to prove it? OK. You either just committed the sin of arrogance because you are questioning how that could be true of you or you just committed the sin of self centered contempt after you dug up your secret thought crime — either that or you have treated me with contempt because you are currently asleep while reading my writings — HOW DARE YOU!!! (See I’m a damn fine counselor — I just made you a law breaker… ) Uh oh, you just judged me for swearing — see I’m on a roll…

Unless we come to an understanding of how shattered we were, we are still, at some level, going to reject ourselves for His love will never settle into the deep places of our hearts. Attempts to make sure I have confessed sin (Remember, all of them are equal in God’s eyes) to be eligible to pray to God are an absurdest exercise in self deception because I violate the old code of law (Which I am never to be under again) so often I would never have enough time in any day to confess it all. This is a Joy filled pessimism: I will never come to the end of my brokenness because it is who I am — and that’s absolutely amazing!!!!!

It’s amazing because, In that state, God in his love gave me a new heart — a new identity. In Romans 8:15 Paul makes it so clear that I may once have been a sinner, a homosexual, an adulterer or a gossip but that is no longer who I am. Because of such, I am freed to climb out of the mud puddle I have been rolling in, to run right into the presence of a Holy God, climb up on His lap, wrap my arms around His neck and squeal Dada and receive love from Him for I have been made holy, I am now called a saint and a beloved and forever adopted child of the Most High King. The impact of the Gospel is first and foremost relationship — whatever happens after that is just a bonus — not the goal.

In other words, my response to that love IS the transformation of the Gospel in me. (It may have an ethical look to it but the improvement to ethics is irrelevant — ethics are only one evidence of transformation — not the transformation itself.)

When we make our behaviors the issue and stopping (Or at least confessing) the focus, we commit a cardinal error. Gal 2:16-21 addresses that problem: “But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be! “For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor.

Paul is saying something critical there that I’m going to try paraphrase:

“If you, in your desire to be holy, have again adopted a performance and rule based system of evaluating whether you are acceptable and have used the Gospel to justify such, then you are making Christ Lord over a system of death again for having to perform killed me in that it made me want to be bad. That can’t happen. If you again put together a system of rules (Written on new tablets of stone) to follow in place of the new law (written on tablets of flesh), all you manage to do is to again make yourself into a person under the condemnation of your new system of rules which Christ came to abolish.” (Stone/flesh metaphor taken from Ez. 36:26-27)

If we have to create a pure heart by going through a religious exercise in confessing every transgression before we believe God will listen to us, we have first of all climbed back under the law to which we died. We have then taken that law and used it to judge ourselves — which God Himself will not do now that we are in Christ. We add insult to injury through creating a new system of sacrifices whereby we figure we can pay for our sins by just reciting a prayer — which insults a God who had to die for that problem. We finally stand before our cosmic vending machine with just the right number of quarters and believe that we can now buy God’s performance. How dare we?

It’s either about relationship with Jesus wherein we address lies that keep us from total freedom to be in His presence (holding His hand where our new hearts want to be) or it’s about cleaning up our act and fighting a war we can only even remotely look like we are winning if we delude ourselves. (And evil wins anyway because we have taken our eyes off our focus — Jesus.)

Shaulah.com

To claim we believe is simply not enough. The call of Jesus is one that demands action. (Erwin McManus in The Barbarian Way)

In nearly every church in North America, we are repeatedly told that salvation is a free gift. That God came, looked down upon us and realized that we would never be able to get to heaven on our own so he came and made a way for us through dying for our sins on the cross. We are simply called to accept His free gift. And, it’s all good as we are welcomed into the kingdom and the door swings shut behind us.

But then, as the latch clicks home, the story changes. We are then told that this free gift really wasn’t a free gift after all. It was more of a lease arrangement. That God looked down upon us and realized that we needed a car to drive to heaven but couldn’t make the down-payment. So, He made it for us — but now we have to keep up the payments by being really really good or… What? Well, something will happen… The best explanation that they can offer is the suggestion that, “Maybe you were never one of His…” Welcome to prison.

Somehow, we are to believe that there is a magical power we are given that allows us, for the very first time, to pull off being good. Christ in you provides the energy to be good — and being good proves that Christ is in you. Trouble is, that’s none of us…

So, we struggle, we fight, we lie to others and, mostly, we lie to ourselves trying to convince ourselves that we have somehow managed to stop violating the law for, oh, say, 30 seconds this time?

We tell ourselves that we have to be good for God can not look upon sin. In other words, God is basically as highly developed as your house cat. If you are nice to Him and do what He wants, He likes you. If not, He sticks His head in a corner and sulks. All because you didn’t perform — and not even God could find a way to fix it — not even with the cross??? Friedrich Nietzsche made the comment that, “God created man in His own image, and man returned the favor.” He was so on the money there.

RIGHT… Sign me up for that sort of holiness…

When Martin Luther concluded that Salvation had to be, “By faith alone,” he was simultaneously recognizing his own inability to be good, the need for God to place His righteousness upon him and that the only action He could take was to stop trying to create His own Righteousness. Christ in you has to do the rest — not our own efforts — as our heart responds to His transforming love.

Anything else is a false gospel. It’s a demand we perform and that’s salvation by works.

TBO.com: AP Entertainment

A student at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College was charged in the theft of his roommate’s debit card, which was used to pay for more than $2,300 worth of calls to phone sex lines, prosecutors allege in court papers.

So, why is it that the most fundamentalist of establishments with the highest codes of morals and the most determined adherents to said code of law don’t even seem to be able to corral the behaviors on their naughty list — to say nothing about the rest of the behaviors they believe God winks at?

If we could manage to stop the behaviors we considered really bad, there maybe would be a case for legalism — we could worry about the rest later. But, we can’t — in fact, we usually manage a few of those behaviors at once. Holiness is a myth supported only by dividing our crimes and misdemeanors up into, “Really bad,” and, “Not so bad,” categories and then deluding ourselves into believing that we don’t actually commit the bad ones.

If we are going to have any holiness, it’s gonna have to be a gift straight from God. Of course, that gift was already given — freely, without strings attached and without threat of having it rescinded for our bad behaviors because the law that defined bad behaviors — well, it doesn’t apply to dead people: people who have already died with Christ.

That would be you — if you are His…

But then, if you are His, that means you can never again estimate yourself in degrees of righteousness or perversion. You can never again stand in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and erect fences of law to keep you from facing your fears. You will have to go out there, stand so naked, unrestrictedly free and exposed in such a dangerously wide open world that you would die without a hand so much greater then your own to hold.

Of course, while holding that hand, you are a lot less likely to walk into those places where you hung out before — those places where your anthropology was so brutally eroded while you thought you were having fun — but the improvement in your ethics really isn’t especially relevant. It isn’t about that anymore. It’s about being His.

CANOE — CNEWS – Canada

Club Eden, which opened just last weekend, is a so-called “on-premises” club, which means private and shared rooms are available for members. Other clubs typically meet in hotel rooms or private homes.

The Supreme Court decision allowed Club Eden and others like it to stop being so discreet about what’s been going on behind their closed doors – and to try to open people’s minds at the same time, Fox said.

“There’s a lot of perceptions about (the swinging community). One of the things we’re trying hard to do is to eliminate the negative perspective that does surround it and really bring forward the positive.”

Well, we all knew it was exploding — now someone finally confirms it. What is really striking to me is that one of the key motivations — latent same sex attractions — is largely being ignored in favor of simplistic assessments of repressive society keeping people in the closet. (Exactly the same logic used in the late 70’s and early 80’s with homosexuality/lesbianism proper.)

Los Angeles Times

Rosenbaum found that 52% of those who said they had signed virginity pledges had had sex within a year. And of those who had sex after telling the first interviewers they had taken the pledge, 73% denied in the second interview having made the pledge.

Ok, this is too much fun to pass up: Not only is this just one more evidence that the law never made anyone holy, it’s also proof that it isn’t even very memorable…

Insomnia and Other Sleep Disorders

Valerian has been used as a medicinal herb since at least the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Its therapeutic uses were described by Hippocrates, and in the 2nd century, Galen prescribed valerian for insomnia [5,7]. In the 16th century, it was used to treat nervousness, trembling, headaches, and heart palpitations [8]. In the mid-19th century, valerian was considered a stimulant that caused some of the same complaints it is thought to treat and was generally held in low esteem as a medicinal herb [2]. During World War II, it was used in England to relieve the stress of air raids [9].

As per request. This works!!!

The case for advocating and teaching self-defense against rape

A thorough review of the available literature has led us to some surprising conclusions about the effectiveness of traditional anti-rape advice. Women are often advised to use non-aggressive strategies against sexual assault (Storaska, 1975; Channing L. Bete Co., What every woman should know about rape, 1989; Channing L. Bete Co., What women and men should know about date rape, 1989). Research suggests that this is poor advice. According to one study (Zoucha-Jensen and Coyne, 1993), women who used non-forceful verbal strategies, such as crying or pleading with the assailant, were raped about 96% of the time. In the same study, women who did nothing to protect themselves were raped about 93% of the time.

Forceful verbal resistance, including yelling and loud screaming, was more effective than non-forceful verbal resistance. These strategies were associated with completion of rape from 44% – 50% of the time (Quinsey and Upfold, 1985). This study is particularly interesting because the data were collected from rapists in maximum security psychiatric hospitals, showing that forceful verbal strategies can be effective even against the violently insane.

Running worked even better than verbal resistance. Although researchers who relied on rape crisis center records and police records (Zoucha-Jensen and Coyne, 1993) report a 55% rape completion rate against those who attempted to flee, broader studies such as Bart and O’Brien (1985) indicate that only 15% of women who attempted to flee were raped. Running was also associated with a lower rate of injury (Kleck and Sayles, 1990; Siegel et al., 1989; Ullman and Knight, 1991).

Forceful physical resistance was an extremely successful strategy. The completed rape rate dropped to between 45% and 14% when the rapist’s attempt was met with violent physical force (Kleck and Sayles, 1990; Siegel et al., 1989; Ullman and Knight, 1992; Zoucha-Jensen and Coyne, 1993). Striking was more successful than pushing or wrestling (Quinsey and Upfold, 1985). Physical resistance also appears to be more effective when assault occurs outdoors (Quinsey and Upfold, 1985).

It’s about time someone finally said it…

KCCI.com – News – Publisher Won’t Print Bibles With Porn Reference

{SARCASM}Once again, the church is out there spreading the Good News that Jesus wants you to get your act together. Isn’t it nice to know the love of God comes with strings attached???

In other news, Rahab and Mary Magdalene just seen fleeing heaven…{/SARCASM}

That being said though, the organization (xxxchurch.org) that is trying to print those Bibles is insane enough to be responsible for this: (No, I’m not kidding…)

Every time you masturbate…God Kills a kitten!

Who needs soap operas when we have Christianity???

Pensacola College rewrites the definition of legalism — yet again…

Sabrina Poirier, a student at Pensacola who withdrew in 1997, was disciplined for what is known on the campus as “optical intercourse” — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as “making eye babies.” While the rule does not appear in written form, most students interviewed for this article were familiar with the concept.

I think I’ve finally found it — Christian fundamentalism at its finest. A must read for anyone who still can’t figure out why the credibility of the Church is at an all time low and North America is rapidly becoming a pagan continent…

Text Archived here:

Frequent (Daily) ejaculations counter prostate cancer.

The study suggested that frequent ejaculations may decrease the concentration of “chemical carcinogens which readily accumulate in prostatic fluid” and may reduce the development of crystalloids “which have been associated with prostate cancer in some.”

This is a strong counterpoint to the, “Hair growing on knuckles,” and, “Retention of life force,” theories/arguments against ejaculation.

Obviously, this does not address the addictive component many find in sexuality (Including masturbation) but it fits well with other medical findings/disastrous fundamentalist experiments in zero ejaculation that have been seen.

Apparently, the male body was designed to have sex — and lots of it.

It is also worth noting that other studies suggest that ‘having a variety of partners or frequent sexual activity’ could increase the risk of prostate cancer by 40 per cent through the risk of STD.

Los Angeles Times

The below image says it all…

(With thanks to George Orwell — 1984.)

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. -Benjamin Franklin