Tina Brown joins the religiophobes

Money quote:

The prayer, so to speak, was that the new pope might miraculously turn out to be a shot in the arm not just for anti-materialism but also for anti-religious humbug, anti-medievalism and anti-repressive orthodoxy. Instead of which it looks as if we are in for more dogma closing the windows of our world -- unless he enjoys an epiphany.

That's it right there. Those in favor of "the truth of spiritual liberty," as Tina puts it, feel they are enlightened and that the "fundamentalists" who believe that 2 + 2 = 4 need to be helped to experience this same enlightenment.

Teacher sex

Why is thishappening?

A Brooklyn middle-school teacher - a married mother of three - was arrested yesterday on sex-abuse charges, becoming the third female educator nabbed in a week for alleged shenanigans with male students. Joanna Hernandez, 27, was collared after allegedly embracing and kissing a 15- year-old eighth-grader in an empty classroom inside IS 55 in Brownsville nearly a week ago. She was charged with misdemeanor sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.

Abortion and Homosexuality

Robert Knight, spokesman for Concerned Women of America, explains why Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson would speak at Planned Parenthood's national conferene:

"A lot of people wonder why homosexuals would be interested in the abortion issue at all, but it really all comes together in one place," he explains, "and that is the challenge to God's plan for the family and for sex as exclusively something that brings a husband and a wife together and produces children. The abortion movement and the homosexual movement have long supported each other.

Theocracy

The New York Times lead editorial yesterday said that Bill Frist's stand on filibusters of judicial nominees "is determined to get judges on the federal bench who are loyal to the Republican fringe and, he hopes, would accept a theocratic test on decisions."

I was startled when I saw the word "theocratic." But a quick google search of the word turned up some very interesting things, including the following website: www.theocracywatch.org

One of the most interesting things on there was a comment from the lefty blog daily kos, in an article titled "How to Beat the Christian Right":

The answer to the power of the Christian Right is electoral power of our own. No excuses. Many of us have tended to abandon this cornerstone of citizenship in favor of other things.  It is time to get our priorities strait. Less talk, more action. Less entertainment, more citizen involvement. Less TV and sports. More electoral politics. Do we want the theocrats to win?  More electoral politics.

If we believe that democracy is a good thing, we need to learn to get very good at it. We need to be better at it than those who would destroy it.

I'm tempted to say that anything that gets people watching less TV is good, but this is also a warning to Christians and the church. If we are left sitting on the couch with the remote while secular humanists are reading books and organizing and meeting and sharing their message with others, we will have completely forfeited any claims on grace and blessing and we will deserve whatever the ramifications are.

Also fascinating was a conference scheduled two weeks from now in New York called "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right." The conference is co-sponsored by the NY Open Center and CUNY Graduate Center Public Programs, and has seminars with the following titles:

Fundamentalism: The Fear and the Rage

The Rise of Dominionism in the U.S. Government

Millennialist and Apocalyptic Influences on Dominionism

Learning about the Christian Right, and What in the World to Do

The Real Hidden Religious Agenda: The Theocratic States of America

Is an Unholy American Theocracy Here?

On the Psychology and Theocracy of George W. Bush: Reflections in a Culture of Fear

Christian Jihad

Jesus Plus Nothing: Elite Fundamentalism, Pragmatic Dominionism

Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration

Fear on the left

The Daily Ledger makes some great points about the Dems reaction to Frist's stand on filibusters, and about what this signals for Frist's political career as well.

"I am disappointed that in an attempt to hide what the debate is really about, Senator Frist would exploit religion like this," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. "Participating in something designed to incite divisiveness and encourage contention is unacceptable. I would hope that Senator Frist will rise above something so beyond the pale."

Incite divisiveness?  Using that definition isn't that exactly what Reid and his liberal cohorts are doing when they refuse to allow judicial nominees and up or down vote in front of the full Senate?

Reid's criticism is a smoke screen.  He's only frightened of the Christian base and their opinions on unconstitutional filibusters.

This is a unique opportunity for Bill Frist.  Reportedly the good doctor has some very serious presidential aspirations for 2008 and if he can force the Dems hand and get these judges their "day in court" [aka a vote in front of the full Senate] then he has done his job as party leader in the Senate and will score some very serious points with the primary voting conservative base.

Both/And vs. Either/Or

Ravi Zacharias told the story of speaking to a Hindu professor.

Ravi said that the pantheistic worldview is systemically contradictory. Anything can basically mean anything; terms are meaningless.

Afterward, the professor said that Ravi did not understand the two kinds of logic—the law of non-contradiction, an either/or way of thinking, which is Western thought, and then there is the law of both/and way of thinking, the dialectical system, which is Eastern.

The professor said that the dialectical system applied to Hinduism, not the either/or system.

Ravi said, “You’re telling me that when I discuss the Hindu religion, I either use the both/and system of logic or nothing else, is that right?”

He said, “The either/or way of thinking does seem to emerge, doesn’t it?”

Ravi said, “Even in India you look both ways when you cross the street, it’s either you or the bus.” He was using the either/or system to prove the both/and.

Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual Episcopal Bishop (of N.H.), said the following during a speech at Planned Parenthood’s 2005 Leadership Conference Prayer Breakfast, in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

We need to teach that the world is not black and white. This current administration notwithstanding, the world is not black and white. We need to teach people about nuance, about holding things in tension, that this can be true, and that can be true, and somewhere between is the right answer. It's a very adult way of living you know, and people don't like it. They're not entirely comfortable, and it is way more comfortable to know black and white, and to believe one is right and the other is wrong.

What an unimaginative God it would be if God only put one meaning in any verse of Scripture...

So Mr. Robinson, are you saying we see the world either with nuance or with nothing else? A nuanced view would suggest that it's okay to see the world, and sex and morality, with both a black and white view and a nuanced view. Which makes it, in your own words, perfectly fine for me to have a black and white view.

Who are the radicals?

Bill Frist has finally decided to press for an end to the Dems filibustering, which has the left in histrionics.

The New York Times editorial on Saturday was titled, "Bill Frist's Religious War." The anti-Christian, hysterical tone of the piece simply confirms everything the editors are trying to attack and deny.

"Senator Frist is determined to get judges on the federal bench who are loyal to the Republican fringe and, he hopes, would accept a theocratic test on decisions," the Times writes.

This kind of bizarre and misleading name-calling is the surest sign that the New York Times and much of the left is scared to death that Frist is calling the Dems bluff on this issue.

MUST READ - American Youth's Religion

Al Mohler's blog (there is a permanent link on the menu to the right) is an absolute must read. Yesterday he wrote about a significant study on the religious views of young people.

The study itself states:

"...A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually [only] tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but is rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism...The language, and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, . . . and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward."

Christians have conformed to the world by moving away from a God-centered universe to a self-centered one.

Even more alarming is this emphasis on "an earned heavenly reward." That is a false gospel. It is heresy.

Mohler delivers a stunning conclusion. It is not a surprising conclusion, but it is clear, stark, and backed up now by hard information, and Mohler states it articulately.

"...We face a succession of generations who have transformed Christianity into something that bears no resemblance to the faith revealed in the Bible. The faith 'once delivered to the saints' is no longer even known, not only by American teenagers, but by most of their parents. Millions of Americans believe they are Christians, simply because they have some historic tie to a Christian denomination or identity.

We now face the challenge of evangelizing a nation that largely considers itself Christian, overwhelmingly believes in some deity, considers itself fervently religious, but has virtually no connection to historic Christianity. Christian Smith and his colleagues have performed an enormous service for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in identifying Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the dominant religion of this American age. Our responsibility is to prepare the church to respond to this new religion, understanding that it represents the greatest competitor to biblical Christianity. More urgently, this study should warn us all that our failure to teach this generation of teenagers the realities and convictions of biblical Christianity will mean that their children will know even less and will be even more readily seduced by this new form of paganism. This study offers irrefutable evidence of the challenge we now face."

Fighting for Islam

Since the election terrorism has slid off the front burner, but if another attack happens, it will of course slide right back.

Last June Policy Review published an essay on a topic that is by and large ignored--how to ideologically fight Islamic terrorism. Sec of Defense Rumsfeld and Sec of State Rice have both said that this is crucial, but few in the media have written about this.

The essay is called "Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism." It is written by Shmuel Bar, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel and a veteran of the Israeli intelligence community.

Here is his conclusion:

Only by setting up a clear demarcation between orthodox and radical Islam can the radical elements be exorcized. The priority of solidarity within the Islamic world plays into the hands of the radicals. Only an Islamic Kulturkampf can redraw the boundaries between radical and moderate in favor of the latter. Such a struggle must be based on an in-depth understanding of the religious sources for justification of Islamist terrorism and a plan for the creation of a legitimate moderate counterbalance to the radical narrative in Islam. Such an alternative narrative should have a sound base in Islamic teachings, and its proponents should be Islamic scholars and leaders with wide legitimacy and accepted credentials.11 The “Middle-Easternization” of Asian Muslim communities should also be checked.