Civil Commotion

I think Christians need to be concerned about this because Christian care demands that we be able to help the people all around us who are struggling. We’re in a culture where Christians are the only ones that can teach moral sanity in the midst of the moral craziness we’re in.

Thus speaks a genuine-article Christian counselor explaining why he rejects “that a human being could possess a gender other than the one indicated by biological sex.”

Sex is plumbing, and that’s that. And those who don’t accept what a bunch of Bronze Age goatherders thought about it are just plain wrong. So there.

Tom Rich explains how pastors are a major engine of Christianity’s decline.

These guys have more money then ever before to preach the gospel. They have more avenues by which to share the gospel then ever before. They have more celebrity status then ever before. They have more congregants then ever before. They take more Holy Land trips then ever before. They cruise more European rivers with members of their congregations then ever before. They stomp and yell and criticize their congregants more than ever before.

Notice this, too:

So like they did with Santa Claus, they begin to question what they were told. This is okay. This is healthy. Whatever religion they were taught should be able to stand up to public scrutiny.

This second point, I think, will ultimately be more damaging to Christianity, and to religion in general, than the hypocrisies and childish theatrics, for there will always be insecure people who need to belong to a club, who will submit to any humiliation in order to belong somewhere.

Whether one approaches the Abrahamic narratives with the perspective of science, or Biblical scholarship, the bottom line is the same: The narratives are untrue. Some people will never understand the science, but everybody can understand that most scholars doubt Moses ever existed, and that there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the Egyptian captivity.

It can’t stand up to educated scrutiny, so it’s over.

Scott Walker will announce he is ending his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination at 5:00 PM (EST) today.

Bill Donohue is at it again, this time taking George Will to task for, coincidentally, the very column I approvingly quoted below.

If it weren’t for Catholicism, there would be no Age of Science, so it is mind-boggling that Will would suggest otherwise. More recently, as Pope Benedict XVI has said, when faith and reason are severed, serious problems emerge. Will gets the latter but not the former. Neither did the 20th century’s totalitarians.

This is … amazing. Is Donohue so ignorant he actually believes these things, or is he merely making a bleating sound intended to comfort those who are so ignorant that they believe these things?

If it weren’t for Catholicism, there would be no Age of Science …

This claim is so grotesquely at odds with reality that it seems hardly possible that Donohue could actually believe it. The Roman church suppressed the writings of Epicurus, and Aristotle, and its 1000-year long domination of the West is known as the Dark Ages for a reason — because the progress of science, logic, and the arts stopped. Stopped.

There was a supernova in 1054, and for the next 2-years there were 3-lights in the sky — the sun, the moon, and the supernova. Chinese astronomers noted it. Arabic astronomers noted it. Cave-dwellers in the American southwest noted it. Cave-dwellers in South America noted it. But in all the libraries and museums of the world then governed by Rome, there is not a single scrap of paper nor a single pictograph to suggest that anybody noticed it.

That is how dark the West was during the years it was governed by the Catholic Church.

And then Donohue goes on to link Will’s entirely justified criticism to … who, exactly? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot?

If Donohue had a shred of intellectual dignity, or even ordinary human decency, he would be squirming with shame right about now.

You know the world is spinning off its axis when red-faced blowhards such as Bill Donohue suggest that Cuba is an example of Church/State separation that America should emulate.

If they can build Catholic churches in Cuba, the time has come to ask these Catholic-bashing entities to take their cues from the Communists: Catholics are not asking for funds to build their churches (though President Thomas Jefferson did provide monies for this initiative), but they are asking for such things as school vouchers. If the Castro brothers are not scared to death of public money servicing the Church, then these militant secularists ought to take a deep breath and move on. Ideally, they would go into retirement.

Right. We should start buying bishops instead of making them pay their own way.