Category: Religion

Report from The New York Times:

It is the time of year when bedtime stories and television specials often recall the plucky reindeer and the little girl of Whoville who managed to save Christmas. This year, some conservative groups are hoping to add a new name to that pantheon of heroes: Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee.

“Liberal groups like People for the American Way and the A.C.L.U. have opposed public Christmas and Hanukkah displays and even fought to keep Christmas carols out of school,” declares a radio commercial paid for by the conservative Committee for Justice beginning Monday in Colorado, Wisconsin and West Virginia, states whose senators are considered pivotal votes on Judge Alito.

“Some courts and judges have supported this radical agenda, but not Judge Sam Alito,” it continues. “Throughout his career, Judge Alito has consistently upheld the Constitution’s protection of free religious expression.”

Christianity and the Christmas story (in some form) have survived nearly 2,000 years. These modern American Christians are sure having a crisis of faith if they believe only Sam Alito can save Christmas.

But of course I may have it backwards. It’s certain political leaders that are having the crisis of faith. They believe only Christmas can save Sam Alito.

Pharyngula tells us some scary stuff:

The program was called “Faith Matters”, and it’s not clear whether Nightline was going for high irony or was sincere. It’s about the Justice House of Prayer, an anti-abortion group whose strategy was to rent an apartment with windows facing roughly in the direction of the Supreme Court, where “interns” jump up and down and rant and pray towards the Court, apparently under the impression that they will have some psychic influence on the justices, or that their all-powerful god requires constant nudging and needs to be aimed in the right physical direction to have an effect. I get the idea they imagine their god as a vast, logy blimp without much consciousness, and if only they tug on his supernatural guidewires enough, they can position him over the court building—at which time he’ll reach down with fat, bloated fingers and diddle about in the brains of the people below him. It’s a strange, primitive theology, cult-like and absurd.

NewMexiKen isn’t quite certain how this kind of “prayer” is any less effective than any other kind, but it’s certainly more open to ridicule.

OneGoodMove has a video of the Nightline report.

Limbo — the place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized — may have its days numbered.

According to Italian media reports on Tuesday, an international theological commission will advise Pope Benedict to eliminate the teaching about limbo from the Catholic catechism.
…

In his Divine Comedy, Dante passes limbo on his way into hell and writes: “Great grief seized on my own heart when this I heard, because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in limbo were suspended.”

Reuters via Yahoo! News

At first NewMexiKen thought they meant the dance.

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.'”

— Jack Handy, who has many, many more Deep Thoughts.

This and the item directly below via ack ack ack.

There are 6.4 billion people living on earth. There are approximately 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy — 16 times more stars than people. The latest estimates say there are over 125 billion galaxies in our universe. The universe is estimated to be between 13 and 14 billion years old and having a radius of at least 10 billion light years (because we can see stars that far).

The earth is about 4.55 billion years old. And man has been on earth for the last 350,000 of those years. By my arithmetic (which is open to correction), if the age of earth was proportionately reduced to 100 years, then man has been on earth for not quite 3 days and each person inhabits this earth for about one minute.

With all this in mind, does God really care if someone kicks a field goal?

— The Lazy Way to Success

As NewMexiKen looks around and views some of God’s recent handiwork, it occurs to me that God probably cares more when someone misses a field goal.

Now here’s an interesting twist — religion as a Darwinian survival tactic.

In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a “useful” genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents’ daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by “natural selection”: adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

Excerpted from Robert Winston, Why do we believe in God? in The Guardian.

From an article in The New York Times, Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last:

Word spread quickly in some conservative Christian circles when Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem from Arab forces in June 1967. This was it: Jesus was coming.

But Jesus did not return that day, and the world did not end with the culmination of that Arab-Israeli war.

Neither did it end in 1260, when Joachim of Fiore, an influential 12th-century Italian monk calculated it would, nor in February 1420, as predicted by the Taborites of Bohemia, nor in 1988, 40 years after the formation of Israel, nor after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But after last week’s devastating earthquake in Pakistan, coming as it did after a succession of recent disasters, the apocalyptic speculation, bubbled up again with impressive fervor on many Christian blogs, in some pews and among some evangelical Christian leaders.

*****

“It’s inherently interesting,” [Craig C. Hill, a professor of New Testament theology] said. “If you have a sign out for the sermon, ‘Our obligation to the poor,’ you won’t get anybody. If you have a sign out for, ‘The Internet and the Antichrist,’ you’ll bring them in.”

Legions of metalheads who’ve saluted “the number of the beast” may need to subtract 50 from the numeral that adorns their notebook doodlings, T-shirts and tattoos.

A newly discovered fragment of the Book of Revelation challenges the conventional belief that the Antichrist’s mark is 666, indicating instead that it is 616. Expert classicists used multi-spectral imaging to get a better view of the text, which is written in archaic Greek and dates to the late third century.

“It is clearly an important new manuscript, giving us a relatively very early copy of the text of Revelation,” said Christopher Tuckett, a theology professor at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. “It is probably not the earliest manuscript of Revelation that we have … but this is the first time [the 616 reading] has been found in such an early text.”

Fear of 666 is so extensive it actually has a name — hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia — and has inspired everything from televangelist speeches to Hollywood films. …

mtv.com – News

So, as NewMexiKen has asked before, can we change the name of the highway back now?

Thanks to Reecie for the link (in her comment to the entry below).

Roger Ailes nicely slices Lileks.

[J]ust like the hand-wringin’ pseudo-sanctimonious Christian Right predicted. Horrors bled into the streets, presidents lied so as to lead a nation into bloody violent unwinnable war, tens of thousands of Catholic priests groped and molested countless children over a 50-year period without the slightest punishment, the environment teetered on the brink due to government rollbacks as air quality and water quality and food sources were ravaged in the name of corporate profiteering, the economy crumbled…Oh wait. That was all *before* the gay marriage thing.

–Mark Morford, The Morning Fix

Some thoughts on public prayer from Easterblogg.

St. Blaise was, so far as is known, a bishop in Armenia who was martyred in the early fourth century. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Blaise (or Blasius)

was taken prisoner at the command of the governor, Agricolaus. The hunters of the governor found him [Blaise] in the wilderness in a cave to which he had retired and while in prison he performed a wonderful cure of a boy who had a fishbone in his throat and who was in danger of choking to death. After suffering various forms of torture St. Blasius was beheaded….In many places on the day of his feast the blessing of St. Blasius is given: two candles are consecrated, generally by a prayer, these are then held in a crossed position by a priest over the heads of the faithful or the people are touched on the throat with them. In other places oil is consecrated in which the wick of a small candle is dipped and the throats of those present are touched with the wick. At the same time the following blessing is given: “Per intercessionem S. Blasii liberet te Deus a malo gutteris et a quovis alio malo” (May God at the intercession of St. Blasius preserve you from throat troubles and every other evil).

While having his throat blessed each year as a kid, NewMexiKen often wondered why Blaise — if he was the protector of throats — didn’t save his own throat from the ax.

From Primary Sources in the January/February issue of The Atlantic

Americans mix belief in spiritualism and reincarnation with traditional Christian teachings about the afterlife, according to a new survey from the Barna Research Group. The survey finds that nearly 20 percent of Americans (including 10 percent of “born-again Christians”) believe that people are reincarnated after death, and 34 percent think that it’s possible to communicate, Crossing Over-style, with the recently departed. But doctrines of a more traditional nature still have widespread appeal: 76 percent of those polled stated that heaven exists, and nearly as many (71 percent) expressed a belief in hell. Hell isn’t necessarily perceived as teeming with fire and brimstone—in fact, only 32 percent of adults called it “an actual place of torment and suffering,” whereas 40 percent called it “a state of eternal separation from God’s presence.” Either way, though, if Americans are right, the Inferno’s population growth will be slow: 64 percent confidently predict that they themselves will find their way to paradise, whereas only .005 percent expect that they will be sent to hell.

“Americans Describe Their Views About Life After Death,” Barna Research Group

Today is the Epiphany, one of the three major Christian celebrations along with Christmas and Easter. The Epiphany is celebrated by most Christians on January 6 to commemorate the presentation of the infant Jesus to the Magi or three wise men.

The celebration of the Epiphany began in the Eastern Church and included Christ’s birth. However, by the 4th century, the various calendar reforms had moved the birth of Christ to December 25, and the church in Rome began celebrating January 6 as Epiphany.

Epiphany is derived from the Greek epiphaneia and means manifestation or to appear. In a religious context, the term describes the appearance of a divine being in a visible or revelatory manifestation.

In Mexico, today is Día de los Santos Reyes, the day Mexicans exchange Christmas presents to coincide with the arrival of the three gift-bearing kings or wisemen.

Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi
The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1445
Samuel H. Kress Collection
National Gallery of Art