I think there is a bizarre parallel between religions and music genres. Let me explain. There are quite a lot of people (you may be one of them) who enjoy music but aren’t passionate about it and have no extreme preference in what they listen to. One of these people would probably claim they listen to everything, even though it’s not like they sincerely enjoy every piece of music that goes through their ears. There are similar types of people when it comes to religion. The equivalent would be those who may know vaguely what they think but consider many matters unimportant, and then give themselves a  label like agnostic (or not at all) and then attatch, “but I respect all beliefs”. But can they honestly say that they respect all beliefs? If they thought about it, probably not. On the extreme end there are also music fanatics who will just be plain OCD about their music generes. Have you ever been listening to a friend’s song on their iPod, and you ask what it is, and they’ll reply, “oh, that’s post-industrial tranceacid rapcore,” or, “that would be popharmonics jazz fusion.” Unfortunately, I think the same thing is happening to religion, and so many labels are popping up these days that I can understand how it would be hard to distinguish them without some good research. Lately I’ve heard people describe themselves as “christian wicca”, “naturalized deist”, and “environment-oriented theist” (I think they might have been trying to say pantheist) among some others. 

All of this is to prove a point about people these days. An overwhelming amount of them just lose track of what they think. This is often either because they just don’t know what to call themselves, or because they get confused by the myriad of (now becoming) interchangable beliefs that eventually become meaningless if they’re mixed up too much. 

To a point, I have a solution for these people.

The Belief-O-Matic.

I’m actually not kidding about this. It’s an astonishingly accurate quiz made up of about 20 really precise questions. I really think that many people are intimidated by, or just don’t feel like doing, the research it takes to be knowledgable about their faith. I think that this simple online quiz is surprisingly effective and non-hoaxy, as opposed to basically every other “what are you” quiz on the internet these days. 

Even if you are quite clear on what you are, you should go on over to beliefnet and take a look, because you’re probably skeptical (and I know you want to). The quiz takes about 5-10 minutes and is so right it will surprise you.

Cheers

First the titles:
CP: Atheists ‘Evangelize’ on College Campuses
IDS: Ex-preacher speaks to students about atheism

The intros:
CP:

At least one Christian club or group can be found on most public college and university campuses today.

One prominent Christian campus ministry, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, has staff working on 580 U.S. college campuses alone. InterVarsity President Alec Hill calls the college campus “the strategic point where you can impact the world by connecting with students, because of who the students will become.”

It seems now that militant atheists are catching on. Atheists can now be found nearby Christians on college campuses “evangelizing” new adherents.

This new generation of atheists – typically more aggressive and outspoken than their predecessors – includes bestselling authors Richard Dawkins and also ex-Christians.

Just over the weekend, John Loftus, a former Church of Christ preacher, took his crusade to debunk evangelical Christianity to Indiana State University, where he promoted his new book, Why I Became an Atheist.

IDS:

John Loftus, an ex-evangelical preacher and author of the book “Why I Became an Atheist,” told both believers and non-believers why he considers Christianity to be a false system of beliefs Saturday.

His lecture, received by a diverse crowd, summarized his life’s journey from preacher to atheist in Ballantine Hall.

Perhaps for ‘objective reporting’ CP brings in comments from Lee Strobel (’atheist’ turned preacher), not from Strobel, but from a video of his:

Loftus’ story contrasts with that of Lee Strobel, a former atheist who accepted Christ and is now a popular Christian apologist.

Strobel has encouraged Christians and pastors to arm themselves against attacks on Christianity, which were in part fueled by an increase in best-selling atheist books.

A best-selling author himself, Strobel just released “The Case for Christ” DVD, which answers two of the biggest objections to Christianity: “Why is Jesus the only way to God?” and “How could a loving God exist if there is evil and suffering in the world?”

In his latest work, Strobel interviews scholars, theologians, and ministry leaders who provide intellectual arguments to questions skeptics might ask.

“The questions can be brutally difficult and the answers are not quick – they’re not easy,” says Strobel in the DVD.

How do they finish the articles?
CP:

[Strobel:] “But if we come to God in faith, I believe he gives us legitimate reasons for hope that carry us through the most difficult circumstances for our lives.”

IDS:

No matter what their beliefs, Loftus left the audience with one final thought.

“I want people to think for themselves,” Loftus said.

(Note: I am merely taking the author’s, Roland G. Ley, article and adjusting it to mesh with reality. The original text will be emphasized).

1. He has the most liberal voting record in the Senate in his first two years and in Illinois he was a very liberal state legislator. This is an issue since in eight years many Americans may have forgotten what it’s like to not have a deficit, to have an increase in available jobs and to generally see good things happen to the economy.
2. He will grow the federal government by putting it in charge, directly or indirectly, of everything he perceives has something wrong and ignore remedies that are limited to just fixing the problems created by the previous administration.
3. He will increase taxes for just about everyone and everything, especially business, who have for far too long gotten a much easier break at the expense of the average American. Or better yet he will increase taxes while increasing welfare, resulting in an increased standard of living, as opposed to the steady decline.
4. He has a very liberal voting record on abortion and is against all pro-life issues, however, he is only human and may not be able to permanently end the abortion debate while standing up for women’s rights.
5. He is against just about everything that we need to strengthen our national security. He would remove troops from Iraq prematurely, resort to talking to the leader of Iran, leave our borders porous to illegal immigration, join our European “friends” in just talking tough to Russia, etc. essentially, he make actually improve the US’s image internationally. (Then who will us Canadian’s make fun of?)
6. He will make it easier for the trial lawyers to sue corporate America and others and raise the cost of just about everything we buy to pay a very few, mostly lawyers. Imagine how bad life will be when your boss is pissed because he’s being sued for making 7 digits while you can’t afford health care. I mean, it’s just not fair for your boss to have to suffer like that right?
7. He will lead the federal government in taking over the nation’s health care industry with his version of universal health care. And this still might not be enough.
8. He will favor unions leaders getting “open balloting” for union elections and other pro-union issues that do not help the rank and file. Well, that’s not technically true, he may actually be favouring unions in general, helping them form, which is naturally evil.
9. He will put liberal judges on the supreme and other courts and they will continue to legislate from the bench instead of opining on existing laws and the constitution.
10. He will favor the movement toward secularization and even atheism, but likely won’t do enough.
11. His main counsellors over the years have included the likes of Rev. Jeremy Wright, William Ayers, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko, etc. and he may have actually listened to them instead of just having to be there for the sake of participating in American Religio-Politics.
12. He lacks experience in either running anything or serving long enough to understand how things work, and we really don’t want people with no experience in the White House.
13. He is a very good speaker, but avoids substance because he tries to either be on both sides of, or appear to be leaning toward the conservative side, of many issues, and really, he still reaches out to the religious far too often, and may not actually be as liberal as the rest of the world thinks.

Yes that’s right… discontented with the lack of overt religious themes in mainstream superheroes such as Superman or Spiderman, CBN has created a series called “Bibleman”. Part Jedi Knight (who, judging from the choreography hasn’t even mastered the simple Shii-Cho form) and part former security guard turned holy avenger, Bibleman battles stereotypical one-sided supervillains, some of whom have been effeminized to imply that they are homosexuals.

In the beginning, Bibleman’s sidekick Cypher (the African-American in the picture) fights off thieves who intend to steal bibles from a Christian bookstore and burn them… for no particular reason whatsoever except maybe that they hate religion or something.

We soon find out that the real enemy is someone named ‘The Wacky Protester’ (the ridiculous-looking thing at the left of the poster), who has a machine that generates a portal to a virtual world where “there is no God”. The Protester essentially wants to lure little kids into his ‘funbox’ (nothing wrong there…) and convert them into atheists, as if there isn’t any indoctrination coming from anyone in the religious community and just being an atheist were some sort of horrible atrocity. It is at this point where the film makes a pathetic attempt at pop culture, when the talking computer that is the Wacky Protester’s partner in crime compares his virtual world machine to “The Matrix”.

Two kids are quickly abducted from a Christian summer camp, lured inside the machine, and converted into atheists by the virtual world’s subpar 3D graphics and random buzzing CGI bees… somehow. But unfortunately for the Protestor, Biblegirl – despite being a creationist and biblical literalist – is able to spout out a bunch of Treknobabble in Bibleman’s pseudoscience lab to determine what was happening to those two kids who became atheists.

Bibleman and Cypher then engage in a battle royale with the Wacky Protestor – if you consider a crappy musical number and lightsaber choreography more pathetic than any Star Wars fanfilms that I’ve seen a ‘battle royale’ – to save the souls of those two children. Of course, God always wins in the end, so despite the Protestor and his swarm of CGI bees’ best efforts, Bibleman prevails and those two kids can continue to be good fundamentalists who will grow up voting Republican because of ‘family values’ issues.

It’s ironic that Bibleman – A Fight for Faith implies that atheists are out to indoctrinate young people into not believing in Christianity when the film itself is doing the exact same thing towards atheism – essentially indoctrinating kids, who form and hold opinions much more easily than adults, that atheists are all elitist college nerds who should be feared. But I would argue that this film also teaches kids a far more dangerous lesson – that people different from your conservative Christian self are somehow ‘out to get you’; replace ‘atheist’ with any other religion or ethnic group and this film would be just as reprehensible. On the other hand, the effort (or lack thereof) that CBN put into special effects made the film more hilarious and bearable than otherwise intended.

Overall, for promoting negative stereotypes about atheists and to aim it towards the most susceptible audience possible, Bibleman – A Fight for Faith gets 4.5 out of 5 popped collars.

“I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won’t find the Higgs,” he said.

This marks the third, publicly-announced wager Hawking has made over a matter of science: he once wagered a year’s subscription to Penthouse that conclusive evidence of the existence of black holes would not be discovered (he has said that he is 95% sure he has already lost this bet), and in 2004 he conceded a bet with astrophysicist John Preskill over the resolution of a paradox involving the loss of information in black holes.

If Hawking is right, not only will it end his apparent losing streak, it will also “show something is wrong” with the so-called Standard Model of Physics, though he has optimistically told the BBC that “whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.” The Higgs Boson is an as-yet hypothetical component of the Model whose role in particle physics is to confer atomic structures with mass.

One Australian news source has claimed that Hawking’s bet is that the LHC simply “won’t work,” though Hawking has stated that the LHC could instead find certain physical structures that would be “a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together.” There does not appear to be any evidence from Hawking’s own statements that he believes that the LHC “won’t work.”

The Large Hadron Collider, whose first experimental test was today (it was successful), has been under intense media scrutiny over hysteria surrounding one German physicist’s largely unsubstantiated claim that the LHC could annihilate the Earth by creating miniature black holes. At the height of this hysteria, CERN scientists were particularly annoyed to find themselves the target of a lawsuit by a group of Hawaiians who were afraid that the LHC would either eat the Earth with a black hole, or just render it a mass of inert matter via a hypothetical “strangelet.” One particularly snarky rebuttal to this charge can be found here, and further safety information about the Large Hadron Collider can be found on CERN’s website.

Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, reminded CNN reporters that “when Columbus sails west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn’t find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting.”

These theories are boring. We have heard variations of them before: some said that a lone nut shot JFK, others said that a laundry list of secret societies were behind it. We have been told that it was a deranged fan(atic) who shot John Lennon, but others have pointed to anti-counterculture agents of the FBI. Did aliens crash at Roswell, or a government project? I, as undoubtedly you also are, am tired of this crazy-versus-government dichotomy. So, in the interest of injecting a little Ralph Naderesque third-party diversity into the upcoming Toronto debate, let me present them with a little theory of my own that is a healthy medium between the two prevailing theories:

Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center.

Now, I am sure that you are as shocked as I was when I first stumbled upon this horrible, slightly befuddling truth. Dylan Avery, director of the groundbreaking 9/11 conspiracy documentary Loose Change, blowing up the World Trade Center? You scoff!

But think about it. The prime rule in conspiracy thinking is cui bono, that is, who benefits? According to the government’s official explanation, Muslim terrorists conducted the attacks. But what did they gain? Indefinite military escalation on the part of the United States and the alienation of their allies in Pakistan, not to mention the out-and-out obliteration of their terrorist fascism that once ruled Afghanistan. On the other hand, the conspiracy nutters say that the government did it in order to gain support for the Iraq invasion of 2003. But what did they really gain? The pro-war hawks got obliterated in the 2006 election, Hillary Clinton’s own primary bid was probably sabotaged singularly on the issue of her pro-war vote, and Bush is imprisoned in the inescapable mess of being labeled the worst and least popular president of all time. And when did his downward spiral begin? With the invasion.

My theory, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Dylan Avery has profited immensely off of the tragic murder of thousands. I mean, who was this guy before “terrorists” handed him the biggest indie film contract in history? He was rejected by film school twice. He was probably living with his parents, at age 22, when he made the movie. He was so rock-bottom in his life that he even had to cavort and consort with losers and treasonous deserters like Korey Rowe. But now look at him: selling DVDs at $20 a pop. He has invented a personal subculture of facebook groups, message boards, and an underground merchandising empire of T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, books, and movies. He has been all over the conspiracy radioroll: mentioned everywhere, personally appearing in news, Coast-to-Coast, he and his associates are with Alex Jones… he is a celebrity now. He is the champion of a cause. And he can retire at 25 because of it. Is this suspicious to anyone?

And I say: how? Because he invented the cause.

I submit to the court Exhibit B: false flag operations. These are covert operations perpetrated by nations against other nations seeking to frame enemies for dastardly acts, with the intent of drumming up support for “retaliatory” action against the blamed party. According to the government’s official explanation, this was no false flag operation but this must be rejected because it seems ridiculous to me personally, therefore it is worthy of our collective suspicion. According to Avery’s conspiracy myth, the government ran the attacks as a false flag attempt to gain the PR momentum necessary to invade the Middle East. But this doesn’t make any sense because none of the hijackers were from Iraq or Afghanistan, yet those were the targets, and the government could easily have used a list of Afghani or Iraqi terrorists. No, those theories are both crap.

And that is why my case wins Exhibit B: who can say that the 9/11 Truth Movement has done anything besides hurl vitriol at the Republican Party? That’s right, Dylan Avery is a lifelong leftist, and I proudly proclaim that 9/11 was a false-flag operation designed to rally the conspiracy psychopaths against the Republican Party. Now, you might object that the radical far left already hated the GOP, but Avery’s dastardly plot even had the effect of rallying certain right-wing nuts against George Bush. And now Avery has his wish: an entire electorate built on blaming George Bush for murder. He even had Dennis Kucinich talking about it with him! It’s all going according to plan for Dylan Avery, but nobody seems to realize the obvious truth: Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center.

Exhibit C is particularly damning: Dylan Avery is not an engineer, knows nothing about engineering, yet he has been able to fling engineering claims around left and right. Melting steel does this, falling concrete does that, WTC 7 can’t do this, jetliners can’t do that, and look at this tiny photograph here, and here is how thermite works, and here is where you would have to plant it. But George Bush couldn’t have figured it out, as there were no PhD engineers anywhere in his cabinet. And yet there was Dylan Avery, with a master list of highly technical reasons why the World Trade Center could not have been destroyed by the plane. But it isn’t just like Dylan Avery was running a half-assed quote mine / rumor mill duplex of sloppy stupidity by begging unqualified engineers to rally to his cause or anything, because otherwise we would have to conclude that Avery is just an incompetent, deceptive buffoon, and if we did that we might be accused of ad hominems. Rather, the TRUTH is quite plain: Avery knew the ins and outs of the attacks almost immediately after they happened because, duh, Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center!

And then just think about the logistics. According to the conspiracy theory, the government did it. But as one of the individuals who will be debating on the 12th in Toronto has shown, this would have meant the involvement of literally thousands of people, including airline personnel, WTC personnel, soldiers, pilots, politicians, media… one screw-up anywhere in a chain of command a thousand ranks long would have been a complete controlled demolition of the Republican Party (and any of its conspirators) for about the next thousand years. Not only that, but they would have needed to have voice actors available and intelligence personnel to gather information to fake cell phone calls, and Avery has been unable to produce a list of prominent voiceover actors and actresses who vanished into the night on 9/12/01. Why is this? Because, as Exhibit D undeniably proves, Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center.

By now I’m sure you’re saying, “well yeah Chris, obviously Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center, but just so we can start producing pamphlets, protest signs and songs, low-quality Youtube diatribes, and an endlessly repetitive, self-plagiarizing blogroll, how did he do it?” Well, I’ll tell you!

See, the government theory has planes, but the conspiracy theory has thermite or other explosives. Now, the planes don’t make sense because Avery’s oddly brilliant and accurate analysis (see Exhibit C) shows that burning jet fuel can’t melt steel. But the conspiracy theory (thermite stashed at structurally significant points all over the World Trade Center) also makes no sense because it would take thousands of pounds of thermite to accomplish this, and the odds of the government squeezing a forklift full of thermite into a World Trade Center service elevator without a Democrat, a New York Times reporter, or a disgruntled ex-John Bircher noticing are rather low. So, my theory combines these two wrongs and makes a RIGHT: Dylan Avery blew up the World Trade Center by flying thermite-laden planes into the World Trade Center.

Firstly, Avery’s computer expertise is self-evident (I mean, the guy did make Loose Change on his home computer), so hacking into a jetliner’s navigational computer would be a cakewalk for him, and we know that it is at least possible since he has accused the government of doing just that, and it’s not like he would just make up claims about the capabilities of military electronic warfare measures. But where did he get the thermite? Well, the guy has to have plenty of money, because he has clearly demonstrated that his entire life and body are for sale, as when he was approached with a monetary offer to turn his script for a fiction movie about a 9/11 conspiracy into a documentary. Because it’s not like a guy would just whore out his soul to the highest bidder at the drop of a hat, this must have been a lifelong pattern of profound disinterest in self-respect, and so the guy probably had a lot of money stashed away under his bed from whatever previous prostitutions he had partaken in prior to his Loose Change days.

With that money, he had his right-wing militia friends (who all came together to endorse the 9/11 conspiracy theory right after “whoever” blew up the World Trade Center…) make him some thermite, and getting it onto the planes was nothing more than a simple matter of confusing airline computers into giving orders by email to pick up such and such a package and put it on such and such a commercial passenger jet.

And that is the Truth about 9/11. Dylan Avery is the culprit, and, with the help of canonical conspiracy thinking, we have proven it beyond all semi-literate doubt. Join us next week when we ask the toughest question in the history of modern science: Was 1969 the year of the Moon Landing, or was it just a Romulan Hoax??

But, it seems that Mr. Moore did not simply fade away after the Ten Commandments circus as I thought he would, and indeed he has cast himself as a long-term, in-it-to-win antagonist of everyone who wants to keep the church out of the government. As it appears that we will have Roy Moore to contend with for some time, I think that we have to start asking certain questions.

Moore’s claim to fame among the theocratic is his belief that the Ten Commandments are in some way the “foundation” of American law. During the media hubbub about whether Moore had violated this or that part of Alabama state law or the Constitution itself, nobody ever stopped to ask what I think is the most important question of the day: was he right? Are the Ten Commandments responsible for our most cherished judicial principles? It may surprise you when I say that no, no they are not.

First of all, Moore himself does not appear to be very familiar with his own Bible. If he were, he would have known that the rules we today call “The Ten Commandments” were never once explicitly described as being written on stone (his wooden reproduction of the Commandments clearly shows the Commandments written on stone tablets) in the fanciful Exodus myth of the Pentateuch. There were ten rules that were written on stone tablets given to Moses, but this was the so-called “Ritual Decalogue,” which gives such unmemorable legal advice as “do not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk” and “sacrifice firstborn male animals to Yahweh.” The image we have of Charlton Heston descending from on high with the Law of Moses written in stone hoisted over either burly shoulder is nothing more than a crude cultural parody of what the Bible itself actually says, but I think we can move on from Moore’s Biblical illiteracy since it is not at all the worst of his slanders against American law.

But even if Moore were not completely ignorant of the superstitions he claims to champion, he would still be wrong on the notion that the Ten Commandments in some way form the foundation of American law. One of the most important principles of the Constitution of the United States is this: it can be amended. When we mutually agreed that slavery, contrary to Biblical injunction, was wrong, we added the 13th Amendment with the consent of the people. When there was an apparently irreparable hole in the way that states conducted civil rights law, we added the 14th Amendment, again with the consent of the governed. That is the Constitution’s great strength: we do not deify the Founding Fathers to the point where we conceive of their word as final, exhaustive, and infallible. Instead, we have room to hammer out new laws to fit new situations that could not have been foreseen even by geniuses like Madison, Jefferson, and Franklin.

What parallel to this is there in the Ten Commandments? What room for amendment is there in the Word of God? None whatsoever. This problem is in fact even more profound for Moore because he is not Jewish, in which case his discourse would be constrained only by the Hebrew Testament, he is a Christian. This means that he is also bound by Jesus’s supposed proclamation that in principle not so much as a fraction of a letter of the Law of Moses can be expiated by any means. There is not even an exception made for God himself to change the Ten Commandments.

And what of the Laws themselves? Not one of them is reflected, either verbatim or even in principle, anywhere in the Constitution, some of them are obvious and are reflected in numerous other primitive codes of law, and some of them are directly antithetical to the promises given in the Constitution. The first five Commandments (I use the Jewish parsing of the Laws here) are a hat trick of unAmerican judicial failure:

1. I (Yahweh) am the Lord your God.
2. You will have no other Gods before me, nor will you make any false idols.
3. You will not misuse the name of God.

These rules are all obviously antithetical to the Establishment Clause, which was specifically set up to prevent the government from making proclamations like this. Any law that ever existed proclaiming that Yahweh is the only God, or that non-Judeo-Christian Gods are forbidden, or that saying “God dammit, I can’t believe Roy Moore actually thinks that he has a substantial legal case” is an offense against the law has been eliminated, and any future laws will not outlive the blink of an eye in any reputable American court.

4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

This one firstly would require the government to figure out when the Sabbath is (the Jews say it’s Friday, most Christians say Sunday, most Mormons and some off-the-mainstream say it’s Saturday, and I’ve heard of at least one church that says Wednesday), and then the court would have to tell us all that we can’t work on that day. The Bible says that the punishment for breaking the Sabbath is murder by your fellow citizens, with no exception made for doctors, soldiers, or children. So not only would this require American courts to legislate on religious calendars, it would also shut down our economy one day out of the week and fill death row with anyone who dares to deliver the Sunday Times. Is Roy Moore prepared to defend this as a bedrock principle of American law?

5. Honor your father and mother.

Not bad advice, but then, the Confucians made a religion out of ancestor-worship and they didn’t seem to need the Ten Commandments to do it, so in what way could we plausibly argue that without the Hebrew Testament, nobody would ever honor their parents? And, of course, no exception is made for abusive, murderous parents, just another reason if Moses were an intelligent dictatorship (or, at least, a conduit for a far greater dictatorship), he would have left a little wiggle room. There is none.

6. You will not kill.
7. You will not commit adultery.
8. You will not steal.
9. You will not perjure your neighbor.

The idea that the sixth commandment actually says “you will not murder” is simply untrue; the Hebrew language at the time lacked any word distinguishing killing other people from murdering other people (the distinction is rather sophisticated when you think about it). In all probability, the original commandments probably were just a single word with a negative prefix, reading like “no-kill” and “no-steal” to honest translators. The commandment against killing is paradoxically sandwiched between stories of Israelites ankle-deep in the blood of some foreign tribe, but less us pretend for the moment that the Bible were at all consistent. Roy Moore is now in the position of abolishing the death penalty, firearm possession, and the military. If he is against stealing in principle, then it is unconscionable that the US government would seize the assets of terrorists and drug warlords for use repairing the damage they’ve done. Clever hair-splitting occasionally renders “do not lie” as the flaccid and obvious “do not perjure” (which is completely unfaithful to the original Hebrew), so Moore must then be against lying in principle (or else he is a bad Christian and/or illiterate). As such, remember that when the Nazi stormtroopers come poking around for Anne Frank, Roy Moore wants you to tell them everything you know about where she’s hiding.

And if Roy Moore really needs God to tell him not to cheat on his wife, then he’s in even worse shape that I postulate.

10. You will not covet your neighbor’s house, goods, possessions, slaves, beasts of burden, or wife.

Every faithful translation loops the “wife” in with all the other material possessions (you will also notice that there is no commandment not to covet your neighbor’s husband). So, first of all Roy Moore must think that it is a foundational truth of American law that women are property (if he does not, he is either a bad Christian or a liar), and not only that, but that capitalism is inherently evil. For indeed how could our economic system survive if advertisers couldn’t play off your jealousy of the handsome man with the lavish vacation home, or the chic and sexy young woman with earrings more expensive than your car, or any of the irksome jealousies that drive you out of your home to buy this or that or the other in the name of looking like you’ve succeeded over others?

Roy Moore is obviously wrong about the Ten Commandments, and if he believes what he says about them then he is an anti-American, anti-freedom ruthlessly theocratic nut who would rid us of our military, our economy, and our rights. If he does not believe it, or if he is so Biblically illiterate (or just plain old regular-illiterate) as to not understand what he believes, then he is not qualified to tell us free-worshiping, freethinking American citizens how to regulate the government that serves us. Moore’s government starts with a bully in the sky, our government starts with the mutual consent of the governed. The problem we face is that everybody has the insight to question the Constitutionality of Moore’s attempts to use his taxpayer-funded court to attribute our success as a nation to the ancient legal code of an extinct bronze age totalitarian theocracy, but nobody has the spine to ask if Roy Moore was even right.

And now that it has been asked, the answer is clear: Roy Moore is wrong on the law, wrong on the Bible, wrong on history, and wrong for America.

“Its message is shameful and disgusting,” Katy’s mother told Christianity Today reporter Anne Thomas. “The first time I heard it I was in total shock. When it comes on the radio I bow my head and pray.”

The song, which has itself drawn the ire of several in the gay community, is about exactly what it sounds like- the (female) lead singer kissing a member of her own gender. In an interview with Zack from thenewgay.net, Katy Perry describes her childhood home as a “strict, suppressed household” where “any of that taboo stuff was wrong.” In the same interview, she also admits that she has never actually kissed a girl before.

Her parents express particular disappointment with the fact that Perry’s career started off in the lucrative, high-octane world of Christian rock and roll, but she was lured into secular music by a lucrative offer from a mainstream record company. “I was worried she’d start doing drugs and drinking alcohol. I still am,” frets her mother. “I spoke to her only recently. She said, ‘Oh Mum, I’m not going to turn into Amy Winehouse.’”

The effort is, of course, to please the so-called “values voters,” which basically means Evangelicals and conservative Catholics. Those fickle Evangelicals, long spoiled by the two parties vying for their votes, now support McCain less than they did Bush in 2004, and Obama even less than they did Kerry. So, this whiny political bloc, long bloated with a sense of the Dominionists being entitled to be kings of America, has snagged a far unequal share of its time in the media. Meanwhile in the Catholic phylum, there is much hand-wringing going on over the fact that the Democrats typically support safe-sex practices and the protection of abortion access rights, but the other guy has earned the adoration of anti-Catholic nutzos like John Hagee and that Obama Nation clown. And so to satisfy them, candidates are endlessly grilled on their beliefs about abortion, equal rights for non-heterosexuals, medical science, and none of them are skimping on the appeasement.

This of course is a far cry from the days when it was the issues that mattered. Why has economic and foreign policy taken a backseat to how many minutes the candidates pray every day? Why are we hearing less about Obama’s plans for environmental change or McCain’s plan to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq and more about Obama’s “journey of faith” and McCain’s Liberty University speech? Does either candidate have any idea that America’s second-largest religious demographic, the “non-affiliated,” actually follows politics every now and then?

Take Obama for instance. One of the most noxious symptoms of this whole religious fervor is his cowardly drive to the center, particularly in his spectacularly Unconstitutional plan to expand the Faith-Based Initiatives office. This office, whose existence is predicated on the idea that religious people know how to spend your money better than either you or the government do, has cost Obama my vote (for now). The secular left’s mantra for many years has been that, when all else fails, vote for the Democrat, but not even McCain has become so downright fundamentalist in his subservience to the theocrat vote as to promise to start giving your money to religious people to bribe them into doing what they claim to do already. What McCain has done instead is to assume the rhetorical default position of the clergyman’s handmaiden, spouting nonsensical blather about Christian Nations and God-given values.

Obama’s stance seems to be that atheists are either too stupid or too greedy to make charitable donations to religious groups, so we’d better just take their money and do it for them, while McCain’s seems to just be that atheism is unAmerican. Neither candidate seems to care that there are 40 million non-religious voters out there whose votes have been carelessly discarded in the name of getting these religionists out of their pews and into the voting booths.

We might disagree on a lot of things, but I think we can all agree that we do not want the government spending our money on religious charities doing their evangelism disguised as good works, and most of us agree that embryonic stem cells do not have moral interests that supersede the moral interests of people with Alzheimers. We do not want you using Leviticus to inform your decision on gay marriage, nor do we want fanatical pro-Israel eschatologists to tell you how long to park the Abrams in the Babylon lot. We want you to be sensible, we want you to reason your way through your platform, and, oh yeah, maybe actually start talking about the issues again. You don’t need the Bible’s permission for this one, don’t worry.

1. Ride those coattails. Remember, the New Atheists may be evil and hell-bound, but they are also your ticket to fame! Just make sure you drop all the right names in the title of your book and you are on the road to a career in reactionary tantrums. It’s easy: just reuse their names or their book titles for your own profit and you’re good to go; whether you’re Alister McGrath (”Dawkins’ God,” “The Dawkins Delusion?“), Scott Hahn (”Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God“), David Berlinski (”The Devil’s Delusion“), Thomas Crean (”God is No Delusion“), or anyone of similar integrity and contributive value, you’ll remember that your own name is obviously insufficient to sell books, so what better solution than to just use your opponent’s names? If you’re particularly desperate for sales/clever like John F. Haught, you’ll manage to squeeze several of the New Atheists’ names in (”God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens“) at once!

2. Snub them for not taking time to disprove God’s existence, ignoring your own failure to prove God’s existence. Several reviews of and responses to Hitchens in particular, as well as Harris and Dennett, contained some snide little attack about how none of these three atheists took the time out to properly address the arguments for the existence of Zeus/Demeter/Allah/Republican-Jesus/God. Now remember, even though popular religious books all the way from the bestselling populist The Purpose-Driven Life up through Charles Taylor’s highbrow A Secular Age spend not one word even trying to prove that God actually exists, who cares? If you’re religious enough to be writing on this subject in the first place, you threw away internal consistency a long time ago. As Dinesh D’Souza thundered during a debate with Dan Barker, “Harris refutes Anselm with a paragraph!” Who cares that you refuted Russell with zero paragraphs? Whatever it takes to make the New Atheists look lazy or uninformed. Which brings me to my next point…

3. Remember, the New Atheists failed to write a multi-volume complete summary of the entire history of Western theology, so they’re “ignorant of the finer points of religion.” One frequent criticism of the New Atheists is that, even if they claim to be targeting religious belief, they are avoiding the totally relevant and politically impotent/important field of highbrow theological writing. Because, unlike you, the New Atheists have not taken the decades of study required to lodge yourself in an obscure niche of your religion’s ivory tower to which nobody listens except the others trapped in the same nitch, you are understandably infuriated that Hitchens never once mentions Eric Rust’s clever interpretation of Tillich’s commentary on the epistemology of empiricism as applied to the miraculous, or that Harris never even bothers to set himself against every single sentence of The City of God. Sure, nobody cares about what theologians have to say, and their commentary is wholly irrelevant if there isn’t a God in the first place, but so what? You’re a religious writer; what do you need with honesty? Just make those atheists look unlettered, and don’t forget to end every chapter with a snippet of Bonhoeffer or Averroes or whoever it takes to confuse your reader into thinking you’re smart.

4. Alternately claim that science is just a hypothesis and so can’t be proven, and that proven science has been on your side all along. If you’re a particularly talented anti-atheism writer, you can sometimes manage to make both of these tactics work within the same exact book! For example, in Dinesh D’Souza’s famously whiny screed What’s So Great About Christianity?, chapter 8 tells us that science cannot exist apart from the (Christian theological) assumption of an ordered and logical universe, chapters 11-14 are dedicated to showing how science independent of Christian theology has arrived at the existence of God in the first place! Remember, not only has science demonstrated that the universe is irreducibly complex, science is also a faith-based assumption that the universe is ordered and rational. Who cares that scientists only concluded the universe to be rational upon empirical observation that effects tend to follow causes? Who cares that you’re whoring out your intellect to whichever side of the same bad argument you wish to make by routinely deploying two contradictory arguments to the same end? This isn’t about integrity, this is about religion!

5. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Irrelevant ad hominem that does nothing to show the truth or falsehood of the idea of atheism, but who cares? As long as the reader’s attention is diverted away from the bloody history of your own religion. And when doing body counts, only count wars and Inquisitions, not things like the deaths from religious resistance to vaccines and medicines, religious opposition to condoms even in high HIV-risk parts of the world, day-by-day violence and discord within families over homosexuality and apostasy, etc. Also never mention that Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin might have had other motives for their actions than their atheism.

6. Always point out that atheism is a faith just like any other. Atheism is the faith-based assumption that there is no Zeus, or whichever god you are apologizing for. This is one of those arguments that has been recycled over and over and over again in anti-atheism books marketwide, so it must be a good one. Do not worry about talking about whether or not your own lack of belief in the thousands of other extinct religions is also a faith, as this is likely to lead you into unChristian thought.

7. And if all else fails, you can always say that atheists “just don’t get it.” They haven’t had the divine, transcendent experiences you’ve had about Jesus, or Mohammed, or the Buddha, or David Koresh, or Sai Baba, or the UFO hiding behind the comet, or whatever. They just can’t get it because they’re too close-minded to see the truth and thanks to personal religious experience we know that those close-minded atheists are wrong without even doing any investigation! As long as your own mind is open to the possibility that your personal, local, favorite tribalism is the One True Way, and the atheists’ minds are closed to the idea that they are too blind and stupid to see that your personal theological suppositions must be accepted or else you’ll burn in Hell forever, you win. I mean, when you accuse the atheists of being too close-minded to accept Jesus as their personal savior out of fear of the scriptural, doctrinal, strictly unobserved reality of Hell, what are they going to say? That you’re the close-minded one?

Well, that is your lesson for today. I look forward to seeing your book right alongside the likes of the brilliantly untalented McGrath, Berlinski, and others: rotting in bargain bins next to old astrology guides and full-color atlases of Denmark, ten thousand ranks below The God Delusion on Amazon, or sitting on the shelf of some smarmy theology student who agreed with you before he ever even heard of you.