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Internet televangelist Bill Keller on Oprah Winfrey: “…she is the queen of the new age witches.” She’s the prophetess of all the new age movement. “She’s making millions and millions of dollars selling the spiritual crack of our day…leading millions of souls to the flames of Hell.”

Well, alrighty then.

Nebraska Democratic State Senator Ernie Chambers is suing God to “fight possible laws restricting the filing of frivolous lawsuits.”

You can’t make this stuff up.
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I felt compelled to follow-up on Scott’s post regarding Edwards. This is an issue that holds a special place in my heart: the non leadership of leaders. How can a man (or woman) expect to lead if they are unwilling to take a stand? The whole “everything is equal to all else” is ridiculous. I know Edwards only mentioned different faiths, but why are we so scared to say we think something is better, or “more right?” Why in the world do you believe it then? Was it simply encoded into your DNA, and is thus not your fault, so please don’t think any less of you as a human being?

When a person comes to terms with their faith, politics, etc they are declaring the choice is the best out of all the alternatives available. Even those who are “pressured” into it by parents, peers, etc are still making the same declaration. For, choosing someone else’s choice is the best option for them at that time. I’m not trying to get overly philosophical here, but the fact remains that throughout our days we makes choices that we deem the best: the decision to get up and go to work, to eat, to watch TV, to spend time with people, are all choices because we could have stayed in bed, gone on a diet, read a book, or sat in front of the computer working on your blog.

When we look at this behavior, there are really two things at work here: 1. avoiding taking responsibility for your choices, and 2. being scared of offending someone else. If we say that this is what I believe, and it is the best, we then have to take ownership of it. By saying, this is what I believe, but it’s no better than what other people believe, we minimize the importance and our role in the decision. Our society has also been conditioned to be mindful of others’ feelings. While this is fine, it should not be at the expense of one’s own feelings. There can be debate with out rancor, but no one is willing to vocalize their opinions any more out of fear of being called names themselves.

So here we have a possible candidate for president that first of all demonstrates to people of faith that his faith is shallow at best. If faith played as an “enormous” role in Edwards’ life as he claims, it would affect his entire life. Faith is not meant to be compartmentalized. It permeates everything. People understand this, and know this when they elect representatives for themselves. In fact, a large portion of our nation elect people for their faith. Not to establish a theocracy, but because they understand the values these people hold, and that they hope will be with them when they are making decisions that affect us all. They (we) do not want someone in an executive role sitting there wondering how he can keep from offending the least amount of people, instead of making the tough decision that needs to be made. Can you imagine a CEO sitting in his office with a difficult choice to make, hoping he’s not offending someone, and then saying, “Well, any other decision would have been equally good.” The words are hollow, and lack leadership. The first thing someone would say is “Then why didn’t you make the decision that didn’t mean I had to lose my job?”
Can our nation be led by a leader who shows no leadership? The coming election may give us a chance to see.

On Monday, the Democratic Presidential hopefuls reached out to the “Religious Right” by holding a forum with the head of the Sojourners Social Justice Ministry. Some of the attempts to connect with the faithful through biblical references were fairly amusing like Sen. Obama’s statement that “I am my brother’s keeper”.

Now while I’m sure Obama was proud that he remembered something from those Sunday school lessons long ago, he probably should have checked his reference. The only time the phrase “my brother’s keeper” is used in the bible is in Genesis 4:8-9. And its use is Cain attempting to change the subject when God asks about his brother Abel (recently killed by Cain). Probably not the imagery the Senator was hoping to conjure up.

Aside from the amusing allusions, there was on statement that I found to be quite shocking. Though no one else seemed to pick up on it. When John Edwards was asked “If you think something is morally wrong, though, you morally disagree with it, as president of the United States, don’t you have a duty to go with your moral belief?”

His response? “No.” No? NO! John Edwards -at a forum that was supposedly faith based- wanted to make it clear that any morals that were held by him would not effect how he ran his Presidency. Now his response was actually quite longer than just no, here is the transcript for his full response: Read the rest of this entry »

John Kasich, a guest host for O’Reilley, proved himself to be a blithering idiot while holding down the fort yesterday. Here’s the setup: A new creation museum opened on Monday and “Fair & Balanced” Fox wanted to show both sides. So they got Ken Ham head of the museum and Lawrence Krauss an evolutionary scientist against the museum to “debate”.

Each man opened with their positions basically: a 4.5 Billion year old Earth & Genesis is a just a story verses a 6 Thousand year old Earth & the Bible account is literally true. It could have been a good debate, unfortunately John Kasich didn’t like either position and set out to bring BOTH men over to HIS view.

Now while most school children could point out how these two men held diametrically opposed views, Kasich asked Ham “Why is it not acceptable that evolution and creationism can be compatible?” Ham responded that while many people held Kasich’s theistic evolution view, “Evolution and a literal Genesis are not compatible…”

Kasich then interrupts and says “But maybe a literal Genesis is not the deal here.” I have to stress here that John is saying this to the man that just opened a 27 million dollar museum dedicated to the view that scientific evidence supports a literal six day creation. I mean, does John Kasich have ANY knowledge of the people he’s interviewing?

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A new study reports that Hollywood is one of the biggest polluters in the LA area.  This includes explosions, cars kept idling for 'talent', and other things done during production.  Will they listen and clean up their act before they turn the entire world into a lifeless desert?  

Stratfor just released an analysis of Pope Benedict's recent comments. Quite interesting!
Long, but well worth it.

(note: I recently published the entire commentary, but for brevity's sake will summarize it.)

Essentially, the Pope knew what he was doing. He sees how the war in Afghanistan and Iraq are going, he sees how Christians are treated, he knew the effect his words would bring. He is a politician after all: ruler of an autonomous state, etc…

He called Islam out. He lifted up the rationality of the West and Christianity (and so doing lended support to Bush), and asked Islam to do the same. He gains popularity with his followers, helps Bush out, gives hope to Christians in Islamic states, condemns the violence of Islam, puts the burden of proof on Islamic leaders, all while maintaining the ability to distance himself from his remarks. Brilliant. Bravo!

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