When discussing religion, it's impolite to mention that the Old Testament Jews were some of the first practitioners of religious warfare, later following Akhenaton in the Egyptian desert. Deuteronomy 2:33-36, God instructs the Jews that the people of King Heshbon, should be "utterly destroy(ed) the men, women, and the little ones."

Damn that's hardcore. Even children?

And that's only one incident of religious warfare, cruelty and violence, that God commands. Here's more. As to the number of innocents that God has killed,  2,391,421 not including, at least in some cases, women and children. And this doesn't account for the impending Tribulation. There are billions and billions of unbelievers in the world - Jesus will have much blood on his hands that day.

With this theme in mind, I bring you some good, Old Testament butt-kicking violence relevant to the news of today.

God will Rain Fire on the Islands of the Sea
Big surprise, Robertson calls again for the end of the world. Apparently he expects Israel to start a bombing campaign on Iran in the next 75 to 120 days.

Can you be any more non-specific?

I predict that in the next 75 to 120 days the Midwest will face extreme weather. Brilliant. Give me a funny robe and hat.

You think in Roberson's daily conversations with God, Robertson could get the old guy to clarify his "prophesies" that Robertson this time bases on various news reports and the Bible and not from direct intercessory prayer?

“It all will conclude when God has rained fire on the islands of the sea and on the invading force coming against Israel.”

The old kook doesn't just end with Isaiah 11 and the Middle East.

"However, we may not be spared nuclear strikes against coastal cities  in America"

Robertson answer to this apparently imminent event?

"If there was ever a time for fervent prayer, it is now."

If there is no attack, Robertson claims victory. If there is an attack, Robertson declares victory. Talk about fixing the game.

Who does Robertson think he is? If he's praying so that God will spare the rod because we've spoiled His "holy mountain" he opposes God's will.

Perhaps, Robertson is just slightly more moral than the God he magically talks to.

Unless, Robertson is praying that God will rain that fire and end the world?

Such is the morality of good, fundamentalist Christians these days.

(Source)

Gov. Sarah Palin's Anti-Pagan Coreligionists
If the right-wing wants to associate Obama with Wright, then its only fair to bring up the religious dirt on Sarah Palin.

Mary Glazier was the leader of not-then-Governor  Sarah Palin prayer group and in 2005 "anointed and blessed Sarah Palin as a political leader."

What is Glazier guilty of?

In 1995, Mary mobilized a prayer network for Alaska's prisons and began experiencing spiritual warfare as never before. She had received word that a witch had applied for a job as chaplain of the state's prison system... Mary recalls, "As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer" ... "Ultimately, the witch fled to another state for medical treatment. Soon after, revival visited every prison in Alaska. At the women's correctional facility in Anchorage alone, 55 of 60 inmates found Christ. "Ask largely," Mary says. "Intercessory prayer is making a major difference in North America."

As pagan blogger Jason Pitzi Walters observes:

"Glazier and her prayer warriors claim to have made God blind and give cancer to a Wiccan chaplain. Is this anything but the most malefic of magic? Any Pagan who proudly claimed to have given a Christian cancer, or put out one of the eyes of a Christian, would be rightly shunned and rebuked."

Jason is correct. If a pagan or Wiccan had done that, you'd see the media equivalent of another Christian crusade against their coreligionists, the Cathars.

As far as magic that Jason comments on, I'll leave them to have fun with that.

(Source)

Go Slay In the Spirit
My wife once said to me that I was obsessed with God. That's not true, I am more obsessed with religion if anything. Lately, I've become obsessed with Jesus.

Myth or not, the man is a great pugilist. Hit them high. Hit them low. Turn the other cheek - Jesus delivers the knock-downs.

 

 

 

 

For a blasphemous good time, check out Faith Fighter.

I even put the hurt down on that upstart, Lord Xenu!

I am off for mini-moon (that is, a short honeymoon) with my wife over the holiday, but there's been some news revolving around my pet issues that I wanted to comment on before heading on out of here for a weekend in Sturgeon Bay.

That Old Time Religion // God against the Gods

Neo-paganism is on the rise.

Apparently, my last post which I argued reductio and in the spirit of Julian the Apostate that monotheists should become polytheists does have some merit. (Although not for the same reasons.) The Denver post reports that pagans "...numbers roughly double about every 18 months in the United States, Canada and Europe, according to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance," and "is now among the country's fastest-growing religions." Accordingly, many leave monotheism as a rejection to the authoritarianism of those monotheistic religions and in pursuit of their own religious experiences. To me, this is very much like the American value of "rugged individualism." This individualism can be found with founders like Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams. The Enlightenment Rationalist (probably Christian) Adams, stated

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy."

Adams was very much a religious iconoclast and it was his view that religious dogmatism was a barrier to rational thought. While it is nearly always true that religion is a barrier to the free inquiry of science, so to is it true with the varieties of religious experience.

Anyway, this study seems to confirm the trend as reported by the the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 35,000 Americans have "... 'stunning' lack of alignment between people's beliefs or practices and their professed faiths."

My incidental experience seems to confirm this. In my debates with Christians and other supernaturalists over the past decade, the tendency that I've noticed that when one leaves a monotheistic faith like Christianity (other than professing a belief in a "higher power" ) it is quite not uncommon to become a pagan. These religions are highly individualistic and allow for a greater sense of experience of the divine. Also some of these pagans that I know do not literally believe that these gods are real beings, but participate in paganism in some metaphorical sense. This is not uncommon even for an atheist. One of my favorite authors, Dr. Robert Price (Books: The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Deconstructing Jesus and Beyond Born Again) and former editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism still attends church and enjoys the metaphorical aspects that the religion provides.

The irony, oddly enough, as classical society around the first century of the common era turned away from the conservatism of polytheism and to the radical monotheism of the Christian state, it removed more spirituality from the public sphere by its narrowed prohibitions on what religious experience could be in its pursuit of certainty about the mysteries of its own unprovable beliefs.

I think we might be on the precipice of another turning of the tide.

Evolution // Paradigms and Consciousness Raising

Yesterday, July 1st, one-hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin and Russell Wallace, presented their papers on evolution by natural selection.

Richard Dawkins observers evolution as a consciousness raiser

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters on of the oldest ideas we have the 'idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You'll ever see a spear making a spear maker. You'll never see a horse shoe making a black smith. You'll never a pot making making a potter.' Darwin's discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, an so loaded with the power to raise consciousness. (The God Delusion)

The Wired article points out that because of this simple, yet powerful discovery that

It involved not a simple invention or discovery but a paradigm shift, inventing the reigning paradigm that organizes modern biology -- and in some sense all modern science.

Gregor Johann Mendel, a Christian monk, had presented his paper on experiments on genetics with pea plants around the same time. His observations and experiments with pea plants had no explanatory power in itself, other than human selection could affect inheritance. Darwin's and Wallace's work was able to provide a mechanism for genetic selection without a god of the gaps.

Which is the beauty of evolution. That something so simple can do so much.

Church and State // Let's do away with the Constitution Already

Pandering once again, Obama announced that he would expand faith based initiatives to the tune of some half a billion dollars per year. Don't we already give these particular institutions who do not have to pay taxes, enough? Yes, I know the money is supposed to be used for humanitarian causes, but the religious can't help bringing their particular brand of religion into the mix. Of course, last year the Supreme Court ruled that citizens do not have the right to sue over executive mandates like the Office of Faith Based Initiatives. (Read about the Freedom from Religions lawsuit over this program, here.)

I'm sure this will play well in mobilizing the progressive religious left to vote for Obama, probably better than McCain will get the regressive religious-right to vote for him. But I have to confess, all these appeals to religious groups on both sides of our political spectrum makes me rather queasy. I think I prefer outright religious warfare, than this cool war of votes.

Well, not really, I just tire of it. I wonder when can we leave our religious differences at home and vote and decide on the merits of an issue, rather than what we think that God says with his invisible mouth? McCain has said in the past said some smart things about the religious-right (in the style of a Goldwater conservative), but his overtures to religious-right at the Farwell's Liberty University completely turned me away from the "maverick" McCain. Sorry McCain, but we know what type of Supreme court justices you will now appoint.

Unfortunate as this is, as both conservatives and liberals are expanding government by co-opting religion.

I am not sure now if I want to vote for Obama. He may have lost my vote.

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Happy Woden's Day to you. See you in a week!

A few posts ago, I commented on the insane theodicy of an Iowa Pastor and the Midwestern flooding. This morning after doing some research into global warming, I have come to reconsider my position. I hope that I will not be accused of being a flip-flopper, as reasonable people change their positions when new information comes to light.

Doubts Arise

It all started with reading the blogs at Lake Country Living and the hard skepticism on global warming. I did some further reading by these hard skeptics on how the science of global warming is wrong and the whole premise is false, which quickly led me to the conclusion that the underlying methodology of the scientific method that atmospheric and meteorological science is predicated upon is completely flawed! Science does not work!

A breathtaking conclusion indeed!

If this is true that global warming is not contributing or driving adverse climate change, then what can possibly explain all these disasters and the weirdness like an iceless North Pole this year? As Jane Poulsen describes about the flooding, “We’ve never seen the water level up this high,” Poulsen said. “This is unprecedented."

Therefore, some agency has to be responsible for these unprecedented disasters like Katrina and the recent Midwestern flooding. Humans are not to blame and science is false. Just what is going on here?

And suddenly...the answer came to me. Of course!

Some History First

Fast forward to the past, 4th and 5th century Rome.

As Christianity began to assert its dominance through various factors and mostly by the assistance of the Roman state, the worshiping of the traditional gods of classical society was criminalized by Holy Roman Imperial Authority.

Justinian, emperor from 527-65, declared:

All those who have not yet been baptized must come forward, whether they reside in the capitol and in the provinces, and go to the very holy churches with their wives, their children, and their households to be instructed in the true faith of Christianity. And once thus instructed and having sincerely renounced their former error (paganism), let them be judged worthy of redemptive baptism. Should they disobey, let them know that they will be excluded from the state and will no longer have any rights of possession, neither goods nor property; stripped of everything, they will be reduced to penury, without prejudice to the appropriate punishments that will be imposed on them."

Despite the decline of paganism during the period an the subsequent criminalization, the worshiping of other gods did not fall out of favor with the local populaces even when these strict laws were enforced around the common era. Christian biographers, then and now, frequently claim that once the faith was introduced to the people, millions converted overnight and of their own volition. This is not so. From the chronicles of the time, we see a confluence of worshiping both Christian and Pagan gods, at public festivals, often celebrating a Christian celebration and a Pagan celebration together like Easter. Also, Christians never stopped believing in the pagan gods, and instead of outright disbelief, the old gods were now believed to be demons.

Remember, what happened when Christianity finally took hold over all of Europe? That's right, the Dark Ages began when the old gods were no longer worshiped.

And remember that during the Renaissance when old pagan gods and stories began to be represented in art and literature? That's right, the Dark Ages ended and science and the Enlightenment came!

Coincidences? I think not.

Revelation

The conclusion, the pagan gods are still very much alive and trying to get our attention.

And how are the gods doing this? We have a whole list of human afflictions to draw from. Here is a small sampling:

1. The Iraq War. We need to get out and win this thing. Therefore, we must appeal to Mars for his help. You support the troops right?
2. Female Infertility. You must appeal to Venus, she is the goddess of motherhood, then and only then we can end the debate over human embryos and stem cells. It might also help to worship Nona too.
3. The Asian Tsunami. Killing thousands and thousands and destroying millions and millions of dollars in property. Those people were killed because you Christians, stopped worshiping Neptune.
4. Insomnia. Only when we appeal to the god, Somnus, will all overworked Americans finally get a good nights sleep. I'm going to get my alter together before tonight. I could use some sleep.
5. Earthquakes and volcanoes. More frequent now. Injuring and destroying millions throughout the world. Remember the enormous earthquake in china last month? Vulcan we need to appease.
6. Hurricanes. The number, severity and frequency of hurricanes has increased every year, destroying millions of dollars of property, and injuring and killing hundreds. Again, Neptune, just trying to get your attention.
7. Greenhouse emissions, and Global Warming. Threatening humanity's entire existence. We need to appeal and appease, Veiovis, only he can heal the planet. Oh except, global warming is not true.
   

Sounds crazy? It is not. Christians are encouraged to find miracles in the everyday as proof of the God's work through the Holy Ghost. Pat Robertson and Jerry Farwell famously said that 911 was the direct result of God punishing the United States for homosexuality and abortion. For devout Catholics, the tireless Virgin Mary appears all over the world as oil stains on office windows, to knots in trees, to rust stains underneath highway bridges, to grilled cheese sandwiches in her never-ending mission to convince you. Don't have time to travel to these miraculous sites, take a chance and stare at the sun until you do. The truth will simply blind you.

You see, we simply live in a world where the supernatural manipulates the natural world.

Refuting the Skeptics

Only the unprejudiced reader, without reservation of doubt and a true open mind will come to the same logical conclusion that I have made. As God is invisible to man, like Zeus, Apollo, or any of the other pagan gods, makes belief that much more plausible. The more miraculous the claim, the inverse is equally true as to the level and quality of evidence which is needed substantiate the claim. That's why it is called faith. It is this type of faith which has been praised as virtue from Paul writing his letters before the gospels were penned and up through the theology of St. Augustine of Clement. In fact, this type of faith is encouraged as a virtue. And do you think your smarter that Paul or St. Augustine? Are they not authorities on God and on faith? 

Whereas, an atheist believes in one less god than a monotheist, it is not much of a leap of faith to believe in one more god or gods for a theist. After all,the Burden of Proof is up to the skeptics that any of the old pagan Gods, like Zeus, do not exist. The skeptic can dispute these facts I've outlined and even argue successfully on the evidence, but all that requires is faith despite whatever the clever skeptic may introduce. As everybody knows, skeptics hate America and are known for doing the work of the Satan, poisoning the well for a peoples faith.

Therefore, Christians, you can say all you want that you do not believe in the old pagan gods, but that does not make them just go away and not exist. The Bible supports other gods and even mentions them (i.e. Saturn, Baal), this is why God tells the Israelites they should have "no other gods" before him, acknowledging that they do exist.

And why not? Paganism is far older and was more widely practiced  than even the great monotheistic religions of today. Are you so bold to say that all those countless people were wrong?

Conclusion

Since God came down from Heaven to be Himself as His Son, to sacrifice Himself to Himself, thus satisfying the Old Testament that He in His plan put into motion before His return back to Heaven, it is only wise that monotheists again worship the old gods and must include the old pantheon in their duties. (Here's a quick how-to.) We have all been saved, otherwise all that sacrifice that Jesus did was for nothing. God has not destroyed the Pagan Gods in the supernatural realm as we continue to be rocked by disaster after disaster and disease after disease that pagan gods lack of involvement clearly shows. Even the liberal media can not cover this fact up. This is all evidence that is needed.

Therefore Christians, is the time for you to make the sacrifices and rebuild the temples and attend them, like last year when a sect of Rabbis decided to resume animal sacrifices on the Temple Mount. Since America is founded on Judaeo-Christian principles, we ought to follow the Rabbis example. We simply need the protections that the Pagan Gods used to provide and has since withdrawn because they are longer worshiped. In doing so, you are showing your love to your neighbors as well as God's enemies (i.e. other gods) that even Jesus said was a high moral principle. Once again, you will be securing the gods protection from natural disasters. I can not think of a better use of our tax money in this new faith based initiative to rebuild the temples and supply meat and incense in sacrifices to the gods.

Only when the peace of gods has been secured, peace on earth will once again be secured.

Let's put Saturn back into Saturday!

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FYI: I originally posted this on exchristian.com and a few other places a few years ago. I've rewritten this piece to make it current and to make my argument stronger. Also, an award to the person who can name as many logical fallacies I relied on in formulating this argument. :)