THIS MODERN WORLD

I know criticizing a column at WorldNetDaily is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this guy’s asking for it. In “Welcome to my first column”¹, the author argues that Christianity is going to take over the entire world and in the process wipe out secular humanism and “liberal Christianity, whose basic tenets are the opposite of the Bible”². In order to prove his case, he resorts to hackish extrapolation like this :

In 1900, there were 2 million evangelical or charismatic Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 200 million. In Latin America during that period, the born-again population zoomed from 1 million to 170 million. And in China, just since 1950, Christianity has exploded from fewer than a million to almost 120 million.
. . .
Now, straight-line projections are silly because nothing ever goes in a straight line. But just to give you a comically precise picture of our current momentum: At 8 percent growth a year, the world would have more Christians than people by the fall of 2032!

If you really think straight-line projections are “silly”, why build an entire article around them?? Maybe he believes that by 2032, Christianity will be so popular, it’ll start spreading to domesticated animals, inanimate objects, or reanimated corpses.

My research for my new book, “Megashift,” has found 52 countries where God has brought people back from the dead, mostly in the last 20 years. And these are not near-death experiences, where someone on an operating-room table passes out and sees himself going down a long tunnel. These are stone-dead corpses.

Also, for what it’s worth, I have zero interest in flying saucers, crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, the anti-Christ, or the sexual preference of Spongebob Squarepants.

Whew! Glad we cleared that one up. For a minute there I thought he might be kinda crazy.

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^{1 : Yeah, that’s really the name of the column.}

2 : Personally, I blame all those liberal women who insist on wearing pants.

I’m quite happy with the way this is working so far, and judging from the feedback I’m getting, so are most of you. For week two, if we’re lucky, our little group will be joined by Jeanne d’Orleans and Brooke Shelby Biggs. And — who knows? — possibly even the elusive Jack Hitt.

Dubya’s been acting like a tough guy all week with promises to veto bills on highway spending…

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a transportation bill Tuesday that would plow billions into highway and transit projects through the end of the decade, but states say that isn’t enough to keep pace with growing traffic congestion.

Approval of the $295 billion measure sets up a showdown with the House, which has passed a $284 billion bill. The administration is threatening to veto any bill authorizing more than that amount.

…and stem cell research.

President George W. Bush said he would veto legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives that would ease restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

“I have made very clear to the Congress that the use of taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against that,” Bush told reporters in at the White House before meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. “If the bill does that, I will veto it.”

Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it. Bush hasn’t issued a single veto during his presidency, so why should we believe him now? As you can tell from this speech he made two years ago, he’s fond of patting himself on the back, but rarely follows through.

“I can assure you I will work with Congress to control excessive federal spending. One reason they give the President the veto power is to make sure the Congress doesn’t over-spend. Over-spending could serve as an anchor on economic vitality and growth.”

Even after bragging that he’d use his power to control spending, he’s earned the wrath of conservative think tanks for out of control budgets and he’s done nothing about record levels of pork-barrel spending. This can really lead us to one of two conclusions : He doesn’t really care about the things he claims to or he’s a spineless coward who’s unwilling to stand up to special interests. Either way, Little George’s veto threats are toothless and should be ignored.

…that the Koran-in-the-toilet story isn’t going to be Topic A on the blogs today.

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
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Dilawar was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who died while in custody of American troops.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Story.

…actually a quick glance at the righties suggests that I’m wrong. It’s extraordinary, really — they spend a week complaining about the Koran-in-the-toilet, yet when someone leaks a 2000 page Army report about the torture and death of detainees, the silence is thunderous.

It’s heartening to read the letter that Tom printed below from Scott in Nashville. I’ve received plenty of letters and comments along these lines in response to the religious posts I’ve done in the past and it leads me to this question : Are you also saying those things to your fellow Christians or just smartass atheists like me¹ who to like to take cheap shots at the religious wrong? I’m grateful that there are Christians who are willing to fight the stereotype that conservative fundamentalists represent all of Christianity, but correcting misconceptions is only one piece of the puzzle². As Bruce Bawer explains in his excellent book “Stealing Jesus”³, Christians need to reclaim their religion from the radical right :

In recent years, [conservative] Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the [conservative] variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from : The God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative.
. . .
[Conservative Christianity] has warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism. And, quite often, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus-yoked his name and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.

And let’s face it, it’s not too hard to jump to the conclusion that Jesus would have been appalled by fundamentalists’ devotion to “God’s Official Party”. This excerpt for the book of Luke is a perfect example of what I’m talking about :

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good — except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.'”

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I doubt there are many religious leaders who would advocate giving up everything you own and giving it to the poor, but even with a loose interpretation of this passage, it’s not to difficult to infer how Jesus would react to the men and women on both sides of the aisle who accumulate great wealth while people around the world are literally starving to death. Or leaders who are more concerned with giving tax breaks to the rich while children are dying of preventable diseases due to a lack of healthcare. Or a president who ignores the plight of millions of men and women who work multiple jobs to make a decent living because his highest priority is to destroy the safety net that keeps those same people from spending the last years of their lives as paupers.

I hope this doesn’t come off as preachy or patronizing when I say that it’s time for Christians to take back Jesus from the theological kidnappers of of the far-right. The conservative extremist brand of Christianity is an aberration that doesn’t represent the mainstream and makes a mockery of the teachings of Jesus, who warned :

“Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'”

You can be proud of your religion without proselytizing. There’s nothing pushy about saying “I voted against Bush because I’m a Christian” or reminding people that Jesus had more to say about compassion for the poor than he did about abortion, homosexuality, or judicial activism. Considering how much our President is fond of telling the public how much he loves Jesus, it’s fair game to point out how skewed his priorities are when held up to the teachings in the gospels.

The perception that Christianity is an exclusively right-wing religion isn’t going to go away until the silent majority of Christians stand up and take their religion back. Yes, you should correct people on the far left who make the mistake of assuming everyone who reads the Bible is in league with Fred Phelps, but you should be equally vigilant in regards to the mainstream press. If an AP article uses the word “Christian” to describe Pat Robertson without qualifying it with an adjective like “evangelical”, write a letter to the editor. If CNN implies that someone is conservative because they’re religious, flood their switchboard with complaints. Most of all, don’t let anyone get away with implying that you’re betraying your own faith just because you disagree with the Republican party.

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^{1 : I’m describing myself here, not accusing anyone of labeling me as such.}

2 : But it’s an important piece. I often try to be sensitive to these sorts of things, which is why I make an effort to never use the word “Christianity” when referring to the extreme-right without qualifying it with terms like “conservative”, “fundamentalist”, or “lunatic”.

3 : You can read an excerpt of the book here.