The radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties. The country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is, and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.” — Bill Moyers

The more I learn about this woman, Sarah Palin, the more frightening it becomes. We are in imminent danger of having a crazy fundie as leader of our secular nation — one who is a dominionist, who believes in speaking in tongues, being possessed by the holy spirit and holy anointing of laughter, just to name a few. Everyone should post this on their websites and send it via email to all you know, including all those fundie family members who send you religious crap all the time. Considering all the media attention that Obama’s crazy pastor got during the primaries, why isn’t the media talking about Palin’s personal crazyass beliefs? Especially if one day a dominionist may have her finger on the nuclear button.

I came across the link to this video via talk2action.org:

Palin’s Churches and the Holy Laughter anointing

From Bruce Wilson at Huffington Post (I’ve provided a few links):

Sarah Palin’s churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same ‘Spiritual Warfare’ movement that was featured in the award winning movie, “Jesus Camp,” which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin’s churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young “Joel’s Army” to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin’s extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate. Palin’s dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God “Masters Commission” graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as “One Lord Sunday.” At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the “laying on of hands” by Wasilla Assembly of God’s Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family “curses”. Palin has also been blessed, or “anointed,” by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a “spirit of witchcraft.”

The Wasilla Assembly of God church is deeply involved with both Third Wave activities and theology. Their Master’s Commission program is part of an three year post-high school international training program with studies in prophecy, intercessory prayer, Biblical exegesis, authority and leadership. The pastor, Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a “prophetic conference” at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. Becky Fischer was a pastor at Morningstar prior to being featured in the movie “Jesus Camp.” [my emphasis]The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.

(More at Huffington Post under Bruce Wilson’s page.)

Just read this headline at MSN’s mainpage. The media continues to perpetuate the god shit instead of emphasizing GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE AREA:

As Ike storm surge begins, ‘it’s time for prayers’

GALVESTON, Texas – Hurricane Ike rumbled through the Gulf of Mexico as a 350-mile-wide monster Friday toward the Texas coast, led by a massive storm surge that was already flooding homes many hours before the main event was to begin. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said authorities had done everything they could to evacuate more than 1.2 million people from the coast and “now it’s time for prayers.”

Perry said the hurricane could cause more than $100 billion of damage, making it the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, while Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who called the storm “potentially catastrophic,” warned that as many as 100,000 homes could be flooded.

My heart does go out for victims of natural disasters. And “praying” is just saying as Gov. Perry says that they have done everything they can do. But when will anyone ever say that people must use their brains and common sense in order to have a chance to survive these things because that is what it actually takes . . . human survival skills.

Prayer will not stop a hurricane or any other forces of nature beyond our control.

When “prayers are answered in Florida, for instance and the hurricane changes course, what about the prayers of those in the new path of inevitable disaster?

To the news media, STOP THIS PRAYER BULLCRAP and encourage people to follow evacuation orders to get the hell out of the storm’s path. Homes can be replaced, things can be replaced but no god will save your life.

Other things that have been done is the national guard and rescue units are on alert ready to help clean up and help the ones who chose to stay and pray.

Well, lo and behold the New Lenox Patriot published my husband’s rebuttal to Pastor Mondo Gonzales in its entirety. I cannot believe it. It gives me hope that a newspaper printed this without editing it at all, including my husband’s ending criticism of the newspaper itself. (My husband did edit out a couple of things at the end at the suggestion of some of our readers, like calling the Bible a comic book. Readers would have zeroed in on that while overlooking the message of the rebuttal if he had left that in there.)

Campbell Brown interviews Tucker Bounds on Sarah Palin’s national security experience and Tucker just keeps evading her questions which is pretty much how her supporters respond when it comes to her lack of experience. Palin keeps spouting off about her experience as “commander and chief” of Alaska’s National Guard and Tucker brings it up too in this interview with Campbell, but he never does state even one order she has given to the Alaska National Guard in times of crisis since she has been governor.

As we reflect on the incidents which happened on 9-11-2001, I hope that voters will really think about who they are going to entrust with our national security but my cynicism tells me that the evangelicals will blindly vote for their party of God candidates once again just because they have the same fundamentalist god beliefs, or that they believe it will expedite the end-of-times and the great Armageddon or whatever. How can people believe this is the greatest nation in the western world when more than half of our population are morons?

And then this one:

Sarah Palin says the war is from God and it’s gods plan

Sarah Palin loves Jeezus—”the real deal” believer

The Huffington Post reported:

“Speaking before the Pentecostal church, Palin painted the current war in Iraq as a messianic affair in which the United States could act out the will of the Lord.”

“‘Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending out on a task that is from God,’ she exhorted the congregants. ‘That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.’”

“Religion, however, was not strictly a thread in Palin’s foreign policy. It was part of her energy proposals as well. Just prior to discussing Iraq, Alaska’s governor asked the audience to pray for another matter — a $30 billion national gas pipeline project that she wanted built in the state. ‘I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,’ she said.”

This video is from HuffingtonPost.com, broadcast September 2, 2008.

And we were worried about McCain choosing FHuckabee.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – Santayana.

The anniversary of Black Tuesday has arrived yet again. Seven years have passed. But we should not let this memory dim, this wound heal. It was an important lesson: it taught us that religion, that cheap rationale of the relusional, can be twisted like a knife into the metaphorical heart of things. Whether it is one human, several human beings, a cross-section of humanity, or an arrow into the heart of a nation.

Islam proclaims itself a religion of peace. But like all the other monotheisms, hatred and contempt for the flesh is the hidden corrupt blossom at the heart of it. The sickly sweet stench of attar clings to the meme, and neither the flowery rhetoric nor bonfires of incense can mask it.

Remember, remember, the 11th of September. Let not the memory recede into the dustbins of history. Wear the wound, and when the savages try (as they shall) to dilute it, to explain and rationalize it, skin your lips back, snarl, and point to it, and declare:

“No one deserved this. Innocent citizens died. It is unforgivable.”

Never forget, never forgive.

Unless you’ve been living in the proverbial cave for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard the catchy dance tune “I Kissed A Girl (And I Liked It)” by pop singer Katy Perry (vid above).

Apparently Top 40 fans aren’t the only ones listening to Satanic secular songs; Pastor Dave Allison of Blacklick, Ohio’s Havens Corners Church also does so, and was shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to hear lyrics (and see images; he actually watched the video on MTV!) so explicitly describing experimentation with lesbian sex.

So he put up his own spin on the offending words on his church’s outside sign, a message that also serves as this post’s title.

Not surprisingly, reactions to it poured in, but perhaps not quite the ones he expected. Oh, sure, lesbian and gay rights activists protested against it, but so did Christians (maybe even members of his own congregation). They found the statement judgmental and reflective of the pastor’s as opposed to the church’s opinion, and other people remarked that it didn’t make the church seem very accepting of lesbians and gays (to which the good reverend replied that his ministry does welcome homosexual individuals, as long as they’re willing to “give up that lifestyle”).

My take on the whole fracas may not be what you’d expect from an atheist: I say let him keep it up.

Let him demonstrate what he and his church really stand for: bigoted, hateful, ignorant beliefs based on patriarchal, militaristic, imperialistic, propaganda that was already arbitrary and cruelly exclusionary when it was first manifested thousands of years ago by people in a land far away.

It might bring more out into the open; sure, the Christians who agree with it, like scum floating on the surface of a pond but also, hopefully, those Christians who are actually decent human beings in spite of the religion they cling to. Maybe even believers who harbor such thoughts and attitudes but are ambivalent about them will be forced to confront their true bigotry, and see it for its hatefulness.

As I write this, the sign has come down; it seems to have barely survived a day’s exposure. What’s the matter, Pastor Allison? Afraid that people will see you for who you really are, a bigot worthy of standing next to Fred Phelps at the next Westboro Baptist Church picketing of a military funeral? Where’s your True Christian Courage in the Face of Ungodly Persecution(TM)? Are you not willing to be martyred for your faith as your religious forefathers were?

Or maybe you’re just worried that you’ll see more and more empty pews staring desolately back at you on Sundays…

Ah, the joys of seeing xians in political power. (Who the hell elects these yahoos?)

“If you think he’s an idiot, you should see his constituents”…

Think Progress has a good link on Chris Smith and his crusade to get us all back to that ole’ time religion:

Universities have become “bastions of moral relativism?” What kind of bullshit is that? When’s the last time this moron was ever even in a college classroom? Don’t colleges and universities have codes of conduct that they follow? (Oh, that’s right, I forgot: cheating is now accepted and encouraged all across American campuses.)

In general, there’s an important difference between questioning something and rejecting it — and if Smith ever got a decent education he would know something about that.

Why do xians so often think that merely questioning something is going off into the abyss?

(Oh, that’s right, I forgot)…

The purposes of Infidels and Atheists are of course always infamous, ruthless, and heartless. – Rupert Hughes

It’s been a while for this, thus, long overdue.
I read this ditty at approximately the same time I was vigorously cheering Paine in his complete and utter lambasting of the Christian bible. This was a powerful article written as far back as 1924.

Why I Quit Going To Church

by Rupert Hughes

There was a time in this country when I should have been punished for not going to church. In the good old Puritan and Pilgrim days, though only a third or a sixth of the citizens were church members, the parsons were in power and they fined people and put them in the stocks if they stayed away or if the pastor did not like their expressions.

They whipped more than one for criticizing a sermon. They tried to sell two Boston children into slavery because they could not pay their fine for staying away from the church. And they would have done it, too, if the ungodly shipmasters had not refused to carry the children off.

It is incessantly astonishing how often the laity have had to restrain the clergy from cruelty. The Puritan elders held that “the gathering of sticks on the Sabbath may be punished with death.” Sometimes a mob would rescue Quaker women from the whips, but in Cambridge, Benanuel Bower, a Quaker who obstinately stayed away from the Puritan church, was fined annually for twenty years, hauled down a flight of steps by the heels, kept in prison for more than a year, and with his wife publicly whipped several times.

But in these wicked and degenerate times, not only can I stay away from church without getting arrested, but I can tell why without being any more than reviled.

I did not quit going to church because I was lazy or frivolous or poetically inclined to “worship God in the Great Outdoors near to Nature’s Heart.” I don’t believe that nature has a heart.

I quit because I came to believe that what is preached in the churches is mainly untrue and unimportant, tiresome, hostile to genuine progress, and in general not worth while. As for the necessity of paying homage to the deity, I began to feel that I did not know enough about God to pay him set compliments on set days. As for the God who is preached in the churches, I ceased to worship him because I could no longer believe in him or respect what is alleged of him.

I cannot respect a deity who would want or even endure the hideous monotony and mechanism of most of the worship paid him by hired men, hired prayer-makers and their supporters. When I think of the millions of repetitions of the same phrases of prayer and song smoking up to a helpless deity I feel sorry for him. No wonder he gets farther away each year. No wonder the ex-priest Alfred Loisy says (in his “My Duel with the Vatican”) that “the eternal immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, etc.,” who created the universe “by a caprice very imperfectly benevolent … begins to be conceived with increasing difficulty.”

As for the picture of God in heaven, “sitting on the Cherubim” or riding on a cherub (2 Samuel xxii, 11), and listening to everlasting praises of himself, it is simply appalling. I can no longer adore in a god what I despise in a man.

It is a long but powerful diatribe – so I will skip to the end, and leave it to the readers to explore the depth, strength and power of this statement in toto:

Our earth here! that is parish enough for us. Knowledge relieves miseries, brings comfort, saves lives, spreads beauty within the reach of the poorest. If the billions spent in huge empty buildings were devoted to housing the sick and the poor; if the billions spent on the wages of myriads of clergymen who waste their lives in calling aloud to their god Baal or whatever they call him, were spent in really useful human works, these often well-meaning and often gifted men would not squander so much history, so much power, so much eloquence on the hideous folly that “the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom” and the secret of virtue.

Two hundred million dollars spent this year in this country to adding to the number of half-empty warehouses of piety! Thousands of Ministers warring with one another and with common sense. If there is a god such as they insist on immortalizing from the fancies of ancient and ignorant nomads, what need has he of these innumerable dollars?

If there is a god and he is a god of love, God knows he must wish that his children’s treasure and their toil and their fervor should be spent upon one another and on the countless miseries of this unhappy world, which might be made so beautiful. Instead of sanctifying piety, let us make a religion of pity, of mutual help, of the search for truth and power, and the increase of freedom.

 In the heat of the many frays we encounter as atheists, let us take moments to remember the brave hearts who stood against superstition, who fought the good fight, who brought the cold cool light of reason to bear on the atavistic shadows that haunt our species even to this day.

We can only hope that our children, or perhaps our children’s children, will be free of the shackles of the oppression men call religion, that instead of searching outwards for some external vindication, they will find all they need in the moments of their lives and in reality.

So say we all?