Christian Traditions

My father died in 2007 and my brother has started going through some of the seemingly endless boxes that my father had had in storage.  Aside from showing me that he was not the straight A student he claimed to be, this report card from Valpo University sheds some light on other, darker subjects.  Perhaps the reason why I’m an atheist today is because my father evidently got a D in “Christian Traditions 3″.  Bravo old man, bravo.  This is the same man who signed off on my pledges to be a good christian in my cub scout book.

Despite this report card, I still love ya papa.

Chief Justice Roberts – Model Conservative

From the New Yorker:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.  Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

This is a very interesting and frightening article by Jeffrey Toobin, exploring John Roberts’ career so far as Chief Justice.  It’s a thoughtful article about Roberts and well worth the read.

Pay-Day: Blackmail the Catholic Church

The New York Timeshas an interesting article about former Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee.  Evidently 20 years ago he had had an affair with a 30 year old man who then blackmailed the Catholic church for $450,000 – what they paid to keep him quiet.

He has a memoir coming out next month which promises to be a good insight into the corruption of the Church.

The archbishop is also one of the first to actually come out of the closet.  He believes that the church’s teachings about women and homosexuals are misguided.  I hope he succeeds in his efforts to reform the church – for if there has to be a church, I’d rather it be a tolerant one.

National Day of Prayer

Today is the National Day of Prayer- that glorious day where all pretenses of state keeping separate from religion are destroyed and we can all get together and do something we would all be doing anyway.

Unless of course you are non-religious – in which case this day is actually kind of offensive in the civil liberties violating kind of way.

Obama in a way is sweeping the day under the rug, but he is signing a proclamation.

I hope you will join me in celebrating this day by not praying.

 

Camping with Jesus

So I’ll admit it – in 1990 I was a cub scout.  I recently stumbled upon my old ‘Wolf’ book and found something that I have no recolection of – the section about a cub scout’s duty to god:

Here is the Boy Scout of America website that details how and why they don’t let atheists be boyscouts.

More scans after the jump . . .

21st Century Crusades

American soldiers are distributing copies of the New Testament that they had printed in the native Afghan languages to the people of the country.  This is a direct violation of the US Constitution, Army rules, and the laws applying to troops in Afghanistan. 

And this footage was shot a year ago . . . so why hasn’t anything been done about it?  Sometimes it is easier and less controversial to just ignore a problem – that doesn’t mean that we should though.

Golden Rule Evidently Taken more as a Suggestion

From CNN:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.  More than half of the people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified.  Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it.  People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.  Only four in 10 of them did.

Perhaps it is because one of the most common things found at a religious service is:

But then again, I don’t really buy the argument that images of violence beget violence – so maybe it is just their fucked up morals.