Tag: religion

Philip Anschutz is building his own empire

swanksalot0 comment

Denver billionaire and conservative Christian Philip Anschutz has, uncharacteristically, been in the news recently. First for purchasing Dick Cheney’s favorite magazine, The Weekly Standard:

Right Turn Ahead

[ Right Turn Ahead]

In June, [The Weekly Standard] was handed from one conservative billionaire, [Rupert] Murdoch, to another, Philip F. Anschutz, for about $1 million, according to an executive close to Mr. Murdoch who spoke anonymously because the terms of the deal were meant to be confidential. The new ownership comes at a time when conservatism, especially the version espoused by The Standard involving American muscularity to spread freedom abroad, is not in the ascendancy.

Mr. Anschutz, who made his billions in oil, real estate, railroads and telecommunications before turning to media, is more closely aligned with Christian conservatism, a thread not associated with The Standard.

Staff members say Mr. Anschutz, who has visited the magazine’s Washington offices once since buying it, did not meet with the staff as a whole. He instructed the two top editors — William Kristol, who last year was also a columnist for The New York Times, and Fred Barnes — not to alter the publication’s ideological complexion.

[From New Owner for Weekly Standard as Political Tastes Change – NYTimes.com]

and second, for purchasing a crowd-sourced news web site, NowPublic

Examiner.com, a media company controlled by the conservative billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, said on Tuesday that it had acquired NowPublic, an innovative Web site for citizen-generated media.

With the sale, Examiner.com, a unit of Mr. Anschutz’s Clarity Digital Group, became the latest company to show interest in a lively corner of the Web: the tools that let people read and share the news around them, sometimes down to neighborhood blocks.

[From Examiner.com Buys NowPublic, a Citizen-Media Web Site – NYTimes.com]

Random Anarchists

[for instance, this photo of mine was used by a NowPublic user]

The Weekly Standard does not interest me, except in abstract terms,  ((liberals would do well to at least have a vague idea of what the latest conservative talking points are)) but NowPublic’s users have used dozens1 of my photos in various articles over the four years of their existence. Not a huge number, but at least ten that I noted. I don’t want my photography to be anywhere close to any corporation owned by Philip Anschutz.

Who is Phil Anschutz you might ask? Well, for starters, from his Wikipedia entry:

Anschutz, a Republican donor and supporter of George W. Bush’s administration, has been an active patron of a number of religious and conservative causes:
Helped fund Colorado’s 1992 Amendment 2, a ballot initiative designed to overturn local and state laws that prohibit discrimination against individuals on the basis of sexual orientation.[13]

Helped fund the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, Washington that promotes intelligent design and criticizes evolution. [14]

Supported the Parents Television Council, a group that protests against what they believe to be television indecency.[14]

Financed and distributed Christian films, such as Amazing Grace and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for mass audiences through his two film production companies and ownership of much of the Regal, Edwards and United Artists theater chains. In addition, as a producer Anschutz reportedly required the removal of certain material related to drug use and sex in the 2004 film Ray because he found it objectionable.[14]

Financed The Foundation for a Better Life.

[From Philip Anschutz – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

There’s more, but that was enough for me to send an email to NowPublic co-founder Michael Tippett, asking

In light of super conservative Republican Philip Anschutz purchasing your company, how do I go about removing my photos from the various stories they’ve been used on?

Cheers, and hope you haven’t been fired, or forced to take a loyalty oath to the anti-evolutionary forces

If I get a response, I’ll add it to this post.

Footnotes:
  1. or more, I stopped keeping track [↩]

George Bush is Insane

Seth Anderson0 comment

Any politician who is this fanatical should not be allowed to be near nuclear weapons, for all of our sakes.

Getchyer Kitschhere

James A. Haught reports:

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.

Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.

[Click to continue reading Council for Secular Humanism : A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush]

Scary stuff.

DeMint is a Christian Taliban

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Republican Party standard bearers are such a strange1 species. They would love to destroy our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and institute a theocracy in America. I call them the Christian Taliban2. To whit:

Family Planning protest w 50 foot Giant Virgin Mary
[50 foot Giant Virgin Mary, Chicago’s West Loop]

Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who recently urged his fellow party members to dig in their heels and create a Waterloo for the president. “It would break him,” DeMint added appealingly.

DeMint is an increasingly influential voice in the Republican Party, and he is now regarded as a potential Republican presidential nominee in 2012. This is partly because of his new book, “Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide Into Socialism,” and partly because almost all the other potential Republican presidential nominees have been sidetracked by lively sex scandals. At present, DeMint does not seem to have a sex scandal, although if he ever comes up with one, I promise to remind you that in his last campaign he said that openly gay people and unwed pregnant women should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

[Click to continue reading Gail Collins – The Health Care Sausage – NYTimes.com]

What century is this DeMint jerk-off living in? The 13th? Does he want to burn the unwed pregnant women at the stake? His Virgin Mary was supposed to be an unwed pregnant woman, would DeMint be happy burning his alleged savior on a cross?

Footnotes:
  1. to me anyway, I guess they convince enough people of their nonsense to get elected, somehow [↩]
  2. Pashto: طالبان ṭālibān, meaning “students” [↩]

Reading Around on July 13th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 13th from 11:10 to 19:39:

  • Unscientific America and those awful atheists : Pharyngula – Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning…? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

  • Baglione

  • Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving : Pharyngula – “Ultimately, this whole exchange illustrates the failure of Mooney/Kirshenbaum’s arguments. The demotion of Pluto, the rise of the “New Atheism”, PZ Myers, and blogging are all recent phenomena — they do not deal with the causes of the disconnect between society and science, and treating them is a distraction from dealing with the real problems. This book is more like a collection of poor rationalizations for complaining about stuff they don’t like than a serious and scholarly attempt to address a significant social problem. To useless, I must also add the adjective lightweight.”

  • Atheist

  • Greetings in a Taxi – “A raised hand generates an irresistible magnetic pull on a taxi driver. After some years the mind is trained to seek it out to the point of forming light-poles, reflections in parked cars, weaving tree branches, and on a slow night, just about any shape into that desired sign, the symbol of time not spent in vain. Depending on the time of day or night, what follows that hopeful hand will vary from absolute silence to aggressive and usually unwanted camaraderie, but in every case it always begins with some sort of greeting..”
  • Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation – NYTimes.com – Oh, boo fucking hoo. Her acid tongue was able to destroy her base all on its own.

    “Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics.

    Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. At home Ms. Palin was dealing with a teenage daughter who had given birth to a son and broken up with the infant’s father, a baby of her own with special needs and a national news media that was eager to cover it all.

    Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser ”

eat a bag of dicks

Reading Around on July 7th through July 8th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 7th through July 8th:

  • Fox report suggests Pentagon policy nixing religious flyover is a sign Obama is anti-Christian | Crooks and Liars – The military was regularly providing flyovers at countless evangelical Christian events all over the country, not only violating the regulations prohibiting military participation in religious events, but spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the process.

    MRFF began exposing these events, which included flyovers on the five holidays when flyovers at civilian events are permitted, and even a few at National Day of Prayer events, and began to see some decline in their frequency, but we weren’t sure if the number of flyovers at these events was really decreasing, or if the military and organizers of these events were just being more careful not to make the nature of the events so obvious.

    Well, needless to say, the following letter denying, for the first time in 42 years, the request for a flyover at one Christian rally…was the best 4th of July present MRFF could have asked for.

  • Branding blunder gives Russia-Nigeria energy linkup a bad name – Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

    …the name has “rather different connotations” for English-speakers.

    It recalled other international branding mishaps including the Ford Pinto ‑ which in Brazil means small penis ‑ and the Pepsi slogan “come alive with the Pepsi generation”. In Taiwan this rousing motto translated as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

  • Living the “art” Life – … there is more, so much more to art…

Reading Around on July 6th

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Some additional reading July 6th from 08:35 to 14:46:

  • Boston to debut ‘killer app’ for municipal complaints – The Boston Globe – “they think they’ve hit on something big: a “killer app’’ that marries 21st-century technology with Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s old-school devotion to pothole politics.

    City officials will soon debut Boston’s first official iPhone application, which will allow residents to snap photos of neighborhood nuisances – nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights – and e-mail them to City Hall to be fixed.”

  • President Obama’s first 167 days – The Big Picture – Boston.com – “U.S. President Barack Obama has now been in office for 167 days, and it’s time for a look back. Why 167 days? Why not – it’s just as arbitrary a number as the usual “100 days”. In that time, President Obama has contended with stimulating the U.S. economy, reshaping U.S. policy abroad, and starting work on domestic issues such as health care reform. As he and his family arrive in Moscow today for an official visit, find here a look back at some of the first 167 days of the Obama administration. (38 photos total)”

    Barack Obama is the centrist Democrat we thought he was, and I have several policy disagreements with his administration already, that said, still am charmed by the man. So many of these photos make me smile.

  • The Brick Testament – “Ever performed a magic trick for your friends? Committed adultery? Worshipped an idol? Are you cowardly? How about filthy? Have you ever told a lie? If so, bad news. You are going to be ceaselessly tortured for all eternity.Good news, though, if you are a male Jewish virgin. A lucky 144,000 of you are going to get to live on the New Improved Earth with Yahweh”

Reading Around on July 4th through July 5th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 4th through July 5th:

  • Can I Get a Witness? | TPM – yet more evidence that the Washington Post is in a death spiral”But it is bizarre to say that Palin is uncomfortable in the role of the victim. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever found a better use for this much over-used word. As Noam Scheiber explained in one of the earliest and perhaps most insightful profiles of Palin, victimhood and resentment are Palin’s twin touchstones. They define who she is.”

  • Cat M.D.s prevent heart attack fatalities | The Daily Blank – Image by swanksalot via Flickr “Owning a cat could mean the difference between life and death. The University of Minnesota recently released a study that the risk of dying from a heart attack is 40% higher among people who have never owned a cat, compared to people who have.”
  • Confirmed: God is slightly gay – “Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm, even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn’t quite figured out yet. Imagine.

    Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep and such, creatures who obviously haven’t read Leviticus. But that’s about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn happy about it, right?

    Wrong.”

  • Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Palins Poetry – Awesome.
    “The following is the complete text, directly transcribed, of the portion of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech available on video. The text is accurate and unaltered; a portion of the speech is missing from the beginning because the video does not start until then.The lines have been transcribed, however, in the form of vers libre poetry, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.”

  • War: Retreat of the 20,000 — Printout — TIME – “Retreat, hell!” snapped Major General Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the 1st Marine Division, with which he had fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain, Peleliu, Okinawa (TIME, Sept. 25). “We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction”

    Wait, you mean Sarah Barracuda Palin flubbed a quotation, again? She needs to stop letting Trig vet her speeches

Gingrich scared of Pagans

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh Newt Gingrich, please run for President in 2012, I would so love to ridicule you and your Big Ideas.

“I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Gingrich said. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.”

…

Gingrich, now a consultant and author, said the ties to religion in American government date to the Declaration of Independence, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that men are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights.

“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”

[From Huckabee, Gingrich urge political engagement in Va. Beach | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com ]

If Newty wants to be surrounded by paganism, he should pay a visit to my house. While I subscribe to no religion, I have plenty of items and talismans that might make Newty wet his pants.

Who Is This Slimy Creature Its Newt

scanned from a print, mid 1990s, Wicker Park.

Caption reads:
“Who is this slimy creature?

Raised by a single mom, but wants to put other fatherless children in orphanages.

Smoked pot in college, but seeks harsher penalties for drug use.

Dodged the draft, but plans to increase military spending.

Rants about government corruption, but agreed to a $4.5 million book advance/bribe from a company under investigation by Congress.

Divorced wife number one while she was in the hospital with cancer and is a deadbeat dad, but supports “Traditional Family Values.”

It’s Newt!

A public message from Guerrilla Girls”

Rumsfeld the Manipulator

Seth Anderson0 comment

Donald Rumsfeld was never a pious man, but, evil as he is, Rummy realized the easy way to manipulate George Bush was simply to cite biblical verse. So Rummy did. Bush considered himself some sort of medieval Crusador, so slurped up the rhetoric, and asked for more.

Two Sides to Every Midnight Tale

This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

[Click to read more Frank Rich – Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush – NYTimes.com]

Getchyer Kitschhere

Like this one:

dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Cynical, and evil.

Reading Around on May 8th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading May 8th from 08:41 to 20:13:

  • My Life With Cables – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com – visual fun with cables
  • Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness – True/Slant – windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.
  • The Eagleton Delusion : Pharyngula – "so crammed with people that they actually took my computer and book bag away from me to pack in the cargo hold, and I had to quickly snatch something to read before the baggage handlers took it away. I grabbed the Eagleton book. Thus was my fate sealed.

    I was trapped in a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but Eagleton and the Sky Mall catalog.

    This is an account of my day of misery."

The Black Hebrews

swanksalot0 comment

Fascinating article about the Black Hebrews who left Chicago (and the US) to settle in Israel, often under duress. The African Hebrew Hebrew Israelites persevered and flourished in the desert village of Dimona1 long enough to become assimilated, and even nearly accepted by the Israeli citizens.

Elyahkeem Ben Yehuda could have become another statistic, growing up poor, black and fatherless on the west side of Chicago during the 1950s.

But he never had a run-in with the law, nor did he see the inside of a jail cell, until he moved to Israel to join the African Hebrew Israelite community. “I had to come to Israel to get my first experience in jail,” he said. “But in those days, that was like a badge of honor, to be arrested for God and His people.”

Last month, the 62-year-old Ben Yehuda — father of 10 children and husband of 3 women — became the first member of his community to gain full Israeli citizenship. Looking back on the hurdles he overcame since his 1971 arrival, Ben Yehuda mused, “I can only describe this journey in relationship to my forefathers,” referring to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. “They were able to endure. As long as we put fulfilling the will of the God of Israel first, there’s no challenge that we can’t overcome.”

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem — or Black Hebrews, as they are more commonly known (though not all members are black) — have sparred with the Israeli government for decades over their right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. It is a right they still do not have. But presaging Ben Yehuda’s achievement last month, Israel granted the community permanent residency status in 2003, offering its 3,000 members a five-year path to apply for citizenship on an individual basis. It’s a process that many others are now undertaking.

[Click to continue reading Once Reviled, Black Hebrews Now Fêted – Forward.com]

via Michael Hawthorne‘s Friday afternoon twitter feed

DNA Bricks

The African Hebrew Israelites web page offers a bit of their history:

In 1966 our spiritual leader, Ben Ammi, had a vision that it was time for the Children of Israel who remained in America (the land of their captivity) to return to the Holy Land (the land of their origin).

In 1967, after almost two thousand years in the Diaspora, four hundred Hebrew Israelites were inspired by the spirit of God to make an exodus from America. According to plan, they settled in Liberia’s interior to purge themselves of the negative attributes they had acquired in the captivity. After spending a two-and-one-half year period in Liberia, The African Hebrew Israelites were prepared to make the last portion of their journey home, returning to Israel in 1969.

In today’s world, man has created so many diversions from and substitutions for the true worship of God that the people have lost their way. We realized just how far we had been led away from God and were astounded by the drastic changes required for those of us who desired to fulfill our responsibility to God as Hebrew Israelites. Nonetheless, we have committed ourselves to the high degree of courage and discipline required to establish an alternative lifestyle that is in harmony with the cycles of God.

[Click to read more of Our Philosophy]

I don’t know if the Black Hebrews have done any deep DNA study, but they explain their origins thusly:

Prior to the excavation of the Suez Canal (1859-69) the entire Arabian Peninsula and what has become known today as the ”Middle East” were physically connected with the African continent. African people lived and moved freely throughout this region of the world.

After the invasion of the Romans in 70 C.E., remnants of the Hebrew Israelites were driven from Jerusalem. For more than 1,000 years many of them migrated across the continent, eventually reaching West Africa.


“Soul Messages from Dimona” (Various Artists)

Update2 via Kumar303’s twitter feed, the African Hebrew Israelites have put out an album called, Soul Messages From Dimona:

Following a path blazed in Belize and the Bahamas, The Numero Group finds yet another stop on the soul diaspora tour: Dimona, Israel. Between 1975-1981, a group of American ex-pats took their native sounds of Detroit and Chicago and intermingled them with the messages of the Black Hebrew culture. The results are a heavenly mix of spiritual soul and jazz with an undercurrent of gospel psychedelia. Featuring the Soul Messengers, the Spirit Of Israel, Sons Of The Kingdom, and the Tonistics, Soul Messages From Dimona is the only living document of a thriving community at both the center and fringe of the world.

Deluxe CD and 2LP set comes stuffed with rare photographs, sleeves, and expansive liner notes about the African Hebrew

sounds fun.

Footnotes:
  1. דִּימוֹנָה [↩]
  2. gotta love Twitter [↩]

In Honor of Lent

swanksalot0 comment

I gave up Christianity for Lent, circa 1983, and haven’t looked back. (lifted from @joem500‘s FB account )

Your morality is 0% in line with that of the bible.

Damn you heathen! Your book learnin’ has done warped your mind. You shall not be invited next time I sacrifice a goat.

Do You Have Biblical Morals?
Take More Quizzes

I AM Temple Faux Lomo

If you did poorly on this quiz (and I hope you did), it is because our morality does NOT come from the bible. If the bible were the source of morality, then there would be no basis to reject portions of it. Simply put, this book of Bronze Age myths reflects the superstitions of cruel and ignorant people that lived in a cruel and ignorant time, and has no place in an enlightened society.

Quite a lot of the questions on this quiz are illustrated in the lego-illustrated bible page, the Brick Testament.

Scientologists Want to Invade South Clark

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Scientologists want to take over the building at 650 S. Clark, Chicago and turn it into a Scientologist “Church”, thwarting the normal procedure.

Xenu dot Net

Micah Maidenberg writes:

The Church of Scientology proposes to change the building from DX-12, a downtown mixed-use district, to DR-10, a downtown residential classification.

The change would allow the group to develop a church without obtaining a special permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals, as the current zoning requires. The group has been unable to secure the permit in the past.

Some Printers Row residents expressed skepticism about the parking plans for the new church and worried about sidewalk solicitation at a Jan. 27 neighborhood meeting about the proposal.

Representatives from the church said they wouldn’t solicit and said they had provided enough parking for church use.

A few residents were hostile toward Scientology generally. One woman even denied the Church of Scientology constituted a religion. The group has religious tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Service guidelines.

[Click to continue reading Controversial zoning change could be considered tomorrow]

Personally, I don’t think any church should enjoy tax-exempt status, no matter how politically connected (or not) they are.

As an aside, I wonder if I have a photo of this building? I’ll have to dig into my archives…

Hey, I'm working here!