Miscellanea Agnostica

In the “Are you kidding me?” department … the BBC reports that famous Scottish author J.K. Rowling was refused an important honor because the White House thought she “encouraged witchcraft”:

Harry Potter author JK Rowling missed out on a top honour because some US politicians believed she “encouraged witchcraft”, it has been claimed.

Matt Latimer, former speech writer for President George W Bush, said that some members of his administration believed her books promoted sorcery.

As a result, she was never presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Latimer’s disclosure comes from an upcoming tell-all book:

The claims appear in Latimer’s new book called Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor.

He wrote that “narrow thinking” led White House officials to object to giving Rowling the civilian honour.

The award acknowledges contributions to US national interest, world peace or cultural endeavours.

First, let me say that these “tell-all” books by folks who are, essentially, disgruntled employees, are not very trustworthy. So I’m not sure how credible this is. And even if there were someone in the White House who made remarks like this, it’s not clear who it was, or how much influence that person had. It’s not even clear if some other objection to Rowling getting the medal was raised, such as her not being a US citizen. (The Medal has been given to some not born in the States, e.g. Elie Wiesel, but not being an American may have represented a hurdle anway. To what extent, I have no idea.)

Nonetheless, it’s remarkable that in the 21st century, people can still fear books that mention “witchcraft” and/or “sorcery” merely because they contain these story elements. After all, famous Christian writers have used magical or sorcerous settings for their own widely-beloved works … sticking to the UK, the examples of J.R.R. Tolkien (a lifelong devout Catholic) and C.S. Lewis (an adult convert to the Anglican Church) leap to mind. The religious devotion of neither of these men has ever been seriously questioned, nor has it ever been suggested that either of them ever “promoted” or “encouraged” witchcraft or sorcery, even though they both wrote about worlds (Middle-Earth and Narnia respectively) in which these things existed, and protagonists (e.g. Gandalf and Aslan) who made use of them. Objecting to Rowling’s Harry Potter series on that basis — which are almost as much moral tales as either The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia — is simply irrational and unfounded.

While we cannot just take Latimer’s word that Christian-dogmatic anti-witchcraft sentiment played a part in this decision, it is unfortunately true that the Harry Potter books were the targets of fundamentalist Christian outrage. It’s nonsensical, of course … but these folks are fully committed to their nonsensical ideas and are unable — and unwilling — to see them as the nonsense they are.

On the heels of my post yesterday about the anti-vaccine movement raging in New York state, I thought I should remark on Phil Plait (of the excellent Bad Astronomy blog) deciding to take a stand against the anti-vaccine movement in his own way:

I used to write for the Huffington Post, an online news and blog collective. It was started by Arianna Huffington during the Bush Era as a response to all the far-right online media. I didn’t agree with a lot of what was on there — I am more centrist — but at the time I thought it was necessary.

Then they started to promote far-left New Age nonsense, and when it came to vaccinations, HuffPo started posting all kinds of opinions that amounted to nothing more than out-and-out health threats. While they do sometimes post a counter-argument, it’s still almost all alt-med, all the time.

Here’s the latest: a doctor named Frank Lipman is telling people not to get vaccinated against Swine Flu. Instead he says you should wash your hands a lot, eat well, and take homeopathic medicine.

I’m sure the folks at Huff feel they’re doing the right thing, but when you’re talking medicine, feelings do not matter … science and, more specifically, evidence do. At any rate, Plait is done with Huff:

It’s the peddling of antivax rhetoric like this that drove me from HuffPo, and I’ve let them know why. I was a minor cog there, so I know it made no difference… and the proof is that they still post articles promoting procedures known to be useless. In fact, it’s worse than that, since someone might try the homeopathic water rather than get actual treatment.

So, as always, don’t listen to people like Lipman, or even to me when it comes to this stuff. Instead, go to your doctor, a board-certified and science-based doctor, and ask them about the H1N1 swine flu, and see if they recommend getting the shot.

That’s good advice … go to a bona fide evidence-based doctor, and follow his/her instructions. Plait’s exit from the circus of children that is Huff may not alleviate that blog’s fuzzy thinking, but even symbolic stands can carry some weight. Good for you, Dr Plait!

In the “good news and good-bye” department, the splinter of Operation Rescue which lingered in Kansas — the better to harass the now-late Dr George Tiller — is broke and may be shutting down, as reported by the Washington Post:

Operation Rescue has told its supporters it is facing a “major financial crisis” and is very close to shutting down unless emergency help arrives soon.

Troy Newman, the antiabortion group’s president, blamed the economic downturn for its money woes in a desperate plea e-mailed Monday night to donors. But the Wichita-based organization has also been under attack from both fringe antiabortion militants and abortion rights supporters since the May 31 shooting death of George Tiller.

Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Does the Bible not say that those who start trouble will be afflicted by it? (See among other passages Job 4:8, Jeremiah 6:19, & Galatians 6:7.) Seems organizational collapse is not even a fitting end for a group that may (note: I said “may,” not “did”) have had a hand in the assassination of Dr Tiller. One of OR/K’s operatives, Cheryl Sullenger, gave accused assassin Scott Roeder information about Tiller’s schedule that might have led to the shooting.

If all that happens to OR/K is that they end up closing their doors, that will have been too good for these people. But it’s the least that I can hope will happen.

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

The anti-vaccine movement, about which I’ve blogged before, has found a new demographic to exploit — healthcare workers in New York state — and a new vaccine to bellyache about — the H1N1 (aka “swine flu”) vaccine that will be released soon (as the CBS News Taking Liberties blog reports):

Health care workers are planning to take to the streets Tuesday at a rally in front of the Albany, N.Y. state capitol to protest mandatory vaccination.

The rally is intended to call for “freedom of choice in vaccination and health care” and to protest mandatory vaccination for influenza and the H1N1 swine flu. “This vaccine has not been clinically tested to the same degree as the regular flu vaccine,” Tara Accavallo, a registered nurse on Long Island, told Newsday. “If something happens to me, if I get seriously injured from this vaccine, who’s going to help me?”

Well, of course the H1N1 vaccine hasn’t had the decades of testing that the conventional flu vaccine has. It never will have that amount of testing until more decades have passed; if the vaccine is never released until that length of time has passed, any chance to arrest H1N1 will have been lost. They may as well never develop an H1N1 vaccine, if this is the standard that must be met. Of course this is foolish … and of course healthcare workers know it. The report continues:

State Health Commissioner Richard Daines, who is probably feeling a bit of political pressure after deciding that the Empire State will go where no other state has, released a lengthy open letter last week that concludes: “We, as health care workers, owe it to our patients and to society in general to demonstrate our confidence in those scientific standards. Even more importantly, we should reconfirm our noble commitment to the tradition of putting patients’ interests first by supporting the mandatory influenza vaccination requirement.”

What should be noted, too, is that New York state … and the metro NYC area … were “hotbeds” of H1N1 occurrence in the US. Containing this virus in New York is much more important, and will have a greater effect on transmission around the country, than elsewhere.

Next related item:

Outside the realm of healthcare workers in New York state, the irrationality surrounding vaccines has hit new highs, and has led to truly strange, if not utterly dangerous, things like “swine flu parties” (as reported by US News & World Report):

[Question:] I’ve heard that some parents are throwing “swine flu parties” for their kids with the intent of exposing them to the virus now, while it’s mild, so that kids have enough immunity to fight the virus off. Is this a good idea?

[Answer by] Judith Palfrey, M.D.: While parents want to protect their children from infections, exposing them to illness is not a prudent practice. I asked Dr. Thomas Sandora, the director of infection control at Children’s Hospital in Boston, to give his advice. Here’s what he had to say:

“Swine flu parties are a dangerous gamble and a big mistake. The novel H1N1 influenza virus is predicted to be the predominant circulating strain of flu in the country this winter. It is true that infection with an influenza virus can produce immunity to that strain—that’s the principle by which vaccination works. However, catching this novel H1N1 flu virus can be extremely dangerous. …

“The idea of parties designed to expose children to infections is not new—in the past, some people have hosted ‘chicken pox parties’ in an attempt to expose their children to varicella, often with the goal of avoiding vaccination. But chicken pox can also have fatal complications, so it’s a huge gamble. In my opinion, intentionally exposing your child to a potentially fatal infection is never a risk worth taking.”

I’d never heard of “swine flu parties” before and have no idea how common they are. For all I know they’re just an urban legend that no one actually takes a chance on. But if they are happening, all I can say is — in the words of G’Kar on Babylon 5 (episode “Revelations”) — “Weep for the future; weep for us all.” Because we’ll have fallen into a chasm of irrationality out of which we may never be able to climb.

Richard Dawkins is once again taking on the forces of religionism. This time, he’s explaining what evolution is and isn’t, and how creationists and their close allies “intelligent designers” misinform their sheep about it. His new book is called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Excerpts have been published in several venues; here is one published in Newsweek:

The Angry Evolutionist

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record, because they have been taught (by each other) to repeat, over and over, the mantra that it is full of “gaps”: “Show me your ‘intermediates!’” They fondly (very fondly) imagine that these “gaps” are an embarrassment to evolutionists. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all, let alone the massive numbers that we now do have to document evolutionary history—large numbers of which, by any standards, constitute beautiful “intermediates.” We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them obsessively.

Essentially Dawkins goes on to explain that the “gaps in the fossil record” that Creationists wail about so often, do not actually refute evolution. Fossils — any fossils at all — are merely “frosting on the cake,” and even if there were none at all, evolution would still be borne out by the evidence. Dawkins goes on to explain what might weigh against it:

What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum. As J.B.S. Haldane famously retorted when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!” No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found. All the fossils that we have, and there are very very many indeed, occur, without a single authenticated exception, in the right temporal sequence. Yes, there are gaps where there are no fossils at all, and that is only to be expected. But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved. That is a very telling fact. A good theory is one that is vulnerable to disproof, yet is not disproved. Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colors. Skeptics of evolution who wish to prove their case should be diligently scrabbling around in the rocks, desperately trying to find anachronistic fossils.

Dawkins also addresses the fallacy of looking for “transitional forms,” as well as Creationists’ other unreasonable expectations of evolution, which is that it cannot be true, since monkeys do not give birth to homo sapiens:

The silliest of all these “missing link” challenges are the following two (or variants of them, of which there are many). First, “If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a ‘fronkey’?” And, second, “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby.” This last one makes the same mistake as all the others, plus the additional one of thinking that major evolutionary change happens overnight.

Well, of course, monkeys are not descended from frogs. No sane evolutionist ever said they were, or that ducks are descended from crocodiles or vice versa. Monkeys and frogs share an ancestor, which certainly looked nothing like a frog and nothing like a monkey. Maybe it looked a bit like a salamander, and we do indeed have salamander-like fossils dating from the right time. But that is not the point. Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one.

The fact is that Creationists and Intelligent Designers have, in fact, lied to people about what evolution is. They purposely misrepresent it, and explicitly misstate what it says, so that it appears foolish and absurd. And to be honest, if evolutionists were teaching that a monkey once suddenly gave birth to a human, I’d agree that would be wrong. But evolutionists don’t actually teach that, because that’s not what evolution says.

It’s time for religionists to grow the hell up, stop lying about things, and just accept that their metaphysics has been scientifically disproven. Their beliefs about creation do not entitle them to lie about evolution or about science in general.

One last note: Is there any particular reason the editors at Newsweek decided to denigrate Dawkins by labeling him as “angry” in their headline? Just wondering out loud.

Since I started this blog, I’ve mentioned the amorphous Christian movement known as “dominionism” many times, and have suggested that it’s much more of a motive force for the Religious Right than even they might let on. I’ve been asked if my assertion might not be more paranoia than insightful conclusion.

Let’s face it, not many people really know what dominionism is or what it’s trying to do; and I fully admit that at least some Religious Right leaders sincerely do not view themselves as dominionists. Not only that, the scenario does carry of whiff of “conspiracy theory” and I’m far too skeptical to be susceptible to that. So it’s rare that anyone ever says anything that offers any similar thinking. But I recently came across something that speaks to this movement and the tentacular entanglements it has throughout the Right in the US. That comes from Sarah Posner over at Religion Dispatches:

Despite all the attention paid to the religious right’s declining interest in gay marriage as a key issue, it’s clear homosexuality is still a vibrant bogeyman—but the tea party bandwagon is simply more enticing at the moment. [Chaplain Viviana] Hernandez’s activist roots, for example, are with the National Organization for Marriage, though she is now affiliated with a group called the City Action Coalition International which, she says, trains pastors to be political activists. It is led by Bishop Joseph Mattera, whose son, Jason, is a well-known conservative activist and blogger who led another Values Voter workshop, “Turning the Tide in Your Generation.” …

The continuing influence of “Christian nation” mythology and dominionism is evident in Hernandez’s activist trajectory. She told me that before running (unsuccessfully) for state senate and city council in New York, she attended classes at the Providence Foundation, a small group based in Charlottesville, Virginia that has been described as Christian Reconstructionist. …

Religion Dispatches goes on to describe this group and its relationships to other arms of the Right:

Stephen McDowell, Providence’s co-founder, said in a telephone interview that he would not consider himself a Christian Reconstructionist, “but I do believe that the Bible is the template that we ought to look to to build our life upon and our family and our business and our civil society. That’s where the people who founded America looked.” According to its Web site, “The Scriptures contain a theology of the family, the church, and the state. Principles in God’s written Word that relate to civil government, politics, economics, and education are timeless and universally useful for the benefit of any culture on Earth today.” …

Although it’s a small operation, Providence has the blessing of David Barton, the religious right propagandist and Republican activist who claims the separation of church and state is a myth, and who serves on its board. Barton’s attempts to influence both politics and public education with his “Christian nation” mythology are legion; most recently, right-wing members of the Texas State Board of Education appointed Barton to serve as an “expert” on its social studies curriculum. McDowell serves on the board of Barton’s organization, WallBuilders. …

Whatever the tea party movement is—Dick Armey’s astroturf to kill health care reform, Rupert Murdoch’s marketing plan to boost Glenn Beck’s ratings, a grassroots outlet for right-wing rage and paranoia—the Values Voter Summit made clear the religious right is hitching its wagon to that horse. Sharing a common enemy (Obama, the Democratic Party, liberalism writ large), different participants wrap their rhetoric in red, white, and blue, whether the endgame is a romanticized rebellion of “authentic” patriots, uber-libertarianism—or Biblical law.

The notion of a “Christian nation” is one that the country’s Christian majority finds attractive. Rightist Christians definitely would love to see the US government overtly “Christianized,” even if they do not count themselves among dominionists. The truth is, though, that this sentiment makes them tacit dominionists. And even some Christians who are not committed Rightists, may find some appeal in it.

The dominionism movement is very dangerous, because its appeal is pervasive and because it’s often very hard to discern deep under the Religious Right’s machinations. Be afraid … be very, very afraid!

Back in early August I blogged about the immaturity that has saturated the country, and described examples of people getting hurt because of it. Well, it’s possible this has been ramped up from fisticuffs, to homicide. A US Census worker has been found dead, as reported by the AP (via the Hartford Courant):

When Bill Sparkman told retired trooper Gilbert Acciardo that he was going door-to-door collecting census data in rural Kentucky, the former cop drew on years of experience for a warning: “Be careful.”

The 51-year-old Sparkman was found this month hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery with the word “fed” scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

At the outset let me be clear: The nature of this killing, much less its motive, is not yet known. Suicide has not been ruled out. And even if it turns out to have been murder, it may have had nothing to do with distrust of the government:

Manchester Police Chief Jeff Culver, whose agency is not part of the investigation because the death was outside city limits, said the area where Sparkman was found has a history of problems with prescription drug and methamphetamine trading.

“That part of the county, it has its ups and downs. We’ll get a lot of complaints of drug activity. They’ll whittle away, then flourish back up,” Culver said. He said officers last month rounded up 40 drug suspects, mostly dealers, and made several more arrests in subsequent days.

It could be that he visited some place that drug traffickers didn’t want him to see or had stumbled into an area they didn’t want to be noticed. The jury is definitely still out on this.

It’s plausible that anti-government sentiment was behind this; parts of the country are seething with ideological immaturity. And the Census has drawn particular attention by the extreme Right. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-MN, issued warnings about the 2010 Census and linked it to ACORN, the activist organization that president Barack Obama had worked with. (In the eyes of the Right, ACORN is inseparable from Satan.)

About the only thing that can be said for certain about Sparkman’s death, is that it was not robbery (as the AP notes):

Census employees were told Sparkman’s truck was found nearby, and a computer he was using for work was inside, she said.

Not only that, robbers are not likely to have staged a hanging … they’d have just swiped the computer and/or taken off with the truck, and had done with it. Beyond this, however, almost any motive is possible.

That said, the accusations are flying thick and fast. The Left, typically, has assumed the worst of the Right, from the outset (e.g. Daily Kos):

The real murderers of this man are the Glenn Beck’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s, and Michele Bachmann’s who have spread the deadly poison of hate and fear of our government and the Obama administration across the land.

This is out of line. Not only do we not yet know what the motive was, here — as I’ve discussed at length already — while Bachmann’s remarks about the Census were unnecessarily stupid and paranoid, nothing she said suggested anyone ought to kill a Census worker. In fact, she said that people ought to respond to the Census — but only with minimal information, which they’re within their rights to do. What’s even worse than this are blog comments by Rightists suggesting that someone on the Left — probably from that infernal communist organization ACORN — killed Sparkman and set up his death to look as though it had been done by a murderous Rightist, so as to discredit the Right.

Folks, these kinds of reactions are almost as immature and irrational as the anti-government sentiment that may or may not have cost Sparkman his life. Juvenile responses to juvenile outrages are simply inappropriate. Let’s grow up and use our heads here, fercryinoutloud!

The folks at Trinity College here in Connecticut released a report on a segment of the population previously mentioned in their 2008 survey (called ARIS) of religiosity in the US (which I blogged about earlier this year when it was released). Today they released a follow-up report, based on the 2008 survey data, on what they call “the Nones” (here’s a US News & World Report story, by Dan Gilgoff, on it):

If current trends continue, a quarter of Americans are likely to claim “no religion” in 20 years, according to a survey out today by Trinity College. Americans who identify with no religious tradition currently comprise 15 percent of the country, representing the fastest growing segment of the national religious landscape.

While the numbers portend a dramatic change for the American religious scene—”religious nones” accounted for just 8 percent of the population in 1990—the United States is not poised adopt the anti-religious posture of much of secularized Europe.

A point of clarification: the Trinity report on the Nones (which can be viewed here in PDF format) is not precisely “a survey out today.” It is, as I said, a follow-up report based on the earlier 2008 ARIS survey; this is not new data, as Gilgoff suggests. But Gilgoff does correctly note that not all the “Nones” are atheists:

That’s because American religious nones tend to be religious skeptics as opposed to outright atheists. Fewer than ten percent of those identifying with no religious tradition call themselves atheists or hold atheistic beliefs, according to the new study.

In other words, not all these Nones scoff at God. They may believe in a aloof, impersonal, supernatural Creator — or something along those lines — but do not necessarily reject the idea of a God. This means that many Nones might actually be best labeled as Deists.

One of my own positive observations about this report is that one of the questions in this 2008 poll, “Regarding the existence of God, do you think…?”, has a number of possible responses which allowed the surveyors to tease out potential differences among people who might together be lumped under the label of “non-believers.” These were: “There is no such thing [as God]“; “There is no way to know”; “I’m not sure”; and “There is a higher power but no personal God.” I note this because too many surveys of religion don’t dig into non-belief … instead, they present one overly-general response such as “I do not believe in God,” which can mean different things to different people.

What this means is that religonists who’d railed that “the New Atheists” had been making converts en masse back when the ARIS 2008 was initially released, are not actually correct. It is not “atheism” which is growing; the Nones identified in the survey include people with varying degrees of non-belief, and include Deists, who are most certainly theists (of a sort).

At any rate, this report appears to be the first major, serious, meaningful, large-scale investigation of “non-belief” in the US. It’s odd that, some 43 years after Time magazine asked on its cover, “Is God Dead?”, that only now has anyone bothered to seriously look at non-believers.

Several times I’ve blogged about the unthinking nature of journalism in the US, and how they’ll stoop to reporting on the “paranormal,” putative hauntings in various places, alien abductions, and so on if it’s a slow news day and they have space to fill. This trend has only gotten worse with the mass layoffs at most newspapers and many other types of media outlets, which have in turn resulted from the collapse of advertising revenue. The latest example of this horrible trend comes from KXTV, News10, in Sacramento CA:

Are children more psychic than adults? According to two people with American Paranormal Investigations (API) kids tend to be more open to certain paranormal occurrences.

Ana Marie Sotuela and Dave Bender are real-life ghostbusters with API. They are holding a seminar this Saturday, Sept. 18 called “Children and Psychic Phenomena” with paranormal expert Loyd Auerbach.

Folks, phony psychics peddling their crap in the form of seminars, is not “news.” And swindles like this hardly deserve any free advertising in the form of this story.

Note too that the word “investigations” in the name of this outfit, is a misnomer: They are not truly “investigating” anything, they’re merely taking their beliefs, and using methods such as shoehorning, cherry-picking, and following other cognitive biases, to justify and rationalize them. None of these things has the slightest thing to do with any kind of truly objective “investigation.”

I suppose it’s possible these “psychics” paid the TV station for their airtime and Web advertising … the wall between media outlets’ news and ad departments has been under pressure and is even collapsing lately elsewhere, so I assume this is possible. Then again, this may be a simple — but not unethical — example of overly-credulous reporters looking for something to fill time and Web pages.

At any rate, the last thing our young people need is to have the idea that they must be “psychic” pushed on them by these swindlers, the reporters who tell us about them, or their own well-meaning but misguided or ignorant parents. Children are a precious resource and ought be exploited.

Hat tip: Skeptic’s Dictionary.

A historical milestone:

John T. Elson, the former religion editor at Time magazine — the man responsible for one of the most incendiary headlines ever to grace the cover a major US publication — has died. Elson was not a household name, to be sure, and the controversy surrounding the story in question has died down over the decades, but it did cause a tempest in its time (as the New York Times reports in its obituary of Elson):

For more than a year, Mr. Elson had labored over an article examining radical new approaches to thinking about God that were gaining currency in seminaries and universities and spilling over to the public at large.

When finally completed, it became the cover story for the issue of April 8, as Easter and Passover approached. The cover itself was eye-catching, the first one in Time’s 43-year history to appear without a photograph or an illustration. Giant blood-red letters against a black background spelled out the question “Is God Dead?”

The issue caused an uproar, equaled only by John Lennon’s offhand remark, published in a magazine for teenagers a few months later, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The “Is God Dead?” issue gave Time its biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor, the most in its history to that point.

But as the Times explains, the article itself was a thorough investigation of “new approaches” toward thinking about God … it included many viewpoints and was not an “atheist” article. Elson himself was a believer:

“He was catholic with a capital C and a small c in his interests, deeply and widely read,” Jim Kelly, former managing editor of Time, said in an interview last week. “His ability to absorb an enormous amount of information and turn it into a readable story was remarkable.”

The Times goes on to say that people today often misrecall the headline, as a statement that “God Is Dead,” rather than correctly as a question, “Is God Dead?” Another well-known misremembrance — that the Times didn’t mention — can be found in the song “Levon” (written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin and performed by the former), which has the lyrics:

He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day
When the New York Times said God is dead

There are three errors here: First, the wrong headline (as mentioned); second, it was Time magazine, not the New York Times; and third, it was published around Easter of 1966, not around Christmas. The story itself was a substantial and even scholarly one, and people do it a disservice by misremembering it as they do.

The idea that Barack Obama is the Antichrist (which I blogged about before) is one of those “crank” notions that apparently refuses to die. According to Public Policy Polling, nearly 1/3 of New Jersey Republicans believe Obama could be — or truly is — the Antichrist. Rachel Maddow recently had Frank Schaeffer — the evangelical preacher and former Religious Right activist — on her show to discuss this. I have rarely seen anyone express the problem of Christian fundamentalism any more concisely than Shaeffer does here. He posits that these folks constitute an American subculture of their own, complete with its own customs and suppositions (transcript courtesy of Alternet; a Youtube video of this is below):

But I think the larger point this brings up is that the mainstream—not just media, but culture—doesn‘t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture, we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts as a matter of faith. And so, this substitute for authentic historic Christianity …

Stunning, yet true … Christian fundamentalists do — in fact — utterly reject all facts that even appear to have the possibility of refuting their beliefs. They do not care what it is, they just refuse to accept it — reflexively and without hesitation. They view “facts” as impediments to belief … hurdles they must jump on the road of faith, if you will, or tests of faith thrown in front of them (by God or by Satan).

But Schaeffer doesn’t just leave it at that, he continues, explaining things even better:

And when you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our president is the anti-Christ, you have to draw one of two conclusions. Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they‘re beyond crazy? And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation.

And that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America and we have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon. Good news is bad news to them.

When we talk about the “Left Behind” series of books that I talk about in my book “Crazy for God,” what we‘re talking about is a group of people that are resentful because they‘ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature. The rest of us are getting on with our lives. These people are standing on the hilltop waiting for the end.

And this is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors, and they‘re our national neighbors. And this is the source of all of these insanities that we see leveled at the president. One way or another they go back to this little evangelical subculture. It‘s a disaster. …

There is no end to this stuff. Why? Because this subculture has as its fundamentalist faith that they distrust facts per se. They believe in a younger of 6,000 years old with dinosaurs cavorting with human beings. They think that whether it‘s economic news or news from the Middle East, it all has to do with the end of time and Christ returns. This is la-la land.

And the Republican Party is totally enthralled to this subculture to the extent that there is no Republican Party. There is a fundamentalist subculture which has become a cult. It‘s fed red meat by the pawns like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other people who are just not terribly bright themselves and they are talking to even stupider people. That‘s where we‘re at. That‘s where all of this is coming from.

Schaeffer has a little advice for the Republican party, too:

And until we move past these people—and let me add as a former lifelong Republican—until the Republican leadership has the guts to stand up and say it would better—it would be better not to have a Republican Party than have a party that caters to the village idiot, there‘s going to be no end in sight. …

Look, in the year 2000 I worked for John McCain, to try to get him elected in the primaries instead of George Bush. But John McCain sold out by nominating Sarah Palin who comes directly from the heart of this movement and carries with her all that baggage. So, he sold out. I don‘t see anybody on the Republican side of things these days who has the moral standing to provide real leadership, or who will risk their position to do so.

I agree with Schaeffer on this … unfortunately there are no serious, credible, competent Republican leaders capable of seizing the reins of the party and casting off the fundamentalist subculture. At the moment, this “lunatic fringe” of furious and often armed wing-nuts is their sole source of political power (since they no longer hold the White House, Congress, or a majority of state houses or governorships). The GOP does not believe it can afford to jettison them. Of course, if they did, they would widen their appeal immensely among the 75% or so of the US which is not enslaved to religious fundamentalism … and in so doing they might acquire political power they currently don’t have. But, to their own and the country’s detriment, they staunchly refuse to take “the leap of faith” required to find out.

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

Lastly, here is Maddow’s interview of Schaeffer, courtesy of Youtube:

For the last few months, local radio has advertised a “Get Motivated” seminar to be held in Hartford (CT) in the 9th of September. Well, the seminar was held … and was successful … but it turned to have been in disguise, as the Hartford Courant reports:

Laura Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell and Joe Montana didn’t come to the XL Center Wednesday to pitch products or services. They just told stories.

But the celebrities — along with cheap ticket prices — helped draw an overflow crowd for “Get Motivated!,” a one-day event billed as a business seminar that, unbeknown to many attendees beforehand, doubled as a sales pitch for costly investment seminars and other products, and for Christian evangelism. …

Not everyone who attended the event, which flooded downtown Hartford with about 19,000 people, cared for the overt religious proselytizing.

“To be perfectly honest with you, it pissed me off,” said Bill White of Westfield, Mass., who helps manage a CVS store in Bloomfield. “I have my own beliefs and I don’t like it when somebody tries to shove it down my throat.”

White said he felt misled by the event’s advertisements, which emphasize business skill development, increasing profits and overcoming challenges, but make no mention at all of religion. “I almost feel like I’ve been lied to,” he said.

Event officials declined to discuss the event’s religious aspect.

That’s odd, because one of the event’s organizers said something else:

“The real superstar is Jesus Christ,” intoned Tamara Lowe, who with her husband, Peter, runs Get Motivated! Seminars Inc., the Florida company behind Wednesday’s event and similar events throughout the country.

If the real star of your shows is Jesus, Ms Lowe, why would you not have mentioned that in your ads? And why would your organization now be clamming up about the event’s religiosity?

Look, if you want to hold a revival service, fine. Hold one. It’s a free country. Have at it! Just don’t package it as something else, reel people in, then shovel a whole lot of religious propaganda at them. Deception isn’t very Christian!

I’m surprised to hear that Rudy Giuliani, of all people, would be involved with a scheme like this. He had once been the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2008 … but his campaign had been torpedoed by the Religious Right, e.g. James Dobson, then head of Focus on the Family and commander-in-chief of the Protestant evangelical movement, who said he was unacceptable as a candidate. I would not have thought Giuliani would get involved in religiosity of this kind.

But he did anyway.