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 not be exploited.
Time magazine cover / April 8, 1966 / 'Is God Dead?' by John T. Elson
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 (WebCite cached article):
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.
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.
A variation on the old “the Devil made me do it” excuse was on the news today, concerning the plane hijacking that took place in Mexico (as reported by the New York Times):
Federal police raided a Boeing 737 at Mexico City airport and freed more than 100 passengers on Wednesday afternoon after an unstable man threatened to blow up the plane as it flew from Cancún unless he could speak to President Felipe Calderón of Mexico to warn him about impending doom, officials said. …
The man had a criminal record in Bolivia for armed robbery, and was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, officials said. Mr. Flores told authorities that he had a divine intervention that the date — Sept. 9, 2009, or 9/09/09 — had a connection to 666 and that Mexico might suffer a devastating earthquake as a result.
Paraded before reporters at the airport by federal police, Mr. Flores smiled nervously at the cameras, chewing gun. He later gave a rambling interview in which he frequently invoked the name of God and spoke of his desire to save Mexico. He said he had seen the devil in the Mexican flag and he called on Mr. Calderon to assemble the population in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s enormous central square. “Awful things are coming,” he said.
A Bolivian priest hijacked a Mexican flight from the resort city of Cancun after receiving “divine inspiration”, officials said.
I’m not sure he really is a “priest,” though, because apparently Mr Flores has an extensive criminal history and I don’t see how he could have kept up his clerical obligations while in Mexican prison(s). The media had also reported multiple hijackers initially, but after arresting a number of people on the plane, Mexican authorities decided Mr Flores had been a lone hijacker.
If anyone tells you that little superstitious beliefs … such as that today’s date, 9/9/09, is somehow significant, or that the number 666 carries some kind of profane power … are harmless, well … now you know otherwise!
Another example of Christians doing things they shouldn’t … but refusing to stop, because they think they’re doing “the Lord’s work” and this gives them a “pass” to do whatever they want, no matter how wrong it is … was reported in the Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal recently:
The head football coach at Breckinridge County High School took about 20 players on a school bus late last month to his church, where nearly half of them were baptized, school officials say.
The mother of one player said her 16-year-old son was baptized without her knowledge and consent, and she is upset that a public school bus was used to take players to a church service — and that the school district’s superintendent was there and did not object.
A public-school coach uses his position as the leader of an athletic team, to get members of his team to get baptized in his own church. It’s not clear to me how this is not crossing the line of separation of church and state, but the Christians involved have managed to come up with a sleazy legalistic evasion:
But Superintendent Janet Meeks, who is a member of the church and witnessed the baptisms, said she thinks the trip was proper because attendance was not required, and another coach paid for the gas.
Meeks said parents weren’t given permission slips to sign but knew the event would include a church service, if not specifically a baptism. She said eight or nine players came forward and were baptized.
“None of the players were rewarded for going and none were punished for not going,” Meeks said.
Let’s be both honest and clear here. When you’re on a school team and there’s a team activity, it is never truly “voluntary” for members of the team. There is, at best, an unspoken expectation of attendance, and at worst, there can be implied coercion, peer pressure, and other forms of quiet retribution for those who may opt out.
As for who pays for the gas … is Ms Meeks really serious about? Does she really, honestly believe that payment for gasoline can obviate separation of church and state?
What’s more, who is this coach to take members of his team to any particular church? What if there were Jewish or Muslim kids on the team? What makes him think their parents would be happy about taking their kids to an evangelical Christian revival service?
Please, enough is enough. Christians like this need to be stopped — in their tracks — their legalistic bullshit excuses notwithstanding.
If the human creature’s relationship with the Creator weakens, matter is reduced to egoistic possession, man becomes the “final authority,” and the objective of existence is reduced to a feverish race to possess the most possible.
His argument appears to be that a lack of belief in God leads people to not value anything enough to care about the planet.
This, of course, is rubbish of the worst sort. Damage to the planet is not being caused by atheists or atheism. The principle way I know this, is because, quite simply and very obviously, the majority of the world’s population is religious. Atheists and atheism are in the minority — by a wide margin.
Simply put, if the world’s environment has been and/or is still being damaged, it’s not at the hands of atheists or atheism … it can’t be, because there aren’t enough of them to account for all the damage!
What’s more, one would think that materialists (i.e. people who don’t believe in any transcendent reality; matterial existence is all there is) would treat the material world as inherently more precious than transcendent thinkers — like the Pope and the rest of the world’s Catholics and Christians — would.
I’m afraid the Pope’s latest slanderous lie against atheists places him in my “lying liars for Jesus” club. Isn’t it time for rigid theists like the Pope to stop blaming atheism for things it cannot have caused, and instead, take responsibility for what theists themselves are doing? Or is this kind of integrity and moral uprightness too much to ask of the man who claims to be the final arbiter of morality in the world?
It’s been a long, hot summer … and not just in terms of weather. The political heat has been bubbling around the country for months. The Religious Right lost power at a national level in November 2008, and since they lack the maturity to deal with this reality, they are raging and fuming all over the place. The latest example of ferocious hyperreligiosity gone out of control, is from an Arizona paster who says he’s prayed for the death of President Barack Obama — and he stands by that, as reported by television station KSAZ, Fox 10 in Pheonix:
The sermons at this east valley church are stirring controversy and for some, causing alarm. Pastor Steven Anderson says he’s a man of God, but some are horrified at what he’s preaching.
Anderson is standing by his controversial sermon, entitled “Why I Hate Barack Obama.” Video of the sermon has hit YouTube, and he’s taped explaining why he hates the President and praying for his death.
Sunday at church, Anderson told FOX 10, “I hope that God strikes Barack Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy and I hope it happens today.”
Using typical religious double-talk and evasion, then, Anderson takes the cowardly route of insisting he is not asking that anyone actually do anything to make his wish come to pass — just expressing some kind of latent (and, he thinks, benign) belief that Obama must die:
Anderson is continuing to encourage his parishioners to pray for the president’s death, but says he doesn’t condone killing.
“I will not take the law into my own hands. I will not take up any arms. It’s a spiritual battle, spiritual warfare.”
Calling it a “spiritual battle” as opposed to a “physical” one — Anderson thinks — relieves him of any responsibility for his own words. But he can’t do that so easily, because in fact, many people — in the US and around the world — frequently confuse spiritual and physical warfare.
Unfortunately these kinds of imprecatory prayers against the president are not new, and neither are the dodgy, “I-stand-by-what-I-said-and-I-believe-in-it-but-I-don’t-believe-it-enough-to-want-anything-to-actually-happen-even-if-I’m-convinced-of-it-which-means-that-while-it-sounds-like-I’m-threatening-the-president-I’m-really-not-so-don’t-send-the-Secret-Service-after-me” responses when queried about it.
Of course, opponents of the Right felt the need to ramp up this ridiculousness by showing up to protest:
Sunday, about 30 parishioners of the Faithful Word Baptist Church were met by a handful of protesters.
In response to this ramping up of the matter, Anderson’s parishioners even-more-childishly responded with a ramp-up of their own:
Tempe Police patrolled the area to make sure tempers didn’t get out of hand, while many parishioners walked into the church carrying guns on their hips.
One of them was Christopher Broughton, who got national attention when he brought an AR-15 assault rifle to an Aug. 17 rally outside the Phoenix Convention Center where President Obama was addressing veterans.
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