• Con-artist, habitual liar and right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton illustrates the stopped-watch principle by accidentally saying something partly true. Barton celebrated the lackluster box office performance of the new Left Behind movie because, he says, it teaches a false and unbiblical eschatology. True! Barton complains that the pessimistic outlook of premillennial dispensationalism discourages Christians from working for change in this world. Also true!
Of course, Left Behind’s strain of dispensationalism differs from the earlier variations taught by folks like Scofield and Hal Lindsey, in that it’s married to Tim LaHaye’s John Birch Society political ideology, encouraging an activism that closely aligns with Barton’s own right-wing dominionism. And if I were forced to choose between the passively destructive pessimistic quietism of earlier PMD eschatology and the actively destructive paranoid theocracy promoted by LaHaye and Barton, then I’ll take the former, thanks.
• This seems like a smart idea in Conshohocken: “The chief has designated the parking lot and the lobby at police headquarters as an online safe transaction zone. He says if you’re conducting a one on one transaction where money is changing hands. This is the safest place to do it.”
• “It would seem that the Bible belt has been unbuckled and the fly is now open.” Michelle Krabill on rape culture in christianamerica.
• Glioblastoma multiforme will kill you within a few short months. With the very best medical treatment in the world, it will take a precious few months longer to kill you. But it will kill you. It is, without exception, a death sentence.
So if Pat Robertson can do what he says and heal people with this deadly form of cancer, then he needs to get his butt out of the TV studio and go do it. Otherwise he really, really needs to STFU right now and stop telling people that dying from a terminal disease is some kind of moral failing.
• Phil Plait has a good post on how it’s not really news that Pope Francis accepts the science of evolution. He blames the “unholy marriage of the Republican Party and religious conservatives” for the widespread American surprise over the unremarkable news that a religious leader doesn’t reject science. The “science versus religion rhetoric” of the religious right, Plait says, “has polarized our country so badly that a lot of people perceive all religion to be totally anti-science, and that’s not true, and not fair.”
Yep. And the perception that this is how it ought to be — that real, true religion ought to reject all science — has been far more disastrous for religion than it has been for science.
• And by the way, the West Chester University Golden Rams women’s rugby team is now 5-0.
• In The Bible Made Impossible, Christian Smith writes about “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” Here’s a musical illustration of what such interpretive pluralism looks like. (I forget whether I posted this previously, but either way, it’s still wonderful.)
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