Tag Archives | Christianity

Man Has Spent 26 Years Dragging 12-Foot Crucifix Around The World

By on March 5, 2013 in News 49

An apt metaphor for the pointlessness of religion? Via the Daily Mail:

A determined Christian evangelist has demonstrated his devotion to his faith by carrying a huge cross for thousands of miles across the globe for the past 26 years.

Lindsay Hamon, 60, has trekked through 19 countries including India, New Zealand, Romania and Sri Lanka during his remarkable journey. And despite being thrown out of St Peter’s Square, in Rome, and being shot at in Bangladesh, he remains resolute and has no plans to give up on his mission.

Mr. Hamon carries the huge cross for up to 12 hours a day, and often has no idea where he will sleep that night. He [began] in 1987 and has only spent a handful of weeks without it. Mr. Hamon receives donations from supporters to help him stay on the road, but he stops to carry out carework in his home town in order to pay his family’s bills.

… Read the rest

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Pat Robertson Says You May Have Demons In Your Wardrobe

By on March 1, 2013 in News 19

Are you a constant thrift-shopper? Always looking for a bargain? Find yourself often at Anton LaVey’s family yard sales? Well then watch out! There could be demons in them clothes! Now don’t worry, he tenderly quips that “not everything’ has a demon in it. I mean THAT would be ridiculous, right?
It would be entirely funny except for the fact that I as a child hung on every word Pat Robertson said and millions of Americans still do.

This calls for a whole new detergent line, ‘Tide Spirit: Now with blessed Holy Water drops from Jerusalem!

Gabriel D. Roberts is the author of the book, Born Again To Rebirth, available now for free download on iTunes till Easter Sunday.

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Does The Internet Mean The End For Organized Religions?

By on February 10, 2013 in News 15

Tweets from the Pope aren’t going to help—mainstream organized religion requires closed systems of information, and will inevitably be destroyed by the Internet, Valerie Tarico argues via Alternet:

The biggest threat organized religion has ever faced [is] the Internet. A traditional religion, one built on “right belief,” requires a closed information system. That is why the Catholic Church put an official seal of approval on some ancient texts and banned or burned others. It is why some Christians are forbidden to marry nonbelievers, and moms home-school their kids with carefully screened textbooks.

Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas.

… Read the rest

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The Evangelical Political Movement’s Racist Origins

By on February 10, 2013 in News 89

Religion Dispatches explains the actual galvanization of the modern evangelical conservative movement:

The right-wing evangelical movement was not an immediate backlash to Roe v. Wade. The evangelical community, unlike Roman Catholicism, showed little interest in combating abortion until almost 1980.

Although evangelicals were mostly silent on abortion after Roe v. Wade, they were not silent on other political issues. Paul Weyrich, one of the evangelical right’s most influential founders, recalls that the movement initially emerged to defend racially segregated Christian schools from government intrusion:

What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.

In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.” Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion.

… Read the rest

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Defending God: The Paradox of Violence And Faith

By on January 30, 2013 in News 87

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons, or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?”

– Job 38:31

Despite how one feels about God, or how one defines God, or if God even exists at all, the idea that He needs defense seems a bit weird.

In the quote at the beginning of this post, we see God asking Job if he could change the nature of constellations. Why is this important? The God of the Bible is saying that he was in control of everything. If God plainly says he is in control, then why does he need defending? Why is it that we see him giving a mandate to the Israelites for genocide in the Old Testament?… Read the rest

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DisinfoCast 42: Gabriel D. Roberts: ‘Born Again to Rebirth’

By on January 25, 2013 in News, Podcasts 3

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Born Again to Rebirth author Gabriel D. Roberts was born and raised in a fundamentalist Christian church. At 7 years old he was street preaching in Salt Lake City, Utah and by 10 years old he had traveled to China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau and The Philippines as a missionary. After moving to Seattle to attend Bible college, Roberts had a crisis of faith that led him to a radically different life.

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Pharmakia: Traditional Medicine and Black Magick

By on January 4, 2013 in News 11

An excerpt from Riding the Fine Line, by Gabriel D. Roberts. Purchase it here.  

I was taught as a young person that the Bible spoke out against black magick, or witchcraft. To a Christian, these terms are interchangeable. In college I learned the Koine Greek word for witchcraft was ‘pharmakia’. As it happens, this word is where we get the term pharmacy from and as a blanket statement was a biblical assertion of the condemned use of alchemic means of mixing natural ingredients for one’s own gain. I find it very ironic that this term is used as a proof against recreational use of entheogenic substances and naturally occurring plants. It’s time I brought the truth to light. There’s something very insidious about this modern contextual viewpoint that western society has embraced. You see, while puritanical groups maintain this argument, they take pills from mega-pharmaceuticals for every ailment under the sun.… Read the rest

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Christianity ‘Close To Extinction’ In Middle East

By on December 25, 2012 in News 11

How long before religion in general is close to extinction, disinfonauts? From the Telegraph:

Christianity faces being wiped out of the “biblical heartlands” in the Middle East because of mounting persecution of worshippers, according to a new report.

The study warns that Christians suffer greater hostility across the world than any other religious group.

And it claims politicians have been “blind” to the extent of violence faced by Christians in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The most common threat to Christians abroad is militant Islam, it says, claiming that oppression in Muslim countries is often ignored because of a fear that criticism will be seen as “racism”.

It warns that converts from Islam face being killed in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Iran and risk severe legal penalties in other countries across the Middle East.

The report, by the think tank Civitas, says: “It is generally accepted that many faith-based groups face discrimination or persecution to some degree.

… Read the rest

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Texas School District Investigates Muslim Bias, Finds Christian Bias Instead

By on December 17, 2012 in News 9
muslim rage

Picture: Flickr user derek7272 (CC)

Despite having the most wealthy and politically powerful voice in the country, some zealous Christians never feel secure or safe enough. When radical right-wingers aren’t decrying the insidious secularism of those shifty-eyed atheists, they’re more often than not found using law enforcement, legislation and military strength to discriminate against Muslims whom they feel, without a sense of irony, are going to trample on their religious freedom.

Public school policies are no exception. After the paranoid complaints of an Irving, Texas resident with the email header ‘IRVING ISD INDOCTRINATING ISLAM’, (which would have gone directly in my SPAM folder with the other psychotic FWDs and conservative rantings), school board members and district officials leapt at the opportunity to ”stand up against the pro Islamic teaching in our public schools.”

Via AlterNet:

The alleged indoctrination had to do with the fact that the district uses a state-wide teaching program called CSCOPE, which is put together by the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, administered by an organization called Region 10 .

… Read the rest

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