The BOOK!

I ran across this article on the weekend and it deserves reading for some of the statistics they have compiled on religion. (I am one of the 72% who believe in God but don't like church!)

Tuscaloosa News, Guest Post by Sarah Bruyn Jones'

A majority of adults who don’t attend church say they believe in God, but they have other feelings about the institution of church.

A recent U.S. survey of adults who don’t attend church, not even on holidays, found that 72 percent thought the church ‘is full of hypocrites,’ but that 78 percent would ‘be willing to listen’ to someone who wanted to share their beliefs about Christianity. At the same time, 72 percent of respondents also said they believe God exists.

The survey results were published last week by Life Way Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. The organization surveyed 1,402 ‘unchurched’ adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is 2.5 percentage points.

The survey defines unchurched as those who had not attended a religious service in a church, synagogue or mosque at any time in the past six months.

More than 1 in 5 Americans say they never go to church, the General Social Survey found in 2006. The survey is conducted every two years by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Other researchers have found similar negative opinions about church.

Researchers at Barna Group, a Christian survey organization, have found that young adults in particular are rejecting the institution — and Christianity in general — because it is perceived to be anti-gay, too political and hypocritical.

The implications, the researchers from both studies said, are seen when churches try to evangelize to and reach the unchurched. But the research also speaks to the way churches have communicated their messages, said Jerry Wilkins, director of the Tuscaloosa Baptist Association, the local Southern Baptist organization.

‘We’re just still struggling,’ Wilkins said. ‘I think the answer for this dilemma is for the church to better communicate that we are a hospital for sick people. We need to be helping [non Christians] understand what the church is. My feeling is we’ve done a poor job communicating that church is not for people who have arrived, but for people who are on a journey.’

The Barna findings were the basis for the book ‘unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why it Matters,’ released in October 2007.

‘There are a lot of different factors for it,’ said David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group and one of the authors of ‘unChristian.’

‘The reasons people come to negative conclusions about Christianity, churches or Christians is as diverse as the people you ask. But I think the media-saturated, fault-finding, skeptical society we live in is part of it. You see the mistakes of prominent [Christian] leaders broadcast and printed on pages, and that solidifies people’s perspectives about Christians as hypocrites or living hypocritical lifestyles.’

The recent headline-making stories of disgraced church leaders accused of lying, cheating and philandering have had their impact, but Kinnaman said people’s personal relationships also influence their perception of church, such as the neighbor who is heavily involved in his church, but also heavily involved with a mistress.

Some high-profile Christian leaders have also come under fire for alleged misdeeds, with their stories played out prominently in the media. Richard Roberts, son of evangelist Oral Roberts, resigned last week as president of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa amid allegations he misspent school money to support a lavish lifestyle. And six popular televangelists are under federal investigation for financial misdeeds.

In November U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the committee on finance, requested financial information from the six ministries: Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Creflo and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International, Benny Hinn of Benny Hinn Ministries, Bishop Eddie Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, Joyce and David Meyer of Joyce Meyer Ministries, and Randy and Paula White of the multiracial Without Walls International Church and Paula White Ministries.

Evangelical leaders have also come under fire for other personal sins that are contrary to the Christian message.

Ted Haggard, the former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his post as pastor of the church he founded after allegations surfaced of a homosexual affair and methamphetamine use. And just this week, Georgia megachurch leader Archbishop Earl Paulk pleaded guilty to lying under oath about several sexual affairs and was sentenced to 10 years probation.

Scandal isn’t the only problem. Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, said in comments released with the survey that many unchurched don’t have a biblical understanding of God and Jesus. The survey found that slightly less than half, 48 percent, agree that God is the God described in the Bible, while 61 percent said they believe ‘the God of the Bible is no different from the gods of spiritual beings depicted by world religions.’

At the same time, LifeWay found that 78 percent of those surveyed were open to talking about spiritual matters with a friend. That number was even higher among young adults, aged 18-29, of them 89 percent said they were willing to listen to a Christian sharing his or her beliefs.

That openness should be used as a platform for holding conversations, said Scott McConnell, associate director of LifeWay Research, in the news release.

‘Although we may not have the home field advantage we once did, people are open to spiritual conversations, open to hearing about a genuine faith, and God is still at work, using people and churches to share the Good News in an increasingly confused world,’ McConnell said. ‘That should propel us to action and help us move beyond fear to share our faith.’

Still, the perception that Christians are hypocritical is one that faith leaders say needs to be addressed.

Kinnaman said part of the problem comes from a misunderstanding that Christians believe they are perfect.

‘There is not a particular strategy or approach where a church can say we are no longer going to be hypocritical,’ Kinnaman said. ‘We are trying to become much more of a movement to restore, except, love and bless the community around us. That’s important when the only thing that a non-Christian sees from a church community is discussion of becoming a saved Christian and Christian morals and ethics or how we define family.

Those discussions have missed some of the larger needs that the community is looking for and shows how out of tune Christians can be with the real world.’

Now, after all this has been said, I would like to give a short rebuttal to the statement; ‘The reasons people come to negative conclusions about Christianity, churches or Christians, is as diverse as the people you ask. But I think the media-saturated, fault-finding, skeptical society we live in is part of it. You see the mistakes of prominent [Christian] leaders broadcast and printed on pages, and that solidifies people’s perspectives about Christians as hypocrites or living hypocritical lifestyles.’

No my friends, that is a cop-out and just plain bullshit!

The reason church leaders make "mistakes" and "errors in judgement" are the same reasons we can't trust anything written in the Bible to begin with.

People wrote the Bible. God didn't write the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah, (Pentateuch) God only inspired them.

People, on the other hand, wrote what was relevant to them, at that time, and in those circumstances. Then it was further clouded by the writers own prejudices, inclinations, personal beliefs, hang-ups and morals.

In other words, anything in "The Book" had the taint of the authors personal agenda on everything they did. Some of it done consciously, and some unconsciously.

So, we are not practising the "Word of God" when we go to church, or the Mosque, or the Synagogue, but rather the Gospel of "The Word of Sam," or "The Word of Ishmael," or better yet, "The Word of Job's Mother!"

And that's why I don't go to church!

If I have something to say to God, I say it myself.

(This, by the way, is what the Gnostic's were all about and what Jesus might well have been!)

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Killing of Non-Muslim's is O.K.

It's Sunday and you're in Church. Doesn't matter whether it's Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Baptist, Mormon or Jehovah's Witness. The Priest, Minister, Deacon or whatever comes up to the pulpit and starts to give his sermon.

The First thing he says is that Muslims don't accept God and it is O.K. to kill them!

That, my friends, is what the article the other day was all about when I said that Islam is not at fault for atrocities by Muslims, but rather the Imam's, Mullahs, Ayatollahs and the Madrases Schools were the true culprits of Islamic extremism for what they taught the masses.

(Naturally if you're an un-educated Muslim teenager with no real knowledge of the outside world, or even a middle-class, jaded and disenchanted Muslim, you're going to listen to him and believe everything he says!)

This is an interview on British TV with a radical Mullah and believe me when I say that for this interview he has toned-down the rhetoric compared to what he says in the Mosque when no outsiders are present!



(Note! Muhammad originally wanted all Muslims to pray twelve (12) times a day but a few of his buddies talked him down to five (5) times! Rather a shame really, since if the radicals WERE all praying twelve times a day, it would afford them less time to get into mischief!!)

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Will the Real Islam Please Stand Up!

I have been thinking about Aqsa Parvez the last few days.

You remember she is the 16 year old Toronto girl whose father killed her over an argument about whether she should wear her Hijab (Headscarf) in public or not!

Now there are some people who told me they thought is was a religious matter, while others thought it might be social, and still more said it was just a violent father who got carried away.

Whatever the fact of the matter is, the religious angle has received all the attention and further ignited the fire over Islam and violence that occupies so much of the Western mind.

Whether Islam is truly a religion of violence is an academic question and actually beside the point at this stage of the game because it has developed an image in the media and population as being such.

In other words, Islam has one hell of a Public Relations problem here in the West.

I have been reading articles by some leading journalists over the last few days and although they are by varied individuals in both their background and beliefs, a common consensus is developing.

Let me first give a quick quote from my book The Plain Truth About God with a brief summation of the early days of Islam.

Where we run into a problem is that, as in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, there is no actual copy of the Koran that can be said to have come directly from the hands of Mohammad.

The earliest written record of the Koran (and the 45 scribes who supposedly documented it) was written in the biography of Mohammad by a certain Ibn Ishaq who wrote Sirat Rasul Allah, (The life of the Prophet of God) about 100 years after the death of the prophet Mohammad!

From this point on, it gets even hazier since there is no actual record of this document as well, but rather, it is extensively quoted in an even later work by al-Tabari who lived close to 200 years after the death of Ibn Ishaq.

Suddenly we have a space of over 300 years (close to 1000 C.E.) that cannot be properly documented.

With this in mind we can look back to about 620 C.E. when Mohammad, (or someone like him,) started on a campaign of dominance.

Here in less than 100 years Arab tribesmen, riding on horseback, emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain.

Now the great question we have to ask here is whether the Arab armies were fuelled during their expansion by religious fever; or was the religion “spiced up” during the 350 years where it was not documented properly.

In other words, was this re-vamping of Islam the manipulations of a politically dominant group whose aim was to establish a religious justification for Arab Imperialism? Or was it based on a religion that advocated the expansion of its ideals by force?

Don’t forget, during the first 200 years of this great expansion Arab conquerors were a minority against a vast non-Muslim majority.

Then, once the Arabs had acquired a sizable empire—a coherent religion was necessary in order to hold that empire together. (Note: in the long run, over the centuries, the main purpose of any religion, once it had gone beyond the “sect” stage, was to perpetuate itself and also act as a glue to hold the empire together.)

So once again, was the religion in place and acting as the fuel for Arab hegemony, or was it the glue that was manufactured “after the fact” to hold the whole empire together.

This is a question that will never be properly answered - as it is now lost in the mists of time.

However, we can draw certain inferences from it.

One of the facts that we have to consider is that Islam was bound up in war and aggression from its very inception.

In spite of any history of Islam we wish to consider, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Muslim Practitioners live a peaceful and quiet life that is not tainted by the fervor of the Conservative and Fundamentalist factions.

They, especially in the West, live a life much the same as their Christian brethren in that their daily lives are centered around family and friends and not dogma and zealousness.

However, because of the silence of this overwhelming majority on the atrocities of the fanatics, there has been a marked perception that all Muslims have at their heart a violent streak that is part of the very nature of this religion.

It is sad, mistaken and troubling, but unfortunately true.

Now, about that common consensus, I would like to quote two columnists who have expressed different but not contradictory opinions on the state of Islam in the West.

Although neither is an Apologist for Islam nor seeking to blatantly condemn it’s followers they have made some observations about Muslims that should be noted!

One is a right wing Christian and the other is a Muslim academic and here is what they have to say.

First the right wing Christian who comments on the killing of Aqsa Parvez and his thoughts on Islam. His name is Michael Coren and he is a broadcaster and writer:

Most Canadian Muslim leaders immediately condemned what had happened but it didn't take very long for the usual suspects to explain on radio and television that the tragedy had nothing to do with the Muslim faith and that all religions contain extremism.

Islam, we were told, is a religion of peace.

Which is probably just what the owner of a Christian bookstore in Gaza thought three months ago as he was murdered and his shop firebombed. Or Danny Pearl, shortly before the American journalist had his head cut off by Islamic terrorists -- who, naturally, filmed the whole thing and made sure their chants from the Koran were loud and clear.

Or the wretched gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 200 lashes for daring to be in a car at the time of the crime with a man to whom she was not married or related. Or the women stoned to death for adultery. Or the Iranian men hanged because they were homosexual. Or the women who lived and died under the Taliban. Or the Christians persecuted and killed in Pakistan, Egypt and Sudan. Or the young women in France, Britain and all over Europe killed by fathers and brothers for leaving Islam, dressing like other girls or dating non Muslims. Or the teacher who allowed a student to name a teddy bear Muhammad, or Salman Rushdie's translator whose throat was cut from ear to ear, or movie director Theo Van Gogh who was slaughtered like an animal in the middle of a Dutch street.

And on and on. On until the denial is sickening.

It's cultural, it's because of colonialism, it's because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islamic Fundamentalists.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom.

But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between Conservative Fundamentalist Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

And then these thoughts from Salim Mansur, who is a Muslim scholar, Professor at the University of Western Ontario here in London, and a Columnist for the Sun Media Group.

Professor Mansur has more of an insiders view of the situation and his thoughts will hopefully hit home to Muslims in the West and elsewhere.

The cold-blooded murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was not like any other crime that cuts across ethnic and faith boundaries, as Muslim apologists in Canada will do their best to characterize it.

The murder was prompted by an ideology of bigotry and terror masked as a faith-tradition -- an ideology of radical Islamism at war with the modern world of freedom and democracy.

The fear of this perverted ideology and its fanatical promoters silences most Muslims, regardless of their numbers in society, for they fear that speaking out against this ideology might place them in greater jeopardy within their community and with those who claim its leadership.

Then there are Muslim organizations -- such as the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) in free societies such as Canada.

Their deafening silence in condemning Muslim violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike is revealing of their true nature.

These are front organizations for global radical Islamism making apologies for their ideological brethren, and directing polemics against the West for victimizing Muslims and undermining Islam.

Moreover, they are fraudulent in their claims of representing Muslims in general as the CIC does.

The fact is, on the contrary, most Muslims in Canada and elsewhere in the West left their native lands to escape from unmitigated cruelty, heartlessness and hypocrisy of Muslim rulers and religious leaders.

But these organizations are sinister in their objectives of taking full advantage of free societies and subverting their institutions for the purpose of undermining freedom and democracy.

For instance, Canadians have never heard from or witnessed Muslim organizations such as the CIC publicly mobilizing Canadian Muslims in denouncing suicide-bombings, honour killings of hapless women, genocide on display in Darfur and persecution of dissident Muslims in the Arab-Muslim world.

Instead, as fraudsters they have developed the swindler's art of blackmailing free societies as the CIC has done by filing complaints with the Human Rights Commissions (HRC) federally, and in Ontario and British Columbia, against Maclean's magazine and one of its contributors, Mark Steyn.

The complaints are frivolous, claiming Maclean's defamed Canadian Muslims by publishing some writings of Steyn as excerpts from his best-selling book, America Alone.

But the greater frivolity is the HRC's willingness to hear the complaint from an organization whose president, Mohamed Elmasry, is on public record in Canada for the suggestion -- though later retracted under duress -- that Israelis in general over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for Palestinian suicide-bombers.

The murder of Aqsa Parvez and of countless other women among Muslims will continue not merely because Muslims cower in silence in their fear of radical Islamists, but also for the apathy of the Western public and politicians supinely appeasing and accommodating Muslim organizations such as the CIC.

If nothing else we can surmise that both writers agree there is a problem and both agree that something has to be done about it!

Your humble author;
Allan W Janssen

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Islam is O.K. The Imam's are NOT!

A couple of days ago we told you the story of a 16 year old Canadian Muslim girl who was strangled to death by her father because she refused to wear a Hijab (head cover) when she went out in public.

(Even though Toronto is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, wearing a Hijab for a sixteen year old suburban Muslim girl is still a traumatic experience. Especially at school!)

Her father thought that her intransigence on correct Muslim dress was bringing dishonor to the family and this led to the altercation that claimed young Aqsa's life!

The irony in all of this is the fact that it is NOT Islam that is making a big deal out of proper dress, but rather the Imam's themselves.

Here we have a group of misogynist men who have been brought up with a sense of "Fundamentalist, Islamic" beliefs, (Otherwise they would not have become Imam's to begin with!) and hammer their own prejudices and interpretations of Islam into the faithful five times a day.

(Imam's are not the same as a priest in the Christian faith in that Islam, on the surface, let's every man communicate directly with God, while in actual fact it is the Imam's that control public opinion and the direction of the faith.)

Here is an example of this from my book "The Plain Truth About God!"

The Islamic State, as it has come to be known, exists in the Middle East on the principal of obedience being due to God only and that Muslims reject the Western, secular idea of separation of church and state!

This is a nice trick fostered by the Islamic clergy to hold on to as much power as possible in spite of the emergence of democratic and populist movements in the world at large.

One of the greatest drawbacks to Islam is that it operates on the surface as being infallible, much as Christianity did.

Among Muslims however, it is acknowledged that the Prophet Muhammad left no actual interpretation of the Koran, but rather said it should be read and taken literally as the word of God.

This means we have a Divine text that is adding to the confusion by being interpreted differently from scholar to scholar and person to person.

This interpretation by individuals depends on every one’s personal understanding, experience, social, political, and economic environment.

(In fact, this happened almost exactly the same way among the early Christians.)

In Islam, no one, not an individual dictator, an elected national body, or a scholar of religion, theoretically has the right to make any legislation that contradicts what is stated in the Koran or the Hadith of the Prophet.

If they do so, they are committing an act of grave Shirk, or “putting themselves in God’s place.”

BUT, the clergy interprets and decides which part of the Koran they want the general population to use.

They are also the ones that give guidance as to “what it really means.”

It is one of the greatest con-jobs in history since anything that goes wrong or not according to their particular plan is obviously “God’s Will.”

(It is also the one of the main reasons that a Muslims will end every second sentence with the phrase “Insh-Allah” - or –“ God willing!” Being as pragmatic as they are, this puts the onus back on God for whatever happens and absolves them of being in “Shirk.”)

As a believer, a man (remember this is a male dominated organization that would put the Catholic Church to shame) can offer his own proposals for the renewal of his religion, so it is always open to change.

The sad truth of the matter is that in Islam, as in every other religion in the world, there are no shortages of people who try and put themselves in positions of influence and power. (The Imam's)

This, for the purpose of spreading their own version of reality amongst the masses.

Another one of the other great threats to the Islamic state comes from a source that has been kept in check for the last 1400 years.

Of course we are talking about the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world.

Men are concerned that any loosening of the reins that keeps their females in a position of subservience will lead to an all out revolution by women.

(In light of this, it is interesting to note that women enjoyed an almost equal position with men in Arab society before the coming of Islam.)

This makes us wonder how much of the abolition of rights for women was a cultural phenomenon and how much can be attributed to a misogynistic group of men (Imam's)using religion to undermine a woman’s place in society.

We are not just pointing the finger at Muslim society here, since it is a fact that the Christian community has also done its fair share in the subjugation of women. (After all, it was Jesus who championed the cause of women, only to have it put on the back burner again by Paul!)

From the book;

It might seem a bit unfair to bring this subject up in the section on Islam but the Muslims are, for the moment, the greatest perpetrators of injustice to women, and since the matter must be addressed, it may as well be here.

As we saw earlier in this book, throughout history it has been the men who waged war, made laws, and generally ran things according to their outlook. That was fine when the men went hunting while women stayed back at the campsite or early settlements.

Over the centuries, however, we have seen a gradual shift in responsibilities and division of work, with females taking an ever more proactive role in society, as they should!

Men, by their very nature of being the hunter-gatherers, have always had the inclination to “shoot first and ask questions later.”

This might have worked well in the past, but society is at a point now where the more reasoned and analytical approach employed by women might be a lot better for us in the long run. The natural balance that the female mind gives to a male deserves to be listened to much more than it has been so far in history.

Remember, in the Jahili culture of old, women used to mix freely with men. They used to dress in the same way as women in the secular societies now dress themselves.

It was only after the advent of Islam that it became the custom for Arab women to spend most of their time at home, to cover their bodies, and be kept away from other men.

You will now find some people who tell you that the Hijab (women’s Islamic dress) is an Arab custom, and not an Islamic requirement. Wrong!

Arab society was at one time much more enlightened than now and it is through the diligence of a few religious extremists through the centuries that the population has become narrow-minded in their world and cultural views.

This is one of the first things that have to be changed for women to take their rightful place in Arab society.

But then again-the difference between the wishing and the doing is great.

** Women have three roles - obey the father, obey the husband, obey the son.—Mid-East Proverb.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Praise the Lord and Pass the Amunition!

Guest Post: Andrew Higgins

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was “boring and stupefying.”

This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia’s biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe’s long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened:

A national furor erupted.

A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television.

A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

“Sweden is not as secular as we thought,” says Christer Sturmark, head of Sweden’s Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback.

Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys.

Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

God’s tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why?

Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants.

Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment.

At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people’s contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe’s highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious “firms.” The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.

“Monopoly churches get lazy,” says Eva Hamberg, a professor at Lund University’s Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and co-author of academic articles that, based on Swedish data, suggest a correlation between an increase in religious competition and a rise in church-going.

Europeans are deserting established churches, she says, “but this does not mean they are not religious.”

Upstarts are now plugging new spiritual services across Europe, from U.S.-influenced evangelical churches to a Christian sect that uses a hallucinogenic herbal brew as a stand-in for sacramental wine.

Niklas Piensoho, chief preacher at Stockholm’s biggest Pentecostal church, says even sometimes oddball, quasi-religious fads “tell me you can sell spirituality.”

His own career suggests that a free market in faith is taking root. He was poached by the Pentecostals late last year after he boosted church attendance for a rival Protestant congregation.

Most scholars used to believe that modernization would extinguish religion in the long run. But that view always had trouble explaining why America, a nation in the vanguard of modernity, is so religious.

The God-is-finished thesis came under more strain in the 1980s and 1990s after Iran, a rapidly modernizing Muslim nation, exploded with fundamentalist fervor and other fast-advancing countries in Latin America and Asia showed scant sign of ditching religion.

Now even Europe, the heartland of secularization, is raising questions about whether God really is dead.

The enemy of faith, say the supply-siders, is not modernity but state-regulated markets that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month.

In Europe, where the state has often supported — but also controlled — the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.

“The state undermined the church from within,” says Stefan Swa”rd, a leader of Sweden’s small but growing evangelical movement.

Consider the scene on a recent Sunday at Stockholm’s Hedvig Eleonara Church, a parish of the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran institution that until 2000 was an official organ of the Swedish state.

Fewer than 40 people, nearly all elderly, gathered in pews beneath a magnificent 18th-century dome. Seven were church employees. The church seats over 1,000.

Hedvig Eleonara has three full-time salaried priests and gets over $2 million each year though a state levy. Annika Sandstro”m, head of its governing board, says she doesn’t believe in God and took the post “on the one condition that no one expects me to go each Sunday.” The church scrapped Sunday school last fall because only five children attended.

Just a few blocks away, Passion Church, an eight-month-old evangelical outfit, fizzed with fervor. Nearly 100 young Swedes rocked to a high-decibel band: “It’s like adrenaline running through my blood,” they sang in English. “We’re talking about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Passion, set up by Andreas Nielsen, a 32-year-old Swede who found God in Florida, gets no money from the state. It holds its service in a small, low-ceilinged hall rented from Stockholm’s Casino Theatre, a drama company. Church, says Mr. Nielson, should be “the most kick-ass place in the world.” Jesus was “king of the party.”

The message has lured some unlikely converts, including a heavily tattooed, self-described former mobster. “I’ve gone soft,” says Daniel Webb, the son of an English father and Swedish mother, who spent five years in jail for illegal arms possession and assault.

He was baptized, like most Swedes, in the Church of Sweden but never prayed. He went to church for the funerals of fellow hoods but scoffed at Christian sympathy for the meek.

Mr. Webb first went to Passion Church three months ago with a female friend.

Expecting to be bored, he got hooked. “An ocean of anger has calmed,” he says. His ex-wife, he says, “thinks I’m ridiculous.”

He says he’s turned his back on crime.

Europe’s upstart churches aren’t yet attracting anywhere near enough customers to offset a post-World War II decline. But they are shaking up and in some places reviving the market for religion, argues Rodney Stark, a pioneer of religious supply-side theory at Baylor University in Texas.

Mr. Stark first developed the notion of a “religious market” in the 1980s as a way to explain America’s persistent faith. It posits that people are naturally religious but that their religiosity varies depending on the vigor of what he calls religious suppliers. “Wherever churches are a little more energetic and competitive, you’ve got more people going to church,” he says.

The notion that Adam Smith’s invisible hand reaches into the spiritual realm has many detractors. Steve Bruce, a professor of sociology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, says market theory “works for cars and soap powder but it does not work for religion.”

Christianity in Europe, he says, has reached the point of no return, like a dying language doomed because too few people transmit its vocabulary to their children.

The Church of Sweden is also skeptical of the supply-side view. “We don’t sell a product,” says archbishop Anders Wejryd. With 1,800 congregations, he says, his church must cater to a spectrum of views.

He says the Church of Sweden’s more dynamic parishes, some of which mimic evangelicals’ methods, are thriving.

Predictions that Christianity is doomed in Europe date back centuries.

Writing in the early 1700s, Thomas Woolston, an Englishman, estimated it would die out by 1900. A century later, France’s Auguste Comte proclaimed the end of mankind’s “theological stage.”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed religion as a symptom of capitalist ills that would be cured by socialism. More recently, the demise of Christianity in Europe has led to warnings that the continent risks becoming “Eurabia,” a land dominated by Islam.

Conservative U.S. preachers and politicians curse European non belief and trumpet the religious values of America’s pilgrim fathers. But Mr. Stark, the supply-side theorist, says America’s religiosity is relatively recent. In 1776, he says, around 17% of Americans belonged to churches.

That is about the same as the current proportion of the population in Belgium, France, Germany and the U.K. that worships at least once a month, according to 2004’s European Union-funded European Social Survey.

In the U.S., the American Revolution ended ecclesiastical hegemony in the 11 colonies that had an established church and unleashed a raucous tide of religious competition. As Methodists, Baptists, Shakers and other churches proliferated, church-going rose, reaching around 50% in the early part of the 20th century, he says.

Europe never developed such a religious bazaar.

The Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Catholic Church in Italy and France, state-funded churches in Germany and others lost their de-facto “monopoly” status to other denominations over a century ago.

But they retained their ties to the state and economic privileges.

Grace Davie, professor of sociology at Britain’s Exeter University, compares them to “public utilities” — institutions that people look to for basic services such as weddings and funerals but that don’t demand day-to-day involvement.

The Church of Sweden, for example, has a near-monopoly on death. Its broad property holdings, gathered since the 16th century, include most of Sweden’s graveyards. The state still pays it to oversee funerals, even those involving Muslim rites.

Around 75% of Sweden’s nine million people are nominally members of the “state church” — though few ever worship and around 10% are avowed atheists, says Jonas Bromander of the Church’s research unit. Sweden’s evangelical churches, by contrast, have only 31,000 members, but they worship regularly and are growing, slowly, in number.

Tension between the Church of Sweden and would-be competitors goes back to the early 19th century, when early evangelicals were banished into exile. So-called free churches were later permitted but they remained in the shadow of the state-coddled Church of Sweden.

After World War II, the Church of Sweden followed the leftward direction of Swedish political life. The Ecclesiastical Department, the ministry that supervised the church, was headed for years by a prominent atheist. Liberal theology triumphed. Church attendance plummeted.

In the early 1980s, Ulf Ekman, a Church of Sweden priest, set up Livets Ord, or the Word of Life, an American-style congregation in Uppsala. His strict Bible-based message and charismatic preaching style attracted a flood of worshippers, and also controversy.

The Church of Sweden stripped Mr. Ekman of his status as a preacher.

The media denounced him as a cult leader bankrolled by America.

The government investigated. Today, his church has around 3,000 active members.

A big impetus to the return of faith is fear of the future, says Elisabeth Sandlund, editor of Sweden’s main Christian newspaper, Dagen. In Sweden and across Europe, old moorings are coming loose as cradle-to-grave welfare systems buckle. “People want something solid to hold on to,” says Ms Sandlund.

While working as a financial journalist, she started sneaking off to church and in 1999 eventually told her husband she believed in God. “He was not happy,” she says.

Whether competition for believers actually boosts belief stirs bitter academic discussion. Measuring religiosity is difficult and each side cites different statistics. The latest data from a major research project that tracks churchgoing and belief in concepts such as God and soul, the European Values Survey, were compiled between 1981 and 1999. (They show a decline in faith in the 1980s followed by a leveling off and, for some indicators, a slight bump in the 1990s.)

To try to refute the supply-siders, Aberdeen University’s Mr. Bruce points to Poland and Ireland, highly religious countries each dominated by a Catholic “monopoly church.” Mr. Stark and those in his camp counter that market mechanisms in Poland and Ireland were trumped by the church’s role as a vehicle for nationalism.

More revealing, they say, is America’s boisterous religious market and its high levels of religiosity.

One factor now spurring religious competition in Europe is the availability of state money that traditionally flowed almost entirely to established churches. It still does, but the process is more open.

In Italy, the state used to pay the salaries of Catholic priests, but in 1984 it began letting taxpayers choose which religious groups get financial support. The proceeds of a new “religious tax” of 0.8% are now divided, according to taxpayer preference, among the Catholic Church, four non-Catholic churches, the Jewish community and a state religious and humanitarian fund.

The result is an annual beauty contest ahead of a June income-tax deadline, as churches try to lure taxpayer money with advertising campaigns. Catholics get the lion’s share — 87% of nearly $1.2 billion in 2004, the last year for which figures are available.

But according to a 2005 study by Italian lawyer Massimo Introvigne and Mr. Stark, the system “reminds Italians every year that there is a religious economy.”

Sweden has also overhauled church financing. In 2000, the government gave up formal control of the Church of Sweden. With great fanfare it replaced what had been a church “tax” with an annual “fee,” still collected by tax authorities, levied on Church of Sweden members.

For the first time, taxpayers were told what they owed in cash — instead of being given just a percentage figure, which is typically under 1% of household income.

Church of Sweden membership dropped abruptly, and the church launched a publicity drive pitching religion. Membership stabilized, though church-going continued to decline. Still, the established church last year received around $1.6 billion in membership fees via state tax collectors. The church also brings in some $460 million in funeral-and-graveyard administration taxes.

A government-run commission provides money to 28 registered religious groups outside the Church of Sweden, but these funds totaled only $7 million last year. Passion Church and other such ventures rely mostly on voluntary donations by their worshippers.

This, says Kjell-Axel Johanson, an evangelical priest, keeps upstarts more in tune with their flock. He recently set up a new church that, unable to afford a permanent home, rents a bar for a few hours. “God doesn’t care about packaging,” he says.

Hotel chain Scandic, meanwhile, has reversed course. Before Christians mobilized, it planned to keep a few copies of the New Testament at the front desk, along with the Quran and Hebrew Bible.

With the hotel under new ownership since April, Bibles are back in rooms. The Swedish arm of Gideons, a Bible distribution group, recently gave the chain 10,000 New Testaments in Swedish and English.

And so the battle between secularists and religion continues.

Your "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition" scribe;
Allan W Janssen


Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 at www.God-101.com

Gay marraige nixed!

Canadian Anglicans voted against blessing same-sex unions late Sunday afternoon.

Church delegates voted on the issue at their general assembly, or synod in Winnipeg.

Earlier in the day, delegates voted in favour of a motion decreeing that blessing the unions does not violate core doctrine of the Anglican Church of Canada.

But another motion, which would have allowed individual dioceses to choose whether to perform the blessing, was rejected by the bishops of the church late Sunday afternoon.

Cheryl Chang, a spokeswoman for Anglican Essentials, a group lobbying against same-sex blessings, said she believes confused and frustrated parishioners will start finding other churches immediately.

"People [will] leave to go to the Catholic church, the Baptist church, the Pentecostal church. That's going to happen starting next Sunday, or next Monday even," Chang said.

"These are decisions that are very confusing for the church, and ultimately, very divisive."

Both resolutions were widely supported by both clergy and laity in Sunday's votes, but needed the support of the bishops in order to pass.

The bishops narrowly accepted the resolution on doctrine by just two votes. However, when it came to allowing same-sex blessing ceremonies, the bishops voted 21 to 19 against the idea.

Though the church hasn't approved the practice, observers say the foundation has been laid for same-sex blessings in Canada.

Some of the more conservative Anglican churches have already threatened the U.S. church with expulsion over its blessings of same-sex couples, a reason opponents are concerned about Sunday's decisions.

"To do what they've done is to step apart from the worldwide Anglican communion," said Rev. Canon Charlie Masters, the head of Anglican Essentials.

"This is a very sad day for Anglicans." The issue has been contentious beyond the Anglican community.

Canada's Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is also meeting in Winnipeg this weekend, rejected same-sex blessings in a vote held Saturday.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Just the Facts, Ma'am!

I ran across some interesting observations on the Creationists / Evolutionists debate on Les's site S.E.B. and a few other locations.

(We had some of this discussion a few days ago on Half of all Americans are idiots! Boy, this is a good way to make friends and influence people, eh!)

Aside from the fact that 56% of Americans believe in Creationism while only 44% believe in Evolution, (These figures are arbitrary and should only be used as a general guideline.) it also found that the percentage of Creationists was quite a bit lower in Canada and even lower in the rest of the world!

In spite of Fundamentalist Christian and Islamic pressure, the Southern, Catholic States are still 70% pro-Evolution, Great Britain and the Northern Countries of Europe are 80% pro-Evolution and Australia and New Zealand are 95% pro-Evolution,

Compare this to the U.S. (56%-44%) where, in general, older adults (those 55 years of age and older), adults without a college degree, Republicans, conservatives, and Southerners were more likely to embrace the Creationism positions in the questions asked. (75%-25%)

Those with college educations, Democrats, independents, liberals, adults aged 18 to 54, and those from the Northeast and West support the belief in Evolution in larger numbers. 75%-25%)

Aside from regional differences, if we look at the beliefs of members of the major political parties we find a wide variance as well. According to CBS News, a recent Gallup Survey shows that 68% of Republicans Disbelieve Scientific Explanation of Creation!
A Gallup poll released Monday said that while the country is about evenly split over whether the theory of evolution is true, Republicans disbelieve it by more than 2-to-1.

Republicans saying they don’t believe in Evolution outnumbered those who do by 68 percent to 30 percent in the survey. Democrats believe in Evolution by 57 percent to 40 percent, as do Independents by a 61 percent to 37 percent margin.

Or, as Jon Stewart might say; (From S.E.B.)

OK, Republicans, we understand that you’re devout. We understand that you love God.

That’s simply beautiful, it really is.

Regardless of that, you have to stop cherry-picking the facts.

Evolution is a fact, just like some of those other facts that are somewhat less controversial, like Helio-Centrism. The church no longer arrests and executes people who believe that the sun is at the center of our solar system because there’s just simply such an abundance, a cornucopia if you will, of observational evidence, that no rational person would claim otherwise.

The same is true for the facts of evolution: That species emerge and change over very long periods of time.

That some species that used to exist, no longer exist.

Further, it is a fact that humans appeared relatively recently in the history of our world.

The facts are irrefutable.

They are written in the very bedrock of our planet.

They are there for everyone to see, everywhere: older species in strata below newer species.

Never an exception.

No human jawbones have ever been found in a Tyrannosaurus nest.

No dinosaurs after 65 million years ago.

No Australopithecenes after about 2 million years ago.

No Homo Sapiens before about 500,000 years ago.

None!

Anywhere!

Now, while you can certainly take a religious position on the explanation of Evolution, you cannot take a religious position on the existence of Evolution.

In other words, you can certainly disagree with the leading scientific Theory of Evolution, which explains how such facts as we observe everywhere in the world came to be (and does so quite nicely, thank you very much), but you can only disagree with the facts of Evolution to the same extent that you can disagree with the fact that the sun is at the center of the solar system, or that Pasteurization helps preserve foods, or that DNA codes genetic information for all species on earth.

We need to remember that, as Stephen Jay Gould said, there’s a difference between a fact and a theory, and Evolution is both:

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty.

Facts are the world’s data.

Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts.

Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them.

Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome.

Humans evolved from apelike ancestors, whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

If you’re planning on rejecting the Theory of Evolution, the scientific mechanism that Darwin proposed almost a century and a half ago, you have to follow the rules.

The rules are simple.

Come up with a better explanation for the fact of Evolution.

Just make sure it doesn't require anything beyond what we can expect from our normal, natural, very non magical world.


Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Toe the Line, or Else!

A few weeks ago we had an article about Herouxville, Quebec, which has one immigrant family in its population of about 1,300, and is 160km (100 miles) north-east of Montreal.

It is attempting to attract new citizens and its council published (with tongue in cheek) the new rules for immigrants on the town's website.

"We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here," the declaration reads.

"We consider it completely outside norms to... kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them, etc."

It points out that women are allowed to drive, vote, dance and own their own homes.

The rules ban Sikh children from carrying ceremonial daggers to school, even though the Supreme Court has ruled they can.

The man behind the declaration, councillor Andre Drouin, told the National Post newspaper the rules were not racist.

"We invite people from all nationalities, all languages, all sexual orientations, whatever, to come live with us, but we want them to know ahead of time how we live," he said.

Mr Drouin said there had been a number of recent incidents of culture clashes that meant the new rules were needed.

Mr Drouin said most e-mails were supportive of the new declaration.

However, the president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, Salam Elmenyawi, condemned the council, saying it had set back race relations decades.

He told Reuters news agency: "I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion."

In response to Mr. Elmenyawi I would like to quote some of the rules that my wife had to follow when she was in Saudi Arabia with her first husband back in the 1980's!

1. You must live in a walled compound supplied by the Saudi government. Living anywhere else is forbidden.
2. Women are NOT allowed to drive.
3. Women cannot go out of the compound without a male companion.
4. Women must always wear an Abaya when outside. (This is a long cloak that covers you from head to foot.
5. You must surrender your passport when entering Saudi Arabia and obtain an "exit visa" when wishing to leave. Internal travel papers must be issued to foreigners.
6. No personal photographs or magazines allowed in the country that have pictures of women with bare arms or legs.
7. No crucifixes or Star of David medallions to be displayed or worn. No church or Synagogue services allowed.
8. Any and all T.V. programs will be censured by the Saudi Government!

Now, just so you know, here is the complete declaration from the town of Herouxville and it doesn't seem very Draconian at all. Tongue in cheek or not!

Municipalité Hérouxville
Publication of Standards

The social development and territory security are some of the major objective goals of the democratically voted individuals in our MRC. Hérouxville being part of the MRC, we share these same objectives. To do this, we would like to invite, without discrimination, in the future, all people from outside our MRC that would like to move to this territory.

Without discrimination means to us, without regard to race or to the color of skin, mother tongue spoken, sexual orientation, religion, or any other form of beliefs.
So that the future residents can integrate socially more easily, we have decided unanimously, to make public, certain standards already in place and very well anchored in the lives of our electors.

These standards come from our municipal laws being Federal or Provincial, and all voted democratically. They also come from the social life and habits & customs of all residents of our territory.

Our objective is to show that we support the wishes of our electors and this being shown clearly by the results of our poll regarding this issue. And our goal is to inform the new arrivals to our territory, how we live to help them make a clear decision to integrate into our area.

We would especially like to inform the new arrivals that the lifestyle that they left behind in their birth country cannot be brought here with them and they would have to adapt to their new social identity.

Published by The mayor and 6 city counselors of Hérouxville, democratically elected.

Municipalité Hérouxville

The Standards

Our Women

We consider that men and women are of the same value. Having said this, we consider that a woman can; drive a car, vote, sign checks, dance, decide for herself, speak her peace, dress as she sees fit respecting of course the democratic decency, walk alone in public places, study, have a job, have her own belongings and anything else that a man can do. These are our standards and our way of life.

However, we consider that killing women in public beatings, or burning them alive are not part of our standards of life.

Our Children

Our children are required to attend public or private schools to insure their social development and to help integrate into our society. Any form of violence towards children is not accepted.

Our Festivities

We listen to music, we drink alcoholic beverages in public or private places, we dance and at the end of every year we decorate a tree with balls and tinsel and some lights. This is normally called “Christmas Decorations” or also “Christmas Tree” letting us rejoice in the notion of our national heritage and not necessarily a religious holiday. These festivities are authorized in public, schools, and institutions and also in private.

Our Health Care

In our old folks homes men and women are treated by responsible men and women. Please note that there is no law voted democratically that prohibits a woman treating a man and a man treating a woman.

In our hospitals and CLSC’s woman doctors can treat men and women and the same for the men doctors. This same principle applies for nurses, firemen and women, ambulance technicians. These responsible people do not have to ask permission to perform blood transfusions or any task needed to save a life.

For the last few years men have been allowed into the delivery room to assist in the birth of their baby. They have been with their wives to prenatal courses to help them in this task.

In the said establishments the patients are offered traditional meals. There is often music playing in the background. There are magazines or news papers available and any other form of multimedia that shows our community spirit and our way of life.

Our Education

In our schools certified men and women teach our children. The women or men teachers can teach boys or girls with no sexual discrimination. They do not have to dress any different to accomplish their tasks.

In our schools the children cannot carry any weapons real or fake, symbolic or not. The children can sing, play sports or play in groups.

To promote decency and to avoid all discrimination some schools have adopted a dress code that they strongly enforce.

For the last few years to draw away from religious influences or orientation no locale is made available for prayer or any other form of incantation. Moreover, in many of our schools no prayer is allowed. We teach more science and less religion.

In our scholastic establishments, be private or public, generally, at the end of the year you will possibly see “Christmas Decorations” or “Christmas Trees” The children might also sing “Christmas Carols” if they want to.

Many of our schools have cafeterias that serve traditional foods. Students may decide to eat elsewhere.

The history of Quebec is taught in our schools. Biology lessons are also given.

Our Sports & Leisure

For the longest time boys and girls have played the same games and often play together. For example, if you came to my place we would send the kids to swim together in the pool, don’t be surprised this is normal for us.

You would see men and women skiing together on the same hill at the same time, don’t be surprised this is normal for us. You would also see men and women playing hockey together, don’t be surprised this is normal for us.

In our public swimming pools we have men and women lifeguards for our security to protect us from drowning, don’t be surprised this is normal for us.

All the laws adopted that permit these phenomenons have followed a strict democratic process. You would appreciate this new life style and share our habits & customs.

Our Security

Our immense territory is patrolled by police men and women of the “Surete du Quebec”. They have always been allowed to question or to advise or lecture or to give out an infraction ticket to either a man or woman.

You may not hide your face as to be able to identify you while you are in public. The only time you may mask or cover your face is during Halloween, this is a religious traditional custom at the end of October celebrating all Saints Day, where children dress up and go door to door begging for candy and treats.

All of us accept to have our picture taken and printed on our driver’s permit, health care card and passports. A result of democracy.

Our Work Place

The employers must respect the governmental laws regarding work conditions. These laws include holidays known and accepted in advance by all employees. These work conditions are negotiated democratically and once accepted both parties respect them.

No law or work condition imposes the employer to supply a place of prayer or the time during the working day for this activity. You will also see men and women working side by side. We wear safety helmets on work sites, when required by law.

Our Business

Our businesses are governed by municipal, provincial and federal laws. In our busi-nesses men and women work together and serve the clientele whether they be man or woman.

The products sold by these businesses can be of any kind. Food products for example must be approved by different governmental agencies before being offered to the general public. You might see in the same store several different types of meat, eg. Beef , chicken, pork and lamb.

Other stores offer their clientele a place and equipment to exercise. These places have windows that their clientele can look outside while exercising and are composed of men and women dressed in clothing appropriate for exercising.

Our Families

You will appreciate that both parents manage the children needs and both have the same authority. The parents can be of the same race or not, be from the same country or not, have the same religion or not, even be of the same sex or not.

If a boy or girl wants to get married, they may, they have the liberty to chose who their spouse will be. The democratic process is applied to ensure each and everyone’s liberty to choose.

In our families, the boys and girls eat together at the same table and eat the same food. They can eat any type of meat, vegetables or fruit. They don’t eat just meat or just vegetables they can eat both at the same time and this throughout the whole year.

If our children eat meat for example, they don’t need to know where it came from or who killed it.Our people eat to nourish the body not the soul.

Other

You might still see crosses that tell our past. They are an integrated part of our history and patrimony and should be considered as such.

To publish all the laws and standards of Municipalité Hérouxville would be a tedious task.

The standards published above are just a sample so the new arrivals to this territory can clearly identify with us before making their decision to move here.

Certainly, being the elected members, we would give the new arrivals the assurance that the conditions that they have fled from in their country would not happen again here in our territory.

Signed jointly by the mayor and 6 city counselors of Hérouxville, all democratically elected.

Makes sense to me! Except of course that since we are talking about a village in Quebec, all the street and store signs have to be predominately in French.

Your "common sense" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Allah Akbar! (God is Great!)

ALLAH AKBAR!



(Psssst, are we having fun yet?)

This used to be the favourite pastime of Christians as well!

Just so you know we don't play favourites!

Your "beat me till I'm blue" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

(This is not what I have in mind when I think of "self abuse!")

Heaven Help Us!

I was listening to a program on the radio this morning about a Christian Minister who was giving a sermon about "Muslim Jihad!"

You and I are well aware, in other words we both know, that the Muslim's idea of Paradise, with 72 Virgin's waiting for him upon arrival, is not only a bunch of sexist garbage, I would go so far as
to say it is a bunch of God Damned Crap.

Or, to put it another way, "The guy must be a complete and utter Moron to believe something like that!"

But, what about the Christians amongst us??? Think about it!

Are you going to "Heaven," and all you have to do is believe in, and accept, Jesus Christ as your personal saviour!

Nothing else, just do as your told and Heaven awaits you!

Could that possibly be as dumb an idea as the 72 Virgin's scam?

Believe in GOD my freinds, because a Universe as great and wonderful as this did not happen by chance, but NEVER - EVER
let someone else tell you WHAT to believe!

They will fuck-you-up faster than you can blink an eye!

Your "Sensible" Scribe;
Rev. Allan W Janssen

How's That Again?

We know a couple where the guy is an atheist, his wife is Jewish and their son is Jewish.

Their son just married a girl who is a Muslim, her Dad is a Muslim, and her Mother just converted to Christianity.

So, they are all going to the parents of the bride's place to celebrate Christmas this year!


Also, none of them believe in the Easter Bunny, or in putting all your eggs into one basket!

Your secular scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Deal with it!

When I first started this blog and others, as well as comments I made on a few blogs I follow, I put the following quote on the Masthead for a definite reason.

"I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the only warrant and the sanction. Your religion stops where my rights begin. Deal with it!"

Because of my disdain for mainstream religion and how it is all driven by a human agenda mixed with a good dose of avarice, I naturally expected quite a bit of backlash.

What I didn't expect was a lack of outrage from the Muslim community compared to the vile, vindictive, virulent, vixenish vilification and vituperation I have received concerning the denouncements from the "Buddies of Jesus" and all other manner of adherents of the religious far right that exists here in North America.

Even some of the Muslim sites I follow in places like Egypt and Lebanon are more concerned with political matters and oppression than with pulling a "Salmon Rushdie" against people they disagree with.

I know I am in a predominately-Christian neighborhood here in North America as opposed to the reception I might receive if I was in the Middle East. Non-the-less, the mere mention of the fact that the "Christ" of the bible is quite different from the historical "Jesus," as I do in my book "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!) sends a lot of fundamentalist Christians into fits of frenzy that I could write such blasphemous material.

Please, please, stop with the letters designed to help me mend my ways and come around to your way of thinking. Please don't tell me I will rot (or burn) in Hell if I don't repent and accept your version of Christ and especially don't try to argue and debate with me on matters that you have been brainwashed with.

I refuse to participate.

My opinions on matters religious have come to me through many years of hard thought and internal debate and all the evangelizing in the world will not make me "see the light!"

I do not know if there is an actual "Heaven," or if the opposite extreme is true, that after death there is "nothing."

I can tell you for sure that Paradise does not have 72 virgins waiting or that only fellow believers and I will go through the Pearly Gates. (Whether it be 144,000, 39 people taken up in a flying saucer or 900+ drinking cool-aid!

I can also not tell you the nature of God since God, by God's very definition, is quite beyond our understanding. All I know for sure is that these questions are not in the domain of the here and now.

If I am to have any sort of a belief, it is my belief that anyone of a deep religious conviction should put that energy to better use by trying to live an exemplary life before we "shuffle off this mortal coil!".

This would lift humanity to a higher plane of spirituality and make this "vale of tears" a little easier to handle.

We have to stop childish things and rather stand with our heads tall and take responsibilty for ourselves, not just leave it up to some supernatural force. After all, that is our purpose; to get through this life and do the best we can, period!

Your Humble Scribe;
Allan W Janssen

By the way, if you want to see God at work - read the article below!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Never give an inch!

Good old right-wing Republicans in the U.S.of A.
They just NEVER give up.
This is a mural of "Adam and Eve" on the wall of a Babtist Church somewhere in the Southern Sates.

Check out Adam. Who does it remind you of?

A Cry in the Wilderness

There are many, many Arab sites and blogs which promote hatred, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian viewpoints.

These sites cater mostly to the poor and lower class because (surprise! surprise!) they are the most religious and in the majority.

The Arab (And Persian) middle-class however are a whole different ball game. While only the minority, they represent a point of view that is more reasoned and logical.

They have long odds to beat, but theirs is not a cry in the wilderness.

People are listening and I would like to convey one of these blogs from Iraq for your perusal. (Since this blog is out of Iraq I thought it prudent to give the writer anonymity.)

Begging for more anger!

Iraq's speaker of parliament opened Tuesday's session by complaining "the Pope's excuses are not enough, he must make a clear apology…."

The Islamist speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said it without shame or hesitation, just like all other leaders who owe us a thousand apologies a day for their ignorance and incompetence.

What can I say? We got used to this kind of behavior. When someone is full of mistakes he finds no shelter except in accusing others of being wrong.

I don't know what good this can do for Iraq or its people!

What difference does it make to the average Iraqi whether the pope apologized or not? Did Mr. Speaker ask himself these questions?

My guess is that he was in a state of euphoria after watching 150 teenagers demonstrating in Basra, which is another proof of the ignorance of its managers.

I saw angry young men burning the flags of America and Israel, and I still can't figure out the connection they saw between Israel or Jews and the Pope!!

In fact the continuous pathetic attempts to blame the West and Israel for everything shows clearly that the motives of such demonstrations are political not religious.

Anyway, it looks like the reaction of Muslims were not as violent or as bloody as the leaders wished them to be and that's why they're now provoking and yelling at the "sleeping" masses and pushing them to show more fury.

They want to add another big scene to the countless previous ones—angry mobs burning flags and pledging to destroy the "infidels".

Actually their latest calls for MORE ANGER are becoming pretty much like begging.

Meanwhile, Iran thinks the Muslim people fell short of doing their duty and Qaradawi calls on Muslims to have a "day of fury".

All these are theatrical acts directed by governments and corrupt clerics seeking controlled anger among the mobs to use in intimidating the West and discouraging it from applying more pressure on, or calling for changing, these tyrannical regimes.

Such calls are taking the headlines in the governments-controlled media in the Arab countries, and the governments, whether religious or secular, are promoting this provocation of anger.

Meanwhile, voices of reason are being pushed to the rear -to appear in a short subtitle or in a tiny corner in the 10th page, or even not mentioned at all.

What the rulers want is the anger that the masses, in the eyes of the rulers, did not express enough of.

What has to be done now from the governments' perspective is to lash those lazy masses with the whips of the media and religion to do more angry protests and show more fist-shaking on TV.

For a while let the people forget about poverty, hunger, terrorism, illiteracy and other problems of the region…

And let's redirect the world's attention from "insignificant" issues like Darfur, nuclear reactors, Hizbollah's defiance or Syrian and Iranian meddling with Iraq's or Lebanon's affairs.

What matters now is anger and only anger.

Right Mashhadani? Right Ahmedinejad? Right Asad? Right Mubarak?

Now in answer to this I have to once again quote from the blog: "Enough With The Apologies Already!"

A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the Pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical Imams and fanatical clerics every day across Europe and the Muslim world.

Almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all.

Maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

By "we" I also mean the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between.

True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the Pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus.

As one of the newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute says:
"These people (Middle East governments and clergy) are laughing at us because nobody in the (Western)media or government will stand up and tell it like it really is!"
Just so you know!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

What's going on?

Here it's been almost a week and nothing has happened to set me off on another rant. I mean, lots of stuff has happened, but nothing to get me seriously indignant or P.O.'d. (Not even watching Bill Clinton tie himself in knots and turning purple during an interview!)

Christians and Muslims haven't been killing themselves much in the last few days, the Pope is having a nap, Bush actually went the better part of a week without saying anything stupid and Iran didn't nuke any foreign countries! The only really newsworthy item was when Paris Hilton was charged with impaired driving!

Jesus, is my silence a sign of old age? Or senility? Or (God forbid) humility? Maybe it's just a temporary burnout, after all the view always seems so much better from the moral high ground!

Let's hope my exaggerated sense of self-righteousness has only taken a short holiday or I might not recognize myself after a few more weeks. (Me, you know.... Don Quixote!)

Humility feels strange although it should make my wife happy. She keeps saying that this is something that I could use a little more of!

Will keep you updated.

Your Humble Scribe;
Allan

Heaven help us!

Is there any one world religion that can truthfully document its origins ?

The early Christian gospels are not historical biographies of Jesus. They were written in a way that appeals to historical truth, but are not history in any actual sense. The Gospels were written between 40 to 200 years after the fact, and then drastically altered during the “Council of Nicea.”

In Islam, there is no actual copy of the Koran. The earliest written record of the Koran was mentioned in a biography of Mohammed by Ibn Ishaq who wrote about 100 years after the death of the Prophet. We don't have an actual copy of that either, just a later reference to it!

Hinduism does not have any one founder, or any single doctrine.

Buddhism is a religion that would be much closer in spirit to the views of an agnostic or atheist.

Where did the book of Mormon come from? Joseph Smith said he translated it from old manuscripts, but all we have are HIS papers.

The only “Religion” documented is “Scientology.” We have all the original bullshit and still some people can’t believe it’s a vast con game!

Heaven (?) help us!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Should we take the Bible literally or figuratively!

The best answer I can give is to take a quote from my book "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!)

**At the end of the first century C.E. The “Alexandrian School of Thought,” of which Origin and Clement of Alexandria were part, taught that there were three possible approaches to be taken to the scriptures. (That there were already discussions of this magnitude and significance tells us a lot of the early Christian movement.)

The first approach was the literal translation, the second was symbolic, or allegorical, and the third was spiritual.

The first (the literal) was described as simplistic and solely for the un-educated. The second (symbolic) was the use of parables to convey a deeper meaning, and third (spiritual) was to transcend the mortal plane and bring us closer to God.

Unfortunately at that time, as now, the un-washed masses cried out for a ready-made, simplistic, popular faith. A faith that can best be described as closer to a romance novel than any serious attempt at theology, history and philosophy.

This is also the reason that the "Resurrection" was proclaimed as the basis for Christianity.

(It was a con thought up from ancient Greek mythology by Paul. He's the one responsible for the Christianity we have today. Not Jesus!)

This version of the "Faith," when combined with the Roman gift of organization and brute force, led to the "Christianity" that has been handed down to us.

It seems to be the consensus among New Testament scholars that "Jesus” preached a message that teaches a way of behaving and living that applied to a first century reality.

However, the words of "Christ" are another matter.

If the sayings and parables of "Christ" are examined closely with the purpose of separating those words that were actually uttered by “Jesus” from those that were later attributed to him, we see a vast difference in the context, meaning, and purpose between the two.

The sayings of “Christ” display a metaphorical and allegorical context that suggest someone slightly removed from the everyday world.

The biblical words of "Jesus," however, were indeed a direct reflection of their place and time. (Just as today, we are all products of our own time and age)

The actual sayings of the historical "Jesus,” which upon close examination shows only a handful of thoughts and parables, are so simple and basic, with such underlying truth, that they can be applied to the human condition of any age. -A.W.J.

Please, Please pay attention to this> It is probably the closest you will ever get to the truth behind Jesus and the whole religious thing.

Don't blindly accept what other people try and tell you, go and find out for youself.

"Faith" can very well turn out to be a false God!

Your Humble Scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Why The "Fundamentalist" Approach To Religion Must Be Wrong!

GUEST POST

This is from a blog by Scott Bidstrup. Access his blog at;
http://www.bidstrup.com/index.htm

Fundamentalism Defined

Fundamentalism is variously described by various authors, but to me it really boils down to a rather simple test: In my view, a fundamentalist religion is a religion, any religion, that when confronted with a conflict between love, compassion and caring, and conformity to doctrine, will almost invariably choose the latter regardless of the effect it has on its followers or on the society of which it is a part.

Fundamentalist religions make this choice because they uniformly place a high priority on doctrinal conformity, with such force that it takes higher priority than love, compassion and service.

Indeed, many fundamentalists are so caught up in doctrinal seriousness, that love, service and compassion seem scarcely to even be a part of their thinking. As one correspondent said to me regarding a certain Christian sect's converts, "Its like they go in and surgically remove any sense of love or any sense of humor."

This emphasis on doctrinal conformity seems to be the result of the belief in the requirement of absolute conformity to doctrine to achieve salvation. Yet at the same time, many will also officially claim that simple acceptance of that sect's doctrine is sufficient for salvation.

This dichotomy is often seen in the same sect; some of the fundamentalist Christian sects being good examples. The contradiction seems to go unnoticed or if it is noticed, it is ignored.

It seems that another facet of fundamentalist thinking is belief in the correctness of their thinking. Invariably, they will make the claim that they are right to the exclusion of others, even all others, and that they, and they alone offer the path to salvation.

Fundamentalist religions regard their missions with great seriousness. Many claim that the salvation of the world depends on them, and some will seriously contend that the earth will end without them.

It is this overwhelming seriousness about religion that seems to be one of the hallmarks of the fundamentalist. He is concerned not only with his own conformity to doctrine, but the conformity of the rest of society to it, too. Many fundamentalists will not hesitate to intervene in the political process to ensure that society is forced to conform to the behaviors their world view requires, if not accept that world view.

The belief that they are right, without any question, justifies, in their own minds, taking upon themselves the right to impose their point of view, by force if neccessary. An example is the attempt, by some Christian fundamentalist groups to shut down, by force, abortion clinics that are operating in accordance with the law. Some have gone so far as to threaten and intimidate employees, and even murder doctors working there.

Fundamentalism isn't restricted to Christianity or Islam, the two major religions on which it has had its greatest impact, but it is found in every major religion, ranging from Judaism, to Hinduism, to Sufism, to Buddhism, to even Zoroastrianism.

In Christianity, though relatively small in numbers, it has overtaken the legitimate sects in influence, and has become the dominant force, particularly in the United States, much of Latin America, and in the Christianized African nations. Most (though certainly not all) "evangelical" Christian sects have succumbed to fundamentalism.

In Islam, which has always eschewed the separation of church and state, it has amalgamated with political forces to institute a particularly harsh set of rules as political law. Called the Sharia,this code of law is the law of the land in Iran, the Sudan, some of the sultanates of the Persian Gulf and lately in Afganistan. Its advocates threaten to institute Sharia in Algeria and Egypt as well.

In Judaism, fundamentalism represents only about 1/10th of those who call themselves Jews, but it certainly makes the most noise, especially in Israel, whose constitution and political situation almost guarantees a major voice to fundamentalist sects in parliament and government, even though they are only a small portion of the population.

Why does fundamentalism have such a broad appeal? Besides the appeal to vanity ('join us and you can be one of God's chosen'), and its appeal to fear ('you can't be saved without us'), its broad appeal is because it offers an easy way -- a fundamentalist need not think deeply about doctrine or be highly educated in it; as one Mormon leader once said to an audience of university students, "Don't think for yourself. The thinking has already been done."

If you surrender your right to think for yourself and just do as the leader asks, the fundamentalist promises you a sure ticket into heaven. What could be easier?

Of course, the fallacy is that the possibility always exists that the fundamentalist leader seeking your submission could be wrong. He may not have a sure ticket into heaven to offer you after all. And if he doesn't, you've engaged in an act of self deception of massive proportions.

Indeed, I am prepared to argue that he never does. He is always wrong, at least to some degree.

"Bidstrup's Index of Fundamentalism"

It has been observed that one of the characteristics of fundamentalism is that among patriarchialistic religions, at least, chavinism is a clear, almost defining characteristic. Indeed, it has been my experience that the degree of chavinism within a religion seems to closely parallel the degree to which the organization could be charactarized as fundamentalist.

Based on that observation, I hereby propose what I'm somewhat laughingly calling "Bidstrup's Index of Fundamentalism." It is basically just a measure of the degree to which women's rights are abrogated by the religion's doctrine and the culture that the religion creates. It is scored like this: If a religious organization is characterized by each or any of the statements below, add the points indicated to the score.

Does the religion deny to women the same religious privileges and authority it accords to men (such as denying the priesthood)? If so, add 2 points.

Does the religion seek to deny women secular (i.e., usually political) power (e.g., the right to vote, run for office, etc.)? If so, add 3 points.

Does the religion impose greater 'moral' burdens on women than it does men (i.e., promote a double standard)? If so, add 4 points.

Does the religion seek to promote unquestioning submission of wives to their husbands? If so, add 4 points.

Does the religion promote involuntary marriage arrangements (such as arranged marriages, involuntary polygamy, denial of divorce initiated by the wife, etc.)? If so, add 5 points.

Does the religion discourage the participation of non-parenting wives in the workforce? If so, add 3 points.

If the above question is no, does the religion discourage the participation of parenting wives in the workforce regardless of economic circumstances? If so, add 3 points.

Does the religion discourage the education of women? If so, add 4 points.

Does the religion encourage women to remain at home, with contact with other women and men in the community discouraged? If so, add 5 points.

Does the religion accept or promote the treatment of women as property or a commodity, or treat wives as servants? If so, add 5 points.

Does the religion seek to deny women their reproductive freedom (taking a "pro-life" position on abortion, or discouraging or interfering with artificial contraception)? If so, add 5 points.

Does the religion seek to deny women the full right of self-determination, dignity and self respect that they accord men ("at home, barefoot and pregnant")? If so, add 4 points.

Does the religion publicly humiliate women who violate the prohibitions that apply only to women? If so, add 3 points.

By applying this little index, it will help measure the degree of intolerance and bigotry associated with a fundamentalist religion. This, then, becomes an index to how dangerous a religion is, as defined below.

Why Fundamentalism Denies The Power Of God

The greatest philosophical problem of fundamentalism is that it denies the power of God. Gott Mit Uns (God is with us) proclaimed the belt buckles of the Nazi SS storm troopers. Of course, every religious fundamentalist makes the same claim. The way that the fundamentalist justifies the exercise of his influence and power in society is that God is on his side, and needs his efforts to see that God's work is done.

The famous Christian fundamentalist political technician, Ralph Reed, even says of himself, "I'm the stealth candidate... I paint my face and travel at night." How does he morally justify that kind of deceptive behavior? Does the end justify the means? Or is God simply incapable of implementing His own agenda without Ralph's help?

Does God really need the fundamentalist's efforts?

To make the claim that God needs one's efforts is a flat-out denial of the power of God. Claiming that God is omnipotent and omniscient is to imply that nothing happens in the universe that isn't happening with the knowledge and consent of God. How could it happen without the knowledge of God?

It has to be that way if you accept the omniscience of God. If God doesn't allow it, how can it happen? Otherwise, God would not be omnipotent. If God allows it, it implies at least knowledge and consent.

Why, then, must God require the services of the fundamentalist to ensure that His will happens in the Universe?

If the homosexual were as abhorrent to God as most fundamentalists imply, the homosexual wouldn't last a millisecond. Otherwise, God cannot be omnipotent. Why would an omnipotent God need someone else to persecute the homosexual for Him?

If God is saying, "I'll let him live, but he's still abhorrent" it implies that God's behavior isn't consistent with what He wants. Why would God want something abhorrent to him to continue to exist?

Then there's proselytization.

There is a saying in Buddhism that where the student is ready, the teacher is provided. Such a concept certainly affirms the power of God to bring the word of God to the sincere seeker. Why then, does the fundamentalist almost always assume that God needs him to go out and spread God's word? If God is omnipotent, He doesn't need anyone to proselytize on His behalf. He's quite capable of steering the seeker in the direction of His word all by Himself.

Why Fundamentalism Appeals To The Base Tendencies In Man

The reason that fundamentalism makes the claim that God needs his services is that it flatters the fundamentalist. He gets a self-stroke out of the deal. Makes him feel good about himself and what he's doing.

But it doesn't stop there. When you figure God is on your side, you can justify almost anything. Recently a spate of bombings of abortion clinics and gay bars in North America has underlined how far this self-justification can take the fundamentalist. Even murder has been justified by those claiming the authority of God.

Of course, if God wasn't willing to allow abortion, it wouldn't happen. And if God didn't want the obstetrician-gynecologist to live, he would last even a millisecond. So why does God need the fundamentalist to carry out his will? But this does not occur to the fundamentalist, since his conception of God's word becomes his self-justification for acts he would find abhorrent in any other context.

This isn't the only base appeal in fundamentalism. Another appeal, equally damaging, is the notion that you're one of "God's chosen." Such an idea is an outright appeal to vanity and ego. Here the unspoken implication is that if you're one of God's chosen, the other fellow isn't, and that you're somehow therefore better.

This appeal to vanity can set the fundamentalist apart in his own mind from his peers. It can justify a certain arrogance in thinking he is superior. This is seen in just about any public debate involving fundamentalists and those who oppose them -- just watch the attitude of the fundamentalist when the subject of abortion rights or gay rights comes up.

Another belief common to fundamentalists is that they are somehow less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. God will somehow protect him, because he is chosen to do God's will. Of course if that were actually true, it would be reflected in statistical analysis.

Science has studied this problem extensively and has never been able to show a correlation between fundamentalist belief and any measure of well-being. To the fundamentalist who holds this view, however, it just means science is wrong.

Fundamentalism often justifies hatred in the minds of its adherents. This is undoubtedly the most dangerous aspect of fundamentalism. The idea that God hates the same people you do is particularly gratifying in that it makes the indulgence in hatred not only acceptable, but somehow approved and even encouraged by God.

This is seen most clearly in many fundamentalist Islamic sects, which routinely justify terrorism and murder as being "God's will." Of course, Islamic fundamentalism isn't alone. There are plenty of Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist sects which do the same.

The results are obvious. Terrorism in Northern Ireland, which is framed in religious terms, war in the Middle East, domestic terror in Egypt, Algeria, and in countless other conflicts around the world are the results of hatred justified by the fundamentalist notion that my side is right and the other side is wrong.

If the religionists involved adhered to the concept that the purpose of religion is to teach tolerance, love and compassion, such conflicts would not exist. But they are justified to the fundamentalist, because he believes that God is on his side and will reward him for his acts that in any other context, he himself would condemn.

Sincere people who come to religion often come as a result of guilt and shame. Such a motivator often leads the seeker to a fundamentalist religion which tries to assure the follower that he need not concern himself with his guilt and shame because of some doctrine which exempts him from responsibility for the situations that cause that guilt and shame. Among many Christian fundamentalist groups, that exemption is found in the doctrine of the redemption of Christ.

That sense of exemption relieves the guilt and shame, and thereby makes the follower feel good. That good feeling is then often associated with the notion that the follower has been 'saved.'

Often the price the religion extracts for that 'salvation' is a requirement to contribute to the church or to proselytization its behalf, or at bare minimum, conformity to the doctrine and the advice of the leadership. Hence, the follower is made loyal to the religion which has relieved him of that guilt and shame, and a true-believer and often zealous advocate is born.

Why Fundamentalism Accepts Hypocrisy

Fundamentalism, like any other belief system, has to propagate itself in order to survive and prosper.

A method used by many fundamentalist Christian religions, is to appeal in very subtle ways to some of the baser instincts in man.

It is obvious that telling someone he is right is more likely to get him to agree with you than telling him he is wrong and should reform himself.

And so fundamentalist sects do just that; they have justified slavery to slaveholders. They have justified persecution of unpopular minorities to bigots, and war to nationalists. They have justified disregard and even oppression of the poor and dispossessed by the wealthy and powerful.

What have the fundamentalist sects gained by such behavior? Obviously it is membership and financial support among members, and an acceptance and acquiesence among its neighbors.

Yet a fundamentalist religion cannot make such base appeals openly. To do so would be to deny the principles of religion that make religion a positive force in the minds of most people. Religion must be respectable to survive for long, so fundamentalist sects will invariably pay a great deal of lip service to the ideals of true religion, all the while ignoring them in practice, and occasionally even being contemptuous of them in private.

An example is the anti-abortion movement; while it makes a lot of noise about the sanctity of life, rarely do its adherents concern themselves with the lives of the babies after they're born. The reason why is that they don't really care about the infants; what they really care about is the control.

Why Fundamentalism Promotes Intolerance

The fundamentalist believes that he is right. Period.
He believes he knows the will of God. We've all seen that bumper sticker that says, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." Of course the fallacy is that there's no proof, or even reliable evidence, that God ever said anything.

When someone takes such a doctrinaire approach to religion, without being willing to accept that he may be wrong, it becomes very easy to believe that he knows what's right for everyone else as well.

When he believes that he knows what is best for everyone else, it is a very short leap to the feeling that he has the right, if not the responsibility to impose on others the point of view he is so sure is not only correct, but even infallible. After all it is for their own good, is it not?

Thus the fundamentalist has, by his conviction that he is correct, justified the extinction, by force if neccessary, of opposing points of view. This is why so many highly public fundamentalists take positions that would not only be familiar, but quite comfortable to most fascists.

This is why Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, feels justified in saying that he doesn't want pluralism. It is why Ralph Reed used to describe himself as the "stealth" candidate, "painting [his] face and travelling at night."

The philosophical Achilles' heel, here of course, is that the fundamentalist can be wrong, and occasionally have to admit it. There are few Southern Baptists today who would openly argue that God meant for people of African descent to be enslaved to people of European descent.

Yet that argument is precisely how the Southern Baptist Convention came into being. Now, a century and a half later, the doctrine seems to have changed, in spite of their notion that the Bible should be interpreted literally, and therefore it's meaning can't change.

Well, if the Southern Baptists were wrong about slavery, and later about segregation, those very facts beg the question, what else are they wrong about? Yet it is remarkable how few Southern Baptists ever stop to consider that question. The belief is that by asking such questions, you're somehow falling into "Satan's trap" as if logical inconsistency wasn't itself a trap.

Of course, the Southern Baptists aren't alone. A favorite example of mine is the Mormon practice of polygamy in the 19th century. For five decades, the Mormons endured considerable persecution in the practice of their belief in polygamy; yet today, a century after the official practice of polygamy ended in the Mormon church, that church is using precisely the same arguments against gay marriage that were used against them in the practice of polygamy a century ago. And the proponents of gay marriage are using the same arguments in favor of gay marriage that the Mormons used in arguing for polygamy then.

Yet the ironic hypocrisy of that position is totally lost on the current generation of Mormon leadership and even many of the members.

Why Fundamentalism Contradicts The Intent Of Founding Prophets

The purpose of religion is to teach love, both for self and for others. Indeed, living in the state of self-love is "the kingdom of heaven" that Jesus and other founding prophets talked about being "within you."

When one has self-love and self-respect, one respects others, because one sees reflected in others the empathy, compassion and love one sees in oneself. It is this insight that the founding prophets of all major religions have tried to convey to their followers. It is arriving at the point of living this ideal that has been, from the beginning of time, the goal of the sincere seeker and the true, undefiled religion.

Achieving this self-love, however, can be difficult. It requires self-examination, which at times can be intensely painful. Not everyone is up to that kind of self-discipline.

A religious leader seeking to fill the pews with contributing churchgoers at some level has to know this. Yet he must fill the pews to keep the lights on, the furnace running and the maintenance paid.

The temptation is there to do what will fill the pews. And filling the pews can be really much easier, if all you feel you have to do is make the worshipper feel good about being there.

If making the worshipper feel good is all you're after, and you don't care how you do it, the easiest way to do it is to assure him his prejudices are approved by God. Make him feel that he doesn't have to change because he's already arrived at salvation, or, as in the case of the Christian doctrine of redemption, someone else has agreed to pay for his mistakes, or you or God can make the changes for him, and you have a loyal church member. It's, oh, so much easier than telling him he has to work on himself!

Yet the founding prophets never did such things. Jesus Christ and Ghatama Buddha and the prophet Mohammed (p.b.u.h) and many others all knew of the fallacy of such an approach and did not advocate it. They were totally honest with themselves and their followers, that salvation requires personal effort and sacrifice.

Those who sincerely seek spiritual growth intuitively know this. This is why sincere followers are attracted to the words of the founding prophets like bees are drawn to nectar laden flowers. The sincere seeker already knows he is going to have to work on himself, and is looking for the best method by which to do it. As he seeks that path, and he finds his personal insights match those of the prophet, the seeker is drawn to the prophet's wisdom.

Unfortunately, for every sincere seeker, there are a thousand people driven to religion by fear, guilt and shame. These negative emotions are then played upon by religionists who seek to fill the pews with compliant, profitable members. It is my contention that many, if not most fundamentalist organizations have fallen into this trap.

How Fundamentalism Promotes Ignorance

Fundamentalism almost invariably has a problem with science. Science is the process of starting with the evidence and proceeding to the conclusion that best fits the evidence, regardless of what that conclusion may be.
Fundamentalism, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and searches for evidence to support that conclusion.

Anyone who has ever been wrong knows that the latter is no way to find the truth, because it presumes the searcher has the truth to begin with, which of course may or may not be the case.

But this doesn't stop the fundamentalist; the very premise of fundamentalism presumes to start with the truth, and all the fundamentalist lacks is evidence. This false science has even become an industry in such organizations as the Institute for Creation Science, the Family Research Council, etc. There are many other examples, and from many religions besides just Christianity.

This can most clearly be seen in the Christian fundamentalist's hard-core, bedrock belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. While there are numerous contradictions, obvious errors and serious problems with doctrine in the Bible, the Christian fundamentalist simply ignores them at worst, and applies tortured, twisted logic in an effort to explain them at best.

But in the final analysis, the Bible speaks for itself, and anyone who takes the time to seriously study it will be impressed at how many irreconcilable problems there are with the Bible.

How can the fundamentalist read the Bible and ignore the irreconcilable contradictions? It is done by compartmentalized thinking, a thought technique that allows two or more contradictory facts to inhabit the mind at the same time in peace and without conflict. Yet when the contradiction is directly pointed out to the fundamentalist, the reaction is to claim that such an argument is "one of Satan's traps."

It really isn't, of course, it's just truth coming to call. But the notion that such nagging thoughts are the devil's tools are the way the inerrantist maintains peace in his mind.

Why Fundamentalism Is A Force For Evil In Society

By distracting otherwise sincere people from honest self-examination and the spiritual growth it makes possible, and by obstructing honest scientific inquiry and intellectual debate, fundamentalism derails the progress that society would achieve by honest, competent religious practice.

But more than that, fundamentalism all too often justifies in its adherents' minds the prejudices, the zealotry, the intolerance and the hatemongering that are all the most base of human instincts. To gain and keep adherents, these religions can do great violence to human freedom and dignity, and often are the source of much economic and social stagnation and even ruin. Much human misery owes its origins to fundamentalist religion and the spiritual corruption it fosters.

Why Fundamentalism Should Be Fought

Human progress is essentially a search for truth. To the extent that fundamentalism blocks or impedes that search for the truth, it blocks or impedes human progress. True religion is a relentless search for and acceptance of truth about yourself and the universe in which you find yourself regardless of the discomfort that truth may cause.

One of the insights of the American democracy has been the unique justice of the concept of equal protection of the law. Unfortunately, fundamentalism undermines that concept by promoting its political philosophy as superior to others, even though it is often wrong, and thereby undermines the egalitarian foundations of western democratic institutions.

An example of this is the hard fight that the Southern Baptists fought in the last century to preserve the institution of slavery, and the fight to preserve segregation in this century. Those fights were all based on Biblical scripture, of course, but few fundamentalists today would still defend these positions.

Fundamentalism of any stripe is not progress, but rather, I contend, is the impedance of progress. With so many problems facing humanity, the notion that we can even afford the luxury of even tolerating politically active brands of fundamentalism is rapidly becoming impossible.

The world gets continually smaller as it gets more crowded, and the imposition, by public policy, of religious doctrines on others who know better is a sure recipe for strife. It has been the cause of enormous death and suffering over the centuries.

As the world becomes ever more crowded, there are fewer and fewer places to which a refugee of conscience can escape. For this reason, it is imperative that we strive to make our nations as egalitarian as possible, affording for all the freedom of conscience to all equally and without acceding to the presumption of superior wisdom by any religious group. Environmental pressures caused by rapidly expanding human populations, make public policy decisions based on the best available information and hypotheses, elucidated by honest intellectual inquiry, increasingly urgent.

Some fundamentalist religious groups, which seek to strike down the wall of separation between church and state so that they can impose their views on others, work in opposition to this increasingly urgent need.