Deborama's WWW Number 11 - Landover Baptist Church

My Wednesday Website of the Week is a little late this week. But here it is nonetheless, the one and only Landover Baptist Church website. Hours of fun. As Swami Beyondananda says, it puts the "fun" in "fundamentalism".

The truth about fundamentalism

Karen Armstrong is the foremost world authority on the fundamentalist elements of all three "religions of the book". I am amazed that she can maintain her academic detachment, knowing all she knows about the bloody histories of their fratricidal contention. Today's comment in the Guardian gives just a taste of what she's on about.

More Intelligent Design madness

Excerpts from a follow-up story to the recent court decision (see previous post) knocking down a school district's policy of teaching ID as science:

Both sides are looking to Kansas as the most likely new battlefield in the culture war over education. Last month, the state's education board voted for new teaching standards, redefining science to include the supernatural [italics mine - because I am just dumbstruck] and encouraging Kansas science teachers to question the validity of evolution in their classrooms. If a local authority within the state accepts the board's recommendation and changes its school curriculum to play down evolution, it could trigger another legal battle.
Steve Abrams, the Kansas board chairperson, told The Associated Press that the Pennsylvania and Kansas cases were very different. In Dover, science teachers had been made to read out a statement in biology class pointing to holes in evolution theory and recommending pupils look into an intelligent-design library textbook called Of Pandas and People.
Abrams said the Kansas board was not specifically advocating intelligent design, only questioning evolution. . .
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Georgia is considering the case of an Atlanta suburb that had stickers put into biology textbooks, describing evolution as "a theory, not a fact".

Trust Georgia to take the lazy way out. Stickers in textbooks! When I was in the Georgia schools, they would have suspended you for doing that, and now the administration is doing it, and smirking behind their hands at the heathens in the "fed'ral gummint".

Antievolution idea can't be public school class, judge rules

Good news, good sense. I reckon that "intelligent design" is not false on its face, the way hard-core believers in the religion I call scientism believe. But it is not science. And it is not religion either. It is something almost unheard of in the 21st century, a little thing the ancients used to call "philosophy". And Grid knows, we can't be teaching that in the public schools. Wouldn't that be confusing?
By the way, G. Trudeau has a really trenchant observation on the implications of disbelief in evolution. Perhaps, in the trenches of medical care, there are nothing but atheists? (Another negative consequence of the death of philosophy, imho.)

The Great American Man-Dog Marriage Panic

Put your coffee cup on the other side of the room and read this bit in The Village Voice by Richard Goldstein. Link found on Earl Bockenfeld's Radio Weblog.

Will not compute! Help! Hair on fire!

The incomparable Zoe Williams has a Guardian daily comment article today called "In pursuit of the pink". This is all about the Tories and New Labour falling all over each other trying to woo the "homosexual vote". She has a really ingenious explanation of why "family values" politicians cannot come out (as it were) in support of gay marriages:
"My personal theory is that, if they did bring in gay marriage, there would de facto be gay divorcees, and the upholders of "family values" would become irretrievably confused over whether these were destroying the very fabric of society. (Divorce: bad! Homosexual partnerships: unnatural! Divorcing homosexuals... emergency! Will not compute! Help, hair on fire!)"

US now in the hands of a group of extremists - Soros

In a follow-on from another article I posted about (the Bubble of American Supremacy), George Soros, writing in the Guardian, charges that a small group of extremists has control of the US government. The crux of his charge is this:

The US can lose its dominance only as a result of its own mistakes. At present the country is in the process of committing such mistakes because it is in the hands of a group of extremists whose strong sense of mission is matched only by their false sense of certitude.
This distorted view postulates that because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. That is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.

Brain Left Behind

This article on the depressingly popular "Left Behind" series is not so much a book review as a history lesson and exegesis of a body of paranoid literature.
"The worldview. . . propounded in the books was first popularised by the Protestant theologian John Nelson Darby in the mid-19th century, and it is disturbing how it has become an underlying meta-narrative for American life: progress for the righteous, doom for the enemy. It has even found a role in US politics – with a large lobby of North American citizens who believe that the Middle East roadmap should be opposed because it conflicts with their interpretation of end-times prophecy."

Bush Adminstrations latest briefing from God

I just discovered "The Scoop", a gossip/weird news column on MSNBC. Two excellent items are to be found there today.
Is Bush getting apocalyptic advice? Only a good quote will suffice to show the true juiciness of this story, this one being from apocalyptic televangelist Jack Van Impe:
“I was contacted a few weeks ago by . . . Condoleezza Rice to make an outline. And I’ve spent hours preparing it. I will release this information to the public in September, but it’s in his hands. He will know exactly what is going to happen in the Middle East and what part he will have under the leading of the Holy Spirit of God. So, it’s a tremendous time to be alive."
Uh, right.

Believers and Non-believers: both in error

In Karen Armstrong's article Believers in the lost Ark in the Guardian, I found the best explanation yet for the difference between logos and mythos. It is very frustrating in the modern world to be one of those who "believes in myths". To the modern mind, blinded by science, this is tantamount to believing in lies or crediting obvious falseness. So completely is the meaning between "truth" and "fact" conflated that it is impossible to talk of "two kinds of truth", one physical and one metaphysical. This article is an attempt to tease the meanings apart again, and explain to the modern mind why we need mythos.

Months Before Debut, Movie on Death of Jesus Causes Stir

This is a very frightening story, frightening in what it reveals about the current state of the religion-politics dialectic in the world, and especially in the US. Essentially, Mel Gibson, and others like him, seem to be going all medieval on us.

Apocalypse fiction (a tautology)

Absolutely unfathomable to most Brits, not even that interesting to most Americans (but rather horrifying to all the rest): the surging popularity amongst fundamentalist Christians of the Apocalypse fiction genre.

Hola, young lovers

A quixotic attempt to improve the social lives of 20-somethings in Spain is a proposal from the Green party. Catholic pressure group Opus Dei threatens the proponents with hell.