Mainstream Protestant Denominations: Triggering Ideas Banned

Major news about Mainline Protestant Christianity, from the Babylon Bee:

LOUISVILLE, KY—While some college campuses have established safe spaces where the disenfranchised can avoid the pressures, biases, and judgement of the world, mainline Protestant denominations are taking it one step further. The entire umbrella group has now been designated a safe space for those who would otherwise be offended by the gospel, sources confirmed Wednesday.

Speaking on behalf of a plethora of denominations including the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United Methodist Church, a spokesperson issued the following statement: “We are in agreement that there is a great need for churches to rise up and create spaces that are safe for questioning and accepting our identities, doubts, fears, failures, and blatant sins. Effective immediately, we are declaring all mainline Protestant churches safe spaces, where there are no judgments, conviction, repentance, or gospel presentations whatsoever.”

The statement listed elements that safe space churches should remove from their premises, including “crosses, Bibles, pulpits, organs, hymnals, systematic theologies, and sermons exhibiting any form of triggering micro-aggression. Be considerate.” Words like “sin,” “hell,” “death,” “wrath,” “propitiation,” and “substitutionary atonement” are also on the ban list.

On behalf of all of mainline Protestantism, the spokesperson expressed heartfelt joy that they were able to make such a major step toward accepting—and not judging—anyone who may be on a path toward God’s judgment. “Our congregations are now spaces that are safe from the power of God in the gospel, where each person is free to construct their own narrative. That’s worthy of celebration.”

This, of course, is not a sudden shock, but rather the culmination of longstanding trends in these denominations.

Hillary Clinton: Elitist Snob Demeans Lots of People

It was the id of elitist liberals showing itself, the now famous comment by Hillary Clinton about how Donald Trump’s backers belong to a “basket of deplorables.”

But Clinton has a long history of demeaning people whom she stereotypes as not sharing her elitist liberal views. From Front Page Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark revealed her utter contempt for ordinary Americans, which stretches back decades. Before an adoring audience of wealthy elites, Hillary dismissed millions of American citizens, who happen to support her opponent Donald Trump, as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She said they are “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Hillary Clinton had no compunctions about branding millions of her fellow citizens “irredeemable” and “not America,” while saying on another occasion that we must show “respect” to our enemies and “empathize with their perspective and point of view.” Moreover, she wants to vastly enlarge the basket for “refugees” admitted from the Middle East, without sufficiently robust vetting in place first to make sure that jihadist terrorists don’t find their way into that basket.

After coming under withering attack for insulting so many hardworking, patriotic Americans, Hillary half-apologized: “I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.” What is really wrong is Hillary’s 100 percent condescending attitude towards ordinary Americans who do not inhabit her insular bubble of self-righteous snobs. And her condescension is a deeply ingrained character trait she has evidenced for years in her attitude towards stay-at-home moms, working people, parents who do not want government interference in how they raise their children and people with religious beliefs that are not in accord with her secular progressive ideology.

Stay-at-home moms, for example, are not worthy of Hillary’s respect. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, she strutted her status as a career woman while putting down those women who regard being a mother a full-time job.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary declared, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

The truth is that Hillary rode her husband Bill’s coattails in Arkansas and Washington to promote her own career as a partner in the Rose law firm and then onto the national stage.

“You know, I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary remarked during a joint 60 Minutes interview with her husband.

The only problem is that Hillary not only stood by her man while he was carrying on multiple affairs. She ran interference for Bill, demeaning and allegedly intimidating those women who had dared to come forward to tell the truth. Demeaning ordinary women who were exploited by her husband gave Hillary no pause as long as it helped advance the Clintons’ political fortunes.

Working people in industries that do not fit Hillary’s progressive ideology, such as combating climate change at all cost, are also disposable. In March 2016, Hillary added to her disposable basket the coal miners, who have risked their lives to help provide the fuel that powers this country. “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she vowed.

Parents who want to be left alone to raise their children according to their deeply held moral values are also not worthy of Hillary’s respect.

Commenting in “Harper’s Magazine” in October 1992, Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester, pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s writings demonstrate how “from her perspective the ‘traditional’ family is, for the most part, an institution in need of therapy, an institution that stands in the way of children’s rights—and an obstacle to enlightened progress.”

Consistent with her “It Takes a Village” collectivist philosophy, Hillary enthusiastically supported the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which her husband signed as president. This treaty potentially pits children against their parents. Irrespective of the child’s age, parents would not have the final say on their child’s access to materials the parents find to be morally offensive.

Article 12(1) provides that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Article 13 of the Convention guarantees each child the legal right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.” (Emphasis added)

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides for free legal services and access to the courts for any child who thinks that his or her “liberty” has been violated by a parent.

The United Nations, through an unaccountable committee of experts, would have the power to monitor each State Party’s compliance with the Convention’s provisions and to establish norms in implementing the Convention that may become part of customary international law.

Thus, if a child does not want to accompany his or her family to the family’s house of worship, the parents risk being dragged into court by the resisting child if the parents do not submit to the child’s wishes. The parents are responsible for keeping a roof over the child’s head and making sure the child is well taken care of. But when it comes to matters of faith while the child is in the parents’ care, the rules of the global UN village put the ultimate decision-making power into the hands of the child and the state.

Indeed, Hillary wants to change ordinary Americans’ religious beliefs that get in the way of her progressive globalist agenda. At the Women in the World Summit last year, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. People with such beliefs belong in Hillary’s basket of “deplorable sexists,” as far as she is concerned.

Hillary Clinton’s contempt for the beliefs, livelihoods and concerns of ordinary Americans is deplorable, not the millions who were targets of her invective.

The Plight of the Campus Religious Believer

From the Intercollegiate Review:

If you’re an orthodox believer at a mainstream college, you don’t need me to tell you that you feel like an oddball, maybe even besieged. Your professors and most of your peers would treat your most deeply held beliefs with condescension and probably horror, if they knew about them.

So what should you do about it?

If you had asked my advice even a few years ago, I would have told you to be the turd in the ­liberals’ punchbowl. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I did everything in my power to challenge leftist orthodoxies. I saw offending liberals as a key public service, which I dubbed “insensitivity training.” I relied on, and fought for, the principle of free speech.

That’s long gone on campuses now.

My advice today? Grit your teeth, do your reading, make some friends, get your degree, and then make like Lot fleeing Sodom: never look back.

Sounds depressing, right? Well, I do have some good news, as you’ll see.

Big Mother Is Watching You

Colleges are much less tolerant than they were even back when I was in school. Instead of welcoming free, vigorous debate designed to prepare people for adulthood, many campuses are turning the classroom into a “safe space” where infantilized pseudo-victims can wallow in their phantom pains for four long, pricey years before the college dumps them into the real world and sends the bill. The tenets of your faith, if you stood up for them, might count as “microaggressions,” “trigger words,” or even “harassment.” Citing free speech won’t get you far on most campuses nowadays.

If your creed is anything like mine, it is by any contemporary secular standard “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “patriarchal,” “sexually repressive,” and opposed to “abortion rights.” There is no way to airbrush any orthodox mono­theist religion, especially biblical or ecclesial Christianity, to make it acceptable to secular progressives. It would take full-on plastic surgery, and you saw what that did to the Episcopal Church, Bruce Jenner, and every Jesuit college.

As someone who delighted in debating professors and students in and out of the classroom, it pains me to recommend a “covert-ops” approach. But the battlefield has shifted, and you are now deep behind enemy lines.

And what to do about this?

So keep your head down, and keep your faith. That last part can be difficult when peers and professors attack your religious beliefs as “retrograde” or “reactionary.” But you can do it. You can do it even if your campus ministry soft-pedals any supernatural aspect of your religion, privileging instead some social justice activism. If that’s the case, go find a local church and pray with the grown-ups at a faithful congregation. You may spot fellow students there. Befriend them.

You can also find like-minded students in organizations like the ISI-affiliated group on campus, Young Americans for Liberty, College Republicans, or your campus pro-life club. Maybe even a Greek organization, if those haven’t been banned from your campus. Their meetings could be a “safe space” for you.

It’s not quite as bad as this essay makes out, although anti-religious (or at least anti-Christian) intolerance can be pretty bad.

But:

Some institutions are better than others. A useful (but perhaps a bit dated) ranking of schools by religious commitment can be found here.

Sometimes the students are not as biased as the professors. At Marquette, for example, students apparently split about equally in voting for Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Mary Burke.

Some majors are better than others. Expect a lot of leftist indoctrination in the humanities, the social sciences (except economics and perhaps political science), communications and education. Other majors are better, although you will have to take some courses in those most biased departments.

Plot out your path carefully. You will indeed be in enemy territory.

Intolerance of Christians in . . . Guess Where?

From Real Clear Politics:

As an ancient Christian minority in a mainly Muslim society, Coptic Christians have often been persecuted and marginalized.

Even so, Coptic believer Nadia Eweida was startled at the blatant discrimination she encountered in her job at the national airline. While Muslim women around her freely wore headscarves to fulfill their religious obligation, she was forbidden to wear a cross openly while working. Even Jews and Sikhs received more consideration: the policy was directed solely and explicitly towards Christians. When Nadia complained, political authorities and news media were grossly unsympathetic.

We might wonder why Nadia did not simply give up the unequal struggle, and move to a country like Great Britain, where Christianity is not just tolerated but which actually has an established national church. Why would she continue to tolerate the systematic injustice of an aggressive Islamist regime...

Oh wait, my mistake. Is my face red!

It turns out that although Nadia Eweida really is a Coptic Christian, she was living in England at the time, rather than Egypt, and that her job was with British Airways, at Heathrow. It was her British employers who concluded that public expressions of Christianity were unacceptable, in a land where the Queen is head of state, and the Supreme Governor of the Church by law established. British government lawyers defended that situation before a European court. One suggested that if Christians did not like the situation, they should find other employment. And why so much fuss about the cross, they objected? Wearing it is not an actual requirement of the faith, as opposed to an individual whim, so you can’t insist on any right to do so.

British Christians are not persecuted. Around the world, Christians are massacred, tortured, subjected to bogus show trials, starved into submission, and reduced to penury on the grounds of their faith. That’s real persecution, and nothing like that happens in the United Kingdom.

But it is legitimate to point out that in contemporary Britain, aggressive secularism on a wide variety of fronts is making life very difficult for conservative or traditional-minded Christians. Notionally, such an anti-religious campaign should be targeting all supernaturally-based faiths equally, but British secularism is accompanied by a multi-cultural principle that acknowledges some religious expressions as legitimate manifestations. Hence the tolerance for Muslim headscarves or Sikh turbans in the workplace.

Unfortunately, that respect does not extend to the beliefs or practices of Christians who often come from other non-European cultures -- to a faithful Coptic Christian like Nadia Eweida, or to African or Afro-Caribbean Pentecostals. Most media coverage of thriving African churches in Britain involves ludicrously exaggerated charges of witch-hunting and even human sacrifice by these supposedly primitive fanatics. It’s good to know the old idea of the Heart of Darkness is alive and well in the former imperial metropolis.

Legal cases resulting from religious discrimination have generated vast media attention in Britain. The Eweida affair apart, some other employment conflicts involved nurse Shirley Chaplin, ordered not to wear a cross on her ward duty; or Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar who refused to conduct same sex civil partnerships. Relationships counselor Gary McFarlane was fired because his religious beliefs prevented him offering sexual therapy to same-sex couples. McFarlane and Ladele, incidentally, are both black.

In the United States at least, a clash between gay rights and the rights of religious believers would normally mean walking a delicate legal tightrope. Not in England, though, where the senior judge Sir John Laws -- the amazingly titled Lord Justice Laws -- proclaimed in the 2010 McFarlane case that in any such clash, religious rights would, and must, always lose out. As he said, “The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds...is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”

You can actually spend a good while dissecting Laws’s prolonged shriek, which also noted that “in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence.” So much for a few thousand years of theology and apologetics -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic.

So much, too, for the British courts, who have moved beyond parody.

The only hope left for the dissident Christians, then, is the European Court of Human Rights, which in recent years has come to occupy a position in European countries parallel to that of the US Supreme Court. And that is where Eweida, McFarlane and the others are now headed. If nothing else, the cases will contribute to shaping the European Court’s developing stance on religious rights, a topic that has caused fevered debate over the past decade. The Court is at what Americans might call a John Marshall moment, deciding the proper limits of judicial power over an emerging constitutional system.

Who would have thought that in the 21st century, Europeans would still be grappling with defending the basic rights of religious believers who still, after years of secular drift, make up a sizable majority of the continent’s population?

The elites that dominate Europe, of course, are the sort of elites that attack religious freedom here in the U.S.

Conservative Catholicism: The Future of the Church

From the Wall Street Journal:

In his Holy Thursday homily at St. Peter’s Basilica on April 5, Pope Benedict XVI denounced calls from some Catholics for optional celibacy among priests and for women’s ordination. The pope said that “true renewal” comes only through the “joy of faith” and “radicalism of obedience.”

And renewal is coming. After the 2002 scandal about sexual abuse by clergy, progressive Catholics were predicting the end of the celibate male priesthood in books like “Full Pews and Empty Altars” and “The Death of Priesthood.” Yet today the number of priestly ordinations is steadily increasing.

A new seminary is to be built near Charlotte, N.C., and the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has expanded its facilities to accommodate the surge in priestly candidates. Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley recently told the National Catholic Register that when he arrived in 2003 to lead that archdiocese he was advised to close the seminary. Now there are 70 men in Boston studying to be priests, and the seminary has had to turn away candidates for lack of space.

According to the Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics, there were more than 5,000 more Catholic priests world-wide in 2009 than there were in 1999. This is welcome news for a growing Catholic population that has suffered through a real shortage of priests.

The situation in the U.S. is still tenuous. The number of American Catholics has grown to 77.7 million, up from 50 million in 1980. But the priest-to-parishioner ratio has changed for the worse. In 1965, there was one priest for every 780 American parishioners. By 1985, there was one priest for every 900 Catholics, and by 2011 there was one for every 2,000. In dioceses where there are few ordinations, such as New York’s Rochester and Albany, people know this shortage well.

Still, the future is encouraging. There were 467 new priestly ordinations in the U.S. last year, according to a survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, up from 442 a decade ago.

While some of the highest numbers of new priests are in the Catholic-majority cities of Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia, ordinations in Washington, D.C. (18 last year) and Chicago (26) also are booming. The biggest gains are not only in traditional Catholic strongholds. In Lincoln, Neb., Catholics constitute only 16% of the population yet have some of the strongest numbers of ordinations. In 2011, there were 10 men ordained as priests in Lincoln.

What explains the trend? Nearly 20 years ago, Archbishop Elden Curtiss, then leader of the Omaha, Neb., diocese, suggested that when dioceses are unambiguous and allow a minimum of dissent about the male, celibate priesthood, more candidates answer the call to the priesthood. Our preliminary research on the correlates of priestly ordinations reveals that the dioceses with the largest numbers of new priests are led by courageous bishops with faithful and inspirational vocations offices.

Leadership and adherence to church doctrine certainly distinguish the bishop of Lincoln, the Most Rev. Fabian Bruskewitz. He made national news in 1996 when he stated that members of dissident Catholic groups including Call to Action and Catholics for Choice had automatically excommunicated themselves from the church.

Cardinal Francis George, the longtime leader of the Chicago archdiocese, once gave a homily that startled the faithful by pronouncing liberal Catholicism “an exhausted project . . . parasitical on a substance that no longer exists.” Declaring that Catholics are at a “turning point” in the life of the church in this country, the cardinal concluded that the bishops must stand as a “reality check for the apostolic faith.”

Such forthright defense of the faith and doctrine stands in clear contrast to the emphasis of an earlier generation of Catholic theologians and historians. Many boomer priests and scholars were shaped by what they believed was an “unfulfilled promise” of Vatican II to embrace modernity. Claiming that the only salvation for the church would be to ordain women, remove the celibacy requirement and empower the laity, theologians such as Paul Lakeland, a Fairfield University professor and former Jesuit priest, have demanded that much of the teaching authority of the bishops and priests be transferred to the laity.

This aging generation of progressives continues to lobby church leaders to change Catholic teachings on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and women’s ordination. But it is being replaced by younger men and women who are attracted to the church because of the very timelessness of its teachings.

They are attracted to the philosophy, the art, the literature and the theology that make Catholicism countercultural. They are drawn to the beauty of the liturgy and the church’s commitment to the dignity of the individual. They want to be contributors to that commitment—alongside faithful and courageous bishops who ask them to make sacrifices. It is time for Catholics to celebrate their arrival.

Of course, the same thing is happening within Protestantism. Liberal denominations that spend their time accepting gay marriage, criticizing politicians like Paul Ryan and divesting themselves of stock in companies that do business with Israel are declining. More conservative denominations (and liberal denominations in the Global South -- Methodists and Anglicans in Africa, for example) are at least holding their own, and often prospering.

None of this, of course, proves that liberals in the Church are wrong on theology. But it does prove that their liberal views simply aren’t consistent with a growing, thriving Church.

Faith is Better Than Atheism

From Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, the story of Rabbi David Wolpe, a former atheist who turned to faith, and wrote a book called Why Faith Matters.

It is interesting to experience, in the same week, both Wolpe’s book and Religulous, Bill Maher’s cinematic assault on organized religion. Maher, a caustic comedian and TV host, also turned his back on religion in his teens. “I hated church; it scared me,” he says near the start of Religulous. He also says, somewhat inconsistently, that he found religion “boring” and that it “wasn’t relevant” to his life.

Like Wolpe’s book, Maher’s movie raises questions about faith; unlike Wolpe, Maher isn’t interested in answers. Religulous is a profane, condescending, and often funny rant against religion -- Christianity especially, but also Judaism, Mormonism, and Islam. Maher’s mocking documentary promotes the idea that only oddballs, cranks, and nincompoops can take religion seriously. That’s a fairly easy case to make if you focus, as Maher’s interviews mostly do, on oddballs, cranks, and nincompoops: the Puerto Rican cult leader who claims to be the Antichrist, the pothead in Amsterdam with his marijuana “ministry,” the misfit rabbi who embraces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the young-earth creationist who teaches that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed.

It’s also easy to portray faith as a goofy fairy tale if you spend your time deriding tales of ancient miracles -- a burning bush! A virgin birth! A prophet swallowed by a fish! -- but never pause to acknowledge the far-fetched improbabilities inherent in atheism.

Maher characterizes religion as “fantasy and nonsense.” Yet atheism is no guarantee of enlightened rationality. In a study released this past September, researchers at Baylor University found that adherence to “traditional . . . religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams [foretelling the future], Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead, and astrology.” By contrast, those who reject traditional religion -- “self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious” -- are “far more likely” to believe in superstition and the occult. Or other nonsense: Maher, for example, claims that aspirin is lethal, doubts that the Salk vaccine eradicated polio, and has praised the horse that threw Christopher Reeve.

This, of course, brings to mind Chesterton’s famous aphorism: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.”

And Jacoby failed to mention (since this seems like ancient history now) the nastyest and most destructive belief that many 19th and 20th Century atheists held: Marxism.

So it is unsurprising that Maher sees only the foolishness and evil that religious people, like all people, are capable of, and misses entirely the extraordinary good that religion engenders. As Wolpe notes, numerous researchers have found that “religious people are happier, more charitable, have more stable families, and contribute more to their communities.” They are less likely to suffer depression or commit suicide, to use drugs or be involved with crime, to drink to excess, or to smoke.

The Los Angeles Times reported last year on research showing that people without faith were less likely to help a poor or homeless person than religious believers. While both were equally likely to describe themselves as “good citizens,” their charitable practices were strikingly different. Americans of no faith donated an annual average of $200 to charity; active-faith adults typically contributed $1,500. Even when church-based giving was subtracted from the mix, religious Americans donated twice as much to charity as the nonreligious.

It is no coincidence that so many hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, and aid organizations have been started and sustained by religious groups. “We are creatures designed to flourish -- to heal and to help -- when we believe,” Wolpe writes.

Normally, we wouldn’t bother to debate religous belief, viewing it as an individual matter. But aggressive and hostile secular people, including both those like Maher and the gay lobby, have dragged it into the public arena. So if they want to debate, they can have a debate.

Are the Quakers Going Pagan?

From Christianity Today:

When his partner died in 2004, Kevin-Douglas Olive reached a crossroads in his faith. Even though he had been a Quaker for almost two decades and put his trust in Jesus, he began to explore other ways of tapping into the divine.

“I had this experience of (my partner) after death, and he spoke to me and woke me up out of my sleep,” Olive says. “It freaked me out, because I really didn’t believe in that stuff; . . . my faith in God had disappeared when my partner died.”

He started to explore Wicca, a nature-based pagan religion, surrounding himself with pentacles, candles and incense. But that didn’t stick. “It seemed like more make-believe on top of the Christian make-believe,” he says. “I was rejecting one; I didn’t want to bring in another.”

Even after Olive found his way back to Jesus, he retained some elements of paganism. While he upholds the standard traditions of his local Quaker meeting hall, he privately incorporates pagan ritual into his prayer.

He’s part of a small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan — a trend that may or may not exist in other Christian traditions, but certainly not in such an organized, public fashion.

Across the board, the number of Quakers is dwindling, to roughly 100,000 in the U.S. But if Quakerism continues to catch on among the estimated half million pagans in the U.S., those who embrace both traditions predict that could reverse the Quakers’ downward trend. Still, some Quakers worry about losing their own traditions through the process of accepting new ones.

In the last decade, this dual faith has sprung up around the country, including Quaker-pagan gatherings, seminars, an extensive presence on the Internet, and even explicitly Quaker-pagan congregations. There may be only several hundred Quaker pagans, but among American Quakers, their presence can be distinctly felt.

“It seems that now, in most liberal meetings at least, you can always find a few members that identify as pagan,” says Stasa Morgan-Appel of Ann Arbor, Mich., who has facilitated a Quaker pagan interest group since 2002.

Quakers — officially the Religious Society of Friends — are divided into four main branches, three of which are explicitly Christian. Pagans have been generally joining the liberal fourth branch, the Friends General Conference, which counts 30,000 members in North America, including Morgan-Appel.

Liberal Quakers are less tied to the Christianity and instead hold established Quaker practices, such as unprogrammed pastor-less meetings, as the basis of their faith. Because of that flexibility, many liberal Quakers no longer see Jesus as divine, and some don’t believe in God at all.

It may seem strange that pagans would join the Quakers, which began in the 1600s with strong anti-pagan sentiment. Founder George Fox even altered the days of the week because of their pagan roots. To this day, Quakers refer to Sunday as First Day, Monday as Second Day and so on.

Witnessing about Jesus in Olive’s meeting has become infrequent. “People here come from so many different places, spiritually,” he says. “Meetings can be very quiet, as many people are afraid to voice views that others might not hold to be true. We talk about God, but we don’t really put a name to him or her.”

Raw Anti-Christian Bigotry

From the website of famous atheist Richard Dawkins:

Dawkins reproduces a manifesto from a blog called the Christian OUT.

Some typical excerpts:

We need to realize that we should be reaching out to people with true compassion and sincerity, minus the pious pharisaical cloaks; to both the saved and the lost. We need to reach out in support to our fellow Christians that are new or struggling, to give support and love through their trials, tribulations, and times of growth as a Christian; to be understanding, yet Scriptural, with a kind heart. We need also to reach out to this lost world with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, remembering to not find it uncommon if by chance the lost person chooses to reject God and the Scriptures, to our dismay. We should not allow their rejection of it to be taken personally, but to be brought to God in prayer for their soul’s need of salvation.

We need to realize that it is necessary for a Christian to personally speak out against sin. We need to speak out against the sin in our own lives and other professing Christians, and also when we are confronted with sin by family, friends, and co-workers. At the same time we are first to examine the beam in our own eye before pointing out the dust in our neighbor’s eye. The dust in another’s eye does not make us more righteous, nor does looking around the beam in our own eye. In contrast, we also need to speak out concerning the truth, morality, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even when it is uncomfortable, we are to be true to Scripture and obedient to God, therefore calling good “good” and evil “evil.” Remember we are to speak and do that which is right because it is right, out of obedience to God, not for personal prestige, gain, or that we should be puffed up while others are put down, causing our pride to be lifted up causing us to fall into sin.

We needn’t be so timid or worldly that no one knows that we are a child of God, yet we must refrain from the pitfall of legalism whereby we judge the whole world by our personal moral code brow beating and demanding the lost world or fellow Christians to conform to a system that is above even that which Scripture calls for.

How do the commenters respond?

With an outpouring of naked anti-Christian bigotry. Readers can go to the comments section and peruse them.

But a warning: if you are a Christian, you are going to feel like a black guy at a Klan rally.

Of course, one can expect anti-Christian people to frequent richarddawkins.net.

But the comments aren’t that different from opinions expressed in the liberal blogosphere in Wisconsin. Check particularly Hermes’ Journeys and Illusory Tenant.

The secular leftists, of course, are not merely anti-religion. You won’t hear them say much bad about Islam. They simply have a particular grudge against Christians.

The Death Spiral of the Secular Culture

It may be that demography is destiny, but it often seems like a boring subject. But it shouldn’t be, since vastly important things turn on demography. And especially on fertility.

The following are from a long article in the Washington Post.

For the first time in 35 years, the U.S. fertility rate has climbed high enough to sustain a stable population, solidifying the nation’s unique status among industrialized countries.

The overall fertility rate increased 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, nudging the average number of babies being born to each woman to 2.1, according to the latest federal statistics. That marks the first time since 1971 that the rate has reached a crucial benchmark of population growth: the ability of each generation to replace itself.

“It’s been quite a long time since we’ve had a rate this high,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics. “It’s a milestone.”

While the rising fertility rate was unwelcome news to some environmentalists, the “replacement rate” is generally considered desirable by demographers and sociologists because it means a country is producing enough young people to replace and support aging workers without population growth being so high it taxes national resources.

“This is a noteworthy event,” said John Bongaarts of the Population Council, a New York-based think tank. “This is a sign of demographic health. Many countries would like to be at this level.”

Europe, Japan and other industrialized countries have long had fertility rates far below the replacement level, creating the prospect of labor shortages and loss of cultural identity as the proportion of native-born residents shrinks in relation to immigrant populations.

The reasons for the unusual U.S. fertility rate are the focus of intense interest. Experts can only speculate, but they cite a complex mix of factors, including lower levels of birth control use than in other developed countries, widely held religious values that encourage childbearing, social conditions that make it easier for women to work and have families, and a growing Hispanic population.

“It’s not clear which of these factors is most important,” Bongaarts said.

While being a mother who works outside the home is far from easy for many American women, many experts said the United States is in many ways more amenable to the practice than many other developed countries. The high-octane consumer economy, for example, helps women run households more efficiently in a number of ways, including making prepared foods more widely available, and weekend and late-night shopping possible. American men are also helping more with their children than in the past, experts say.

“We also have a relatively high percentage of part-time jobs available,” said Ronald Rindfuss, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina.

These, of course, are jobs that don’t offer the benefits that full-time jobs do. These are the jobs that are claimed to be exploitative by people who love the rigid social democratic union-dominated model of Europe. But in this, as in a lot of other things, the flexible free market economy of the U.S. serves us well.

“There’s also more shift work outside the normal nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday schedule that enables parents to share child care.”

The nation’s religiosity also contributes to the higher fertility rate, which varies geographically, experts said. Red states tend to have both more religious people and higher fertility rates.

“Americans are much more religious than Europeans: They believe in God more. They go to church more,” said Charles Westoff, a Princeton University demographer. “That sort of religious attitude or set of values is strongly correlated with fertility.”

There is, in fact, a huge irony here.

The secular folks in Europe and in blue-state America are the ones who sneer at Intelligent Design and view Darwin as making belief in God unnecessary -- or even dangerous.

(We have no beef with Darwinism as a scientific theory. But when people try to make it the entire explanation for why we are here in this world, we smell dogmatism.)

The culture of the secular people fails the most basic Darwinian test: survival.

The culture with superior Darwinian “fitness” is the culture of religious people.

Without an infusion of religious immigrants, secular societies wither away.

And they are particularly likely to get into fiscal trouble because of another project of the secular leftist elites: the overly-extensive welfare state. Those societies that have made the most extensive promises of government benefits are the ones lacking the demography to deliver on the promises.

Heaven knows Americans are too secular, and our welfare state has promised too much. But we can look to Europe to see how bad things can really get.

Unitarian-Universalist Pagans

Sometimes, one runs across a web page that one assumes to be a parody.

And sometimes, it turns out to be entirely serious.

Thus it was with Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. The page exclaims:

Welcome to CUUPS!!

Explore the beauty of Pagan, Goddess, and Earth-centered spiritualities woven together with Unitarian Universalism.

The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, Inc. (CUUPS) is an Independent Affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA). The Statement of Purpose in our bylaws states that CUUPS exists to enable:

• Networking among Pagan-identified UUs; providing outreach of Unitarian Universalism to the broader Pagan community continentally.
• Providing educational materials on Paganism for Unitarian Universalist congregations and the general public.
• Promoting Pagan - Jewish & Christian dialogue; encouraging the development of theo/alogical and liturgical materials based on earth and nature centered religious and spiritual perspectives.
• Encouraging greater use of music, dance, visual arts, poetry, story, and creative ritual in Unitarian Universalist worship and celebration.
• Providing support for Pagan-identified UU religious professionals and ministerial students; and fostering healing relationships with our mother the Earth and all her children.

OK, does it still look like a parody?

Well . . . the official Unitarian-Universalist web site has the following blurb:

There are many Wiccans, witches, Pagans, and people with other earth-based spiritualities who lead and worship in Unitarian Universalist congregations. At last count, 19 percent of our members identified with an Earth/Nature centered faith. This is one of the fastest-growing groups within our faith.

The sources of inspiration for the UU faith are too many to be counted, but delegates from each congregation have agreed that one of the predominant sources of our faith is, “Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”

In addition to modern Paganism, many Unitarian Universalists find spiritual inspiration in other forms of nature-based spirituality, including simple seasonal reverence, modern Transcendentalism, and other nature-honoring paths.

The Unitarians, of course, consider themselves open, tolerant, inclusive and non-dogmatic.

But at what point does not standing for anything become itself a dogmatic principle?

Militant Atheist Scientists Versus Newton

From Jeff Jacoby:

DID YOU hear about the religious fundamentalist who wanted to teach physics at Cambridge University? This would-be instructor wasn’t simply a Christian; he was so preoccupied with biblical prophecy that he wrote a book titled “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John.” Based on his reading of Daniel, in fact, he forecast the date of the Apocalypse: no earlier than 2060. He also calculated the year the world was created. When Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning,” he determined, it means 3988 BC.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely “intelligent design” but out-and-out divine creation. This applicant’s writings on astronomy, for example, include these thoughts on the solar system: “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being . . . He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.”

Hire somebody with such views to teach physics? At a Baptist junior college deep in the Bible Belt, maybe, but the faculty would erupt if you tried it just about anywhere else.

Many of them would echo Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, the prominent evolutionary biologist, who writes in The God Delusion that he is “hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect.”

Equally blunt is Sam Harris, a PhD candidate in neuroscience and another unsparing foe of religion. “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum,” he writes in an essay whose title -- “Science Must Destroy Religion” -- makes clear the antipathy with which many modern scientists regard religious faith. “The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.”

Less elegant but more influential, the National Science Education Standards issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 classified religion with “myths,” “mystical inspiration,” and “superstition” -- all of them quite incompatible with scientific study. Michael Dini, a biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, made headlines in 2003 over his policy of denying letters of recommendation for any graduate student who could not “truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question of mankind’s origin. Science and religion, he said in an interview at the time, “shouldn’t overlap.”

But such considerations didn’t keep Cambridge from hiring the theology- and Bible-drenched individual described above. Indeed, it named him to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics -- in 1668. And a good thing too, since Isaac Newton -- notwithstanding his religious fervor and intense interest in Biblical interpretation -- went on to become the most renowned scientist of his age, and arguably the most influential in history.

Newton’s consuming interest in theology, eschatology, and the secrets of the Bible is the subject of a new exhibit at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (online at jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/Newton). His vast religious output -- an estimated 3 million words -- ranged from the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple to a method of reckoning the date of Easter to the elucidation of Biblical symbols. “Newton was one of the last great Renaissance men,” the curators observe, “a thinker who worked in mathematics, physics, optics, alchemy, history, theology, and the interpretation of prophecy and saw connections between them all.” The 21st-century prejudice that religion invariably “subverts science” is refuted by the extraordinary figure who managed to discover the composition of light, deduce the laws of motion, invent calculus, compute the speed of sound, and define universal gravitation, all while believing deeply in the “domination of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Far from subverting his scientific integrity, the exhibition notes, “Newton’s piety served as one of his inspirations to study nature and what we today call science.”

For Newton, it was axiomatic that religious inquiry and scientific investigation complemented each other. There were truths to be found in both of the “books” authored by God, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature -- or as Francis Bacon called them, the “book of God’s word” and the “book of God’s works.” To study the world empirically did not mean abandoning religious faith. On the contrary: The more deeply the workings of Creation were understood, the closer one might come to the Creator. In the language of the 19th Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

To be sure, religious dogma can be a blindfold, blocking truths from those who refuse to see them. Scientific dogma can have the same effect. Neither faith nor reason can answer every question. As Newton knew, the surest path to understanding is the one that has room for both.

The hostility toward Christianity of many in the scientific community doesn’t follow from any principled committment to the scientific method.

Rather, it comes from a set of cultural biases.