July 24, 2008 | 2:25 pm

Israel terrorizes Palestinians with super rats

Israel’s stripper assassins must have been a treat compared to the Jewish state’s new weapon against Palestinians.

See the Jew is much more insidious in his choice of weapon. Palestinian militants and martyrs make Qassam rockets or strap bombs to their chests or hijack bulldozers. Jews poison the well and engineer supernatural rats with supernatural powers and a supernatural hatred for non-Jews.

A ridiculous claim, of course, but that didn’t prevent it from being reported last week by two Palestinian Authority papers, one directly controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’ office. From Palestinian Media Watch, via Yid with Lid.

According to the PA papers, the Israeli-Jerusalem rat is:
1. Immune to rat poison;
2. Aggressive and larger than usual;
3. Unafraid of cats and able to scare them away;
4. Highly fertile—female rat gives birth to 140 babies a year, four times the normal average;
5. Highly selective—Jewish residents of Jerusalem apparently are not affected by these rats.

Israel’s goal, the libelous PA articles accuse, is “to turn the residents’ life into a living hell, forcing them to leave.” Interestingly, the articles do not mention how the rats are trained to differentiate between Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem.

You can’t make this stuff up. At least, I couldn’t. Does anybody think this actually helps the peace process? Then again, political expediency has never been the forte of Arabs or Israelis.

The newspaper reports are after the jump:

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Tags: israel, media, palestinian authority, peace process, weapons

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July 24, 2008 | 11:59 am

The communion controversy continues

I told you Mark Shea wouldn’t have the last word. PZ Myers returns with ”The Great Desecration,” a short history of how the transubstantiated body of Christ has been used to incite violence against Jews and other non-Catholics and how he thinks it applies to his call for public defiling of a communion wafer:

Obviously, it’s not desecration they find disagreeable — it’s the idea that someone would offend their weird sectarian sensibilities. Here’s one from Jack Isaacks that fits the mold.

Dear Professor Meyers,

If you REALLY want to do a courageous, revolutionary act, defecate publicly on a copy of the Quran.

Or do you have the cojones?

Christians won’t attack you for desecrating a host, but will those wonderful cuddly peace-loving Muslims be as forbearing if you used their book for a toilet?

Well, how brave are you?

Yeah, right. Catholics won’t attack me, but Muslims will. Never mind that the Catholic League demands that I be fired, thousands of Catholics write to me demanding I be kicked out of the university immediately, and that they send me death threats, both the explicit kind and the vaguely menacing kind. Let’s not forget Webster Cook, who started this all by simply walking back to his seat with a cracker, and now faces censure and possible expulsion from his university. Oh, those Catholics sure are forbearing and tolerant.

I have nothing more to say about this. Let me know if you do.

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Tags: catholic league, catholicism, communion, pz myers

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July 24, 2008 | 10:46 am

Americans (allegedly) don’t do atheism

Polls consistently find that Americans harbor strong animosity toward atheists, and that Americans would be less likely to vote for an atheist than for a woman, African American, Latino, Catholic, Jew, Muslim or Mormon. (What these polls don’t state, but what I, as a God-fearing Christian, will say, is that the fear, loathing and general suspicion of the godless is not only unwarranted but ungodly.)

“This kind of thing tends to leave Britons either bewildered or terrified,” Nick Spencer wrote on his blog for the London Telegraph. “The US and the UK are two nations divided not so much by a common language as by a common religion. In the former, Christianity is officially absent but unofficially everywhere; in the latter it underpins the entire structure of state but usually dares not speak its name.”

That is an astute, and poetic, observation. Spencer goes on to detail just how intertwined Christianity is with the Amerrican presidency, using as his launching pad the new book by David Domke and Kevin Coe, ”The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.”

Spencer’s lamentations continue:

Domke and Coe’s analysis suggests that the current climate of theo-political rhetoric means would-be presidents do not, in fact, have that many “different ways” open before them now. It is simply inconceivable that Americans would elect a president who refused to genuflect energetically before the altar, any more than they would elect one who failed to do so before the idea of liberty.

But Domke and Coe also sense (as does the political activist Jim Wallis who was in UK last month) that the tide is turning. They put this down to a new evangelical conscience, which is noticing people trafficking, climate change, the AIDS pandemic, and other issues that had somehow slipped their minds before. And they see Rick Warren (see above) as a key mover in all this.

If that is so, those Britons who fear the mixing of God and Caesar might have reason to be a little less panic-stricken today than they were four years ago. And those who actually like to see God get down and dirty with Caesar, but have been depressed by the narrow and ugly way that has happened over recent years, have reason to be cautiously optimistic.

This perspective is essentially a mirror image of how religious American feel when they look at godless Europe. I looked closely at this issue of atheism and the future of religion in America two years ago in this story. Despite what Domke and Coe say about the tide turning, about religion leading the revolution, I find that Christian rhetoric is now more dangerously interwoven with politics than any time during the past eight years, or in American history.

The Bush campaigns of 2000 and, especially, 2004 showed just how powerful this pandering could be. Now everyone else is following the model.

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Tags: america, atheism, europe, politics

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July 24, 2008 | 12:11 am

Tennis star in Playboy reveals Jesus fish tattoo

Daniel Radosh, author of ”Rapture Ready!”, has the skinny on tennis player Ashley Harkleroad, who made headlines recently, not for her play on the court but her agreement to pose for Playboy. She has, and Radosh spotted an odd inking in one of the photos.

It’s a tattoo of the Jesus fish, just above her waistline, and I sure hope this is a first for the magazine.

“In the word-things that accompany the pictures,” Radosh writes on his blog. “Ashley says she got the tat when she was younger, but stands by it. “I still believe in God, but God made female athletes beautiful and sexy, and I want to represent that.”

Oh brother. And I thought putting the Ichthys on your bumper was bad because, as Ben Folds sharply sang, “See that a--hole with the peace sign on his license plate/ Giving me the finger and running me out of his lane.” God is definitely not happy.

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Tags: jesus, pornography, sports, tattoos

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July 23, 2008 | 10:08 pm

Obama visits Western Wall

It’s Thursday morning in Jerusalem. Do you know where your Democratic U.S. presidential candidate is?

As evidenced by the photo here, Barack Obama was at the Western Wall, paying the obligatory visit to the remnant of the Second Temple. No trip to Israel would be complete without a visit to the wall, and no trip to the wall would be complete without a quiet prayer being interrupted by the cacophony of some protester, this one shouting, “Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale! Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale!”

Seriously, he’s got to be wondering what it takes to catch a break. (Probably not this.)

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Tags: barack obama, israel, western wall

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July 23, 2008 | 4:47 pm

McCain accused of exploiting Holocaust

I’ve heard people accuse Jews of abusing memories of the Holocaust for political gain. Some people make a career of it. But I’ve never heard a Jew accuse a gentile of doing the same.

With Barack Obama visiting Yad Vashem today and paying homage to the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis, John McCain’s campaign was trying to score political points—and failing miserably.

“Today he says ‘never again.’ A year ago stopping genocide wasn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. Doesn’t that strike you as inconsistent?” aide Michael Goldfarb asked.

I’m going to start by assuming that Goldfarb is Jewish (he would do the same if he met me), but he was speaking here as an emissary for McCain. Secondly, genocide hasn’t been at issue in Iraq since the Al-Anfal campaign against Kurds ended in 1989, two years before the first war in Iraq. Sectarian violence still simmers and hasn’t disappeared, but it is a stretch to imply that ethnic cleansing would return if we left.

Civil war, yes. Genocide, no. While both scenarios would be awful, the former is irrelevant for the issue at hand.

“This is a base, shallow and treif attack that abuses one of the central historical events of Jewish history to smear a presidential candidate,” Richard Silverstein wrote on his blog.

Indeed, if genocides already underway were McCain’s concern, why didn’t he speak up when the Khmer Rouge wiped out 2 million Cambodians or during the three-year siege of Sarajevo or when the crisis in Darfur began five years ago? (If he did, somebody put me in my place.)

J Street, which has been looking for opportunities to make its dovish-pro-Israel name known, brought the exploitation accusations against McCain. Their release is after the jump:

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Tags: barack obama, holocaust, israel, john mccain

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July 23, 2008 | 1:38 pm

Christian guitarist loses his faith, then his band

Everyone who either grew up as an evangelical Christian or dated one has heard or spoken this line: “It’s not you. I just want to spend more time with God.”

I always thought this line was a crock, not because wanting to spend more time with God wasn’t admirable, but because it was typically used as a cop-out, a way to ease the discomfort of ruining someone’s junior year of high school.

(See, I have this friend, and he had this girlfriend ...)

I think we can agree that few relationships, especially those where both members were Christians, end because one person’s quest for godliness is inhibited by the other’s indifference. But this story from the Christian Post presents a more difficult issue: What to do when the guy in your Christian band stops believing in Jesus?

Christian metalcore band Haste the Day has asked guitarist Jason Barnes to step down after months of spiritual searching by their close friend concluded with his loss of faith in God.

“This is going to come as a shock to many of you,” the group wrote to fans in their official MySpace page Friday. “After much prayer and thought given to the matter, we asked Jason Barnes to step down from his involvement with Haste the Day.”

In their statement, the seven-year-old band from Indianapolis explained that Barnes had been “searching and searching for real meaning in his existence.”

“After several months of reading literature and talking with friends, Jason had determined that he felt there was no God and certainly no Jesus,” the group revealed.

“We as a band do not have problem with those that do not believe in Jesus, nor do we cast judgement (sic) on those that do not believe in Jesus,” the band continued. “We just want to love on people like Jesus would and hopefully share a little bit about what he’s done and doing in our lives.”

After you get over the lameness of the band’s name, which sounds like a rip-off of Saves the Day, you realize this situation doesn’t have a simple solution. From an evangelical perspective, the band members had to weigh whether Barnes was more likely to return to God if he remained in the band or was removed from it. (In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul tells the church of Corinth to expel an immoral brother for his own good, though the reason is for sinful behavior, not lack of belief.) Then, from a music-making perspective, the band needed to decide whether Haste the Day could stand for the same things with a non-Christian in the band.

Churches deal with the same question when they assemble their worship band, an often-rotating group of musicians selected by a worship leader. I have heard complaints before about non-Christians performing during a Sunday service, and I’ve known worship leaders who have stepped down without solicitation because they didn’t feel their lives were congruent with their words of praise.

I can’t think of any parallels from the world of Christian punk culture I matriculated through, but I do remember when Pedro the Lion lost his way.

David Bazan, the frontman and every-position musician behind Pedro, had written poetic albums about God’s role in curing the human condition, which album written like a book, with plot and theme and characters and beautiful language. But then I bought “Control,” and I noticed Bazan’s message was changing. The album, which I believe was about the struggle to fight the ways of the flesh, particularly materialism and infidelity, was among the most depressing I owned. The next album, “Achilles Heel,” was much more upbeat, but had some shockers like this line from “Foregone Conclusions”:

You were too busy steering the conversation toward the lord
To hear the voice of the spirit begging you to shut the f--k up

”’Foregone Conclusions’ has to be the sweetest piece of music and melody Bazan has ever produced even though the lyrics are as bitter and cynical as ever,” this art and religion blogger wrote. “Ignore the content of the lyrics and you almost have a feel-good summer hit. I guess that’s one of the things that makes the man compelling. Paradox is his bread and butter – cussing with Christianity; sweet melodies with bitter words.”

But by last summer, it became clear that Bazan’s bitter words had found a soft spot. He’d lost his faith. “I just find myself on the other side of this line that I wasn’t on before,” Bazan told the Daily Iowan.

The thing is: His music still shakes my soul. It is beautiful and bitter, obsessed with pain and sadness and joy and doubt and all the other things that make life so wonderful. And his early albums still share the redemptive message found on “Whole.”

So—back to Haste the Day—what to do when a band member loses their religion?

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