Jesus Bending

American Issues Project is "using Jesus Christ to emphasize the scale of the $787 billion package" stimulus bill, Politico has pointed out today.

The ad, titled Every Single Day, notes that if we spent "$1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born" we still would not have spent as much as Congress just did.

More "people who agree with me have morals, people who don't, don't" from our political leaders

"Homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion. And you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts. But I don't care. They're mean. They want to talk about being nice. They're the meanest buggers I have ever seen. It's just like the Muslims. Muslims are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side. What is the morals of a gay person? You can't answer that because anything goes. They're probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of."
- Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars (R), speaking in the documentary, 8 - The Mormon Proposition.

Hat tip: Joe my God

McCullough: Political leaders with no morals are raping your pockets

I'll let Kevin McCullough of Townhall speak for himself:

In other words when Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and President Obama got done "financially raping" you this week they left you with a tab to be paid that is a higher price tag than the globe's resources could combine to pay off.

Political leaders with no morals see little difference between nominating administration members who will not prosecute those harmful persons that create elements that lead to sexual assault on innocent girls, nor the physical equivalent of doing the same thing to your pocketbook, future earnings, and any ability to dream of self sufficiency.

They merely take what they want, throw you in the gutter when they are through, and laugh while you and I are left to pay the bill.

I've tried to be as tasteful as possible in explaining this comparison, and due to the passion of the natural man that was not an easy thing to do!

How kind of McCullough to undergo such a difficult trail for a natural [?] man to help us to understand the connection between child molesters and the recently signed America Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

Instead of offering any actual insight into the conversation about our national economy or the issue of "sexting" and obscenity laws, McCullough has nothing add but a cowardly abuse of language. If our conversations about ethics are reduced to imposing analogies of a brutal physical and psychological assault to victimize an entire nation and point to "those moral-less leaders" as the perpetrators, than we will be reduced to a nation of victims and evil-doers, indistinguishable from each other.

Thanks for that earthquake, Jesus.

Whatever message Jesus has for us by appearing in a rock cliff, here is a message back:

The Internet is a cynical, therapeutic place.

Hat tip: Buzzfeed

Jesus Rocks?

Jesus, is that you?

One woman thinks it is, and she's made the Channel 19 news in Alabama.

Is Bible bending impeding our response to global warming?

Mark Kleiman has a hunch:

One possible reason that global-warming denialism is more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere is that more Americans than Europeans are Biblical literalists. That involves believing that all biologists and paleontologists are either massively incompetent or deliberately trying to mislead the public about the central facts of their disciplines. [The alternative theory, held by some, is that the entire fossil record is a trick by Satan, intended to deceive those whose faith isn't firm.] I haven't seen any data on the overlap between global-warming denialism and creationism, but thinking about Sarah Palin and her fans you'd have to guess at a strong correlation between the two beliefs.

Freedom for non-Bible benders

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has written a letter to Arkansas Congress urging them to support Rep. Richard Carroll's bill to lift Arkansas's Constitutional ban prohibiting a “person who denies the being of God” from holding a governmental position or testifying in court.

Eric Rassbach, national litigation director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said:

While it is unlikely that these laws will ever be enforced, removing them is more than symbolic. It signals to U.S. citizens and to the rest of the world, that the freedom and sanctity of conscience – including the right to believe there is no God at all – is a fundamental right for all people.

Reason magazine notes that Arkansas is not the only state that bans atheists from participating in government duties. Tennessee and Texas have similar bans.

This just in from Newsweek: Bible readers hate the rich

Jerry Adler, writing for Newsweek, reflects on the absence of class warfare in the U.S.

Adler opens his article with the Bible's rage against the rich:

The poor you will always have, the Good Book says, but as for the rich man, he will wither away like a delicate flower in the midday sun. The first prediction has certainly been borne out, but the second part (James 1:11) had not yet come to pass by the Panic of 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt warned of a coming reckoning against the "malefactors of great wealth."

And with that set up, the article closes with some sweeping presumptions (projections?) about Bible readers:

presumably Americans who read the Bible are looking forward to the day when the words of James come to pass, and "you rich men [shall] weep and howl for your miseries that shall come on you." You can look up the rest of the passage (5:1-6), but trust us, it makes living on a paltry $500,000 a year look pretty good in comparison.

Here for the thoughts of one American who reads the Bible, Dave Ramsey, on the Bible's condemnation of the rich.