Wait…

Candace Chellew-Hodge is the founder/editor of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians and a Christian pastor. She wrote a post about Teresa MacBain for Religion Dispatches.

MacBain recently attended the American Atheist’s convention in Maryland, where she came out as an Atheist pastor and has found a home in a new coalition helping such disbelieving clergy called “The Clergy Project: “a safe haven for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs.”

As a member of the clergy, I totally get it, but what I think is wrong with this situation is the false dichotomy at play here. Specifically, either you’re a Christian or you’re an Atheist. [Read more…]

Justin interviewed the “crack that wrist” “no no no sweetheart, you will walk like a girl and smell like a girl” pastor.

Justin: Why do you have signs telling your members how to vote?

Sean Harris: Oh because we believe that this issue is not a political issue, we believe that this is a bible issue; we’re not endorsing any candidates. You won’t find that anywhere in this church. But this marriage issue, as far as we’re concerned, is a bible issue.

So that’s why they tell their members how to vote…despite their tax exemption.

Justin also extracted one key bit about exactly how a parent is supposed to hit a child. Not with a rod. Oh god no. But with an instrument. That’s quite different.

This time Greta talked to Roy Speckhardt, who is Executive Director of the American Humanist Association and on the SCA board, about the hiring of Edwina Rogers and what she’s been saying and how it’s all panning out.

He said she had a particular combination of skills and experience that no other candidate had. I can easily believe that (and see it as a compelling reason to hire her, and so on). Skills and experience matter; no question.

But. There is a problem, nevertheless. Greta sums it up in one question:

…were there any concerns raised during the hiring process having to do with the fact that, you know, frankly, for several years, she’s been working for a party that has been working very much against the values of most people in the secular and atheist movement, you know, not just in terms of the separation of church and state, but on issues such as gay rights, issues such as, you know, abortion rights, birth control rights, etc.? [Read more…]

Jesus and Mo are appalled that witchcraft and Druidry are on the curriculum for Religious Education in Cornwall. They are not proper religions, Jesus stiffly says. He’s reading Cristina Odone’s recent column in the Telegraph.

I’ve already mocked that column briefly, but why not mock it again at a more leisured pace. These things repay doing thoroughly.

Fear of being judgmental is so ingrained today that no one dares distinguish between occult and Christian values, the tarot and the Torah, the animist and the imam. [Read more…]

Robert Fisk points out that “the Arab Spring” has driven the region’s appalling racism out of the news.

I fear very much that the video of Alem Dechasa’s recent torment in Beirut is all too typical of the treatment meted out to foreign domestic workers across the Arab world (there are 200,000 in Lebanon alone).

Many hundreds of thousands have now seen the footage of 33-year-old Ms Dechasa being abused and humiliated and pushed into a taxi by Ali Mahfouz, the Lebanese agent who brought her to Lebanon as a domestic worker. Ms Dechasa was transported to hospital where she was placed in the psychiatric wing and where, on 14 March, she hanged herself. She was a mother of two and could not stand the thought of being deported back to her native Ethiopia. That may not have been the only reason for her mental agony. [Read more…]

From the back channel but with permission to quote. Ian Cromwell in reply to the explanation that Edwina Rogers calls herself a nontheist because she dislikes “divisive labels”:

She should stop calling herself a Republican then.

So Greta pushes her. “Why should people in the atheist movement support a leader for the SCA who’s frankly, worked for years for a party that has consistently opposed on of our core values?” Because she’s going to educate them, ER says. But why have you supported the party all this time, Greta says.

Well, I can tell you, it’s not a party position. It’s an individual position by some members. And it really varies by the member. I have plenty of friends and colleagues who are Republicans, the majority of them, it’s not their position. It’s really hard to stereotype…millions of people: they’re all opposed to gay rights, and everybody in the Republican party is opposed to gay rights, because that’s not true. It’s not true for me; it’s not true for other people I know. It’s not true for every republican elected official. It’s not an official Republican Party position. [Read more…]

Reading Greta’s interview with Edwina Rogers…

Greta says you’re pro-gay, pro-choice, and pro-separation of church and state, right? ER says yes and I always have been. GC says “Now the Republican party – ” and ER says she has “run across quite a few people who are atheists, agnostics, etc, who are pro-life, and they don’t see that necessarily as a religion, non-religion issue.”

GC: …you’re a Republican, and the Republican party has been very adamantly opposed to all these positions for very many years. So I have to ask you a question that very many people want to know the answer to. If you’re pro-gay, pro-choice, you know, pro-separation of church and state, why are you a Republican? And why have you worked to promote the Republican Party for so many years. [Read more…]

I’m reading the comments on Greta’s interview with Edwina Rogers. They don’t bode well.

chriskg for instance –

Let’s be frank about this, either she never read the Republican platform on values (which means she is inept) or she knows the platform and she chooses to lie about it. When she said, “…I don’t agree that the Republican Party is pro-life…” she is lying. There is no better explanation for it. She is pandering to her new audience and she must think we are idiots. [Read more…]