Did you know that Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has an almost daily round-up of of issues of concern for good conservative Christians called The Briefing? It’s on his website, under the category Urgent, because it’s all very, very important stuff, you know. I browse it occasionally to see what’s making Christian hemorhoids burn now; it’s kind of like the flip side of The Morning Heresy, if Paul Fidalgo were a glassy-eyed regressive conservabot zealot, but it’s not quite as demented as trying to read WingNut Daily — Mohler, dull and blinkered as he is, is someone mainstream religious conservatives take seriously.
Anyway, you might want to look in now and then, just to see what the staidly stupid Christian right is up to. Here’s a summary of a recent edition:
-
He defends Black Friday, that orgy of raging consumerism, because “Christians must understand the moral complexity of a market economy”, and we must support retailers so they can keep people employed. What would Jesus say?
-
Something I agree with: the state should not be involved in religious education at all. Of course, his reasons are a little different: it’s because state religion is a “tepid, lukewarm, lifeless distortion of Christianity” which led people like Dawkins and Hitchens to repudiate religion altogether.
-
OMG, the University of Wisconsin-Madison funded the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics student group on campus, to a degree comparable to that of Christian clubs! Beware, those universities are hotbeds of secularism.
-
Paul Krugman has “assaulted” Marco Rubio for being a creationist. Doesn’t Krugman realize that this means he denies the truths revealed in the Bible?
-
Britain isn’t making typewriters anymore. How sad. That damn future keeps rising up and burying the antique relics that established his worldview.
The nice thing about it is that you quickly realize that Christians and atheists are mostly interested in exactly the same issues. The big difference: Christians are mostly wrong about everything.
No more typewriters?!!! Thanks, I’m really feeling my age now.
But I like typewriters! (They’ll have to take my IBM Correcting Selectric III from my cold, dead hands!)
(Funny how the typewriter is the one thing we can really relate to in that list of inanities!)
most people don’t know that jesus actually owned a chain of corndog stands.
Something I wrote on the Australian Skeptics list. Apologies for the length.
I fear Mr Mohler’s lost the plot.
““tepid, lukewarm, lifeless distortion of Christianity”
as opposed to Mohler’s hateful ignorant version of Christianity. Oh look the TrueChristians(tm) strike again.
Why are christians in America so pro free market.
We have socialist christians over here.
I mean free market as in “savage, unregulated free market that thinks if you lose your home you should die on the streets because its your fault so fuck you” – that type of free market.
No more typewriters??
The horror.
The horror.
I still haven’t recovered from the transition of horses to automobiles, or abacuses to calculators. I refuse to do any calculations that don’t involve moving beads across rods.
jose @ 6
I think it’s because the Republican Party has so courted the extreme Christians that they’ve become convinced that the Republican Party is the political arm of the church, and the church is the religious arm of the party — so they have to be pro-laissez faire capitalism and anti-government anything and anti-environmentalism because that’s what God’s Own Party says is right and just.
I keep getting surprised that Mohler is a Baptist. I can’t help but think that he sounds like he should be a rabbi.
Britain isn’t making typewriters any more? Why pick on Britain? Nobody is making typewriters now. The last factory closed a couple of years ago. It was in India. But I see why this is a crisis: where is the Southern Baptist Seminary going to get its typewriters from when the old ones wear out?
Typewriters? Is that like some new brand of keyboards?
Someone tell Dr Righteous that we don’t make buggy whips much anymore either, and to get a damn computer and a printer like everybody else. Crikey.
Why does the religious right love Jesus so much ?
They don’t. They love power, and saying “my authority comes from God” means no one can ever take it away.
If a typewriter was good enough for Jesus, why do we need more?
Another excellent, concise and articulate take-down by Paul Krugman. Brilliant.
Britain isn’t making typewriters anymore!?!?
Is this also the end of the horse-drawn zeppelin???
(frantic typewriter noises) Fly! Damn you! Fly!!!