It’s an honor, of sorts

She beat Brownback. She trounced Tancredo. She even clobbered Coburn. America’s Holiest Congressperson is Minnesota’s own Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Bachmann, an Evangelical Lutheran, and self-professed “fool for Christ,” ran for Congress because God—and her husband—wanted her to. The representative publicly credited her campaign to her submission to her husband, who was channeling God’s wishes for her.

Prior to this higher calling, Bachmann earned a law degree from Coburn, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University, and helped found a charter school where she reportedly worked to prevent the Disney movie Aladdin from being shown, because it supposedly promoted paganism. Then, as a Minnesota state senator, Bachmann launched a crusade to outlaw gay marriage that turned into a highly publicized spectacle replete with restroom run-ins with angry lesbians and grainy photos suggesting that Bachmann was “spying” on a gay rights rally while crouching behind a bush.

Tireless in her pursuit, Bachmann has even gone so far as to be active in efforts to “rehabilitate” people who “suffer from ‘same-sex attractions,’ and once articulated the merits of being “hot for Jesus Christ.”

The magazine also has a list of our Ten Dumbest Congressperson — couldn’t they have saved some space by consolidating the two lists?

Conversions to Christianity scheduled to sweep across the nation next Wednesday

If you’ve been looking forward to that debate between Ray Comfort/Kirk Cameron and the Rational Response Squad, it has been rescheduled. It will occur tomorrow, 5 May, in New York, but you won’t be able to see it until 9 May.

It will be streamed from ABC.com on Wednesday, 9 May, at 1:00pm EST.

Comfort claims he can prove the existence of god in 13 minutes. We’ve been waiting millennia for this amazing proof. I look forward to racing towards my nearest church (which happens to be Catholic) at 1:13 EST 5 days from now. Or do you think I should arrange to watch it with a priest so he can bless me or shrive me or give me a cracker or hear my confession or bugger me or dunk me in a tank of water or whatever magic they do to make sure I get to heaven as quickly as possible? I’m hoping it’s just the enchanted cracker, especially since that will fall during the lunch hour here in the midwest.

Is it true that the cracker tastes like raw pork?

Guys, another reason to be godless: Christian girls let their figures go

90% of teenage girls believe they are overweight, according to a recent survey. That’s something to worry about — there’s the reality, that a lot of us are overweight, but there’s also the perception problem, that many girls are convinced that they must lose weight when they really don’t. There’s an article that speculates on the cause of this problem, whether it is an obsession with celebrity, peer pressure, or pressure from the diet industry, but it comes up with a strange explanation:

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More bigotry masquerading as religion

Read Ophelia’s take on the Israeli ‘modesty buses’. Would you believe certain buses in Jerusalem are set aside to make special accommodation for orthodox Jews?

Women are compelled to sit in the back of the bus.

In the back of the bus. I think they need a Jewish Rosa Parks.

The most disingenuous argument in favor of this discriminatory policy is the excuse that not all the buses are ‘modesty buses’ — that all you have to do is wait a little longer at the bus stop and take a different bus that doesn’t enforce the idea that women must be segregated. As a former commuter on an overcrowded bus and subway system, I know how ridiculous that suggestion is. “Separate but equal” is a policy that always emphasizes “separate”, not equality.

A curious perspective

This interview with a Rabbi Sacks is rather hard for me to wrap my brain around. The first part is about something Sacks is very concerned about: Jewish continuity. He seems strangely concerned about Jewish young people marrying outside their group, and has run ad campaigns to convince young Jews to raise their children in their faith. It’s all very weird; I know my grandmother was concerned that her grandchildren marry good Scandinavians, and I even got admonished about what ethnic groups I could date when I went off to college. I’m afraid that when my Norwegian/Swedish grandmother did that sort of thing, we just called it bigotry and ignored her.

Even now, I can’t quite imagine telling my kids who they are allowed to marry, or being concerned with maintaining an ethnic bloodline. Be different and unique, I say — no one should try to be who their parents and grandparents are, but should follow their own path, and we parents and grandparents should reconcile ourselves to our progeny’s independence.

There is one odd moment in the interview. I don’t sympathize at all with the ethnic purity angle, but this part I actually liked:

In the question and answer session that followed Rabbi Sacks was asked how he would convince someone like scientist and atheist, Richard Dawkins of the benefits of religious identity.

Mr Sacks responded: “We need atheists to remind us things are not God’s will, God does not want hunger, injustice or violence. I am quite happy Richard Dawkins stops us having too much faith. There’s a lot more religion in the world than there was 25 years ago and there’s a lot more violence in the world than there was 25 years ago.”

I suspect that while I enthusiastically agree qualitatively with Rabbi Sacks, we might disagree on how much religion is too much — I’d say anything above zero.

Too many reviews in one place

David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It’s not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what’s been published lately.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)

The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)

Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)

Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)

Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

I’ve read most of these, and I roughly agree with most of Barash’s assessments except that he’s much milder in his criticisms than I would be. I was also disappointed in Wolpert’s book, which was a bit too scattered.

Next on my list: Boyer. It’s going to have to wait a little longer, though, until this term ends.