News-Record.com

John Hagee has successfully removed from YouTube every video of him preaching.

For good or for ill, the Episcopal church has always been, in some sense, "America's church."

"They went to a remote region where people needed medical help and the Gospel of Christ," said the Rev. Chris Bitterman, a family friend and the assistant pastor at their church, Meadowview Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lexington. "And they took both."

That sacrifice is heavy on the hearts of the people now raising money to help the missionary family come home to bury one of their sons.

Same-sex marriage is legal in two states, but not a single one will show up in the 2010 census, according to the Associated PRess.
The Census Bureau says the federal Defense of Marriage Act bars the agency from recognizing gay marriages in the nation's 10-year count, even though the marriages are legal in Massachusetts and California.

I'd have waited.
Then again, I wait out funeral processions as well (though it can get a bit hairy on High Point Road and Wendover and ...).

A Moroccan woman who wears a burqua was denied French citizenship last month.

Now the country's Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, herself a practicing Muslim, says she backs the decision.

From the news story:

The burqa is a prison, it's a straightjacket," Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, herself a practising Muslim who was born in France to Algerian parents, said in an interview in Le Parisien newspaper yesterday.

"It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy."

--

I've been uncomfortable about the burqua question for many years -- but in the end it was a Muslim woman who brought me around to being full-bore against it. Many women in her family wore the burqua and she had become something of a black sheep for rejecting it and deciding to go to college and study science. She was speaking from experience -- not having idle coffee table chat about something she didn't understand.

"But if you asked Muslim women who wear the burqua why, wouldn't they say it's out of sincere religious belief and that they choose it?" I asked her. "Shouldn't they be allowed to make that decision, even if we don't agree with it?"

"Sure," she said. "They should be allowed to do whatever they like. But the truth that most of these women will never tell you is that they would be beaten by their fathers and brothers if they did not wear it. And the 'belief' that makes them wear it is that they are the property of their fathers and husbands, which is what they have been taught from birth. That is what you support when you say it is all right for women to wear the burqua."

Bill Maher has a religious riff from his act of a few years ago that includes a bit about the burqua. It's in the below video and begins at about the 20 minutes 30 seconds point (some strong language):

In brief, without strong language: if any religion tried to sell us on the idea that they had to keep their black men in burquas because, after all, that's just their culture -- we would lose our minds. It would be apartheid all over -- but without a viable separate but equal pretense. But when they tell us the women have to be covered in this manner...well, that's just their religion. You have to respect that.

Where do you guys come down on it?

A Dutch ban on tobacco smoking indoors has been a windfall for "The Only and Universal Smoker's Church of God," which now has Dutch citizens flocking to become "Holy Smokers" -- which could let them legally circumvent the law on religious grounds.

From the piece in the Telegraph:

Michiel Eijsbouts, founder and "Smokelighter" of the church he founded in 2001, has insisted that the Dutch smoking ban in place does not apply to members of his church under national and European human rights legislation.

"We will have to find out what the secular powers-that-be think. For us the constitution and European rules say we have the right to express our religion and we express our religion through smoking."

---

The First Commandment: smoke 'em if you got 'em!

Grandpa John demonstrates the power of Christ.

Using pickles, electricity and what looks disturbingly like a miniature sex sling.

Hard to argue with that.

(Via Filled with Chocolate Pudding!)

If you're a Jewish prisoner in an Ohio prison, you can get a kosher meal.

But not if you're a Messianic Jew.

Leaving aside the obvious question of why people who are paying this much attention to their diet for fear of offending God are...you know...in prison...I think this is an interesting debate.

Is it your belief in things like strict dietary guidelines that make them an essential part of your spiritual life, or what your religious leaders and texts say about them?

For those who are confused: Messianic Jews are Jews who believe that Jesus (or Yeshua) is the Hebrew messiah but do not consider themselves Christians.

They are not to be confused with Jews for Jesus, whose name is much funnier and who are allowed to eat bacon cheeseburgers.

A man in New Zealand is claiming God ordered him to behead two women with a samurai sword.

The story seems to indicate the man's changed his story a number of times -- but I guess my question is: what do you do if you think God really is telling you to kill people?

If you're a devoted Christian who believes in a literal translation of the Bible then you'd know your crimes would be in line with the many atrocities The Lord Your God has either performed, sanctioned or demanded in the name of faith. Killing heretics (Deuteronomy 17:12), atheists and people of other religions (2 Chronicles 15:12-13), raping and killing women (Deuteronomy 22:20-21, Isaiah 13:15-18), children (Hosea 9:11-16, Ezekiel 9:5-7) and even your own offspring -- if the Bible is your touchstone on the voices you're hearing, you may believe you'd be asked to do any of these things.

Indeed, if you've read your Bible and think you're getting messages, you may realize that many biblical heroes killed on God's orders and might think yourself doomed if you hesitate (Jeremiah 48:10).

Some of this can be chalked up to the utter strangeness of the Old Testament, which many modern Christians dismiss in large chunks or almost entirely. But once you've taken an Old Testament-rooted fundamentalist line on one thing (homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, contraception, inter-faith marriage, the utter impossibility of non-Christians to enter the Kingdom of Heaven), where do you draw the line, shake your head and say some of this stuff is crazy?

And if you begin to hear voices or see signs -- do you obey them as a good Christian or seek psychiatric help and chance burning in Hell for all eternity?

Christians are hardly the only people who have to struggle with this question -- but it would seem to me that if this Christian guy in New Zealand did kill two women with a Samurai sword on God's orders, he'd have some biblical loopholes even if he has no legal ones.