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The sleep walk never ends

The sleep walk never ends

Last updated on: June 4, 2014 at 2:04 pm by Fred Clark

The sleep walk never ends 2014-06-04T14:04:07-04:00 Fred Clark

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• If there’s one thing I find sillier and more pointless than formally staged theist/atheist “debates,” it’s the Möbius-strip logic of “presuppositional apologetics,” which is another version of the dumb person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like phenomenon.

Still, though, most of the guys peddling this presuppositional suppository at least seem vaguely familiar with their Bibles, unlike Sye Ten Bruggencate, who provided this dismal response in a recent “debate”:

Questioner: … As a Christian, does your doctrine not state to be kind to other human beings?

Bruggencate: Um, I don’t know. You’d have to quote the verse.

All of Bruggencates former Sunday school teachers and VBS volunteers should be fired for malpractice. How does he not know Ephesians 4:32? How does he not know this song?

Everyone should know that song. (When I was a kid, we sang it with more of a ukelele, string-band shuffle kind of arrangement. And now, oddly, I’m wishing that somehow it should come to be that Leon Redbone would record that song.)

• Tony Jones points us to “An Ode to Alice” following the death of Brady Bunch actress Ann B. Davis. Davis’ post-Brady life is worth remembering too:

Since 1976, Davis lived with an Episcopal community, first in Denver, then in western Pennsylvania, finally settling in the Texas hill country near San Antonio. She worked in a homeless shelter in Denver and devoted herself to prayer and Bible study but took occasional acting roles through the years.

She was basically Shane Claibourne, but with two Emmys.

Ann B. Davis (1926-2014)

• “Scrupulosity literally means ‘fearing sin where there is none.'”

• It’s best not to go around quoting Adolf Hitler, but if one must quote Adolf Hitler, it’s best not to do so approvingly. On a billboard. Do we really need to clarify that? Yes, apparently some people needed us to clarify that.

• On his fascinating blog Naturalis Historia, Joel Duff often writes about Martian geology, frequently pointing out that Mars’ landscape disproves the claims of young-Earth creationists about the supposed “flood geology” they claim as proof that the story of Noah is a modern history describing real events that took place here on our 6,000-year-old planet. If, as the creationists claim, fossilized riverbeds here on Earth could only have been formed in Noah’s flood, then how can they explain similar inverted paleochannels on Mars?

I didn’t realize that creationists had attempted to respond to this problem, but it turns out they have. James McGrath links to a 2008 Answers in Genesis article arguing that the Martian landscape shows evidence of planet-wide “catastrophic flooding … occurring about the same time as the Genesis Flood.”

Yep. They’re suggesting that Noah’s flood wasn’t just world-wide — it also inundated Mars.

• James Dobson is lying about Planned Parenthood. That’s not news — it’s only newsworthy when white evangelical leaders don’t tell lies about Planned Parenthood.

But Brian Tashman catches something more interesting in Dobson’s June newsletter for Focus on the Family: His repeated defense of the “freedom to worship.”

Dobson, you’ll recall, has been one of the loudest promoters of the Chuck Colson’s mendacious conspiracy theory that claims “freedom to worship” is a code-word used by evil liberals seeking to undermine the real, true religious liberty of the really, truly religious. This is from February 2012:

Chuck Colson appeared on James Dobson’s show Family Talk last week to discuss how President Obama is trying to replace the freedom of religion with the more narrow “freedom of worship,” telling Dobson, “I have not seen ‘freedom of religion’ mentioned by an official in the Obama administration.” Colson also claimed that President Obama “used ‘freedom of religion’ only once, and that was when he was talking about the mosque in Ground Zero.”

As we have pointed out many times before, this right-wing conspiracy that Obama is avoiding the term “freedom of religion” by not using it in his speeches is patently false, as a search of the White House website return 123 uses of “freedom of religion” and just four uses of “freedom of worship.” A similar search for the Bush White House returned 33 uses of “freedom of worship,” but that was never seen as a ploy to eliminate freedom of religion.

Colson knew he was lying then. Dobson knows he’s lying now.

• As my fellow Jersey transplant John Fea notes, today is the 30th anniversary of Born in the USA, so let’s listen to “Darlington County” and wonder what ever happened to poor Wayne:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA85UiQxNho

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