Research & Rescue

How religious are Americans really?

Two in five Americans say they regularly attend religious services. Upward of 90 percent of all Americans believe in God, pollsters report, and more than 70 percent have absolutely no doubt that God exists. The patron saint of Christmas, Americans insist, is the emaciated hero on the Cross, not the obese fellow in the overstuffed costume.

There is only one conclusion to draw from these numbers: Americans are significantly more religious than the citizens of other industrialized nations.

Except they are not.

 

Read the rest at www.slate.com

Happy Halloween - Keep it Real

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

How will the world end?

To be honest, the way our public education school gets battered nowadays by science deniers, this didn't have to be on The Onion....

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming

Record number of Indian-Americans seeking office

Meet Reshma, Surya, Manan, Raj, Ami, Ravi, Nimrata and Kamala — a new wave of Indian-American politicians. At least eight children of Indian immigrants are running for Congress or statewide office, the most ever. The star of this trend is Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, who is favored to win the election for governor of South Carolina.

Indian heritage is where Haley's similarity with the other candidates seems to end. She is the only Republican, the only one who has been widely mistaken for a white woman, the only one who has been accused of abandoning her heritage for converting from the Sikh faith to Christianity.

Yet when Haley's motives are questioned and some suggest Indians must become less "foreign" to get elected, many of these new candidates are quick to ask: Who are we to judge the mashup of American ambition with an ancient culture?

via news.yahoo.com

Jim Wallis: A Time for Moral Reckoning

I am watching unbelievable pictures tonight of endless swaths of brown oil mixed with the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, of dying wetlands and marshes, of miles of contaminated coastlines, of dead birds and animals, of helpless and hopeless Gulf Coast residents sadly witnessing their livelihoods and their lives slipping away. With the explosion and sinking of the BP oil rig six weeks ago, the immediate talk was about environmental threats and technical fixes, economic losses and political blaming, and debates about responsibility for the costs. But with the failure of the latest attempt to stop the spill, and with both BP and the federal government admitting they still really don’t know how much oil has already spilled or will spill, a national discussion is beginning about the fundamental moral issues at stake, and perhaps even a national reflection on our whole way of life based on oil dependence and addiction.

Read the rest at blog.sojo.net

Federal Judge Rules Against Religious Right Charter School

In a major defeat for the Religious Right, a federal court in Idaho has ruled that public charter schools have no constitutional right to use the Bible as part of their curriculum.

U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge held Monday that state education officials, not the Nampa Classical Academy, get to set the curriculum for public schools in the state. And state officials, Lodge continued, were right to exclude religious texts from the classroom out of respect for the separation of church and state.

Read the whole article at blog.au.org

If Christ were to go to Arizona… » CWS Immigration Reform

A great piece from Church World Service...

In light of the anti-immigrant law in Arizona, SB 1070, I have been doing a lot of research on the public sentiment in the state that led to this legislation.  While Governor Jan Brewer stated that this legislation is in response to the Federal Government failing to fix the “immigration problem” that her state is facing, other Arizona residents are looking to the Bible to justify their support of SB 1070.

Read the rest at: supportimmigrationreform.org

The Language of God

Amazing Grace

This video is making the rounds in the blogoshphere and was e-mailed to my spousal unit by a former fellow chorister. Since this particular person has quite different theological view than do we, we were hesitant to watch it (Note: liberals can be closed-minded, too). The video is fantastic. I do have one small bone to pick here. While Newton was a slave trader, I believe that he also had some hand in passing the abolitionist Slave Trade Act 1807, even if it was later in his life.

After the Rapture Pet Care

They say they're serious. OK. I suppose if you really believe in the rapture and they are for real, then sharing is providing a service. For the rest of us, surely entertainment.