There Is No Plan

i'm better now

God gave us free will. But he also has a plan. So goes the tautology at the heart of Evangelical Christianity. It’s a religious belief based on the fact that everyone can be saved and forgiven, no matter what your position in life or transgression.

That is particularly convenient if you happen to be a disgraced evangelical preacher trying to make a comeback. In fact, it makes the repentance all the sweeter. If some nobody who’s done not that much repents, it’s nice but it’s not news.

If the guy who ran your mega-church and is a big Evangelical honcho gets tangled up with allegations of meth and male prostitutes, now that right there is big news. Forgiving a guy who’s done an awful lot of forgiving is just the kind of challenge that Evangelicals like, you know, to show the unwashed what fabulous, selfless people they are. Read the rest of this entry »

Ten Commandments

Talk about a plan. The US Constitution is probably one of the world’s biggest blueprints. A whole – thoroughly undemocratic – apparatus of government has been built to protect it. But the Supreme Court has its work cut out now the Summum have come to town. Who? One may ask. You know, The Summum, and their Seven Aphorisms. They want to put up a monument to the Seven Aphorisms in a park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, next to the monument to the Ten Commandments. Duhh.

Summum

No way, you might say. But the United States Constitution clearly states that there is to be no established religion in the United States, and the Free Exercise clause suggests that anyone who wants to practice any religion can.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

So where does the Pleasant Grove City decision to deny the Summum the right to put their monument up in the same park as the Ten Commandments fit in to the “Establishment Clause” of the Constitution? Answer. It doesn’t. You can’t favor one religion over another, regardless of whether it has the power of Christianity or the obscurity of Summum. Either both monuments go up in the park or neither do.

Seems pretty simple, except that, surprise, surprise the Christian community don’t see it that way. They want the court to be ‘strict’ when it comes to ‘liberal activism’, bad a tad more lenient when it comes to their harebrained notions of justice, which stomp on the very fabric of the Constitution. Craven and hypocritical are two words that come to mind. There are others but why bother. Read the rest of this entry »