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Merry sixth day of Christmas to all. We have commented previously on some of the downtick in War on Christmas media hype. I noticed there were also fewer stories claiming that Christmas was created by Christians to replace pagan holidays. And then in a really interesting and important piece by The Washington Post‘s Shankar Vedantam, the allegation rose again:
This week The Denver Post‘s Eric Gorski broke a story about a Colorado megachurch pastor resigning amid allegations of homosexual conduct. The congregation in question is, like Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, down the road from where I grew up.
I generally like lists. But only if they’re good lists. And by good I mean lists that generally agree with how I see things. In other words, this week’s Washington Post “Ranking the League” (about the National Football League) is a bunch of garbage. The Indianapolis Colts are not #1. Somehow the geniuses over on 15th Street think that the San Diego Chargers and the Chicago Bears are better than the Peyton Manning’s Colts. Go figure.
Back in December of last year, a federal judge ruled against a Dover school board including intelligent-design theories in curriculum. The ruling basically said that intelligent design is religion-based and therefore false science. Mainstream coverage pounced on this. I raised a question about the coverage then:
In a previous post today, I referred to Time and Newsweek competing with each other for the best religion-centered cover story last week. Newsweek offered a package of articles (here’s the mainbar) about the Religious Right, while Time offered a more tightly focused debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.
The cover copy for the November Wired invokes the giddy atheist triumphalism of John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the Crusade Against Religion.”
Remember that pre-Easter slate of stories attempting to debunk Christianity? There was the shocking lost “Gospel of Judas” story. The Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water) that forms once every few millennia story. The Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera story and the Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up story.
Molly Moore, who writes about France for The Washington Post, filed a report on French fertility. It is an anecdote-driven, uncritical look at French regulations’ effect on working mothers. It’s a bit light on data for being so heavy on conjecture, but here’s the nut:
Legislators must go crazy, whenever they enter the arena of church-state law, trying to write laws that protect the innocent without creating legal sanctuaries in which the demons of fraud and corruption have even more room to dance.
