This story is why elaborately constructed reasons that Pope Benedict XVI was wrong in the most recent flap with radical Islam are wrong.

Radical Islam wants no criticism of its major figures or of its truth claims.

I do not believe that we should gratuitously insult persons others revere. There is no place in a multi-cultural society at war for thoughtless offense.

Christians live in a public square where they are happy to defend the freedom of atheists to state their views about the divinity of Christ. The free and open society built mostly by Christians over the last two hundred years demands this. We respect those who disagree enough to engage in polite and reasoned discourse.

But we will not give up our right to make reasonable, but tough arguments against ideas we think are bad.

As usual the story is in plain type below and my comments are in italics:

(more at Middlebrow…)

Stonehenge is a good reminder that early English culture was, well, primitive. Compare Stonehenge to the Roman baths in Bath.

Christianity was good for England. It added no new problems, cured many old ones, and was capable of change under pressure.

(more at Middlebrow…)

I have read the Pope’s address which stirred up so much fuss which seems to be more than many American papers are willing to do.

The obvious question is to wonder about how easily our foes are baited by a very clever pontiff. Is there a radical Moslem with a sense of irony? When they threaten to kill the Pope for “saying” that they are violent, don’t they get a bit concerned about how that appears?

My new idea for capturing Bin Laden is for President Bush to announce that if he does not come out of hiding soon that he is a big, fat scared-y pants. Bin Laden is sure to do it on the same swift reasoning being shown by radicals in the Middle East today.

The second less obvious set of questions hinge on fears about media education when some American papers and reporters are shocked to discover that (perhaps!) the Pope believes Islam is wrong. Next they will be discovering that Catholics send out missionaries to offer people the chance to convert to Christianity and not to Islam! Ever!
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She turned and said with a thoughtful manner, she always had a thoughtful manner, “Books are no longer the literature of our culture. Movies are now way the masses receive truth.” So a seminar speaker, long ago, introduced me to the idea that perhaps literacy is a thing of the past. We are, she proclaimed, “a post literate people.”

If I accept this, I still wonder at accepting it. For some reason, we are to rejoice in it instead of combating it. This is deemed progress so it must be opposed, but there is nothing progressive about it. It is simplest to see it as a return the slavery of illiteracy.

Even the phrase “post literate” is nonsense. Christians have always taught people to read. God, after all, sent a book not a video. We did not let the pagan Irish wallow in their symbols of other gods rudely painted on stone walls. Why should we let the pagan Americans sink back to pictures flickering on modern walls?

(more at Middlebrow…)

My fifteen year old son starts blogging and settles this age old question: Who would win a fight: Nessie or Dracula?

I love you L.D.!

(more at Middlebrow…)

My mother bought it and it lives in my memory like an evil dream. It was lemon yellow and made of polyester that would not die. It was a leisure suit for boys and it could not be destroyed.

At last I outgrew it, but it could have lasted forever looking just as lemony with orange glowing buttons. It lives still in my memory, but I may recover with some fashion therapy. What it could do was throw off little pills of itself. . . each an indestructible piece of itself that could not be detached from the whole without destroying it. But if you did cut it off carefully with a clever tool that K-Tel would sell you on late night television, the pill would glow on its own in the waste can. You can be sure that all the leisure suit pills in the world still exist buried out of sight in the dumps of the world.

It is a frightening thought.

It has become fashionable on the blog-o-sphere to call Mr. Ned Lamont, slayer of Jewish Senators, an empty suit of clothes.

And there is some virtue in it, for Ned Lamont is an empty suit filled with the hot air blown his way by Michael Moore, the Daily Kos, and whatever leftist tripe he still remembers from college days. His thoughts are not just undigested, for he seems to lack the internal mental organs needed to digest thought, but almost random. If his wine-and-cheese crowd friends suddenly supported the War, Ned Lamont would support it with a change so intellectually effortless that it would be nearly impossible to notice it.

That is not what is interesting about Ned Lamont since Ted Kennedy has spent a lifetime without thinking for himself the scion of a rich family who pretends to have made it on his own. Half the Democrat Senate consists of rich white men who are sorry for being rich, white, and male in a superior self-satisfied way.

No instead what is frightening about Lamont is his potential staying power. His naive views are ugly, in a world where anti-Semites run nations they are even dangerous, but come packaged in a sunny exterior that appears capable of discharging little mental pills into our political system for decades.

He is young and has the rich kid health and confidence that means he can go forever. Send Lamont to the Senate this time and we may see him there for the rest of our lives. . . slowly evolving into the Teddy Kennedy of the twenty-first century.

He is Leisure Suit Lamont and he may live forever in the Senate.

Below is one pill discharged from the leisure suit mind of Ned Lamont. . . with my comments in italics. Long after his Michael Moore/Daily Kos creed will have been utterly out grown by the body politic, he will go on glowing in the Senate discharging his fuzzy warm wisdom to us.

(more at Middlebrow…)

One of the oddest notions now alive on the ‘net is that Evangelicals support Jewish persons because they want to bring on the End Times. Says the leftist hater of Evangelicals to obvious evidence of Evangelical love of all things Jewish, “You cannot give Evangelicals credit for their support of Israel, because they really want all Jews to become Christians or die at the end of the world that Evangelicals are hoping to trigger.”

Now this is just a lie, or at best guilt by association, but it is the kind of lie that leads a great many Americans to dislike their religious neighbor. “Those Evangelicals are all Ned Flanders! So weird and such clever anti-Semites, pretending to love Israel and Jews so that they can kill them!” While figures like Flanders are funny, and often deflate Christian wind bags, such stereotypes become harmful when they are almost the only media image of Evangelicals . . . and then slander is mixed into this pop culture version of forty percent of the population: Evangelicals are shallow and scary!
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U.S. Lags Behind Europe, Japan in Acceptance of Evolution
Thursday, August 10, 2006

. . . as usual my comments are in italics.

The following is a delightful Fox story shot through with evidence that those arguing for Darwin still don’t get it. They keep trying the same “our opponents are stupid” and “mainstream religion is for Darwin” arguments. . . but have made little progress.