Doug Giles’s Brother-in-Law Wants Men to Fight Demons

World O’Crap explores Rev Doug Giles’ latest sermon for Townhall, a bizarre exegesis on Adam and the Garden of Eden. Apparently the Garden was a wild place where Adam was hunter, killing antelopes with rocks and living among “giant lizards”; the Fall was his failure to live up to God’s masculine ideals by not mastering [...]

Gulliksen: Vineyard a “Clanging Cymbal”

ASSIST carries an interview with Kenn Gulliksen, the founder of the Vineyard neo-Pentecostal churches who is now best known (and so described in the headline) as “Bob Dylan’s former pastor”. Gulliksen provides an interesting perspective not just on Dylan, but also on John Wimber and the whole religious scene of which he has been a [...]

Soldiers Convert to Islam Before Iraq Tour of Duty

The Tehran Times provides a nice “not a lot of people know that” piece with news that there are apparently 35,000 South Korean Muslims (plus 70,000 Muslims of foreign nationality in South Korea). Apparently Turkish soldiers introduced the religion during the Korean War (although there were previously mosques in the Koryo period of 918-1392, according [...]

More on Pinckney’s Inspirations

Education Week carries a piece on TC Pinkney, with photos and a bit more biographical information. Pinckney is a former Southern Baptist vice-President, and, as has been widely reported, he has put forward a resolution for the next Southern Baptist convention that members remove their children from public schools. The main reason given is the [...]

The South Will Rise Again

Several bloggers (World O’Crap, The Dark Window) are making scoffing sounds at a report in WorldNetDaily that a plan is afoot to get South Carolina to secede from the Union and establish itself as an independent, Christian nation. The idea is the brainchild of Cory Burnell, who, on his ChristianExodus.org website explains the problem:
It is [...]

Libertarian Theocrats?

TC Pinckney and Bruce Shortt’s proposal that Southern Baptists remove their children from public schools is, I’ve just discovered, only part of the plan: if Pinckney has his way, there won’t be any public schools to send children to anyway. As noted by Joe Rodgers in a long essay from a while back (undated, maybe [...]

Memo of Christian Zionist White House Meeting Surfaces

The Village Voice carries a piece on Pastor Robert G Upton and the Christian Zionist Apostolic Congress, who were the subject of this blog a couple of weeks ago. According to the report, the Voice has picked up a confidential memo signed by Upton in which he describes a meeting between a delegation from the [...]

Is Your Child A Socialist?

Yesterday I noted that the proposal ”encouraging” Southern Baptists to take their children out of public school had cited studies by the Nehemiah Institute, run by Dan Smithwick. Today I’ve been able to look at the Institute’s website; and sure enough, there’s Smithwick with E. Ray Moore, the retired military man whose Exodus Mandate promotes TC Pinckney and Bruce Shortt’s [...]

We Don’t Need No Anti-Theistic Education

As is widely reported, the Southern Baptists are currently pondering this resolution, put forward by T.C. Pinckney (Brig General USAF retired) and Houston Attorney Bruce Shortt:
that the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention encourages all officers and members of the Southern Baptist Convention and the churches associated with it to remove their children [...]

Snot Funny

Folllowing the furore over Buddha bikinis (see Ryan’s Lair) come complaints about a sweet (“candy” for US readers) sold in Nara near the huge bronze Daibutsu (Great Buddha statue) in the Todai-ji Temple:
Priests at one of Japan’s most famous temples have taken steps to block the sale of a sweet marketed as the “Snot from [...]