Right-wing Biblical Illiterates Would be Shocked by Jesus’ Teachings

Stephan:  One of the things I have noticed about the Theocratic Right is that although they loudly profess their belief in Christianity and Jesus they actually hold the modern day equivalent of the positions held by the Sadducees and the Pharisees who persecuted Jesus. They also have a remarkable, considering that they talk about it all the time, illiteracy about the Bible. It is a very bizarre trend.

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly defended the Republican Party’s spending cuts for SNAP by effectively declaring Jesus would not support food stamps for the poor because most them are drug addicts. If his insensitive remark is inconsistent with Scripture, which it is, then the question becomes why do talking heads on the right get away with proclaiming what Jesus would or wouldn’t support?

The answer is simple: Conservatives have not read the Bible.

The Right has successfully rebranded the brown-skinned liberal Jew, who gave away free healthcare and was pro-redistributing wealth, into a white-skinned, trickledown, union-busting conservative, for the very fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are astonishingly illiterate when it comes to understanding the Bible. On hot-button social issues, from same-sex marriage to abortion, biblical passages are invoked without any real understanding of the context or true meaning. It’s surprising how little Christians know of what is still the most popular book to ever grace the American continent.

More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research […]

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Republican Acceptance of Evolution Plummets

Stephan:  The rise of the aggrieved whites has taken on the attributes of a tribe. And, like all tribes there are things the tribe believes to be true, and things the tribe does not believe. One thing the angry white tribe has apparently decided not to believe is evolution. This is an account of spreading willful ignorance, Creationism has become one of the tribal oaths. This is one of the reasons I consider the Theocratic Right, which is a 99 per cent aggrieved white person tribe, to be a toxic malevolent force in American society.

A poll released today by the Pew Research Center reveals that acceptance of evolution among Republicans has plummeted in recent years, from 54 percent in 2009 to a jarring 43 percent today. The poll also found that a startling 48 percent of Republicans believe that all living things today have existed in their present form since the start of time.

Democrats and independents fared much better: 67 percent of Democrats accept evolution today (up from 64 percent in 2009), while 65 percent of independents accept it (down from 67 percent in 2013). Overall, 60 percent of Americans accept the basic fact that ‘humans and other living things have evolved over time,

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2013: The Year in Whiteness

Stephan:  One of the major trends facing the U.S. is that it is on track to become a country with no racial majority, and to develop a culture where just being born white will no longer confer automatic privilege. For a significant minority of white people, particularly in the Southern states, this is causing massive angst and anger. I have been writing about this for over a decade, now others, as this report describes are beginning to see this trend as well.

Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent “War on Christmas,” that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket.

Fox News has been peddling the phony “War on Christmas” for years, of course, but it took new Fox phenom Megyn Kelly to give it an explicitly racial cast. Not only did Kelly wage war against the menace of a black Santa – declaring nonsensically that the fictional character of Santa Claus “just is white” – but when she was called on it, she made herself out to be the victim of politically correct bullies, race-baiters and Fox haters. Suddenly it was clear: The imagined war on Christmas has become an equally farcical war on whiteness in the minds of those sad right-wing warriors.

The next week, “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson also became a martyr for the white right, after A&E briefly suspended him for holding forth on the nastiness of gay sex while insisting […]

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Thicker Brain Sections Tied to Spirituality: Study

Stephan:  It is always very important to distinguish between spirituality and religion. Religion is entirely man made. Humans decide who is a prophet and who is a dingbat, and it is humans that write the dogma and create the rituals. Spirituality is an experience of nonlocal consciousness that has to be experienced to be properly understood, and many religious adherents have never had a spiritual experience. Many spiritual experiences have nothing whatever to do with religion, although they often start religions. But what is particularly interesting, and a modern contribution to understanding spirituality is the neuroscience, of which this report is an example. Source: http://bit.ly/1jYo6ro JAMA Psychiatry, online December 25, 2013.

NEW YORK — For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain, a new study hints.

Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said religion or spirituality was ‘important’ to them versus those who cared less about religion.

‘Our beliefs and our moods are reflected in our brain and with new imaging techniques we can begin to see this,’ Myrna Weissman told Reuters Health. ‘The brain is an extraordinary organ. It not only controls, but is controlled by our moods.’

Weissman, who worked on the new study, is a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University and chief of the Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology department at New York State Psychiatric institute.

While the new study suggests a link between brain thickness and religiosity or spirituality, it cannot say that thicker brain regions cause people to be religious or spiritual, Weissman and her colleagues note in JAMA Psychiatry.

It might hint, however, that religiosity can enhance the brain’s resilience against depression in a very physical way, they write.

Previously, the researchers had found that people who said they were religious or spiritual were at lower risk of depression. […]

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Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

Stephan:  We are still far from the end of the revelations concerning the rise of the security state coming out of the Snowden papers. Here is the latest.

The NSA’s TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency’s top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.

In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn’t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States’ foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA’s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at […]

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