This Week in God

September 1, 2007

First up from The God Machine this week is an interesting study about religious ministries and the increasing interest in some circles about public faith-based initiatives. To hear proponents, including the president tell it, ministries deserve taxpayer-financed contracts, not to fund religion, but to get results — religious charities, the theory goes, are simply more effective than their secular counterparts.

The claim has always been controversial for years — evidence supporting the faith-based contention has been elusive — and this week, Bush & Co. suffered another setback when a faith-based rehabilitation program for prisoners failed to deliver on its promises in Oklahoma.

As the Associated Press reported, corrections officials in Oklahoma turned to a group called Genesis One for help in dealing with inmates who are about to be released. Oklahoma officials don’t currently give Genesis One tax funds but may be preparing to do so this November under the terms of a new state law that requires corrections officials to partner with faith-based groups on reentry programs.

Key to Genesis One’s program is attendance at a local church. John Easley, who directs the program, says participants must be willing to “accept God.” He is adamant that the program will not work without a religious conversion first. The organization claims to be open to inmates of all faiths, but its Web site speaks strictly in Christian terms.

A study prepared for the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission by the Criminal Justice Resource Center “shows little difference between recidivism among participants in Genesis One and other inmates leaving the prison system,” the AP reported.

Steven W. Taylor, a member of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and a Commission member, reported that the recidivism rate for Genesis One males over a five-year period was 36.9 percent, the same as the general rate for all inmates incarcerated by the Department of Corrections.

In light of the results, Oklahoma will scale back its support for the religious program? No such luck — the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission said the study will have no effect. Faith, apparently, isn’t just part of the program; it’s part of the backing for the program.

Other items from the God Machine this week:

* The religious right movement lost yet another icon this week, when the Rev. D. James Kennedy, head of Coral Ridge Ministries and Reclaiming America for Christ, announced his retirement. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, called Kennedy one of Christianity’s “truly significant figures.” He was also one of the nation’s more notorious theocrats and fundamentalist extremists.

* Televangelist Bill Killer, best known for recently equating a vote for Mitt Romney with a vote for Satan, is being pulled off the air at his local television station after some harsh criticism of Islam. In a May 2 broadcast, the televangelist said Islam was a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell” and called the Prophet Muhammad a “murdering pedophile.” He also called the Quran a “book of fables and a book of lies.” A few weeks ago, officials from the Council on American Islamic Relations wrote a letter to the TV station’s owners asking for an investigation of the show, and shortly thereafter, WTOG-TV, a CBS-owned station that airs the CW network locally, cancelled Keller’s program.

* Remember Ted Haggard? He’s not exactly ready for a comeback, but he is soliciting funds from former supporters to help finance his new academic work. Haggard is apparently seeking a master’s degree in counseling at the University of Phoenix. “It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years,” Haggard said in an email fundraising message. “During that time we will continue as full-time students, and then, when I graduate, we won’t need outside support any longer.”

* After initially slighting a war widow who successfully challenged the administration’s refusal to allow the use of the Wiccan symbol of faith on government-issued grave markers, George W. Bush did the right thing yesterday and called Roberta Stewart, whose husband, Sgt. Patrick Stewart was killed in combat in Afghanistan, to express his condolences. “I just now got off the phone and personally spoke with President Bush,” Stewart said. “I am happy to say that he did give me his deepest condolences. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and I do have to give him kudos that he at least took the time to call, give his condolences, and apologize for the VA problem.”

* And after a bizarre incident involving my friends at Americans United for Separation of Chuch and State, “imprecatory prayers” are finally getting the attention they deserve.

I will give him [Bush] the benefit of the doubt and I do have to give him kudos that he at least took the time to call, give his condolences, and apologize for the VA problem.”

Now was that so fucking hard????

* Televangelist Bill Killer, best known for recently equating a vote for Mitt Romney with a vote for Satan, is being pulled off the air at his local television station after some harsh criticism of Islam. In a May 2 broadcast, the televangelist said Islam was a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell” and called the Prophet Muhammad a “murdering pedophile.” He also called the Quran a “book of fables and a book of lies.”

Well if he hadn’t mention a specific religion and just said that about all the organized religion it would have been a public service announcement

If a religious organization can hand out food with less than 10% admin costs and no evangelizing then give’em some money. Anything more complex than that and they’re worst than useless.

  • “Oklahoma officials don’t currently give Genesis One tax funds but may be preparing to do so this November under the terms of a new state law that requires corrections officials to partner with faith-based groups on reentry programs.”

    This requirement is undoubtedly unConstitutional, as are all of the fundamentalist – Bush administration’s “faith-based initiatives”.

  • CB – Mr. “a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan” is Bill Keller, not “Bill Killer,” even though that name seems oddly appropriate as well.

  • Re: “imprecatory prayers”

    “What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? Does the total number of people praying for or against something matter? How about the righteousness of the supplicants? Are positive prayers answered more frequently than negative ones? Does God take the positive ones and Satan the negative? Does the intensity of the praying have any effect on the outcome? Does the length of time one devotes to praying have any effect on the frequency with which one’s prayers are answered? Do the words and phrases used in the prayer — either positive or negative — have any bearing on the success rate? Does the nature of the thing or things prayed for have any bearing on the prayer’s success rate — either positive or negative prayers? Why or why not??” -Robert A. Baker, Prayer Wars (Full article here)

  • So Ted Haggard wants people to send him free money just because he’s Ted Haggard. Not for any services rendered or promise of repayment, but just because he’s Ted Haggard and everybody used to give him free money before and he’s kind of gotten used to it so everybody needs to give him free money now just because he’s Ted Haggard.

    If there was ever a poster child for the classic, semi-retarded Christianist welfare addict, Haggard is it.

  • Given the fact that there are so many obviously quite decent people who are religious(imho, most of them would be just as decent even if they werent religious) and that we are virtually all programmed from childhood to assume that religious people are better, it is no surprise that invalidating statistics are given little credence or weight.

  • Well put Curmudgeon but people like Haggard are also worse than welfare recipients—-they’re parasites. Indeed, all religion is basically parasitic. Some even kill off they’re hosts and others actively advocate the killing of others, especially those unbelievers who refuse to allow themselves to be hosts.

  • …ministries deserve taxpayer-financed contracts, not to fund religion, but to get results..

    This argument works when the program is, say, a church organizing volunteers to pick up trash along highways. If they need money for garbage bags or to charter a bus to carry volunteers around the state, give them a grant. If they want to sing hymns while doing the work, fine. These aren’t the programs getting “faith-based” funding, though. It’s always the “whole-person” social services, where they help you find a job, balance your budget, and raise your kids, and step #1 is always “Believe in Jesus.”

  • The whole myth that Christian organizations are the only ones providing effective humanitarian services in the world is just that – a myth. Yes, they hand out clothes and food and medicine to poor, starving children in Africa and India, etc., etc., but it’s always predicated on one thing – conversion. The first thing a religious organization does when they hit the ground in whatever benighted country the claim to be helping is to build a church. I know, I used to put my money in the collection plate while watching videos of the shiny new whitewashed building the missionaries were putting up in some miserable village. It never occured to me until later to wonder if the money it took to put up a church might not have been better used to feed the kids and vaccinate them against measles and polio. Yes, the starving kids can eat – but the ulterior motive attached to the food is baptism numbers. Success in these countries is not measured by the number of people lifted out of a desperate situation, but by the numbers who are baptised into the church. Meanwhile, the people’s original culture and religion are denigrated and destroyed, as they are taught that the white, Christian, “way” is better than theirs.

    Organizations that do real good, without an ulterior motive, such as Doctors without Borders, are actually far more effective at what they do, not to mention the many secular
    efforts. The Christian organizations just scream louder, whine more, and spend big bucks to get noticed by the politicians. I say, Screw ’em. Let God give them money for their projects. Let my taxpayer dollars go where I choose.

  • I never understood one thing about D. James Kennedy. He always proclaimed that America is a “Christian nation;” however, his organization Center for Reclaiming America held an annual conference called Reclaiming America for Christ. Why would America need “reclaiming” for Christ if the country is already a “Christian nation?” Any Kennedy supporters/defenders out there want to explain how those are not contradictory positions?

  • I don’t have the reference at hand, but the committee supervising Ted Haggard told him to stop it: no soliciting for money and no career in counseling.

  • The whole myth that Christian organizations are the only ones providing effective humanitarian services in the world is just that – a myth. Yes, they hand out clothes and food and medicine to poor, starving children in Africa and India, etc., etc., but it’s always predicated on one thing – conversion.

    Want to hear a sickening example to illustrate your point? My brother was a missionary in Liberia before the whole Charles Taylor fiasco. Their mission had probably the best hospital in a country with very pathetic social services, and at one point they did a bypass or some coronary procedure on a wealthy Liberian who then offered to build and pay for the staffing of an entire new wing on their hospital, out of gratitude for what they’d done for him. They turned him down, despite the desperate need for hospital facilities in the country. Why? Because it was their policy to proselytize to all their patients in the language of the patient, and they didn’t have enough staff who knew the native tongues to be able to fulfill that goal if they added a new wing and that many more patients. So the hospital expansion never took place, they just pissed away the opportunity. Incredible!

  • http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/09/fargo_commissioners_say_no_mor.php

    Fargo commissioners say no more monuments on city plaza
    Associated Press Staff Reports OneNewsNow.comSeptember 2, 2007
    FARGO, N.D. – City Commissioners have decided not to accept any more monuments on the plaza near City Hall in Fargo, North Dakota, where a Ten Commandments monument has stood since 1961.

    The commission in June rejected the Red River Freethinkers’ offer to install another monument on the plaza with the words, “The government of the United States of America is not in any
    sense founded on the Christian religion.”

    The president of the Freethinkers, former Fargo mayor Jon Lindgren, said he’s not sure whether the group will take the city to court over the issue.

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