Liberty University blocks news re: Liberty University

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 7 Comments

Jerry Falwell, educator

Quick—what’s the most federally-funded institute of higher education in the nation? Don’t think about the headline of today’s post; just say UCLA or Ohio State or something. Actually, the answer may surprise you: it’s Liberty University, the “Christian evangelical university” founded by television pastor and former fraud indictee Jerry Falwell. Liberty* is a larger recipient of federal student aid dollars than any college or university in the country, in large part due to its online program, which enrolled 53,000 students last year. Along with the 12,000 students at its residential campus, those young scholars gave Liberty $445 million in taxpayer dollars—$25 million more than last year’s federal allocation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The news is counterintuitive, given the Falwell family’s ultraconservative and explicitly anti-federal politics. Maybe that’s why, for at least part of last week, Liberty University blocked campus internet access to the Lynchburg News and Advance, the paper that originally ran the story. Or God did it—whatever.

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Huckabee pretty much wrong re: single moms

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 3 Comments

Mike Huckabee explains his premarital sex alternative in graphic detail.

Perhaps you remember around Oscar time, when Mike Huckabee, oppressed by society’s relentless glamorization of single mothers, found the courage to speak out against pregnant Natalie Portman. “One of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine,’” Huckabee told Michael Medved. “But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie.” The former Arkansas governor has a point: if there’s one thing Hollywood consistently makes out to be totally fun and easy, it’s single motherhood. Portman herself played a single mother in the Star Wars prequels, and those nearly ended western society. A week or so after his remarks, disappointed to find that they were still singing in Whoville, Huckabee issued a clarification on his website:

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A Christmas message from Bill O’Reilly

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 3 Comments

"You're waiting for a tip, aren't you? I'll warn you right now: I got nowhere to go"

We’re coming to this a little late, but Bill O’Reilly has completed the synthesis of Christianity and arch-conservatism that has been vaguely coalescing for the last sixty years—and just in time for Christmas! Ten days ago, he published a column entitled Keep Christ In Unemployment, which is a somewhat misleading title given that it’s A) anti-unemployment benefits and B) as near as I can tell, from a strictly exegetical perspective, anti-Christ. Bill O’Reilly is one hard son of a bitch. As a devout and public Christian, he is apparently obliged to argue that Jesus was one hard sumbitch, too.

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Stem sells appear to cure HIV infection, creating perfect storm

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 2 Comments

Boooooring

Researchers in Berlin have announced that a man who underwent stem cell transplants for treatment of leukemia seems to have been cured of his HIV as a result of the procedure. I think I speak for all of us when I say: there’s a dude a Berlin who has HIV and leukemia? Does he go to church? Also: does this mean we have a cure for AIDS? Shockingly, it looks like it kind of does. According to the excitingly-named Blood magazine, “results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.” While having pluripotent stem cells massively transplanted into your bone marrow likely will remain a less popular treatment than having sex with a virgin, it appears that we have found a solution to the great epidemic of our time. All it takes to cure what the religious right once called “the gay plague” are stem cells harvested from embryos that the religious right considers tiny babies.

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Religious politics and the President’s secret agnosticism

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 3 Comments

In all the speculation about whether the President of the United States is a secret Muslim—a concern matched only be the pre-election fear that his Chicago pastor made him a secret black nationalist—we sometimes forget another possibility: that he secretly subscribes to no religion at all. Obviously, when you’re publicly speculating on a man’s deeply-held beliefs, you can’t just accept what he says. Until we devise some sort of test for determining whether someone is actually a Christian, possibly involving a very large wheel, we’ll have to content ourselves with two things: wild speculation by crazy white bitches and textual analysis.

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