Belief in What?

CNN's "Belief Blog" is at it again. Here's today's lineup:


Beginning at the top left icon, a story about whether Christianity can stop pornography. In other words, lots of Christians are into pornography and this hypocritical chaos over sexuality is something to behold.

Moving rightward, the next icon tells of a touching story about congressman Keith Ellison's conversion from the "ritual and dogma" of the Catholic church he suffered as a lad to the "multi-national congregation" he found in Islam as a college kid. Right wingers are mean to him because of it, but he laughs them off.

Onward, the next story is about an atheist getting through AA despite her view of the counselors and her fellow participants as a bunch of Jesus nuts. God bless her for enduring the twin struggles.

The next story is kinda weird, one about a flight attendant aboard the D.B. Cooper hijacking airplane whom the pilot credited with being a calming influence on the hijacker, possibly saving lives. It details her mysterious subsequent venture to a convent followed by a name change and later move into obscurity. She's either nuts or in some kind of witness protection program.

The final top icon deals with 'speaking Christianese', which can be summed up by the final few sentences:

Speaking Christian can become a way of suggesting a kind of spiritual status that others don’t have,” he says. “It communicates a kind of spiritual elitism that holds the spiritually ‘unwashed’ at arm’s length."

By that time, they’ve reached the final stage of speaking Christian - they've become spiritual snobs.

Finally, the main story about how religion was affected by 9/11. There are four bullet points..

1) A chosen nation becomes a humbled one.

In other words, the chickens came home to roost. America was not really as exceptional as her idiot patriotic naive citizens believed. 9/11 proved we were no better or worse than Zimbabwe. So take that, wingnuts. The empire is falling so wake up and relish the reality of violence like everyone else in the 3rd world (even if America had already suffered two terrorist attacks on large buildings in previous years under Clinton, when sweetness and light prevailed and none of this was ever mentioned).

2) The re-emergence of "Christo-Americanism."

Summary--cut the Islamophobia you Bible thumpers. Muslims didn't attack us on 9/11, extremists who happen to be Muslims did. It wasn't about their religion at all, but it appears to be about yours.

3) Interfaith becomes cool.

Or in other words, believing in your Christian religion as before became un-cool. You didn't realize how bigoted you were but now you do, and all religions are correct and all express the truth--except yours, which is full of holes.

4) Atheists come out of the closet.

Yes, largely to smear militant Islam with general Christianity and Judiasm so as to blame ALL religions for the attack instead of the religion for which the attackers martyred themselves. In other words, rather opportunistic. Madalyn Murray O'Hair would have surely approved.


Summary--despite what CNN says 9/11 didn't vastly change the religious landscape other than to open a lot of eyes to the threat of militant Islam while allowing others to condemn Christianity as a participant in the evil. Yet Christians didn't form mobs to burn mosques or hunt down people who looked Muslim, instead many of them reached out to understand, some in a state of populist guilt brought on by stories like these. Of course, it's not hard to connect these dots to Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and other conservatives, but surely that's a coincidence.

MORE 9/4/11

Now the Belief Blog is highlighting a website that allows Muslims (or those appearing Muslim) to log-in and describe how they've been persecuted by Tea Partiers since 9/11. OK, it doesn't specifically say Tea Partiers, or baggers, but we all know who the culprits are, don't we?