I’m trying to be serious here, but every time I try to contextualize this video appropriately, I stumble into the phrase “a growing storm” and I can’t stop laughing. Janet Porter is as pathetic as she is barefaced in her requests to God to provide her and her ilk command of our media. Good thing there’s no one listening upstairs; I wonder what the people of Palestine, Israel, India, or China might say about a spontaneously Christianist local media.

Here’s the video.

Janet Porter Prays For Control of the Media: Speaking at the “Convergence 2010: A Cry to Awaken A Nation” conference on March 4-6, 2010, Janet Porter prayers to God to gain control over the nation’s media. (rightwingwatch.org)

Gay News Watch | Papal aide, Vatican men’s choir in gay prostitution ring

“Put on some music, swallow a Viagra, and adelante!”

That’s the headline in Europe today following reports that a papal aide used an intermediary in an elite Vatican choir to solicit young male choristers and seminarians for prostitution.

Police wiretaps are expected to result in charges against Angelo Balducci, 63, a Papal Gentleman, as lay attendant are called, and the former chairman of the Holy See’s Public Works Department, which is itself caught up in a corruption investigation.

Hat tip to SLOG.

BTW, “Papal Gentleman, as lay attendant are often called” is perhaps the gayest phrase ever, and it’s their own terminology! This is easily worth 2D6 against any saving throw by the Vatican attempting to brush this off.

While Doctors without Borders was struggling to get anesthetics for amputations into Haiti, an Albuquerque group queued up aid of their own sort: 600 solar powered talking Bibles. Even now, food, water, and medicine are having trouble reaching Haitians because of damaged transportation facilities and supply lines, but the missionary group says some of their Bibles are on the way.

I first read about the solar powered Bibles after a friend forwarded an article from an Australian news source — the point being that half way around the world people found the story controversial enough to be newsworthy. Why?  Because it is morally troubling, even for many Christians. According to the gospel writer, Jesus says “I was hungry and you gave me bread,” not “I was hungry and you gave me Bibles.” How can anyone see pictures of crushed buildings, blood covered children, and people begging for food, and think of it as an opportunity to win converts?

Like many others, I read about the solar Bible effort with a sense of disgust. But as a former Evangelical believer, I also read about it with some sympathy for the people packing the boxes. There is no doubt in my mind that they think what they are doing is kind and good. I would bet my psychology license that their behavior is driven by genuine concern for the people of Haiti. I simply believe also that the Evangelical mindset has tremendous power to co-opt and redirect a believer’s moral priorities and compassion.One of the most pernicious attributes of ideology, whether secular or religious is its power to disconnect true believers from moral emotions like empathy, shame, and guilt. In fact, what often happens is that the ideology repurposes both these emotions and the rest of a believer’s moral machinery in the service of the ideology itself.  Let me explain.

Under ordinary circumstances and with normal brain development, certain moral instincts are built into us.  Universally, for example, we have an aversion to the thought of babies being burned for the pleasure of adults. We have some general notion that stealing is wrong. We value honesty.

Research in brain science is showing that moral reasoning and behavior is driven by a set of inborn emotions — empathy, shame, guilt, disgust, righteous indignation, moral pride — and that these in turn drive moral reasoning and behavior.  These emotions, along with specialized circuitry for analyzing morally relevant situations (and some pre-set defaults) are shared by our whole species. Why? Because they allow us to live in community with each other.

We humans are social creatures. To use the technical term, we are “social information specialists.” Our primary resource is information, and we mostly get it from each other.  Without the ability to cooperate and share knowledge we’d all still be in the Stone Age — or the tree tops. The only way we thrive in the long run is if we support the well-being of our community and, as we are starting to recognize, the broader web of life. That is what morality lets us do. It helps us to treat the wellbeing of others as if it were our own — because in a peculiar way it is.

For this reason, empathy or compassion is at the very center of most religious and secular wisdom traditions — usually in some form of the Golden Rule. Often the best means we have of guessing what another sentient being wants or needs is by projecting ourselves into their situation: How would I feel? What would I want? What would make me happy?

This is where a viral ideology like Evangelicalism can hook in and take advantage of our moral make-up. First, it can diminish empathy by downplaying the importance of here and now suffering. Second it can make something other than a person’s apparent needs (like food or anesthetics) seem critically important. Third, it can re-direct our mother-bear instincts away from protecting vulnerable individuals and toward protecting the ideology itself. Believers may come to feel more protective of their religion than they are of actual human beings.

1. Diminishing suffering: Evangelical Christianity downplays the horrors of suffering in several ways and sometimes even glorifies it.

a. Bible-believing Christians are taught that this world is just a prelude to the next – the one that really matters.  Suffering is part of God’s plan, because it surrounds us, so it must be.  Mother Theresa, for example, is said to have told a man in pain that Jesus was kissing him.

b. Because God is described as fair, there is a heightened tendency for believers to fall into the “just world hypothesis” to think that people deserve what they get. This can lead to a pattern of blaming victims for their own misfortune: pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex, rape victims should dress differently, poor people should work harder.

c. In the Bible, when God intervenes he often does miracles that affect a few people rather than responding to the suffering of the many. A few blind receive their sight, one lame man stands up and walks. This teaches people to focus on the “miraculous” exception rather than the pattern. Believers can praise God for saving a handful of orphans, neglecting the tens of thousands He just created.

d. In the central story of traditional Christianity, Jesus was born to be a human sacrifice; his ministry was just a prelude to Golgotha.  Suffering, rather than something to be fought against, is seen as redemptive. The human race is saved by torture.

2. Redirecting focus: Economists say that religions create “goods” which then have “scarcities” that people desire and compete for — God’s favor, for example, or sacred space, or a certain status during the afterlife, and Evangelicalism offers several great examples of this.

a.  Evangelicals prize salvation–a “personal relationship with Jesus,” and the promise of heaven—so it is natural that when they are being altruistic, this is what they want for others. For someone who is salvation focused, the best thing he or she can do is to save someone’s soul. If feeding people wins converts, fine.  But if you have to choose between food and Bibles, only one saves people from eternal torture.

b. In particularly evangelistic denominations, even children are taught that God wants them to be “fishers of men.” Think Jesus Camp. A Buddhist might get a feeling of virtue or self esteem from pursuing compassion, mindfulness and simplicity; for some Christians, this same satisfaction comes from a convincing others to become believers.

c. Rather than being defined by service, generosity, or other consensually valued character qualities and activities, virtue can get re-defined as a life of Bible study, church attendance and prayer and/or sexual abstinence. These behaviors may become more highly valued than the qualities that normally make someone a “decent human being” a “good colleague” or a “great neighbor.”

3. Self-perpetuation: Religions that focus on recruiting and keeping believers – on marketing and on defense of the ideology — often out-compete those that don’t. This is why Muslim countries are arguing in the United Nations that religions as entities have human rights — including the right to be protected against criticism.

a. The most evangelical forms of Christianity gain mind-share by turning the whole congregation into a sales force with divine sanction. Individual members may support missionaries or may pack up their families to go seek converts in foreign countries. Populations that are seen as vulnerable to conversion — poor people, uneducated people, families in crisis, youth in transition — are targeted for intensive missionary efforts.

b. Christians are encouraged to give money to the church. One successful Seattle mega church has two or three offerings in a single Sunday for different causes. Another cites (twists?) scripture to make the case that God wants believers to give first and foremost to their home church, and only to believers.

c. Rhetoric like “The War on Christmas,”  “The War on Easter,” “Activist Atheists,” and “Jihad” keep believers under a perennial sense of seige. Stories of martyrs are read to children — while Christianity’s bloody history is largely ignored.

d. Even though Christianity is the largest religion in the world, commentators and pastors lament the decline of the faith and the loss of young people. They raise the specter of Christianity becoming shrunken and marginalized within a generation.

The heart of Evangelicalism may be thought to lie in two Bible verses, both of which are taken to be perfect words from God, essentially dictated by God to the authors.  One is John 3:16, the most memorized verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[a] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This verse is paired with one called Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19NIV)

Contrast this with the verse that is the center of faith for many modernist Christians, what is called the Great Commandment.  When asked what was the greatest commandment in the Torah, the writer of Matthew tells us that Jesus replied “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

Both evangelicals and modernists call themselves Christians, or followers of Jesus, but the two preceding paragraphs define two different religions. As much as Evangelicals argue to the contrary, they are in conflict. Only one of these religions sends missionaries pretending to be aid workers into Afghanistan, putting other aid workers at risk. The other sees this as immoral. Only one of them sets up recruiting clubs on grade school campuses. The other sees this as immoral. Only one of these religions uses money, time, and cargo space to send Bibles to people in need of anesthetics.

I consider World Vision to be at the better end of the Evangelical spectrum based on a ratio of humanitarian aid to proselytizing. But even World Vision goes out of their way to downplay their mission: bearing witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ. In the wake of the Haiti disaster, ads on the internet showed bandaged children with a banner that said, “Save a Life.” A banner that said, “Save a Soul,” might have been equally in keeping with their statement of faith.

World Vision shares the Church’s commitment to disciple followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others. (emphasis theirs).

Would World Vision’s Evangelical donors, volunteers, and staff put their energy into disaster relief and poverty programs if they weren’t on a mission to disciple followers? Who can say. At least they do a tremendous amount of good by any measure.

At the uglier end of the spectrum is a Seattle mega-church that claims almost 20,000 members, Mars Hill, founded by Calvinist celebrity Mark Driscoll. In the wake of the Asian tsunami several years back their website advised members to 1. Pray for people in the disaster zone.  2. Give to Mars Hill church.  3. Give to our church building enterprise in India. Five years later, their opportunism, meaning willingness to co-opt the compassionate impulse and redirect it into church growth is more sophisticated but unabated. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, Mars Hill directs members to a site called Churches Helping Churches. “Who will help the Church?” it asks.

“Rebuilding local churches helps address the practical and spiritual needs of a country, one person, one neighborhood, and one community at a time. We need to help the church of Jesus Christ as our first priority in areas hit with human catastrophe. I challenge all thoughtful, biblically-minded Christians to find a single instance of the New Testament church filling the plates of the “general population” poor.”

You can be assured that in Haiti, none of the money will go to the Catholic churches that have functioned traditionally as community centers among Haiti’s poor and that are pictured in ruins on the website’s banner. No, the money will go to Evangelical missions seeking converts among the Catholics. (Oh, btw, the site features another front page action item: Follow Mark Driscoll on Twitter.)

Is the founder of Mars Hill and of the Churches helping Churches site a crass self-promoter? Perhaps, but I suspect that he genuinely believes he is doing good, even maximizing good, by turning suffering into fundraising for his brand of beliefism. The crass self-promotion may be a quality of his belief system, not his person.  Physicist Steven Weinberg once said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Weinberg’s statement may simplify overmuch, but it contains a kernel of truth. For genuinely decent people to engage in systematic acts of harm, even for them to take milk from the mouths of babes as it were (like Mars Hill does), something has to override their moral sensibilities.

Fear has the power to do this, but so does ideology.  For solar powered Bibles or church-building to win out over food and medicine requires a religion that values conversion over compassion. But when we see this phenomenon at its worst, it is because a devoted leader in the thrall of a viral ideology has mastered some reverse alchemy that turns the precious gold of empathy into the lead of opportunism.

Be sure to register soon for the NW Freethought Conference in Renton, before it fills up! Space is limited! Registration is online, via PayPal! The conference website is https://www.nwfreethought.org/

Speakers include:

Ophelia Benson, the co-force behind several books and a superb website, the goal of which is “fighting fashionable nonsense.” She will open our conference talking about being as critical of what we agree with as what we scorn.

Dr. David Domke, University of Washington Communications professor and author of “The God Strategy” and “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House.” He was one of the two top-rated speakers at the 2009 conference, and will be the keynote speaker at the banquet this year. He’ll be sharing ideas from his most recent research.

Anu Garg, the founder of wordsmith.org, which goes to 800,000 subscribers in 200 countries, and has often included free-thought ideas in the daily quote. He’ll talk about his philosophical path from Hinduism (330,000 deities) to where he is now (none at all). He’s a member of FFRF and AU.

Topics include:

AU/CFI Forum: Reaching Public School Students for Christ — It’s Legal!
Green Eating
How We Know What Isn’t So: Why Personal Experiences Override Science
Critical Thinking Skills
Living without a Soul, Dying without a God
Green Burial
Faith-based Child Abuse: Recent Oregon Court Cases
Current Church-State Separation Cases
Drug Policy Reform

Sign up now! Registration is online, via PayPal!

Saturday, February 6,  2-5 p.m.

Wednesday, February 10, 6-8 pm

Christians stepping up; where are atheists?

By Brad Eleken, of  Graham

My prayers go out to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, and I will help by donating through a Christian charity. I am thankful that the United States, as always, takes the lead in helping when disaster strikes. As I read The News Tribune, I am struck by the fact that the Christian organizations are mobilizing and sending aid and aid workers without any thought as to the religion of the people of Haiti.

Just as when the tsunami struck Indonesia, and tens of thousands of Muslims were killed, the United States and Christian charities took the lead.

So where are the atheist organizations? Are they sending aid workers, money or prayers? No. But they do have money to devote to a display in the Capitol building in Olympia, to tell us there is no God, there is no heaven or hell.

If there are atheists interested in helping the people of Haiti, I ask them to give to World Vision or one of the other fine Christian organizations. Or they can do nothing.

This screed is especially outrageous in light of the call to arms that went out from Seattle Atheists asking people to donate for Haiti relief that went out Jan. 14.

It’s more inaccurate because of the SCORES of atheist and humanist charities that were launched in the past few years, and which are SPECIFICALLY addressing the Haiti crisis.

Seattle Atheists itself commits itself to charity and community service, and has an ongoing food drive, a blood drive, and gift wrapping, of which 100% of the proceeds go to Childrens Hospital.

CFI’s S.H.A.R.E. project, Richard Dawkins Foundation’s Non-Believers Giving Aid, Humanist Charities’ Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund have all dedicated the full force of their giving power to the victims of the Haiti disaster. Additional secular charities include MADRE, Partners in Health, Doctors Without Borders, Americares, International Relief Teams, and Mercy Corps.

Atheists give to secular aid organizations, because we do not like to see money going towards  solar powered bibles. Because if that’s your idea of humanitarian aid, you need to really be shot out of a cannon.

We recognize that people need clean water, food, medical care, and shelter, and NOT proselytizing. They need care, not “ministry.” They need to survive. They don’t need half the money that would have gone to pay for these things going to fat cat pastors and churches.

So in other words, Brad Eleken of Graham, you’re an ill-informed ass.

Please voice your displeasure both in the comments and by writing letters to the editor. This will not go unchallenged.

Seattle Atheists and our fellow organizations in the Northwest Freethought Coalition (NWFC) will come to together to celebrate Darwin, science, humanity and in appreciation of verifiable knowledge that has been acquired solely through human curiosity and ingenuity.

The event is family-friendly and will include speakers, educational evolution-themed games, activities, and food. The public is encouraged to attend.

WHERE:
Juanita Community Club, 13027 100th Ave NE, Kirkland, WA 98034

WHEN:
Saturday, Feb. 6, from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m.

Dear Friend,

I thought that you might be surprised, as most of my old friends and my family have been. It is difficult for most Christians to believe that a former southern baptist minister could be an Atheist. You responded very much like a lot of them and did so with concern, love, an obvious bias that I understand, and some false assumptions. I have no problem explaining my journey to you or anyone who has a sincere desire to know, but you really need to keep an open mind, because as you already have in your e-mail, you will be tempted to assume some things that simply are false. Nothing that you wrote that supports your faith is new to me and I think you know me well enough to know that. They are convictions I once held myself. I think you also know the answer to some of the questions you posed; especially the one about whether or not I ever was a Christian. You, of all people, know better than to ask such a question. As arrogant as this may sound, if I wasn’t a Christian, then no one is.

Let me answer some of your other direct questions. I do not believe in anything supernatural or spiritual, therefore I do not beleive in a god. Christianity at it’s core is a religion based on faith (believing without evidence). In fact there is no evidence that the God of the bible exists, there is only personal experience. This is how there can be so many different religions and so many different Christian denominations that can claim to have the truth. None of them have the truth, they have belief without evidence. So, to your question about death and an afterlife….when I die, I’m dead, gone, that’s it. No I will not see my wife and children somewhere in a “spiritual place.” No such place exists.Now to some false assumptions you made. The mental health field in general is not “new age.” The new age movement DOES believe in the spiritual and I do not. The mental health field, whether it’s psychiatry, psychology, counseling, is extremely diverse in it’s theoretical orientations and lense through which people are evaluated and treated. What you didn’t say, but I will, is that the higher a persons level of education the more likely they are to be non-religious. I know that as I have become more and more educated and have chosen to view the world with an open mind instead of through the dogma I was raised with I have been able to discover some truths, some facts, some evidence that contradicts most, if not all, of my Christian faith.

Another assumption you made, which is very common, is that something must have happened to cause me to turn from God. Nope, nothing “happened.” It was a 10 year process of challenging my beliefs against the evidence. A very simplistic example of this is that Evolution is a fact, not “just a theory” as fundamentalists believe. I have learned that to deny this fact is like denying the earth is round or that the holocaust happened. It’s just ridiculous. There are many, many other more complex examples I could give.

There are statements you made about why we don’t or can’t know the answers to certain questions, but all of your examples have simple answers. Your daughter is pregnant because she had unprotected sex. That’s it. There is no “why” to this beyond that simple fact. Good people die at the same rate as “bad” people, it doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, shit happens and believing in a god makes no difference in that. You have a disability for the same reason the Muslim man has the same disability, or the Hindu, or the Atheist. It’s probably a combination of genetics, environment, and life circumstances.

When my children were born I was in awe of the human condition, of the process of procreation, and the emotional bond that was immediately formed between me, my wife, and our children. I was in awe of the overwhelming sense that I now had so much more to give my life meaning and purpose. No god is needed in this process. Basic sex education explains how humans procreate. The orchestrators of my children’s lives were me and my wife, her egg and my sperm, not a god. I am sad for you that you feel sorry for me, because there is nothing to feel sorry for. That’s just it, I have discovered that most of the things Christianity claims to provide people (love, happiness, fellowship, compassion, inspiration, etc. etc.) are all available without a god. I am in awe of the universe. I am in awe of the billions of years it took for the universe to form. I am in awe of how in the context of the universe our planet is like a speck of sand on a beach. I am terrified that religious conservatives, out of their belief in “the end times” are going to make policy decisions that ensure that we bring about the end of our planet.

You ask where I get my love for humanity. Quite simply, I am human. I know that you will find this difficult to comprehend, but my love for humanity, my faith in people, my level of compassion, my personal happiness, have all grown way beyond anything I possessed as a Christian. Knowing that this life is all we have and that the most important relationship we have is not with some deity, but with the people around us, our family, friends, and community. It’s why I am so outspoken for equal rights for ALL people, not just those the religious right thinks deserves equal rights. And yes, my experience working with and getting to know people in the gay community has had an impact on my beliefs. I don’t deny that, but it isn’t THE reason. When I see the rates of successful suicide in gay men who try to be “healed” and aren’t, I become angry with the traditional church. There is nothing wrong or sinful about being gay or living a gay lifestyle. It’s not that they don’t have enough faith, it’s that they are Gay and to change that is the same as trying to get a straight person to stop being straight. The bible is wrong about this matter and many, many others.

I have always, and will always be your friend. I love you dearly. I will answer any question you have for me and I will always be completely honest with you. There is so much that I could write, but it would probably take a book. When you make a statement about my life meaning nothing, nothing to my clients, my family, or my self, you are being hurtful. You are also speaking out of ignorance. My life means more now than it ever did before. My life means a great deal to my wife and children, my family, my friends, and my clients. I have a gay client in fact that sees me as the only person in his life that accepts him for who he is, and for that reason, I matter a great deal to him. If he hadn’t found me and come to me for counseling, he may have been one of those statistics I mentioned earlier. His Christian family, friends, and church have rejected his sexuality as an abomination, and therefore reject him.

I am not saying that religion does not provide some people something good. It does. I’m saying it’s unnecessary. This is probably going to come across as very callous, but you asked what happened to me and whether or not God didn’t do what I asked of him. I’ve already told you that nothing “happened.” It was a long process. But, I think you should think about your own life and how you have probably come to God with a great deal of awe and love, but God has not seen fit to alleviate your pain.

Our purpose in life, the meaning we place on our lives, are up to us. It’s what we make it. And I have made my life about being the best father, husband, friend, and healer I can be. I have love in abundance and I am happy, healthy, successful, and an Atheist.

Your friend, with love,

Rob

It appears that televangelist Pat Robertson is in the thrall of Satan, according to spiritual warriors, Drs. Valerie Tarico and Marlene Winell.  “It’s the only possible explanation,” said Tarico. “How else can we make sense of his repeated attempts to humiliate both God and Christianity in the wake of recent natural disasters.”

Tarico spotted what she saw as a suspicious pattern after Robertson’s recent remarks about Haiti. As people lay dying in the rubble of Tuesday’s tragic earthquake and nations around the world scrambled disaster experts, Robertson spoke to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club:” ”Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” “They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the Devil said, okay it’s a deal.” Robertson summed it up: “Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

“Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” said Tarico. “When Robertson blamed the Katrina disaster on God, and said He was punishing those black people for the sins of their gay neighbors, I thought it might just be human error. All we like sheep have gone astray, you know.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But suddenly, when I read Robertson’s remarks about Haiti, it was like a light blazed down from heaven and a voice spoke saying, ‘Behold, the Father of Lies.’ I picked up the phone and called the only person more familiar with these problems than I am, Dr. Marlene Winell. She confirmed my worst fears.”We spoke with Dr. Winell in her Bay Area office. “Demons need a host, and they can jump from one person to another,” she explained. “We know this because Jesus cast demons out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs. The pigs drowned themselves, the same kind of self-destructive behavior we are seeing in Mr. Robertson. It is possible that he was infected at or around the funeral of Dr. Jerry Falwell. In hindsight we can see that Dr. Falwell was possessed by a similar — possibly the same — demon.”

Back in 2001, when the U.S. was reeling from the Twin Tower bombings, Falwell horrified Christians around the world by blaming the disaster on gays and woman who have had abortions. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” Falwell said on The 700 Club television show. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Could this be the work of any old run-of-the-mill demon?  “I doubt it,” said Winell. “Those remarks were broadcast to an enormous audience.  Probably tens of thousands of people were turned off of Christianity and the Christian God. I think this is a media strategy organized by Satan himself. We’re talking about Beelzebub. The guy is a marketing genius. This is the snake that sold Adam and Eve an apple in trade for paradise.”

Winell went on to remind us that “Sarah Palin, as a prominent Christian could easily have been possessed by Satan, like Roberts, but she is very aware of spiritual warfare. She had the foresight to have an African Minister pray over her for protection against witchcraft.  Now would be the time for Palin to help Robertson. With her connections, she could arrange an exorcism and then get him the same protection treatment.” **

Our reporter pointed out that similar comments have been made by Islamic leaders about natural disasters: “A Saudi professor at Al-Imam University said the devastating tsunami that killed over 150,000 people was Allah’s punishment for homosexuality and fornication at Christmastime.”These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries are Allah’s punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims,” said sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan.”

Both Tarico and Winell saw this as confirmation of their hypothesis. To quote Tarico, “Anyone who listens to Reverend Hagee knows that Muslim leaders are controlled by Satan himself. And now you tell me they have been using words that are virtually identical to those of Falwell and Robertson?! Fawzan Al… It sounds a lot like Falwell, doesn’t it. Look no further.”

**Friends of Sarah Palin interested in helping Pat Robertson and defending the honor of Christianity can post this article on her wall.