Peter Wehner: Jesus told us to love our enemies. And yet so many have embraced hostile politics in the name of Christianity.
@#8 ... They started believing obvious con-men (and women) ...
Yeah, you might have been able to say that back in the day with the PTL Club.
The PTL Club
en.wikipedia.org
... The PTL Club, also known as The Jim and Tammy Show, was a Christian television program that was first hosted by evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, running from 1974 to 1989. The program was later known as PTL Today and as Heritage Today. During its final years, The PTL Club, which adopted a talk show format, was the flagship television program of the Bakkers' PTL Satellite Network.
History
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had been in the ministry with the Assemblies of God denomination since the early 1960s prior to joining Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), then based in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1965. The Bakkers launched a children's show called Come On Over where the couple entertained viewers with songs, stories, and puppets. In 1966, Jim Bakker became the host of The 700 Club, a religious talk program that evolved from a telethon. The 700 Club would become the flagship program of CBN, which expanded from its original Hampton Roads station to include outlets in Atlanta and Dallas"Fort Worth by 1973.
Beginning in 1972, the Bakker-hosted 700 Club was launched in a dozen test markets, including then-independent station WRET-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina. However, the Bakkers departed CBN in 1973 and relocated to Southern California for a brief period, where they assisted Paul and Jan Crouch in launching Trinity Broadcasting Network before starting their own television ministry in North Carolina. When WRET-TV dropped The 700 Club in 1974, the station's then-owner Ted Turner approached Bakker about buying two hours a day on the outlet, which Bakker accepted. Bakker opted to call the show The PTL Club, and The 700 Club moved to then-ABC affiliate WCCB in Charlotte. ...
Due to his involvement in highly publicized financial and sexual scandals, Jim Bakker resigned on March 19, 1987. He turned all ministry assets over to Lynchburg, Virginia"based pastor and broadcaster Jerry Falwell, who became CEO of the parent organization, Heritage Village Church and Missionary Fellowship, Inc. and assumed control of Heritage USA, the cable network, and of its flagship program. Falwell's involvement was deemed newsworthy,[by whom?] as the PTL ministries were a part of the Assemblies of God denomination and Falwell was a Southern Baptist. Ministry supporters questioned Falwell's intentions and attributed his interest solely to maintaining control of the lucrative cable-television empire owned by PTL to broadcast his own ministry programming.
One commentator noted that "Bakker arranged for Falwell to take over PTL in March in an effort to avoid what he called a 'hostile takeover' of the television ministry by people threatening to expose a sexual encounter he admitted to having seven years earlier with church secretary Jessica Hahn."[3] According to Hahn, on the afternoon of December 6, 1980, when she was a 21-year-old church secretary, Bakker and another preacher, John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped her for "about 15 minutes". Hahn stated she overheard Bakker say afterward to another PTL staffer, "Did you get her too?"[4]
A federal grand jury indicted Bakker for diverting millions of dollars of church funds to personal use. Much of the nation[citation needed] watched the court case to see the outcome of the $165 million in donations.[5][6] ...
(... and don't get me started on Mr Falwell. ...)
And that led us to Kristin Kobes Du Mez. She's been thinking about, researching and writing about these issues for years in her work as a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich. She also identifies as an evangelical Christian. She says that it wasn't until the late 1970s that abortion became a mobilizing force for the religious right. Before that, she told us there was actually a diversity of opinion about abortion in evangelical spaces.
www.npr.org
Religion should be private. Nonsense should stay at home. Don't subject fellow people to dumb ideas.
"[D]ata from the Federal Bureau of Prisons suggest that atheists are far less likely to commit crimes than religious people, and globally the least religious countries have the lowest crime rates."
today.uconn.edu
Oh.
- Russell's Teapot.
Debunked on many levels...
Philosopher Brian Garvey argues that the teapot analogy fails with regard to religion because, with the teapot, the believer and non-believer are simply disagreeing about one item in the universe and may hold in common all other beliefs about the universe, which is not true of an atheist and a theist.[3]
Garvey argues that it is not a matter of the theist propounding existence of a thing and the atheist simply denying it " each is asserting an alternative explanation of why the cosmos exists and is the way it is:
"the atheist is not just denying an existence that the theist affirms " the atheist is in addition committed to the view that the universe is not the way it is because of God. It is either the way it is because of something other than God, or there is no reason it is the way it is."[3]
Philosopher Peter van Inwagen argues that while Russell's teapot is a fine piece of rhetoric, its logical argument form is less than clear, and attempting to make it clear reveals that the Teapot Argument is very far from cogent.[8]
Another philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, states that a falsehood lies at the heart of Russell's argument. Russell's argument assumes that there is no evidence against the teapot, but Plantinga disagrees:
https://medium.com/@jrcii/debunking-russells-teapot-aa06417c0137
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