Christmas Tree-son

Hey, you! Do you find "nature" problematically pagan? Do you doctor secular Christmas hymns to make them about religion? ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire/Just like people do in Hell...") Is your living room lacking in crucifixion imagery?


Then have I found the tree for you.

The inventor calls it the CHRIST-mas tree. (Get it? Because the word "Christ" is in Christmas, but people say it like "Chris" because clearly they're on the wrong side of the war.) It can be yours for $400 -- pricey for a plastic tree, perhaps, but how else will you teach your kids about the first Christmas, when the disciples hung commemorative Ronald McDonald ornaments on the cross?

For the CHRIST-ian on a budget, they offer this reimagined holiday wreath for $60. Because circles? Also pagan.

Gay Exorcisms? Really, Tyra?

According to this recap on Jezebel, today's Tyra Banks Show featured a sixteen-year-old boy who underwent an exorcism to have his gayness removed. She also gave significant air time to the (totally insane) priest who removed his "demon", and showed footage of the actual (terrifying) exorcism.

On the plus side: all the homophobic gay-demon-exorcising folks came off looking crazy. Tyra, clearly, thought they were crazy. The audience thought they were crazy. And maybe the point was to be all, hey, look at these crazy people.

But - BUT!- is it too much to ask for a pro-gay Christian to appear on a show like this? To present a worldview that moves beyond Gays Vs. Jesus? To show that poor, conflicted sixteen-year-old kid that he doesn't have to choose between love and faith?

Tyra also had a show in 2006 featuring the Phelps family - a.k.a. the Westboro Baptist church, a.k.a. the charming people who hold up "God hates fags" signs at the funerals of hate crime victims. And again, the crazy people came off looking crazy. But again - they were the show's only representation of what it means to be Christian. And if anyone has an unbelievably screwed-up idea of what it means to be Christian, it's the Phelps family.

People being loving and accepting don't get the big ratings. (Sweeps Week would be really boring if they did.) But here's the thing: Tyra herself is both clearly pro-gay and, by all evidence, a Christian. It's not a contradiction. Hopefully her viewers have caught on - but it would be great to see her drive that message home in lieu of another Jesus-fueled hatefest.

Which Sin Makes the Best Baby Name?

In their research of the all-time worst baby names, the folks at Ancestry.com located babies named after every one of the seven deadly sins - except gluttony. The most popular sin-based baby moniker was Pride, followed distantly by Lust. A sampling of actual names they uncovered:

Lust Garten
Greed Sister Mancini
Avarice Sullivan
Sloth Washton
Wrath Gordon
Envy Burger (Shouldn't these folks have gone with Gluttony?)
Pride Saint
Greed McGrew
Pride Saint
Lust T. Castle

I can't wait until the Pope's seven new deadly sins start to appear in the baby-name rosters. Note to Angelina: Morally-Debatable-Experiments Pitt is pretty catchy.

Pictured: my own baby, who was named after a saint, but only because "Envy Burger" was taken.

You Know How I Know You're Gay?

"Masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he’s watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body." - From the tract
"Porn Again Christian" by Mars Hill Church pastor Marc Driscoll.

Better yet, here's the cover image, which leads one to the conclusion that masturbation is both gay AND suicidal:



Good times!

Buddha in the Supreme Court

The Sociological Images blog takes a critical look at racial stereotypes in political satire, including the baffling, maddening recent cover of the National Review depicting Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as Buddha.

The comparison of the magazine cover to the original icon is particularly eye-opening...

Stephen Baldwin the Baptist

What was it I was saying about reality TV and religion? Whatever it was, forget it: I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here has taken reality-TV religion to new extremes. Above, watch Evangelical spokescelebrity Stephen Baldwin preach the word to The Hills' Spencer Pratt, who knows that Jesus answers prayers because Jesus introduced him to Miley Cyrus. (Seriously.) Below, Stephen spontaneously baptises Spencer, who compares sin to eel sperm and his baptism to "a ten-year bath with lots of bubbles."



For more, check out Gabe's astute commentary on Religion Dispatches.

Doonesbury Does the Bible (But Not Very Well)

This past Sunday's Doonesbury strip comparing the Old and New Testaments has some Jewish leaders demanding an apology. Trudeau's take is oversimplified at best, offensive at worst, but to play devil's advocate: the 17-year-old in the comic strip isn't supposed to be a Biblical scholar. She certainly sounds like a real teenage kid, earnest and uninformed, talking about religion. The problem, as I see it, is that this is a Sunday strip, meaning that it's not in the context of story. There's no "before" and "after." Trudeau opens up a can of worms and tries to toss it off with a chuckle -- disappointing for a satirist with an admirable history of tackling cultural issues head-on.

Benjamin Weiner at Religion Dispatches suggests using this as a "teachable moment":

Christians, if you haven’t already, please take some time to recognize that the division of your scriptures into “old” and “new”, with a panting demiurge presiding over the first and a Guevarist lovegod community-organizing his way through the second is a false dichotomy, and a dangerous and frustrating one, at that, when it is used as a thumbnail sketch of Jewish-Christian difference. Your “old testament”, what we call the Tanakh, portrays a God of manifold characteristics—from the friend and confidant of Abraham and, yes, the ferocious goader of the wilderness, to the ironic moral conscience of Jonah and the mystical whirlwind of Job—that have served as the basis for kaleidoscopic articulations of Jewish theology.