On Religion in Tri-Cities Virginia Tennessee

There is a great deal of material on this site in regards to religion, in particular subjects related to rational monotheism. While rejecting elements Christian theology as a form of Gnosticism (Gnosticism is not used as an attack), I'm not anti-Christian and in fact as a classical Deist/Unitarian I consider Christians and Jews as fellow believers. This is a skeptic site, but that also includes equal treatment of radical Islam, and secular pseudo-theologies such as socialism/Marxism, radical environmentalism. Those I do oppose and do so openly. They are a threat to our freedoms, Christianity is not. They are as irrational as the ravings of Pat Robertson. This includes all form of racist, left-wing "liberation theology." Also see Sullivan County, TN. Exposed

To quote a visitor to this website on Jews:

I think it is safe to say, that with the election of Barack Obama as president, that there is no way that a tiny elite of rich powerful Jews controls the world. The conspiracy theories that say a tiny elite of rich powerful Jews controls the world are undeniably flat wrong. If there was such a powerful group they would have never let him become president. The Jewish conspiracy theory is completely busted.

D.C. RN, BSN

Say no to the ACLU

How did I go from local culture to religion? In a community that in 2001 ING ranked as one of the worse to earn a living, and in 2008 ranked in the bottom 10% nationally, local religious fundamentalist' fanatics (known as the Religious Right) showed utter indifference. As thousands of jobs were lost from 1990 to present, all they were obsessed with the Y2K Rapture by putting emergency services on alert and hanging the Ten Commandments in the Sullivan County Courthouse. To quote one former supervisor, Sullivan County doesn't lay down for atheists. The Sullivan Baptist Association was behind this (as in Southern Baptist Convention and a tactic promoted by Jerry Falwell) I asked to hang a plaque and the process be opened to all faiths. I was refused, I accused them of pandering to Jerry Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention, claiming the anti-Christ was coming and was a Jew. Super bigot Bob Jones shows up to lend his support. Even while they were hanging the thing Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, the region's largest employer, just fired another 750 workers. The indifference, at least in public, was shocking. I was threatened with legal action over this website and public comments on their pandering. What I didn't know at the time was is an effort to draw attention to the poverty and job problems here, I stumbled into the cross-hairs of a religious war between the Religious Right and the Religious/Secular Left.

Yes there is a Religious Left, often in a tense relationship with the Secular Left. They agree on most issues except religion. So I was forced to look into both sides and I revile both sides. Their indifference towards common working class people (white, black, or Hispanic) and their irrational thinking should make everyone fearful. They call themselves various labels such as liberals, but I'm a classical liberal and these people are not liberals. Hillary Clinton doesn't like the term liberal either, because she isn't one, but prefers the term Progressive. While being mostly a hodge-podge of left-wing causes and hard to define, they are in every sense of the term a religion. They are as fundamentalist and intolerant and just as prone to using government coercion and intimidation to remake society as does Pat Robertson.

Their main religious views are dogmatic Humanism/Marxism (more the secular left, but overlap on many social issues) and with Al Gore leading an environmental religious crusade. See Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, and the Rejection of Reason. Both are a mortal threat to individual liberty and freedom. Socialism can be a pseudo-religion in itself. They're for helping the poor, but by wealth redistribution and dependency, not supplying the skills and means to live independent lives. In a way it's social and economic serfdom and they fight to keep it that way.

Equal Time for Christians

NASHVILLE, Tenn. May 15, 2008 (AP) - A proposal that would allow the state Department of Education to develop a curriculum for the academic study of the Bible in public schools is on its way to the governor's desk...

Ten years ago I would have been on the side of banning the Bible, but here is my view printed in the Bristol Herald Courier June 4, 2008. My views are keep all religion out of schools, politics and religion out of science.

Re: Teaching the Bible in Public Schools. As one who openly opposed hanging the Ten Commandments in the Sullivan County Courthouse, and who has written openly against Christian theology in the Herald Courier, I say yes, teach the Bible in school. Shocked? Here's why:

First, many schools are teaching a whitewashed introduction to Islam, a violent religion far worse than anything today outside Marxism is. Christians don't practice violence, outside an occasional lone individual. Islam openly teaches violence against non-believers.

Second, school material in general is highly anti-Christian, with underlying tones of Marxism, liberation theology, and Humanism. If they want to promote these pseudo-religions, it's only fair Christians get an equal hearing.

Third, so-called "environmentalism" is another pseudo-religion, an irrational, pagan earth-worship that holds Nature as somehow divine and is equal to man, a theological view. This pantheist/New Age nonsense too holds many anti-Christian undertones and its followers are often just religious fanatics that misuse science to promote a political/religious agenda.

Finally, the misuse of evolution to undermine the Christian faith. I'm an evolutionist myself, but the evidence is clear there's no "natural" mechanism to explain the Creation of the universe. And I do mean Creation unless one can supply verifiable scientific proof the atheist view is correct. There is none. They need to teach the scientific method so one understands just what a "theory" really means in science. Darwin warned when intelligence was involved, natural selection was voided.

It is time schools get back to academics and away from politics, religion, and social engineering. But if they want to keep promoting anti-Christian and often anti-Western themes, then I must stand with Christians and demand they get equal treatment.

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Propaganda In Science Class

By Letters To The Editor June 7, 2008

I agree with Lewis Loflin ["Equal time for Christians," June 4] that our schools are full of anti-Christian propaganda. One of the biggest offenders is in the area of science. I have been doing some serious research on the subject of evolution vs. creation. If you talk to the very scientists who have been trying to duplicate the processes involved in the spontaneous creation of life as theorized by Darwin, they have failed to do so. Any other theories that have been put out there have been disproved or laughed off the table. Dr. Walter L. Bradley has a doctorate in material science and is an expert on polymers and thermodynamics, both of which are critically important in the life origin debate. He has done extensive research and has come up with an interesting analogy. What if you have a printer that just started printing on its own, randomly printing letters? What are the chances that it would produce a written language that tells a story? That's like finding one particular grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.

The DNA inside a single cell is purely and simply written information. We use a 26-letter alphabet in English. In DNA, there is a four-letter chemical alphabet whose letters combine in various sequences to form words, sentences and paragraphs. These comprise all the instructions needed to guide the functioning of a cell. It works just the way alphabetical letter sequences do in our language. Now when we see written language, we can infer based on our experience that it has an intelligent cause, so we can legitimately, using analogical reasoning, conclude that the remarkable information sequences in DNA had an intelligent cause.

This means life on Earth came from a "who" instead of a "what." The scientific community has admitted that the theory of evolution does not make sense, yet we continue to teach it as fact to our school children. I think it is time for the education system to update its curriculum to reflect these findings.

Deborah Foran Bluff City, Tenn.

Joy A. Smith-Briggs

My response to a New Age Mystic

Who Else Will Be Responsible For Earth?

By Letters To The Editor July 1, 2009 Bristol Herald Courier

My righteous indignation reared its head when I read a recent letter from Lewis Loflin concerning the "followers of the watermelon cult." Mr Loflin claims that "The earth is not holy, divine, sacred, etc." as he rails against the "pantheistic New Age nonsense" advanced by those of us who can clearly see and acknowledge global warming.

Perhaps we are reading from different Bibles, but mine states that "the earth is the Lord's...the sea is his and he made it, and his hands prepared the dry land." That clearly makes it holy, divine and sacred to me. If we don't assume responsibility for stewardship of the Earth, who will?

Joy A. Smith-Briggs Bristol, Tenn.

See Exposing the (Eco-Socialist) Watermelon Cult
What is New Age Religion?
Environmentalism is Religious in Nature That is actually Psalms 24:1-2 and it says, "The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters." (NIV) In no manner does it say the world is God nor is it holy. If she was really a Christian (which I'm not either by the way) she would find the following:

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and (his) divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened...They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator...Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them" (Romans 1:18-32)

In other words Joy worshipping rocks, trees, and dirt is idolatry. Injecting that religious view into politics and using it as public policy to promote your religion still violates separation of religion and state. I don't need deluded mystics such as you using government coercion to meddle in my affairs or telling me where the hell to set my thermostat. That you for sharing your view.

As Ben Franklin noted in a letter to Ezra Stiles in 1790 (Salisbury, Dorothy Cleaveland. "Religion: As the Leaders of this Nation Reveal It." Daughters of the American Revolution Vol.106 (1972), page 541.) what American Deism is all about:

Here is my creed. I believe in One God, the Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render Him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion.

English Deism

French Deism

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