If you watch South Park – a crude and offensive adult cartoon that makes insightful social commentary – or watch conservative news, you’ve heard of the recent Comedy Central censorship of an episode a recent episode, partially due to a vague threat from some stupid website.

Here’s the basic premise: All the celebrities the “town of South Park” have been making fun of get together and decide they need to find a way to stop South Park’s abuse. So they make a class action law suit against them. Tom Cruise, knowing that the Muslim prophet Muhammad is the one thing no one is allowed to mock, demands the town make Muhammad appear, then the celebrities will withdraw the lawsuit.

Of course, the town’s people, during a discussion, sight the danger in doing so, and point out the utter conundrum in producing a depiction of someone who has been dead for 1200 year for whom there is no depiction of to reference.

The episode was in two parts. The first one had Muhammad appear inside a moving van, then inside a mascot outfit of a bear. I haven’t seen the second part but it was highly censored and likewise isn’t available on southparkstudios.com where I usually watch.

No one made of fuse when Muhammad appeared on the show several years ago as a member of the Super Bestfriends, a group of super heroes that included several religious icons and Aqua Man. But in recent years some Muslims have turned seriously violent using depictions of Muhammad as an excuse.

So it’s totally and completely clear that Comedy Central is unwilling to allow fun to be made of Muhammad. However, South Park maintains Jesus as a running character, as well as God – the Judeo-Christian one, who is depicted as an amalgamation of all kinds of different ugly creatures – with zero censorship. And the word around is, there will soon be a new series of Jesus episodes coming up.

So some Christians might take offense to the fact that South Park makes consistent fun of Jesus, but has had resent attempts at Muhammad censored. So, for those people who hold their Christian religion sacred, and want to do something about South Park’s double standard, here is my best advice: Don’t.

Listen. If you want to boycott Comedy Central go ahead. Besides South Park you’re not missing anything. But listen. Trey Parker wrote this one. He’s an expert in highlighting ridiculous things in our society people like to spin or ignore – love or hate. Pay attention to the overall point he’s making!

We just watched a big to-do over Muhammad. Out of fear Comedy Central sat on their writer’s freedom of speech. Liberals defended the censorship. Muslims threatened violence that people took serious – appropriately. And now we’ll get to see how society reacts to Jesus.

So if you are upset about a double standard, embrace South Park. They’re doing your work for you. This is a real world proof of a double standard – not to mention the fact that Christianity is the one group America feels comfortable offending and otherwise oppressing.

Noisy Dove wishes everyone a happy Passover and Good Friday.  

I still don’t have much love for the Creationist movement, but this Ben Stein movie is hilarious. It, among other things, follows scientists who were blacklisted for being associated with “intelligent design.” It’s pretty well done. Made me laugh.

I did hear of Pat Robertson’s comments. I know next to nothing about the supposed pact though. It apparently comes from a single book. Some say it is true, others say it is not. Either way, Robertson certainly wasn’t being intentionally hateful. The program he said the comment on was dedicated to raising relief money for the Haitian victims. Immediately after the comment he added something like, “so let’s reach out and help these people….” The comment was meant to move his viewers to compassion for a lost and struggling people.

Of course, there were Christian Haitians injured and killed in this incident, and that is regularly the case; the righteous and unrighteous suffer together so that the righteous can show the unrighteous how to suffer as trusting creatures of Almighty God.

There is good reason to see this situation as the doing of humans rather than demons, though. So many buildings collapsed because they were hazardous buildings. So many are now destitute because they were already in poverty. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Why only now are the richer nations of the world rushing out their hands with commitments of long-term help? Perhaps this earthquake will be the turning point for Haiti. New resources. Better government. Stronger communities. If God did send the quake, he might have sent it to wake us up!

I think to start, if there were rumors of our own ancestors having made a pact with the devil, I would want to organize a ceremony dedicating us and our children forever to the Lord. Just in case. Just to be clear.

Activity and Ontology.

Ontology (a static condition):

Something is to be labeled evil when it is in opposition to God’s desires.

Evil is a label, not a unit of measurement. There is no degree or scale to the label. Something is in conflict with God’s desires, or it is not.

Every human is born into a condition opposite of what God desires.

Every human is evil.

Activity (fluid decisions):

How often each human chooses to actively engage inclinations proceeding from their evil condition is a matter of personal decision.

Illustration: Jane is a sexual creature. That condition she did not choose and cannot unchoose (repress, yes, but not unchoose). How often and to what degrees she chooses to express that condition is a choice she constantly makes.

(  Excursus: This is why Paul taught that we are doubly guilty; (1) we were born into a condition we cannot change, and (2) all have at one time or another made choices in accordance with that condition.  )

The effect of these two realities:

Jane jaywalks and John eats babies. Both humans are evil. And one is choosing to participate in that condition to agreater degree than the other.

How will God handle these varying degrees of participation at the last judgment? He hasn’t told us. Dante in his Divine Comedy suggests that the degree of each person’s suffering in hell is related to their degree of participation in their evil condition through this life. That doesn’t seem likely to me as hell isn’t pitchforks but separation from God’s relational presence and the bearing of his image. Will there be degrees, then, of separation from bearing God’s image and experiencing his presence? I don’t think we’re going to know before it happens.

Listen atheists, I appreciate and understand your position. When your lawsuits successfully remove religious symbols – mainly Jesus and the 10 Commandments – you count a victory. Indeed, allowing the state to endorse, or even seem to endorse, a specific religion can be dangerous – so much so that followers of religion should argue to prevent their own religion from being endorsed. It’s so important because if the state is willing to promote your religion, that means one day it may switch to another, or highjack the authority your religion might give over its followers.

Law suits aren’t the answer here though. Atheists, I know you look forward to a day when religion is only a distant memory. You imagine children hearing about Jesus and Buda the way children now hear about Hector and Hercules. You like to think the future holds a utopian world totally ruled by logic and science, perfect justice, and steady human progress no longer hindered by the belief in a higher greater power.

You have to understand something. You don’t have to even give religion one once of credibility. What you have to do it realize that religion, specifically Jewdeo-Christian religion, is an ingrained part of our culture. Not only were most of the first colonies composed of religious zealots seeking religious freedom, but the vary morality the free world is built upon comes directly from the Jewdeo-Christian religion – The 10 Commandments. Indeed, the idea of valuing other people – life – was enforced beyond Darwinian empathy. This is easily seen in how cruel nearly all other pre-modern societies are/were who did not inherit these values.

Ending slavery, modern justice and democracy, and equality all have roots in Jewdeo-Christian morality. Arguing that religion is the cause of such things as slavery is counter to your precious logic, regardless of how convenient some abusers of religion may have made such arguments.

So spend your time on something productive will you? If your town puts up a display around Christmas, leave it the hell alone. It’s not unconstitutional unless Congress makes a law endorsing a religion. And remember too – atheism is a type of religion. LOL – I know, I know… You really don’t like that. Logic and reason, logic and reason. Seriously though, do you think all your current ideas will be seen as rational science 1000 years from now? More likely our descendents will see our science the way we see blood letting and the study of Chi and humors. Face it. Treating science as your religion is as silly as treating religion as science. And if you don’t want to keep acting like a religion, stop your bickering with religion.

When the last surrender finally ended World War 2 in 1945, another crisis was already staring the world in the face: stabilization. For six years humanity had bombed, burned, and bled their existence on Earth. From water pipelines to government officials, entire nations had to be rebuilt from rubble and debris. In that process some boundaries were redrawn and others were newly created. A part of this global reshuffling was the founding of the modern nation of Israel in 1948. The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine facilitated this national independence that against immense odds still endures today.

This modern story is said by some to have been foretold thousands of years ago. They believe that in ancient books of the Bible, Israel’s ancestors prophesied their 1948 declaration of independence. The passages most frequently appealed to as such prophesies are the following Old Testament excerpts. Other passages exist, but these suffice as characteristic examples:

Ezekiel 37:21-22
This is what the sovereign LORD says: “Look, I am about to take the Israelites from among the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from round about and bring them to their land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel, and one king will rule over them all. They will never again be two nations and never again be divided into two kingdoms.”

Ezekiel 34:13
I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and bring them to their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the streams, and in all the inhabited places of the land.

Amos 9:14-15
I will bring back my people, Israel; they will rebuild the cities lying in rubble and settle down. They will plant vineyards and drink the wine they produce; they will grow orchards and eat the fruit they produce. I will plant them on their land and they will never again be uprooted from the land I have given them, says the LORD your God.

Jeremiah 31:10
Hear what the LORD has to say, O nations. Proclaim it in the faraway lands along the sea. Say, “The one who scattered Israel will regather them. He will watch over his people like a shepherd watches over his flock.”

These passages and others that refer to a scattering and regathering of Israel are from books of the Bible written by prophets preaching before and during Israel’s exile in the 6^th century BC. This is an important observation.

As part of God’s plan for that time, the kingdom of Israel was conquered and deported by Babylon. Later, the Israelites returned to their homeland under the protection of Persian King Cyrus. The Old Testament book of Ezra is the record of this feat.

It seems to me the above passages are promises from God to return his people to their homeland, and those promises were fulfilled with the proclamation of King Cyrus of Persia (see Ezra chapter 1).

To the best of my knowledge, no prophecies of another scattering and regathering of Israel occur in any Old Testament book written after the Babylonian exile. This is further evidence that the prophecies about Israel returning to their homeland were fulfilled circa 538 BC as recorded in the book of Ezra.

So while it is possible that the Bible could contain prophecies of Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence, the Old Testament passages normally appealed to as such prophecies were almost certainly already fulfilled 2,500 years before modern Israel was born.

Below is a chart that places the Old Testament writing prophets in their respective times. The chart shows how prophets like Ezekiel who prophesied about a regathering wrote during the Israelite exile in Babylon. The chart also shows the prophets like Haggai who do not prophesy about a future regathering wrote after the exile.

Click on the image to enlarge

This is the standard ‘big tent’ definition of Evangelicalism, using my words:

Evangelicalism is a Christian Protestant movement that began in the 1730s in England and America, led by the likes of Puritanism, Pietism, and Methodism in England, and the likes of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in America. It maintains four essential priorities:

• the primacy of Scripture

• the centrality of Christ’s death as substitutionary atonement for human sins

• the necessity of personal conversion

• the importance of ‘kingdom living’ (actively following Jesus by engaging such efforts as the spiritual devotions, Christian community, deeds of compassion, justice, etc)

Anything else, or anything less, is not Evangelicalism-proper, but someone’s personality or opinions fused in with these four pillars. For instance, Evangelicals did not vote George Bush into office. Political/social conservatives, who also happen to be Evangelicals, voted him in. Further, many political/social liberals, who also happen to be Evangelicals, voted Barrack Obama into office this time around.

As another example, A Christian who says she is an Evangelical because she really has a heart to love the poor is not an Evangelical. She is a Christian who has a passion for a Christian principle which also happens to be one-quarter of the essential priorities of Evangelicalism.