I am at somewhat of a disadvantage since I’m a hunter and pecker, not a touch-typist, but I can still win the odd 4×4 round when the word count is low (and the real pros aren’t racking up massive totals). As for 5×5, well, if I get on the first page of the scoreboard I am doing well!

One of the interesting aspects of the site is the number of people who use their screen name (which can be changed at any time) to make a political statement. Hence you get the Obama supporters, and the Obama haters, and a fair number of people proclaiming “Jesus Loves You”, “Jesus Is Lord”, or “U Have a Friend In Jesus” and so on. I must admit that occasionally they would prompt me to change my screen name to something like “Jesus, Your Imaginary Friend” — a little petty I know, but it used to irritate me that they would pester the rest of us with their proselytizing when all we want to do is play Boggle for a few minutes. In the end I just used the screen name “Above Us Only Sky” and left it at that.

Another cool aspect of the site is that you can form teams with other players—particularly fun if you’re not one a regular high scorer. Since I started playing the 5×5 board, I have noticed that it’s the religious teams that get the most traction, followed by the usual pro/anti-Obama teams. Thus you will almost always see a “Team JesusIssovereign” (of course it’s got to be more explicit than “Team Christian”), a “Team Atheist,” a “Team Jewish,” and even a “Team Catholic.” Thus the religious divide that exists in society reaches even into Boggleland! The one notable exception is the regular “Team Pirates, Aarrgh!” because you can never have too many pirates playing Boggle.

(CNN) — A federal judge on Thursday struck down the federal statute that established the National Day of Prayer, ruling that it violates the constitutional ban on government-backed religion.

“[I]ts sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function,” a Wisconsin judge wrote in the ruling, referring to the 1952 law that created the National Day of Prayer.

“In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience,” wrote the judge, Barbara B. Crabb.

So, in the time it took for me to (almost) finish my taxes, the story changes from the silly email rumor that President Obama has canceled the National Day of Prayer to a federal court ruling that declares the 1952 National Day of Prayer statute unconstitutional!

Now, nothing is actually going to happen between now and May 6th since the statute will stand until all avenues of appeal are exhausted, and President Obama has already stated that he will be issuing the proclamation on scheduled, but this is going to drive the conservative Christians to apoplexy nonetheless.

Should be fun.

For the record, while I agree with the judge’s ruling (prayer is an inherently religious exercise and the federal government should stay out of it) I fully expect it to be overturned on appeal, with the appellant judges citing some sort of vague ceremonial tradition as the reason why the statute should stand—just as they did in various Ten Commandments monument-related cases.

In fact, given that this will give the religious right all the excuse they need to kick up an even bigger fuss about activist judges and the perceived persecution of Christians, I would have actually preferred it if the Freedom From Religion Foundation had not brought the suit. Ceremonial stuff like National Day of Prayer proclamations, religious mottoes on our money, and moldy old religious monuments stuffed away in the corner of a courthouse yard are the type of thing that people don’t pay much attention to anyway, secular or religious, and filing lawsuits against them does nothing but keep the religious fundamentalists fired up, engaged, and ready to fight.

I grew up in Britain during the time when Christianity went from being a dominant force in British life to being almost irrelevant.  That didn’t happen because atheists and non-believers fought tooth and nail to overthrow the established order. It happened though benign neglect. The shrinking religious minority found it very hard to get fired up about the gradual atrophy and decay of their religious institutions.

I would prefer the secularists and the separationists to keep their powder dry for things that really matter, like efforts to teach creationism in school, or attempts to proselytize students in public school, etc. But, what’s done is done, and no doubt Fox News pundits everywhere are lining up a gaggle of guests to express their righteous outrage at the court’s decision.

All Obama has done is decided against holding a prayer service in the White House on that day, an event was only started under the last president as a rather empty political gesture to his evangelical Christian constituency. And, by the way, he didn’t hold an NDP service in the White House last year either, so it’s not like this should be shocking news to anyone.

That decision President Obama made last year made Shirley Dobson cry:

Naturally, prominent evangelicals, including National Day of Prayer Task Force Chairman Shirley Dobson, and her husband, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, expressed disappointment in Obama’s decision.

“At this time in our country’s history, we would hope our president would recognize more fully the importance of prayer,” Shirley Dobson said in a statement.

I suspect that in the three weeks between now and May 6th, the outrage of the religious right will serve to prove that the President did the right thing by returning to the usual practice of just issuing a proclamation. Thanks mostly to the efforts of Dobson’s sectarian NDP Task Force, the day, and the celebration of the day had become little more than a political football in the hands of the religious right.

Conservative Christians everywhere will be able to pray to their heart’s content on May 6th (or any other day), whether or not the current president panders to their wishes.

Update: Corrected post to reflect that Dobson’s quote was actually made before last year’s NDP.

Question

When is the National Day of Prayer? Where can I get more information about the event?

Answer

The 2010 National Day of Prayer (NDP) will take place on Thursday, May 6. Shirley Dobson continued as Chairman of the NDP Task Force; Dr. Franklin Graham is the Honorary Chairman for 2010.  

The National Day of Prayer has its own Web site (www.nationaldayofprayer.org) that offers information about how the day is observed across the United States.

The first paragraph is highly misleading. There is no Honorary Chairman for the National Day of Prayer. It is a position that has been created solely by the NDP Task Force and thus Graham is only the Honorary Chairman for the National Day of Prayer Task Force’s observance of the National Day of Prayer, which is a completely different matter.

The second paragraph is completely untrue. The domain name nationaldayofprayer.org is owned by the “National Day of Prayer Committee” which operates out of the same building as “Focus on the Family” and runs the NDP Task Force solely for the benefit of conservative “Bible-believing” Christians. The site has no information about how the day is observed across the United States unless you happen to be a right-wing moral majority type of Christian.

I filled out the feedback form to (politely) point out the erroneous information in the answer.  It will be very interesting to see if they do anything about it.

One of their long time contributors used to start a daily thread called “Pray for President Bush.” A laudable endeavor, if you happen to be religiously minded, and the prayers he invoked were certainly uplifting enough:

Pray for President Bush day 2579

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank You for this day and for Your mercy and blessings towards us. I thank You for Your power and grace. I think You for Your love. Lord, forgive us of all of our trespasses before You and help us to forgive others as You have forgiven us.

Lord, I pray for the President today. He seems to have a tender heart. May it be attentive to Your plans and Word. May He rest in Your strength to accomplish Your will. May His heart always seek after You. May he have the courage to stand for the one true God, for besides You there is no other god. And, may He triumph over his enemies as he obeys Your will.

I pray for Israel. Let us remain her friend and work towards her good. Lord, protect her from her enemies. Protect her from Ahmadinejad. And may her heart turn to God, her maker.

For it is in the precious name of Christ Jesus that I pray these things, Amen.

But then a funny thing happened. A Democrat won the Presidential election, and the poor old prayer blogger didn’t know what to do. He started off by continuing the daily entreaties to pray for President Obama, but soon the right-wing rabble was roused and vehemently objected to the notion that a left-wing Marxist Muslim Kenyan usurper was worthy of their daily prayers. So after a little soul searching our brave little blogger offered to compromise, and turned the daily thread into the occasional weekly thread to pray for both President Obama and the Republic. But I wonder if you can detect the ever so slight change in tone when it comes to praying for a Democratic president rather than a Republican one…

Pray for the Republic and Obama Weeks 69-71

Lord God, I come to You today watching my country’s government and being stunned at the audacity of those who claim to represent us. Are they in an alternate universe? How shameful! Then, I look at the nation and more than half of the people are against the action they are taking; and yet, it seems they are going to let them just get by with it. Are they spraying us with stuff to make us passive? Where is America’s fighting spirit? Have we become so cynical so as to not risk the wrath of someone like Pelosi? I’m sad for my country. I am fearful for her. She teeters on the edge of a precipice and won’t so much as take a stand and oppose it. Where are the men and women who will say count me in when it comes to leading this country back to its foundations? Are they gone? Is America gone? Lord, only You know and only You can save her.

I know our nation deserves Your wrath. Our abortions have made our streets flow with blood and our rivers and oceans stink with the corruption of deeds of selfishness and callousness. Greed and stupidity caused our nation to elect a Marxist to power. And Naivety and apathy keep him there. God of all Creation, save us from ourselves. Draw us back to You. Keep our corrupt government from destroying us all. And help us to learn the lesson so that we don’t repeat it.

For it is in Jesus’ Holy name and precious name that I pray these things, Amen.

In the words of America’s favorite cartoon hippie, “Zoinks!” After reading all that I have this uncontrollable urge to look outside my window to see if the streets are running red with blood and fire and brimstone are falling from the sky. Funny, though, all I see is a neighbor’s kid playing around on his skateboard in the warm evening sunshine.

Every day I live in this country, I am more and more convinced that while right wing conservatives may physically inhabit the same planet we do, their minds are unimaginably far off in some other reality or dimension most of the time. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

You see, the Census Bureau has told gay couples that they can check the “married” box if they consider themselves married, even in states that do not allow same-sex marriage. This would seem to be a sensible move (for those without an axe to grind) since it provides the government (and posterity) with a more accurate picture of gay households around the country, but I guess Family News In Focus is just worried that gay people could be misled into placing themselves into legal jeopardy.

Yeah, that must be it.

But, as seems to happen with all too many authors, when they get a wee bit famous, they start injecting all kinds of personal views and prejudices into their stories.  I guess they feel that they have earned that right, and I suspect that editors tend to have less control over the content and tenor of their prized authors’ later novels.

I remember slogging my way through Terry Goodkind’s marathon Sword of Truth fantasy series a couple of years ago.  As with many such series, the first few books were entertaining and engaging, but then the pace of the action began to slow and I found myself skipping whole pages as the same plots and conversations were rehashed over and over again.  Then in book eight, Naked Empire, the hero of the story saves a bunch of pacifists from themselves, but not before he holds up the action and gives a chapter-long speech on the evils of pacifism.

Now, I’m not a pacifist.  If a nation is under attack from an aggressor, I believe they have the right to defend themselves.  But the last thing I need when reading a fantasy novel is a  twenty-odd page diatribe against pacifism just because the author has an axe to grind.  Nothing turns me off more.

Anyway, back to Orson Scott Card.  It was when reading the books in the Ender series when I noticed things starting to go downhill.  The sequel to Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, was okay, but Xenocide began to get a little preachy, and I found Children of the Mind unbearable and couldn’t finish it.

That was around the time I discovered that Card was a Mormon (no big deal) and a social conservative (a slightly bigger deal), but since I had already been turned off by the failing quality of his work, I had no further interest in reading anything more of his anyway.

Then I read Ender’s Game again, as part of a reading group, and it turned out to be an interesting exercise.  This time I was fully aware of Card’s politics, and was surprised how much of his personal beliefs can be found in the novel now that I knew what to look for.  Knowing that Card was, and still is, an enthusiastic backer of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq certainly shed new light on the militaristic nature of Ender’s training, not forgetting that he is a very young child at the time.  Now there is no reason why an author should not create such a setting for their novel and it may not be any reflection of the author’s personal views or prejudices, but I have little doubt that in Orson Scott Card’s case, it is.

Of course, now that Card has fully allied himself with the religious wingnuts in their ridiculous effort to “defend marriage from the gays,” I have absolutely no inclination to contribute further to the coffers of Mr. Card by buying any more of his books.

Now they’re back, in full whine mode, and with a law suit claiming that their academic freedom and their constitutional right to free speech have been violated.  Not surprisingly their press release is laughable, and full of lies and distortions.

Dr. Raymund Paredes, in his official capacity as Texas Commissioner of Higher Education, has assumed and officially favored his personal viewpoint that the Big Bang was an “astonishing event” that “was initiated some 14 billion years ago,” and imposed that personally-held belief on a private school. No eyewitness or forensic evidence was presented by Dr. Paredes last April to support his assumption; he relied only on his ardent belief in this theory that is professed by some scientists, but not all.

It’s just laughable that any scientist would even suggest that “eyewitness or forensic evidence” is required before a scientific theory can be considered to be more than an “assumption,” but it is an objection frequently raised by creationists in the form of the question “If you weren’t there to witness it, then how do you know?” often followed by “God was there, and told us exactly what happened.”  Naturally, this begs the return question: “So, were you there when God told us what happened?”

And, as it happens, we do have very good eyewitness and forensic evidence going all the way back to just after the Big Bang, from instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cosmic Background Explorer.  But, of course, the ICR conveniently rejects telescopic observations as reliable evidence, despite having failed hopelessly in their attempts to produce a coherent alternative that explains how we can see galaxies that are 13 billion light years away from Earth.

As a result, college-level science education in Texas is now muzzled by Texas governmental censorship, a situation that interferes with both academic freedom, the right of a school to teach any subject from its own institutional viewpoint; and interstate commerce, the right of a school outside Texas to recruit and teach Texas residents.

Nonsense.  Nobody is muzzling college-level science education.  The ICR is free to teach whatever they want as science—even the theory that the Sun and Moon are moved around by angels, or that hurricanes are God’s belches, if they want.  What they can’t do is teach their creationist nonsense in a science course and have it recognized by the State of Texas as an accredited Master of Science program.

Of course, the controversy is not unique to ICR’s graduate school. Scientists and professors who are Christians, and even non-Christian academics, continue to face persecution from science censors. Ben Stein’s Expelled documentary in 2008 clearly demonstrated that even highly-qualified scientists in secular institutions are facing various forms of expulsion simply because they question “recognized” Darwinian beliefs and the tenets of evolutionary science.

And we all know what a load of hyped up nonsense that movie turned out to be.

THECB Commissioner Raymund Paredes insists that the 27-year-old Master of Science program at ICRGS cannot possibly be “science” because its professors hold a biblical Christian viewpoint about the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. Call it something other than science, he and his board members suggested, and ICR can move its school to Texas.

Paredes is exactly right.  The ICR doesn’t practice science because it cannot accept any scientific finding that contradicts their literal interpretation of the Bible.  When you use the scientific method to make a discovery, you don’t do what the ICR does and go running to Bible to find out if you’re on the right track.  That is not science.

I still remember from my boyhood the days of racial segregation in America, and walking past public bathroom doors labeled “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.” Discrimination was ugly then, and discrimination is just as ugly today.

Oh boy.  How unbelievably crass to compare their imagined affront with the century-long struggle of African Americans to acheive equal rights in this country.  Pathetic.

ICRGS is now the victim of academic (and religious) viewpoint discrimination in the Lone Star State. And because this government-mandated viewpoint ban is now enforced against the content of ICR’s school catalog within the state, this viewpoint discrimination includes censorship-stifling freedom of the press.

Again, their academic freedoms have not been discriminated against.  They are allowed to teach what they want, where they want, how they want, and they can call all of it science until they’re blue in the face.  What they can’t do is force the State of Texas to redefine science so that it matches the ICR’s definition, nor that they force the THECB to grant official recognition to a Master of Science program that doesn’t teach real science.

I predict that, even in a state as conservative as Texas, this law suit isn’t going anywhere, and for that, I will be thankful.

So sayeth the sharp-witted political wit, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.

It is probably the most famous quotation to come out of his brilliant show, The Colbert Report, and it has the merit not only of being funny, but of having a large ring of truth about (or should I say “truthiness”?) too, at least it does in America.

Why do I say that?  Well, as a British expat, I know that there is such a thing as a rational, secular conservative, in fact there are millions of them.  Right wingers in Britain may be a little more religious that their left-leaning fellow citizens, but they have nothing like the same religious fervor that swamps the conservative movement here in the USA.  British conservatives are quite capable of debating the merits of social policy without invoking the Bible or God at every opportunity, and even when I believe they’re on the wrong side of the argument, there is at least some comfort in knowing that I have a chance of changing their mind if I present them with a persuasive enough rational argument.

Contrast American conservatives.  Oh, I know there are plenty of secular and non-believing Republicans and conservatives around–I know a few personally–but they are in the unenviable position of belonging to a party that is dominated by the religious right and their allies.  Their voice is not heard.  Indeed, they are often treated with suspicion and even vilified if they speak up to defend their rational beliefs. 

It’s not all sweetness and light for non-believers on the left side of the political spectrum either, of course.  But at least we don’t have to battle the same amount of religious intensity when it comes to debating politics, moral issues and public policy.  Sure, there is still plenty of irrationality to go around, but it tends to be less organized, less focused, and can usually be overcome eventually.

Of course, in the end, there is only one true reality, and it’s neither left or right, it just is.  It’s just unfortunate that in America, one side (in general) is so much further away from the truth of that reality than the other.  It doesn’t always have to be so, and I am hopeful I will live to see the day when it is no longer that way.