Not just the Washington Times and Fox News. IIRC the story yesterday was that the Clinton people had fed the smear to the Washington Times, which makes that "unnamed sources close to a political campaign" a little pointed, too.

This is sweet. I've been waiting for the day when ordinary viewers tell Fox News to go fuck itself, and I have a sense that the moment is coming soon.

the Clinton people had fed the smear

I sure hope this isn't true. I don't need any more reasons to hate that campaign organization.

"doesn't have to be hostile in tone"

Does this mean hostility is optional?

Someone brought this up before, and while it's possible, I don't yet see any reason to think that blaming the smear on Clinton is anything more than a double-ended smear. If it were something true and damaging, I'd be more ready to believe it, but spreading lies about another Democrat would hurt Clinton so much that it seems really unlikely.

That is, if the story were something true and damaging about Obama, so spreading it could be justified as just pre-empting the moment when it would have come out anyway, it would seem like something a fellow Democrat would be more likely to do.

Please change it to "Barr-Y! Barr-Y!"

So far, the only people making the claim are a Sun Myung Moon-owned magazine, FoxNews anchors, Rush Limbaugh, and Melanie Morgan. Given those sources, I'm going to label this one an out-and-out lie.

Now it'd be nice if she'd come out with a statement that the attribution of the story to her is a filthy lie.

Filthy lies and vile innuendo!

Which would suggest that Obama should have talked to the Clinton folks before taking a swing at them.

Perhaps this has been noted, but Obama's rebuttal is, in essence: Not a Muslim, Not an Atheist. Christian.

I'm not sure this is as much a blistering attack on false reporting as it is on the godawful possibility that Barack (ha!) is not a Christian.

Anyone care to say where the rumor that the Clinton campaign was responsible is coming from?

Drudge, I think.

12: See the story Apo linked in 8.

9: Now it'd be nice if she'd come out with a statement that the attribution of the story to her is a filthy lie.

I think LBJ had something to say about this phenomenon.

Have you all read Obama's response? It actually made me quite uncomfortable and I think on the balance I've actually lost a bit of respect for him. It wouldn't have been so hard to comment on Doocy's "Why didn't anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised -- spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father -- as a Muslim" and maybe say something about how Keith Ellison has gotten treated recently.

Instead, all the energy seems to be put into making sure that everyone knows that Obama is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party Muslim.

Clinton's office categorically denied having anything to do with the smear immediately. In the end, it seems like the entire thing was more of an attempt to smear Clinton than Obama. Which makes sense, given that the substance of the rumor will be immediately disproven, whereas the attribution of the rumor to Clinton will be much more difficult to disprove.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect an explicit "not that there's anything wrong with that". If the slur were that Obama had been a rent boy on the docks of Honolulu as a teenager, saying that it's simply untrue without simultaneously making it clear that he had the utmost value for gay rights and esteem for sex workers would be okay as well. Badmouthing Muslims is one thing, and something that shouldn't be tolerated in a politician. Reacting to being called a Muslim in a political environment that makes it clear that it's a smear attempt rather than a neutral mistake, on the other hand, IMO he can treat it as the smear that it's intended as.

At the very moment he's been smeared as a Muslim (again, while it shouldn't be a smear, to a large portion of the electorate it is) is not the moment to insist that he burnish his ecumenical credentials.

I think LBJ had something to say about this phenomenon.

Yeah, maybe. My sense of the tactics is far from flawless.

14: Thanks. And to Apo's link.

One wonders about the extent to which an apparently just emailed denial on Obama's part will reach the Limbaugh/Fox News audience.

Stay tuned, I suppose.

Clinton's office categorically denied having anything to do with the smear immediately.

Heh. Hadn't seen that, but good for her.

We will know that America has fullfilled its promise of becoming a great nation the day that a former rent boy from the docks of Honolulu becomes President.

Or when a former president becomes a rent boy on the docks of Honolulu.

I'd settle for a former president strapped naked to an oil rig in Lubbock and left there to shrivel in the sun. Wanting him fucked by the occasional roughneck would be wrong, and besides, he might enjoy it.

I might make a more extensive comment later but for now I'll just say this: if a fairly popular Democratic (i.e. doesn't have to worry about the 40% of Republicans who are so insane that they think Muslims should have to register with the government) congressman who does not have to face election any time in the not-too-distant future cannot bring himself to say "There's nothing wrong with being a Muslim" then, really, who is there left who can say it?

23- I'm relatively sure he can bring himself to say it. It's just that trying to do so at this particular time would probably have been unwise. A little too nuanced, you might say.

Also, you can simultaneously hold that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim on the one hand, and that a Muslim would not get elected president on the other hand.

He can say it, just not at the very same moment he's trying to establish that the people lying and claiming he's a crypto-Muslim mole are making shit up. When you're saying, "I'm not a crypto-Muslim mole, and the people who say I am are making shit up", adding "nonetheless, Islam is a great religion of peace. There is no God but God, and I respect and affirm my brothers who consider Mohammed his prophet" makes you look a little shaky.

I'm certain he's said there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim in the past, and I'm sure he'll say it in the future. I just don't want to insist that he say it as he's being lied about.

I have too much of a crush on Obama. This is unseemly, and will undermine my reputation for evenhanded level-headed hysterical calabatting.

Ba-RACK! Ba-RACK!

Yay! Keith Ellison!

From the Heartland! Be very afraid, coastal elitists! The Lake Wobegon dhimmis are after your ass!

They attached a letter from various religious leaders, including some Muslim ones. (Also including my former rabbi!)

Actually, just one director of the "Muslim Public Affairs Council".

Still, nicely done. One's enough to make the "I'm not distancing myself from Muslims here" point.

"Can Democrats generally make a practice of doing this? It doesn't have to be hostile in tone..."

Disagree. Adopting a hostile tone is important. Otherwise, the statement comes off as a whining complaint, which sends a meta-message of weakness. Something like: "No fair! Somebody get the referee!" Hitting back hard sends a message of strength.

Josh Marshall said it alot better here (sorry, don't know how to use html):

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_08_15.php

22: How about tried at the Hague for war crimes?

I can live with that if you'll throw in Cheney and Rumsfeld in the dock with him.

You're on.

Adopting a hostile tone is important.

I never loved (Red) Ken Livingstone so much as when the Daily Mail accused him of anti-semitism, and Livingstone immediately responded by dragging up the Mail's ugly history as the blackshirt's newspaper of choice.

I think he ended up apologising later, but oh boy did he come out swinging.

Adopting a hostile tone is important.

100% agreed when this stuff is coming from FNC and WaTimes. They are not interested in truth or reconciliation. They're going to make it a fight whether you swing back or not, so fuck em.

Regarding "nothing wrong with being a Muslim", do you guys think it is illegitimate for voters to consider a candidates religious views?

Not always, but often. Anyone who campaigns on an explicit promise to bring Armageddon and the Messiah's return about faster by provoking global nuclear war? I'd have a problem with that. Some religion advocating human sacrifice to make the rains come? Also a problem.

For most mainstream religions where the moral code and religiously mandated behavior aren't in themselves objectionable, I think it'd generally be wrong to vote on the basis of religious beliefs, though. It's not a brightline rule.

39

Isn't the moral code and religiously mandated behavior of Islam (as practiced by most Moslems) objectionable to most Americans?

I think it is illegitimate to assess a candidate based on their religion, as opposed to assessing a candidate on your estimation of their policies. If their faith will interfere with their policy, as in LB's examples, then the flaw is their inability to compartmentalize. Which is a sound basis for not voting for them.

I basically consider all religions equally half-baked.

39: Most? There's an awful lot of moderate Muslims out there.

On a political level, my own family religion is objectionable to me. However, a Mormon candidate willing to epouse gay rights and women's rights and reproductive rights and strong social services could totally get my support. (That Mormon candidate might get excommunicated, but hey...)

Isn't the moral code and religiously mandated behavior of Islam (as practiced by most Moslems) objectionable to most Americans?

I think the same's true of a lot of religions, inc.--if you believe that the US public is pretty pro-choice when not at the margins, and pretty pro-death penalty--Catholicism. Isn't that a problem that Kennedy had to deal with?

There's an awful lot of moderate Muslims out there.

Muslim countries do tend to have a lot of their nuttier stuff as the law of the land.

Ladybird Johnson got spat on in Dallas because LBJ was running with that heathen. I just read a biography about her.

If you're defining 'Muslim countries' as 'Muslim theocracies' rather than 'countries with a lot of Muslims in them'. Nothing all that weird about Turkish law, from a religious point of view, but if you look at the population it's a Muslim country.

How's this for a rule. It's not bigoted to consider a candidate's religious beliefs if you have a rational belief that they will significantly affect the candidate's perfomance in office; it is bigoted if the belief you have is irrational. That's not going to allow for satisfying name-calling, because it's so clearly a judgment call, but it's the best I can do.

To me, even is Ellison were a moderately bad guy, pissing off Bush would make it worth electing him.

47 - why not just judge them on their expected performance, independent of their beliefs? If their beliefs will affect their performance, you can still evaluate whether or not you approve of the effect.

If you're defining 'Muslim countries' as 'Muslim theocracies' rather than 'countries with a lot of Muslims in them'. Nothing all that weird about Turkish law, from a religious point of view, but if you look at the population it's a Muslim country.

Yeah, but if you were to look at countries where Muslims are the dominant group, would Turkey be an exception, or the norm?

Indonesia? Pakistan? There are extremist Islamist movements both places, but they don't, AFAIK, control the government. Are we going by counting countries, or by population?

Yeah, but if you were to look at countries where Muslims are the dominant group, would Turkey be an exception, or the norm?

I think even that's misleading. The Arabs I know from Muslim countries generally drink and smoke, and make it sound like there isn't much problem doing the same in private in their home countries.

Isn't the proper measure as practiced by the majority of American Muslims?

52.--Wait, so real candidates for American political office have to smoke and drink?

Duly noted!

50: Very much the norm, actually. The Muslim world is made up largely of secular autocracies. Iran and Saudi Arabia, not Turkey and Indonesia, are the exceptional cases.

For most mainstream religions where the moral code and religiously mandated behavior aren't in themselves objectionable

You can't possibly believe this can you? How many of your fellow citizens consider GAY=ABOMINATION part of their fundamental religiously-mandated moral code? (As just one example.)

Indonesia? Pakistan? There are extremist Islamist movements both places, but they don't, AFAIK, control the government.

Not to the extent that they do in other Muslim countries, although I'm pretty sure there's provinces in both that use sharia. Pakistan isn't controlled by the Islamic extremists at the moment, but they've made a couple good runs at bumping off Musharraf.

That being said, this isn't really all that relevant to the thread, and 53 gets it right.

Well, for the ones who I rationally believe think that way, I wouldn't vote for them because of their religious beliefs. But not everyone in a given sect agrees about this stuff, and so I wouldn't assume it based on religious identification without more.

58- Oh, I have no objection to your standard of evaluation, I just was tripped up by the quoted statement.

The Muslim world is made up largely of secular autocracies. Iran and Saudi Arabia

Iran
Saudi Arabia
Malaysia
Kuwait
Coming soon to Iraq
significant portions of Pakistan and Nigeria

And that's just off the top of my head. There's a lot of these "exceptional cases."

41 gets it right. The candidate's religious beliefs are only important insofar as her policies are affected by them. If I don't like the policies, I can vote for someone else.

Assuming that someone being Muslim entails a desire to form an Evil Muslim Theocracy, of course, just makes you an ignorant bigot.

60: I wouldn't have thought Kuwait and Malaysia belong on the same list as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Care to expand on that?

58

So its ok to be a Muslim as long as you don't actually believe in the tenets of Islam?

Kuwait and Malaysia belong on the same list as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Not as bad as the latter two, but not exactly what I'd call "secular."

If you want to tell most of the Muslims I've ever met that they don't believe in the tenets of Islam, more power to you.

What is up with you? I'm not going to call it trolling, because you're actually engaging on some level, but are you this belligerent all the time, or is there something special about Unfogged that brings it out?

Morocco
Algeria
Tunisia
Libya
Egypt
Syria
Jordan
Lebanon
Yemen
Oman
Turkey
Indonesia
Mauretania
Somalia

That's just off the top of my head. Now, these countries are secular to varying degrees, but none of them even comes close to Iran or Saudi.

Kuwait seems pretty secular from what I've read, unles there's been a diametrical change in the last 5-10 years. IIRC that's one of the places Saudis go to to "play" (nudge-nudge wink-wink).

This might be my mancrush speaking, but get used to Obama making everyone look stupid.

We go play hoop!

I'm pretty bigoted when it comes to the religious beliefs of political candidates. I'd have a really hard time voting for a Mormon. (Sorry, JM.) It has less to do with their policy prescriptions than it does to do with the fact that Mormonism seems like such a fraud in a way that older traditions don't. I don't think any of the ancient writers intended their Gospels to be literal histories, but I do think that Joseph Smith wanted people to accept his account of the golden tablets being taken up to heaven as the literal truth. Anybody who doesn't see a 19th century document poorly written in the style of the authorized edition of the bible as bizarre is someone whose judgment I don't really trust.

All of the atheists are free to chime in that most Christiand (or even Christianity itself) is just as nutty. I'm just being open about my prejudices.

All of the atheists are free to chime in that most Christiand (or even Christianity itself) is just as nutty.

Okay then: Christianity is just as nutty.

69: As I said to a grad school Mormon friend, it's gotta suck when your religion hammered out its doctrines in an age with a paper of record. Rest of us managed to farm the loony doctrines out to philosophers, declare them heretical and squash the copies before the laity got to it.

Yeah, the golden tablets aren't any nuttier than a talking burning bush. It's just a newer story.

And, for the small sample size I know, Mormons deal with the craziness in their theology pretty much the same way other religions do. It seems like it ought to be harder to do that when you only have a few generations of tradition to draw on at best, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Also, they're damn good at marketing, especially to their own kids.

As an atheist with no particular attachment to any sect, while Mormon theology may be odd, it's an awfully competent church. At least in Samoa, the Mormons bowed to no one in terms of keeping their churches painted and maintained in an otherwise unforgiving climate, and the crewcut white boys who showed up to missionize the locals showed up with a decent conversational grasp of Samoan from the moment they got off the plane.

Enough of this. Let's get to the real issues. Hotter sex: lapsed Mormons or lapsed Catholics?

What 70-74 said.

Mormon language training is legendary.

Lapsed Catholics. We're better with the foreplay.

I've only experienced the latter, so I couldn't say.

Tim is angling for a threesome.

And really, how are you going to tell your own grandmother that you're converting to a less fraudulant form of Christianity? She's dealt pretty well with various of her off-spring drifting away from the Church, but a conversion would just be a slap in the face to seven generations of believing ancestors--all of whose names I just rattled off to count them, thank you very much. My great^7-uncle was a fraud, but he was a family fraud.

Now, if I ever ran for public office, then I might have a problem.

Obviously, I posted before 75 went up. Lapsed Mormons have this going for them: sex is considered good and healthy and miraculous. It's supposed to be marital sex, sure, but once you get around that...

Whereas my understanding is that Catholics, even lapsed Catholics, retain a sense of tragedy about sex.

79,81: Another point in favor of Catholics. Easier to find a lapsed Catholic. If all the Mormons lapsed there'd be less of them than there are lapsed Catholics.

Whereas my understanding is that Catholics, even lapsed Catholics, retain a sense of tragedy about sex.

On the other hand, I've been told that guilt makes it more fun.

And leads to better foreplay. Years of practice of everything but, due to guilt.

Mormons: okay with contraception. Lapsed Catholics: probably lapsed over the whole contraception thing.

That one's a wash.

Catholics: twice as likely as Mormons to have moustaches.

It's possibly true that lapsed Catholics have more experience with frustrated foreplay, but lapsed Mormons make up for that with their enthusiasm and famous diligence!

I'm enjoying watching my 18-year-old Mormon niece and her Colombian (Catholic) boyfriend. It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

I'm enjoying watching my 18-year-old Mormon niece and her Colombian (Catholic) boyfriend.

Um.

She's a good Mormon girl. Get your mind out of the gutter.

That's going to be some enthusiastic neurotic virginity loss there.

I am immediately suspicious of a candidate who goes out of their way to mention their faith, including Obama. A politician who says, "Vote for me because I support policies X, Y and Z... and have I mentioned a flavor of God? Because I am totally into that," is (consciously or otherwise) cutting any non-believers out of the conversation. They're not all bad people but I think it is inherent to the nature of one-true-path religions. The assertion that s/he is enthusiastically active in one God club or another means that on some level they think less of all the other God clubs, doesn't it? Fuck a bunch of that.

Also:

63: I really wish LB hadn't beaten me by hours to pointing it out because now I can't concoct some parody "So it's OK to..." question in hopes that its apex in the opinion of the group mind would be to register as mild entertainment, but seriously: slow work week or something? Y'all hiring?

Speaking of your work, McP, what's the rationale behind using lynx—not the Panthera phenotype—to read blogs? I'm thinking I'll soon be working in strange conditions. Is it because it leaves no record, as a normal browser would? Do you carry a copy of it with you, and install it?

From what my ex-wife told me, Mormons are the least anti-sexual Christian church. They just marry off their 16-year-old daughters to 20-year-old guys, and everyone lives relatively happily ever after.

They also are very supportive of their fellow Mormons, and they don't have the sadistic belief in hellfire.

I've also been told that lapsed Mormons, like lapsed Orthodox Jews, are more common in the sciences than statistics would predict.

This is just my objective opinion. Subjectively, I'd hate to live in a Mormon town, though the Mormons I've known casually have been very pleasant, cheery people.

jackmormon, of course refused to marry the bishop and picked up masturbation instead, but that's not Brigham Young's fault.

"The assertion that s/he is enthusiastically active in one God club or another means that on some level they think less of all the other God clubs, doesn't it? Fuck a bunch of that."

I don't think this follows. If I take I-95, because it's closer to where I live, I don't think: fuck all the assholes on I-40.

Also, reasoning by analogy is the new not-reasoning by analogy.

93: I started a new job in early December and was unsure how OK they would be with a little web browsing on company time. It was especially dicey given that I work in network security, y'know? Also, let me be frank: some days I like using lynx because it prevents me from having Mutombo getting sexed or big blue headlines about WHO WANTS TO SEX MUTOMBO or still images of Jessica Biel's ass or ass-groping or whatever on my desktop.

Advantages of lynx: I can ssh from anywhere (thank you, putty) to an account I have on a server I know doesn't give a shit what I look at. An encrypted terminal session looks pretty innocuous whether it's from across the room or the other side of a firewall log and there's no URL filter in the world that can stop it.

You could certainly carry it around on a thumb drive and install it where you wanted (there are even DOS and Windows executable versions), but putting it on a desktop is in no way better than just firing up your normal graphical browser except that it won't display any images and it won't look like a browser window to someone who's never used lynx. For me the point was to actually do my web browsing from a host not on my work network so as to appear more industrious than I am.

There are those who prefer Links, but I am not among them. I don't like the way it tries to render tables and frames which is, unfortunately, its entire deal. Lynx isn't pretty, either, mind you, but I like it better.

In all honesty, though, I have figured out that these people don't give any more of a shit than my last job as long as I don't actually spank it at my desk. I am back to using Firefox to consume Intercubes unless there's great honking graphics that I don't want to look at splashed all over the place. In those instances, such as my daily read of FARK's front page, and in the rumored future when my employer does implement a URL filter, I (will) go back to lynx.

It seems to me that an atheist candidate, were one to exist, would be equally open to the "fuck you, other religions" problem. C.f. Richard Dawkins.

96: But do you think everyone on I-40 is probably going to hell?

I ask because I certainly do.

96: But most religions, unlike most highways, include as part of their belief system the idea that followers of other religions are, at the very least, mistaken.

98: A particularly strident atheist a la Dawkins would certainly be open to the problem as well.

99: Hey, I take I-40! That's okay, we'll be having more fun in Hell anyway.

I think 100 is a misconception. Most religions have some sort of C.S. Lewis backdoor for the uninitiated. Oh, you were really worshipping me all along, that sort of thing. Anyway, that's how I prefer to think about it, keeping in mind the relavent texts were written for and about relatively small populations, and that a Supreme Being might not take the time to try to explain things fully to morons who melt down gold to make cows, masturbate to internet porn, and otherwise, are human.

I don't care if they're atheist or anything else, text; I care that they want to wave their little flag for the approval of those who share their belief. Let us all worship whatever moves us. I could not care any less if you tipped me for good service. I do care, however, about them presenting those beliefs as being a reason to vote for them and part of it is that I am not entirely sure it's possible to brandish a candidate's religion (or lack thereof) as a positive without at least by implication wielding others' as strikes against them.

Jesus H., it is time for bed.

103: I dunno, man. There's Lewis himself, of course, but he's not exactly a towering figure in Christianity writ large. I'm sure there are such ideas floating around in most major religions, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim they're dominant in any of them.

I tend to agree with you. Problem is, we've got large swaths of people who think they are voting according to their religion. Is it worth appealing to them, when by all appearences, they are being fleeced? Or better to sit on our principles while they get fleeced? I sound like B. More wine, less chatty.

teo, was going to make a stronger claim, but would have been unsupported. I dunno either. Within most religions people have been debating this; I think you'll find a wide range of thought within each. Particularly, I think Augustine had something to say. It's by no means a closed issue.

To be fair, in my hick little town where I grew up more people than not were similarly philosophical and willing to do a little hand-waving happy-talk when the rubber met the road on whether a good person was going to burn simply for having a different name by which they addressed the Divine. I don't think religious people are assholes. Almost every person I know and love is religious to some degree, myself included. I think politicians who say, "Vote for me because of my church," though, are tremendous assholes.

he's not exactly a towering figure in Christianity writ large

Isn't he? I get the impression from a lot of my Christian friends, including a fair number of evangelicals, that he's seen as a pretty significant thinker, but I don't really know.

are tremendous assholes

ANGBSW.

"I think politicians who say, "Vote for me because of my church," though, are tremendous assholes."

I would agree, except that assholes are already doing this, and winning (or they were recently) and enacting legislation that went very much against the church they were claiming. So maybe it makes sense to propose an alternative view of politics for those people. This is different from Lieberman's approach. Yes, very different.

There's Lewis himself, of course, but he's not exactly a towering figure in Christianity writ large.

I'm almost certain that I read somewhere that there are serious efforts within the Catholic Church to sort out some sort of similar thing. I don't think it's just Lewis.

109: I doubt Catholics, for example, take him very seriously. But then, I don't really know.

112: Certainly it's an open issue, as text points out, and there's plenty of support within the Christian tradition for this kind of interpretation. I still maintain that orthodoxy has generally been on the exclusionary side, though, and that the majority of believers have been perfectly happy with that. (I'm not talking solely about Christianity here, of course, and I'm particularly not talking solely about contemporary Christianity.)

Morocco
Algeria
Tunisia
Libya
Egypt
Syria
Jordan
Lebanon
Yemen
Oman
Turkey
Indonesia
Mauretania
Somalia

That's just off the top of my head. Now, these countries are secular to varying degrees, but none of them even comes close to Iran or Saudi.

Yemen- laws still largely codified from Sharia, no jury trials, Constitution states Islam is state religion, conversion of a Muslim to another religion a crime punishable by death, women not allowed to leave the home without husbands consent, etc.

Somalia- are you kidding? Control of the capiital goes back and forth between the govt. and an Islamist militia

Oman- Islam is the State religion and that Shari'a is the source of all legislation.

Kuwait- Constitution states that Islam is the state religion and that Shari'a (Islamic Law) is "a main source of legislation." Women got the right to vote waaaay back in 2005, naturalization denied to non-Muslims, women's testimony is worth half that of a man's in proceedings before the family courts, need husbands permission to get a passport

I think we get the point. No, they're not Saudi Arabia, but I'm a bit leery of calling a lot of these countries secular

Those are the marginal cases; the others are more straightforward. And I'm only talking about the regimes here. In most cases the population is more favorably inclined to religious tradition than the government is. As a result you get stuff like this.

And seriously, the Gulf monarchies are one thing, but the North African and (to add some more data points) Central Asian countries are really quite secular. Basically, the Gulf is just a very, very traditional part of the Muslim world.

the bullshit sharia law they have in (one state in) malaysia is just a low hurdle that [the many many] malays who want to get drunk have to hop over. malaysia is just a regular old country with normal people walking around and hot chicks without headscarves and big beer billboards. seriously, don't believe the hype.

In the Unsuggester it seems that C.S. Lewis reader avoid serious non-Christian literature, but apparently not pulp fiction or chick lit. Most serious non-Christian books have anti-books like "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" or some fantasy-horror pulp book, but the anti C.S. Lewises are Rorty, Heidegger, Hobsbawm, etc., and some programming books, with only one or two pop titles.

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/1182675

Malaysia is in the set of states "Thailand, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo", not "Somalia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq". It's a southeast Asian, newly-industrialised, fairly authoritarian state that assembles a shitload of PCs and such and hosts Formula One races.

Kuwait - well, it's secular as in Tunisia, not as in Sweden. Hell, Dubai is officially an Islamic state, and if you've ever been there...

ANGBSW

OK, not sure I'm reading this right: And Not (in the) Good, Butt-Sex Way?

You are correct, sir.

Rock on. The decoder chip is on-line!

Dudes, Obama's in the United Church of Christ. If anyone other than the Unitarians comes closer to "Everyone else is getting there too", I haven't heard of it.

Depends on the church. My grandma was UCC, and her church certainly had a whiff of brimstone in its sermons.

I take that back. I juyst looked up her church. Turns out she was plain old Church of Christ. Jesus, my Grandma was practically a snakehandler!

Yes, the individual congregations can differ quite a bit. The same factors: ethnicity, urban/rural, size and mission, which contribute to differentiation on the denominational level, "the social sources of American Denominationalism," if you will, seem to allow a lot of differentiation within denominations these days. Maybe it was always so, I don't know.

IDP: From looking at Wikipedia's entry on Churches of Chirst, it seems they are another beast entirely from the United Church of Christ--just a similarity of names that had me confused. In reading the entry, I was surpried to discover that Grandma's church had more in common with non-denominational mega-churches and storefront evangelical churches than the UCC. It explains a lot, but it's blowing my mind a little bit at the moment.

I'm quite certain that Barry doesn't think his mom is in hell...IIRC he mentions in his book that he's not sure whether he believes in heaven (though then ruins it by explaining that when he tucked his daughters in at night he experienced a little bit of heaven right here on earth.)

I would be influenced by politicians' religious beliefs even if they don't directly affect policy: for instance, if someone thinks all Jews and atheists are going to hell, that's a big strike against them to me even if they have no intent whatsoever of doing anything about it. But it makes no sense at all to me to vote based on a candidate's religious *identification* unless that identification is specific enough that it actually tells you what they think. Ellison's about to try to model U.S. law on sharia & blowing up cafes about when Russ Feingold is going to try to model U.S. law on Leviticus and start stoning people.

Right. If John Kerry believed that the communion wafer literally turned into the body of Jesus in his mouth, that would be a clear disqualifier for me, on grounds of plain insanity. But otherwise, I don't much care that he's Catholic.

I'm certain there's a bit more affirmation in Ellison's faith than that, but I agree he ought to be treated as if that were all it amounted to as a public matter, and so far he's willing to stand for that notion.

Minnesota also produced the first out atheist governor, you know. That's Jesse "Religion is a refuge for weak-minded people" Ventura, who also blocked a stupid sports stadium for a few years. In other respects he left greatly to be desired.

As most of us haven't lived in (or even visted) Muslim countries, this reduces itself to rank speculation at best (aka, talking out of our collective asses). I've heard (but don't know) that Saudi women aren't allowed to drive. Does this evidence secularism? I suspect not, but I don't know for sure. 114 looks about right to me.

The truth is that there are infinite levels of analysis that could be delved into before reaching a conclusion, such as de jure v. de facto discrimination, for example. Merely citing existing laws scratches the surface- practice and custom (legal or otherwise) often dictate reality.