Billy Graham is not going gently. He has written a “prayer letter” decrying the spiritual decline of America and likening the U.S. today to Sodom and Gomorrah or ancient Nineveh in the Bible: “wealthy, unconcerned, and self-centered.”
And the elderly Graham is “working hard on a new book that addresses some dangerous illusions about eternal salvation that are becoming increasingly accepted in many places.”
Rob Bell, I think he means you.
Goodbye, Gideons: A British hotel is replacing the once ubiquitous Bibles with the soft-porn bestseller, “Fifty Shades of Grey.” It could have been worse – they were considering “Atlas Shrugged.”
Maybe the London Olympics should be an occasion for checking out that REALLY old-time religion.
Scientologists will be out for the Games.
The U.S. bishops are really, really are not happy with the American nuns of the LCWR.
The Vatican’s new doctrinal watchdog isn’t signaling a much softer line, either:
"One cannot profess the three religious vows (poverty, chastity and obedience) and not take them seriously,” German Archbishop Gerhard L. Muller told the Vatican newspaper.
Greg Zanis, an electrician from Aurora, Illinois, has built 13,000 crosses around the country, each for a victim of an American tragedy. He set up twelve crosses in Aurora, Colorado. They probably won’t be the last ones he’ll make.
The Friendly Atheist notes that James Holmes attended a high school that was festooned with God and Country banners, which calls into question – as if it needed to be – claims by Mike Huckabee and Rep. Louie Gohmert’s that secularists took God out of the schools and that’s why Holmes shot up a movie theater.
Secularists have scored another resounding victory in the battle against the encroaching forces of theocracy: they have forced the city of Steubenville, Ohio to remove a small cross from its new city seal (you can make it out on the right of the image above) that represented a Catholic school, the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a longtime pillar of the community.
Hey, anybody seen my copy of “1984”?
The real sin is that the seal at the right is the interim replacement.
Next up in the Logo Wars: Wyoming, Michigan.
A liberal Jewish group is launching a political lobbying arm and Mitt Romney is headed to Israel, though it’s not clear whether he’ll get any political bump.
Miracles happen: Things are looking up for the Christian bookselling market.
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David Gibson
Photo credits: The Franciscan University of Steubenville and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Ron S | Jul 26, 2012 | 4:26pm
I consider Billy Graham a charlatan and, along with other old school religionists, are afraid of losing control of their “sheep.” An anti-semite when he palled around with Nixon, his son also suffers from Islamophobia. Billy’s column appears daily in our newspaper conveniently on the same page as the comics so the it’s always good for a laugh. His writing consistently takes shots at non-believers, whom he accuses of having too much “pride”, and at college professors for polluting the minds of students. Like most clergy Billy is afraid that people may be thinking for themselves. At no time does he and other Christian ministers ever contribute our decline as a nation to our obsession with perpetual warfare and the maintenance of our world-wide empire which requires the presence of 500,000 combat troops in approximately 150 nations..