ACLU forces school board to remove portrait of Jesus

According to the ACLU, the painting of Jesus will cause students and visitors to the school “permanent, severe and irreparable harm and injury”. The only plausible explanation for this is that the school has a higher than normal number of demon-possessed visitors who, on spotting the portrait, froth at the mouth, rotate their heads 360 degrees, grab a convenient student and plunge, gibbering, down the nearest ravine.

I can’t imagine any reason why a person who would suffer “permanent, severe and irreparable harm and injury” on encountering a portrait of Jesus should be allowed into a school in the first place.

From here:

An Ohio school district has agreed to keep a portrait of Jesus Christ off school property and pay a $95,000 fine in the face of legal pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Jackson City School District, located in Jackson, reached a deal on Friday after the ACLU, along with the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, sued the district in February, citing “unconstitutional” actions and charging that students and visitors to the school “will continue to suffer permanent, severe and irreparable harm and injury,” according to the lawsuit.

Jesus in school

When I was in high school I was an atheist. I confess that it was a bit of an affectation; I hadn’t thought through all the consequences of my belief, but I had read a number of Jean-Paul Sartre’s books – to my mother’s consternation – and discovered that amorality is a logical result of atheism. If I was an atheist, I could do as I pleased; to a hormonally dominated 16-year old, that seemed like a good arrangement.

A few years later in university, my mathematics tutor asked me why I had such dreadful marks and why didn’t I feel guilty using taxpayer money to go to parties, get drunk and chase girls rather than study. “Well”, I said, “I agree with Dostoyevsky: if God does not exist, everything is permitted”. He stared blankly past my head and suggested I see my home tutor for further counselling. I never did.

But back to high school. The teacher I liked was an atheist. He was well-read, interesting and, so I thought at the time, unencumbered by the trivial niceties that prevented lesser teachers from showering blows of withering sarcasm down upon those with whom he disagreed. He introduced me to Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Camus, Joseph Heller, Huxley, Orwell and Dostoyevsky among others – and to the delights of mathematics. The professional Christian on staff, hired to teach Religious Instruction, was unconvincing and timid; consequently, he was teased mercilessly. He was, I thought, an excellent advertisement for the benefits of my newly acquired atheism.

There was a rather disagreeable lad in my class who received what my atheist teacher mockingly called a “visitation”; he became a born-again Christian. Regrettably, that didn’t make him, by my reckoning at least, any less irritating, pompous and noisily self-righteous. I will mention no names but the individual I have in mind had orange hair: you know who you are, Langley.

All this makes me wonder about the kid wearing the Jesus t-shirt. I fully support his right to free speech; I just hope he is not the Langley of Forest Heights.

From here:

“He will not attend this school unless they are having reading, writing and arithmetic — good old-fashioned academics,” he said, waving a New Testament bible. “When they’re having forums, when they’re having other extra-curricular activity, he will not attend that school.”

Students said William Swinimer has been preaching and making them feel uncomfortable, and the shirt was the last straw so they complained.

“He’s told kids they’ll burn in hell if they don’t confess themselves to Jesus,” student Riley Gibb-Smith said.

Katelyn Hiltz, student council vice-president, agreed the controversy didn’t begin with the T-shirt.

“It started with him preaching his religion to kids and then telling them to go to hell. A lot of kids don’t want to deal with this anymore,” she said.

 

 

“Life is wasted without Jesus” causes offence

From the CBC:

A Christian student suspended from a high school in Nova Scotia for sporting a T-shirt with the slogan “Life is wasted without Jesus” vows to wear it when he returns to class next week.

William Swinimer, who’s in Grade 12, was suspended from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin in Lunenburg County for five days. He’s due to return to class on Monday.

The devout Christian says the T-shirt is an expression of his beliefs, and he won’t stop wearing it.

[….]

Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, board superintendent, said some students and teachers found the T-shirt offensive.

“When one is able or others are able to interpret it as, ‘If you don’t share my belief then your life is wasted,’ that can be interpreted by some as being inappropriate,” she said.

I wonder how the delicate students, whose fragile sensibilities were offended by a slogan they were free to ignore, will cope when they enter the big bad world of business with all its slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Perhaps they will all become teachers and retain the luxury of being easily offended.

I also wonder what the reaction would have been to this t-shirt:

Veterans not allowed to say 'God' and 'Jesus' in prayers

The Soviet Union tried to stamp out Christianity; it failed, but government agencies in the USA are having another go.

From here:

Veterans in Houston say the Department of Veterans Affairs is consistently censoring their prayers by banning them from saying the words “God” and “Jesus” during funeral services at Houston National Cemetery.

Three organizations — the Veterans of Foreign Wars, The American Legion and the National Memorial Ladies — allege that the cemetery’s director and other government officials have created “religious hostility” at the cemetery and are violating the First Amendment. According to court documents filed this week in federal court, the cemetery’s director, Arleen Ocasio, has banned saying “God” at funerals and requires prayers be submitted in advance for government approval, MyFoxHouston.com reports.

[….]

“We were told we could no longer say ‘God bless you’ and ‘God bless your family,'” Marilyn Koepp, a volunteer with the National Memorial Ladies, told the website. “How did I feel? I probably shouldn’t say how I felt because it was absolutely appalling that this woman would come aboard and tell us we cannot say ‘God bless you.'”

 

The only offensive word left: Jesus

This advertisement was banned at movie theatres because it uses the name of Jesus to refer to the man who lived, died and came back to life 2000 years ago: that, apparently, is offensive, whereas  saying “Jesus” as a mindless expletive isn’t.

[flv:https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/jesusad.flv 600 360]

 

h/t: A Reasonable Faith

Stating the obvious

But I suppose it’s right and proper that the Pope does so.

The Jews are not to blame for Jesus’ crucifixion: since he died to atone for the sins of all, we are all to blame.

From here:

The Jews are not to blame for the crucifixion and death of Jesus, Pope Benedict  XVI said today.

In extracts released from his forthcoming book on Jesus of Nazareth, the Pope  completely exonerates the Jewish people of any culpability of the death of Christ.

He directly confronts the controversial text of St Matthew’s Gospel in which ‘the Jews’ demand the execution of Jesus and shout to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate: ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children.’

The passage has been described even by Catholics as a ‘rallying cry for anti-Semites down the centuries’.

But the Pope says the Gospel writer meant the mob in the courtyard and not  the Jewish people in general.

As such the crowd was representative of the whole of sinful humanity, he said.

Then he explains that the blood of Jesus was not ‘poured out against anyone, it is poured out for many, for all’.

Smoking

I started smoking in university after reading everything I could get my hands on by Jean-Paul Sartre. I had come to the conclusion that God does not exist, life is meaningless and, in order not to go bonkers, man has to create his own meaning. I noticed that smoking provided meaning in two ways: first it gave smokers something to do with their hands when not otherwise occupied and, later, it afforded, as Anglicans are fond of saying, an even deeper meaning in the quest to give it up.

So I decided to start smoking. I smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipes and – other things.

A side benefit was that it annoyed a couple of Christians who inhabited the room next to mine in the university housing.

Now, of course, a person who smokes is a pariah whose standing is only a little above that of a paedophile: his compulsion must be indulged surreptitiously in dark dank alleys. Gruesome photographs of cancerous tissue have become the compulsory adornment of cigarette cartons – an attempt by government to expiate its sin of collecting so much tax from smokers.

Something I failed to consider in my existential smoking experiment was that I am allergic to tobacco; by the time I noticed, I was hooked and I spent a few decades exploring the second part of my theory.  I became an expert: I gave it up every couple of months without permanent success.

I became a Christian in 1978; one of my first prayers to the God I didn’t know was to give me the faith to believe that Jesus is who he claims to be – God – and to help me give up smoking; an odd combining of the transcendent and banal, no doubt but, nevertheless, that is what I did.

The next day I woke up with the certainty that Jesus is God, was born of a virgin, died for my sins and was bodily resurrected – I also woke up a non-smoker: I had no desire to smoke anything at all.

In the following weeks, the absence of any inclination to smoke confirmed my suspicion that something objectively real had happened to me.

Smoking had provided meaning in a sense I had not anticipated; a practical example of Romans 8:28, perhaps.

The “Jesus was HIV-positive” sermon

From here:

“Today I will start with a three-part sermon on: Jesus was HIV-positive,” South African Pastor Xola Skosana recently said in a Sunday church service.

The words initially stunned his congregation in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township into silence, and then set tongues wagging in churches across the country.

Some Christians have been outraged, saying he is portraying Jesus as sexually promiscuous.

HIV is mainly transmitted through sex, but can also be spread through needle-sharing, contaminated blood, pregnancy and breastfeeding.

However, as Pastor Skosana told those gathered in the modest Luhlaza High School hall for his weekly services, in many parts of the Bible Jesus put himself in the position of the destitute, the sick and the marginalised.

It hardly needs to be said that the premise of this sermon is idiotic. Jesus had compassion for the destitute, the sick and the marginalised”, but he wasn’t sick, destitute or marginalised himself: he didn’t become a leper, he healed lepers. And, had HIV been in existence, he would have healed those who contracted it – even if they had contracted it using the preferred method.

Pornographic art portraying Jesus provokes outrage

From here:

An exhibit at a Colorado art gallery is stirring up outrage from critics who say it depicts Jesus Christ in a sexual act.

Enrique Chagoya’s “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals,” created in 2003, is a multipanel piece in which “cultural and religious icons are presented with humor and placed in contradictory, unexpected and sometimes controversial contexts,” the artist’s publisher, Shark’s Ink, said on its website.

The lithograph, on display since Sept. 11 at the tax-funded Loveland Museum Gallery in Loveland, Colo., is part of an 82-print exhibit by 10 artists who have worked with Colorado printer Bud Shark. It includes several images of Jesus, including one in which he appears to be receiving oral sex from a man as the word “orgasm” appears beside Jesus’ head.

Amidst worldwide Christian rioting, hundreds have been killed, taxpayers in Colorado have taken tax inspectors hostage in a local mosque – sorry, cultural centre – President Obama has called the exhibit “un-American”, media are refusing to publish photos for fears of reprisals and imams in notorious Islamo-fascist theocracies say they can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is calling for dialogue with the artist.

Lebanese TV stations scrap Jesus show

From the Jerusalem Post:

Controversial program describes Jesus from an Islamic point of view.

BEIRUT  — Two Shiite Muslim television stations in Lebanon canceled a controversial program about Jesus on Friday, saying they do not want to stir up sectarian conflict in the country.

The 17-episode program, which was produced in Iran, describes Jesus from an Islamic point of view. Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet and a teacher, but not the son of God.

The cancellation is supposedly out of respect for Lebanon’s “religious diversity”. There is a much better reason: the contention that Jesus was merely a great prophet and teacher is illogical and clearly untrue. Either Jesus was who he claimed to be – God incarnate – or he was a nut case. C. S. Lewis said it best:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to