I "stole" this whole piece from Kevin Drum:

CHURCH AND STATE....The New York Times reports that at least a few evangelical preachers are starting to figure out the danger of being co-opted by the Republican Party:

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people. “Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’”

Preach it, brother. Evangelicals should keep in mind that the separation of church and state wasn't intended to protect the state, it was intended to protect the church. In the long run, becoming a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of Karl Rove Inc. comes at a steep price.

More here from Steve Waldman in the April issue of the Monthly.

The current political clout of the religious right in the USA is akin to selling your soul to the devil. More of them will find that out, as many well-intentioned communists in the Soviet Union found out the hard way that their good intention were being used for the personal gain of the greedy and the power hungry.

I particularly like this line by Kevin: "Evangelicals should keep in mind that the separation of church and state wasn't intended to protect the state, it was intended to protect the church."

Bottom line is, they have been having their moment of power and all it brought us has been death, destruction, fear, mistrust, debt, and hypocrisy galore. They are now starting to eat their young. It's going to be fun to see their self-destruction. Yes, indeed, Mister Cheney... the revolution is on it's last throes -- your revolution!

Full article here:

Melvin Lipman believes that with the surge of conservative religious fervor in the country, it’s high time humanists come out of the closet.

"We feel now more than ever there’s a need to assert ourselves to stop this creeping theocracy from taking place, to let the public know that religion has no monopoly on morality," the president of the American Humanist Association said.

Lipman, the 69-year-old leader of the country’s largest humanist group, will be in Columbus this weekend for several events, sponsored by the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.

While polls show that millions of Americans don’t believe in God, Lipman said public officials ignore them because they are afraid to speak out.

"When you speak to anybody, it’s politically incorrect to be anti-gay, it’s politically incorrect to be a racist. . . . But it’s perfectly OK to say, ‘I hate atheists,’ " he said.

That last part ("But it’s perfectly OK to say, ‘I hate atheists,’) caught my attention because in my experiences I've never heard that. In fact, I quite often here things like: "I hate religion" or "I hate religious fanatics". Further, I disagree that today it is politically incorrect to be anti-gay. Let's face it, in the USA that sentiment is alive and well, especially among a section of the so-called religious.

I just seem very much out of sync with Mr. Lipman, at least on those two issues.

This submission came via the Contact Us page from Anonymous:

I have a friend who is 40 + yrs. of age and sleeps nude, but is starting to feel guilty. This person would like to know if there are advantages to sleeping nude, and while this person sleeps, he/she wakes up with his/her hands sometimes between his/her legs. Is this person masturbating in his/her sleep? If he/she does masturbate as others do in his/her sleep, how is this a proven fact? This person is Catholic and the Catholic Church frowns on masturbation, so if he/she has been sleeping nude for the past 30 years and a good percent masturbating during that sleep time, and being frowned on by the Church, Is he/she destined to hell?

VictorM's answer:

I'm posting this here in hopes that others will use the Visitor Comments section. I'm not qualified to answer this from a religious point of view, but since I was raised Catholic, I'll put my two cents in.

Sleeping nude, as far as I can recall, is not a sin in any way. For some people, any kind of clothing becomes constrictive. If they move a lot in their sleep, clothing can choke them or make it plain uncomfortable. So, nude is fine. And while masturbation is a no-no, doing so in your sleep is a "reflex", not punishable with a sin. A reflex is not "willful thought". Well, that's how it was relayed to me when I a kid. I trust the rules haven't changed. Of course, as a kid, it was also an unwritten rule that when your eyes were closed, you were technically asleep. :)

So Hell need not be your friend's destination unless there are other sins involved.

Now, if you allow me a bit of humor, I'll give a very much paraphrased version of Father Guido Sarducci (from Saturday Night Life) take on all this.

He says that life is like a bank. You do good deeds, and "money" gets deposited in your behalf. You commit a sin, and a withdrawal occurs. The object is to die with a positive value in the bank. So, say you walk a little old lady across the street, you get $5. If you commit murder, you get $5,000 taken out. Masturbation was valued at 25 cents.

So... as long as you don't drop a rock on someone's head on purpose, if you walk a little old lady across the street, you can masturbate 20 times... with your eyes open.

OK... now someone please give this person some informed opinion.

From the front page of the LA Times, this article:

Thousands of people wearing their Sunday best will flock today to the Home Depot Center, the site of a Major League Soccer game between Chivas USA and the Los Angeles Galaxy. Before a ball is dropped on the field, though, Chivas USA has arranged for an outdoor Catholic Mass that is expected to fill all 8,000 seats in a stadium next to the soccer field... The Mass is among the first held in conjunction with an athletic contest by a modern-day professional sports organization. "It's the right match between the beliefs of our fan base and the roots of our organization," said Antonio Cue, a Chivas USA co-owner... Supporters say the merging of sports and religion creates a more family-oriented atmosphere at sporting events. Critics argue that mixing the two excludes people who don't share the same beliefs.

Well, first of all, I think any help Chivas USA can get is fine, but I hope the church goers pray for the team on the field -- they sure need the help, maybe even a miracle, to beat the Galaxy.

But I think the comment that mixing sports and religion "excludes people who don't share the same beliefs" is totally bogus. The mass is being conducted in a field adjacent to the stadium, and it will be over an hour before the game starts. So I don't see how having the mass excludes anyone.

The subject is weddings:

Decades of statistics point to a societal retreat from the church wedding. Catholic marriage ceremonies have been in decline for 35 years -- from 426,000 marriages nationwide in 1970 to 212,456 in 2005, according to church data -- even as the number of Catholics continues to grow.

In response, some clergy in mainline denominations are trying to accommodate a more expansive view of the marriage ritual: conducting weddings outside of church, catering to interfaith couples, even permitting subtle changes in centuries-old vows.

The Rev. Frank Trotter of Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church, a Gothic cathedral on Nebraska Avenue in the District, has presided over weddings on Sugarloaf Mountain and at Rehoboth Beach, and he has crafted a variety of interfaith ceremonies that "show the diversity of God's love."

Another force competing with traditional denominations is the trend toward do-it-yourself ordination. The Universal Life Church of Modesto, Calif., has ordained from 18 million to 20 million people since 1962, chiefly for the purpose of officiating at weddings, said Andre Hensley, a director of the church. The Church of Spiritual Humanism, outside Philadelphia, has ordained more than 100,000 ministers since 2002.

"These are people who don't really fit into a regular traditional church, but they still have a sense of spirituality," said Richard Zorger, founder of the Church of Spiritual Humanism.

Zorger's church offers a Deluxe Clergy Pack for $89.95. Hensley's offers a Ministry-in-a-Box for $139. His church's Web site also offers, for $4.95, a Jedi Knight certificate.