We were, of course, never at war with Eastasia.

Through a combination of less sex and more contraception, pregnancy and birth rates among American teenagers as a whole have been falling since about 1991. Texas, however, has seen the smallest decline despite receiving almost $17 million in the name of virginity.

Small wonder that many states are reconsidering the millions of taxpayer dollars they have squandered on the religious right’s sex-obsessed agenda. The Times reports that 11 state health departments rejected abstinence education so far this year, while legislatures in Colorado, Iowa and Washington have passed laws that could take it out of public schools for good.

More here. Oh, and here.

As il papa says, there is only one true church. And because its priests abuse kids, that church is now another $600 million or so poorer.

If there’s anything Christians truly want to believe, it’s that their hard-earned dollars will miraculously do the loaves-to-fishes thing. Enter British con artist Howard Welsh and his wonderfully named American girlfriend, Lee Hope Thrasher, who managed to take American Christians for more than $30 million.

And yet still they believe:

One investor of £60,000 [$120,000], Greg del Ferro, told the local newspaper, even as the trial was underway last July, that he still did not believe it was a con.

“It was about helping other people. That’s what Lee Hope and Howard were stressing. By all means they made mistakes, but they are not the types to deceive or take advantage,” he said. Mr Del Ferro wondered whether the pair may have had problems after inviting the “wrong people” to invest.

Sounds to me like they invited all the right people.

Until recently, the national evangelical leadership included those who denied the scientific consensus that global warming exists. They rejected the notion that climate change is primarily a result of human activity and feared that significant remedies would cost too many jobs.

Hunter and his allies reject these notions and have adopted the term “Creation Care” as an evangelical euphemism for environmentalism. “We’re approaching it with a biblical agenda rather than a political agenda,” he said. “The church should be about replenishing as much as repenting.”

This should have been obvious, said the Rev. Fred Morris, former executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, who has long urged Hunter to become involved in environ-
mental issues.

“Anyone who professes to believe in a Creator God has a moral and spiritual obligation to care for and defend God’s Creation,” Morris said. “I think he is going to get into hotter and hotter water with his evangelical colleagues, but he is willing to do that, because he knows it is a crucial issue.”

Plus Hunter knows that with a Democrat in the White House, the deranged Dobson/
Robertson axis will lose its grip on power faster than California is burning up—and he wants to fill that vacuum.

Pope Benedict turns back the Vatican clock another century. Pissing off everyone from liberal Catholics to Jews (“a body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations”) in the process.

But only if you’re a God-fearing, bible-thumping Christian—because, as we all know, today is primarily a religious holiday. At least, according to a full-page ad in today’s New York Times it is (click here or on image to see in its full PDF glory). And the ad quotes former presidents, the founding fathers, supreme court justices and rulings, Congress, education (?) and—God forbid—foreigners to make the case that the US of A is just the most goddamn Christian country in the known universe.

As the ad says: Blessed is the nation whose GOD is the LORD.

Except of course that it isn’t, and ads like these will hopefully drive even more cash into the pockets of Democratic presidential hopefuls.

And away from the wingnut businesses that sponsored the ad: Hobby Lobby Creative Centers, Hemispheres, Mardel Stores, and all their sad little affiliates.

Michael Behe represents all that is entertaining about creationist pseudo-intel-
lectuals. Even his own faculty, Lehigh University’s Department of Biological Sciences, disowns him, noting on its Web site that Behe is the “sole dissenter” from its “unequivocal” support of evolutionary theory, and adding that “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.” (Odd, then, that Lehigh continues to employ him.)

Still, no harm in giving Behe another kick, which the New York Times has done by getting Richard Dawkins to review his new book. And Dawkins doesn’t disappoint: “Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science.”

Tell us what you really think, Richard.

Britain’s clueless minister for schools, Lord Adonis*—who before his baffling enoblement was plain Andrew Adonis, an equally clueless newspaper reporter—has made it clear that he won’t rule out such a move. Which is hardly surprising, given his embrace of creationists and other religious nuts. And Ofsted, Britain’s alleged schools watchdog, just loves Focus Learning. As the Telegraph notes, in 2005 Ofsted praised the trust for providing “good support to its schools” and a “generally good” quality of teaching. In a country where “teaching standards” is an oxymoron, that’s high praise.

Pity, then, that Adonis and Ofsted didn’t do their homework. Perhaps they would have picked up on the Exclusive Brethren’s lengthy record of child abuse, money laundering, and political meddling.

But then again, perhaps they wouldn’t.

[*Adonis may yet lose his job as a result of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet reshuffle, so there is hope.]

And in more news from the 12th century, Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, estimates that 7% of the world’s Christians—around 150 million people—are “on the move as pilgrims” each year. Add the 80-100 million Hindus, Jews and Muslims visiting their various shrines, and you have close to a quarter of a billion zealots traveling the world in pursuit of, well, figments of their collective imagination.

Makes sense.

Where psychiatry and therapy require a person to look within to solve his or her problems, exorcism and blaming the Devil allows a person to escape introspection and instead discern only external causes for problems. But Amorth and other practitioners quickly dismiss the criticism. “Exorcism is God’s true miracle,” Amorth likes to say.

“We of the Bible know that evil spirits are angels created as good by God and who then rebelled against God,” Amorth said during one of our chats at the Society of St Paul congregational residence in suburban Rome, where, in a back room, he conducts exor-
cisms… “Naturally, everybody defends themselves according to their own culture and mentality… perhaps resorting to witchdoctors or what have you. But all people, all the time, have a perception that spirits of evil exist, which it is necessary to protect against.”

Recognising demonic possession—the “discernment,” as it is called—is the first and very difficult aspect of an exorcism. This is most commonly achieved by seeing how the patient responds to religious symbols such as holy water or a crucifix. For example, the person has a great aversion to entering a church or cannot bear to face a priest.

Perhaps I should make an appointment.

The good news: according to the (subscription-only) Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is one of this summer’s surprise bestsellers. Seven weeks after being launched with an initial run of 40,000 copies, the book now has 296,000 hardcover copies in print, and Hitchens is set to earn at least $1 million for debunking America’s One True Deity™©.

The bad news: apparently the religious crazies are snapping up copies. It’s not clear whether that’s because they care about knowing thine enemy, or plan mass book burnings.

Whatever: the past year has probably seen the strongest sales of atheist books in history. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has 500,000 hardcover copies in print, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation has 185,000, while anti-religious books by Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger account for another 120,000 or so between them.

Hitchens, meanwhile, is winning friends and influencing people during a marathon U.S. publicity tour:

An estimated 1,000 turned out in Miami to listen to Mr. Hitchens challenge a panel that included an Orthodox Jew and a Buddhist nun. “I now wish I hadn’t participated,” says Nathan Katz, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University. “He was utterly abusive. It had the intellectual level of the Jerry Springer Show.”

Mr. Hitchens says he purposely focused his tour on what he describes as “the states of the Old Confederacy,” in part because he says that people in the South are more generous-spirited and less religious than generally thought. He also knew that religion was of particular interest. “Everywhere we had to turn hundreds away,” he says. “I wouldn’t say that I won or lost those the debates, but the audience was much more on my side than people predicted.”

… Mr. Hitchens says he has received surprisingly little hate mail since his book was published. What does he think readers have learned from “God is Not Great?” “That your life is probably better led after you’ve outgrown the idea that the universe has a plan for you,” he says. “The cosmos isn’t designed with you in mind. You might as well just consult an astrological chart.”

Go grab a copy here, or at your nearest independent bookstore.

The Council of Europe—which oversees human rights in the European Union’s member countries—will vote next week on a proposal to defend the teaching of evolution, and keep creationism and intelligent design out of science classes in EU state schools. A report for the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly notes that the campaign against evolution has its roots “in forms of religious extremism,” and that “Today, creationists of all faiths are trying to get their ideas accepted in Europe. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights.”

This isn’t trivial: the Council of Europe governs human rights for more than 800 million people in 47 countries, and has the European Court of Human Rights at its disposal. And although it isn’t binding, the proposed resolution—which says member states should “firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution by natural selection”—could effectively pull the rug from under Europe’s religious crazies.

Of course, the resolution first has to pass. Stay tuned.

Edinburgh’s Fringe festival is discovering that Scientologists are a little thin-skinned when it comes to parody—particularly one as high-profile as Xenu is Loose!, a Fringe play that dares to mock St. Ron’s abysmal “Battlefield Earth.” (The play’s subtitle is “Cower puny Humans as the Dark Prince of the Galactic Federation rains Atomic Death once more upon your Pitiful Planet—The Musical!”)

Naturally, the cult’s spokescrazies are in fine offended form:

Church of Scientology spokeswoman Janet Kenyon Laveau claimed the play’s authors were misinformed about Scientology and advised people not to attend the play during its Edinburgh run. She said people interested in learning about Scientology should instead read Hubbard’s work online or in a library.

“We would advise people to find out for yourself from the horse’s mouth, not from some kooks,” she said. [...] “There is nothing in the theology or philosophy of Scientology about belief in aliens.”

Which is odd: because as Kenyon Laveau knows all too well, belief in aliens is at the absolute heart of the, er, “theology” and philosophy of Scientology. Take a look, for instance, at this (it’s a PDF document, so you’ll need Adobe Reader). The leaflet can also be found on the excellent Operation Clambake Web site.

Still, you can fool some of the people some of the time—including the Scotsman, which reported this story and is usually pretty reliable. It unquestioningly trots out the cult’s lies—that it is “one of the fastest growing sects in the world” (nope) and has “more than eight million members” (not even close—try fewer than 100,000).

But surely it’s true that we’re all possessed by the spirits of aliens murdered by Xenu 75,000,000 years ago?

Isn’t it?

Religious crazies are taking root in Second Life—bad news for those of us who sometimes like to trade theocratic reality for godless virtual reality. Naturally the evangelical megachurches are leading the crusade: Oklahoma-based LifeChurch.tv, for instance, now broadcasts its weekly sermon to a virtual church in Second Life.

Still, look on the bright side: this may be a perfect opportunity for Second Life’s nihilists (known as “griefers”) to give back to the community…