Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey
A study conducted by researchers led by Kathleen H. Corriveau of Boston University examined how religious exposure affects a child’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. They found that religious exposure at an early age has a surprising effect: it makes children less able to differentiate between reality and fantasy.
The researchers presented three different types of stories – religious, fantastical and realistic – to a group of 5 and 6-year olds. Religious children were divided into three groups: children exposed to the Christian religion either as churchgoers who attended public school, non-churchgoers who attended parochial school, or churchgoers who attended parochial school. The fourth group of children included non-churchgoing children who attended public school and had no exposure to religion in either church or school. The goal of the research was to find out if religious exposure would affect the child’s ability to identify if the lead character in each of the stories was real or make-believe.
The study found that children who attended church services and/or were enrolled in a parochial school had a much harder time differentiating between fact and fiction when compared to children of non-religious background. The study, published in the journal Cognitive Science, states:
“The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.”
I am still often puzzled that there are people who do not simply recognize this by casual observation.
There is a reason why scam artists often target deeply religious people, they are the most gullible.
And that is the same reason that politicians invoke god, religion, and the Bible in their speeches.
They know that religious people are predisposed to accept things without the benefit of evidence.
Let's face it, without religious indoctrination there would be NO president Trump.
It requires the dulling of critical thinking skills to convince people to vote for idiots, assholes, and criminals.
And religion serves that purpose quite nicely.
So I stand by my contention that introducing religion to children is in fact a form of child abuse. But will add that in the long run it is also an abuse of our basic human right to use our intellects to protect ourselves as adults.
The television series Trackdown really did produce an episode featuring a "Trump" character who came to town claiming that only he could prevent the end of the world by building a wall (and also sold special force propelling umbrellas to deflect meteorites). The episode (S1, E30) aired on CBS in 1958 and was titled "The End of the World," featuring actor Lawrence Dobkin playing the role of "Walter Trump." A synopsis of the episode from the Classic TV Archive reads as follows:
Walter Trump, a confidence man, puts on a long robe and holds a tent meeting in the town of Talpa. He tells the townspeople that a cosmic explosion will rain fire on the town and that he is the only one that can save them from death. Ranger Hoby Gilman attempts to prove Trump is a fraud.
Every time I think this whole thing cannot get any more surreal, well you know the rest.
I am beginning to think that Donald Trump is nothing but a fictional character himself cobbled together from bits and pieces of television series, comic strips, and science fiction novels.
(BTW did you notice that the TV character was sporting Trump's actual hairline?)
What do the Bible, "The Hunger Games" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" have in common? All three are works of fiction, according to the booksellers at Costco.
Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach made that shocking discovery last Friday as he was shopping for a present for his wife at a Costco in Simi Valley, Calif.
“All the Bibles were labeled as fiction,” the pastor told me. “It seemed bizarre to me.”
Kaltenbach is the lead pastor at Discovery Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in southern California.
He thought there must be some sort of mistake so he scoured the shelf for other Bibles. Every copy was plastered with a sticker that read, “$14.99 Fiction.”
Uh oh somebody needs to tell Sarah Palin about this. If she can get out a ghostwritten Facebook post on this in a hurry, she might be able to knock her book perhaps ten more slots down in the Amazon rating system before the end of the day.
Personally I have to really question the intelligence of anybody who reads the Bible and believes that it is literally a factual account of events that took place in the past.
Of course it's fiction, the only question remaining should be is is good fiction or bad?
Apparently Palin has once again made a splash on the pages of comic books in one titled America’s Got Powers, in which she plays a villainous politician. Here is more from Bleeding Cool:
In America’s Got Powers from Jonathan Ross and Bryan Hitch we’ve been used to seeing a little photo reference going on with the head scientist being “played” by David Tennant and the US Senator involved with the superreality TV show bearing an uncanny resemblance to Sarah Palin.
At first I wasn't absolutely convinced that image WAS Sarah Palin, but hen I saw this:
Yep that's her alright.
No doubt about it.
You know on the one hand the Palin supporters should be happy that she is shown as being proficient with a firearm, And they DID make her a powerful politician. That is better than she was able to do on her own.
As for the fact that she is the villain in the book, well ask yourself, is that really surprising, considering her hateful rhetoric and constant talk of violence?
Though to be fair the woman has been turning up in comics, not always as the villain, for years now.
After all what better place for a creature made up almost entirely of myth, than on he pages of a comic book?
When I saw this video I knew right away that this David Barton guy was full of shit. (Of course just the fact that he was being interviewed by Glenn Beck was probably all I needed to know to figure that out.) However I wasn't confident that we would ever be able to PROVE that he as full of shit.
So I was thrilled when I saw this post over at Wonkette:
Well, it turns out that the topic of guns is pretty darn popular at the moment, so Barton has been having himself a fine old time with tales of how in America’s Good Old Days, an armed populace kept everyone happy and free. Arm teachers? Better yet, why not arm the kids, too? As we see in the video up top, that idea is grounded in the very best Authentic Frontier Gibberish available — after all, it convinced even a skeptical tough guy like Glenn Beck! This week, we learned that Barton’s tale appears to come from an unimpeachable source of knowledge on the Old West — a 1979 novel by Louis L’Amour, Bendigo Shafter.
Barton told Beck this charming true tale of how guns keep good people — even kids! — so very safe and free from worry:
“The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who’s teaching. A guy — he’s out in the West — this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, ‘You kill the teacher, you die.’ He says, ‘Okay.’ The teacher lives. Real simple stuff. Saved the life of — there was no shooting because all the kids — we’re talking in elementary school — all the kids pull their guns out and says, ‘We like our teacher. You shoot our teacher, we’ll kill you.’”
Wonkette then linked to afemale blogger named Chris Rodda who makes it her business to fact check David Barton. Here is what she found:
I assumed that Barton was either exaggerating a real story or just making the whole thing up, but since he didn’t give any source for the story or enough specifics to fact check it, I thought it would be impossible to find out whether or not there was any truth to it. I didn’t even consider that it might have come from a novel, but when a commenter on my previous post noted the striking similarity between Barton’s story and a story from the Louis L’Amour novel Bendigo Shafter, I downloaded the Kindle version of the novel and checked it out.
I wasn’t about to read an entire Louis L’Amour novel, but read enough to get the gist of the story:
The teacher in L’Amour’s novel was Drake Morrell, a gambler and gunfighter who had killed five men. Morrell was sentenced to be hanged in San Francisco, but somehow escaped and ended up in a town in Wyoming, where he became a respected citizen and, of course, the school teacher. But he was still being pursued by a character named Stacy Follett. Years earlier, Morrell had exposed that Follett and his friends were cheating at cards. Two of Follett’s friends had confronted Morrell with guns, and Morrell had shot and killed them. Follett caught up with Morrell and went to the school where he was teaching to kill the now respectable school teacher, who was defended by his gun-toting students.
Here’s how the character Follett recounted the incident at the school to another character in the book when asked if he had killed Morrell:
“… And then I looked at him over my cup. “Did you kill Drake Morrell?”
He chuckled again. “Decided agin it.” He sipped his coffee. “You know somethin’? After he started that there schoolteachin’ I figured I had him dead to rights. I laid out for him, waitin’ until he was out of school, and when he come out the door, I shaped up with my old Betsy girl here” — he slapped his rifle — “right on his belly. I had him where he couldn’t move. There was youngsters all around him, and he stood there lookin’ at me and never turned a hair. He had sand, that Morrell.”
“Had?”
"Has. He’s still around. You want to know what happened? I nigh got myself kilt. Five or six of them youngsters, weren’t but two of them upwards of twelve or thirteen, they outs with their six-shooters and had me covered.
“They told me he was their teacher and he was a mighty good one and if I shot him they’d fill my hide.”
He chuckled again. “An’ you know somethin’? They’d of done it, too.”
“What happened?”
“Nothin’. I pulled down my flag. Pulled her down right quick. I never seen so many youngsters with six-shooters.”
Can you believe that shit? So essentially this David Barton guy, who claims to have access to secret historical manuscripts that tell a different version of American history than the one taught in public schools, referenced a fictional story from a paper back copy of a Louis L'Amour book in an attempt to sell Beck''s audience on the "fact" that in olden times American classrooms were protected from attack by gun wielding school children.
And do you know what? I bet Glenn Beck's listeners ate it up with a spoon, and undoubtedly repeated it to their friends and family as if it were an actual historic fact.
And that my friends is why you don't get your information or historical facts from Right Wing radio, or Fox News.
By the way if David Barton wants to refute the idea that he got his information from a work of western fiction than he is welcome to produce the document that proves otherwise, but until he does and I VERY comfortable stating that we caught his lying ass red handed.
