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Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible. “It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
The best selling Bible study text on Amazon right now is Bible Illuminated, a “286-page glossy oversized magazine style” version of the New Testament (look inside here).
A site that bills itself as the #1 Christian Porn Site sells Jesus Loves Porn Stars Bibles.
The Green Bible is also very popular on Amazon.
The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.
James Earl Jones Reads The Bible.
In a voice as rich as it is recognized, James Earl Jones lends his narrative talents to the King James Version of the New Testament. In over 19 hours on 16 compact discs enhanced with a complete musical score, James Earl Jones interprets the most enduring book of our time utilizing the acclaimed actor’s superb storytelling and skilled characterizations. Hailed as the greatest spoken-word bible version ever, and with almost half a million copies sold, this exquisite audio treasury is certain to enthuse and inspire.
The Message Remix 2.0 is a version for young people written in “today’s language”. Here’s the first few verses of Genesis:
First this: God created the Heavens and Earth — all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.
Inspired By The Bible Experience is a 85-hour audiobook of the entire Bible with over 400 different readers, including Cuba Gooding Jr., Denzel Washington, LL Cool J, and Faith Evans. Samuel L. Jackson plays God! I wonder if he gets to recite this bit from Pulp Fiction:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
The Chronological Study Bible presents the text of the Bible in the order in which they occurred.
The Brick Testament is an online Lego version of the Bible. See The Last Supper. (via BBC)
On one of the window ledges of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem sits a wooden ladder that’s been there since at least 1835. The purpose of the ladder is unclear but its placement there is due to the Status Quo. When the wood rots, it’s replaced. And like many other aspects of the church’s ownership arrangement, the continued existence of the ladder is taken very seriously.
Last Monday, chairs, iron bars, and fists flew on the roof of one of the most revered sites in Christianity, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. When the dust cleared, seven Ethiopian Orthodox monks and four Egyptian (Coptic) monks had been injured. The fight started when an Egyptian monk decided to move his chair into the shade — technically, argued the Ethiopians, encroaching on the latter’s jurisdiction.
The linked-to page is on Geocities so it’ll likely reach its quota very quickly…maybe bookmark and come back for a look? (thx, phil)
Every now and then, you may find yourself wondering: how many atoms of Jesus do you eat everyday?
In the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the eucharist actually becomes the blood and body of Jesus Christ. […] Transubstantiation means that eventually the earth’s entire biomass will be made out of Jesus.
Eventually = 4.91 billion years.
Atheist finds image of nothing in his toast. Quick, put the toast on eBay!
Man, I love this video. It’s some guy explaining how the banana — “the atheist’s nightmare” — so perfectly fits in the human hand and peels so easily that it must have been made by God**. Kirk Cameron listens intently. I can’t wait for the follow-up video where he explains why watermelons don’t have handles and what God was thinking when he built the coconut.
** Not that this guy cares or whatever, but the modern banana is a cultivated fruit…i.e. pressured by humans to, oh what’s the word…evolve into its present form. And other varieties of bananas are smaller or larger and differently shaped. Some wild bananas have large hard seeds. I could go on….
We were talking about the cocksure Christopher Hitchens at lunch today and when I get back to my desk, a link to an interview with Hitchens appears in my newsreader.
Oh, and I do not “profess” to despise religious extremists. I really do despise them.
(via clusterflock)
Photos of a Masonic handbook from 1920 called King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory. The text is written in shorthand. (via clusterflock)
You won’t need to do that. She will be alive by then.
That’s what the parents of a dead 11-year-old girl said when told the medical examiner was to do an autopsy on her. The girl died from untreated diabetes while her parents, convinced she was under “spiritual attack”, prayed for her instead of taking her to the doctor. They face up to 25 years in prison and probably zero guilt because it was all God’s plan.
A list of the Bible’s greatest massacres.
3. Elijah (and God) burned to death 102 religious leaders in a prayer contest. 2 Kings 1:10-12
(via cyn-c)
A profile of elaborate huckster Pat Robertson. Here’s the introduction to the article from the VQR blog:
Sizemore looks at Roberton’s weight-loss diet shakes, his Liberian diamond-mining operation, African gold-mining operation, his Cayman Island for-profit corporation, and his role in the US attorney appointments scandal. In short, Sizemore doesn’t find much to like about the man.
And here’s a fun little snippet about how they were planning for the broadcast of the second coming of Jesus:
We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’
If only toning down the luminosity of Jesus were that simple.
A short list of What Every American Should Know About the Middle East.
Arabs are part of an ethnic group, not a religion. Arabs were around long before Islam, and there have been (and still are) Arab Christians and Arab Jews. In general, you’re an Arab if you 1) are of Arab descent (blood), or 2) speak the main Arab language (Arabic).
A companion list of what every resident of the Middle East should know about the US might also be helpful. (via chris glass)
In The Year of Living Biblically, AJ Jacobs followed all the rules in the Bible as literally as he could.
The book that came out of the year has several layers.
- An exploration of some of the Bible’s startlingly relevant rules. I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I’m a journalist in New York. This was not easy.
- An investigation of the rules that baffle the 21st century brain. How to justify the laws about stoning homosexuals? Or smashing idols? Or sacrificing oxen? And how do you follow those in modern-day Manhattan?
Jacobs was recently interviewed by Jewish culture magazine Jewcy about the book and will be talking about his experience tomorrow at the 92nd St. Y.
Despite a common heritage, the social, economic, and political differences between the United States and Britain are, in some cases, great.
Like most west Europeans, Britons tend to have more left-wing views than Americans, but the first chart shows that this is often by a surprising margin. (“Left” and “right” are harder to locate than they were: here “left” implies a big-state, secular, socially liberal, internationalist and green outlook; right, the reverse.) The data are derived by subtracting left-wing answers from right-wing ones, for each country and for each main political grouping within each country. A net minus rating suggests predominantly left-wing views and a positive rating suggests a preponderance of right-wing views.
Compared to Britain, the US is a remarkably conservative nation. The companion chart is a good look at some of the data. (via gongblog)
Maybe this is surprising to you: when compared to Roman Catholicism, Islam is less conservative when it comes to sexual ethics.
Video of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the topic of “Does God Exist?”
John Allen Paulos has 12 irreligious questions for the candidates. Among them:
Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?
How would you suggest that we reason with someone who claims that his or her decisions are informed, shaped, even dictated by fundamental religious principles, which nevertheless can’t be probed or questioned by those who don’t share them?
(via 3qd)
Cynical-C shares some of the more interesting complaints received by the FCC about television programming. One viewer complains about The Family Guy:
The show has no redeeming/moral value what so ever. The show actually had the gall to show GOD in bed with a young woman ready to have sexual intercourse and the dialogue to go with that event, including the use of condoms. They also had Jesus and his earthly father Joseph having an argument. Along with portraying the total disrespect of family values Stewie hitting his mother, the father and son ganging up on the wife/mother, there was also a male sexual predator in this episode as well.; The whole show was quite revolting. It should be taken off the air.
God’s Eye View presents four important Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, including The Crucifixion, Noah’s Ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on “watch” then “duelity” to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms-from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu-in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
Photos and video here. Watching the videos, especially the one featuring Tong Jian Quan, I was reminded of hip hop dancing (Michael Jackson in particular) in a way that watching kung-fu and other martial arts in Hollywood movies does not.
Also, Shaolin monk Hai Deng was famous for performing a one-finger handstand. The video seems a little suspect but this performance brings the single finger handstand into the realm of possibility.
Sarah Hepola has a pair of interviews up on her site with two Mormon teens (first interview, second interview).
Joseph Smith was evil incarnate — a little insane, but more evil. Sort of like Charles Manson, only slightly better looking.
I hereby declare the interviewees the two most articulate teenagers on the internet. (via the morning news)
We’re running a bit behind in watching The War; we stopped the other night right before D-Day. The series is quite good so far, even with all its flaws. The last section we watched dealt with the Battle of Monte Cassino and the related Battle of Anzio in Italy. With the Germans holding the high ground, these battles were some of toughest of the war for the Allies. During one particularly difficult moment, an American soldier yelled out a prayer (I’m paraphrasing slightly): “Oh God, where are you? We really could use your help down here. And don’t send Jesus, come down here yourself. This ain’t no place for children.”
James Kugel is a former professor of Hebrew Studies at Harvard and an Orthodox Jew whose current book, How to Read the Bible, is getting really good reviews. From a NY Times piece on the book:
Most unsettling to religious Jews and Christians may be Kugel’s chapters about the origins of God and his chosen people. Kugel says that there is essentially no evidence — archaeological, historical, cultural — for the events in the Torah. No sign of an exodus from Egypt; no proof that Israelites ever invaded, much less conquered, Canaan; no indication that Jericho was ever sacked. In fact, quite the contrary: current evidence suggests that the Israelites were probably Canaanites themselves, semi-nomadic highlanders or fleeing city dwellers who gradually separated from their mother culture, established a distinct identity and invented a mythical past.
A first chapter of the book is also available:
In going through the Bible, however, this book will focus not only on what the text says but on the larger question of what a modern reader is to make of it, how it is to be read. This will mean examining two quite different ways of understanding the Bible, those of modern biblical scholars and of ancient interpreters.
(via mr, where the normally unreserved Tyler Cowen says of the book, “[it’s] so good I don’t know what to say about [it]”)
From an article about teen Christians campaigning against pop culture:
“At one point in Jared Hutchins’ young life, the Beatles were a big problem. ‘I had to stop listening to them for a while,’ said Hutchins, who lives in Cumming, Georgia, and plays the piano, guitar and harmonica. He said the group’s world view ‘had a negative effect on me,’ and made him irritable and angry.”
“‘We’re fighting for those who don’t know they have a voice, that are being manipulated by our pop culture indulging in things that, really, they’re not mature enough to be thinking about yet,’ Luce told CNN. ‘Kids are hurting,’ he said. And of those who he feels inflict these moral wounds, Luce said, ‘We call them terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids. They’re raping virgin teenage America on the sidewalk, and everybody’s walking by and acting like everything’s OK. And it’s just not OK.’”
“Virtue terrorists raping virgin teenage America” is quite the turn-of-phrase.
Biologists Helping Bookstores is a guerilla effort to reshelve pseudo-scientific books (books on intelligent design, for instance), taking them from the Science section and moving them to a more appropriate area of the store, like Philosophy, Religion, or Religious Fiction. (via mr)
Christopher Hitchens’ book about religion and atheism is a surprise hit.
The results from a recent Gallup poll show that more Americans accept creationism than do evolution. Among registered Republicans, almost 7 in 10 don’t believe in evolution. (via cynical-c)
David Plotz has finished his Blogging the Bible series at Slate…he wrote about each book of the Old Testament. “While I’ve been blogging the Bible, I have tried not to take myself too seriously and not to pretend more insight than I actually have. I just wanted to read the book and write about what it’s like to read it. No essays, no philosophy, no experts.”
Earlier this month during a debate between the Republican candidates for the US Presidency in 2008, three candidates raised their hands when asked if they didn’t believe in evolution. One of the three, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, has an op-ed in the NY Times today that more fully expresses his view. “The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.”
Update: A related op-ed from The Onion: I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period. (thx, third)
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