Meet the Flintstones | The Texas Tribune

Meet the Flintstones | The Texas Tribune

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The differences in beliefs about evolution and the length of time that living things have existed on earth are reflected in the political and religious preference of our respondents, who were asked four questions about biological history and God:

• 38 percent said human beings developed over millions of years with God guiding the process and another 12 percent said that development happened without God having any part of the process. Another 38 percent agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago."

• Asked about the origin and development of life on earth without injecting humans into the discussion, and 53 percent said it evolved over time, "with a guiding hand from God." They were joined by 15 percent who agreed on the evolution part, but "with no guidance from God." About a fifth — 22 percent — said life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.

• Most of the Texans in the survey — 51 percent — disagree with the statement, "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." Thirty-five percent agreed with that statement, and 15 percent said they don't know.

• Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs? Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don't know.

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... An overwhelming majority said their religious beliefs were extremely important (52 percent) or somewhat important (30 percent). Only 35 percent go to church once a week or more; 52 percent said they go once or twice a year (29 percent) or never (23 percent).

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Democrats (28 percent) are less likely than Republicans (47 percent) to think that humans have always existed in their present form and more likely (21 percent to 7 percent) to think humans have developed over millions of years without God's guidance. About the same percentages of Democrats and Republicans (40 and 36 percent, respectively) believe that evolution took place over time with God's guidance. Democrat Bill White's voters were the most likely to believe in evolution without a divine hand (33 percent); on the Republican side, by comparison, only 6 percent of Rick Perry's supporters were in that category.

Has life on earth always existed in its present form? Republicans are more likely to agree (29 percent) than Democrats (16 percent). They're less likely to believe that life evolved over time with no guidance from God (8 percent to 24 percent). Democrats are slightly less inclined to believe in evolution with a "guiding hand from God" (50 percent to 55 percent).

Republicans are less likely to believe that humans developed from earlier species of animals; 26 percent agree, while 60 percent disagree. Among Democrats in the survey, 46 percent agree that humans evolved from earlier species; 42 percent disagree. Perry's voters were most hostile to this premise — 67 percent disagree. ...

World Vision | Employment Discrimination | Foreign Aid

World Vision | Employment Discrimination | Foreign Aid

World Vision continues faith-based hiring as it pulls in $250 million in US grants. Obama vowed to change that. Why hasn't he?

By Krista J. Kapralos

Published: January 11, 2010 06:30 ET

BAMAKO, Mali — For a year and a half, Bara Kassambara kept his mouth shut.

Every day, all of his coworkers paused for prayer time. There were frequent Bible studies, and constant talk about Jesus. Kassambara attended the required events, but otherwise quietly focused on his work: bringing clean water to rural Mali.

“I think many people at World Vision just believed that I was a Christian,” said Kassambara, a Muslim in a predominantly Islamic country.

Fluent in English and with years of development work on his resume, World Vision hired Kassambara to work on the West Africa Water Initiative — a project to provide safe drinking water to stave off water-borne diseases that run rampant in the region.

It was a rare hire for World Vision, Kassambara said; he only got the job because it was a temporary position. When World Vision stepped down as lead agency on the project in late 2008, Kassambara took a similar job with another organization.

“The goal of World Vision is clearly written: to promote Christianity worldwide,” Kassambara said. “I knew this was going on. I knew the rules of the game. If their goal is to promote Christianity, why should they hire a Muslim?”

World Vision, based outside of Seattle, is one of the largest recipients of development grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the federal government’s foreign aid arm. The organization received $281 million in U.S. grants in 2008, up from $220 million in 2007 and $261 million in 2006, according to World Vision documents. Those grants, amounting to about a quarter of the organization’s total U.S. budget, came in the form of both cash and food.

The organization employs about 40,000 people worldwide.

Charity Navigator, which ranks charities based on efficiency, lists World Vision as a “super-sized charity,” with $1.1 billion in expenses in 2008, and gave it four stars — the best possible ranking. Throughout Mali, Christians and Muslims alike praise World Vision for bringing food and clean water to hungry people — the organization "extends assistance to all people, regardless of their religious beliefs," according to its website. Malians credit the organization with staving off starvation and helping rural villages develop agriculture. If the group ever leaves Mali, people there say they would be devastated.

World Vision officials say the organization does not proselytize, just that they decline to separate their work from their faith. "We do want to be witnesses to Jesus Christ by life, word, deed and sign,” said Torrey Olsen, World Vision’s Senior Director for Christian Engagement. That wouldn’t be possible, he said, unless the organization’s workers were Christians.

Under U.S. law, World Vision points to civil rights protections that allow religious organizations to hire employees based on their faith. This is an uncontroversial protection of religious freedom, given that churches obviously need Christian staff to carry out their missions, just as synagogues need Jews and Mosques Muslims.

But such religious institutions are typically funded by their followers. The controversial question is whether it’s a violation of the First Amendment to exclude on the basis of religion when U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill, a practice that became increasingly common during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. ...

Dick Cheney Admits to Torture Conspiracy | News & Politics | AlterNet

Dick Cheney Admits to Torture Conspiracy | News & Politics | AlterNet

If the U.S. had a functioning criminal justice system for the powerful, former Vice President Dick Cheney would have just convicted himself with his Sunday comments.

On Sunday, Cheney pronounced himself "a big supporter of waterboarding," a near-drowning technique that has been regarded as torture back to the Spanish Inquisition and that has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.

Cheney was unrepentant about his support for the technique. He answered with an emphatic "yes" when asked if he had opposed the Bush administration’s decision to suspend the use of waterboarding – after it was employed against three "high-value detainees" sometimes in repetitive sequences. He added that waterboarding should still be "on the table" today.

Cheney then went further. Speaking with a sense of impunity, he casually negated a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years – that the brutal interrogations were approved by independent Justice Department legal experts who thus gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.

However, on Sunday, Cheney acknowledged that the White House had told the Justice Department lawyers what legal opinions to render. In other words, the opinions amounted to ordered-up lawyering to permit the administration to do whatever it wanted. ...

OpEdNews - Article: Our Founders Were NOT Fundamentalists

OpEdNews - Article: Our Founders Were NOT Fundamentalists
byHarvey Wasserman| February 14, 2010

"God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board."
--Mark Twain

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazinehighlights yet another mob of extremists using the Texas School Board to baptize our children's textbooks.

This endless, ever-angry escalating assault on our Constitution by crusading theocrats could be obliterated with the effective incantation of two names: Benjamin Franklin, and Deganawidah.

But first, let's do some history:

1) Actual Founder-Presidents #2 through #6 -- John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams -- were all freethinking Deists and Unitarians; what Christian precepts they embraced were moderate, tolerant and open-minded.

2) Actual Founder-President #1, George Washington, became an Anglican as required for original military service under the British, and occasionally quoted scripture. But he vehemently opposed any church-state union. In a 1790 letter to the Jews of Truro, he wrote: The "Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistances, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens." A 1796 treaty he signed says "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Washington rarely went to church and by some accounts refused last religious rites.

3) Washington was also the nation's leading brewer, and since most Americans drank much beer (water could be lethal in the cities) they regularly trembled before the keg, not the altar. Like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, virtually all American farmers raised hemp and its variations.

4) Jefferson produced a personal Bible from which he edited out all reference to the "miraculous" from the life of Jesus, whom he considered both an activist and a mortal.

5) Tom Paine's COMMON SENSE sparked the Revolution with nary a mention of Jesus or Christianity. His Deist Creator established the laws of Nature, endowed humans with Free Will, then left.

6) The Constitution never mentions the words "Christian" or "Jesus" or "Christ."

7) Revolutionary America was filled with Christians whose commitment to toleration and diversity was completely adverse to the violent, racist, misogynist, anti-sex theocratic Puritans whose "City on the Hill" meant a totalitarian state. Inspirational preachers like Rhode Island's Roger Williams and religious groups like the Quakers envisioned a nation built on tolerance and love for all.

8) The US was founded less on Judeo-Christian beliefs than on the Greco-Roman love for dialog and reason. There are no contemporary portraits of any Founder wearing a crucifix or church garb. But Washington was famously painted half-naked in the buff toga of the Roman Republic, which continues to inspire much of our official architecture.

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The Double Standard at CBS | CommonDreams.org

The Double Standard at CBS | CommonDreams.org
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Now, before all the knees start jerking, I want to be clear that this pro-choicer has no problem in the abstract with CBS's decision to air an ad featuring Florida football star Tim Tebow. The ad, funded by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, features the decision by Tebow's mother to reject the advice of doctors to have an abortion when she was very sick while the future Heisman Trophy winner was in her womb. That story is an unqualified, beautiful individual testament to faith and love.

But Focus on the Family wants to twist the free choice of this mother into a political vehicle to eliminate choice for all other women. But not even that ultimately offends me. Where CBS bears false witness is the fact that they accepted that ad while rejecting a Super Bowl ad for a gay dating service. The ad starts with one man in a Green Bay Packers jersey and the other in a Minnesota Vikings shirt cheering against each other. It ends with them making out on the couch.

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It is a double standard that fits a pattern. In 2004, CBS and NBC rejected an ad from the United Church of Christ welcoming gay and lesbian people into its congregations. Back then, CBS said, "Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact that the (Bush administration) has recently proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable.''

By accepting the Focus on the Family ad in this context, CBS gives its political blessing to an organization that spends tremendous energy specifically excluding gay couples from full citizenship, and, with its support of conservative Supreme Court nominees, opposes full equality for people of color and women. It is a window to the future under the court's bitterly divided 5-4 ruling that frees corporations to spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

The paranoia of CBS is particularly needless when Americans now overwhelmingly support gay and lesbian rights short of marriage. CBS looks even more ridiculous when Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this week declared that ending "don't ask, don't tell'' to let gay and lesbian soldiers serve openly is "the right thing to do,'' and former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell recanted his 1990s opposition that led to the current "don't ask'' law. ...

Editorial - Abstinence Education Done Right - NYTimes.com

Editorial - Abstinence Education Done Right - NYTimes.com

The ongoing debate over sex education has been rekindled by a provocative new study suggesting that teaching abstinence can delay the start of sexual activity among inner-city youngsters — if it is freed from the moralistic overtones and ideological restrictions that were the hallmark of abstinence-only programs under the Bush administration.

It would be a mistake to place too much importance on a single study of black middle-school students in Philadelphia, but the study appears to be sound and its findings are worth further exploration.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association, was led by a husband-wife team at the University of Pennsylvania. They randomly assigned 662 African-American students in grades six and seven to one of four different programs — an eight-hour abstinence-only program stressing the benefits of delaying intercourse; an eight-hour safer-sex program stressing condom use; a comprehensive intervention that covered both abstinence and condoms; and a control group that offered health information unrelated to sexual behavior.

The only program that successfully delayed the start of sexual activity was the abstinence-only instruction. By the end of two years, only a third of the abstinence-only group had engaged in sexual intercourse compared with almost half of the control group.

Advocates of abstinence-only education have seized on the new findings as evidence that their approach works best. Some are urging the Obama administration to reverse course and restore federal support for abstinence-only education. That is a willful misreading of the implications of this study.

Under current federal law, supported by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress, abstinence-only programs that seek federal support must meet several rigid requirements that essentially make them abstinence-until-marriage programs.

They must teach, for example, that abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage is the “expected standard” for all school-age children. This new study would have failed that test. It did not advocate abstinence until marriage but urged students to wait until they were more mature. It encouraged abstinence as a way to eliminate the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, had youngsters draw up lists of the pros and cons of sexual activity, and taught strategies for resisting pressure to have intercourse. ...

Thom Hartmann: Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies

Thom Hartmann: Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies

Globalization is killing Europe, just as it's already wiped out much of the American middle class.

Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren't making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did.

Globalists/corporatists/conservative "free market" and "flat earth" advocates say this is a great opportunity to cut benefits for the old folks (and for the young folks in the future), thus bringing the countries budgets back into balance, and this story is the main corporate media storyline.

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"Wealth" is different from "income." Wealth is value, which endures at least for some time. Income is simply compensation for work. If you wash my car for $10 and I mow your lawn for $10, we have a GDP of $20 and it looks like we both have income and economic activity. But no wealth has been created, just income.

On the other hand, if I build your car, I'm creating something of value. And if you turn my lawn into a small farm that produces food we can all eat, you're creating something of value. Not only do we have an "economy" with a "GDP," we also have created wealth.

A stick on the ground has no commercial value, but if you add labor to it by carving it into an axe handle -- a thing of commercial value -- you have "created wealth." Similarly, metals in the ground have no commercial value, but when you add labor to them by extracting, refining, and forming them into products, you "create wealth." Even turning seeds and dirt and cows into hamburgers is a form of manufacturing and creates wealth.

This is the "Wealth of Nations" that titled Adam Smith's famous 1776 book.

On the other hand, when a trader at Goldman Sachs makes a "profit" trading stocks, bonds, or currencies, no wealth whatsoever is created. In fact, to the extent that that trader takes millions in commissions, pay, and bonuses, he's actually depleting the wealth of the nation (particularly to the extent that he moves his money offshore to save or invest, as many do).

To use the United States as an example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s manufacturing accounted for a high of 28 percent of our total gross domestic product (and much of the rest of the economy like agriculture that, in a classical sense is "manufacturing" wasn't even included in those numbers), and when Reagan came into office it was at a strong 20 percent. Today it's about ten percent of our GDP.

What this means is that we're creating less wealth here, because we're not making much anymore. (And the biggest growth in American manufacturing has been in the military sector, where goods are made that are then destroyed when they explode over foreign cities, causing even more of our wealth to vanish.)

The main effect of the globalism fad of the past 30 yearrs -- lowering the protective barriers to trade that countries for centuries have used to make sure their own local economies are self-sufficient -- has been to ship manufacturing (the creation of wealth) from developed nations to developing nations. Transnational corporations love this, because in countries with lower labor costs and few environmental and safety regulations, it's more profitable to manufacture products. They then sell those products in the "mature" countries -- the places that used to manufacture -- and people burn through the wealth they'd accumulated in the earlier manufacturing days (home equity, principally, along with savings and lines of credit) to buy these foreign-manufactured goods.

At first, it looks like a good deal to consumers in developed nations. Goods are cheaper! But over a decade or two or three, as the creation of real wealth is reduced and the residue of the old wealth is spent, the developed nations become progressively poorer and poorer. At the same time, the "developing" nations become wealthier -- because those are the places that are producing real wealth.

Which brings us to Spain and Greece -- and the problem of all developed nations including the USA. So long as globalism continues apace, the transnational corporations and their CEOs will continue to become fabulously wealthy. But, more importantly, they also acquire the political power that comes with that control of economies.

So they tell us that instead of putting back into place tariffs, domestic content laws, and other "protectionist" policies that built America from the time the were first proposed by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 (and largely adopted by Congress in 1793) until they were dismantled by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush, we should instead simple "accept the reality" that we're "living beyond our means" and we have to "cut back our wages and social programs."

In other words, they get richer, our nations become poorer, and national sovereignty is reduced. ...

Brit Hume To Tiger Woods: Convert To Christianity To Recover From Scandal (VIDEO)

Brit Hume To Tiger Woods: Convert To Christianity To Recover From Scandal (VIDEO)

Fox News' Brit Hume gave Tiger Woods some personal advice Sunday morning, telling the scandal-plagued (and Buddhist) golfer to 'turn to Christianity' to make a full recovery.

On "Fox News Sunday," Hume — the former leader of Fox News' political reporting and host of "Special Report" who now serves as an analyst for the network — said that Woods' recovery "depends on his faith."

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," Hume said. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world." ...