Ethics

The Door Christian Fellowship, a creepily cultish Pentecostal Christian sect that’s an offshoot of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Gospel Church, is putting on a “hell house” in Chandler. They’re calling it “Hell 101," and, as usual, they are advertising it in a deceptive manner that attempts to hide the fact that it’s religious propaganda. I say “as usual” because not only have they put on such “hell houses” for years around Halloween, they’re also known for advertising events such as Christian rock concerts while conveniently forgetting to mention the “Christian” part. Such deception has long been associated with Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), who was a fraudulent faith healer, alcohol Prohibitionist, and anti-evolutionist who later in life faked her own abduction in order to run off with her lover, Kenneth G. Ormiston, who had been an engineer for her radio station KFSG in Los Angeles. After disappearing for 35 days, she stumbled out of the desert in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, just south of the border from Douglas, Arizona, and told a phony story of kidnapping which quickly fell apart when witnesses came forth who had seen her at a resort in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She ended up dying of an accidental drug overdose from taking too many Seconol sleeping pills, but her Foursquare Gospel Church still exists today with over two million members, mostly outside of the U.S. (Interestingly, as a teenager McPherson was an agnostic who defended evolution in letters to the newspaper.) The Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, and other Foursquare Gospel spinoff churches are Pentecostal churches that engage in faith healing, speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, and other activities of anthropological interest. They can be very hardcore in the pushiness of their evangelism, and engage in cult-like conversion techniques such as separating people from groups they come with, pairing them off with someone of the same approximate age and sex, and bombarding them with rehearsed questions designed to push someone to a conclusion that they need to accept Jesus and join their group. (The Wikipedia page on The Potter’s House describes this particular sect’s origins in Prescott, Arizona in 1970, originally officially affiliated with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. The Wikipedia biography of its founder, Wayman O. Mitchell, is also of interest. The sect’s origins trace back to Los Angeles, as does the Pentecostal movement in general.) “Hell 101”’s website calls it “Final Destination III,” and describes the hell house as “a twist on a haunted house style attraction that was described by Phoenix Arizona NBC News Affiliate Channel 12 as ‘scary, horrifying, suspenseful, sick….’ NBC 12 News had a live video feed from our annual event where hundreds waited up to two hours in line to have the hell-scared out of them.” Their FAQ has the question “If I quit because I was scared or anything else can I get a refund?” The “anything else” would include feeling defrauded by having paid money for a haunted house, but getting instead Christian propaganda. The answer: “There are no refunds if you get scared, cry, feel angry, get sick, hate it, love it or just want to run!!! Our job is to confront your senses and that we do!" A Christian hell house can be quite entertaining, so long as you know what to expect and are prepared to exercise your right to walk away at the end when the attempts at conversion go into overdrive (they may suggest that the doors are locked and that you may not leave). George Ratliff’s documentary film “Hell House” is a great way to get a preview, and shows some of the unintentional comedy that can be produced when a bunch of ignorant people try to put together a scary haunted house designed to persuade you that you’re going to hell unless you believe the way they do. That documentary also shows how ineffectual some atheists can be in their confrontation of Christians, and I highly recommend that anyone planning to visit one of these hell houses for any reason give it a watch before going. A “hell house” usually follows a common script template which the churches purchase and customize. They go through a writing, casting, and production process similar to a high school stage production. The “hell house” script typically guides a group of visitors through a series of rooms, each of which contains a brief performance by actors portraying some scene that argues for certain practices, beliefs, or actions as likely to terminate with eternity in hell, though that latter point may initially be somewhat subtle. (By the end, it is anything but.) I attended a hell house at a Potter’s House church in Tucson in 1990, from which the flyer image was obtained. (Also see this PDF of an Arizona Daily Star newspaper story about that particular hell house, which got in trouble with the local fire department for fire code violations.) That hell house followed a female character from scene to scene which included a car crash caused by teenage drinking (featuring an actual wrecked car and empty beer cans), a band of demons playing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” (suggesting that at least some rock music is demonic in origin and consequences), and the ever-popular hanging nun in hell (Catholicism is regarded by this sect as ruled by Satan) and young woman on a stretcher with a pool of blood between her legs shrieking that she’s killed her own baby (the anti-abortion segment). At the end, there’s a high-pressure call to Jesus which provides an opportunity to argue with someone who may be something like a street preacher in their skill of providing pre-programmed responses to common objections they’ve heard many times but is unlikely to have actually thought deeply about. If you do choose to visit one of these, I advise not getting involved in such a discussion if you’re somebody who is likely to blow up, call people stupid, or otherwise lose your cool–that’s just going to be seen as confirming evidence that you’re under the control of the devil and anything you say can be dismissed without consideration. UPDATE (October 31, 2008): New Times has a review of The Door’s “Final Destination III” hell house. ...

I’ve previously written to critique claims that Sarah Palin is a Christian reconstructionist or dominionist, or that she’s a young-earth creationist or tried to put creationism in the public schools. I still stand behind the former argument, but I think there is now some evidence that she is a young-earth creationist and supported Mat-Su Borough School Board candidates who aimed to put creationism in the public schools, but never got a majority on the school board. There’s also now evidence that Palin is an advocate of pushing an allegedly secularized version of principles from Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, which I previously wrote about here when serial killer Matthew Murray blamed them for his problems. Palin’s Creationism David Talbot’s article at Salon.com about Sarah Palin’s clashes with Rev. Howard Bess over his book about how churches should deal with homosexuality contained a passage that stated that she is a young-earth creationist: Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’ “I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."Munger said the same thing on his own blog: In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. I directed the Mat-Su College Community Band, which played music, and she gave the commencement address. It was held at her [former -jjl] church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature. As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon “during MY lifetime,” were obvious. “I can see that, maybe you can’t - but it guides me every day."I spoke with Philip Munger by telephone on September 17, hoping to be able to find others who could confirm Palin’s creationist views. Unfortunately, he said that there weren’t other witnesses to his conversation, but he did give me a lot of background information about Palin’s political career. He said that the Wasilla government had been dominated by Democrats until 1994, when it shifted to Republicans and John Stein became mayor. Stein was Palin’s original political mentor, but she decided to run against Stein in 1996, under the tutelage of Alaska State Rep. Victor Kohring, Republican representative from Wasilla, who began a 3.5-year prison term for corruption in July. Munger described Kohring, a member of the Christian Businessman’s Association, as a member of the religious right. Stein, while a Republican, was vulnerable to attack as being not sufficiently conservative, due to the fact that his wife is a pro-choice Democrat who hasn’t taken his last name. Munger told me that Palin also supported a slate of religious right candidates for the Mat-Su Borough School Board, including Cheryl Turner, who he described as a creationist. But he said that the creationists didn’t win a majority on the school board, and as a result made no attempt to push that agenda. Munger said that he called in a question to Sarah Palin when she appeared on the Don Fagan program around October of 2006, and he asked her if her views on creationism had moderated since the Dover case. Her response indicated that her views had not changed, and that she had no idea what the Dover case was. Munger offered to explain it to her in detail if she contacted him, but she never did. He said that she didn’t say anything to explicitly endorse creationism, instead resorting to the same tactics suggested by the Discovery Institute of protecting academic freedom, allowing “both” views to be taught, teaching the controversy, etc. My impression is that Palin is likely a young-earth creationist, but not one who knows much about it or has it high on her agenda for political change. She’s probably smart enough to see that such could be a liability for her future political career and so will avoid questions about it or answer in generalities. Palin and Bill Gothard Sarah Posner has a new article at Salon.com titled “Sarah Palin, faith-based mayor." This article points out that the Wasilla City Council passed a resolution in April 2000 at her direction declaring Wasilla to be a “City of Character” and a supporter of the International Association of Character Cities, run by Steven Menzel. This organization promotes a secularized version of the principles from Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, which is a sort of Christianity-lite cult that promotes the prosperity gospel and a whole lot of craziness like this: Wives who work outside the home are to be compared to harlots — Bill Gothard ...

Radley Balko at The Agitator replies to Jennifer Rubin at Commentary about why the Washington Post’s coverage of Cindy McCain’s addiction to painkillers and commission of crimes to support it is newsworthy. Balko gives two reasons: John and Cindy McCain have touted her addiction an example in overcoming adversity. That presents quite the contrast to McCain’s legislative history as an ardent drug warrior. People accused of crimes similar to those Cindy McCain was accused of committing usually go to prison (even when they’re innocent). Her crimes haven’t been well-reported in the media. And they show how John McCain (who, by the way, is running for president) believes in one set of rules for the friends and family of powerful politicians, and a different set of rules for everyone else. While Cindy McCain’s addiction and theft from her children’s charity to support that addiction were lightly covered at the time, there has yet to be much coverage of it at all during this campaign. And one aspect of the case that’s been covered even less is John and Cindy McCain’s attempt to railroad Tom Gosinski, the guy who blew the whistle on Cindy McCain’s theft from her children’s charity. The Post story is one of the first to get his version of what happened. And Balko concludes: ...

A McCain-Palin ad cites factcheck.org to claim that Obama has made false attacks on Palin–but the attacks haven’t come from Obama. McCain and Palin are appealing to factcheck.org’s accurate content in order to lie about Obama, and factcheck.org calls them on their dishonesty.

Yahoo reports: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has charged her state a daily allowance, normally used for official travel, for more than 300 nights spent at her home, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. An analysis of travel statements filed by the governor, now John McCain’s Republican running mate, shows she claimed the per diem allowance on 312 occasions when she was home in Wasilla and that she billed taxpayers $43,490 for travel by her husband and children. Per diem payments are meant for meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business. State officials told The Post her claims — nearly $17,000 over 19 months — were permitted because her “duty station” is Juneau, the capital, and she was in Wasilla 600 miles away. ...

Factcheck.org has a section up on “Sliming Palin." Check it before forwarding on emails, and reply to the authors who are spreading falsehoods. Palin didn’t cut Alaska’s “special needs” education budget by 62% (she tripled it), she didn’t ask for any books to be banned, she was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (though her husband was), she didn’t endorse Patrick Buchanan for president in 2000 (she wore a Buchanan button as a courtesy when Buchanan visited Wasilla, but worked for Steve Forbes’ campaign), and she hasn’t tried to put creationism in schools. UPDATE (September 16, 2008): Apparently one of the books that Palin had inquired about how to challenge and remove from the library was a book by a local Palmer, AK pastor named Rev. Howard Bess titled, Pastor, I am Gay. It does appear that there were some particular books that caught her attention which is why she made the inquiry. UPDATE (September 16, 2008): Philip Munger of Wasilla says that Palin is definitely a young-earth creationist: In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. I directed the Mat-Su College Community Band, which played music, and she gave the commencement address. It was held at her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature. As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon “during MY lifetime,” were obvious. “I can see that, maybe you can’t - but it guides me every day."Surely there must be other witnesses besides Munger to her creationist views who can provide confirmation. ...

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars shows that McCain’s VP nominee, Sarah Palin, didn’t take long to utter her first falsehood as candidate. Near the beginning of her acceptance speech, she said: And I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress – I told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on that bridge to nowhere. (APPLAUSE) If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves. ...

Integrity Bank of Georgia, set up to run on Christian principles, has failed. Integrity’s employees regularly prayed before meetings or in branch lobbies with customers, while the bank gave 10 percent of its net income to charities. “We felt if we prayed and obeyed God’s word and did what He asked, that He would help us be successful,” the bank’s founder, Steve Skow, told the Journal-Constitution in 2005. The executives seem to have done OK, though: CEO Steve Skow earned $1.8 million that year, while senior lender and executive vice president Doug Ballard earned $847,222. A typical community bank CEO, banking consultants said, earn roughly $300,000 per year.(Via Pharyngula.)

Abraham Katsman and Kory Bardash point out several instances of Obama inflating his resumé with bogus claims about his record in The Jerusalem Post. They argue that he is doing this because despite holding multiple noteworthy positions, he really hasn’t accomplished much of anything in any of them. He’s published not a single academic paper while Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, published nothing while Harvard Law Review President, and can’t point to any significant legislation he spearheaded in the U.S. Senate or in the Illinois State Senate. UPDATE: John Lynch, in the comments, has, to my mind, refuted the concerns about publications (a Lecturer is not expected to publish, nor is the Harvard Law Review President), but my main concern was about the false statements. Two of the false statements are that he claimed to have “passed laws” that “extended healthcare for wounded troops who’d been neglected” when he didn’t vote on the bill in question, and his statement that “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee–which is my committee–a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon” when he’s not even on the Senate Banking Committee. On the latter point, Obama’s campaign says he meant to say “my bill” rather than “my committee,” in which case the statement becomes somewhat more accurate, as Obama did supply some of the provisions to the bill in question. But it isn’t really Obama’s bill, despite his contributions. It’s more accurately described as Christopher Dodd and Richard Shelby’s bill. ...

On August 7, the Arizona Republic reported: The race for a state Senate seat in west Mesa broke out into a wide-open brawl Wednesday, with allegations that Rep. Russell Pearce attacked his wife nearly three decades ago and Pearce’s campaign firing back that the charge is false and the height of sleazy campaigning. A mailer sent to voters in west Mesa cited a divorce petition that LuAnne Pearce filed in 1980. In it, she charges that her husband had a violent temper, hit her and shoved her. The petition also says that two days before the filing, Pearce “grabbed the wife by the throat and threw her down." ...