Ted Haggard, Homosexuality And Religious Indoctrination - The Atheist Experience #555

Ted Haggard, Homosexuality, and Religious Indoctrination (The Atheist Experience #555 with Matt Dillahunty and Martin Wagner).

Stanford students confront Christian homophobes

Today, Christian fundamentalists (non-students) demonstrated against homosexuals outside the Spring Career Fair at Stanford University for several hours; fed up, students gathered around to confront them, culminating in a classic makeout session in front of the protesters by two gay students.

Skeletons Tumble out of Evil Catholic Church's Cupboard in India

The Catholic Church has a long legacy of deceit and lies.

Places where religion is dominant invariably take societies back to the dark ages.



Suppressed truths of the history of the catholic church, are documented by three priests in "Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Churchs 2000-year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse" by Thomas P Doyle, AW Richard Sipe and Patrick J Wall, published by Volt Press.

Evangelical Church welcomes gay Christians

By ERIC GORSKI, AP Religion Writer Eric Gorski, Ap Religion Writer – Sun Dec 20, 12:59 am ET

DENVER – The auditorium lights turned low, the service begins with the familiar rhythms of church: children singing, hugs and handshakes of greeting, a plea for donations to fix the boiler.

Then the 55-year-old pastor with spiked gray hair and blue jeans launches into his weekly welcome, a poem-like litany that includes the line "queer or straight here, there's no hate here."

The Rev. Mark Tidd initially used the word "gay." But he changed it to "queer" because it's the preferred term of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people invited to participate fully at Highlands Church.

Tidd is an outlaw pastor of sorts. His community, less than a year old, is an evangelical Christian church guided both by the Apostle's Creed and the belief that gay people can embrace their sexual orientation as God-given and seek fulfillment in committed same-sex relationships.

Disagreements over homosexuality and the Bible have divided mainline Protestant churches for years. In evangelical churches, though, the majority view has held firm — the Bible clearly condemns homosexual acts. The common refrain at evangelical churches: "love the sinner, hate the sin."

But with younger evangelicals and broader society showing greater acceptance of homosexuality, many evangelical churches can expect, at the least, a deeper exploration of the issue.

"Highlands Church represents a breakout position, where you have a gay-affirming stance that moves beyond the traditional kind of liberal-conservative divide," said Mark Achtemeier, an associate professor at University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). "I'm finding lots of moderate conservatives just think there's something wrong with a default position of excluding gays from the life of the church."

David Dockery, president of Union University, a Southern Baptist school in Jackson, Tenn., believes Highlands is — and is likely to remain — outside of the mainstream of evangelical churches.

"I don't think it can be taken for granted anymore that the traditional evangelical view will be adopted by the coming generations given the changes and shifts in our culture," Dockery said.

That makes it all the more important, he says, for evangelical leaders to clearly teach the traditional views on homosexuality.

The people of Highlands Church — those who stood with their renegade pastor and others who left feeling betrayed — have learned that taking an uncommon road comes at a cost.

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"Ted Haggard Is Completely Heterosexual" by Roy Zimmerman

Think homosexuality is "wrong"?

Clip from the West Wing.

Vatican BS

Everything in this video is owned by Showtime Network.

Gay Christian

Christian Leaders Scapegoat Gays on Marriage

The most significant thing about the new, anti-gay "Manhattan Declaration" is not that scores of Christians are against gay rights. It's that, recognizing they're on the wrong side of history, they tie themselves in knots insisting they're not anti-gay. And in doing so, they reveal the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their obsessive persecution of gay people.

The Declaration, released last week and signed by over 150 Christian leaders and social conservatives, identifies abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty as the three most important issues facing modern Christians, and pleads with both believers and non-believers to stand up against the first two and in defense of the third.


Christians, says the Declaration's preamble, were the ones who rescued abandoned babies in trash heaps in ancient Rome, tended to the sick during the plagues, ended slavery in the West, uplifted the poor, created the conditions for democracy, and ushered in women's suffrage. Their bizarre self-righteousness in claiming the mantle of all the great things that have happened in history makes you wonder if these modern moral crusaders have a pathological need to feel that they are good people, which is usually the first sign that they have reason to worry they are not. (Sure enough, one of the three drafters of the document is Nixon's former special counsel, Chuck Colson, convicted of obstructing justice surrounding the Watergate scandal.)


Claiming the rather quaint authority not only of Holy Scripture but of "natural human reason" and "the very nature of the human person," the signatories proclaim themselves vigilantes called to protect "marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society."


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Adam and Eve, the gay version

Banned commercial from Centraal Beheer.

Ted Haggard Admits Everything to Oprah

Sex abuse rife in other religions, says Vatican

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was "busy cleaning its own house" and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that "available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

He also quoted statistics from the Christian Scientist Monitor newspaper to show that most US churches being hit by child sex abuse allegations were Protestant and that sexual abuse within Jewish communities was common.

He added that sexual abuse was far more likely to be committed by family members, babysitters, friends, relatives or neighbours, and male children were quite often guilty of sexual molestation of other children.

The statement said that rather than pedophilia, it would "be more correct" to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

"Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17."

The statement concluded: "As the Catholic church has been busy cleaning its own house, it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media about it."

The Holy See launched its counter–attack after an international representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Keith Porteous Wood, accused it of covering up child abuse and being in breach of several articles under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Porteous Wood said the Holy See had not contradicted any of his accusations. "The many thousands of victims of abuse deserve the international community to hold the Vatican to account, something it has been unwilling to do, so far. Both states and children's organisations must unite to pressurise the Vatican to open its files, change its procedures worldwide, and report suspected abusers to civil authorities."

Representatives from other religions were dismayed by the Holy See's attempts to distance itself from controversy by pointing the finger at other faiths.

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, head of the New York Board of Rabbis, said: "Comparative tragedy is a dangerous path on which to travel. All of us need to look within our own communities. Child abuse is sinful and shameful and we must expel them immediately from our midst."

A spokesman for the US Episcopal Church said measures for the prevention of sexual misconduct and the safeguarding of children had been in place for years.

Of all the world religions, Roman Catholicism has been hardest hit by sex abuse scandals. In the US, churches have paid more than $2bn (£1.25bn) in compensation to victims. In Ireland, reports into clerical sexual abuse have rocked both the Catholic hierarchy and the state.

The Ryan Report, published last May, revealed that beatings and humiliation by nuns and priests were common at institutions that held up to 30,000 children. A nine-year investigation found that Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorized thousands of boys and girls, while government inspectors failed to stop the abuse.

-from guardian.co.uk

Tyra Banks interviews "Gay Exorcism" Victim

Homosexuality and the Church

The clergy abuse scandal has prompted frank discussion of homosexuality, a topic that has traditionally been taboo within the Catholic Church. Evidence suggests there are a significant number of gay men in the priesthood, and many homosexuals among the laity. The question of how the church should respond to gays within its ranks has been much debated. Here is a selection of viewpoints from the Globe.

Christopher Schiavone

My Life As A Gay Priest

A former priest in the Boston Archdiocese speaks out about secrecy, scandal, and being gay in the church.

Donald Cozzens

The Clergy's Buried Truths

The predominance of male teenage victims raises anew a thorny issue -- the presence of significant numbers of homosexually oriented men in the priesthood.

Chuck Colbert

The Spectrum of Belief

As the clergy abuse scandal has grown, the topic of gay priests, gay men, and lesbians in the life of the Catholic Church is suddenly front and center.

Eileen McNamara

For Church, a False Issue

It is not the existence of gay priests but the reticence of Catholicism to address sexuality that has led the church into its current crisis.

M. Thomas Shaw and Bud Cederholm

Affirming Gay and Lesbian Priests

We recognize that faith communities have the right to ordain whomever they choose, but we reject the exclusion of any person from holy orders on the basis of sexual orientation.