Still concerned about the "homogenization" and "over-commercialism" of Christmas, are you? Well, the Theophiles community will rest easier knowing that Sarah Palin will address that very issue in her upcoming book, "A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas" scheduled for release in November.

Each year, state legislatures play host to a variety of bills that would interfere with science education. Most of these are variations on a boilerplate intended to get supplementary materials into classrooms criticizing evolution and climate change (or to protect teachers who do). They generally don't mention creationism, but the clear intent is to sneak religious content into the science classrooms, as evidenced by previous bills introduced by the same lawmakers. Most of them die in the legislature (although the opponents of evolution have seen two successes).

The efforts are common enough that we don't generally report on them. But every now and then a bill comes along that veers off this script. Late last month, the Missouri House started considering one that deviates in staggering ways. Instead of being quiet about its intent, it redefines science, provides a clearer definition of intelligent design than any of the idea's advocates ever have, and it mandates equal treatment of the two. In the process, it mangles things so badly that teachers would be prohibited from discussing Mendel's Laws.

Lots of people hit their head and see visions of angels, but what about the dark side? Journeys to the devil’s domain are more common than you might think.

He was once the hottest evangelical in America. Now, 10 years after the book that made him a star, the pastor wants the spotlight again. This time, it may not be so easy.

You want that blessing to go?

Not a problem. Centerpointe Christian Church at 865 Greendale Road [Lexington, Kentucky] has offered drive-through prayers to those who need them since Easter.

Volunteers stand by as drivers stop. Driver and passengers are asked to relay concerns for which prayers are said. The information is written on a card, which is used for additional prayer later, organizers said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman promised Germany's Jewish and Muslim communities on Friday [July 13] they would be free to carry out circumcision on young boys despite a court ban which has provoked concerns about religious freedom.

Bulgaria’s claim to have unearthed six bones belonging to John the Baptist has received a boost from scientists who have concluded after dating them and analyzing their genetic code that they could indeed be relics of the man who baptized Jesus.

The video begins with Mark Mackey opening his Bible.

“Good morning, everyone,” he says to a group of 15 onlookers waiting outside the Hemet California Division of Motor Vehicles. “I would like to read a little bit of the word of God this morning.”

The video, shot in February of last year, ends with Mackey’s arrest.

“You can preach on your own property,” an officer from the California Highway Patrol tells Mackey as he leads him away in handcuffs. “Folks, this is what the United States is coming to,” Mackey says to the crowd, who were standing outside waiting for the DMV to open. “You can talk about anything you want, but you can’t talk about the Bible.”

[...]Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” [Elaine] Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.