Unapologizer Richard Land in hot pursuit of the unworkable

Richard Land of the unapology apology is back to foreign policy arm-waving. Yes. Recall that in September, Land and his Religious Right friends sent a hyperventilating open letter which left them looking foolish when Iran quickly gave ground to “weak” President Barak Obama by offering to have its nuclear experts meet with U.S. scientists.

Never mind either that or the fruits of subsequent diplomacy, now says Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission chief Land.

Because Iran can’t be trusted.

Trusted in this case to live up to a U.N.-drafted proposal — already endorsed by the United States, Russia and France — to to ship much of its uranium abroad for enrichment and cut back their drive for domestic reprocessing capacity. A proposal to which Iran is to respond officially on Thursday to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Land apparently prefers the trade embargo he and his Religious Right friends recommended in the aforementioned letter — an approach that would bring pain to the Iranian people in general and is unlikely to work .

Which, taken together with his approach to apologies, seems to put Land in the running for master of the unworkable.

Holy Smoke! Richard Dawkins flamed the pope

Byzantine ship using Greek fire in the late 11th century: from the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript.

Asked at WaPo’s On Faith if Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans was “poaching” disaffected Anglicans, atheist Richard Dawkins burst into flame.

Among other things, he wrote:

Poaching? Of course it is poaching. What else could you call it? Maybe it will succeed. If estimates are right that 1,000 Anglican clergymen will take the bait (no women, of course: they will swiftly be shown the door), what could be their motive? For some it will be a deep-seated misogyny (although they’ll re-label it with a mendacious euphemism of some kind, which they’ll call ‘an important point of theological principle’). They just can’t stomach the idea of women priests. One wonders how their wives can stomach a husband whose contempt for women is so visceral that he considers them incapable even of the humble and unexacting duties of a priest.

For some, the motive will be homophobic bigotry, and a consequent dislike of the efforts of decent church leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury to accept those whose sexual orientation happens to deviate from majority taste. Never mind that they will be joining an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture.

Yes, and he was just getting his flamethrower adjusted.

Holy Smoke billowed back from the London Telegraph, blazing:

Richard Dawkins’s latest attack on the Catholic Church is worthy of a dribbling loony on the top of a bus. He calls the Church “the greatest force for evil in the world”, “an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture” and describes it “dragging its skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp”. (Pimps in skirts – that’s a new one.) And all in The Washington Post.

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

Atheist PZ Myers responded with blistering deconstruction, along the way answering Holy Smoke author Damien Thompson’s question:

Why, no, Damian! What’s wrong with you?

The Church Mouse was altogether unflapped, suggesting that Dawkins has discerned a “fine line between the liberal wing of the Catholic Church and the conservative wing of the Anglican Church” and argued that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams “really should announce a new mechanism for accepting liberal Catholics into the Anglican Church.”

Among those muttering from the pews is New Zealand Conservative, who sees in Dawkins’ response evidence that “forces of darkness are gathering” against the pope’s outreach.

EFF ‘Takedown Hall of Shame’

We recommend you visit Electronic Frontier Foundation list bogus copyright and trademark complaints which have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF’s Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.

Yes, the floor is open for nominees (link at bottom right of the shame page).

H/T to BoingBoing, which wrote:

“Free speech in the 21st century often depends on incorporating video clips and other content from various sources,” explained EFF Senior Staff Attorney and Kahle Promise Fellow Corynne McSherry. “It’s what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart does every night. This is ‘fair use’ of copyrighted or trademarked material and protected under U.S. law. But that hasn’t stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see.”

Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth to have ordination of woman to the priesthood

Formed in a 1983 administrative division of the large and growing Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, and stripped of most of its conservatives in a series of actions following consecration of an openly gay New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, the once profoundly conservative Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth is now effectively progressive.

As a result, 33 years after the Episcopal Church approved ordination of women, it is ready to ordain Deacon Susan Slaughter to the priesthood.

She is to be the first woman ordained to the priesthood in the history of the Fort Worth diocese, and probably a rare case in which outmigration of conservatives leaves behind a substantially more progressive diocese which takes such action.

The denomination-wide changes apparently aren’t large enough thus far to cause anything other than sporadic reorientation. Specifically, total U.S. membership of active baptized members in 2007 was 2,154,572, according to the 2008 National Council of Churches Report. That indicates a 4.15% decline from the NCC’s figure for 2006. ()

Along the same lines, Wikipedia reports:

In recent years many mainline denominations have experienced a decline in membership.[74] Once changes in how membership is counted are taken into consideration, the Episcopal Church’s membership numbers were broadly flat throughout the 1990s, with a slight growth in the first years of the 21st century.[73][75][76][77][78] A loss of 115,000 members was reported for the years 2003–5, which has been attributed in part to controversy concerning ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood and the election of Gene Robinson (who is openly gay) as Bishop of New Hampshire.[79]

Or, looking at the 2009 edition of the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, we find that decline in Episcopal Church membership (1.76%) was comparable to Presbyterian Church:USA (2.79%), United Church of Christ (6.01%) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1.35%).

This implies that the changes which have occasioned uproar apparently took place because there was substantial support for them in the church at large.