Christine O’Donnell’s fantasy satanism

Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell told Bill Maher, “I dabbled into witchcraft,” and added a couple of details which suggest that her story was made up for its sensationalistic appeal.

Fred Clark writing at slactivist nails it down:

That evidence — her claim to have seen a “Satanic altar” with “a little blood there” — is cribbed entirely from Mike Warnke, the subject of the second book I’m recommending here: Selling Satan: The Evangelical Media and the Mike Warnke Scandal, by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott. Selling Satan is a remarkably thorough piece of investigative journalism by two devout evangelical Christians whose reluctance to cast judgment on a purported fellow believer lends them to document Warnke’s lies in devastating detail. (The Cornerstone magazine articles summarizing this investigation can be read online here.)

Druid Network first pagan group recognized under UK’s 2006 Charities Act

The Druid Network this week became the first pagan religion in the United Kingdom recogized under the 2006 British Charities Act.

Their announcement says:

The Druid Network received notification yesterday (24th September) that our application to be registered as a charity furthering the religion of Druidry has been finally accepted. This has been a long hard struggle taking over five years to complete. Greater detail shortly and a big thank-you to all who helped make this important recognition possible.

Brynneth writes at The Pagan & The Pen

The Druid Network has charity status – not registered yet, but rubber stamped as fulfilling the requirements for registration, so pretty much there. This is very big news. It makes tdn the first recognised Druid charity in the UK and the first pagan group to be registered under the 2006 Act. It’s taken years and a lot of very wonderful people have fought very hard to make this possible – dealing with a system that had been set up to handle religions shaped more like Christianity than not.

The Druid Network having achieved charitable status will bring all kinds of benefits to the organisation, enhancing credibility and creating opportunities to promote and support Druidry. This is all good. It also means that any other pagan charity is going to have a much better chance of getting charitable status. No other Druid group is going to have to prove that Druidry is a valid religion. Other pagan groups will be able to use the tdn case to help express their own. The process that has got tdn charitable status has helped create understanding of nature based religion, modern polytheism, and things that are not remotely like Christianity. As this is a legal definition of tdn as a religious charity, it will have all kinds of wider legal implications too.

Jason Pitzl-Waters, who writes about modern pagan faiths, explains:

The 2006 act that Brynneth mentions is the Charities Act of 2006, which made it easier for smaller charities to become registered, and to appeal decisions of the Charity Commission. In Britain, there’s a marked difference between a charity and a nonprofit. While The Pagan Federation is a nonprofit organization, it is not a charity, and as such doesn’t receive the same tax privileges.

Does prayer ‘work’ (should it)?

Andrew Brown at the Guardian muses:

When I consider my Christian academic friends – people who are smarter, better read and harder working than I am – it’s clear that Christianity is a very dangerous profession. Three have daughters who died in their 20s; another has a daughter who is a drug addict. Parents and spouses get Alzheimer’s disease when they don’t get cancer. I imagine they all prayed for these things not to happen. I know they all still pray.

So what is going on here? What is the point of all that prayer? This is hardly a new question. It has been around at least since Job. Nor is there any hope of finding an answer that will convince everyone. But it is possible to tease out a couple of questions. The first is whether intercessory prayer works better than chance. There aren’t any reputable studies suggesting that it does, which is, I suppose another example of unanswered prayer, since at least some of these studies must have been commissioned in the hope that they would prove prayer is a worthwhile medical intervention.

. . .

The second question is whether prayer works on the pray-er as a form of pain relief. It obviously sometimes does and I can’t imagine any remotely plausible way to run a controlled trial of these effects. Now, my Christian friends would object at this point that the point of prayer is not “pain relief” and that prayer does not deliver from anguish. I don’t think it does. But it makes life capable of being borne, and that is sometimes the only possible step forward.

. . .

Read the rest here.