Witches Brew

Dave Haxton at MacRaven, Fox News in Raleigh, NC, and a host of other bloggers and online newspapers are reporting that Pastor Marc Grizzard and 14 other members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC, are planning a Bible burning and BBQ for Halloween Night. Yep, Bibles… And the works of heretics like Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and Mother Teresa. Earlier this month the Amazing Grace website was taken down by the website host when the Bibles hit the proverbial internet fan, but Haxton copied the content. From MacRaven:

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.

We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contempory Christian, jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.

We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.

We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.

We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.

If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.

Fox News, which we all know is “Fair & Balanced” did a feature on Pastor Grizzard last week.

And if that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve already eaten too many Reese’s Cups, MacRaven, in the same post, alerts us to the forthcoming “Conservative Bible Project”. Now, I’ve done a search online to see if this is a hoax–and the web debunkers are all scratching their heads–but apparently this is for real: Conservapedia is preparing a new translation of the Bible that will edit out nasty Liberal Bias. My hand to Goddess:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these)
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;[4] Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction[5] by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[6] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Thus, a project has begun among members of Conservapedia to translate the Bible in accordance with these principles. The translated Bible can be found here.

I think Jesus will be wanting a word with these folks when He gets back.

The Celebrating Earth Spirituality Festival was scheduled for today. I wish, I wish, I wish I had a crystal ball because the emotional stakes increased dramatically this week–and I can’t find “the rest of the story…”

When last I checked out The Wild Hunt, a handful of merchants in Stoudtburg Village–a commercial shopping center in Adamstown, PA, DBA as a faux German hamlet–were planning to close today rather than run the risk of doing business with the Reading Pagans & Witches, who had rented the Village for their festival.

WELL! While my attention was focused on mundane things like job hunting, health care reform, and the balance in my check book, some churches in Adamsville were working themselves into a tizzy over this little, constitutionally protected festival. The Gateway House of Prayer somewhere in Lancaster County, PA, put out a call for fasting & prayer. From the Gateway website:

Prayer for the “earth spirituality festival” to be held Sept 12 in Adamstown. See Gateway website for the organized fasting and prayer events to be held in the local churches of the Adamstown area. Isn’t it interesting that in the natural there is construction work on Rt 222 to strengthen the bridges.

“Lord God, we praise you for the truth of your word, for making it clear to us to recognize the wicked and evil practices and instruction to keep our land free of abominations. We declare blessings upon the leaders and pastors of the Adamstown area for coming together in unity to strengthen the ties among the community and to keep their bridges intact, strong and secure.

We pray a hedge of protection around the area, asking for the blood of Jesus to cover their boundaries, gates and bridges, that they would stand strong against the schemes of the enemy. We declare the enemy will have no foothold in Adamstown, or the larger Lancaster County area.

We declare that the attempt to plant seeds of destruction will be uprooted and bear no fruit. We ask that the veil be lifted to those with blind eyes, that the deception would come to the light.

– In Jesus name, Amen.”

Deuteronomy 18:9-14 “When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. For these nations which you will dispossess listened to soothsayers and diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you.”

Well, Goddess Bless America!

And, according to Ron Todt, of the Associated Press (Some Pa. shops close doors to Pagan festival):

[A] dozen or so Christian groups and churches are trying to organize a “wall of prayer” around the village Saturday said, James Horning, executive director of Crossfire Youth Ministries in nearby Eprhata, Pa.

“We are asking the Christians in the community to come out and make a circle around the entire facility and stand there for one hour and pray on behalf of the community, and then go home,” Horning said. “No signs, no shouting, no protests, just a visible sign that we disapprove … of the whole underlying theme.”

So what happened next???? Tomorrow I’ll have to check The Wild Hunt, The Reading Pagans & Witches website, and Witchvox for the next installment.

Watch this space…

Lat night I spent a very pleasant evening with some members of the Peoria Peace Network. They were preparing a couple of episodes of Peace Beat, a local cable access show. Somehow the conversation turned from turned from politics to religion. One member of the group suddenly asked, “How many of you pray?’ The tally was seven out of eight…

How many are Christians? another asked. Six Christians, 1 Agnostic, and me, Pagan. Well, most of the people there had no idea what a Pagan was, and of course we Pagans don’t have much consensus on that! And I was not inclined to discuss the issue with a group of casual acquaintances. But the same individual turned to me a minute later and asked, “So what’s wrong with Jesus?”

Well, there is NOTHING wrong with Jesus–except that he keeps bad company. Perhaps if I had linked up with a liberal Christian congregation in the 80’s, I might still be a Christian; but the Religious Right assumed ownership of Jesus, lock, stock, and cross in those days, and I had no sympathetic community then. It was The Last Temptation of Christ that finally created the rupture with my Christian heritage; it was the boycotting of movie theaters and the hateful rhetoric from the Christian Right that turned me away from Jesus. Though I had never read Last Temptation, I was a fan of Nikos Kazantzakis. I had been eagerly awaiting this movie. Now, I was forbidden from seeing it. The Gatekeepers had decreed which images of Jesus were acceptable. I was locked out of the Christian community.

It would be another eleven years before I formally declared myself Pagan. –Oh, my Goddess was speaking to me long before that! Thanks to the Women’s Spirituality Movement “Goddess Consciousness” was rising. I could see Goddess energy rising all around me, but I was never able to make an intellectual leap from God the Father to God the Mother. But Hathor, the Egyptian Goddess of Love and Beauty, Music and Dance, Terror and Divine Retribution, had been speaking to me since I was a child. I say now that I have been a Pagan since I was four years old when I first saw the Butter Cow at the Illinois State Fair. That’s a humorous exaggeration, but it’s not an untruth.

Through a friend I had developed an interest in Ancient Egypt when we were both in our teens. We were particularly fond of “The Story of the Destruction of Humankind” where the Cow Goddess Hathor loses control when punishing the impious who insulted her father Ra. She is on the verge of incinerating the Earth when the Gods divert her with a lake of beer died red like blood. She laps up att the blood and staggers off to sleep. Humankind is saved! We styled ourselves The Daughters of Hathor! Drunken killer cows: what’s not to love!

I took “hathor” for my first email handle. I bought my “Apocalypse Cow” t-shirt six months before my revelation. When it finally dawned on me that Hathor was really real and calling to me, I gladly embraced God the Daughter. I work with other Daughters as well: Hecate, Artemis, and Athena.

But there is nothing WRONG with Jesus, and I get on well with his liberal, socially conscious followers. It’s just that I belong to someone else.