Just when we thought “Good old boy” clubs had become passé, just when we thought we’d seen the last of former Skull and Bones members holding positions of power and influence, here comes “The Family”.

As the Republican Party implodes, the public is becoming aware of a secretive Christian society known as the Family or the Fellowship. The group was founded in 1935 in opposition to FDR’s New Deal and its adherents subscribe to a far right Christian fundamentalist and free market ideology. A minister named Abraham Vereide founded the Family after having a vision in which God visited him in the person of the head of the United States Steel Corporation (no, I’m not making this up). The Family has a connection to house on C Street in Washington, D.C., known simply as C Street. Officially registered as a church, the building serves as a meeting place and residence for conservative politicians.

Few members of the fellowship talk about the group’s mission. The organization organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast that is attended by the president, members of Congress, and diplomats from around the world. Earlier this year, Obama presented his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the event. According to Jeff Sharlet who wrote a book about the group, the Family’s philosophy is based on “a sort of trickle-down fundamentalism,” that believes that the wealthy and powerful, if they “can get their hearts right with God … will dispense blessings to those underneath them.” True believers in market orthodoxy, Family members think that God’s will operates directly through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”

The Family’s current leader Doug Coe is secretive but enjoys considerable political influence as a spiritual adviser. When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, himself a visitor and a kind of honorary alumni at C Street, compared his political difficulties involving his affair with an Argentine woman to those of biblical King David, the South Carolina politician was falling back on a central figure in Family theology. You could “almost hear Doug Coe’s voice” coming out of Sanford, Sharlet remarks.

C Street’s stately red brick, $1.1 million building is subsidized by secretive religious organizations and is located a mere stone’s throw away from the Capitol. Lawmakers who live there include Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN); Bart Stupak (D-MI);Jim DeMint (R-SC); Mike Doyle (D-PA); and Sens. John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Sam Brownback (R-KS). The lawmakers, all Christians, live in private rooms upstairs and pay an incredibly low rent — a paltry $600 — to live at C Street.

When they’re not philandering and violating their own professed Christian morality, C Street members push for the projection of U.S. power abroad. As Obama went to Port of Spain, Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas in April, Ensign who criticized the president for shaking Hugo Chávez’s hand. (Source-http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/2016)

According to the Washington Post the house is owned by Youth With a Mission D.C. Youth With a Mission is one of the most extensive Christian fundamentalist para-church organizations on Earth, and YWAM founder leader Loren Cunningham has publicly outlined a vision for Christian world-control.

In a 2008 promotional video, “Reclaiming 7 Mountains of Culture”, Loren Cunningham describes a vision he shared along with the late Campus Crusade For Christ founder Bill Bright and late Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, in which Christian fundamentalists could achieve world domination by taking over key sectors of society such as business, government, media, and education.

Francis Schaeffer is widely credited as one of the most influential theologians of the 20th Century Christian right. Among the myriad ministries of Bill Bright’s behemoth Campus Crusade For Christ is the Washington D.C. ministry Christian Embassy that targets Pentagon leaders for evangelizing.

The C Street House is run by a secretive Washington ministry known as The Family, or The Fellowship. Over the past year and a half, The Family has gradually come to public attention, mainly due to journalist and Harpers editor Jeff Sharlet’s ground breaking book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The Family runs the yearly National Prayer Breakfast and maintains a network of Capital Hill prayer groups which have enjoyed the participation of both top GOP but also top Democratic Party Congress and Senate members.
As Cunningham introduces Reclaim 7 Mountains of Culture, “It was August, 1975… and the Lord had given me, that day a list of things that I had never thought about before. He said, ‘This is the way to reach America, and nations, for God.’ ”

The video continues with a narrator who declares, “In every city of the world, an unseen battle rages for dominion over God’s creation and the souls of people. This battle is fought on seven strategic fronts, looming like mountains over the culture, that shape and influence its destiny. Over the years, the church slowly retreated from its place of influence on these mountains, leaving a void now filled with darkness. When we lose our influence, we lose the culture and when we lose the culture we fail to advance the kingdom of God. And now, a generation stands in desperate need. It’s time to fight for them and take back these mountains of influence.” (Source-http://www.open.salon.com/blog/tre_gibbs/2009/07/11/c-street_house_and_the_family_-_america_needs_to_see_this)

…what makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations, two things, you said that it’s secretive. Indeed the leader of the group describes, he says, the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have. And the other things is the nature of the influence they want to have.

The family began, it’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington and it goes back seventy years. And the founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism. (Source-http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/rachel-maddow-show-christian-conservatisms)

Think of C-Street as a TWO-WAY half-way house — except all of the house residents and visitors hold positions of tremendous elected power.
Some of the residents and visitors are RECEOVERING addicts, like former long-time cocaine addict Zach Wamp.
Others are heading into or dealing with CURRENT addictions, like sex addicts John Ensign and Mark Sanford.
And either way, the ultra-secretive house sponsor (who praises Hitler, Mao, and Stalin as role models) get free access with, and leverage over, these former and new addicts.
Nice set-up — that is, if you are a powerful politician who needs a place to live, who is willing to swear to secrecy, and who is willing to pretend not to see evil. (Source-http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/2009/07/wamp_defends_c_street_house_as.php)

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• THE FAMILY and its wacko members need to be removed from office (iflizwerequeen.com)
• God’s Senators (firedoglake.com)
• Sanford Cites Secretive Christian Group’s Role in Helping Confront Affair (usnews.com)
• Frank Schaeffer: Big Time Evangelical Religion: Consumerist Individualism (huffingtonpost.com)

Every time I encounter that sentiment, and that happens all too frequently, I cringe.

Theory as used by science means something quite different than our common, every day usage. It pains me when someone tries to denounce something without having bothered to learn something about the topic. I don’t ignorantly attempt to say that redeemed, which can mean “cashed in” or “exchanged for goods” means that when used in the Christian context. “I’ve been redeemed” would equate with “I’ve been exchanged for something of equal or greater value”. Is that reasonable? No, because it fails to consider context when using the language.

Most of those who have never tried to learn anything about evolution and the theory of evolution generally confuse the process of evolution with the theory of evolution.

Evolution is a process, observed and documented. The theory of evolution is our attempt to explain how evolution works. The theory is incomplete and ongoing. Does the theory of gravity mean that gravity is “just a theory”? Gravity is a fact of nature, like evolution. The theory of gravitation, like the theory of evolution, is limited and incomplete. But scientific theories are not philosophies, nor are physical processes theories or philosophies.

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• The Vatican Agrees With Darwin (takepart.com)
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Theory of Evolution (wired.com)

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right’s stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them — and us — unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes “the jury is still out” on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on “The Colbert Report.” Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn’t actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as “elite,” implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack.

and from Way of the Mind:

In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is one of the world’s most serious problems, these days.

What is it? It’s the belief that what is good are the “simple people”, the “common people”, who are supposedly more honest and “real” than so-called “ivory tower” intellectuals.

It’s also the belief that thinking and learning are trouble, that they lead people to unhappiness, sinfulness, asking too many questions, and such.

It’s geeks, or more intelligent students, being called “brainy” or “nerds” and harassed by classmates. It’s science being seen as a waste of time and money. It’s a political candidate winning an election because he successfully depicted his opponent as an “egghead”. Incidentally, it’s likely that one of the reasons America currently has one of its worst presidents ever is that, by being less educated and articulate than Gore or Kerry, he appeared “more in touch” with the common man (of course, one should then wonder if you really want the village idiot in charge of the most powerful nation in the world… but I digress.)

There are several sources of anti-intellectualism. Religion is an obvious one, of course, since being intelligent and learning makes one less likely to accept arguments from authority, and to question unproven assertions. An intelligent, learned man has no need for religion – therefore, we don’t want any intelligent, learned men (to paraphrase The Fountainhead’s Elllsworth Toohey).

Besides “normal” religion, there’s also the usual mystical, new age thinking, according to which the mind is “flawed” and imperfect, incapable of perceiving any real “revelations”, which you supposedly can only grasp with “your heart” or “your spirit”. The mind is human, and therefore imperfect, while the heart/spirit are filled with “the cosmos’s love” or any other generic, meaningless terms.

Another reason is populism, the belief that the honest, hard working “masses” are oppressed by the corrupt, privileged “elites”. While they certainly are, sometimes (in dictatorships, for instance), populism is wrong because of its belief of “the lower, the better”, and its worship of ordinariness. Populism, like most forms of collectivism, punishes people for ability and for success – therefore, it promotes mediocrity and sameness. And a populist certainly hates and feels threatened by anyone with more “brains” or education.

Dictatorships (communism, fascism, etc.) always strongly promote anti-intellectualism, for mostly the same reasons as religion does: an intelligent, educated person is much more likely to question, and to see “what’s rotten”. The “unwashed masses” are much easier to keep in line. Higher education is seen as “dangerous” and “subversive”.

An intellectual isn’t necessarily someone more intelligent or with more knowledge than the norm. It just means that the person highly values the mind, thinking, and the pursuit of knowledge. And it’s frightening, to me, how few intellectuals (by that definition) I personally know. Anti-intellectuals (people who deride the mind, who pride themselves on not thinking, on not using their reason), on the other hand, are everywhere.

During this presidential campaign we’ve heard the terms “elite” and “elitist” used as pejorative terms.  I agree with Bill Maher when he said,

Say it loud: I’m elite and proud! The right-wing crusade to demonize elites has paid off. Now the country’s run by incompetents who make mediocrity a job requirement and recruit from Pat Robertson’s law school. New rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word liberal, they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite,” or as it’s otherwise known, “hating.” They’ve had it up to their red necks with the “elite media.” The “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is influenced by “the Hollywood elite.” So basically, unless you’re a shitkicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists.

I don’t get it: In other fields — outside of government — elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad (Source)

It’s not just politics, though.  As the influence of fundamental religion grows worldwide, it is becoming perceived as honorable, honest, down-to-Earth to be ignorant and bad-mouth intellectualism.  A 16 year old kid makes the news dropping out of high school to play Guitar Hero.  Education and the desire to know are no longer priorities.

Do you value the intellect?  Does the negative connotation of “elite” and “intellectual” bother you?

The Swedish government has announced plans to clamp down hard on religious education. It will soon become illegal even for private faith schools to teach religious doctrines as if they were true. In an interesting twist on the American experience, prayer will remain legal in schools – after all, it has no truth value. But everything that takes place on the curriculum’s time will have to be secular. “Pupils must be protected from every sort of fundamentalism,” said the minister for schools, Jan Björklund.

Creationism and ID are explicitly banned but so is proselytising even in religious education classes. The Qur’an may not be taught as if it is true even in Muslim independent schools, nor may the Bible in Christian schools. The decision looks like a really startling attack on the right of parents to have their children taught what they would like. Of course it does not go so far as the Dawkins policy of prohibiting parents from trying to pass on their doctrines even in their own families – and, if it did, it would certainly run foul of the European convention on human rights. It does not even go as far as Nyamko Sabuni, the minister for integration – herself born in Burundi – would like: she wanted to ban all religious schools altogether. But it is still a pretty drastic measure from an English perspective.

The law is being presented in Sweden as if it mostly concerned fundamentalist Christian sects in the backwoods; but the Christian Democratic party, which represents such people if anyone does, is perfectly happy with the new regulation. There is little doubt that combating Islamic fundamentalism is the underlying aim, especially in conjunction with another new requirement that all independent schools declare all their funding sources. This would allow the inspectors – whose budget is being doubled – to concentrate their efforts on those schools most likely to be paid to break the rules.

It’s good to see a few governments brave enough to take a stand against supernatural thinking being presented as established fact.  Theists demand we accept their opinions as fact without feeling compelled to offer any sort of credible evidence to support their claims.

Sweden has issued a challenge with this law; if theists want their beliefs to be taught as fact, provide as much proof as science has for evolution or gravity.

Bigfoot Duo’s New Discovery: A Lawsuit Against Them

The two goons who wasted the world’s time by claiming they’d found Bigfoot are now finding themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer went the full nine yards with a news conference, DNA tests (that showed nothing), and all sorts of empty promises last week. Of course, it was all a hoax — and, as many had initially suspected, the creature was no more than a frozen Halloween costume filled with some random roadkill.

Now, the company that helped publicize the whole debacle is demanding cash from the country bumpkins. Searching for Bigfoot paid the doofuses $50,000 for the rights to their story, and it’s not happy the whole thing’s been exposed as fraud.

The good ol’ boys from Georgia, for their part, now claim it was all just a big joke and that Searching for Bigfoot is to blame for “blowing it out of proportion.” They say they never did it to make money — even though they’re still holding onto that $50K that somehow made it into their hands. Oh yeah, and they’re also selling Bigfoot stuff on their own web site.

That same man — who was a police officer in Clayton County, Georgia — has been fired from the force as a result of the scam.

Smart fellers, those Georgians.

I witnessed more media outlets going nuts over this story when it broke than I did individuals.  Anybody I spoke to about the news conference chuckled about it, expressed skepticism and anticipated a debunking by biologists.

It makes me think about Mulder’s poster, “I Want to Believe”.  A lot of people feel that way.  Whether it’s BigFoot, aliens, conspiracies, gods or ghosts, believers want to believe.  They don’t want to know.  They want to believe.  They prefer to believe.  To prefer to know requires the willingness to be wrong, to admit a misconception and correct it.  To prefer to know requires limiting or eliminating the concept of absolutes.  We have no reason to think that we know so much about anything that we’re in any position to suggest there are absolutes.  This reality is a relative reality.  We make best guesses based on our current knowledge.

My best guess is that the BigFoot, Nessy, ghost, gods, luck controversies won’t be resolved in my lifetime.  Superstitions die hard.  I don’t think you can kill them with silver bullets.  Knowledge and an inquisitive mind kills them quicker than anything.  Unfortunately we’re in the midst of another period of social religiosity.  Learnin is a sin these days.  Faith is all you need.  If eating oranges caused a person to quit believing in gods you know the religious would hear a command from their favorite god telling them that eating oranges is now a sin since orange doesn’t rhyme with anything in English, a sure sign of Satanic influence.  God damned orange eaters.  They’re all probably aliens.  Don’t be hanging around with them orange eaters.  They’ll try to probe you, then do things you won’t enjoy.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?

One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.

If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.

If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.

So what’s the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that’s a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There’s no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

From a layman’s standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You’re saying that’s wrong.

Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say, “Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early universe was small and low-entropy.”

But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.

I don’t think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current understanding of physics. I’m just saying it’s not a fact that we should take for granted.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don’t observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Does God exist in a multiverse?

I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.

Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”

Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University’s masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

In light of Stein’s contribution to the pursuit of liberty and truth, particularly as it relates to the field of Intelligent Design, he is being honored with the 2008 Johnson Award. The award ceremony will feature premiere clips from the forthcoming movie, the personal appearance of scientists who were expelled from their jobs because they are sympathetic to Intelligent Design, and will include a brief address by Stein.

Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California, established the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth in 2004 to honor legal scholar and Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who was the award’s first recipient. The award recognizes Johnson’s pivotal role in advancing our understanding of design in the universe by opening up informed dissent to Darwinian and materialistic theories of evolution. British philosopher Antony Flew, once considered the most prominent defender of atheism in the English-speaking world, became the second recipient of this award in 2006 for his Socratic approach of “following the evidence where it leads” and abandoning atheism on account of design arguments.

The sentences I’ve made bold are those that made me nearly spit coffee out my nose.

Submission deadline is February 29, 2008.

Student prizes start with $300 for first place, and includes incentives for sponsoring teachers. Watch those word counts! Several essays among our early submissions have no word count on the registration form, or the word count is over 1,000. Read the Official Rules – essays must be no longer than 1,000 words!

Eligibility:

All students in grade twelve or below in the United States or U.S. territories. Eligible students must be attending a public, private, parochial school, home school or participating in a high school correspondence program. Eligibility of
prospective winners will be verified before the award of any prizes. Alliance for Science members and their families are not eligible. Essay contest judges and their families are also not eligible.

Essay Ideas:

Throughout the ages, the earth has undergone major climate change. Some present-day cities were once covered in sheets of ice and some temperate zones were once lush tropics. These changes had a significant effect on the types of animals that thrived and the species that became extinct. If climate change speeds up, what will happen to the environments where endangered animals now live? How do the latest scientific projections of the rate of climate change compare with the spans of time over which evolution has occurred? Will new species of plants and animals arise with the characteristics needed to adapt to an altered climate, or will many forms of life simply become extinct?
When considering this issue, think about how evolution has shaped the variation in animal characteristics like fur and insulating features like the down feathers of geese that protect against the cold. “Warm blooded” animals such as mammals are generally more able to cope with temperature variation than reptiles. Are changes in global climate pattern likely to affect the distribution of these different animal types? Consider migratory animals – will changes in the weather disrupt the timing or destinations of migratory birds or animal herds?
Even the human body may not be immune to the impact of climate. Will this alter the future evolution of the human species, or will technological factors completely compensate for any potential change in climate?