When that “faith” gets put into action, however, it quickly loses its veneer of sincere religious conviction.

Consider the recent independent expenditure made by the Faith and Freedom Action Super PAC, on behalf of Richard Mourdock. The political action committee announced today that it has spent thousands of dollars on “robo calls” made by the political mercenaries at Conqueet Communications. These obocalls are automatic telephone calls made by a computer, blasting pre-recorded political messages to people who did not request them, giving the recipients no opportunity to speak in return.

What kind of faith needs to rely on robocalls? What is the religious idea behind this literal political machine?

If these supporters of Richard Mourdock genuinely believed in a divine purpose behind the Mourdock for Senate campaign, wouldn’t they rest assured of the campaign’s victory? Do they really believe that their god’s political plans for the U.S. Senate seat from Indiana depends on computer programs that make automatic telephone calls to interrupt voters’ family dinners?

It’s worth noting that the Faith and Freedom Action Super PAC is not even based in Indiana. The shadowy organization is based out of a post office box all the way down in Duluth, Georgia. What’s up with that? I suppose that Super PACs operate in mysterious ways.

There are many other trends visible in the data; I’ll just mention a few. While the number of congregants declined by more than 2.8 million, the number of congregations rose by 7,786. This means that in 2010, American organized religious worship tended to take place in smaller groups of people.

From 2000 to 2010, the religious bodies that lost the most members were the largest, stodgiest organizations with the most old-fashioned religious traditions in America:

The Wesleyan Church: down 131,408 members — a decline of 34.4%
The American Baptist Association: down 77,599 members — a decline of 27.6%
The United Church of Christ: down 414,622 — a decline of 24.4%
The Presbyterian Church: down 689,586 — a decline of 22.0%
The United Methodist Church: down 402,408 — a decline of 3.9%
The Catholic Church: down 3,106,055 — a decline of 5.0%

Not all religious bodies diminished. Some grew, including the Unitarian Universalist Association, up 28,908 — an increase of 15.8%. But the overall trend in American society has been for people to disassociate themselves from religious institutions. Non-affiliation is the strongest religious freedom of all.

In an article by Judy Harrison on the subject, Bangor Theological Seminary administrator Steve Lewis is quoted with this reaction:

What’s alarming about those numbers is that more than 300 years after the country was founded by people seeking religious freedom, the large numbers of nonaffiliated folks out here is just the norm.

Lewis seems to have a funny definition of the term “religious freedom.” When more and more people operate outside the bounds of religious institutions, that’s not a threat to people seeking religious freedom. However “alarming” it may be to tithe-dependent institutions, non-affiliation is an expansion of people’s freedom.

Enrollment is limited to 25 participants, so hurry and sign up for this expensive opportunity now!

On the other hand, if you can’t afford to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to spend three days tending your dreams, don’t worry. The Irregular Times Foundation Of Light is holding its own dream tending workshops, starting tonight.

Dr. Rampo Steele Skyan, who holds a degree in neurophysics from an accredited holistic cryptozoological research institute, will lead members of workshop teams in hands-on exercises of dream tending. These include:

1. Dreamshoe throwing contest
2. Dream grooming
3. Dream trail rides, with BBQ cookout included
4. Mucking the dream stalls

Whereas Dr. Aizenstat’s dream tending classes are limited 25 participants, the Irregular Times dream tending workshops are limited to 10 participants, so you just know that they have to be better.

What’s more, unlike Aizenstat’s worshops, which are located in the boring old Switzerland of the physical plane of existence, Irregular Times dream tending seminars are held on the ZubZub beaches of the astral plane… for those who spiritually enlightened enough to follow the path. This evening, the earthly portal to the ZubZub beaches will be located in the Eastgate Shopping Plaza in Hoboken, at 8:00 PM. Be there now!

In 2011, Shorter University had a faculty of just 109 instructors. However, in October of last year, a few years after the Georgia Baptist Convention’s control of the university was enforced by the Supreme Court of Georgia, the school’s administration presented employees with a new set of requirements. Employees would have to sign “lifestyle statements”, promising to engage in religious worship at local Christian churches, and vowing not to engage in or support homosexuality or extramarital sex.

As a result of the new requirements, 59 faculty members, plus other employees at the school, have declared their intention to leave Shorter University at the end of this school year. Only 12 percent of faculty have decided to sign the draconian lifestyle standards so far.

So, when Shorter University reconvenes this autumn, it will be mostly with new professors, who don’t know each other, and have no history of working with the institution. They’ll have one thing in common, though: They’ll all be ideologically screened to be in line with the beliefs that the administrators at Shorter University are willing to accept. Students at Shorter will be learning certain kinds of information only – and not because it’s accurate information, but because the information has been judged by the Shorter authorities to be politically correct.

Most parents, when they send their children off to college, are looking for an experience that will enable the full development of their children into adults, in a setting where students are able to grapple with the realities of the world, building a mature self-concept and set of intellectual abilities that is founded in honest debate and open access to information. Shorter University won’t be delivering that kind of educational experience. Instead, Shorter University students will gain their degrees without having full access to information. Shorter students will be trained to follow a narrow course that has been selected for them, kept in the status of children, in a controlled environment where the educational philosophy is that the less students learn about the world, the better.

Shorter University will be offering degrees of ignorance, building a reputation for graduates who know less, can do less, and who have not been fully tested with exposure to the full range of ideas and information available to most university students. Shorter University students will carry with them an association with bigotry and intolerance. Diplomas from such an institution of education will qualify Shorter graduates to work for small range of employers within a small ideological territory. Who will want to graduate with that kind of handicap?

What I couldn’t know when I wrote about the subject last week is that just three days later, the Obama Administration would issue new guidelines about how the money funneled through the Office of Faith-Based Intitiatives can be used.

Back in 2008, Barack Obama promised that he would end the use of government money to support employment discrimination on the basis of religion. Now, we’re in the middle of the 2012 presidential election, and people who voted for Obama four years ago are considering the degree to which Obama has kept his campaign promises. Given that, what do you think Obama did about employment discrimination in Friday’s new guidelines for the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives?

Barack Obama decided to keep the employment discrimination on the basis of religion going. He issued guidelines that allow the government to keep on paying money to create jobs that are available only to people who have certain religious beliefs. After the release of these guidelines, Reverend Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State explained that, “A fundamentalist Christian church can still run a publicly funded social service program and hang out a sign that says, “Government job opening: No Catholics, Jews, Muslims or Atheists need apply.”

These jobs may be administered by church officials, but they’re government jobs. They’re paid for with government money. Their creation is approved of by government officials with a White House office. They’re part of a public trust. They are a form of public office.

The Constitution specifically forbids the government’s creation of jobs that are provided on the basis of religious identity. Even before the First Amendment was passed, the original body of the Constitution declared, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”.

Barack Obama seems to care more about his own political future than he does about the constitutional rights of people who are being fired from public office for no other reason than their beliefs about religion. As he’s looking at Election Day coming close, President Obama knows that he would anger people in big churches if he took away their government funding, or if he insisted that religious discrimination in employment end. To keep his job, Obama is willing to allow others to lose theirs.

“Massive Quake/Volcanic Destruction Imminent!”

Oh dear! But I’m not quite convinced it’s time to go out and buy a lava-repellent helmet. In December 2009 Linda Newkirk issued a prophecy that within just a few months, amid a wave of drug fiends, satanic kidnappers and mind-control rays, the messianic Son of God would “be known to the whole world.”

Are you the Son of God? Have you told the whole world? Or did you forget that bit with all the laundry to to do and the appointment with the dog groomer and all?

The oddest part of McIntyre’s little religious rant was when he sermonized, “We know that the true source of power cannot be found here in the Halls of Congress or in the Oval Office in the West Wing or in the chambers of the Supreme Court, but only on our knees before the one who is the true source of power!”

Does Congressman McIntyre really believe that? I don’t think so, because he’s spent his whole career pursuing power through corporate money, and through the power of government, not through prayer. If Mike McIntyre truly believed that true power is found in prayer, rather than in Congress, he’d be back home praying, not working like hell year after year to stay in Congress.

Mike McIntyre doesn’t care enough about prayer to center his own life around the practice, so what right does he have to lecture to the rest of us about how we’re not praying enough? Like most other conspicuously religious politicians, Representative McIntyre is just using prayer as a theatrical prop, to try to gain votes for himself.

Praying loudly in the public square is not what the Jesus suggested. I wish there were someone around to remind Mike McIntyre about that… someone like… gosh, I don’t know who…

The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives is a clear violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state, because it takes resources gathered through an act of Congress and devotes them to religious programs. The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives puts the government in the position of choosing which religious groups should get public support, and which religious groups should be deprived of that support. It encourages ambitious preachers to maneuver political connections, so that their own religious organizations receive the most government money. It leads churches to turn into political campaign machines, with the understanding that financial favors from the government will flow in return for campaign help.

Yet, Barack Obama said he would not eliminate the unconstitutional Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. He said that he would expand it. Civil liberties advocates were stunned.

Still, back in 2008, Barack Obama made a promise. Obama said that he would reform the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Under George W. Bush, the government funded church programs that engaged in blatant employment discrimination. People couldn’t get jobs with these programs unless they belonged to certain religions, with memberships at certain churches. These government-funded programs were set up to promote church attendance with a system of financial patronage that would be withheld from anyone with different religious beliefs.

Such discrimination using government money is illegal. Churches are allowed to engage in employment discrimination, but only with money that they raise themselves, not with money that they take as handouts from the government. At least, that was how things used to work. Thanks to George W. Bush, the government was now paying churches to create government programs, using government money, with the power to hire and fire people simply because of their private religious beliefs.

So, Barack Obama said, he was going to expand the government handouts to churches, but he was also going to end the employment discrimination in government-funded programs. That promise mollified many civil liberties advocates.

A funny thing happened after President Obama’s election, though. He expanded the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, alright, putting Christian power player Joshua Dubois in charge. Those reforms Obama promised, however, never came.

Barack Obama has allowed the Office of Faith Based Initiatives to play the same old corrupt game of government-funded religious patronage, with no reforms. Religious discrimination, paid for with government money, is still taking place.

What’s more, Joshua Dubois and the Office of Faith Based Initiatives have refused to talk about Barack Obama’s old promise of reform. Reverend Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State has written to Joshua Dubois and to members of his staff, seeking to start a conversation about how Barack Obama’s campaign promise to end employment discrimination through the Office of Faith Based Initiatives.

Everyone that’s been contacted at Barack Obama’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives has refused to answer. Not one letter has received even a form reply.

The Obama Administration won’t talk about Barack Obama’s promise to restore separation of church and state. So, why should Americans who support separation of church and state give their support to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign this year?

Ram Bomjon’s devotees said that he had not taken food or water, or even moved, for months. Police and scientists pointed out that Bomjon’s friends had not allowed anyone to get any closer than 15 feet to inspect the meditating boy, and that every night, Ram Bomjon was concealed behind a blind and all outsiders were made to leave the area. Nepalese police were about to force a strict investigation to see whether Ram Bomjon was committing fraud, when suddenly, Bomjon declared that his spiritual journey must lead him to wander the forest for a while.

Ram Bomjon later set up camp elsewhere, and has established a successful Buddhist center of worship, where he is the “blessed Guru”, the center of devotion, teaching wisdom and peace… and doing a few other things, it turns out.

It’s claimed that prolonged meditation leads a person to become calm, controlled, and less prone to angry outbursts. The devotional literature dedicated to Ram Bomjon states that Bomjon was born with a peaceful temperament, and that even during childhood, “Guru refused to fight, and was always calm”. If Bomjon was a peaceful boy, all that meditation seems to have changed him.

According to the Himalayan Times, Ram Bomjon’s followers held two women captive for two months, until they were rescued by police in late March. Ram Bomjon did nothing to help the women, one of whom was suffering from at least one broken bone during her captivity. There are allegations that one of the women was sexual assaulted while she was a prisoner.

The women were kept as prisoners because Ram Bomjon’s supporters accused them of practicing witchcraft in order to magically disrupt Ram Bomjon’s serene meditation. While the women were kept prisoner, Ram Bomjon’s supporters physically attacked five journalists who were attempting to film one of Bomjon’s speeches.

When Ram Bomjon’s family discovered that Bomjon’s camp was kidnapping and violently attacking people, his mother, Mayadevi, expressed her profound disappointment and sent two of Bomjon’s brothers off to talk some sense into him.

It didn’t work. Upon hearing their pleas to bring his violent operation back into control, Ram Bomjon himself attacked his brothers, and ordered them to be held as hostages. Upon hearing of this, Ram Bomjon’s mother and sisters made the journey to Bomjon’s religious center to beg for the brothers’ release. Ram’s response was to strike one of his sisters on the head.

Ram Bomjon has preached that “But the world is submerged in its own selfish aim and nobody could keep the search of soul and the super soul in their heart. Today the world is in search of non violence and guidance in the form of kindness.” Perhaps, instead of preaching from his stage of glory as a guru, Ram Bomjon would benefit by rejoining the world, seeking to embody the non-violence and kindness he asks of others, rather than seeking fame for himself.