More pandering trouble for Obama. From Earl Offari Hutchinson at the Huffington Post:

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama ripped a page straight from the Bush campaign playbook with his announced upcoming three date barnstorm tour through South Carolina with notorious gay basher, gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. The Grammy winning black gospel singer’s last effort on the political scene was his song and shill for Bush’s reelection at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Obama has hitched his string to McClurkin’s high flying gay bash kite in part out of religious belief (he purports to be somewhat of an evangelical), in bigger part because he’s falling further and further behind Hillary Clinton with the black vote in South Carolina and everywhere else, and in the biggest part of all because he hopes that what worked for Bush’s reelection will work for him.

Read more here.

The well-conceived Politifact.com calls Mike Huckabee on his claim that a majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “clergy.” In fact, only one of 56 was a clergyman. From Politifact: “We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.” Read more.

BTW: Politifact is a cool and useful site from the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, dedicated to a factual analysis of presidential candidates’ statements and ads. Learn more about it and its nifty truth-o-meter here and check it often. [Thanks Val and TPM]

The FRC Christian Right Summit Straw Poll Results as reported by the AP. The question: Which is the following candidates for president would you be most likely to vote for?

From the Associated Press:

“There are many who will seek our support,” he [Mr. Huckabee] said. “But let me say it’s important that people sing from their hearts and don’t merely lip-sync the lyrics of our songs.

The language of Zion is a mother tongue and not merely a recently acquired second language.”

And I thought the Republicans were the ones who wanted English to be the official language of the United States.

From the New York Times comes this quote from Mitt Romney’s speech to right-wing Christian activists at the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit”:

I want to make sure my attorney general defends the free exercise of religion in this country. The effort to establish an anti-religion in America, the anti-religion of secularism, has got to come to an end. We are a nation under God, and we do place our trust in Him.”

And P.S. Showing good old Christian Right-Wing political values, the Romney campaign is urging supporters to stack the “Values Summit” straw poll. Read the story at the Baltimore Sun.

P.P.S. The odious Bob Jones III, chancellor of the odious fundamentalist Bob Jones University — yes that’s the BJ-U that’s infamous for its anti-Catholic rhetoric and ban on interracial dating — says Romney is the man for the job. Read more at the god-o-meter.

This weekend’s Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Summit” promises to be a real wince-o-matic source of telling quotes. Friday’s best/worst comes from Fred Thompson:

People ask me, ‘What would you do in the first 100 days in office?’ I don’t really know. But I’ve said to my wife that I know what I’d do in the first hour: Go into the [oval] office and pray for the wisdom to know what the right thing to do was.” [thanks god-o-meter]

It seems to me that in this one quote he pretty much sums up all the reasons not to vote for him: He doesn’t “really know” what it is he will do as president and he’s going to ask Zeus for an answer. Scary.

Also interesting: When Wolf Blitzer asks FRC prez Tony Perkins if Mormonism is a Christian religion, he replied: “Well, I mean clearly it’s different than the Christian faith. It is not a brand of evangelicalism, it is not a brand of the Christian faith. It is a different faith altogether.”

Declareyourdisbelief’s own “Freethinking is the American Way” design now graces goods at the Disbelief Boutique. Own one today.

More goods coming soon! Be sure to check in often.

Students at Missouri State University have started a chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and it’s now the second-largest religious group on campus. Here’s local news coverage from Ozarks Fox KSFX. [thx Laughing Squid]

Find Flying Spaghetti Monster frequently asked questions here.

Take them to court. From the The Christian Science Monitor covering the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and its primary cause — shining light on and stopping Dominionist Christian proselytization in the armed forces:

At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.

On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall’s constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.

Read more at CSM.

Dan Rather covers the same subject on his hd.net show. Click here to see the show at hd.net.

Click here to see nonbelieving soldier Jeremy Hall’s court filing.

… from the friendly folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Click here to see what today holds. The FFRF — which is holding its 30th Annual Convention this weekend in Madison, Wisconsin — is having a big year. This week the group erected its first “Beware of Dogma” billboard and starting this month, its Freethought Radio is now carried nationally by Air America. Hear a podcast of the inaugural Air America show here.

CNN reports that on Sunday, Barak Obama closed a stump speech to 4,000 members of the Redemption World Outreach Center mega-media mega-evangelical mega-church with the line “I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

The Kingdom quote got a lot of people riled up in the blogosphere and I have to admit it was disturbing to me. For disbelievers, the Christian Kingdom he’s evoking shares more with The Caliphate than with the secular ideals of American Democracy. And it’s doubly disturbing because it’s just a phrase that I would never want my president to use — an idea I don’t want the American president paying lipservice to — no matter what crowd he’s pitching to.

Andrew Sullivan tells us, oh, don’t worry about it, Barak’s not of that Bush-Dobson brand, he’s more of the Niebuhr-Tillich brand so it’s okay, he wasn’t really calling for The Kingdom. After all, he was in a church grubbing for votes and he’s really a much more subtle philosophy reading guy — so no worries.

The thing is, I’m not disturbed because I believe Obama wants The Kingdom, the Christian Kingdom right here in the USA. I don’t believe that this Harvard academic star, this worldly man with Muslim relatives wants the Christian Kingdom on earth. What I believe is that he is beginning to be willing to say anything to anyone to get elected. And that’s got me worried, and a little pissed off, because I had had the audacity to hope — after his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 — that he wasn’t going to be that kind of candidate.

This life-in-pictures promo for the satirical Destined for Destiny: the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush will make you laugh/cry. [Thanks evangelicalright]

Plus: Have you met Al the Affable Atheist? Click here to enjoy his polite discussion of his disbelief in Poseidon.

And: Only last week I discovered John Safran vs God on the Sundance Channel. The next episode — which “finds John in Sicily where he confesses to a priest about his very sinful past… goes door-to-door in Salt Lake City visiting Mormon homes and advocating atheism, and takes in the spiritual teachings of some Hindi gurus in India — premiers on Oct. 11. (Unfortunately it’s episode 5 of 8! Wish I would have caught 1 - 4.) Visit the show’s web page to see funny/sad/scarey video clips and learn more about John’s “irreverent personal investigation into religions around the world.”

Scientific American looks at the work of scientists searching for the God-spot in the brain. They’re using various imaging and stimulation devices to study how the brain generates religious experiences. My favorite: The God Helmet. From the article:

So Persinger created the “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface. In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence—a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is—or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.

That’s quite a hat. Read more here. [thanks Val]

On Friday, George Bush appeared to embrace the universal godhead, telling Al Arabiya: “Well, first of all, I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That’s what I believe.” Read more at WhiteHouse.gov.

Since the 1940s, Dr. Bronner sent the same message on his famous soap bottle labels: “Our Brother’s teacher of the Moral ABC, mason-tent-sandalmaker Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free! All-One-God-Faith, as teach African shepherd-astronomers Abraham & Israel for 6,000 years since yr.1 Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One. All-one. Exceptions eternally? None!”

In a speech last week on the Sputnik anniversary, Hillary Clinton vowed — if elected — to end President Bush’s war on science, rescind his restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and make sure government researchers “no longer place ideology ahead of evidence.” [Washington Times]. Scientists applaud and post picture galleries.