New Scientist reports from a survey from Pennsylvania State University that around 12% say they teach creationism or intelligent design as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species”.

When South Korea’s president-elect was mayor of Seoul, he said the city was a holy place governed by God. He’s been associated with Korean evangelicals who pray at their monster rallies for the destruction of all Buddhist temples in Korea. The mega-church he attends is chock full of other government officials. Read more at the Asia Times.

God in the White House — a new book from religious historian, episcopal priest and editor-at-large of Chrisitanity Today, Randall Balmer — explores the history and the consequences of the “religionization” of the presidency from John F Kennedy through George W. Bush. From an excerpt offered at npr.org:

… [E]xamples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. Even the record of the two redeemer presidents of the past half century, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, is mixed. Carter actually sought to govern according to his moral lights and in fidelity to the principles of decency, honor, and fair play that he articulated on the campaign trail; the American voters resoundingly repudiated him when he ran for a second term.

Bush sought the presidency on a platform of morality and Christian virtues. Yet his policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflected those values only dimly, if at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It’s not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth century suggests that we’ve moved toward the latter and away from the former.

But at what cost?…

Read the complete excerpt, “Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency” at npr.org.

Randall Balmer is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

AP: Pope Benedict XVI strongly criticized atheism in a major document released Friday, saying it had led to some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” ever known. Read more from the Associated Press. Read the encyclical “Saved by Hope” at the Vatican web site.

It is hard to believe that Benedict, touted as a great Roman Catholic intellectual, would put forth the worn argument that Stalin and Mao are proof that disbelief itself is a source of monumental evil in the world, but that is exactly the tired old horse he trots out. So much has been written about this, that I couldn’t have much to add, except to say that it seems obvious that cult of personality leaders of the 20th century were not so much anti-religionists as men who simply wanted to replace one god with another in the Big Power Equation — to replace the unquestioned divine right of kings with the unquestioned divine right of, well, themselves. Louis XVI would have understood Stalin perfectly. One was the Vatican-backed ruler of the Most Catholic France who starved, brutalized and executed his countrymen, the other a “godless” former seminarian who took over the oppression of Russia to starve, brutalize and execute his countrymen.

Also always appropriate to note while running over this rutted old road, adherents to this Stalin/Mao argument seem to be cafeteria critics, conveniently picking a few “godless” monsters to damn all disbelief by association, but as Christopher Hitchens points out, “No country has ever fallen into despotism because it has followed the teachings of Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein .” [thx religionandatheism] It is as convenient for Il Papa to forget these as it is for him to forget Torquemada. It is easy for him to limit his discussion to the roots of evil in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the church had routinely tortured and burned people alive for the crime of dissent just a few generations earlier. Easy for him to ignore the fact that all of these atrocities have fanatical unquestioning belief — not disbelief — in common.

CNN: American Academy of Religion is noodling the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Politico: Dean says Jews can go to heaven.

Newsweek: No communion or Presidency for Giuliani say Catholic Bishops.

Bill Keller tells his followers Romney’s Mormonism will cause Americans to end up in hell, says Salon. Here’s an excerpt:

A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan,” Keller declared in his daily e-mail devotional last May. His reasoning went like this: Romney’s election would serve as a giant advertisement for a competing religion, Mormonism, which Keller and others believe has falsely portrayed itself as another form of Christianity in an effort to find converts. “He would influence people to seek out the Mormon faith,” Keller predicted of a Romney presidency. “They would get sucked into those lies and they would eventually die and go to hell.”

Read more. [thx boingboing and Val]

Also: Orrin Hatch urges Romney to give the “Mormon Speech,” says god-o-meter.

British School teacher Gillian Gibbons allowed Sudanese six- and seven-year old students to name a teddy bear Muhammed, so she has been arrested and is being charged with offending religion and inciting religious hatred. [BBC] Her offense could get her 40 lashes and a year in prison, according to CNN. Imagine the reaction if she prevented the children from naming the bear Muhammad.

This prompts the BBC to ask “What can’t be named Muhammad?” The answer, like most religious “immutable truths” remains debatable. Most important, religion retains its right to be offended by anything it dreams up.

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.”

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.

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.

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!”