The Bible's All Wrong, Again and Theocons and Theocrats.

The two articles are related and I only have one picture.

The Bible's all wrong, again/The surprising Gospel of Judas proves you just can't be too sure about all that God stuff by Mark Morford is about the Gospel of Judas and how it changes some of the basic tenants of Christian beliefs. It also shows how the Bible was put together by mere men with political agendas and an eye for getting their own personal slant in the Bible.

Living here in the Bible Belt I find this stuff humorous, to say the least.

Is it not just tremendous heaps of casually blasphemous fun to learn, once again
and for the thousandth time, that the Bible -- that happy mish-mashed messed-up
hodgepodgey cocktail of myths and folklore and revisionist propaganda and
who's-your-daddy reproaches intermixed with lovely stories of redemption and
hope and oh yes sin and hellfire and death -- is so full of colorful holes it
might as well be a bedsheet from Baghdad Target?

Not so humorous is Theocons and Theocrats by Kevin Phillips, it's
about the less than secular direction this nation is headed. This is
serious stuff and Phillips lays it out for us. Trust me, you don't want
these people running the country.

As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes
about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the
unfortunate
criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected
leader who
believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling
party that
represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the
nation's churches;
the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that
government should be
guided by religion and religious leaders; and White
House implementation of
domestic and international political agendas that
seem to be driven by religious
motivations and biblical worldviews.