Our next stop was the Liberty campus bookstore. It was run by Barnes & Noble, and it looked pretty much like any other campus bookstore. I was surprised by the range of books available there, some of which I would have expected to be verboten on campus - from Neil Gaiman's American Gods to Jeff Sharlet's The Family, as well as books on global warming and dream interpretation. That said, there were also four or five whole racks of shelves, a good half of the store, devoted to Christian material - Bibles, apologetics manuals, theology texts, proselytizing handbooks, and one shelf given over to books written by Liberty faculty, including the current president, Jerry Falwell's son Jonathan.

This is a good place to comment on Liberty University's code of conduct, the "Liberty Way", which all students living on campus must obey (students who are under 21 and not married are required to live on campus). Among other things, it requires student groups to get prior approval from the administration for all on-campus speakers, demonstrations, and petitions, with the clear implication that permission will be denied if the activity would "compromise the principles and policies of Liberty University". (Remember what Johnnie Moore said about "disputable matters"? Not too many of those in sight around here, it seems.)

Even more surprisingly, the code of conduct bans Liberty students from seeing any R-rated movies - even while off-campus. (I asked; there was a special exemption for The Passion of the Christ.) Also banned are any video games, posters or music whose content is incompatible with a "healthy Christian atmosphere" or not "in harmony with God's word". This is why it surprised me to find such books in the bookstore - although, like most totalitarian states, I'm certain that Liberty has many unwritten rules in addition to the written ones. It may well be that students are expected not to read or possess unorthodox books, even if the rules don't say so explicitly.

Outside the bookstore, we came across this interesting little pavilion. I'm still not certain why Jerry Falwell chose the Liberty Bell as the symbol of his university, or why he named it "Liberty" in the first place. The Christian belief that Jesus provides "liberty" from sin may be part of it - but if that's the reason, why use a secular symbol like the Liberty Bell, rather than a cross or something else explicitly religious?

This could, yet again, be an example of how the evangelical mindset so often values image over substance. Doubtless, it serves rhetorical ends to proclaim their love of liberty, even while the rules they impose on their students and faculty regarding permitted speech, correct belief and so on are the antithesis of this.

Last but not least, there was our visit to the on-campus memorial to Jerry Falwell. It was on a hilltop, set aside from the other campus buildings, behind the house that Falwell lived in while he was alive and that's now used as an administrative center. There was a stone cross rising out of a reflecting pool, with an eternal flame on top, and a fenced-off plot of land watched over by a small bronze plaque. The snow was well-trampled, but in the chilly peace of that Sunday morning, my friends and I were the only ones there. On the far side of the memorial, someone with a less-than-reverent cast of mind had built a fort in the snow.

I shed no tears over Falwell's death; he was a spiteful, small-minded hatemonger, and proud of it. And to judge from all the accounts I've read, Liberty reflected that attitude while he was in charge of it. For instance, The Preacher's Son tells of several students being instantly expelled if they were even suspected of being gay; some of them were kicked out of their homes because of it, and at least one committed suicide.

Yet it does seem that Liberty has mellowed at least somewhat since Falwell's passing. The Preacher's Son also said that when the author attended Liberty, in the early 1990s, students were forbidden to see any movie or to listen to any contemporary music, even Christian pop; that girls were required to wear dresses or skirts; and that the administration put wheel locks on undergraduates' cars to stop them from leaving campus without permission. None of those things still seem to be true today.

Make no mistake, Liberty hasn't gone very far from its roots. It's still a deeply conservative Christian fundamentalist college, still teaches its students young-earth creationism and the Rapture, still makes attendance at religious services mandatory, still engages in the policing of viewpoints and the monitoring of thoughts, and still views voting Republican as synonymous with Christianity. (As I was writing this, I heard that Americans United has asked the IRS to investigate Liberty's tax-exempt status in light of the administration using the school newspaper, the Liberty Champion, to endorse political candidates.) But despite its origins, Liberty hasn't been able to completely resist the tides of modernity, it seems.

But the problem is that even what's moderate by evangelical standards is not moderate by the standards of wider society. From biology classes that teach creationism to law classes that teach Christian dominionism, Liberty is systematically deceiving its students about the facts of the world. And the old, ugly paranoia and hatemongering isn't far beneath the surface either. And while, by the strict letter of the law, they have every legal right to lie and mislead, we likewise have every right to call this behavior what it is and denounce it. It seems a feeble weapon, but in the long run, no belief system is entirely immune to questioning.

When the church service let out, my friends and I toured several other buildings on campus. We stopped by the dorms, which are strictly gender-segregated:

I wonder what mindset lies behind this. Is it because the trustees of Liberty believe it's indecent for men and women to mingle in public? Then why aren't the classes and the church services also sex-separated? And why don't they also enforce the biblical decree that women not wear jewelry or braid their hair (1 Timothy 2:9)? That's as clear a command as you could ask for, but the administration of Liberty seems to be comfortable allowing students to flout it.

As with many aspects of evangelicalism, I think this rule is more concerned with avoiding the appearance of impropriety than actual impropriety. I mentioned earlier that Liberty's official policy is that students aren't allowed to spend a night off campus without prior permission, and even then, they can only stay at the home of a married Christian couple. This, like the segregated dorms, is presumably intended to discourage students from having sex. But it's not much of an obstacle: after all, there's nothing to stop two students from checking into a motel just for the day (or availing themselves of a secluded parking spot and the back seat of a car...). And sure enough, one of the first rumors we heard on campus was of a female Liberty student who had gotten pregnant and was being pressured to drop out of school.

The next building we visited was one of Liberty's academic halls. This was the first place where the true nature of this university made itself unmistakably clear: the walls were lined with displays advocating young-earth creationism and making snide comments about "evolutionists". I was surprised that they were daring enough to include Archaeopteryx - although, as you'll note, the model plays up the resemblance to a pigeon, and the card doesn't include any information about what this creature was or what evolutionists think about it.

But even that wasn't the height of crazy. At the far end of the hall was a "Center for Judaic Studies", with a display case filled with replicas of artifacts from Roman-era Palestine. A plaque next to the door announced that one of the offices within belonged to Dr. Thomas Ice, "Pre-trib Research Director". I took a pamphlet from a box next to the door, which is reproduced in part below.

See also.

The sheer, undiluted lunacy of this newsletter goes on and on, blithely presenting ludicrous assertions about how the future will unfold as if they were undisputed facts. One can clearly see just how little effort Tim LaHaye put into fictionalizing these beliefs for the Left Behind series. Note this passage from one of the inner pages, which the author somehow managed to write without irony:

A highlight was the bestowment of the Walvoord award upon Tim LaHaye, John Whitcomb, and Chuck Smith... It was a moving experience to realize that those three men were all over 80 and have served the Lord their entire adult lives. Each man is still excitingly looking for the Lord's return at any moment.

And Thomas Ice, despite the cheerful, froggy grin in his headshot, is an utterly demented kook, to judge by writings of his like this post:

Brannon Howse reveals the largely unknown story of how the Obamas are taking national their radical, socialist, and anti-Christian worldview training that was birthed through their organization "Public Allies". The training will include "social justice" training which is code word for Communism, socialism and Marxism.

It's not surprising that a person of this mentality would believe in the Rapture; this belief fits right into the paranoid mindset that's constantly jumping at shadows and that sees evil conspiracies lurking around every corner. But it is amazing that such a person could ever be considered qualified to serve as a professor (at the "Pre-trib Research Center", no less, as if there were were something to "research" about all this, rather than Christian believers telling each other the same fairy tales generation after generation).

At the time I saw all this, I laughed. Can you imagine anyone still believing this nonsense? was my initial reaction. But the more I reflect on it, the more sobering an experience it is. The fact of the matter is that there are people who do believe this nonsense, and are doing their best to broadcast it to the world - and, in large part, they've succeeded.

The church service was one thing; no one who attends that should have any illusions about what they're going to hear or where that information is coming from. But what we have here is ignorance systematically misrepresented as knowledge, virulent religious delusion concealed behind a cargo-cult facade of science. This, perhaps, goes back to what I said before about evangelicals valuing the appearance of the thing more than the thing itself. It's a strategy they've used very successfully here, presenting beliefs that are utterly insane in the manner and the style of academia.

The students who pass through these halls, most of whom have probably never been exposed to a contrary perspective in their lives, likely have no idea how contentious any of this material is. They'll listen, they'll lap it up, and they'll believe it - because that's what they've been taught to do. And when people who genuinely believe this go to the voting booth, when they influence the decisions that affect our society and the lives of everyone in it, this isn't comical; it's incredibly dangerous. When American foreign policy is based on fever-dream interpretations of the Bible; when research funds for science are allocated based on the myths and superstitions of the Bronze Age; when critical thinking is nonexistent and blind faith rules the day; when extremist religion is merged with politics; and when reason is drowned in paranoia and fearmongering, then our society is in grave danger. Liberty's malignant fundamentalism, flaunted to the world without a hint of embarrassment, is a lesson for anyone who still thinks that religion is essentially benign.

Coming up: The campus bookstore, plus a visit to Jerry Falwell's memorial.

By Sarah Braasch

In Loving Memory of My Baby Brother, Jacob Michael Braasch (01/28/86 – 02/02/10)

I was working on this piece when I received news that my beloved youngest brother, Jacob, had taken his own life by hanging himself in my parents' basement.

I was ten, almost eleven when my mother told me and my brother and sister that she was pregnant again. I didn't speak to her for weeks. I was a good little Jehovah's Witness girl back then, but I'm pretty sure that the present day equivalent of my little ten-year-old interior diatribe would be something like, "You stupid bitch."

Our family was on the verge of cracking open and oozing out onto the ground like a rotten egg. "Was she trying to drive my abusive father to killing us all?" I asked myself. Our financial situation left something to be desired as well. The last thing we needed was the introduction of another stressor, another mouth to feed and another victim. I was so angry that I couldn't find the words to express my rage, so I just stopped speaking.

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded. And, my baby brother was born. If by born you mean torn out of my mother's body as a corpse before being brought back to life by a team of doctors. I remember assembling in the school library to watch the news footage of the Challenger exploding in the sky. I remember feeling numb.

I had been so overexposed to constant violence and the constant of impending catastrophe. My Book of Bible Stories was replete with images of apocalyptic mayhem and destruction. I was in full anticipation of being torn from limb to limb by demons at any moment. And, I lived my life in constant terror of my father's fickle and vindictive temper. I didn't have anything left to give to the Challenger. My entire world was exploding in a ball of fire.

When I was told that the state had taken custody of my baby brother, I thought, "If only I could be so lucky." He had needed an immediate life-saving blood transfusion at the moment he came into this world. Of course, my parents refused. Jehovah's Witnesses view blood as sacred and blood transfusions as a mortal sin against Jehovah God. So, the hospital called a judge in the middle of the night, and my baby brother became a ward of the state.

I blamed my mother. I blamed her for everything. She didn't protect her children from abuse, so it seemed fitting that her body would try to kill my baby brother in the womb rather than try to nourish and protect him.

I decided that all of our woes were the result of the fact that my parents were terrible and sinful Jehovah's Witnesses. They were not strong in the Truth. My father's only interest in Scripture was as justification for his maltreatment of his children. He rarely attended Kingdom Hall meetings, and he never went out in service, i.e. going door-to-door, witnessing the Good News. My mother was not the Jehovah's Witness she should have been. But, I would be.

My martyr/savior complex reared its ugly head. I decided to show them up. I would be the best Jehovah's Witness ever. I would keep our house together. I would take care of my siblings. I would be such a good little Jehovah's Witness girl that Jehovah would not only protect me from demons, he would protect me from my own parents.

I enjoyed the feeling of spiritual superiority. I couldn't smite my parents, but God could and would. One day. And, I would save my siblings too. And, we would make new lives for ourselves in an earthly paradise in the new system of things after judgment day, free from our parents' abuse.

While my mother and my baby brother remained in the hospital, I became the mistress of the house. I cooked and I cleaned and I washed clothes. I made sure that my other siblings got to school in the morning. I took care of and fed all of the pets. I worked and I scrubbed and I toiled. And, I imagined that Jehovah was looking down on me from heaven, utterly enamored by my righteousness.

One day, my father said something cruel to me. He said something cruel, but of no great or particular import. He said something about the condition of his eggs. He said something about my obligation to serve him. I don't know why exactly, but, in that moment, I lost my faith. Or, I started to lose my faith. But, not just my faith in God, not just my faith in Jehovah, not just my faith in the Jehovah's Witnesses or the tenets of their religion or their governing organization, but in humanity.

I turned off the stovetop, and I slammed the iron skillet down hard. I realized in that moment that no one loved me. I realized that my father viewed me as something of a dispensable and replaceable slave, as divinely sanctioned by Jehovah. I realized that my mother viewed me as the property of her husband. I realized that I was storing up spiritual riches in an imaginary heaven for a just future that would never come.

I screamed in anguish at my father without regard to the consequences. I wasn't really upset by my father's thoughtlessness. I was heartbroken. I had lost my God. Jehovah had abandoned me.

I screamed at my father to cook his own eggs, wash his own clothes and clean his own house. I expected to be backhanded, but nothing happened. I think he was in shock at the force of my rage. I stormed off to my bedroom, threw myself on my bed and sobbed into my pillow. I had never felt so alone. No one was going to save me.

I sunk into a deep depression. My insides were turning into poisonous, black lead. My limbs felt heavy. It was difficult to move. I was less than enthused when my father announced that we were all going to visit my mother and baby brother in the hospital.

I sat in my mother's hospital room. I gazed out the window at the inky black night. I wondered if I would be able to break the glass, if I threw the full weight of my tiny form against the window. I imagined myself crashing through the window and plummeting to the sidewalk below.

I glowered at my mother. She felt the full force of my rage. The sight of her disgusted me. I wanted to hit her. At first she looked at me with incredulity, but her expression quickly morphed into disdain, then irritation and, finally, anger. I wanted to provoke her. I wanted to anger her. I wanted to impose my presence upon her consciousness. I wanted to force her to react to me, to recognize my existence, my humanity.

My father looked at me with more love in that moment than he ever had, either before or since. He looked at me as a kindred spirit, a pained and tortured soul. I understood him as no one else ever had or ever could. I understood everything he had endured during his childhood. I understood his feelings of desperate helplessness. I understood both his longing and disgust for human affection and connection and intimacy. He had made me in his image. I was his baby Frankenstein, an emotional aggregate of all of his childhood traumas and hurts. And, he loved me for it. I was his little girl with rosy cheeks engorged with the blood of impotent fury.

My mother kept harassing him and tugging at his sleeve. "Get her out of here," she said. "I can't take this. I can't stand her right now. Get her out of here. I can't even look at her."

I just kept glowering at her underneath a furrowed brow with my chin tucked into my chest. I felt nothing but the purest, most unadulterated hatred for her.

The more hatred that oozed from my pores, the more love I felt radiating from my father's form.

He responded to my mother, "She's fine. Just leave her alone. She's fine."

My mother kept clutching at my father's sleeve and nagging him to remove me. But, he refused. He was kind to her, but unrelenting. My mother shot me a look of absolute hatred. My father had betrayed her. He had taken my side. The only time he had ever done so. He had protected me from her.

I finally understood why my mother allowed my father to abuse her children. She didn't care. She didn't love us at all. And, worse than that, not only did she not love us, she saw us as a threat, as competition for our father's affections. In that moment, I think my mother would have enjoyed watching my father strangle me.

I wasn't concerned about antagonizing my mother. She had dabbled in physical abuse when we were little, but that was no longer her modus operandi. And, at the moment at least, I had my father in my hip pocket.

Our father finally suggested that we leave my mother to sleep while we visited our new baby brother in the ICU.

When I was little, I loved hospitals. I loved staying in the hospital when I had my tonsils removed. I loved being doted upon and cared for by the doctors and nurses. I loved being away from my parents. I envied Jacob.

He was bloated and his skin was a putrid shade of yellow. He looked like a little corpse, as if he had drowned and been plucked from the water a couple days later. He was encased in a tomb-like, clear plastic incubator. He was covered with tubing – in his little arms and legs, in his mouth. Every one of his breaths seemed to require a monumental effort on the part of his tiny body.

We took turns putting our gloved hands through the holes in the side of the incubator, so that we could gently stroke his little bloated body. He grabbed my finger with his little hand.

I tried to communicate with him telepathically. I tried to tell him not to fight quite so hard to live. I tried to tell him not to be in such a hurry to get out of this place. I tried to tell him that the world is cruel and loveless and might not be worth the trouble.

In my mind, I said to him, "I would trade places with you, if I could, you poor, stupid baby. You poor, stupid baby." But, I could see that he was fixed upon surviving.

And, then I decided to save him. And, I fell in love with him. I focused my attention on his little fingers clasped around my index finger, and I thought, "I will protect you. I will love you. I will take care of you. I promise. Everything is going to be ok, baby."

I had a reason to live again.

(See Part I here.)

When the band finished their set, they departed and the pastor took the stage. He was relatively young, probably not much older than most members of the audience, and dressed in a plain shirt and jeans. His name, displayed on the giant screens overhead, was Johnnie Moore - a self-conscious use of the diminutive that was probably intended to emphasize the similarity between himself and the churchgoers.

I had come to Liberty expecting a fire-and-brimstone sermon, unapologetic quotations from the more hateful parts of the Bible, pulpit-pounding denunciations of Democrats, feminists and gay rights advocates. That wasn't what we got; if that ever was the atmosphere on campus, it's mellowed a bit since the Falwell days. Instead, like the music, his sermon seemed self-consciously bland, intended to be inspirational rather than wrathful. But there were a few points of interest which I'll talk about here.

The major theme of the sermon came from Philippians 2:14, which Moore translated as "Do everything without grumbling or complaining", and compared it with several other New Testament verses that teach similar lessons. He repeatedly described this as an absolute command - no complaining, ever, about anything, under any circumstances! Even if your life is hard or your job is terrible, he said, it's the duty of Christians to turn the other cheek and to always be so happy and contented that the rest of the world will wonder what they've got that makes them feel so good.

As part of this, he urged his audience to consider how good they have it in America. He pointed out that Christian converts in developing countries regularly suffer much greater poverty, deprivation, and persecution than American believers (such as one Indian convert whom he says was beaten and forced to drink cow urine by unfriendly villagers). And while this is indisputably true, he didn't point out the obvious implication: that American evangelicals are being deceptive when they depict themselves as a besieged, persecuted minority, as they routinely do. Nor did he mention that millions of people worldwide, not just Christians, are often subjected to unjust and cruel treatment from their culture or their government. It would have been nice to have some acknowledgment of that, especially in a sermon whose theme was that we should consider ourselves fortunate, but there wasn't any. Instead, in the moral universe of his sermon, Christians are apparently the only ones whom we should feel sympathy for.

I also want to draw attention to a dangerous implication of this teaching. I certainly wouldn't object if evangelicals ceased their perpetual whining about persecution, but there are real injustices that call for a response. Very often, it's been the complainers and the grumblers who succeeded in abolishing these evils. If we all heeded the advice that no one should complain about anything, ever, there would be no women's suffrage, no civil rights movement, no labor unions, no gay rights movement, no environmental movement, none of the social reform groups that work to improve conditions for the average person. The end result of following this teaching would be meekness, passivity, and docile compliance in the face of authority, even when it abuses its power - and perhaps, for good reason, this is exactly the attitude that the religious right seeks to instill in its followers.

Moore also cited Romans 14:1 to call for unity among evangelicals on "disputable matters", saying that senseless argument and contention over unimportant points of doctrine divides the church where there should be unity. But the question he never addressed, of course, is who decides what's a disputable matter? After all, it was Liberty University that only last year tried to ban the College Democrats from campus, claiming that the political positions of the Democratic party are incompatible with Christianity, and still refuses to hire any professor who does not swear allegiance to young-earth creationism. Clearly there are very few things, if any, that the religious right considers to be disputable. (The sole example that Moore cited was the biblical controversy over whether it's OK for Christians to eat meat that's been sacrificed to idols, hardly a live issue today.) It would have been helpful for him to list some modern issues where Liberty considers there to be room for dispute, just to get a sense of their position on this.

To finish up, Moore spoke of evangelistic efforts abroad. He exulted over how Christianity is exploding in South America and Africa, rising from just a few million believers several decades ago to tens of millions today. As my fiancee astutely observed, he obviously doesn't count Roman Catholics as Christians. As for myself, I was thinking of the savage anti-gay madness unleashed in Uganda by its booming evangelical population, or the witch frenzies in Nigeria, or the harm done by Pentecostalism in the Republic of the Congo. Such things, of course, were entirely omitted by Moore in his sermon. It was no surprise at all that he presented the rise of African evangelicalism as an entirely one-sided picture, portraying Christian missionary efforts as wholly noble and good and the converts solely as the victims of unjust persecution and never its initiators.

Coming up: Part III of my tour of Liberty University. We visit an academic hall to see what's being taught to Liberty students, check out the campus bookstore to see what the administration wants us to read, and make a pilgrimage to the university memorial to Jerry Falwell!

If you noticed that Daylight Atheism was quieter than usual this past weekend, you were right - I was out of town and had limited internet access. But there was a good reason for my absence: I was on a secret mission to penetrate into the very heart of the Bible Belt. Namely, I was storming the gates of Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, infamous for banning the College Democrats from campus and for instantly expelling any student found to be gay. Would they recognize me on sight? Would some supernatural sense of discernment tell them that an atheist was among them? And what would they do if they did find out?

The idea for this trip developed several weeks ago, when one of my friends, a frequent traveler, mentioned having read The Unlikely Disciple, a book by a liberal Brown student who transferred to Liberty for a semester and wrote about his experiences there. I had likewise just finished The Preacher's Son, a similar memoir about a survivor of an extreme fundamentalist family who accepted that he was gay while attending Liberty. A third friend of ours mentioned that she knew someone who attended the school and would be willing to show us around, and over a conversation, a plan was hatched. We set off on a road trip to Lynchburg, Virginia, with a few other stops along the way - one of which was Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, which I may write about later - and at the end of our journey, we saw the sign that let us know we had arrived:

Lynchburg is a semi-suburban town in rural Virginia, sprawled around a tangle of highways and strip malls. Like many communities, I guessed, it owes most of its growth to the university, which was founded in 1971 by Falwell as Liberty Baptist College. The campus certainly dominates the town: it's by far the largest institution there, its buildings and their prominently placed logos visible from far off. And just in case you missed the point, a giant "LU" is landscaped onto the side of a nearby mountain.

For all of that, getting onto campus was easier than I had hoped. There was no Soviet-style security, no checkpoints or guards at the gates controlling who entered or left campus, as I had been more than half-expecting. (I later learned that this is enforced in a different way: resident assistants perform nightly checks to ensure that every student is in their room by curfew, and undergrads must get written permission to stay off-campus overnight.) It would have looked just like any other college campus if not for the first building we passed, the first one that gave me a strange, world-turned-upside-down feeling of disorientation I'd experience many more times on this trip: an arena that was boldly lettered "LaHaye Ice Center".

Our first priority on the trip was to attend a Sunday-morning church service, so we headed for the Vines Center, a domed structure that doubles as the stadium for sporting events and assemblies. When we walked in and found seats, I was taken aback: what stood at the center of the arena was not so much an altar as a stage, complete with swirling spotlights and a fog machine. It could have been the setting for any concert or rock show, if not for the signs scattered about (and for the sharp-eyed, notice the "Falwell" jersey hanging above the stage on the left):

We were early, and I was expecting a flood of people to arrive before services started, but the flood never materialized. I estimated that the stadium could hold around ten thousand people, but throughout the service, most of the seats were empty; I doubt the number in attendance ever got much above a thousand. Attendance at these services isn't mandatory, although I'm told it used to be, and we later found out that many Liberty students attend Thomas Road, the nearby Baptist megachurch also founded by Falwell, or one of the other local churches in the area. (Liberty students are still required to attend convocation, a three-times-weekly mini-church service that includes prayer, announcements and worship songs.)

The stage setup was there for a reason, as we soon found out. The band arrived and took their places on stage, and the service began with a half hour of Christian rock music, during most of which the crowd was asked to stand. I had read in The Preacher's Son that Liberty banned all rock music, even Christian rock, at the time the author attended, so it seems they've relaxed their rules somewhat since then. In any case, I doubt they ever had reason to worry: most Christian music is carefully devised to contain nothing that could possibly offend even the most uptight evangelical, and this was no exception. The music was technically accomplished, insofar as I'm any judge - it was a seven-piece band, with four different vocalists - but the lyrics were insipid and repetitive, each song consisting of the same chorus sung over and over again. It was easy to endure, although after a half hour, I thought I could feel my brain beginning to turn to mush.

But for all its calculated blandness, there were some disturbing undercurrents in the music's message. One song praised Jesus as follows: "I know you're my healer; you cure all my disease". Needless to say, any Liberty student with diabetes or appendicitis would soon find out just how lethally untrue that claim is, if they took it literally and tried putting it to the test. Another one referred to Jesus as "the Lord of this city", which was the kind of unsubtle theocratic message I had been expecting from the beginning.

The music was probably intended to work the crowd into a heighted emotional state, the standard tactic of mass manipulation, but if that was the effect they were seeking, they didn't get it. There was no speaking in tongues, no students collapsing in their seats or hollering amens and hallelujahs. The most visible effect I noticed was a scattering of people raising their arms and swaying sedately in time to the music. That said, the whole spectacle was very well-produced and well-televised. Four enormous screens hanging around the interior of the stadium showed a close-up view of what was happening on stage, and there were cameras recording the action from every angle.

I was unmoved by the music, but there was just one part of the performance that I found genuinely affecting. In between two songs, one of the vocalists read a section from the Bible, from Hosea chapter 6. It was a good choice: there's still some wonderful poetry in that old book, and this is one of the better examples:

Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.

After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.

Let us acknowledge the Lord;
let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises,
he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.

That said, the band obviously skipped over some of the darker and bloodier parts of that very same book, like this one:

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open.

The schizophrenic contrast between these passages just goes to show what a deeply conflicting book the Bible is: it blends beautiful, pastoral imagery with savage threats of hate and bloodshed, all supposedly sanctioned by God. Evangelicals arrive at the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired only by ignoring or downplaying the nastier parts, whereas atheists see this book for what it is: a mirror of the humans who wrote it, magnifying both their best and their worst traits and attributing both to a vindictive and omnipotent god.

Coming up: Part II of our heroes' adventures at Liberty University, as the campus pastor takes the stage. Will he deliver a sermon to stir even the hardened heart of an atheist?

Last night I had a chance to see Creation, the independent film by British director Jon Amiel that presents an account of the life of Charles Darwin and his struggle to write his great work, On the Origin of Species, while mourning the death of his beloved daughter Annie. The movie is based on Annie's Box, the biography of Darwin written by his great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes.

The movie opens promisingly, with Darwin's eldest daughter Annie asking him to tell her a story. He obliges her by describing how Robert FitzRoy, captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, kidnapped four children from the "savages" of Tierra del Fuego and brought them to England to be raised as Christians. On the Beagle's second voyage (the one Darwin joined as ship's naturalist), FitzRoy returned the children to their tribe with the intent of having them act as missionaries, but the outcome wasn't at all what he had expected. (This is a true story, if you were wondering.)

Back at Down House, Darwin's home in the English countryside, he's visited by his friends Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley. Both of them are aware of the theory Darwin has been working on for years, and both of them urge him to collect and publish all his research. Huxley, a firebrand agnostic, is gleeful at the prospect of striking a fatal blow against religious orthodoxy, while Hooker is less anti-clerical and motivated more by what he sees as the scientific merit of the idea. Darwin himself is conflicted, recognizing his theory's potential to undermine religious belief, but far less certain that this would be a good thing. As the movie goes on to show, this is due mainly to the influence of his staunchly Christian wife, Emma.

As the backstory expands, we learn more about why Darwin has delayed publishing his theory for so many years. He's been grappling with a mysterious illness that renders him an invalid for long periods; his family life is increasingly strained and his wife increasingly distant; but most important, we find out, is the death of Annie. She died at the age of ten, and her absence still hangs like a shadow over the household. Of all Darwin's children, she was his favorite, and he's wracked by grief over her passing and tormented by the thought that he was somehow responsible. In repeated flashbacks, we see his affection for her, her budding talent as an amateur naturalist, and her clashes with her mother and the local vicar as she begins to speak up for her own father more passionately than he ever did for himself. Her spirit still haunts Darwin - literally, as she pops up throughout the movie, whether as memory, ghost or hallucination, to converse and at times to argue with him as he puts off writing and agonizes over whether to set pen to paper. Of course, we know how this story ends!

If there's anything I didn't like about Creation, it was its tendency to veer into melodrama. The middle third of the movie seemed overwrought to me, in particular an especially silly nightmare sequence where Darwin dreams that his stuffed and pickled lab specimens come alive and attack him. And while Darwin's imagined conversations with Annie's ghost were acceptable as a narrative device, it got excessive in some places. There's more than enough genuine dramatic gold in the historical details of Darwin's grief over his daughter's death, his struggling with his loss of faith, and his clashes with his devout wife over whether he was jeopardizing his eternal fate by publishing his theory. And the movie did touch on all those points, but I really don't think it was necessary to have a scene where Darwin dashes through the grounds of Down House, shouting out to a hallucination of Annie, while his servants look on in horror. The movie also makes very frequent use of flashbacks, and at times I found it hard to tell whether a scene was supposed to be occurring in the present or the past.

That said, there was much to like about the movie as well. It was extremely well cast: Paul Bettany, who plays Charles Darwin, gives a brilliant, deeply human depiction of a man who is tormented, fallible, but bears a deep love for his family and a fierce devotion to the truth. Jennifer Connelly, Bettany's actual wife, is fully believable as the straitlaced Emma, who loves and fears for her husband but ultimately comes around, to an extent, to his point of view. ("You have made me an accomplice," she says in one of the movie's most memorable lines.) Jeremy Northam, who plays the local reverend, serves as a dramatic foil to Darwin in some extremely effective scenes. And Martha West, who plays Annie, is a treasure.

The movie was also gorgeously shot, giving a strong sense of time and place to the story. The scenes of nature, whether in Darwin's cabin on the Beagle or the forests of the English countryside, were well chosen to complement Darwin's unfolding ideas and to give a sense of where he got his inspirations. And it was a very smart touch to have Bettany narrate parts of the story by reading actual passages from Origin of Species. Charles Darwin wrote some true poetry, and his words are mesmerizing when spoken aloud.

The last third or so of the movie was especially powerful, with some outstanding scenes that more than made up for the weaker ones earlier on. When Darwin pleads in prayer for Annie's life, there wasn't a dry eye in the theater, including mine. And that, I think, is Creation's greatest strength: it shows Darwin not as a stuffy, gray-bearded scientist or a Christian-hating polemicist, but as a human being, a father and husband, who's deeply conflicted about what he's about to unleash on the world but ultimately must go ahead because of his devotion to the truth. This nuanced, sympathetic portrayal of Charles Darwin the man could be just the kind of thing we need to increase public acceptance of his theory (and if you need any further proof, consider that the Christian reviewers loathed it). If this is a subject that appeals to you, Creation is definitely worth your time to see.

By Sarah Braasch

I'm scared to expose myself like this. But, I'm tired of the shame and the guilt and the fear. I have something important to say. And, I want to comfort other victims of religious abuse who feel alone and afraid.

I grew up in an abusive Jehovah's Witness home. When people ask me what my childhood was like, I usually describe it, in all seriousness, as something like growing up in a war zone. I don't mean to belittle or demean the experiences of children who actually grow up in literal war zones, but I struggle to find a more apt description.

The sky was always falling. We were constantly under threat of demonic attack. We expected Armageddon to befall us at any moment. As children, these threats of annihilation all around us were all too real. Demons could murder you, rape you and torture you, psychologically or physically or sexually. The desire for the death and destruction of mankind permeated the doctrine. Of course, this theater of horrors was exacerbated and intensified by my father's abuse and my mother's deranged denial.

I cried through my entire high school graduation ceremony. It became a joke amongst my classmates. It was the strangest thing. I just couldn't stop crying. I think I just couldn't believe that I had made it, that I was free. I was just so overwhelmed with emotion.

My father's parting words to me were to tell me that I would amount to nothing without him. He told me that I would come crawling back to him on hands and knees, begging him to take me in. I told him to wait for me. And to hold his breath.

It was a battle to finish my undergraduate education. If I hadn't gone to family court at sixteen to get a restraining order against my father, I wouldn't have been able to secure the financial aid necessary to continue my studies. I had to present a copy of the order to the university to establish myself as financially independent from my parents.

Also, I was in a tremendously fragile emotional and psychological condition. I had severed all ties with my family. I was socially retarded. I was completely alone. I felt totally disconnected from the university community. Interpersonal interactions were difficult and uncomfortable for me. I had trouble making eye contact. And, I thought demons were stalking me.

Being alone in the university dormitory during school breaks was the hardest. I would sit up all night in the lobby watching TV and chatting with the overnight security guards, and I would sleep all day. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone what was happening to me, and my childhood had been nothing if not a study in secrecy. But, I willed myself to keep it together, to go to class, to work, to do research. I presented as normal a face as possible to the outside world. I gravitated towards other outsiders and social pariahs. The goth transvestite with pet snakes. The bisexual Jamaican dancer.

So, at 22 years old, I had spent five years at the University of Minnesota. I had two summa cum laude engineering degrees, in aerospace and mechanical engineering. I had a French minor. Somehow, some way, I made it through. The world was, seemingly, my oyster.

I decided to continue my education. It just seemed like a good idea. If education was good, then more education was even better. I was racking up prizes and awards and scholarships and fellowships and internships and whatever other honors I could get my hands on. I wanted medals and certificates and esteem. Mostly esteem.

I was fueled by rage and hatred. Hatred and rage. It was driving me forward, relentlessly. But no amount of accomplishments or successes could sate me. I was on a mission for revenge and retribution and justice. But, it was not to be found. I was playing a chess game against my parents, except that I was playing a chess game against no one, because my parents weren't playing, because they didn't care.

That was the cruelest lesson of my twenties. I realized that my parents were not sitting up nights worrying about my wellbeing or lack thereof. My parents were not racked with guilt over their mistreatment of me. My mother and my father were continuing their lives as if they didn't have a care in the world, as if they'd never had a little girl named Sarah.

I couldn't even hurt them. They didn't care. My success was not the best revenge or any revenge at all. My success was meaningless to them. They didn't care. I had to let it go. Their gas-lit alternate reality didn't include me, or even a notion of me or even the idea of me. My anger and bitterness was going to destroy me and no one would care.

I headed off to grad school at UC Berkeley. The moment I landed, everything came crashing down. Something inside of me snapped. It surprised me. I wouldn't have thought it would have occurred then. I was further removed from all of my torments, both geographically and temporally. But, all of my demons were still with me — in my head.

I couldn't sleep. I was terrified of the dark. I spent my nights sitting in the bathtub, searching out the corners of the well-lit bathroom for demons. I would pray to Jehovah throughout the night, in an almost chant-like fashion. I did this to ward off the demons, to call upon Jehovah for protection, and to stop the bad thoughts. If I cursed Jehovah God in my head or asked for Satan, I would scream and cry out to Jehovah to save me. Then, I would begin chanting again. Sometimes, a part of my brain knew that what I was doing was crazy, but I couldn't stop. And, sometimes, I didn't know. Sometimes, I knew that there was a demon there, torturing me, trying to hurt me, trying to get me to kill myself.

I stopped going to class. I stopped going to the lab. I stopped bathing. I spent my days either sleeping or writing out rambling tales of demons and demonic possession. I had a complete nervous breakdown.

In a rare moment of lucidity, I realized that I was either going to drive myself totally and irrevocably insane, or that I was going to drive myself to suicide. I knew it. I had to choose.

There was something alluring about letting the insane parts of my mind just take me, just pull me out to sea and drown me in darkness. I wanted to completely disassociate from reality. Insanity would obviate the need for suicide. Suicide was scary. I had no fear of hell. (Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in hell.) But, I had grown weary of violence. I didn't really want to inflict more violence upon my poor, tired body. But, I decided that my insanity wouldn't be a happy or peaceful place. My insanity would be hell, full of pain and anguish. If I had thought that my insane mind would have taken me to a dreamy heaven, full of cotton candy and angels and down-filled cushions, I would have gone.

I wasn't sure if I could still extract joy from life. I wasn't sure if I could find meaning in life. I wasn't sure if I could determine a purpose for my life. But, I decided to try. I decided I needed drugs.

I headed to the student health center on campus. I told the staff psychiatrist how I was feeling about my tenuous grasp on reality, my views on demons and my thoughts of suicide, and he gave me drugs. Lots of drugs.

The drugs worked. I was walking through life in a hazy fog, but I liked it. I could sleep at night. I didn't think about demons all of the time, but they never left me completely. I went to class. I went to the lab. My productivity left something to be desired. I had been drained of any semblance of a personality. I even spoke really slowly. I gained a lot of weight. I was kind of like the walking dead. But, I was alive. Sort of. And, I could function. Kind of.

I got it in my head that I needed to leave Berkeley. I grew tired of living like a zombie. As often happens, I decided that I didn't need the drugs anymore. I decided that I just needed a new environment, a change of pace. So, I left. I took the first job offer I could find, and I moved to Los Angeles. Things were going ok for a while. Then, I decided to save my siblings. With tragic consequences.

I basically strong-armed my older sister and my younger brother into moving out to Los Angeles and into moving in with me. I had grandiose visions of bestowing new lives upon them, of blessing them with new horizons, of freeing them from the shackles of our hellish family and childhoods. I would be their savior. (And, I hoped it would irk my parents to no end.)

This ill-formed plan, of course, quickly turned catastrophic. Three emotionally damaged and traumatized adult siblings living in close quarters and grappling with reconstructing their lives and identities is a recipe for disaster. Trust me on this one. Things quickly spiraled out of control.

My sister was the first to abandon ship. She saw the light before I did. When my sister left so did any hope we had of building a functional family out of the shards of our broken lives and psyches. She was the sane one. My brother and I descended into a co-dependent psychodrama hell of childhood trauma revisited.

I became cruel to him. He embodied all of my worst fears. He couldn't get out of bed. He imploded in on himself. I couldn't allow that to happen. I forced him to get a job. I forced him to pay rent. I forced him to clean. I was all about the tough love.

He became more and more detached from reality. He would stay out all night, wandering the streets of LA. He would tell me that he had broken into people's homes. He brought home swords, which I quickly re-gifted. He would tell me that he saw a girl, whom he knew from back home, at the restaurant where he worked. He thought he might have raped her during a drug binge. He told me that she sat at the bar and stared at him without saying a word. He told me that she had come to LA to tell him that she was pregnant. He told me that he could hear the thoughts of the customers at work. He could hear them thinking about him, laughing at him. He told me that the patrons in the restaurant were always talking about him, making fun of him. He told me that he often met and saw demons as he wandered LA in the middle of the night. He told me that he challenged Satan to a fight.

I knew he was schizophrenic, but I thought I could talk him out of it. I know it sounds ridiculous. He would have moments of lucidity. I would try to reason with him, to get him to see the distinction between reality and psychosis, to teach him how to recognize the difference.

Then, one night, my brother snapped. He was asking me pointed questions about whether or not my sister and I had been sexually abused by our father. And, I was giving him pointed answers. He responded violently. I had to call the police. I was never afraid of him until that point. I probably should have been, but I wasn't. Even when he told me he was hearing voices and seeing demons, even when he brought home swords.

The next day, I kicked him out. I gathered up all of his belongings after he left for work, and I dropped them off at the restaurant. And, I've never forgiven myself. But, I was scared. I panicked. I was afraid that he would kill or rape or hurt me if I let him stay. Eventually, he made his way back to the Midwest.

My brother is currently being heavily medicated, so that he does not pose a danger either to himself or to anyone else. I tried to save him, but I drowned him instead.

When I think about my brother, I think about how he held me as I cried out my testimony against my father in family court, about how my words became sobs, about how he put his arm around me. And, I hate myself for abandoning him.

Religious abuse exists. Religious abuse is real. Who knows how many unacknowledged walking wounded limp through early adult life, struggling to put themselves back together again. Of course, there are varying degrees and types of religious abuse, just as there are varying degrees and types of sexual and physical abuse. Religious abuse is a form of psychological abuse. As a society, we are loath to acknowledge this fact. We are loath to acknowledge that raising children in religion is abusive.

We are sending millions of young persons out into the world handicapped by religious childhood traumas and indoctrination and social retardation, including religious idiocy, delusion and hatred. For the greater part, these psychological and emotional pains remain unaddressed by our mental health profession. Religion is not addressed as the prime mover.

I am not an aberration. I am your high school friend. I am your co-worker. I am your law school classmate.

I am not unintelligent. I am not crazy. I have two engineering degrees and a law degree. I have traveled the world. I am well educated and well read. I am a human rights activist. I am a writer.

I am an adult survivor of childhood religious abuse. And, so are you.

(Editor's Note: Thanks to DA reader Alan Waldron for suggesting this post!)

I've written about famous atheist composers before, but not all the great nonbelieving musicians belong to the past. Some are still living, working, and performing - like the subjects of today's post on the contributions of freethinkers.

The band Pearl Jam was founded in Seattle, Washington in 1990, a part of the emerging grunge-rock movement that would also produce bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. Its original lineup consisted of vocalist Eddie Vedder, guitarists Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, and drummer Dave Krusen (ultimately replaced by Matt Cameron). Pearl Jam's debut album, Ten, was released in August 1991 and became a breakout, certified-gold success thanks to hit singles like "Alive" and "Jeremy". Their second album, 1993's Vs., set records even more rapidly. Their subsequent albums include Vitalogy (1994), Yield (1998), Riot Act (2002), and Backspacer (2009). Allmusic calls Pearl Jam "the most popular American rock & roll band of the 90s", and a 2005 USA Today reader's poll voted them the greatest American rock band of all time.

Pearl Jam's music, in addition to advocating a variety of progressive causes such as the pro-choice movement and environmental conservation, carries unmistakable themes of science and freethought. In "Big Wave" (lyrics), a song about evolution and how it connects us to our crustacean ancestors in the sea, Vedder sings:

I used to be crustacean, in an underwater nation
And I surf in celebration, of a billion adaptations
I feel the need, planted in me, millions of years ago, can't you see?
The ocean's size, defining time and tide, rising arms laid upon me,
Being so kind to let me ride.

The song "Marker in the Sand" (lyrics) demands to know why a deity would permit people to slaughter each other in his name:

Those undecided needn't have faith to be free
And those misguided, there was a plan for them to be.
Now you got both sides claiming killing in God's name
But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently.

And one of my personal favorites, "Do the Evolution" (lyrics), pointedly criticizes religion for encouraging humanity's violent impulses and fostering an illusory sense of our species' superiority:

I'm ahead, I'm a man
I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I'm at peace with my lust
I can kill 'cause in God I trust, yeah
It's evolution, baby

The video, one of the rare exceptions to Pearl Jam's policy of not creating music videos for their songs, is a psychedelic animated montage of violence through the ages, from knights in the Crusades to Nazi rallies to the KKK - pointedly suggesting that religion and other tribalisms are nothing but a mode of expression of the violent impulses arising from the darker side of our nature.

The Celebrity Atheist List also has this quote from Eddie Vedder:

I think [God is] like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

Dave Schmeltzer's book Not the Religious Type has many examples of what he calls "napkin stories" (i.e., short enough to write on a napkin), brief anecdotes from people who claim to have experienced miraculous events in their lives when they trusted in God. Here's a typical one:

I found out that my aunt and uncle's marriage was unraveling due to an affair. I fasted and prayed for them. After thirty-eight days, I was contacted by my uncle. He was about to sign a lease on an apartment to move in with his lover. Before he could sign, he felt an almost audible voice in his head say "stop." He went back to my aunt and started to see how their marriage could be saved. She found a way to forgive him.

I've observed in the past that evangelical religious belief is sustained by a kind of natural selection among ideas. Stories and personal testimonies that fit neatly into Christian narrative prototypes - stories that resonate with what Christians already believe - stir interest and excitement among believers who hear them, are repeated and passed on from person to person, and soon become common in the apologetic literature. But stories that can't be fitted into these templates don't draw interest or excitement from believers, are not repeated or passed on, and tend to be forgotten. Because of this tendency to count the hits and forget the misses, Christians uneducated in critical thinking tend to believe that answers to prayer are common.

But if you look at all the evidence, a different picture emerges. We hear stories about faithful Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then recover; we hear stories about evangelists who founded a ministry and saw it flourish and grow; we hear stories about nonbelievers who pray for God to reveal himself and then mysteriously receive aid from a helpful Christian stranger at just the right time. However, unless you're looking for them specifically, you probably don't hear stories about Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then die. You don't hear stories about churches and ministries that fail to attract members and fall apart, despite the hard work of their founders. You don't hear stories about nonbelievers who pray to God to reveal himself and then nothing out of the ordinary happens. It's not that these stories never get written - they do, and I'll give some examples - it's just that they don't take root and spread through the Christian community like the other kind.

In this post, I'll try to counteract that tendency by presenting some stories of when prayer fails. The first two examples are from Philip Yancey's book The Jesus I Never Knew:

One terrible week two people called me on successive days to talk about one of my books. The first, a youth pastor in Colorado, had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. "How can I possibly talk to my youth group about a loving God after what has happened to me?" he asked. The next day I heard from a blind man who, several months before, had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. Recently he had discovered that the recovering addict was carrying on an affair with his wife, under his own roof. "Why is God punishing me for trying to serve him?" he asked. Just then he ran out of quarters, the phone went dead, and I never heard from the man again. [p.159-160]

Even the "answers to prayer" confused me. Sometimes, after all, parking places did not open up and fountain pens stayed lost. Sometimes church people lost their jobs. Sometimes they died. A great shadow darkened my own life: my father had died of polio just after my first birthday, despite a round-the-clock prayer vigil involving hundreds of dedicated Christians. Where was God then? [p.165]

Or this tragic story of a young mother dying of cancer, who prayed with a hospital chaplain that God would give her the time to finish a needlepoint project she was making for her children:

I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.

A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.

As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.

Or Paul Barnes, former pastor of a 2,000-member evangelical megachurch, who resigned after admitting that he was homosexual:

"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy... I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."

Or this sad story of an injured man, unable to afford a doctor, who waited months on end for a miracle until he died:

"He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God," said Webb. "And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn't think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people."

And Dave Schmeltzer himself, though he repeatedly claims to be happy and blessed, admits that his life too has times of depression and darkness:

"...it's not as though my life is consistently such a powerful case for connection with this super-duper God. For someone who talks as much as I do about joy... why is it that a few times over the years I've mentioned to my wife that I feel as if my life has been squeezed out of me like water from a sponge, like I relate to Woody Allen's working title for Annie Hall (Anhedonia - the clinical inability to feel joy)."

This quote highlights an important point that shows how miracle stories get started. Every life, regardless of which religion you belong to or whether you believe in God, has its high points and low points. Every person experiences both favorable and unfavorable coincidences. Evangelicals are doing nothing more clever than giving God the credit for the good times, while ignoring or downplaying the bad ones - save for the rare glimpses of honesty like the ones cited above.

But whatever theological embellishments that evangelicals put on them, these ups and downs happen to everyone. Atheists, too, experience them; the only difference is that we recognize them for what they are, the inevitable working of chance, and don't claim them as evidence of some supernatural creature's favor or disfavor. And atheists, too, experience the same kind of favorable coincidences that Christians unhesitatingly ascribe to miracles; again, the difference is that we recognize that occasional striking coincidences are bound to happen in the course of any normal life.

Although I haven't commented on this previously, I'm sure you've heard of the Conservative Bible Project, a brilliant initiative proposed by the savvy folks at Conservapedia. The plan is that they'll retranslate the Bible to eliminate "liberal bias" in existing verses - but not by going back to the oldest manuscripts or the original languages or anything like that. No, the Conservapedia community simply plans to take an existing, modern English translation of the Bible, and when they come across a verse that strikes them as unacceptably liberal, they'll just change it so as to be in line with what they know God must have meant!

This is a major project and I'm sure it will take all the hands they can get. Since I've previously given advice to the prosperity-gospel believers on how to interpret some difficult Bible passages, I'm sure that the editors of the Conservative Bible Project would be equally happy to hear my suggestions. So, I thought I'd offer them some.

Let's begin with this classic example of liberal bias in the Bible, Matthew 5:9, from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

Peacemakers? What is Jesus, some kind of liberal Democrat? This is unacceptable.

Real conservatives, as defined in the official Republican Party creed, know that the will of God is to drop bombs on any country that even looks like it might threaten us. After all, that's just what God did through Joshua in the Old Testament. And anyway, we know from good conservative books like Left Behind that the Antichrist will be a peacemaker, so we know from sound logic that any peacemaker must therefore be the Antichrist.

How can we interpret this verse more fittingly? I have a few different suggestions:

"Blessed are those who wage preemptive war on rogue states that we think might be developing weapons of mass destruction."

"Blessed are the waterboarders, for those who torture illegal enemy combatants will be called sons of God."

"Blessed are the politicians who run secret black-site prisons for high-value detainees, for they are righteous in God's sight."

"Blessed are the private mercenaries and the contractors working for Blackwater, for they shall inherit the earth."

Now that's a properly conservative Jesus for you!

Next, Matthew 6:5-6:

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Now, obviously, this is a disgustingly liberal statement. If you read this verse in modern translations invented by egghead Ivy League elitist professors, you might get the impression that Jesus was telling people to keep their faith a private matter and not flaunt it in public. But as we can tell from modern conservatives, who demand that explicitly Christian prayers and overtly religious language be prominently placed in every courthouse, school board, classroom and town council meeting, we know that Jesus couldn't really have meant that. We need a new translation that's more in keeping with what Jesus was obviously trying to say. Here's my suggestion:

"And when you pray, do not be like the liberals, for they love to pray standing in their room, behind closed doors, and to insist that the public square is secular. I tell you the truth, if God can't see you praying - and he can't, because he doesn't know what you do in your own house behind closed doors, except of course for gay sex - then you'll get no reward for it. But when you pray, go into the courthouse, or the floor of Congress, or the workplace, or just stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and a stack of Bible tracts! The important thing is to be sure that the greatest possible number of people see and hear you praying, because then they'll realize how pious and humble you are, and that will totally make them want to convert."

Once this translation is in Bibles everywhere, the religious right will be able to say with perfect honesty that they're just following Jesus' example. And that's what really matters, right?

Finally, let's take one of the most often misinterpreted verses in the Bible, Matthew 19:16-24. Here's the usual, inferior translation chock-full of liberal nonsense:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

...Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

This liberalism-inspired mistranslation could drive a stake into the heart of Christianity. What Jesus is proposing in this passage is nothing more or less than socialism! And as we good conservatives know, once you've started down the road to socialism, there's only one place you can end up - death panels, abortions at the local 7-11, and mandatory gay indoctrination in elementary schools.

Clearly, we need a dash of good conservative common sense to interpret this passage properly. Here's my advice on how to read it:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, you must get as rich as possible. The more treasure you have on Earth, the more God is blessing you. I recommend a well-balanced portfolio, with wise asset allocations in both stocks and bonds, plus some side bets on over-the-counter mortgage derivatives. If you run your own business, I recommend hiring cheap immigrant labor, and of course firing anyone who tries to organize a union. And don't forget, politicians who want to tax capital gains hate God!"

When the young man heard this, he went away joyous, because he knew that his great wealth was a sign that his virtue was superior to the sinful people whom God punished by making them poor.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is as easy as your chauffeur driving you in through the golden gates of a luxury resort in a black Escalade SUV. That's not a metaphor. Rich people will actually be chauffeured through the gates of heaven in black Escalade SUVs. If any of the poor somehow make it, they'll be your drivers."

Not even Ayn Rand could find fault with that!

This should get the Conservative Bible Project off to a good start, but there's lots of other liberalism that's crept into the Bible and will have to be purged. What other mistranslations can you detect in the Good Book? And what proper, conservative translations can you offer instead?