and get a good dose of what Obama's mentor is all about.

10,000 kooks is a football game. 100,000 kooks is news story. A million kooks is the base of a political movement. A billion kooks is a religion.

I sadly agree. The Earth will warm. People who can migrate far enough south and north might survive, but they won't be living in McMansions. Billions of us will die. Sometimes I think it would be better if we all die. The Earth would reboot and the seas would fill with critters again and the remaining monkeys wouldn't be clever and stupid enough to set the Earth's thermostat to deep fat fry.

Evidently, you have some serious deficiencies in your educational experience. Perhaps that helps to explain why you sound like such an arrogant know it all.

Pick the wrong topic of debate, and I'd bet that an authentic conservative intellectual could pin your ears back. Not that they're very plentiful these days- they're very nearly absent from the comment section of Salon- but such thinkers are not to be dispensed with as easily as you so breezily claim.

As HappyJack observed, Americans have damned America and likely the rest of the world. We're 3% of the world's population and we consume 25% of the world's resources. We're too fat, too lazy, too consuming, too indebted, and too willing to demonize. And your side wants more oil, more imperialism, more torture, more borrowing, and more bathrooms in your McMansions.

Norway hollowed a mountain and filled it with seeds.

We hollowed a mountain and filled it with people trained to obliterate life.

We don't need God to damn us.

We've damned us.

But continue to cluck about Rev. Wright, as if that's going to save your grandchildren.

@sunspot.

I lived in Colorado for almost 30 years. These people were known the "the Colorado Springs Crazies." One of the ironies of the area is that Colorado Springs, that bastion of Capitalism and Free Enterprise, pretty well lives off the military base at Ft. Carson and the Air Force Academy. It is pretty well attached to the public purse. Another irony is that in this anti-socialist bastion, the power company is owned by the city.

A very secular Amen to that.

That wasn't your impression of the Beagle Of Doom, is it?

I can't help but scratch my head over people who deride the faith-based spritual idealism of others- which is inherently ultimately an individual and subjective decision affecting personal consciousness, a realm where people ought to be allowed a wide latitude in their own ideas- while professing their own dire certainties about future prospects for the planet, and covering it with a gloss of "scientific objectivity."

I'm particularly bemused when the certainties take the form of pessimistic nihilism. Great...you're a rational humanist materialist; concommitantly, humanity is all doomed, a pox on the planet.

Mind you, I'm fully on board with the technological mission to supercede the petroleum economy, for a wide variety of sound reasons that don't require speculations.

But human-caused global warming cannot be said to be "scientifically proven." We're still in the midst of the "experiment", after all. Neither can the catastrophic consequences that being forecast be said to be inevitabilities.

If you view those consequences as a certainty- well, as yet, you're simply entering another belief system.

Most of the scientists warning about global warming parse their findings as probabilities, based on empirical modeling that's necessarily incomplete.

Why not entertain some phenomenological agnosticism? What's the rush?

". . . its political end of days are near"??

With grammar like this, perhaps the end are, in fact, near.

Charitable organizations and churches can and always have been able to campaign on non-office elections. This may be a bad thing, I certainly don't especially agree with it, but it's the way the tax laws go. What editor let this "probably violating the terms of the church's tax-exempt status" thing through? I expect better fact-checking from Salon.

(and New Life is evangelical, not fundamentalist-- there's a difference)

The pastor said "We have a biblical worldview here."

How is that not fundamentalist? He believes the Bible to be literal truth and that humans must live according to what is in the bible.... subject to their own interpretation of that pasted-together Bronze Age document, that is.

Fundamentalists always identify themselves as "bible-believing Christians." They believe the world needs to be ruled by the bible, the same as Muslims believe the world should be ruled by sharia. "biblical worldview" = world seen through the lens of the bible.

A Reverend Ted Haggard "was forced out of his post after a scandal involving methamphetamines and a gay hooker".

Yet, congregants worry about what might happen Tuesday. "I'm afraid Obama is going to change our country into a Muslim country," says Melody Edwall, 51. You're 51, and you believe that?

Cabdriver writes about the Council of Nicea and refers to "the Christian Church" in quotes. Since that was the only church, we get into the notion that the Bible fundamentalists are using the teachings of the Catholic Church. How terrible.

As for Saint Paul and Saint Peter, I wonder how their interpretations would fit in right after the introduction of the Nicene Creed which established (?) that Jesus was part of God always, not created. After all, Peter for one had an advantage. To find out, all he had to do was simply ask Jesus.

This is the old argument of the Muslims, "God is one, not three."

If we all believe that there is only one God, we must be worshipping the same God.

As can easily be seen, this leads to much foolishness.

I like the first letter in this thread. Sarcastic but really funny.

How can you even open a dialogue when someone is clinging to something that is just factually wrong? The claims are outrageous, but when you point out the facts and try to insert some rationality in the conversation, they either refuse to listen, refuse to believe anything that doesn't reinforce their view, or claim that they have a "feeling" or they "just know".

Unfortunately you can't reason with people who don't even believe the concept of reason.

We just have to move forward with or without them, its not something we should even worry about, unless they start acting out violently (which some will do). We just have to hope that most will acclimate to a reality-based reality eventually.