In a pre-election video, Rick Warren,who says he would never endorse a candidate but on moral issues makes it really clear whom he prefers–once again fondles a favorite rotting corpse of lies, that "for 5,000 years in every religion marriage has been one man and one woman." Then in an astounding leap of linguistic faith Pastor Rick says that:

There are about 2% of Americans who are homosexual or gay and lesbian people. We should not let 2% of the population change the definition of marriage.

This is not even just a Christian issue. It’s a humanitarian and human issue.

WTF?!  You wanna talk humanitarian issues, Pastor Rick? Let’s talk about your BFF  and partner in the fight on AIDS in Africa, Martin Ssempa who has appeared on stage at Saddleback Church twice and who moved your wife to tears as she declared

You are my brother, Martin, and I love you. 

Ssempa has burned condoms in the name of Jesus, called on newspapers to publish the names of known homosexuals and urged the imprisonment of gays.  And Ssempa is hugely crazy, one of the many evangelized African pastors dangerously obsessed with witchcraft.

As Max Blumenthal writes, Ssempa, who has a room set aside for exorcisms–when interviewed by  Dr. Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure: Why We’re Losing The Fight Against AIDS In Africa–told the public health expert

that Satan worshipers hold meetings under Lake Victoria, where they are promised riches in exchange for human blood, which they collect by staging car accidents and kidnappings.

Blumenthal reports that Ssempe is a close friend with Uganda’s First Lady Janet Museveni, who on New Year’s Eve 1999 rededicated the country to the "lordship" of Jesus Christ during a stadium revival meeting. She was joined on stage by a pastor who announced:

We renounce idolatry, witchcraft, and Satanism in our land! 

Sounds a bit like Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee who cast out witchcraft for Sarah Palin in her Wasilla church.

Last May in Kissii Kenya, 11 elderly people were killed and 50 houses torched as a mob went looking for witches. Residents accused the witches of causing their children to perform poorly in school.  Njoroge Ndirangu, the commissioner in charge of Kisii Central district said:

These people identified who is to be killed by accusing their victims of bewitching their sons and daughters.

Both a part of the continent’s history, traditionally "witchcraft" in Africa differed from sorcery. Witchcraft was an accidental inability to control magical powers, an involuntarily wandering evil eye, while sorcery was directed magic.  There were–and still are–also "witch doctors," sorcerers who cure people of both bewitchments and provide cures for illnesses using local herbs–and yes sometimes these are the same thing. And of course there are charlatans who claim magical powers and like many pastors, will take a fee for removing curses and witchery.

Since the 19th century, evangelical Christianity, which has grown more frantic and fanatic since the influx of billions of dollars in HIV funding, has muddied the difference and witches are seen everywhere.  Pastors tell parents that their children, some as young as nine months, who have fevers or cry are possessed and need to be delivered from witchcraft at a price.

Often pastors promise that children and women afflicted with witchery can be "delivered,"  that exorcised of the ability to bewitch, for  a price. But many times the children are abused and abandoned.

Helen Ukpabio, a wealthy Nigerian evangelist filmmaker and president of Liberty Gospel Church, claims to have done 20,000  "deliverances"  in Nigeria and America.

If you don’t deliver a witch, the family can never be at peace. Let us deliver the people who are witches. We should not allow sentiments to come in here, because witchcraft is real…Witchcraft in not only practised in Nigeria. When I went to North Carolina in the United States, there were very many witches. They came to me asking, "Please can you deliver me? Can you deliver me? Please deliver me."

Ukpabio made a popular video showing children allegedly eating corpse and being inducted into a coven.  She told AllAfrica that the film

warns parents to beware of the greed in their children as greedy children who receive everything they see from other children at school or the playground can easily be contaminated.

"Contaminated" by witchcraft. And how does witchcraft tie into HIV/AIDS education and prevention? Pastor Joe Ita, the preacher at Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church explains:

But we cannot attribute all things to witches, they work on inclinations too, so they don’t create HIV, but if you are promiscuous then the witch will give you HIV.

HIV/AIDS activist Reggie Jerrison of Nata Botswana claims he was resurrected from death by Bishop Dr. Barnabas Lekganyane. Jerrison–who takes antiretrovirals after being diagnosed with HIV and works as a peer counsellor advocating condoms and testing–refuses to admit that he got HIV through sexual intercourse, blood transfusion and needle sharing. He says he got HIV through witchcraft.

"I have not been infected by this virus because I had an affair. It is all witchcraft. It is not because I slept with an HIV positive person."

Even after intense questioning on why he blames his infection on witchcraft, he is adamant that someone has bewitched him.

Western church groups need to continue educating people about the real causes of HIV/AIDS–and those causes aren’t witchcraft. European and and American churches working on African HIV/AIDS education–hello, Pastor Rick!–need to turn African evangelicals away from the insanity of riculous accustations which lead to the repulsive abuse of children and the elderly, often at a profit by pastors. To use Rick Warren’s words:

 This is not even just a Christian issue. It’s a humanitarian and human issue.

A lawsuit that atheist groups will file Tuesday demands that the words "so help me God" be excluded at the end of the president’s oath of office, though oddly they aren’t suing Obama for using those words during the Inauguration.

Among plantiffs is Michael Newdow, a California doctor, lawyer and atheist who is oxymormoically a minister of the Universal Life Church which states:

We are advocates of religious freedom.

The Universal Life Church wants you to pursue your spiritual beliefs without interference from any outside agency, including government or church authority.

 Newdow has filed similar and unsuccessful suits over the two previous inaugurations. Joining him are 17 other individuals and 10 groups representing atheists who are suing:

Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts; the Presidential Inauguration Committee; the Joint Congressional Committee on Inauguration Ceremonies and its chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California; and the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee and its commander, Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe Jr.

along with Pastor Rick Warren and Rev. Joseph Lowery. The suit says that references to God during inauguration ceremonies violate the Constitution’s ban on the establishment of religion and:

There can be no purpose for placing ‘so help me God’ in an oath or sponsoring prayers to God, other than promoting the particular point of view that God exists.

The suit points out that "so help me God"–used in every Inauguration since FDR–is not is not part of the oath as specified in the Constitution, which is a pretty valid point. Unless person being sworn in has a personal belief in God and would like a little help, in which case  that’s the exercise of free speech and freedom of religion.

In the suit, the atheists claim references to God will ruin their experience of watching the Inauguration IRL and on the teevee (oh noez!). Per CNN:

Newdow and other plaintiffs say they want to watch the inaugural either in person or on television. As atheists, they contend, having to watch a ceremony with religious components will make them feel excluded and stigmatized.

"Plaintiffs are placed in the untenable position of having to choose between not watching the presidential inauguration or being forced to countenance endorsements of purely religious notions that they expressly deny."

Just plug your ears during that part, sheesh!

But there’s some cognitive dissonace in the lawsuit. The atheists aren’t suing Obama–who is technically responsible for choosing the speakers and will be uttering the G-word–because as an individual, he has the right to express his religious belief. Newdow said:

If he chooses to ask for God’s help, I’m not going to challenge him. I think it’s unwise.

So um, maybe I am confused, but shouldn’t Newdow, as an atheist, have said something along the lines of:

If the President wants to be superstitious, that’s his right

since basically Newdow admitted in the existence of a God who helps, and that interfering with God might be um…risky?And that seems to run counter to atheists’ beliefs/non-beliefs.

Warren’s recorded remarks about science,  available on the Saddleback’s revised site, are very important for a couple reasons. Throughout his teachings, Pastor Rick reminds his followers that

The Bible commands us to remember the influence we have on an unbeliever.

  Melissa Etheridge, are you listening?

This recording shows that Warren wants his followers to be nice while evangelizing to shift the view point of the scientific community away from science and towards a New Earth fundamentalist thought process (not to say that you can’t believe in God and in science). 

More importantly, this snippet demonstrates that Warren feels that he and his followers should act nicely towards non-believers, gradually bringing them around to thinking along a fundamentalist lines, to "change" their ways of thinking.

It’s not them and us…To act like it’s them and us sets us a false barrier that we need to break through as believers…These are people who need to know Christ just like you and I need to know Christ. If you and I start to act like it’s a them and us kind of a thing we’re never gonna reach the scientific community or those who think qoute unquote scientifically…Obviously science is willing to change…

Here’s how Rick came to believe in creationism and rejection evolutionism (from a PDF of the site before it was revised):

I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!
 

And just to let you know what that brainwashing experience entails, here’s what Pastor Rick said about dinosaurs:

The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with
vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.

Warren also urges his followers to eschew in vitro fertilization and stem cell research:

*Deciding against any infertility options that allow embryos to be frozen and later discarded. (This is a tough decision for couples who have yet to have a child.) 
*Deciding to speak out against overzealous stem cell research, even though you know it slows down the process of finding a possible cure for someone you love.

Rick Warren’s approach of being open and friendly is simply sneaky. He’s deceptive in his kindness, much like the fundamentalist’s snake.

On the heels of her wife Tammy Lynne Michaels’ blog about Rick Warren, Melissa Etheridge posted her feeling about Pastor Rick on HuffPo.

After eloquently explaining the struggle for equal rights and her preconceptions of Pastor Rick, Etheridge describes her phone conversation with Warren:

He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman. He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays. 

She goes on to say that maybe instead of marching on his church

we can show up en mass [sic] and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world. Maybe if they get to know us, they won’t fear us.

Well, okay…not to nit pick, but his church doesn’t believe in condoms or family planning for HIV/AIDS prevention, and works hard in Africa to proselytize his message of Jesus and abstinence, using HIV outreach as an evangelical tool. His church believes that gays who are actively practicing homosexuality are not welcome as members. And Warren says gays should suppress their urges the same way other people suppress anger or shyness.

Melissa, Warren and his ilk aren’t "afraid" of gays: They think gays are sinners who are convertible to their belief system, which includes no gay sex and straight sex only in marriage. 

If you can get Warren to believe that civil marriage equality  does not mean a religious marriage..right on. If you can get him to expand his vision to have marriage be more than just a religious concept, that would be awesome. And, btw, he’s wrong about 5,000 years of marriage being solely between one man and one woman. There are plural marriages still in Islam, as there have been for 1500 years, as well as in the past history of the Mormon church and in current Mormon sects which allow for polygamy…

Many pray daily that closed minds like Warren’s are opened, that the scales will fall from the eyes of Pastor Rick and his ilk. But thinking that "they" are afraid is a wrong move. This type of Christian think they are right, and that (their) God is on their side. And there’s too much at stake in terms of worldly power and wealth to make a sudden sea change. But I do share Melissa’s view that:

…we are headed in the direction of marriage equality and equal protection for all families.

I just don’t share her views that Rick Warren could be a vehicle for that. But hey, if he gets Divine Revelation and sees the light–halla-freakin’-lujah!