“Village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have furthered their cause—the Enlightenment and Darwinism—have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan.” Chris Lehmann on “the tedium of dogmatic atheism.”

The Boston Globe reports on an advertisement seen in Home School Digest for “The Rod,” a $5 whipping stick advertised alongside a biblical passage encouraging parents not to spare the “rod of correction.” A Lutheran home-schooling parent, Susan Lawrence, was shocked by the ad and launched a national campaign to stop the misuse of the Bible to justify corporal punishment and asked the federal government to ban The Rod, and all other products designed for spanking, as hazardous to children. The creator of The Rod, an auto-mechanic from Oklahoma, has decided to stop production for now based on pressure from Lawrence’s campaign, but stood by his product as in keeping with biblical teachings.

CW Check: When’s it okay to mistake “evangelist” for “evangelical”, and when is it okay to mock a person’s argument as faith-based, read: irrational and shortsighted? Apparently when you’re a believer using the terms ironically to argue that science is just another religion, masquerading as objective thought. Wesley J. Smith, a fellow at the Discovery Institute — the body responsible for “Intelligent Design” theory that’s demanding equal curriculum space with evolution — continues with the anti-evolution political strategy of making science a religion byreviewing James Hughes’ new “transhumanist” book, Citizen Cyborg. Smith’s writes that Hughes’ outline for genetically enhanced humans is nihilistic and frought with ethical uncertainties, but the meat of his argument is simply inverting insults against traditional religion so that Hughes’ search for a “corporeal New Jerusalem” becomes an acceptable laughingstock. As humor, it’s a bit stale, but the logic-gap’s a little more troubling. If I.D.-proponents are so intent on ridiculing science as just another religion, how can they complain that faith is under attack?

A district court ruled that a prison mentoring program in Arizona, MentorKids USA, was illegally using federal funds to promote Christianity to the children of incarcerated parents. The challenge to the program and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which funded it, came from the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, which considers the ruling a victory that will help them challenge other publically-funded faith-based organizations that operate without proper government oversight. Annie Laurie Gaylor, a spokeswoman for the foundation, relayed the troubling comments of the DHHS, which said that the government has “‘no guidelines in place or desire to monitor these groups,'” and that it was up to watchdog groups like the Freedom from Religion Foundation to monitor the activities of faith-based organizations.

Professor Steve Prothero, author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, finds the rub about those godless Europeans: they may be four times less inclined to believe in miracles, biblical inerrancy and hell, they know more about religion than Americans by a long-shot. Europeans study religion from elementary school on, but Americans have grown increasingly religiously illiterate since the late 1800s, when people of all classes could follow the biblical references being made on both sides of the slavery debate. But sounding foolish isn’t the worst outcome, Prothero writes: “Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads.” And who’s to blame? The churches and synagogues themselves, which have traded religious instruction for reality religion stories “‘ripped from the headlines,'” but mostly schools that have removed all study of comparative religion due to misunderstandings about the religion clauses of the Constitution. “Though the ACLU may rage,” Prothero writes, “it is not un-American to bring religious reasoning into our public debates…What is un-American is to give those debates over to televangelists of either the secular or the religious variety, to absent ourselves from the discussion by ignorance.”

It’s a busy week for the Presidential Prayer Team, which forwards President Bush’s prayer requests for January 13, 2005. The president would like you to pray for the safety of next week’s inaugural celebration guests; for the end of resistance by the Iraqi insurgence; for the victims of the tsunami, and also that the workers “who represent Christ” will draw others to Him; and for Bush’s cabinet appointees as they continue their Senate confirmation hearings. And if you like partisan prayer fun for the whole family, consider buying the Presidential Prayer Team Activity Journal For Kids: Kids Who Pray For the U.S.A. ($9.99).

Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, has called for parliament to scrap antiquated blasphemy laws that punish “attacks on Christianity” with life imprisonment, but does not punish similar “attacks” on other faiths. Phillips, whose commission also strongly supports Britain’s controversial “hate speech” bill, makes his plea as a Christian activist group, Christian Voice, has threatened BBC with blasphemy prosecution for broadcasting Jerry Springer — The Opera. The group also circulated the home addresses of the executives responsible for the BBC broadcast.

Seems some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Last week the Indonesian Embassy tried to quell rumors among Singapore’s Muslim population that Christian missionaries were about to adopt 300 tsunami orphans from the conflicted region of Aceh, and raise the Muslim children as Christians. This week, a missionary group from Virginia called WorldHelp (directed by the first-ever graduate from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University), has done just that, airlifting the 300 children out of Aceh to Jakarta, where they will be raised in a Christian orphanage that is yet to be built. While larger religious relief organizations have policies against proselytizing after catastrophes, smaller groups like WorldHelp have presented the tsunami as an opportunity to make converts in places that are normalls “closed to the gospel.” On their website, WorldHelp appealed for donations by saying: “‘These children are homeless, destitute, traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children’s home, their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people.”

New York City has banned subway photography, but two new editions collect pictures from before the fall. Revealer contributor Michael Lesy reviews the Dionysian and Apollonian subway photographs of Bruce Davidson and Walker Evans in The Boston Globe.