Atheism

ABC wasn’t the only network to turn to atheist on Easter morning for some acidulous religion-bashing. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry turned to feminist Katha Pollitt to rip apart religions as “all invented by men for men” to repress women.

That came after Harris-Perry somehow compared the morality of abortion as a less weighty matter than access to water in the Third World. Once again, like last weekend, Harris-Perry referred to unborn babies as “things,” in this case “things in your uterus” that you can evacuate: 

As religious people are bludgeoned with secular views by America's media practically 24/7, it would be nice if they could be given a break on their holiest days.

George Stephanopoulos clearly doesn't feel that way for on Easter Sunday he invited an atheist on ABC's This Week to join a panel discussion about - wait for it! - religion (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The debauchery at the Huffington Post knows no bounds.

On Monday, the website actually offered readers a slideshow of the best places to lose one's virginity in San Francisco, and coming in seventh was under the Mount Davidson Cross, one of the city's most beloved religious landmarks:

Sally Quinn sure has a low opinion of the Catholic Church for someone that edits the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog.

Having claimed last week on CBS's Face the Nation that "so many priests are gay," Quinn this Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources said the lack of media vetting and background checks of Cardinals meant Pope Francis "could possibly have been involved in a scandal" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Former Time.com writer Keith Wagstaff has just joined a different magazine, The Week, but he’s still sounding like the old employer. He has a new piece posted on Yahoo! News titled “Was Mother Teresa actually sort of a jerk?”

Catholic-bashing is a much more acceptable journalistic pastime than snarky revisionist histories of hallowed liberals like Thurgood Marshall (honored as a saint by the Episcopalians.) Wagstaff began, "A new study claims the beloved nun might not have been as helpful to the poor as she could have been."

The season of Lent began Wednesday, and the folks at Saturday Night Live thought it was appropriate to usher it in with a movie trailer depicting Christ returning to Rome to exact revenge.

In the gory fashion of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah, SNL presented to viewers on the fourth day of Lent "Djesus Uncrossed" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Christopher Hitchens has been brought back from the dead by Slate, but it won’t do them any good. Yesterday, they republished a hit piece by the atheist from 2010 that was vintage Hitchens: the man was a great polemicist but a third-class scholar. Facts never mattered to him. ("The Pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it.")

Hitchens said the scandal “has only just begun.” Wrong. It began in the mid-60s and ended in the mid-80s. Current reports are almost all about old cases.

There clearly is no limit to Bill Maher’s depravity.

On TBS’s Conan Tuesday, the comedian beloved by the liberal media said that Catholic priests would use birth control if altar boys could get pregnant (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Only about five percent of Americans identify as atheists, but CNN played up the "very activist atheist movement" and touted celebrity atheists like Julianne Moore and Mark Zuckerberg, on Thursday.

"Various surveys put the number of atheists in America around five percent. And according to the Pew study in 2012, one in five people claim they have no religious affiliation at all," anchor Carol Costello noted. She didn't mention that having no religious affiliation might not even be close to atheism.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Catholic League President Bill Donohue on Friday in response to some disgusting comments made by MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell said President Obama might want to swear on Karl Marx's Das Kapital during the upcoming inaugural festivities.

NPR contributing anchor Louise Schiavone took to her Twitter account Saturday asking the disgraceful question, "What is this group? Do they wear hoods?"

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday went on a disgraceful tirade about how the Bible should have nothing to do with the upcoming inaugural festivities.

On Friday, Catholic League President Bill Donohue responded saying, "Given Obama’s ideology, perhaps it would make more sense for him to swear on Das Kapital."

Christmas: a season of generosity, good cheer, preparation for Christ’s birth – and a swarm of lawyers seeking to purge any mention of Christianity from the public square.

Every Christmas, the so-called secular community starts shrieking whenever any mention of religion is brought into the public eye. Lawyers successfully targeted a school’s performance of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ Even Christmas trees have too much religious content to suit the self-appointed censors.

When the word "God" becomes inappropriate in public schools, America really has ceased to exist.

Consider the story of a first-grade girl in West Marion, North Carolina, who had the word "God" stripped from a poem she wrote and was going to read at her school's Veterans Day assembly earlier this month.

Democrats picked up seven new House seats and expanded their caucus in the Senate by two seats, electing along the way the House's first Hindu member and the Senate's first Buddhist. But for liberal religion scholar Stephen Prothero, that's not good enough, because both chambers are still disproportionately too Protestant, with Republicans in particular looking too much like an "old-fashioned America" of yesteryear.

From Prothero's November 16 CNN Belief blog post (emphasis mine):

Stop the presses! Stop the presses!

On HBO's Real Time Friday, Democratic strategist James Carville - yes, I said Democratic strategist James Carville - scolded the Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan for always blaming Republicans (video follows with transcript and commentary):

After offending religious Americans by appearing to boo God, the Democratic National Convention had the top ranking Catholic official in the country perform the closing Benediction Thursday night. Cardinal Timothy Dolan did the same for the Republicans last week in Tampa Bay, but those delegates didn’t seem to have a problem with a party platform that included God and Jerusalem.

The only networks respectful enough to show the prayer in its entirety without interruption was Fox News, Fox Business and C-SPAN. ABC, CNN, and PBS kept it in background while talking over it. MSNBC completely ignored it, cutting the audio feed to let their pundits share their opinions without distraction. CBS and NBC returned to local news affiliates as soon as he began.  

[See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

It's taken over four years for film director Paul Verhoeven to get anyone to turn his 2008 book "Jesus of Nazareth" into a movie, but numerous sources last week say he's finally done it.

Deadline reported last Tuesday that Muse Productions will produce the film claiming Jesus Christ was the product of Mary being raped by a Roman soldier:

Donald Trump on Monday had some harsh words for Bill Maher's incessant attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism.

Appearing on Fox News's On the Record, the real estate mogul said, "If a conservative Republican made a like statement about somebody else's religion, there’d be hell to pay. It’ll be all over the place. It would be the end of that person's career as you know it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported last month, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart did a truly vile sketch a few weeks ago displaying a Nativity scene over a woman's vagina.

According to BuzzFeed, Delta Airlines has dropped its sponsorship of the Daily Show as a result [reader discretion advised: offensive graphic displayed below page break]:

HBO's Bill Maher took a lot of heat last week for calling Mormonism a cult that isn't a charity because it doesn't give to poor people.

Defending himself on Friday's Real Time, the host explained why he believes contributions to the Mormon Church and such things as the symphony and the ballet shouldn't be tax deductible but ignored that he supports federal funding of NPR (partial video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Newsweek's Andrew Sullivan got a much-needed education about religion and politics from not one but two evangelical leaders Sunday.

The first came from Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention who in the midst of a heated debate on CBS's Face the Nation told Sullivan, "Any fusion between evangelicalism and Republicanism pales in comparison to the point of anemia compared to the black church and the Democratic Party" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Mormon Congressman Raul Labrador (R-Id.) scolded David Gregory on Sunday for his network's horrible treatment of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's faith.

Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, Labrador specifically named MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell as one of the offenders (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said on MSNBC's Morning Joe, "Sometimes [Rick] Santorum sounds like he's creeping up on a Christian version of Sharia law."

In response to this nonsense, the Republican presidential candidate told conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt later that day, "This is the intolerance of the Left. If you have religious beliefs that they don’t believe in, then they marginalize you" (video follows with partial transcript):