Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs has failed.

“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Robertson told the newspaper. “If people can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of alcohol and drink it at home legally, then why do we say that the use of this other substance is somehow criminal?”

Robertson said he “absolutely” supports ballot measures in Colorado and Washington state that would allow people older than 21 to possess a small amount of marijuana and allow for commercial pot sales. Both measures, if passed by voters, would place the states at odds with federal law, which bans marijuana use of all kinds.

While he supports the measures, Robertson said he would not campaign for them and was “not encouraging people to use narcotics in any way, shape or form.”

“I’m not a crusader,” he said. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
In a statement Thursday, Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said Robertson’s “clearly stated and well-reasoned comments throw a curve ball into the growing debate over legalizing marijuana.”

“Defenders of marijuana prohibition … must be wondering if it’s only a matter of time before theirs proves to be a lost cause,” he said.

My question: Why arent ALL religious people pro-marijuana? cuz of ignorance based fear about it + cultural distaste, right? or is there more that i’m missing? cuz it’s a plant God made that makes people feel good and with no side effects. So… if you believe in God, whats the argument against his feel-good green gift to us? Anyone have the answer to this?

Here is the full March 1st episode with Robertsons comments that were part of a full segment on the topic. Skip to 20:40 for it in the video below:

I like how they’re snickering and mocking what theyre doing yet will still get evangelical support. people see what they want to, even if that means someone giggling over the notion of being deep in thoughtful prayer = “actually being in deep thoughtful prayer” – so be it.

A friend says “Interesting that they were praying in front of a camera, in an open-faced semi-circle with Santorum in the middle.” – but like i said – they’re not praying. they’re posing. it can be seen as a sincere sign of solidarity, it can be seen as a flippant insult, it can be seen as a shameless pandering photo-op. something tells me that if instead of Santorum, Gingrich, Obama or Romney were the only thing to be replaced in this photo – it would be received quite differently by the people who like it with Santorum in the candidate slot.

Michael Medved wonders whats up with the Teeb totolitarians:

The NFL is generously stocked with forgiven felons, including millionaire wife beaters and dog killers. So how did a clean-living quarterback with deep commitments to charitable service and miraculous last-minute victories become the most controversial player in the league?

The answer of course, is his perfection:

It’s easy to see why legions of loyalists lavish love on 24-year-old Tim Tebow, who leads his underdog Denver Broncos in a crucial playoff game against the New England Patriots on Saturday night. Yet other fiercely focused fans feel no hesitation at expressing their contempt and loathing for a remarkable athlete whose behavior on field and off exemplifies the values of hard work, fearlessness and concern for the downtrodden.

Being awesome and building a picture perfect life for yourself plus religion in your life makes people hate you. It’s why a lot of people hate Mitt Romney, as Medved also mentions:

Mr. Tebow, on the other hand, not only reminds the public of the conversionary ambitions of most evangelicals but also displays the intimidating perfection of what might be termed the “Mitt Romney Syndrome.” On New Hampshire primary night, the beaming appearance of the Romney clan made one of my friends physically ill: “All those handsome, perfectly controlled, wealthy, teetotalers with their gorgeous wives—I wanted to vomit. There was something unearthly about it. Like some weird superior race on the planet Krypton.”

In the same sense, most males look at Mr. Tebow and see a virtuous rebuke to our own limitations and imperfections. If we were 24, single, supremely athletic, enormously wealthy and adored by millions of young women, how many could still wear Tim Tebow’s “purity ring?”

The truth is that America was not founded on the 1797 treaty of Tripoli and that the country wouldnt exist if not for the Judeo Christian values of every one of its founders with no “actually, so&so was just a deist” exceptions.

Jefferson wanted the seal of the US to be the Jews leaving Egypt for christ sakes. Stop using these arguments that rely on the readers ignorance. Just cuz religion is silly and that we have a secular government that doesnt take into account religious dogma doesnt mean we should rewrite history to remove religious influence.

The country is not “in any sense” not based on Christianity – it is in “some sense”. That should be good enough for both sides.

Praise Bieber & may his love continue to guide us.

Does it bother me that Harry Potter directly copied its story from the Bible? A little bit. What bothers me more is the amount of people out there worshipping Harry Potter instead of the real Person who resurrected from the dead Jesus Christ.

It’s not just the phony ‘resurrection’ I’m talking about either. J.K. Rowling made the clear parallels between the devil and Voldemort from the very beginning. And of course made Harry Potter to go through the same rejected, slain, raised pattern as Jesus Christ. Everybody at school thought he was a liar, no one would help him (except for his dedicated followers… errr… friends).

I took a while to catch on; I think the fact that she used ‘constant vigilance’ which is what our same warning is in Scripture about Satan tipped me off in some way (and really bothered me at the time). Then of course Voldemort started to have eyes and ears everywhere – quite like going around like a ‘roaring lion’. The snake was a major tip off and then also the fact that some of his followers had names assigned with constellations that had something to do with Satan.

And then of course there was the clincher. “The last enemy to be conquered is death.” From 1 Corinthians 15:26 and passed off as Rowling’s own. Speaking of course of the resurrection, the resurrection of the bodies of all believers. How in the viewpoint of the Harry Potter series ‘death’ can be an enemy I’m not so sure. But in the real world Satan brought death and from him it has become an enemy. In any other worldview besides Christianity it makes no sense to view death as an enemy because it’s supposed to be ‘natural’. So of course Harry Potter was inconsistent, as many people in the world today are.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Harry hater (I have read all the books) but does Jesus get the glory from all this? No. Is it evil that someone would profit so profusely from stealing a story right out of Scripture? Yes it is.

Just remember that Jesus is the only one who can give life, NOT Harry Potter. Think about it.

The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news, was quoted saying that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve.

He said that these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could arouse women or “make them think of sex.”

He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

According to Bikya Masr, the sheik was asked how to “control” women when they are out grocery shopping, and whether even holding the fruits and vegetables at the store would be bad. The cleric said the matter is between them and God.

Meanwhile: a Salafist Sheikh in Egypt says a woman’s face is like a vagina…

“What is a veil? A veil is what covers the woman’s face. Therefore the woman’s face is like her vagina,” Sheik Abou Ishak al-Houwayni was quoted on the Elaph news website as saying.

His remarks were in reference to a discussion of the late Egyptian feminist, Hoda Shaarawi, who became the first woman to publicly remove her veil in a Cairo train station in 1923.

Houwayni is essentially arguing that the reason a woman’s face should be fully covered is because, like a vagina, it attracts men.

I am no longer surprised by disgusting displays of religious conservatism coming from sexually repressed men who’ve likely never even seen a vagina; they just feel around “down there,” while glancing away and mumbling something to Allah.

Make it good

There’s no way around this one, guys. I get that people are eager to have a Christian, or at least non-Muslim terrorist movement example to point to in the decade wake of September 11th and it’s related jihadist bombings around the world, but distortion is never a way to argue a point. This Norway loser said that “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” is “everything we DO NOT want” and a “secular European society” is “what we DO want.” There’s no Christian-terrorism here…

I apologize for my previous comments that took anti-Christian biased reports as fact without checking for myself.

His use of the term is not based on faith but out of collective identification with a notion of “Christian Europe.”

“Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he says in his 1,500-page manifesto. “I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe.”

Breivik’s video, in which he blames “cultural Marxists” for supporting a multicultural Europe, is replete with imagery of various sword-wielding and carnage-provoking crusaders and defenders, many of whom sport crosses.

Ironically, anyone who has recently checked the state of deep and abiding faith, or “piety,” in Europe, will find the place is decidedly, and more than ever, secular. In this sense at least Breivik is honest about his brand of Christianity. God-talk hasn’t occupied much of northern Europe for years, and not because bearded jihadists have blocked the entrance to the church.

UPDATE:More info and humorously delivered facts about the killerthat is spot on, but… you’re not gonna like that it’s from Ann Coulter, who titles her piece New York Times Reader Kills Dozens in Norway (a reference to the fact that Breivik cited the NY Times over a dozen times but the bible 0 times):

Breivik says he is “not an excessively religious man,” brags that he is “first and foremost a man of logic,” calls himself “economically liberal” and reveres Darwinism.

But Times reporters had their “Eureka!” moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word “Christian” someplace to identify himself. No one at the Times bothered to read Breivik’s manifesto to see that he doesn’t use the term the way the rest of us do. That might have interfered with the paper’s obsessive Christian-bashing.

Other famous killers dubbed conservative Christians by the Times include Timothy McVeigh and Jared Loughner.

McVeigh was a pot-smoking atheist who said, “Science is my religion.”

Similarly, Breivik says in his manifesto that “it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings” –- a statement that would be incomprehensible to all the real scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein and Pauli, all of whom believed the whole purpose of science was to understand God.

The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was lyingly described by the Times as a pro-life fanatic. Not only did more honest news outlets, such as ABC News, report exactly the opposite — for example, how Loughner alarmed his classmates by laughing about an aborted baby in class — but Loughner’s friends described him as “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal” and “a pothead.” Another said Loughner’s mother was Jewish.

The only reason Timothy McVeigh has gone down in history as a right-wing Christian and Jared Loughner has not — despite herculean efforts by much of the mainstream media to convince us otherwise — is that by January 2011 when Loughner went on his murder spree, conservatives had enough media outlets to reveal the truth.

As explained in the smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” the liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by a white man with a gun is a right-wing, Christian conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by a nonwhite is the government violating someone’s civil liberties.

If you are one of these people who think it is shameful to celebrate the death of a man who dedicated his life to murdering completely random innocent civilians – explain yourself. I’m hungry for answers and never get any on this.

Bill Maher joined this claiming you’re not a Christian if you celebrated Bin Ladens death saying “Capping thine enemy is not exactly what Jesus would do — it’s what Suge Knight would do.” It’s only “not exactly” what Jesus would do because Jesus wasn’t an agent of the government. If you’re a Christian however and you honestly think that Jesus would be pissed at you if you celebrated the end of a person who murdered in the name of God, then your version of Jesus sucks. Maher also said “Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practiced loving his enemies, and Gandhi was so fucking Christian he was Hindu” which are funny lines, but not good satire on the serious point he’s trying to make.

Dennis Prager on Celebrating the Death of Evil People:

When she saw images of Americans celebrating, “My first reaction was, ‘I wish I was with them.’ … My second reaction was, ‘This is disgusting. We shouldn’t be celebrating the death of anybody.’ It felt gross.”

Likewise, many Jews, including rabbis, have cited traditional — though seemingly conflicting — Jewish attitudes regarding how to react to the death of evildoers.

One frequently cited source is a famous one from the Talmud: “When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the angels wanted to sing. But God said to them, ‘The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing?’”

Also cited is the biblical Book of Proverbs: “When your enemy falls, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, let your heart not exult.”

On the other hand, the Talmud also states, “When the wicked perish from the world, good comes to the world.” And the Book of Proverbs also states, “When the wicked perish, there is joyful song.”

So what is one to make of this mixture of sentiments?

I do not see them as contradictory. God may chastise angels for singing at the drowning of the Egyptian army. But God does not chastise Moses and the Children of Israel for singing at the Egyptians’ drowning. People may do so; angels may not.

Secondly, it is one thing to celebrate the fall of one’s personal enemy; it is quite another to celebrate the fall of evil individuals. The two Proverbs citations are not contradictory. The vast majority of our personal “enemies” are not evil people. Therefore, we should not exult at their downfall. And the vast majority of the truly evil are not our personal enemies. Bin Laden was not my personal enemy. He was the enemy of all that is good on earth.

It seems to me that if one does not celebrate the death of a truly evil person, one is not celebrating the triumph of good over evil. I do not see how one can honestly say, “I am thrilled that bin Laden can no longer murder men, women, and children, but I do not celebrate his death.”

Exit note: Rapturing but be a lot of fun cuz I first heard it when the Scarecrow exclaimed “oh joy! Rapture! I’ve got a brain!” in the Wizard of Oz and subsequently in many Ren & Stimpy episodes. Makes me disappointed I didn’t get to experience it

In other News: Macho Man, the wrestler, passed away after suffering a heart attack while driving. Evidently it was the car crash that resulted which killed him and not the attack itself. Too bad, but we can at least be comforted by this thought: