City of Houston demands that pastors hand over all sermons on homosexuality — I think they should all do a series on Romans 1 and send her every single sermon.

Romans 1:26–27 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

This is what you get when you elect the blind men (and women) of Sodom to political leadership roles.

Also see Houston: Turn Over the Sermons and No One Gets Hurt — The blind men (and women) of Sodom won’t be stopped by a pesky Constitution.

This is so brazenly unconstitutional that I can’t believe any court will honor the request. But just the fact that there are government officials who think that this is a proper thing to do does not bode well for religious freedom in a country that is becoming more and more hostile to traditional faith, or indeed any form of religious expression that does not march in lockstep with the Zeitgeist.

7 Things Your Church Needs From You — Great list.  See how well you are doing!

Archaeology and the Bible — “The Bible’s best friend.”

Sam Harris on defamation — Schadenfruede alert!  Professional Atheists Sam Harris and PZ Myers are having a Twitter scuffle.  Sam is shocked — shocked, I say! — to see behavior that he finds immoral.

Why are they doing this? Presumably because they think it works for whatever their goal is.

A better question is, why is Harris puzzled? The creation story of new atheism is Darwinism, for which moral values are merely a means of increasing reproductive fitness. (Smart people see that, and as for the rest of us, our brains did not evolve so as to enable us to see it.)

Now both Greenwald and Aslan should know better, of course. But, having read Harris’s book, The Moral Landscape: How science can determine human values, I think he is deeply confused.

One can demand moral accountability only if one believes that the universe is fundamentally moral, and Harris explicitly does not believe that.

Put another way, one can be good without God, but not without a moral universe. All moral discussion just becomes A shouting about what he wants B to do and B shouting about what she wants A to do. And finally, the stronger will prevail.

Be Ready to Answer Your Kids’ Questions About the Bible — Very important!

Concealed-carry permit holder uses gun to save woman from attempted rape — This should be national news about the benefits of gun ownership, but it doesn’t fit the meme.

Video: Protesters inflate “coal plant” balloon with renewable energy. Hilarity ensues — Sweet, sweet schadenfruede.  Use a reliable source next time, guys!

Polar Bear Hunting Still the Rage in Champaign, Illinois — Media too busy generating riots in Ferguson to report on black-on-white armed robberies.

President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She?

What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.

Before the media swallow implausible claims of funding problems, perhaps they could be more skeptical of the idea that government is responsible for solving all of humanity’s problems. Barring that, perhaps the media could at least look at the roles that waste, fraud, mismanagement, and general incompetence play in the repeated failures to solve the problems the feds unrealistically claim they will address. In a world where a $12.5 billion slush fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is used to fight the privatization of liquor stores, perhaps we should complain more about mission creep and Progressive faith in the habitually unrealized magic of increased government funding.

10 Things Every Black American Should Know About Dr. Ben Carson Before Forming Any Opinion of Him