We got your back, Ryan Seacrest!

Meagan still wants a millionaire. And VH1 will oblige.

We’re lovin’ DKNY’s fall collection.

There are lots of songs about balls….

Is God going gender neutral in the Bible?

Cheap, amazing dorm room DIY.

Not so fast, girls. I am here to show you some books that are totes worth reading when the 347 pages of History/English/Psych reading are finished. Books that will make you laugh, cry, and change the way you think. Good books (which I know is hard to believe when you think of the stuff assigned for class). Stick with me and you will spend a lot less time watching Real World reruns, and a lot more time enjoying books again.]

A lot of books aimed at women are chock full of shopping, sex and other things that are stereotypically “feminine.” Not this book. The Red Tent is the most female-empowering piece of writing I have ever found.

If you’re familiar with the Bible or the Broadway musical, you know the story of Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat. This is the story of Joseph’s sister Dinah, who is only mentioned ONCE in the whole Bible! But even if you’re not religious and have no interest in religious history, this book is still worth your time.

Diamant creates a rich and vivid backstory for Dinah and also reveals the female-worshipping ways of the Old Testament. The history itself is fascinating, and even with the barren backdrop of the desert, this book never gets boring. The writing is perfection, too! Diamant is an accomplished author and has a great hold on the English language. She takes advantage of beautiful metaphors to enhance the story and enthrall the reader.

It sounds cheesy, but reading The Red Tent made me feel like such a woman. A proud woman. Diamant empowers women and makes the reader realize that women were once highly revered. She even makes the process of giving birth sound spectacular. After reading this, I am truly grateful to be a women. It’s a fantastic book and a must-read for ladies everywhere.

If you watched the VP debate last night you heard a lot about Sarah Palin’s BFF, Joe Six Pack. But who is he? What does he like? What does he do?

We don’t know Joe Six Pack personally (though we have hooked up with his cousin, Mark Quarter Barrel…who could not keep it up), but we imagine he’d be something like this:

Description:

5’11, brown hair, brown eyes, some sort of facial hair, big hands and a tattoo of some sort (possibly his kids’ initials) on his upper arm. No actual six pack to be seen behind the slight beer belly hanging over the top of his ill-fitting denim.

Likes:

Beer (most likely Natty Ice and PBR), Nascar, cars with big engines, girls with big boobs, Sundays spent watching football, red meat, keg stands, tobacco, lawn chairs, American flag apparel, Levi’s, the missionary position, pepperoni pizza, boys’ weekends full of beer and conversations about women with big boobs, the Bible, those giant turkey leg things you get at the fair, classic rock, leather vests and “that hot lady who is always with John McCain.”

Dislikes:

Books, politics, vegetables, flowers, people who don’t approve of burping/farting in public, organic anything, beverages that are non alcoholic, women’s sports, and feminists.

How to woo him:

Beer, boobs and talk of WWE. That is, of course, if you have any interest in wooing him.

But why wouldn’t you?

Yesterday, the pundits had their panties in a bunch because James Dobson said Barack Obama was “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.” But over the past seven years of the Bush Administration, I’ve realized that to know what people are lying about, just listen to what they’re accusing others of doing–which is exactly what Christian-right leader and founder of Focus on the Family, James Dobson has done by claiming that Barack Obama is ‘distorting’ the Bible. His comments come in reference to a two-year-old speech Obama gave in June 2006, while speaking to a Christian group.

Check out video of Obama’s full speech after the jump!

From CNN.com:

“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asks in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination. Or we could go with Deuteronomy which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount.”

“So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bible now,” Obama also said to cheers. “Folks haven’t been reading their Bible.”

On the radio show Tuesday, Dobson said Obama should not be referencing antiquated dietary codes and passages from the Old Testament that are no longer relevant to the teachings of the New Testament.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the tradition understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, later adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

Essentially, Dobson is deriding Obama for picking and choosing which Bible passages should determine law. But that is exactly what Dobson and his organization have been doing for years, especially concerning abortion and homosexual rights.

What Obama is vaguely pointing out is that the Constitution endorses non-discrimination, outlaws slavery, and promotes “the general welfare” of all people–all of which the Bible preaches, but is not cut and dry about. He is cherry-picking sections of the Bible that agree with the Constitution, which makes sense, in the context of his speech.

It is not acceptable–or legal–to go the other way around, (i.e., to make the Constitution agree with the Bible). This would be a violation of the Constitution’s own First Amendment; it would constitute the “establishment of religion.”

That said, sections of the Bible do, in fact, advocate (a) redistribution of wealth, called “Jubilee” (Leviticus 25:1-22, Matthew 4:1ff), (b) non-violence, instead of solving all international problems by war (the entire Sermon on the Mount).

So, not only is Obama not ‘distorting’ the Bible, he’s using examples from it to argue that the document should not be directly quoted for the purpose of forming public policy–something both legally and theologically sound.

Dobson, on the other hand, has been at the head of the evangelical movement, portions of which say the Christian religion should be used for personal gain (“God will make you rich!”) and that promotes Constitutional amendments banning Gay marriage, at least partially because of a couple of passages in Leviticus (yes, that’s part of the Old Testament). Both are ‘deliberate distoritions’ of the Bible’s message.

So basically, Dobson is a hypocrite, that doesn’t know what his beloved Bible even says. Because if he did, he’d know exactly how Jesus felt about hypocrites. (HINT: They don’t go to heaven.) So, good luck with that…

UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter, we now have video of Obama’s full speech.

I was raised to believe that there was a god, one god, and that Jesus Christ was his son. I accepted him into my ‘heart’ and was baptized at an early age. Then I was taught that anyone who didn’t move forward with those two procedures was going to go to Hell; even if they were a good person. Oh, Hell. The fiery pit where bad people burn with the devil.

I once believed this place was real and I could quote scriptures from The Bible as my own little way of reassuring myself that I wasn’t gonna be one of those bad people going to that bad place. I prayed when things weren’t going my way and I prayed when things were going my way. Come to think of it, I spent more time chatting it up with God when I was young than I did my friends.

I knew nothing about earning money, but I knew you were a selfish person if you didn’t give at least 10% of your income to God and your church. I knew that Halloween was for Satan and witches, that Jewish people believed in the same God that I did but were still going to Hell, and that Pulp Fiction was a very, VERY demonic movie that I was never allowed to see.

When I entered adolescence, I started to embrace my Christianity in new ways. I listened to rock bands who screamed lyrics you couldn’t understand…but they were Christian, so it was okay. I wore punky clothes and was straight edge. A straight edge jerk, judging everyone I knew who did drugs or drank or — god forbid — had sex.

I attended three different churches growing up and met all sorts of Christians. Good ones, bad ones, and everything in between. But, as most Christians will be quick to remind you, Christianity is about Christ-not Christians. So let’s forget about the massive churches who have Starbucks booths in their lobbies. Lets forget about the way a person can so eloquently damn another person to Hell, but with compassion. Lets talk about Christ, according to The Bible.

No matter how liberal you’d like to be with your beliefs, that book is still pretty clear about the fact that believing in this guy, Jesus, is the way to save your soul. And the only way. Crazily enough, that was okay with me…until I started meeting people who weren’t Christian. Good people who were more devoted to their respective religions than I ever was started to stand out to me in a crowd. The message of Christ — of peace and love — started to speak much louder than the rules and regulations of religion.

Slowly, but surely, I stopped believing in everything but the peace, love, and golden rule concepts. I started to believe that no religion was absolutely wrong or absolutely right. I started to accept the fact that The Bible was written by humans and no matter how divine their passages may have been, humans are still humans. Eventually, I found myself where I stand today.

I stand in a place where I do not believe in Heaven or Hell. And even if those places did exist, I certainly don’t believe in worshipping a god who would send good people to a torturous place just because they didn’t ‘accept Jesus into their heart’. I believe that there may be something greater than us; in fact, I believe that there probably is. But that doesn’t mean I believe in a god. I just believe that we’re humans and we don’t know the answers. Even if we all collectively contributed our religious experiences to a new religious book, I still do not believe we’d get it right. I do not believe we’re capable of this.

I know that religion means a lot to a lot of people. I am not trying to make a laughing matter of it — particularly not after the years I spent devoted to it. However, I’m much happier now in this place in my life where I can live with an open mind and not have to have even one friend in my social circle who I feel like I need to ‘save’. I’m much happier here with a Pulp Fiction poster on the wall in my living room. I’m much happier having met the guys in the Christian rock bands I once worshipped and having seen that they do cocaine, they have sex with groupies; they are not flawless. I much happier with Halloween.

I don’t believe in absolutes anymore, except for the absolute that that lifestyle was wrong for me.

[Photo courtesy of daretoshare.org.]

“Never? You’ve really never been to church? What about Christmas? Easter? Seriously?”

Nope, never means never. At the age of 18, I had never sat in a pew and attended a church service. We weren’t high Holy Day Jews, or Easter-only Catholics, or even Unitarians in it for the social aspect (as my Dad was raised, until he was given the option to stop going around age 12). American demographics being what they are, my exposure to religion was haphazard, but fairly broad. I had friends of many religions, though I was too young to really understand what that meant, beyond a weekly time commitment. More importantly, I knew no one for whom it was a problem that I didn’t believe, just as I didn’t care if they did.

Even with this lack of Christianity, Christmas was (and is) a big deal in my home. A tree with an angel and packages and cookies and friends and family, the whole nine yards, the family tradition. Looking back, it’s odd that we had tiny creche figures that we got to remove one at a time from our daily advent calendar, complete with baby Jesus, but it was part of the package. We believed in the story, but that was as far as it went. I knew that Jesus was a good guy, a leader of men, but…he can’t be the son of God if you don’t believe in God. So, when I moved from the liberal stronghold of Seattle to another, New York, there were certain genres of America that remained largely theoretical for me. When George W. Bush was elected President, I was genuinely baffled. Literally no one I knew had voted for him, yet he still won. Conservatives were out there…but where, exactly?

Finally, when I was 20, I found them. My long-time college boyfriend came from a Southern Baptist family in Tennessee. I didn’t know this until we’d been dating for a while; he didn’t go to church, and his religious upbringing was mentioned only in passing. So, imagine my surprise when I went to visit him over New Years, and the first thing I saw was an absolutely enormous tapestry on the wall, embroidered with a psalm. Beneath it, a bookcase overflowed with the following titles:

The Case for Christ

Falling in Love With Jesus

The Bible

Share Jesus Without Fear

The Bible, again

Champions for God by Jerry Falwell.

Uh oh.

It really should have come as no surprise when, on my last night in town, his father snuck this into an previously innocuous conversation: “So, Gemma, [boyfriend] tells us that you don’t believe in God.”

F***ck.

And the interview began. Sitting on the floor, pinching the ever-loving hell out of my boyfriends thigh under the coffee table, I hoped for some intercession, but none came. The questions about my beliefs, or lack thereof, kept coming, and awkward though I was, I tried to answer honestly. I felt like I was holding my own until we got to “Why do you think people are good to other people?”…and I stopped. This had to be a trick question, right? I sorted through the language, looking for the real target, but in the end I settled on something unspeakably halting like, “Well…I guess people have figured out that if they are kind to others, others will likely be kind them, and it creates the most happiness for the most people.”

“Oh, and God has nothing to do with it? Well, clearly I believe something different.”

And with that, the conversation was ended. At first I was just f*cking confused, but when that wore off, I was livid. Absolutely raging. I had gone to church with his family. I had bowed my head while grace was said before every meal. I hadn’t sworn once. I had respected his household and his beliefs, and here he was, implying that there was something wrong with me, that I was a lesser human being, incapable of true kindness, because I didn’t believe as he did.

Excuuuuuse me? I am kind to my friends and family. I volunteer at animal shelters, and I give pregnant women my seat on the subway. I send thank you notes, remember birthdays, and I call my grandmother. I’m not Mother Teresa, but I am a pretty good person. My beliefs are informed. They are my own, and they are a matter of personal pride.There is no void in my life, but to this man, that didn’t matter. I had been judged, and been found lacking.

After the interrogation, my boyfriend and I fought about it constantly. I couldn’t understand how someone so logical could be a part of something so rigid, and he couldn’t understand how I just…couldn’t understand it. I tried, I did. We give up believing in Santa before we leave elementary school. How could I learn belief in an unknowable God as an adult?

So, how has this affected my adult life? I still exist in a fairly liberal bubble. My community is made up of artists – writers and musicians – and there is little variety in the Bush-hating members of (as my Mom calls it) The Church of the Brunch. But, I make an effort to keep myself out of the closed-minded Liberal category – those who fancy themselves free-thinking and left-wing, yet automatically write off anyone even slightly to the right of center as ignorant.

That being said, I have learned that I am not going to change. I admit that when perusing online dating profiles, the ‘religion’ question is important to me. I think faith itself may be the important element, and the form it takes less so. However, if you’ve got it and I don’t, that’s all well and good, but it is one of the few differences in my life I have found to be truly irreconcilable.

[photo courtesy of www.sweden.se]

As a former bible toting, God-loving Christian, I can easily say that converts are whole-heartedly welcomed and celebrated in the church. But now, there is another type of conversion, a conversion from “straight” to gay to “straight” again that is also being welcomed and accepted.

This “conversion therapy” is really behavior modification or simply put, brainwashing.

From the article on ABC News, it sounds much like the movie So You Want to Be a Cheerleader except in real life (and maybe slightly less creepy…remember those outfits??). Making someone participate in so-called straight male activities like football banter with the guys or automobile maintenance aren’t any way to change their inherent attraction to one sex or another.

James Serra attended Love In Action, the largest gay “rehab” located in Tennessee. He spent THREE YEARS in the program and is now a counselor.

Serra said that he sees homosexuality as a behavior, a choice. Although he is still attracted to men, he has not acted on his feelings for eight years. He hasn’t been with a woman either.

I hate to break it to this guy, but that isn’t conversion, that’s a really long sex drought.

As a reformed, and now much cooler and accepting Christian, I have a problem with the church trying to convert their gay population into a “straight population” because it is not going along with the message that Jesus (you know, that slightly important religious figure) tried so hard to preach: God loves everyone.

This does not exclude the vagabonds, the sex workers, the child molesters, the gays or the plain old sinners like myself. It is an all-inclusive club that everyone is invited to and no one is turned away at the door.

Perhaps it is my distaste for organized religion in general that makes me feel so bitter about these so-called “converts.”

I also have more than a few lesbian friends who are openly gay, active in the church and live in the South.

It gives me hope that not all Christians are crazy.

Politically it is unfavorable, socially unacceptable and statistically unbelievable, but many American heroes wore the scarlet letter. Some people claim that the founding fathers of our nation were nearly all infidels including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson and even Abraham Lincoln, stating that they had no direct belief in Christianity.

It wasn’t until the late 1950’s that “In God We Trust” became our national motto and was printed on paper currency to counteract “Godless“ communism. So if America wasn’t founded on Judeo Christian beliefs, where did these strong religious undertones come from, and why the hell is there a bible in every seedy motel in America…right beside the vibrating bed?

Next time you are on vacation open up that bible in your hotel and notice where it comes from. All bibles are distributed throughout American hotels by one specific organization. An evangelical society over a hundred years old founded by two traveling salesmen, Gideons International now makes sure 112 bibles per minute are distributed across the country. But it wasn’t until 1908 that numerous copies found their way into hotels, nursing homes and firehouses. Around the same time, “In God We Trust” was implemented on to our paper currency and “one nation under God” was put into the Pledge Of Allegiance. Originally, the piece contained no reference to any deity but when the threat of communism was plaguing America Eisenhower felt the need to instill religious values as a moral compass and symbol of national unity. Thus, blurring the lines of church and state.

Perhaps you have heard the saying: “There are no atheists in a foxhole”, but there are quite a few soldiers who beg to differ. As a result of Katie Couric recently evoking the statement on NBC’s Today, atheist civil rights groups are up in arms and after viewing The FX network’s “reality” docu-series 30 Days: An Atheist Among Christians, I learned a few important facts about America’s most oppressed non-religion:

Statistically, America is 75% Christian and as “one nation under God”, only 5% of our country is considered atheist. Shockingly, their approval and acceptance is lower than all other minorities, actually making the bottom of the list. When asked via survey, it has been discovered that American parents would rather their children marry any minority over someone with no faith in God or a supernatural power. When voting for president, women, homosexuals, and other minority groups had a higher approval rating than a candidate that was a non-believer.

The question is: Why are we so intimidated by non-believers and can we eliminate the great divide?

Atheists are not moral deviants nor does their belief give them an ethical carte blanche to wreak havoc on society. They are simply defined as people who hold no belief in a higher power, people who believe that in death existence is terminated. For some reason, the most scientific way of seeking truth in the world is tossed aside for supernatural mythology. There is nothing wrong with committing to a religion, but you would think something faith based would be more taboo than the rationalization of science.

Many people maintain that politics and religion are personal topics to steer clear of in passing conversation. But an open social dialogue is what keeps people informed and can be an open door to different points of view. Yes, saying “I am an atheist” is a dicey move, you may even get a blank stare from the crowd across the room, but it is important not to compromise your beliefs for acceptance. Angelina Jolie, Julianne Moore, Bjork, Roseanne, Bill Maher, Howard Stern, Lance Armstrong, Kathy Griffin, Ray Romano and Billy Joel have all professed their disbelief in organized religion and proclaimed themselves members of this highly controversial system of thinking.

Woody Allen, a devout atheist once said; “Not only is God dead but try getting a plumber on weekends.”

Amen to that…or woman for that matter.