D. James Kennedy, famed theocratic evangelist and pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, has announced his retirement, having failed to recover sufficiently from the cardiac arrest he suffered last December to resume his preaching. Kennedy is one of the most influential, respected and powerful evangelicals in America, which should scare the shit out of you when you realize just what a dishonest, anti-intellectual weasel he really is.
Some years ago, I started reading Kennedy's book Skeptics Answered, and posted the first part of my fisking of it to the ACA website. It's still there, and reading it today, I don't think I did a half-bad job, even if I never got around to completing it. Considering the poor quality of what I did read and critique, I'm not confident it would have gotten better anyway. Still, you can check it out if you like.
With Falwell mercifully gone, Kennedy and Graham ailing, and Robertson and Dobson hanging on, the old guard of septuagenarian evangelical superstars are on the way out. But sadly, their bad ideas have calcified in the public conscience. They leave behind an America thoroughly seeped in superstitious twaddle, distrustful and deceived about science, and ill-equipped for critical thinking and unable to judge new ideas, other than by how threatening they are to Christian dogma. It will take a lot of work to undo the damage, and I fear it won't come soon enough for America to be surpassed in science, technology, and human rights by much of the rest of the world.
Update: 9/5: Kennedy discovered there was no Heaven today.
I wonder why God didn't give him the strength after his heart attack to keep on preaching? I guess God is tired of his bullshit too.
ReplyDeleteDang it! You must have beaten me to this post by just a few minutes.
ReplyDelete'Sokay. Yours is better.
ReplyDelete