G. Frink's

Saddleback Church's evangelical pastor Rick Warren is not a "bigot."

No, as Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School explains in his current Sightings column, Warren is a theocrat who proclaims that "five issues that are non-negotiable. To me, they're not even debatable because God's Word is clear on these issues."

Southern Baptist Pastor Wade Burleson suggests that an unduly privileged International Mission Board (IMB) trustees oversee publication of inflated, sometimes fabricated statistics of missionary accomplishment.

The IMB, which has missionary operations in virtually every country in the world other than the U.S. and Canada, is not new to controversy. IMB Baptism numbers were challenged in 2005 by Tony Cupit, then Baptist World Alliance evangelism director. He and others indicated that the IMB had claimed work done by indigenous pastors, missionaries and church planters with which it had some relationship. He also raised questions about the capacity of the available staff to achieve the reported numbers, saying:

The actual number that may be baptizing is quite a small percentage. In that light, each of these would have to be doing little else but baptizing, and that is not happening.

Burleson's analysis is similar to Cupit's. Blogging the Southern Baptist Convention's IMB with almost the facts-first attitude of newspaper local government reporter, the Oklahoma pastor and former IMB trustee explains that it isn't at all likely that in 2007 each of 5,551 missionaries abroad:

• Planted on average five new churches each in 2007.
• Baptised on average 120 new members each in 2007.

A young child's unbearable, inescapable suffering creates Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

To survive, the child separates the pain into different personalities, usually each with separate memories.

DID's origin in almost inexpressible pain makes Showtime's dark comedy United States of Tara something of a paradox.

How can civilized people laugh at the consequences of extreme suffering -- suffering which often involves both long-term sexual abuse and torture?

While deciding, let's use the following video to look more closely at DID:

Or view this more lyrical and far more disturbing video.

Now preview the first episode of "United States of Tara" here, entering the password "tara" when prompted.

Shall we laugh at Diablo Cody's dark comedy, or at least give it a chance to prove itself?

Showtime's United States of Tara is written by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody.

The dark-comic show's central character is Tara.

Tara suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and when stressed cycles with comic effect between her four personalities.

The following video lyrically and with disturbing illustrative images explains DID's symptoms and origins:

Return to DID funny? Ha!

Toni Collette as Buck, Alice, Tara and T.

Tara of Showtime's dark-comic United States of Tara has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and when stressed, cycles rapidly between her four, vocal personalities.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody plans to live-tweet her show, when it debuts on Jan. 18, and that's both a brilliant innovation and one the show needs. If she can pull it off.

Because it will, I believe, be an extraordinary challenge, even for the Academy Award winner.

The often both intellectually and emotionally intense land of Twitterettenam is likely to generate a flood of head-wrenching questions in response to a show which offers a comic representation of the life of a mother with an acute psychiatric illness. A woman with two adolescent children, a husband and a sister who all love her. Albeit often amid pain-wracked confusion.: ... [there's more] ...

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Purity ring - (c)Rlmabie

Premarital teenage virginity pledges don't delay premarital sex and do result in more unsafe sex, concluded a large, well-designed study by Janet E. Rosenbaum at the Johns Hopkins School Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Earlier, nonpartisan studies of abstinence-only sex education similarly concluded that it doesn't work.

This study compared similar pledgers and non-pledgers and did find one, telling difference, as CNN reported: ... [there's more] ...

Sunday with predictable effects, pastor Rick Warren threw a bucketful of loaded words on the waning fires of controversy which erupted from his earlier comparison of homosexuality to incest and pedophilia.

Giving his critics no credit for good faith, Warren began with a false denial of his earlier incendiary assertions and climbed a tree of polemic, concluding that those who took offense at his views were suffering from "Christophobia."

An inaugural invocation by evangelical Baptist pastor Rick Warren and call for national voluntarism isn't what Focus on the Family Action anticipated [.pdf] in the trench warfare days prior to President Elect Obama's landslide Nov. 5 victory.

Do you have visions of sugarplums and exploding Southern Babtoy Corp. game-toys dancing in your head?

It isn't too late to get a warning-never-included, problems never recorded, S. Babtoy Corp. never accepts responsiblity, this-isn't-a-game toy that uses you or your children or your grandchildren to amuse itself.

If you're a Southern Baptist, you may already have one, or several.

The Southern Baptist Convention doesn't know.

Or, official behavior says, want to know. Which pastors and staff are child predators.

The SBC studiously refuses to create, keep and maintain a database of Baptist clergy and staff who are pedophiles.

It's so much easier and inexpensive to duck responsibility and accept the collateral damage in children harmed.