Rick Warren gets his comeuppance

Uh, Pastor Rick, you know that commandment that says you shouldn't bear false witness?

You just violated it.

Huffington Post explains:

On Thursday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reviewed Rick Warren's video condemnation of an anti-gay law in Uganda. While she said the statement was "better late than never," she stated that the famous pastor came up a little short.

In his message, Warren claimed to be incredulous that his public opinion on the issue should matter. Maddow showed a clip of Warren saying he never campaigned on the issue of Proposition 8 -- followed immediately by a clip of the pastor telling supporters to vote yes on the gay marriage ban.

Here's the video:


Gotcha.

(By the way, I violently disagreed with Obama choosing Warren to speak at his inauguration. If he had to choose a Christian religious figure, why didn't he go with evangelical Christian and social-justice advocate Jim Wallis instead?)

Rick Warren has sold tens of millions of books selling his "softer" version of Christianity. That means he leavens extreme views about social issues (stem cell research, evolution, same sex marriage, abortion, etc.) with a show of concern about environmentalism and fighting poverty.

See his debate with Sam Harris (author of The End Of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) in Newsweek, where he:

spoke out in favor of creationism. He also said that brutal dictators such as Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were all atheists, when questioned on whether religion is beneficial to society. In 2005, during the Terri Schiavo controversy, Warren stated that withholding feeding to Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state, was "not a right to die issue". He then called Michael Schiavo's decision to remove her feeding tube, "an atrocity worthy of Nazism", and while speculating about Michael's Schiavo's motives, put forward the idea that Schiavo wanted Terri to die because, if she regained consciousness, she might have "something to say that he didn‘t want said."

I saved the best part for last. Here is a video of philosopher Daniel Dennett's secular rebuttal to Rick Warren.