Reading the Bible as Hate Literature

Will Canada ban the Bible?

A year after a member of the Canadian Parliament proposed a bill that Christians say could censor Scripture, the mainstream media are finally catching up.

New Democratic Party MP Svend Robinson, sponsor of the hate crime bill, says there's no way a pastor would be prosecuted for preaching against homosexuality on the basis of the Bible.

"There's not an attorney general in the country anywhere at any level who would consent to the prosecution of an individual for quoting from the Bible," he told a House of Commons committee, according to Reuters. "An attorney general who tried something like that would be run out of town on a rail."

But just because the attorneys general wouldn't prosecute doesn't mean it wouldn't be illegal. Five months ago, a Saskatchewan court ruled under a different human rights law, that a pastor's quoting of Leviticus "exposes homosexuals to hatred."

For more on this story, check out ChristianWeek's archives. The Canadian newspaper's stories are a bit older than the Reuters piece, but no less current.

Chimpanzees are human, say Wayne State University scientists
After finding 99.4 percent correlation between "key genes" in humans and chimpanzees, scientists from the Wayne State University School of Medicine say it's time to start monkeying with taxonomy. Chimpanzees, they say, should be considered humans and placed in the Homo genus under the Hominid family. They're currently part of the Pongidae family, which include other apes.

But the researchers' argument seems to suggest that it's humans who should be moved, not chimps. "We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes," says the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Anatomy ...