58 thoughts on “Today’s banner for the Indianapolis Star”

  2. On my browser your book cover is superimposed on the right side, which much improves the look

    1. Yes, any posts I’ve followed back via my browser have the books “stuck” over the content (when there is content on the upper right). But they don’t show at all in my email subscription.

    1. Oh, I forgot you asked two questions!

      1) They abridged the verse.
      2) Not very.

  6. Why not this:

    “But if … evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones…” (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)

    Wonderful piece of literature you’ve got there.

  7. Offputting indeed, but perfectly within the rights of the Gannett chain to post it in a privately owned publication.

    2. Gannett is a publicly traded company, but even so, it is within their rights. But it is highly unprofessional and compromises their credibility as a news organization.

  8. I’ll say this about that. The Indy newspaper will not get any “stars” in journalism class.

    You would think they have gone so low as some small town newspaper in Alabama, or maybe Iowa.

    1. I think Jerry once referred to Indiana as the Alabama of the north, this confirms it.

  10. Similarly, The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville has a daily bible verse on the editorial page, or at least it did when last I lived there.

    1. Haven’t read The Fl Times-Union in a while tho’ I’m in Jax myself, but just seeing the likes of Anne Coulter, Cal Thomas and other ultra-hateful conservatives on their editorial pages was enough to make me gag and put me off the paper. Yeah, I’m all in favor of free speech but if they want to give the likes of Coulter a forum to spread ignorant, vicious bile they can do it without any funding from me.

  13. I much prefer the last phrase of an earlier verse in this chapter:

    3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

    FLESHY TABLES OF THE HEART! Now THAT’S great literature. And it suggests where the Indianapolis Star should be publishing its news.

  14. It’d put me off reading it, and make me be more skeptical than usual about anything I read.

  15. If you think that is bad, I was raised in a small town in Illinois named South Holland. The water tower had “Faith, Family, Future” written on it and the town slogan was “Community of Churches”. Sales of alcohol is also prohibited altogether for presumably pseudo religious reasons. Where I live now in Indiana, alcohol is still illegal to purchase on Sundays.

  17. I see that it’s now a Gannett paper. Once it was published by Eugene Pulliam; his grandson ascended to the Senate in some large measure due to granddad’s assistance in PR. Oh, yeah, that was Dan Quale- who was a heartbeat away for 4 years. Palin in pants. Pulliam also published both Phoenix dailies. Dishin’ it out for the rubes.

  18. Forget about the good Lord, as part of the Gannett Company — the GoP house organ, home of the reporters Shrub called in when he wanted to bypass the MSM “filter” — how objective do you think the Indy Star is going to be about any matter pertaining to the rightwing agenda?

  19. I live in Indianapolis and have two additional bits of information. First, that quote from 2 Corinthians is the paper’s motto — that quote appears every day in the same location. Second, there is also a new “daily prayer” on page 2 every day. The Star actually tried to drop the prayer a few years ago but quickly reinstated it after the local christians gave the paper hell.

    1. Sweet!

      Who can take a bible verse
      Sprinkle it with dew
      Cover it with choc’late and a pussycat or two
      The LOLCat Bible Can

  21. Last year I was invited to give a presentation at a conference of the Tennessee Press Association. This included a luncheon, which, to my surprise, opened with an overtly christian prayer. Had I known, I would not have attended. Any news organization that promotes religion has no credibility.

    1. Check out Mark Twain’s ‘Journalism in Tennessee’ in case you want confirmation that sociocultural evolution hasn’t occurred in that state.

      1. Yep, we can trace the state of the State of Tennessee’s sociocultural evolution from the Twainoic era to the Menkenoic to the present without marking a whole shitload of progress, can’t we?

        Still waiting for the equilibrium of this long period of evolutionary stasis to get punctuated.

  22. That was also the motto of the Arizona Republic, when Eugene C. Pulliam was publisher. I don’t know whether it still is, but it’s likely.

  23. That quote is borderline Deepakity!

    I was skeptical about the word “liberty” and looked up the Greek text and, sure enough: áŒÎ»Î”Ï…ÎžÎ”ÏÎŻÎ± (eleftheria, transliterated as eleutheris) is the word – eleftheria is also the personification of Liberty, as in the one on old American dollars. Eleftheria was also an epithet for Artemis.

    I don’t think “Paul” was talking about “liberty” the way it is conceived in American. I think what the original passage is saying is that a believer is free in his mind when he is in the spirit. He’s still a slave, in the real world! But inside he’s free. There’s a fine line between dangerous idea and opiate of the masses.

    But, hey, liberty is wherever JC is, and America is all about the liberty, so, yay JC and yay America, amirite?

  24. Hello Jerry,
    This is not relevant to the above post, but I wondered I you deal much with Pantheos?–Samuel James’s website. He is very annoying; In fact I sent in a comment pointing out that he is a Christian fundamentalist who thinks he owns other people’s bodies and their genitalia;–after which he promptly disabled comments permanently;–so I am quite flattered.
    Recently he ha posted 4 ways in which Christians might get the better of atheists,-in discussion. I wondered if you had seen it? I have not had time to respond, and we won’t post comments anymore now, thanks to me. A he ha nailed his coloured to the mast, I wondered if you would like to administer the coup de grace by answering him?
    Regards, Reg Le Sueur, Jersey. Channel Islands.(Doctor and amateur philosopher).

  26. When I lived in Indiana, we referred to Indianapolis as the neon cornfield. I’m not sure why anyone woud expect a newspaper to be objective.

  29. Indianapolis resident here. I check the Star’s website every day, to try to stay up on local news. This Bible verse does not appear on the website, or at least not that I’ve ever seen. It’s only in print. So it’s probably just for the old folks who still get the print edition, and would be more likely to raise hell if it went away.

    As for content, the Star is about half local and regional sports (Colts, Pacers, IU, and Purdue) but they have just enough coverage of City/County and State affairs that I still check daily. They also LOVE to cover local crime – I imagine the publishers high-fiving every time there’s a grisly murder. So sports and crime, and a little bit of other stuff. It’s not a great paper, but it’s the coverage I care about is done reasonably well. Also, the print edition is TINY – minuscule compared to the papers we got when I was a kid in Knoxville, TN, a muuuch smaller community. Budget cuts have not been kind. The print edition is also half Indy Star/half USA Today. It’s a vestige of what newspapers used to be, like leg bones in whales. Once it goes all digital, I doubt the Bible verse will continue.

  32. That’s my hometown paper. I have long found it sadly amusing that several years ago they removed the “Daily Chuckle” because the humor occasionally offended one of those folks who sits around looking for ways to be offended. However, they kept the daily prayer and the ask Billy Graham columns which offends every thinking non-christian every day.

  33. I am not at all “religious.” I think a person’s relationship with the God of his or her choosing (whether the God of the Bible, or the God if his/her own intellect) is a matter of personal choice that no other human being has a right to infringe upon. The editor of that paper has a right to publish what he wants to publish, and any “offended” parties are free to read another paper, or publish one that doesn’t offend them.

    That said, atheism is a religious belief system. Atheism, Christianism, any “Ism” always has religious extremists who, in order to exist, need to look for, and find a “polar opposite” extremist group to label as “the enemy” and “bash” To endeavor to out-control or “win” over—-to defeat/exterminate in some manner that proves “rightness” or “superiority. All extremism misses the mark, in my humble opinion, of what it means to be wholly human, which I personally define as “capable of loving, respecting, and genuinely caring about the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health, happiness, and well-being of other human beings, even those who do not happened to share our opinions or beliefs.

    I have a few atheist friends who don’t fear, hate, judge, criticize, ridicule, or otherwise attempt to pull down Christians. I have a few Christian friends whom I know for a fact would be the first to give up their own seat in a lifeboat to an atheist, and/or risk drowning themselves to try to save one



    So what’s the issue? Common decency. Love and respect are simply in short supply.

    Me personally
..I just hope to live to see a day when ALL “religious” extremists —whatever “ism” they’re defined by, manage to grasp what love and respect look like toward “enemies.” In that, I think the historical Jesus might have had something to teach ALL of us

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