Meet Tim Scott, Your New Jim DeMint

Earlier this month Jim DeMint announced he was leaving the Senate in January to run the Heritage Foundation, perhaps because the Wingnuts of America Foundation isn't hiring.

This meant that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley got to pick someone to replace him, and today she will announce her choice: Rep. Tim Scott, a Tea Partier who joined Congress during the Republican midterm victory in 2010. What is his deal?

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Tags: Guns, Jim DeMint, Nikki Haley, Religion, South Carolina, Tea Party, Tea Party Express, Tim Scott, Twitter

Quote Unquote: Bill O'Reilly's War on Reason

Bill O'Reilly on why Christmas displays in public buildings are constitutionally sound…

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"It is a fact that Christianity is not a religion, it is a philosophy."

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It's also a fact that Bill O'Reilly doesn't understand the definition of the word "fact" any better than he understands the definitions of the words "religion" or "philosophy."

Tags: Bill O'Reilly, Christianity, Quote Unquote, Religion, War on Christmas

Quote Unquote: Punched in the Nose

Evangelical leader Rick Warren draws an analogy to explain homosexual urges…

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"Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it."

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Warren's pretty lucky other people around him exercise similar restraint.

Tags: Christianity, LGBT, Quote Unquote, Religion, Rick Warren

Heretic Pat Robertson Believes in Science

Pat Robertson has a poor track record when it comes to predictions. He's basically the Dick Morris of apocalyptic soothsaying. In the '70s, Robertson predicted that the end of the world was coming in October or November 1982. In 2007, he foresaw "mass killings" in the coming year. He's just not very good at this.

But if Robertson were to once again predict that the end is nigh, I would have no choice but to believe him, because viewers of yesterday's episode of the 700 Club witnessed the surest sign of the apocalypse that has ever been seen.

It began when woman wrote to Robertson, expressing concern that her husband and children would spend eternity amid hellfire because they questioned why the Bible failed to explain the existence of dinosaurs. Robertson responded…

Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn't. You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.

If you fight science, you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.

Repent ye, for some strange stuff is happening in the world of TV evangelism.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Tags: Christianity, Pat Robertson, Religion, Science & Technology

Pat Robertson Absolves David Petraeus for His Sins of the Flesh

Okay, I know what you guys were thinking: What does televangelist Pat Robertson think about David Petraeus' covert extra-marital sexing-up of biographer Paula Broadwell?

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the super-Christian 700 Club host has signed off on it…

"She is an extremely good-looking woman," Robertson said of Broadwell. "She is marathon runner, she'd run Iron Man triathlons, and so she's out running with him, and she's writing a biography. And I think the term is propinquity. And there was a lot of propinquity going on."

He then offered up this potential reasoning for Petraeus' affair: "The man's off in a foreign land and he's lonely and here's a good-looking lady throwing herself at him. He's a man."

Right! He's a man. He's just a man, cursed with a penis. Therefore, we cannot rightly blame him for folding to his totally understandable sexual urges, especially in the face of such a handsome triathlon-competing woman. It's not like it was another man with whom he wanted to commit himself for the rest of his life. It was a woman. One whom Pat Robertson finds "extremely good-looking." And he only wanted to bang her a couple times. It's not for us to judge such things.

Especially since we've all got our hand pretty full judging women for looking at porn.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Tags: Christianity, David Petraeus, Pat Robertson, Religion, Sex