A Surprise from the Economist.

For those of you who may have missed it, a Texas Baptist preacher was electrocuted a few weeks ago while performing a baptism in his church. The Pastor grabbed a corded microphone while still in the baptismal pool and was killed. The reason I heard about it was because a colleague in my graduate program is from Texas and knew the man personally.

From time to time (on advice from one of our faithful readers) I read the Economist because of their nearly always unbiased and fair reporting. For example, their article today analyzing Jordan and King Abdullah and their role in the war on terror is an excellent piece of journalism. However, for some reason also today they decided to mock this Texas Pastor's death.

The article is called Texas's Dangerous Churches, and the Economist claims that:

Baptism, the Christian act of dipping people (usually tiny ones) in water to erase the effects of original sin, is known to be dangerous. Babies are sometimes almost drowned.

First, the majority of Christian baptisms do not include the "dipping" of children, but rather the sprinkling of water on their heads. Also, have you ever heard of a baby drowning? I searched the web and could not find one instance.

The Economist goes on to point to the Branch Dividian compound incident as an example:

Worshippers in the state are prone to horrifying incidents-most famously the explosion at the Davidians' besieged compound in 1993.

Did the compound blow up? I thought it burned down. Were they really "worshipers?" I thought they were in a freakin' cult!

Of all the articles included in this superb paper I have no idea why they found the need to mock this man, Christianity, and Texas. Talk about a skewed article... This is clearly not what I expect from the Economist.