Department Of Slight Overreactions

The Vatican released a statement today updating some of it’s many, many, many rules, and calling the ordination of female priests a “grave crime” that should be punished in the same way as clergy sexual abuse. While advocates for ordaining women were naturally ruffled at the notion of being compared to the Catholic Church’s veritable legion of sexual predators, this may actually be  good news for their cause. After all, the policy towards ordaining women just essentially became ‘Official Disapproval Followed By Decades of Not Doing Shit.’

The Vatican also updated some of their rules regarding how they will deal with priests who sexually abuse children, basically codifying and making official the current de facto policy of ‘not doing shit with a gun to their heads.’

 

Rasmussen Declares War On Secular Humanism With Army Composed of Santa and Magic White Baby Jesus

Rasmussen Reports is officially out of control. Today’s report on the holiday season shows that 66% of Americans celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, which is a total load of shit if we ever heard one. A more accurate statistic would probably be that “About 50% of Americans will lie to a stranger over the phone about their religiosity.” But Rasmussen is intent on getting the Christ back into Christmas, even if it means counting listening to Linus read from the book of Luke as a religious observance on par with midnight mass.

The report is full of other interesting tidbits, including the shocking fact that 52% of Americans find the holiday season “joyous,” meaning that only 48% of people want to scoop their eyes out with tablespoons. Also, 72% of Americans despise the phrase “Happy Holidays” and, by extension people who do not believe in our Lord God and are going to Hell.

But perhaps most intriguing is this nugget – among people who are celebrating Christmas,  81% believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God sent to earth to die for our sins and 72% say Jesus was born to a virgin. Which means that fully 9% of you folks can buy the whole son of God, magical absolution of sin thing, but can’t quite extend that suspension of disbelief to a virgin birth.

You bunch of godless heathens.

 

This week in ‘Conservatives Against the Bible…’

Last week, the right wing loons at Conservapedia were rewriting the bible on the grounds that the good book just wasn’t gay bashing and free-marketeering enough for them. But that sort of revisionist thinking doesn’t set well with The Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina. For their annual halloween celebration, they’ll be burning… well, pretty much every thing, actually. The congregation will be torching every copy of Satan’s music they can get their God-fearing mitts on, Satan’s music in this case meaning just about any music, including but not limited to “…contempoarary Christianm, jazz, soul, oldies but goldies,etc.” And when they’re done with that, they’ll be torching the works of known Satanist and practitioner of the dark arts Mother Teresa. Did you know she was not even a mother? What other lies lived in her black, corrupted heart? And when they’re done with that, they will finish the night off like any right thinking groups of Christians – by setting fire to as many fucking bibles as they can find.

Don’t worry though – they’re only burning Satan’s Bibles, which Jesus totally approves of, and does not find at all morally reprehensible. And they don’t mean copies of the  Necronomicon, though they’d probably burn those too if you gave them a chance. They’re not exactly what you would call picky about all this burning, after all. In fact, according to Pastor Marc Grizzard, Satan’s Bible is any Bible that is not the King James Version, which, as it was commissioned by an English king 15 centuries after the birth of christ for the purpose of reinforcing the existing social hierarchy, maintaining the divine right of kings and continuing the oppression of English Catholics, is obviously and indisputably the one true word of God.

Which is why the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will be burning one fuck of a lot of bibles, so that explains that. But can anyone explain why this so called man of God Marc Grizzard spells his name with a “c” at the end, which is not scripturally accurate and an abomination in the eyes of almighty God?

Also, for attendees who are feeling a bit peckish after a long day of immolating scripture (and let’s face it, heresy does work up a powerful hunger!)fear not! According to the press release there will be fried chicken with all the sides, cooked over the roaring pyroclasm of thousands of copies of Corinthians! One can safely assume that it too, will be burnt.

 

Hey, While You’re In There, Can Jesus Ride A Dinosaur This Time Around?

The Bible is great and all, but let’s face it the book has some problems. For example, it’s nowhere near hostile enough to women or gays.

The Conservative Bible Project aims to fix that, by  demonstrating the truly staggering balls required to remove and rewrite passages of the BIBLE that the groups editors deem too liberal. For example, the Gospel of Luke’s “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do,” has to go, because liberals love that line, so God must not. Also marked for speedy deletion by the folks at Conservapedia, who are spearheading the editorial effort, is the word “comrade,” which everyone knows is a socialist slur that “improperly encourages the social justice movement among Christians.” And since Christ will have an M-16 to which he is legally entitled now, you can expect the stations of the cross to play out…a little bit differently?

The tenets of this latest effort to put a new spin on the word of God, which editors are of course referring to as simply returning the Bible to it’s natural, woman hating, gay bashing, self go beyond simple language choices, ensuring that the new Bible do things like “explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.” Which is great, because we’ll finally learn exactly how Pilate invested those 40 pieces of silver.

Oh, yeah, and all that shit about forgiveness and peace and love and acceptance and stewardship of your fellow man?

Yeah, that’s all right out, hippy.

 

Constitution 1, God 0

American Atheists, Inc. has won it’s continuing battle to keep God out of Kentucky.

Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate, who apparently despises The Lord and all of His magnificent creations, has declared that a 2006 law requiring Homeland Security officials in Kentucky to recognize their “dependence on God Almighty” to defend the Bluegrass State from those who would harm it. Exactly which terrorist cell was out to get Kentucky remains unclear, but the fact that legislators felt they needed the direct protection of YHWH suggests that an impressive array of nefarious forces were being aligned against the northernmost region of the American south.

Even for a devout agnostic like myself, it seems that there’s a little room for divine intervention in this case. After all, if you’re not going to get God to come down and protect the American bourbon supply, not to mention the beating heart of the twin industries of horse racing and glue manufacturing, what are you going to call the big guy in for?

Now that they’ve made Kentucky safe for secular humanism, the folks American Atheists Inc. can get back to their more important humanitarian work of feeding the hungry, fighting poverty and providing quality housing in depressed neighborhoods.

I’m just joshing! They’re gonna file a complaint about a cross on some stretch of bumfuck highway or some shit. Keep up the good work, guys – you’re really making the world a better place.

 

Like A Prayer

Landfall in Florida? Not if Charlie Crist and his good buddy God have anything to say about it.

We find ourselves at a crossroads in American politics today, where we have to choose between two kinds of politicians. One sort, epitomized by Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, waits patiently in quiet deference for God to start holding up cue cards and then acts according to His divine will.

Which is all well and good, I suppose. But wouldn’t you rather vote for a dynamic, aggressive politico who brooks no sass from anyone, up to and including the Lord Almighty? That’s the sort of elected official Charlie Crist is. Need proof? How about this – when Charlie Crist tells God to keep them hurricanes out of Florida, then those motherfuckin’ hurricanes stay the hell out of Florida.

The only question now is, who do you want running your country –  a fundamentalist Christian who can’t take a shit without the say so from the Man Upstairs, or a fundamentalist Christian who single handedly defends his entire state from the ravages of tropical storms by telling God how the fuck it is going to be?

 

I Always Feel Like (Somebody’s Watching Me)

I See You!

Now sure, the far off NGC 1097 galaxy looks, to the untrained observer, like the eye of some angry God, glaring down upon us disapprovingly.

But it’s not. It’s something even cooler.

What looks to be the pupil in this image, captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, is actually an enormous black hole that weighs in at more than 100 million times the mass of our sun.

The bright white glow it produces stems from the fact that it is surrounded by a star nursery, where new stars are being formed at an astonishing rate.

Also notable in this fantastic image is the large blue dot to the left of center, nestled between the two leftmost spiral arms. This object is NGC 1097’s smaller companion galaxy, which may be “poking through” the larger galaxy, as researcher George Helou puts it, or might just be nicely placed to say cheese at the moment. What it is not, is a cataract on the eye of an all powerful deity.

So just sit back, appreciate how beautiful and strange the universe really is, and remember – although God almost certainly disapproves of a great many of your lifestyle choices, he is not staring at you from 50 million light years away. Probably.

Sleep tight!

 

RIP Dr. George Tiller

I’m not what anyone would call a religious sort. I like the idea of a greater force at work in the universe, because it seems appropriate, and because dismissing the possibility of it strikes me a stunning act of arrogance. I don’t pretend to know very much about religion. So mark me down as ‘spiritual but not religious.’ Or maybe a member in good standing of the First Church of Hedged Bets. However you want to look at it, I don’t claim to be a pillar of faith or a religious scholar of any sort.

That said, like most people, I’ve managed to develop a couple of ideas in the course of my life about the likes and dislikes of whatever higher power is out there. For instance, when you walk into a church to kill a man in cold blood? I don’t think God likes that.

And when members of your church show up to heckle a vigil held for the victim of this brutal and senseless crime? I don’t get the sense that God would much approve of that, either. In fact, while we’re on the topic, if the word ‘hate’ features prominently in the domain name of your church website, I’m prepared to say that the big guy upstairs is docking you points.

The belabored point here being, I don’t know God, but I’m pretty sure people who commit murder (and depending on how charges pan out, maybe domestic terrorism, too) and those who condone it don’t know God either. And while I didn’t know George Tiller, I can tell you that the work he did could not have been easy, but that it saved lives. I can tell you that his work had gotten him shot at, bombed, sued, and caused his name to be dragged through the mud by lesser men, and that it eventually cost him his life. And I’m willing to take a bet that George Tiller, a man active in his church who lived with the courage of his convictions in the face of obstacles that would have caused others, including yours truly, to shrink from their sense of the duty in favor of the easy road, knew a little something about God. 

The guy who murdered George Tiller in his church, while his wife looked on from the choir, doesn’t know God. The hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church don’t know God. I don’t think you have to be able to quote chapter and verse to know that carrying out this sort of despicable violence in the name of God is not an act of faith but the gravest of sins.

Rest In Peace, Dr. Tiller. If there is a happy reward out there somewhere, here’s hoping you’ve found it, if all too soon.

 

The Truth Is Out There

Researchers in Antarctica have discovered the creature responsible for the Taylor Glacier’s strange, reddish feature known as Blood Falls – it turns out, the deposits of oxidized iron are created by  a colony of microbes living in a pool  thousands of feet below the surface of the glacier that breathes iron and hasn’t seen the sun in a million and a half years.

You can check out more about the bacteria, which is one of a few helping to redefine what a life sustaining environment consists of, here and here. 

Meanwhile, as microbial life continues to be discovered thriving in Earth’s least hospitable neighborhoods, from super hot deep sea vents to thousands of feet below arctic deserts, finding this sort of life on other planets seems more and more to be a ‘when,’ rather than an ‘if’ scenario.

So what’s been bugging me lately is this – how would a discovery of life on other planets jibe with contemporary thought, especially religious thought, on this one? In other words, if you believe God created the universe, and man in his image, what does it mean if there’s another planet or planets out there with living organisms that bear no resemblance at all to human beings? There are some thoughtful essays on the matter here, but I’d like to hear about the matter from someone who doesn’t have a PhD in either religion or physics.

Any thoughts?

 

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

A truly epic fossil dig in the Arctic Circle has turned up a new species of pliosaur that just moved to the top of the food chain in the oceans of the Jurassic. Currently going by the awesome title of “Predator X”, the beast was about 50 feet long, weighed in at 45 tons, and ate fish, sharks, plesiosaurs, and with a bite force of 33,000 pounds per square inch, most likely anything else it felt like. A quick not to whoever will name this thing – once you have a name like “Predator X,” you don’t really need to improve on it.

Speaking of horrific monsters, guess who is implying that condom use is partly to blame for the AIDS epidemic? That’s right, the always wacky voice of God on Earth, Pope Benedict XVI is at it again, stating before his first trip to Africa that the HIV/AIDS problem, so prevalent throughout Africa, is a situation that

“cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem.”

Other notable pearls of health advice from the rock of the church include the fact that sunblock can lead to skin cancer and fresh fruits and vegetables are the main causes of malnutrition.

 

Monk! Fight! Monk! Fight!

This probably isn’t the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m hard pressed to come up with anything that beats it off the top of my head. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem plays host to this bench-clearing brawl between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks that would do the NHL proud.

The fight started over a standing quarrel between the Greek and Armenian monks, who share an often tense responsibility for the church with four other sects. After a Greek monk apparently attempted to occupy the Edicule, which is purported to hold Christ’s tomb, during the Armenian monks’ celebration of the Feast of the Cross. What began as a peaceful protest swiftly degenerated into an old fashioned donnybrook – featuring the servants of God. Though to be fair, if you’re going to get engaged in fisticuffs over something, who gets to hang out with Jesus is a pretty solid bone of contention.

Will the pope be handing down suspensions and fines to the monks involved? And who’s side is God on here? We may never know these answers, but one thing is for certain: as noble as living one’s life in devoted and pious service to God is, the dude in the red robe missed his true calling as a cage fighter. Just sayin’.