Christianity

This blurb finds itself attached to email forwards (hello again, cute kittens, awesome videos, and "good ol' days" pastiches!), and supposedly comes via comedian Jay Leno:

With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?

All righty; that's blandly cute as a one-liner. But come on, you just know that American fundies will take the gag as an actual warning against de-godding the Pledge. For the flag-waving, school-prayer-ing crowd of fearful out there, let me note:

Yeah, with hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, having God in the Pledge of Allegiance is working out so well for us.

Now you know why your atomic flying car is a few hundred years behind schedule.

Image via Eat Liver. Source unknown. 

Vicar went to hospital with potato stuck in bottom

Christian conservatives of America! People of faith! The moment is upon us – and you know which of the candidate parties Jesus wants you to choose.

It's time to make sure that the right candidate ascends to the White House. So get out there and do what you know you have to: 

Pray.

No, don't pray and vote! That's just what the Devil would want you to do. Are not all things in the hands of the Lord? He'll take care of the election; for you to cast a vote would mean you don't trust God to handle it. Leave that matter to the Almighty. Your role is to support His will, and thwart the godless voters for the other candidate, through the most potent force in the universe, the awesome power of prayer. 

Meet in your churches. Gather your families in your living rooms. Convene in parks or wherever you can. Let the faithless flock to the folly of their ballots.

Don't let God down on this one. Stay away from the voting booths and pray like you never have before. Fulfill that mission, and come November 5th, you'll find we've gotten the best candidate to lead our nation!

Debunking Christianity quotes an old Catholic maxim: “Given be a child to the age of twelve and I’ll give you a Catholic for life."

Fantastic author and self-proclaimed atheist Anne Rice is justly famed for her Gothic horror novels of supernatural creatures, from Interview with the Vampire to The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches). One would assume that she's never had a problem distinguishing her fictional creations from reality. Readeth thou more

In "Evangelicals reluctantly embrace McCain", a Rev. Loran Livingston says, "Economics change... But how God feels about life and marriage never changes. So I tell them, 'Find the candidate whose philosophy lines up most with the Scripture, pray a lot, and vote'."

How God feels never changes? Then I certainly hope that Loran lives in full accordance with Old Testament law, including all the stuff about unclean foods and mixed threads in cloth and stoning adulterers and killing disobedient children and what not.

And no homes with pointy roofs! Remember, how God feels never changes!

Now get out there, Reverend, and kill some gays.

Heh. I used to be one of these "end of the world, any time now" Christians. Oy vey.

Comic from the wonderful Big Fat Whale.

Small update to Is there something Jesus wasn't telling us?:

I would certainly expect that my little gag about "gay Jesus" is completely unoriginal, and probably as old as the hills. (Well, no more than 2000 years old, actually, whereas "the hills" are 6000 years old. Right?) Of course, we have no basis on which to speculate on the Savior's horizontal proclivities, so it's just good-natured silliness. But in any case, I wasn't aware that the great Pat Condell was among the jokesters. For your entertainment:

YouTube will get you many more brilliant rants by this fellow. Go kill a half hour or so.

Via Jack Shedd's Big Contrarian: Steven Weinberg's essay Without God casts a sober look at the conflict – or "tension", as he puts it – between science and religion, and finds that we're slowly losing God (and that that's okay). It's a good read; have at it.

I wanted to highlight the same passage that Shedd did:

[E]ven someone who believes in God can feel that Abraham in the Old Testament was wrong to obey God in agreeing to sacrifice Isaac, and that Adam in Paradise Lost was right to disobey God and follow Eve in eating the apple, so that he could stay with her when she was driven from Eden. The young men who flew airplanes into buildings in the US or exploded bombs in crowds in London or Madrid or Tel Aviv were not just stupid in imagining that these were God’s commands; even thinking that these were His commands, they were evil in obeying them.

This is what I was just writing about in "Would you do it?": An open question to believers: that an evil command is evil, regardless of its source. One of the saddest aspects of religion is the backward logic of starting with the bald-faced assertion "God is good!", and from that, proclaiming that any command attributed to God – any murder, any atrocity, even Old Testament-style butchering of children – must also be good. (Good for the circumstances of the time, as apologists try to argue.) Readeth thou more

It's a miracle!

Neapolitans – people from Naples, Italy – are thronging to their cathedral to allegedly see the dried blood of a saint turn all liquidy via divine magic. (Via Pharyngula.)

Skeptics suggest that chemicals in the dried blood undergo a change in viscosity when jostled. I expect some believers to plead that skeptics just instead accept a "real miracle".

Those believers would be missing a key point. Atheists like me think don't merely think it sad that people are deluding themselves with this "miracle" nonsense. We also think it'd be even sadder if this were a true divine miracle. Readeth thou more