The Funnies

This came via an email making the forwarding rounds; I don't know the original source. Might not even be new.

The text:

Religion is like a penis.

It's fine to have one. 

It's fine to be proud of it. 

But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around. 

And PLEASE don't try to shove it down my children's throats. 

Well. That certainly is some rather direct imagery. But I sure can't argue with the sentiment!

(Ooh, here's an ugly thought. Since I used to be a proselytizing, door-knocking Christian, it's like I was offering my penis door to door. Now I feel insulted that I had so few takers. : )

In an AP story about bin Laden's email habits, a commenter named Jeremy adds:

Dear Westboro Baptist Church:

We have a funeral for you to protest. It's somewhere in the middle of the northern Arabian Sea. We would be more than happy to help you pack, fly you there, and drop you off.

Sincerely,

America

Amen!

The Intertubes as a whole have been laughing at Bill O'Reilly's naming of the tides as "proof" of a magic man in the sky. Responding to the claim by David Silverman, President of American Atheists, that all religions are a scam, O'Reilly tells us how he knows they're not: 

"Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that."

Full video of the interview:

It seems that O'Reilly drops the tide bomb often, even roping that big shiny daytime ball-thing into his theology:

"Sun goes up, sun goes down."

Not surprisingly, comics everywhere aren't going to let that tide just come and go without remark. Stephen Colbert offers the video compilation of the universe a la O'Reilly:

(Colbert's summary of O'Reilly's theology: "There must be a God, because I don't know how things work.")

Well. Everyone's already done his or her best to let O'Reilly in on the secret behind the tides. Here are a few more things I think he should know:

1. The sun doesn't actually "go up" or "go down". Which is not a knock against O'Reilly; those are the colloquial terms for how we view things from the ground, and I suspect that even Bill knows that the Earth revolves. But:
2. The sun does indeed go up and down with impressive, clock-like regularity. That's because an object in motion (including revolution) continues to do so, unchanged, unless affected by an external force. In other words, the regular rising and setting of the sun is what must happen in the absence of a miracle-working God.
3. Thus, if the sun and the tides didn't move with predictable regularity, that would be a sign of possible divine power. (Thanks, Bill, for helping argue for the lack of a God!)
4. Once again, O'Reilly is right when he claims that the sun behaves with awesome regularity. And that's why, when we hear an ancient claim that the sun stopped for a day so Joshua could kill more people, we know it's a myth.
5. Getting back to real phenomena of nature, here are a few more occurrences for O'Reilly to ponder: Earthquake comes, children die. Volcano erupts, children die. Drought sets in, children die. Too much rain falls, children die. Plague breaks out, children die. Explain those, Bill.

Speaking of children, let me note in closing that the babes – or at least, those that survive the grotesque "miscommunications" of O'Reilly's God – are the very ones who hold The Book that may help explain the tides mystery to Bill:

(Should be a required science text at Fox News. They could call back David Silverman, or any egg-head liberal, to help with the big words.) 

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