It’s the second day of fall classes. I must be a little punch-drunk, what with all the obscure humor going up today, so forgive me.
It’s the second day of fall classes. I must be a little punch-drunk, what with all the obscure humor going up today, so forgive me.
What a strange story: a woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back.
Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses.
“I feel helpless,” she says. “Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who’s going to hell.”
There’s some freaking weird theology going on here. Does she think her DNA is going to be assumed into the afterlife? Do spirits have DNA? Do you need a kidney as an angel?
She also has some strange anxieties, since the recipient is a pagan.
Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering “strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa,” she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a “triple-espresso high” she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.
That’s tragic. The kidney is also missing the opportunity to filter the body and blood of Christ, transforming Jesus’ protein into urine. Oh, to never again deaminate the amino acids of the God of Abraham, to never again extract Jesus’ sodium ions, and to have to settle for filtering the ichor of little animist gods…what a sad fate.
I don’t know about this bodily resurrection thing. I would think that running a little lapsang souchong through the ol’ nephric ducts is small potatoes compared to being perfused with embalming fluid and later rotting into a putrid film of bacterial goo. Apparently, the Holy Ghost can reanimate that, but foreign tea is going to have It scratching It’s immaterial and invisible Head.
The theological absurdity goes on.
“I’m all for spiritual curiosity,” she says, “but you’ve got to settle these things beforehand. My kidney belongs to Christ. It will never be Pagan.
Hmm. Yes. Various organs in your body all make intellectual and emotional decisions about what religion they should follow. Personally, I’ve had my organs all committed to different and appropriate philosophies: my colon is a good disciplined Calvinist, my lungs are Breatharians, my right forefinger is an acolyte of the cult of Macintosh (*click*, praise Jobs!), and my penis is observant of some hysterically hedonistic faith which doesn’t require much in the way of intellectual expression. My brain, however, is godless.
Smith’s brain is definitely fundamentalist Christian: inert, uninformed, and irrational.
(via God is for Suckers)
P.S. Some people aren’t getting it. The article is satire, although if you do think about it, there is some weird stuff going on with this whole idea of an afterlife.
Chris has his latest, greatest cartoon. It’s correct: you’re either nuts, short-sightedly stupid, or venal to an extreme if you support the Republican party in any way anymore.
Oh, no. Our work is never going to end. You should take a look at the new Politically Incorrect Guides that will be coming out after Wells’.
At least the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Holocaust looks like it will be very short.
It’s cute, but where did this cartoon convention of one-eyed cephalopods get started?
Chris Mooney did send me a copy of the new paperback edition of The Republican War on Science, so it’s official: he’s now the man who tried to kill me twice.
At least I can testify that a Mooney attack is survivable. I toughened myself up since the first edition with a regimen of Coulter and Wells, and if anything, Mooney is understating the tactics of the Right.
If you’ve heard the strange little anecdote about GW Bush that’s going around, you will find Tild hilarious today. The illustration is perfect.
The Inoculated Mind twists a Calvin and Hobbes comic to make a point about debates with creationists…I don’t know if I should endorse that kind of tinkering with Holy Writ.