I had no idea it was so easy

Have you ever seen the True Christian, the kind that will calmly and confidently tell you the most insane and ridiculous things as if he were ordering a cup of coffee? Meet Randy Demain. He has raised the dead, and does it all the time. It’s easy. You just go up to an old corpse and tell it to get up, and poof, it’ll hop up and start running around.

It helps if you annoy him by interrupting his sermonizing, so he’s a bit cranky about the effrontery of the dead person for interfering with his preaching.

The psychology of these wacked out liars and fantasists for Jesus is fascinating. Also creepy.

America’s Next Religion!!!

On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I’d had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather tepid, an exposure to bland liberal Lutheranism of the Scandinavian Phlegmatic sect, and had no drama at all to it, and was more like a Unitarian Universalist church with a historical creed attached to it that no one cared much about. Yet here I’d been talking with ex-fundamentalist ex-Mennonites, people who’d had a religion that was like a hammer to the cranium. The fellow who had shown signs of thinking as a teenager, and whose older brother therefore schemed to do him a favor and kill him in his sleep before he became a hell-bound apostate ought to win some sort of prize.

So I was pondering why some faiths seem to be so bland and others so ferocious, and I had to think that, at least in Western countries, a period as a state religion had to have some moderating effect. My Swedish forebears, for instance, were mostly Catholic in the 15th century, and switched to Lutheran in the 16th. Why? Because they had the principle that whatever the faith of the king, that was the faith of the nation. That’s a concept that’s a little weird to people who have it dunned into them that their particular faith is the one true path to God and heaven, since apparently which faith is the right one can be changed over the course of a coronation. Sweden went through that switch, and not only that, but shortly afterwards Gustavus Adolphus hands people pikes and muskets, marches them off to Germany, and has them killing and being killed for their new version of God (and for mercantile interests in the Baltic states, but that probably wasn’t played up among the troops much).

It had to instill a little cynicism in the people.

Anyway, I was just thinking that it sure would be nice if the US had an official state religion, just because it would be such an effective way of making religion irrelevant. However, we couldn’t do it the old Swedish way, and make the religion of the president the state religion — our political campaigns are already too pious, and the thought of turning them into religious wars that made faith even more important was too much to bear. The big obstacle to establishing an American state religion (besides the first amendment, and the Republicans don’t care about that anyway) is deciding which religion it would be. And that’s where I had an epiphany.

Let’s pick the official US state religion with a game show. Sure, it would be shallow, loud, flashy, and would pander to the lowest common denominator of the population…but can you imagine anything more American? And it would make money! Even more American!

We’d do it in a program that would air over the course of several months. In the first phase, we’d collect entrants; the larger sects, the Catholics, the Southern Baptists, the Mormons, the Episcopalians, etc., would of course get a spot just because of their numbers and popularity, but to be truly representative, a wide selection of smaller, edgier religions ought to get a shot, too. A panel of celebrity judges would travel to major American cities and have auditions, in which representatives of various faiths in the region would show up and give a brief spiel about their beliefs and put on a demonstration of what’s so cool about their particular practices. They would be judged on entertainment value and local color, and only the best show would move on to the next level.

The celebrity judges would be important. The panel should consist of a curmudgeonly atheist who believes in nothing, a ditzy, New Agey bit of fluff who believes in everything, and some wobbly agnostic who doesn’t know what to think. Christopher Hitchens must be the atheist judge; someone like Robert Wright or Ariana Huffington can be the ditz judge (Huffington would be excellent just for the accent); and the agnostic judge would be tougher, since they tend to be much more low profile, but perhaps we can just trawl a few bars for unemployed Ph.D.s in philosophy. All he has to do is bawl, “Why am I here?” now and then, so those qualifications should do.

The main competition would consist of multiple televised rounds. There would be a division of skills, so one round might be musical, with demonstrations of their singing or dancing or babbling ability; another might be on dogma, with succinct summaries of what their religion can do for and demands of the practitioner; there could be gladiatorial rounds, where top athletes of each religion pray for god’s aid in sporting events, and the loser drops out and goes home. Some rounds would be judged by the celebrity panel, while others could be judged by call-in votes.

We could also have tests of power. At the beginning of the competition, each religion could be assigned by chance a dying child, and the adherents would be expected to pray mightily for their kid. This could lead to more drama — we might have occasional interruptions, as the announcer intones, “We are sorry to report that little Timmy Robinson has died. The Methodists have no power here, and will be going home.” Conversely, if one of the children has a miraculous remission, the prayer team for that child could be automatically advanced to the next round.

You might argue that the atheists would have an edge, because instead of prayer they’d be sending money to the best doctors and hospitals and getting the child the best medical care possible. Atheism is not a religion, however, so they won’t be in the competition.

Another concern you might have is that there is no way the contestants could be judged objectively. One property of religion is that it encourages tribal loyalty, so even if the gospel stylings of the African-American Baptist church have even the godless dancing in the aisles, all of the Catholics will still vote for the droning off-key old hymns of their congregation. That’s OK! We should expect some bias in favor of the numerically superior dogmas, and it’s fair that the more numerous faiths have an edge in becoming America’s next religion. That’s because the main competition will only serve to winnow down the contestants to a dozen or two, and the final winner will be determined entirely by a lottery. Knowing the American people, charismatic underdogs will make it to the final round alongside the stable favorites.

Think of the excitement, and the ratings, that the final show will get! Chits, each with the name and religious symbol of the surviving contestants, will tumble about in a basket, and then an attractive starlet with very large breasts will reach in, pull out one, and hand it to a bronzed macho star with very large teeth, who will make the final announcement: “America, we are a SCIENTOLOGY NATION!”, or whatever religion wins.

Note that since we are a nation tolerant of many faiths, American citizens will not be required to convert to that faith. It just means that on all official pronouncements and legal documents, the government will declare itself officially an X nation, where X is whatever religion won. All opening prayers to congress will be delivered by a representative of that religion; all military chaplains will be required to be practitioners. You will also be able to sue all politicians and pundits who declare that America is a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation without specifying the winning faith, because obviously that is a slight to that triumphant religion.

There will also be a monetary gain. The winning religion should be granted a substantial sum of money, say $100 million dollars, to be used freely in any way they see fit: it can be used to repair decaying churches, buy air time for proselytizing ads, pay off lawsuits to parents of molested children, or even buy wetsuits and dildoes for the entire priesthood. We won’t care, we won’t pay any attention, it’s simply their fairly earned winnings. Most importantly, as the official state religion, all of their activities will be tax exempt.

Oh, that was the sneaky part. All the loser religions will no longer be recognized by the government, and will lose all their tax exemptions. That’s where we make the big profits off this scheme.

Just to be generous, though, there will be an easy loophole. Churches can freely convert to the new official religion and gain the tax exemption back. All those churches with only the vaguest theological foundation, and which are really just placeholders to service their leaders, will not be harmed in any way; Joel Osteen and Rick Warren will continue to rake in the moolah, even if it is as the Saddleback Church of the Sub-genius or as Lubavitcher Rabbi Joel Osteen.

Now wait! I’m not done! I had another epiphany that turns this whole idea into a major revelation of brilliant genius that will change the whole future of humanity.

We do this every year.

This is not a one shot deal that establishes one official American church for ever and ever. It’s a process that we will go through every year. We will regularly change our state religion. No faith can slack off; they all have to muster their best game to serve their congregations and gather the talent and the votes to be competitive. It will all be very Darwinian.

But there’s another cunning bit to the scheme. This is not a contest that will simply be won by whoever has the largest membership, so it won’t lead to a single religion simply dominating every year, and strengthening its grip with each win. Because this is going through the most frivolous of media, making an appeal to popularity on the basis of short-attention-span glitz, there will be a definite edge given to novelty. The Red Queen hypothesis will apply, and we’ll be churning through lots of religions, one after the other.

It’s going to be great. We’ll either turn religion into a trivia question, or we will select the most virulently appealing faith of all time into existence. Either way is going to be much more interesting than what we’ve got now.

We just have to persuade the government to try it.

Oh, God, we are afflicted with a leadership of idiots

Here’s what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.

(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)

Skin-deep Christianity

I was one of those weird kids growing up: nose always in a book, bored by sports, happy to go to school. This was a bit strange because my father had been a broken-nosed lineman on the varsity high school football team, was always playing hooky to go fishing, and once he graduated, went off to a succession of manly muscular jobs, working on the railroad, as a lumberjack, and eventually as an auto mechanic. I think he was perpetually baffled by the bookish nerd he’d fathered, but then, he had six kids and everyone of us ended up different, independent, and stubborn in our own ways. And that was just fine, that’s what good parenting is about — supporting your kids just enough that they can be free to be themselves. My parents did a good job.

When I had kids of my own, I also discovered how hard that is. Children can be wilful little beasts, but they are also desperate for approval. It would have been so easy to raise a family of neurotic, unhappy, but miserably obedient dependents, if only I’d been willing to impose my views on theirs, and withheld love to get my way. As it is, though, I’ve ended up with three kids who’ve each gone off in their own weird direction — sometimes leaving me baffled — but I trust them to know their own minds and be willing to struggle a bit to figure out what works for them, not necessarily what works for me.

So it was with a special revulsion that I read this story of oblivious parents giving their kids home tattoos. They were branding them with their religious identity, inking crosses into their skins, which explains a lot, since smug Christians tend to be completely blind to the freakishness of their obsession, but it wouldn’t make any difference if they’d been atheists punching scarlet “A”s into their childrens’ shoulders — it’s child abuse. It completely misses the point of parenting, which is not the same as indoctrination, and confuses guidance and education with ownership. Here’s what the mother said about it:

“I’m their mother,” Patty Jo Marsh said late Saturday. “Shouldn’t I be able to decide if they get one?”

No.

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper. They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

Jeez, next thing you know they’ll be demanding the right to chop off the ends of the boys’ penises. Or to take a chunk of broken glass to the girls’ clitorises.

Nah, nobody would be that crazy.

Christian martyr complex on a hair-trigger

One of those lunatic religious right sites compiled a list of the top ten “anti-christian attacks” of 2009…and the pathetic thing about it is how feeble and largely imaginary the attacks are. They range from a rantin’ anti-choice pastor getting arrested for harassing women at a clinic to the existence of those uppity gays who complain when Christians lie about homosexuality. There isn’t one crucifixion or involuntary lion-feeding on the whole list. Read this dissection of the compilation — those poor guys are really desperate for some notable oppression.

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

I’m really in the wrong business

I told you yesterday that it was amazing that a religious crank could serve an adoring audience with 55 radio stations, all pumping out Grade A Prime lunacy. It was a bit depressing that all an old fool needs to do is babble about God and the Bible and people will throw money at him.

But then I’d also pointed out that another phony, Rick Warren, had suffered a major financial shortfall of almost a million dollars, and was begging for more donations. That makes you feel a little better, right? Stupidity is not a smooth road to riches, at least.

Despair some more, people. Warren put out his call, and his flock of sheep answered with donations adding up to $2.4 million over one weekend. And he’s bragging that most of these were small donations from many people, not the largesse of a few rich individuals, and calling it a “miracle”.

It’s a bit ironic that initially he’d said the shortfall was due to a poor economy and people having little to give. It’s revolting that he would then proceed to put the bite on the financially stressed members of his congregation, and that they’d then dredge up more of their money to hand over to the Saddleback simpleton. It wasn’t a miracle: a better word would be a fleecing.

Danish cartoonists proven wrong!

Oh, yeah, but they screwed up. Probably the best known of the inflammatory anti-Islam Danish cartoons was the work of Kurt Westergaard, who drew the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. It was a very misleading portrayal of a Muslim, which was demonstrated lately when a Somali fanatic tried to break into his home and kill him while yelling “revenge!” and “blood!” …with a knife and an axe, not a bomb!

I’m sure Westergaard will be publishing an apology and retraction now. Or maybe he’ll just have to admit his error and redraw Mohammed with more personal nasty weapons of death and destruction bristling from his turban.

The poor oppressed Muslim man was shot and received some minor wounds, and has been arrested. Westergaard is fine; for some mysterious reason, he had security alarms all over his house and a safe room where he and his 5 year old granddaughter, who has probably learned something from this encounter, could hide. All signs of a guilty conscience, no doubt.

(Danish source, and horrible google translation, if you’re interested.)

Start off 2010 with schadenfreude

Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church is bleeding money. He just sent out a letter begging for almost a million dollars from his followers.

With 10% of our church family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated. Still, with wise management, we’ve stayed close to our budget all year. Then… this last weekend the bottom dropped out.

On the last weekend of 2009, our total offerings were less than half of what we normally receive – leaving us $900,000 in the red for the year, unless you help make up the difference today and tomorrow.

Good.

I don’t mean that it is good that people are poor and suffering; I think it’s wonderful that a pious fraud who preys upon them is feeling a teeny-tiny pinch. I’d feel even more cheerful if I didn’t think that his begging from the faithful will most likely work.

Hey, if anyone wants to see me go into raptures, all they have to do is add to Saddleback’s woes by making their fleecing operation taxable. That would definitely break the back of Saddleback.