The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they insist on being called, has earned another reason to be regarded with a sneer of contempt: they sent a letter to all of their churches in California urging their adherents to vote for Proposition 8. It’s bizarre that a religion known for being out of step with the rest of the country on the issue of marriage, a place populated with polygamists and young girls treated as chattel and coaxed into child marriages, now wants to “preserve the sacred institution of marriage”. They sunk tens of millions of dollars into the campaign.

Californians are rightly demonstrating against the Mormon church—I’d be more than a little pissed off myself. After Enron enriched itself by bilking Californians, now you’ve got Salt Lake City trying to turn you into a little Utah. You’ve got cause to be annoyed at the way you’re being targeted.

People are trying to do something, and one thought is to try and revoke the Mormon church’s tax exempt status. Ah, sweet dream. I’d dearly love to see Obama repair the damage to our economy by revoking religious tax exemptions across the board, and refill our treasury with loot from the theological con artists. Alas, I’m at an Americans United meeting, and the place is crawling with lawyers and experts on separation of church and state issues, and I asked Barry Lynn directly what kind of legal recourse we had, and he regretfully pointed out that what the Mormon church did was entirely legal. It was ethically repugnant, of course, but complaining to the IRS is likely to net you doodly-squat in this case.

We may have to settle for escalating our mockery of mormonism. It’s not hard, after all: it is one of the most palpably ridiculous, unethical, dumb-ass religions flourishing in our unfortunate nation of theological dumb-asses. Did you know that being excommunicated from the Mormon church can get you expelled from BYU? Don’t go to BYU (not that there’s much chance many of my readers would do so), and feel free to sneer a little bit at the poor BYU graduates. Forget that ski vacation in Park City; Colorado has great snow, too. Be even ruder to the next pair of white-shirted Mormon missionaries who come to your door. Hey, does anyone know what a Mormon would find heretical? Send me something they find sacred.

Otherwise, we’re just stuck with this ugly outcome. All we can do is be more aware of the flock of smug, sanctimonious, hypocritical holy meddlers in our midst.

Remember, though, that all they were doing is trying to keep the definition of marriage as it has been since the beginning of time. Dumb-asses.

This is a video of Barack Obama pointing out that we can’t use the Christian holy book as a guide to secular law — it has bits that advocate slavery and stoning obstreperous children, and that the injunctions to “turn the other cheek” and follow the golden rule in the Sermon on the Mount would, if taken literally, put the Defense Department in violation.

The irony comes from the outraged Christian fundie voiceover. He accuses Obama of mocking the bible, and then defends it by claiming that the Sermon on the Mount is “spiritually inspiring”…completely missing the point that Obama was not saying otherwise. And then he claims that Jesus would never advocate turning the cheek to terrorists and America’s enemies. What? I don’t think Jesus had much to say about America, and probably wouldn’t have much concern about some strange secular nation far removed from his natal region. To defend Deuteronomy and Leviticus, he makes a similar non sequitur, complaining that the Ten Commandments are also in Deuteronomy. So? Even if you consider the Ten Commandments virtuous, it does not negate Obama’s point, which is that you have to pick and choose bits of the bible, making it an inappropriate guide to civic behavior…and there this narrator is, picking and choosing. And of course, the Ten Commandments are mostly irrelevant, and not the basis of US law anyway.

And then he accuses Obama of distorting the bible. That’s the whole point, bozo! The bible is a welter of contradictions and archaicisms — you are unavoidably distorting it if you try to take that mess literally and run a country on its precepts.

Some Christian fanatics are concerned, quite reasonably, about the economy, and have chosen, quite absurdly, to try and correct the problem with prayer. So far, so typical, but then … well, they picked a peculiarly oblivious way to do it. They prayed before a statue of a golden bull on Wall Street.

We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems. While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.

Just a clue: there’s this book called “the bible” that these people claim to follow, but I suspect they’ve never actually read it, or they might have seen Exodus 32.

¹And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

 ²And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

 ³And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

 ⁴And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

 ⁵And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.

 ⁶And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

 ⁷And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:

 ⁸They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

 ⁹And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:

 ¹⁰Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.

They even made a movie of it, if cracking a book is too highbrow.

Trust me, this is one of those things in the Judeo-Christian heritage that never ends well. There’s this jealous god who does smitings.

She may have deleted her post that called for killing homosexuals, but now she’s put up a guest post from some freaky Baptist minister, shrieking about “Sodomites” who are being punished by her loving god, with quotes from the usual suspects — Romans and Leviticus — demanding that they be put to death.

That Christian deity sure is a cranky, bitter, hateful old guy, isn’t he? And Christians sure are talented at inventing imaginary enemies to work themselves into a frothing rage over.

I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.

• Yom Kippur is supposed to be such a solemn holiday in Israel that no one drives, no one works, no one eats, but apparently, there is no proscription against rioting. A non-Jewish man started his car (blasphemy!), which drove his Jewish neighbors insane with pious rage to the point that they ended up rampaging through the streets, requiring police force to end the violence. (via Obsessed with Reality)

• A doll that babbles baby talk has Christians upset — it seems that they when they listen closely, they think it’s praising Islam. That’s funny — that’s what I hear when I hear Pentecostals speaking in tongues.

• “The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Wait — I thought I was the opposite of holy. My wife is going to be so disappointed.

• Peter Watts has an interesting analysis of how dumb-as-rocks fundie goons can thrive in modern society. The pared down explanation: holding ridiculous religious beliefs is costly, and therefore represents an expensive investment that testifies to the depth of commitment, and thereby promotes greater group cohesion.

• Tim Tingelstad is running for the Minnesota Supreme court. Please don’t vote for him. He’s a far-right religious kook who wants to ‘return’ the country to godly rule.

• Another day, another preacher caught collecting kiddie porn. At least he’s honest—he says he viewed it for the purpose of sexual arousal, but at the same time he’s all tangled up in guilt because he thinks Jesus is unhappy with him.

Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.

People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.

The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.

Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.

I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.

If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.

Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.

And I’m already a-scared! It is not recommended that you view this collection of video clips and links of Pentecostals spazzing out before bedtime, unless you really want to induce nightmares.