Elle Jacobson is a high school student who is skipping school because she’s afraid of atheists. Some parents are joining in the fear, all because of one little incident:

“This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible.”

Jacobson said that she quickly felt threatened.

“He took the Bible and he said, ‘I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages.”

Ripping up a copy of your own book is perfectly legal. Freaking out because somebody tore pages out of a book is silly — while I can’t approve of destroying any books on general principles, the kids at that school learned a valuable lesson: nothing is sacred.

When I read this tale of woe, I have to admit I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the victim.

The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor’s living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches.

And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Florida, area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White.

Only the blessings didn’t come. Fleenor ended up borrowing money from friends and payday loan companies just to buy groceries. At first she believed the explanation given on television: Her faith wasn’t strong enough.

But then again, she was probably brought up to trust her preacher, and she was promised all sorts of amazing things like immortality and paradise, and no one ever raised a question about those promises — and she was probably also told that to doubt was a sin. Who do you blame for deeply inculcated gullibility?

The story does go on to say that Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa (and a Republican! Hallelujah, it’s a miracle!) is investigating a half dozen of these holy parasites, including the odious Benny Hinn, and there is the threat of removing their tax exempt status. There is also the usual collection of theologians making excuses, claiming that this is not True™ Christianity.

Bunk. This is the heart of all religions: make the priesthood fat and happy by extorting money from the sheep with threats of hellfire and promises of paradise, promises that they never have to fulfill. If you’re going to go after Hinn and Copeland and Roberts, you have to go after every little preacher who passes the collection plate on Sunday — they’re all in the same game. The only difference is that the promoters of the prosperity gospel make promises that can be assessed. They broke the rule that the good stuff always has to be nebulous and untestable.

The archbishop of Wales thinks one of the greatest problems facing the world is “atheist fundamentalism”. The only problems he seems to be able to ascribe to it, though, are a dearth of school nativity plays and stewardesses failing to drape themselves with religious paraphernalia, neither of which seem to be exactly pressing crises, especially since it is quite clear that there is no worldwide shortage of public piety. If all outspoken atheism has done is offend a few sanctimonious old bishops, it sounds to me like a virtue that we ought to encourage.

I’d say that this is a much more serious problem:

There are demented fuckwits running for the office of president in the most militarily powerful nation in the world. They think they can have conversations with an all-powerful cosmic being who instructs them in the right things to do, and that they have the approval of that being, no matter what they do: they can initiate an unjust and futile war that kills and maims our soldiers and slaughters the civilians of another country; they can endorse torture; they can deprive people of their civil rights; they can treat loving couples as pariahs if they don’t meet their abstract notions of who is allowed to fall in love; they can poison the planet; they can oppress the poor; they can enrich their corrupt cronies; they can pretty much run roughshod over any notion of justice, liberty, and equality. And what does their imaginary god do? He gives them a phantasmal thumbs-up and an ethereal “Good job!” and assures them that he is on their side. That’s all he can do, since all he is is a projection of a mob of venal bluenoses’ sense of entitlement.

And of course, archbishops and other such foolish figureheads will support their delusions, pointing their bony claws at a woman who isn’t wearing a crucifix around her neck as the great problem of the world. Wouldn’t it be better to point to men with armies who get marching orders from hate-filled apocalyptic holy books as a slightly more plangent concern?

Does this count as child abuse yet? Some Muslims are distributing children’s DVDs with this wholesome message:

The first video shows an Arab woman playing with her two children before leaving her home with dynamite tucked into her dress.

She is approached by uniformed soldiers and the camera pauses on her thoughtful expression before a large explosion blazes across the screen.

After finding out about the suicide on television, her small daughter finds a stick of dynamite in her mother’s wardrobe and turns to the camera with the subtitles: “My love will not be by words. I will follow my mother’s steps.”

You can inculcate some mighty fine, high quality hate if you start ’em young enough.

Someday, I’m going to have to get John Wilkins to explain to me why we still have universities with theology departments, and haven’t razed them to the ground and sent the few remaining rational people in them off to sociology and anthropology departments where their work might actually have some relevance. It’s terribly uncharitable of me, but after reading this interview with John Haught, a Georgetown University theologian, I’m convinced that the discipline is the domain of vapid hacks stuffed full of antiquated delusions. I also feel bad for the guy since he did testify on the side of reason in the Dover trial. On the other hand, he is one of Richard Dawkins’ fleas, and has a new book on the way complaining about those annoying New Atheists — which is another serious strike against theology. How is it that a book all the inmates in that moribund playroom full of pious god-wallopers despise has become the central focus of their academic careers? I could see it if they were actually addressing the arguments in The God Delusion, but they never seem to do more than squeal the same old arguments in favor of their tired dogmas.

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I have to wonder if Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, Chaplain, was considered a man of good character—he just received a two year prison sentence after using his office for years as a base for preying on young Navy men…and he was also HIV-positive. He had his sentence reduced for his willingness to give up all of the names of his sexual partners, for their own good, I presume.

I also wonder if the Navy would be so fierce in their denunciations if he’d been using his rank and reputation to molest young women. There’s also a troubling suggestion that their pursuit of the victim’s names wasn’t entirely virtuous.

By trying to control the story and dampen the coverage, Marine officials delayed informing the public about the case — and Lee’s partners and victims about potential health risks. The officials knew that aim was important: They were willing to reduce the fairness of the sentence to achieve it.

Had the Corps released this public information to the media, it would have bought Lee’s victims more than a month to seek treatment, since the charges relating to his HIV status were preferred Nov. 1. It might not sound like much, but ask the victims whether they would like that time back. More important, ask anyone who’s had sex with the victims since then.

Remember that bizarre video from Pat Robertson that claimed I-35 was a holy highway? One element featured there was a cheerful (ex-?)gay man who claimed to have been “cured” in one of the Purity Sieges the Christians put on.

It turns out that the story wasn’t quite as beautiful as it was portrayed. The fellow was bipolar, was deprived of his medicine, put through a hellish harrowing instead of treatment, and was eventually kicked out of the “gay cure” program as a failure. The poor guy was simply manipulated for propaganda purposes by these Christianist fanatics.

And the outcome is pretty ugly for Christianity. The lesson from this story is that when people set aside their religious beliefs, they can be decent to one another; when they use them to provoke violence, well, they look rather stupid.