Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It’s rich soil for stupid over there, and they’ve got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.

I hesitate to mention this one because I know it’s going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a human eye, and carrots are good for your eyes, and just goes downhill from there — tomatoes are red and have chambers, just like the heart, walnuts look like brains, kidney beans look like kidneys, etc.

I think the creator must be a virgin. He also claims that citrus fruits look just like human mammary glands.

Today is actually the National Day of Prayer. Really. Let that sink in for a moment.

We have regional coordinating groups — Minnesota is having events at the Capitol today. Did you know that prayer is “America’s strength and shield”? I didn’t. Our governor has issued a proclamation asking citizens to “open our hearts in thanksgiving”. It’s a weird document. It announces that we have all these problems like poverty and sickness and crime, and then declares that we’ve been strengthened by the “conscience-based actions of people of faith” … I guess we people of reason don’t have consciences, and I think it’s setting the bar awfully low anyway to declare prayer an “action”. It’s more like an inaction, with lame excuses.

The head wackaloon of this year’s National Day of Futility is Shirley Dobson … of those Dobsons, the fundagelically evil kooks behind Focus on the Family. This was supposed to be an ecumenical event, as near as something that celebrates religious idiocy can be ecumenical, but it has since evolved into an exclusively evangelical Christian church service, sponsored by our federal government. Using her vast powers as chair of the national task force, Dobson requires her coordinators to sign this statement of faith.

I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God. I believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, his virgin birth, his sinless life, his miracles, the atoning work of his shed blood, his resurrection and ascension, his intercession and his coming return to power and glory. I believe that those who follow Jesus are family and there should be unity among all who claim his name. I agree that these statements are true in my life.

Hello, Jews and Moslems! Nice to see you’re joining us atheists in rejecting prayer. Oh, you’re not? Well, at least we’ll be able to keep each other company with all the other second-class citizens.

Fuck the National Day of Prayer.

I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries. What a waste, and what an encouragement of further waste.

I feel like just declaring this the official National Day of Derangement and writing it all off, maybe spit in the soup of people who say grace, or flip off any group I catch trying to do a collective exercise in ritual invocation of nonexistent beings, but the Minnesota Atheists have a more productive idea: they are calling this a National Day of Reason and are setting up to demonstrate in the Minnesota capitol in St Paul today. They actually have a prime position, and all the legislators leaving their workplace to join in the National Day of Inanity will have to troop by them. In my dreams, these politicians would feel a little sense of shame at the foolishness of the official events, but in reality, I’m sure they won’t.

The Danish cartoonists vs. Muslims conflict is flaring up again, with the discovery of a conspiracy by Muslims to kill a cartoonist. There are many levels of irony here; it’s simply stupid to try and protest accusations that you are violent by committing acts of violence. I’ve also noticed an interesting pattern of escalation.

The aggrieved Muslims are saying, “Mock our god and we will kill you.” They have the goal of suppressing images they consider blasphemous.

The cartoonists are saying, “Threaten to kill us and we will mock your god.” Obviously, they’d like to stay alive, but their goal in this context is to see their work disseminated widely.

Now ask yourself, who is achieving their goals? Who is winning?

It looks to me like a few relatively obscure cartoonists are crushing the fundamentalist Muslim world. Those cartoons aren’t even that good, and they’re being published everywhere, even appearing on blogs.

Now maybe I’m misinterpreting the fundie Muslim position here: maybe their goal is actually to make sure the world thinks their beliefs are dangerous and stupid, and also ineffectual; they’re flailing pointlessly to suppress a couple of scribblings that would have vanished into obscurity, and have managed to turn them into icons of Islamic insanity. They’re doing a good job if that’s so. They’ve convinced me, at any rate.

So the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. In a rational world, there’s a range of options available: stop protecting priests who abuse their position, threaten convicted child-abusing priests with expulsion and excommunication, even revisit this peculiar custom of demanding celibacy for the priesthood. Alas, the Pope has his own very special solution.

Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.

Pray harder! Exercise a completely ineffective technique more strenuously!

I do wonder how the Pope imagines god will “cleanse” the church. Just tweaking the brains of priests so they don’t feel lust anymore would be a violation of free will and make a mess of centuries of theology, while having god get all Old Testament on the church and smite priests all around the world with lightning bolts would be spectacular and effective, but probably very bad PR.