The Satanic Temple takes on the US Navy

The Satanic Temple keep pushing on the contradictions that exist in how US governmental institutions treat religions. Rather than simplifying matters by requiring that the government and all its agencies be strictly secular, as a reasonable reading of the Establishment Clause might require, the government and the courts have sought to find ways to accommodate religious beliefs in some form, partly I suspect out of fear there will be an outraged reaction from Christian evangelicals who strongly believe that this is a Christian country.
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Bernie Sanders the optimist

Dave Weigel tweets out the following.

Really, Bernie? The Republicans painted John Kerry, who fought in Vietnam and was injured twice, as some kind of coward who pretended to have been injured, while their own candidate George W. Bush got a safe stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard. They have shown that facts do not stand in the way of smearing anyone.
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Film review: The Last Hangover (2018)

What happens if the Last Supper of Christian lore is combined with the 2009 comedy film The Hangover featuring a group of friends who wake up after a drunken bachelor party and find the bridegroom-to-be missing? What you get is this comedic short Brazilian film (about 45 minutes long) that has the last supper being a drunken revel that ends with everyone in a stupor who wake up groggily the next morning to find Jesus missing, and struggle to reconstruct what happened the previous night from the fragmentary recollections of each of the disciples.

It is a film with many funny moments and a very different take on the relationship between Jesus and Judas, and explicitly mentions the lesser-known disciples such as Thaddeus, who is largely ignored even in the Gospels, so much so that very few would be able to name him as one of the twelve

If you know Portuguese, you can watch the trailer below that has no subtitles. The film on Netflix has English subtitles and if you click here it takes you to the Netflix site where the same trailer has English subtitles.

It is interesting that this film was released in Brazil, a Catholic country, just before Christmas in 2018. I wonder whether the reaction was as outraged as it was for Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

A great ad during the debate

During the Democratic debate yesterday, I was surprised to see an ad on CNN by the Freedom From Religion Foundation featuring Ron Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son, who introduced himself as an “unabashed atheist” and said that the FFRF is the nation’s largest organization of atheists and agnostics and that it seeks to keep church and state separate.

I liked the ad and loved his final words because you don’t hear things like that on mainstream TV very often.

Update on the strange case of Jerry Falwell Jr.

You may recall my earlier post about the strange relationship between Jerry Falwell, Jr,, his wife, and two young men who seem to have benefited from his largesse. Donald Trump’s erstwhile fixer Michael Cohen was also involved as were some supposedly compromising photographs. Falwell is an evangelical and stalwart supporter of Donald Trump and is the current president of Liberty University that was founded by his famous preacher father. So, like Trump, he obtained his position due to his father.
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Surprise move by the Trump organization

A right wing, anti-Muslim group called Act for America decided to hold a fund-raising cocktail party and dinner at Donald Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on November 7, charging people $1,500 or more to attend. Constantly frothing-at-the-mouth hatemonger Michelle Malkin was to be the keynote speaker.

This seemed like a win-win for both sides. The group got to curry favor with Trump by sending money to his family coffers, which by now is the well-known method of gaining his favor and attention and is known to all manner of foreign governments and lobbyists, and Trump and the bigots in his base would benefit, since nothing pleases them more than targeting non-white, non-Christian groups and riling up liberals.
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The enduring allure of near-death experiences

One of the most common arguments that are presented for the existence of the afterlife are the reported near-death experiences, where people say that they died, entered the afterlife, and then for some reason returned to life again and were able to report what they saw. I can’t count the number of times religious people have told me that such experiences are real and prove that their god and heaven exist.

There seems to be an inexhaustible desire for such stories and are eagerly lapped up by religious believers, even though no real evidence has been produced to substantiate them. This article by Arthur E. Farnsley II describes the case of one person who said he actually died (not merely that he was near death) and returned from the dead, not once but twice. Of course he wrote a book about his experience. The article explores how rationalists might respond to such claims.
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The Christploitation genre of films

On a regular basis, I hear about films that are released that are targeted at evangelical Christians that feed them with the comforting notion that their beliefs are correct, that they are their god’s chosen and that the rest of us heathen are grossly mistaken and will suffer in hell unless we repent and turn to Jesus. The film industry is a commercial one and they are well aware that there is a sizable audience out there for this kind of film so it should be no surprise. I myself have not seen any of them. Life’s too short to spend on C-grade religious propaganda disguised as a feature film.
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