godisimaginary.com

This is perhaps the most serious religious parody I’ve ever seen. The article itself is inspired from a snope, but the comments are juicily delicious and the blogger is a SERIOUSLY TRUE believer ;)

Very few commentators get it. The whole comment thread is ROTFLMAO.

Man has invented enough Gods already, but never really wondered if they made any sense.

But hey, maybe your God makes sense. Why not put Him to the test:

http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/whatisgod.htm

Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

[...]
Twyman – a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs – staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it’s come to that.

“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”

Fascinating programme on radio 4 about apostasy in Islam. You can probably only listen again for a week so hurry along
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/pip/2fcan/

New sins everyone: hurting the environment, and anything bioethically arguable. Courtesy of the Vatican:
Vatican lists ‘new sins’, including pollution.

The meta-lesson here is that we can see, right under our eyes, religion in the making. Why did the Church have to make these amendments? Why wasn’t the Bible/Jesus smart enough to foresee environmental issues and warn us way ahead of time? Would’ve also helped improve Bible’s impressive failed prophecies record.

Times changed, and the Church invented these new sins, with the obvious motive of gaining popularity in the midst of a “green” trend in the civilized world. But what if they invented a few sins before these, for other motives, such as self-preservation, or increased obedience of the populace? What if they had invented a few others even earlier in history? What if THEY MADE IT ALL UP?

From San Diego CityBeat:

Heath Ledger is in Hell and has
begun serving his eternal sentence.

That was a quote from the leaders of the Westboro Baptist Church, who, among others, are claiming that God killed Heath Ledger for portraying a homosexual in a big-time Hollywood movie.

While it is true that this particular church is wildly extreme, there have been plenty of other God-worshipper types who have made similarly despicable comments.

Like when local Christian crusader James Hartline said God started the San Diego County wildfires because he was mad at us for being hospitable to gays. Like when Pat Robertson said Hurricane Katrina was God punishing New Orleans for being gay-friendly. Like when Jerry Falwell – may he Rot In Purgatory (RIP) – said 9/11 happened because America’s got the ACLU, the pro-choicers and, of course, the gays.

To me, the saddest part about you hardcore God-worshipper types isn’t that you actually believe The Almighty is capable of this sort of behavior but, rather, that you believe it and continue to worship him.

Just look at his record:

1. Your God is a Jerk: This is the most obvious reason not to worship the kind of god you Hardcore God Worshippers worship. Among countless other transgressions, killing gays and sending them to Hell seems the sort of thing only a jerk would do.
2. Your God is Stupid: So, the Hardcore Worshippers believe The Heavenly Father smote Heath Ledger because he portrayed a homosexual in a big-time Hollywood movie. Does The Heavenly Father think movies are real? Does He not know that Heath Ledger was an, um, actor? It seems to me that an important quality of the ruler of the universe – creator of all things, all-powerful, all-knowing – is to not be a dimwit.
3. Your God is Inconsistent: If God’s policy is to exterminate celebrities who portray homosexuals in Hollywood movies, then why is Gary Oldman still alive? Harry Hamlin? Patrice Donnelly? John Leguizamo? Why the hell is Matthew Broderick not dead yet, or at least suffering a Hell on Earth? The movie Torch Song Trilogy, in which Broderick acted gay, could easily be the poster film of the so-called homosexual agenda: It highlighted the injustices perpetrated amid an inhospitable culture. It delivered an awareness of and disgust for gay bashing. It testified to the rewards and benefits of gay adoption. Torch Song Trilogy has all the content a homophobic god would detest, yet Broderick’s life is far from hellish. He’s married to Sarah Sexica Parker, for crying out loud. It’s just not consistent to allow him a life of bliss while worms burrow into Heath Ledger’s eyeballs.
4. Your God Has Bad Aim: Even if the ridiculous were true, that God targets gays and people who act gay in movies, well, his collateral damage is unacceptable. Even a blindfolded Dick Cheney in a room full of 100 old white guys and one quail has better aim than Your God.
   How many heterosexuals who never acted gay in any Hollywood movies died on 9/11? How many hetero homes and lives were destroyed by Katrina and the wildfires? And what about the hetero babies, Lord?! How many straight babies must suffer before you consider subcontracting your hits to a pro!?
   I could never worship a deity with bad aim. I need a sure-shot god who can put a bullet between the eyes of an actor who portrayed a homosexual in a Hollywood movie without getting so much as a speck of blood on any heterosexual infants who never played a homosexual baby in a movie.
5. Your God is Bad at PR: Waiting until now to whack Heath Ledger is a weak PR move. God could have garnered way more press had he exacted his vengeance at the time of Brokeback Mountain’s release. You know, like at the world premiere – on the red carpet – maybe drop an anvil on his head with a thousand shutterbugs recording it for the world to see and heed.
   PR prowess is a profoundly important skill for a deity to have. Even Zeus knew that. All his smitings made front-page news – like when he chained Ixion to a wheel and cooked him slowly over the fires of Tartaras. That’s how to get a message across.

I know what you’re thinking, Hardcore God Worshippers. You’re thinking The Lord’s actions don’t seem logical to us because “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Well, sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say God works in a manner unknowable to man and then presume to know why he makes gay-acting actors overdose on pills. Besides, who wants to worship a mysterious deity? “Ooooh, you’re so mysterious God. Spooky spooky. We don’t know what you’re doing or why, but we love you soooo much.”

To hell with that noise. I need a god that works in transparent ways, a god I can keep tabs on – a real god would want that because a real god’s got nothing to hide.

You know, for thousands of years, humans have argued, fought and killed one another over which is the one true Lord. It seems to me, there’s no way any person can know this. It seems to me, the best we can do is just choose a deity that’s worth worshipping. Then, if we’re wrong, at least we aren’t wrong and worshipping a stupid jerk.
It’s simple, really: All we have to do is look at our all our god options, scrutinize their manifests and the commandments until we find one we can get behind – a kind and wise god; a reasonable god; a common-sense kind of god that understands that movies are make-believe; a god who does not say, “Burn in Hell, queer,” but, rather, says, “I made you as you are, child, so go forth and be the best damn gay you can be!”; a god who loves all the people he creates, unconditionally, unless they are total losers – like rapists, murderers and Patriot fans – each of which The Almighty will deliver a thousand lightning bolts unto their faces, with sure-shot aim, so as not to hurt others. Anything less deserves our contempt, not devotion.

this bought a smile to an otherwise middling day.

If you haven’t already signed a petition against the death sentence for Sayed Pervez Kambaksh on the grounds of “blasphemy” then please do so here
or at a petition of your choice. We should all be outraged at the way religion belittles and sneers at human life. To say that the loss of a life is fair punishment for so small a thing as downloading and distributing written material is to say that life is pretty cheap indeed.

I thought I was done with this goal. I’ve made my contribution, I’d thought, and after all it’s just taking up space on a list I like to keep to under 22.
No sooner had I deleted it than I received an email from a friend of a friend, just in time for Christmas.

I’ll spare you the finer details, but I thought you might enjoy the general absurdities:

there’s a girl who comes in from school and is hungry. Luckily her mother is baking a cake, and offers her some flour. The girl says something along the lines of “eeuw, no, that’s yucky”.
What about raw egg? “Yucky!”
A slab of butter? “Yucky!”
A spoonful of baking powder? “Yucky!!!”
Eventually the woman has the good snese to just make the damn cake, and when it comes out of the oven, the daughter of course delighted to eat a slice. Not yucky, yummy.

The moral of this story was, the email acquaintance went on, to remind us that although we might look around us this Christmas and feel sad for the children dying of AIDS, and wonder how a loving god could allow that to happen, we should not despair or lose faith.

No indeed, for just as the baking powder was yucky by itself but a necessary part of an ultimately delicious cake recipe, so it is with god’s plan.

The individual pieces of it might not make sense at first (aha, that’ll be the children dying of AIDS which their mothers, now dead, contracted after being brutally raped and then horrifically maimed by soldiers in certain African conflicts), but when you put all those pieces together (presumably adding in those yucky rotting corpses of people who died of famine or water borne disease or under earthquake rubble), by jove, suddenly it all begins to make sense.

Well, no, it might not actually seem to make sense, the email conceded, but luckily we have our faith in god to assure us that ultimately, it really does make sense, and that so much suffering is an unfortunate but wholly necessary part of God’s plan.

A good job really, the email didn’t go on, because if I were an orphan who had died in excruciating suffering of AIDS, only to get to heaven and discover that it had all been a preventable mistake rather than deliberate planning on god’s part, I’d probably be a little peeved.

This email was sent by someone I would otherwise describe as “normal” and “fully functioning”. She actually signed off with the sentence “hope this brightens your day as much as it did mine!”

I felt sick, to be honest.

It seems our work is far from done.

If you haven’t watched it, there’s a four hour discussion between Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Dicky Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens here. I saw the first hour last night and it’s interesting to see how the four of them interract together. Christopher Hitchens is a pompous ass as usual, but he does make me laugh.

courtesy of www.lifesucks.info

I particularly like the line: “For God liked the world somewhat, so he allowed the only son he ever bothered to have to suffer briefly, so that some people could escape the hell which God created”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6996621.stm

India: government wants to build a canal to provide a “continunous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsluar”.

The culture minister has now offered to resign if the Prime Minister wishes her to do so.

Environmental scandal? Bribery from would-be contractors?

No.

The assertion, in a report supporting the building of the canal, that the area in question was not built by Lord Ram and an army of monkeys as devoted Hindus claim, but is the result of natural sand and rock formations. Worse still, the assertion that religious texts do not necessarily prove the existence of Lord Ram.

The report has been withdrawn.