Christ gets crucified, once again

Oh, the irony.

After close to 2,000 years (give or take, no one really knows) of trying to cram Christianity down the throats of millions around the world imbued with common sense, the hordes of faithful have now spoken:

Comedy Central should just leave religion alone.

That was the general public reaction (y’know, the ol’ comment thang) to word that the network — famous for wussing out and censoring images of Mohamed — is considering a cartoon in which a resurrected Jesus Christ is portrayed as a slacker youth in New York, who doesn’t get along with his perpetually distracted father, who in turn is addicted to video games.

I kid you not. Sounds pretty damn funny to me!

In fact, I’m wondering if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are kicking themselves. They’ve been using JC as a character for years, and a spinoff was just sitting there, begging to be done.

Anyway, the general reactions ranged from hurt to bemused to disgusted. But that’s religion for you. The fact that multiple sects of evangelical Christianity spend much of their time trying to convert people doesn’t strike any of these people as ironic.

Selling religion is fine, you see, because — delusional and irrational or not — lots of people have it. Deriding it, on the other hand.

Well hell, that could lead to dancing.

Issues like this make me wish the average American knew more about the founding fathers, more specifically Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson loathed organizaed religion — he even rewrote the lessons of the New Testament into a reinterpreted Bible, taking out all of the mysticism and magical silliness.’

He would’ve loved the idea of a show that could make fun of religion. When asked about his support for Deism and Unitarianism — constructs allowing the practice of spiritual communalism without subscribing to a religious ethos — he remarked, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

The modern translation of that is “any God who could’ve created as screwed up and complex a race as man would have appreciated it if we wondered if he was even there sometimes.”

But that would be rational. Whining about Comedy Central, for some, is just comforting.

South Park creators hate virgins, paradise

Of all the dumb moves guaranteed to provoke dumb responses, inciting nut-job Muslims to attack the creators of South Park has to rank right up there.

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To the idiot running Revolutionmuslim.com: these are Americans you’re talking about. In the Middle East, perhaps theocratic dipwads can use the threat of violence to scare people into believing/behaving. But over here, it just makes them violent right back.

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In fact, over there it just makes them violent right back, too. The difference is that, thanks to a myriad of concurrent freedoms, people in the U.S. have the right to bear arms. So, look for a nutty Christian to go after a nutty Muslim if the threat ever turns into reality. In fact, I’d say the dude who wrote the post, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, might wanna up his home insurance, because the nuts on the Christian side are just as nutty as he is.

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What these sheep took offense to was a broad parody during South Park’s weekend episode in which major religious “prophets” are lampooned, including Mohammed (peace be upon everyone and all that.) Noting that using his image has led to murders in the past from said orthodox nutjobs, creators Trey Parker (left) and Matt Stone had Mohammed dress up in a mascot-style bear outfit.

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Look, we know you believe in raptures and virgins and one-world caliphates that prepare everyone for some mystical, magical paradise beyond the stars….but you’re a bunch of fruitcakes. There’s no proof other than blind faith behind any of the major religions, and you can deny that until you’re blue in the face, while rational people look on and wonder why anyone would want to become blue in the face.

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The vast majority of South Park’s targets deserve it (including Richard Dawkins, whose sociological ideas we often agree with, but who has the graceful approach of a lame rhinocerous in a glass-blowing factory). Few deserve is at much as Mormons and the Scientologists, because they proselytize more than most. But pretty much all religions get the same treatment, including atheists (really? Creation from nothingness? Physical impossibility. Something had to come first, so call it ‘God’ whether you anthropomorphize the image or not, and get over yourselves.)

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So rather than waste precious air pointing out once again the foibles of orthodox religion, I’ll leave the last few words on this to the unusually astute commentators who posted after a CNN story on the issue:

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From poster Neil: you watch media in the US and in other countries which allow freedom of expression, you will see numerous examples of comments and cartoons (including South Park) wherein the author treats Jesus in a way that the most devout christains would find offensive. That is exactly what was contemplated by the First Amendment to the US Constitutition, which Revolutionmuslim. com seeks the protection of when spewing its hate and thinly-veiled threats but abhors when someone says something that offends.

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From poster Evan:
This was a joke on extremists who use anything as a reason for violence. “You made fun of me, therefore I’ll kill you.” This is not a rational thought process and needs to stop. And I see these same people are asking about how we would feel if they made fun of Jesus. You obviously have not seen the show. They do make fun of Jesus, and every single group you can imagine. That is their point, and you missed it entirely.

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From DaveC:
Mohamed was as insane as was Jesus. Dudes, there is NO GOD. Grow up; this is the year 2010 and it’s time to stop believing there is a magic man in the sky who reads your minds 24/7 and will give you goodies after you die. You have one life to live and it’s on the earth and it’s now. Now run along and live a true life and not the fairy tale of the Bible, or Qu’ran, or The Book of Mormon.

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And the last word, from Bruce Roll:

Personal beliefs are not public facts. All followers of every religion should spend less time memorizing their respective sacred texts and more time studying their religion’s actual history. A religious devotion is no basis for murdering and/or maiming fellow human beings.
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I have had enough of devout extremists threatening everyone’s safety, because a non-believer had the audacity to question their religious beliefs. To me, the three most repulsive words in the English language are Evangelical, Orthodox, and Fundamentalist.

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The United States of America is a democratic republic, not a theocracy. We should stand by our constitutional freedoms and not bow to the will of ignorant religious zealots

Martyrs can’t be wrong

Am I really an atheist? We get such a bad rap this time of year. The hyper-religious claim I can’t possibly be one. Look, they exclaim, you’re eating a Cadbury cream egg!

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Canadian writer Michael Coren has just taken aim at atheists in a piece where he denounces some notable non-believers for questioning the existence of Christ. At first he attempts to rationally debate the authenticity of historical texts written a considerable time after Christ’s death. But then Coren asserts that since so many early Christians were willing to die for their beliefs, their martyrdom must be considered evidence of Christ’s authenticity and that he was indeed the messiah.

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Let’s be clear. Fervent belief in Jesus and the resurrection doesn’t make it any more true than your neighbour’s adamant belief he was abducted by a UFO and anally probed by extra-terrestrials. Does the world really need more young men strapping bombs to their bodies in return for scores of virgins in the afterlife? Thank-you, Mr. Coren, for offering evidence that those girls in heaven exist. (Just to be on the safe side, I think we ought to ban anyone with Coren’s essay on their computers from boarding aircraft.)

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Coren isn’t the only one who equates numbers with truth but he ought to know better. As an atheist, I’m hardly afraid of polls. I don’t wish to slam democracy here, but if the majority was always right, then chocolate eggs would be good for us and Nickelback would be cool.

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I admit I occasionally doubt my atheism. Sometimes I pick up pennies for good luck. And I often catch myself believing that bicycles have souls. Musicians feel the same about guitars. Everybody talks to their cars, especially old, and sputtering about-to-die cars. We coax them up hills with an encouraging, “You can do it, sweetheart!” I do, at least.

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Religious folks say this shows I’m part of the majority which believes in a higher power. Not really. When I really examine the issue, I realize that I’m only projecting human qualities onto inanimate objects. Bicycles and guitars only have souls as far as our hearts are concerned. My mind is rational enough to know better.

And not that it matters to whether it’s true or not, Mr. Coren, but I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

The pope, pedophiles and pragmatic pluralism

There’s a fair body of both social and biological science now to suggest that, however it comes about, most humans are cognitively wired to accept irrational beliefs.

But it often requires a stark level of realism to break through the mental defensive shell erected around that belief, with the end result cognitive dissonance — the emotional quaker a person goes through when they can no longer rationalize having faith in something and suddenly lose its emotional support.

A former mormon bishop once said that realizing his faith was based on lies was like having the world pulled out from under him, like he had no understanding of humanity or his role in it, for months.

Like most intelligent men who are nonetheless capable of becoming captive to faith, he’s happier since living such a strident orthodoxy, although has somewhat lapsed in that he immediately turned to capitalism as a replacement.

People: all systems of faith, economics and politics are created by us. We’re flawed, so none of them are perfect.

The question is how imperfect, or blind to those imperfections, a faithful person is willing to be. This Dallas Morning News article outlines the crisis of faith people around the world are experiencing as it becomes more evident daily that high-ranking Catholics — and quite possibly Pope Benedict himself — helped cover up, or wilfully ignored, years of system child abuse.

This guy, creepy? No way!

The article is crap, replete with specious examples of crises of faith that, regardless of the cause, have long-existed in the church. But the end result is interesting: people don’t lose their faith in a higher power, just their faith in a particular religion.

If you’re a pragmatic pluralist — someone who accepts we’ll likely never understand our origins or which side of the atheism/theism argument is correct — it’s neat to see people realizing they can use the ceremony, community and decency inherent to many moderated religions, and discard the divisive, insulating effects of orthodoxy.

This is not new. Many religions have can thank their lucky starts they embraced religion and reform early on, and consequently are represented by entire congregations of agnostic supporters. For example, there are more than 40 synagogues across North America that are home to “secular humanist judaism,” the practice of elements of the faith, but with an acceptance that religion is created by man in an attempt to understand his origins.

On the judeo-christian front, there’s unitarianism, which is rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition of taking the logical communal lessons from the Bible and applying them humanely …without arrogantly assuming a super being that looks like us (or we like him, six of one, half a dozen of the other) is in charge of everything and created it all.

A few years ago, the author and lecturer Dr. David Wulff told me it all comes down to the same thing: a need for comfort and security.

“In religion, you have a magnet that draws people together: there’s mystery, there’s the promise of a form of immortality, there is hope for solutions to complex problems,” said Wulff.

“A lot of it is very pragmatic. It’s been argued that religion is what we do when there are no real answers left. And you see that reflected all the time: when people are trapped in a mine and there’s nothing the people trying to save them can do, they pray. The fact that it’s so often ineffective doesn’t seem to matter, given the comfort that it brings them.

“I’m thinking back to a study done in the 1970s by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in which they trained interviewers to go into nine congregations and interview members to find out why the church was important to them and what about it was most important.

“And what the people kept saying over and over again was that it was the sense of caretaking, first towards the congregation by the minister, and then between the congregation itself. Whenever one of the interviewers would suggest there was something wrong with the answers, because they didn’t discuss the church’s ‘justification by faith’ doctrine, or God or Jesus, they would remark that there was no better conversation stopper than the actual theological questions.

“So despite the church’s belief that all of these important doctrines, rules, codes and traditions were important, inevitably the congregation wasn’t concerned with that. They were much more concerned with one another.”