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.

Why fluffy is God

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It was Gary Cooper’s last line at the end of “Sgt. York” when he returned home from WWI and found the government had built him a brand new farmhouse. The Lord was rewarding him for ignoring “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and picking off 25 Germans with an American Enfield rifle. Mysterious for sure.

You may be wondering why the Lord is good to your neighbour considering all the sins you’ve observed him committing through your binoculars. How do you unravel the Lord’s mysterious ways without professional help? Where do you find Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby in the Yellow Pages? So many questions.

The answer, friends, to God’s mysterious behavior is so alarming that you’d better make sure you’re in a calm, safe place before reading any further. Are you safe. OK, good. God isn’t really as smart as everyone makes Him out to be. Don’t believe it? Why else would he make genitals so vulnerable and logs accross rivers so slippery?

Essentially, God is like your cat. He quietly prowls around and pounces when he finds prey. It’s the luck of the draw who he gets and he loves to play with his catch. The more you struggle, the more fun Whiskers and God have. So take my advice — if God has you under his paw, play dead and scramble under the sofa when he gets bored and starts licking himself.

God, like your cat, is also mostly interested in who is feeding him. If God is rewarding a Toyota executive with a pool full of bikini hotties while punishing you with chemotherapy, think feline. Have you fed God a fish lately? You could win God’s favour by emptying your bank account into a collection plate, but remember that like cats, God is fickle. He may scratch your face in bed the morning and ignore your snoring partner because he knows you are the one who provides the Tender Vittles.

Cat worship died out in ancient Egypt, I think, because it was too scary. Bad, bad things happen in the world and it’s much more comforting to believe there is a guiding force like God giving it order and justice. But there isn’t any justice when it comes to earthquakes, birth defects or gas chambers. Still, most people would rather blind themselves to reality and explain “God’s” actions as being “mysterious.”

Shitty things happen in the universe for no good reason. Cat worship is actually more logical than current religions when you think about it.

Faith, hope and character assassination

You’ve heard the phrase “playing to his base”?

Basically, it means pandering to the voters who got you where you are, giving them a message they want to hear. Given how much of pandering to a base on either side of the political spectrum is dependent on the ignorance and fear of said base, it’s definitely one of democracy’s shortcomings — especially when that base then demands some follow through.

Take Barack Obama’s Muslim ties, for example.

Or lack thereof. You’d have to be an idiot at this point to put any stock in the once-heavy rumor mill spiel that the U.S. president was actually a Muslim with a fake birth certificate. (In fact, you’d have had to have been an idiot at pretty much any time to believe it, but I digress.)

However, a recent study demonstrates just how easily swayed people are when a rumour matches their pre-existing bias — bias really being a nice short word for “orthodox belief”. It’s the same in religion, politics, chocolate consumption, you name it. We gravitate to the tribe that seems most like us, whether in thought or appearance (although, as often as not, not in deed), unless we possess enough social intelligence to inject humility into the debate and admit that our own lack of knowledge and foresight is worth heeding when making a decision.

Whether a message has any basis in rational thought  has really nothing to do with the equation for many, many people. If Rush Limbaugh tells them Obama is a Muslim, he may as well have been born on Mars, for all that reality will matter. Similarly, if Al Gore tells the extreme left that the continental U.S. will flood within a decade due to global warming, who are they to instead believe the thousands of climatologists who, while fearing the consequences of climate change, are somewhat more restrained?

In the Obama study, a researcher quizzed people on their knowledge or belief in Obama’s faith over the course of three months. Despite extensive media coverage demonstrating conclusively that Obama wasn’t secretly born overseas and a Muslim, after three months of new information, the same 20% that believed he was at the start still did so by the end of the study. They want to hate the guy and will simple accept anything that lets them do so.

When questioned on the lack of evidence to support the claim, cognitive dissonance kicks in and, rather than face the discomfort of challenging their own beliefs, they’ll react with a tangential argument, perhaps something about ruining health care or hiring death squads or whatever other political nonsense is being dreamed up today.

That’s faith for you.

Oh, you mean THAT God, the guy from Milburn St…..


In a brilliant and insightful moment, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has decided “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t violate the separation of church and state because…it’s not about God.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the court  considers the phrase patriotic, not religious, according to Judge Carlos Bea.

“The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our republic was founded,” he wrote in his decision, apparently missing the part wherein the Pledge of Allegiance was written 116 years after U.S. independence. In fact, the Founding Fathers were pushing 180 years old or so by the time Francis Bellamy wrote the piece in 1892.

Genius, Aunt Bea, sheer genius. Wanna bet two of the three justices are devoutly religious?

The third, the apparently quite sane Judge Stephen Reinhardt, noted in his dissent that the recitation of the pledge of allegiance in schools, which started in 1954, was “designed to promote religion and to indoctrinate schoolchildren with a religious belief.”

By that point, it’s worth noting, the Founding Fathers were pushing age 240.

Anyway, the Ninth court also said “In God We Trust” can stay on money for the same reason, because the language is “patriotic and ceremonial.” (Under the “no shit sherlock” clause of the constitution, it’s worthing pointing out that pretty much everything religious is “patriotic and ceremonial.”)

Incidentally, the phrase didn’t land on coins until 1864, when it was added to reflect “strong Christian sentiment” regarding the civil war. (At which point, the Founding fathers were a relatively spry 150 or so, on average).

Had they been smart, they would’ve listened to the Founding Fathers on the subject of faith. Or, as ol’ Tom Jefferson once declared, “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.”