Today’s reading, which serves and protects the people of the city, is from Luke 15, Genesis 27.1-45 and Psalm 20. I’m pretty excited about it, not because I expect anything from this ridiculous book, but because I’ve been a few days out of the loop and am glad to be getting back on the ole’ horse.

The snooty people are mad because Jesus eats with sinners. Isn’t it a basic pillar of their faith that everyone’s a sinner? So if Jesus didn’t eat with sinners… Well, let’s just say that mealtimes would be pretty dull.

Next, we get one of my childhood favorites, the story of the Prodigal Son. We all know it, son gets his inheritance, goes off and pisses it away on hookers and blow, comes home, and dad welcomes him back with loving arms. The good son who had stayed behind and worked is jealous, and dad says to him, “Of course I am giving him a month’s free service, for he is once again a new customer, but if we gave all of our customers a free month, we would be bankrupted and you would have no cellular service at all!” Okay, that’s not what the dad said, but clearly a lot of service companies are taking this story way too much to heart. I don’t know why this story bugs me. I have written three different paragraphs about this that I deleted, but something about it really doesn’t sit well with me. Weird.

Our Genesis reading is the story of how Jacob fucked his brother out of everything. At the behest of his mother, Jacob lied to his father and confused him into thinking that he was Esau, and thus received the “You’re my guy” blessing that assured him that he would rule over Esau and the rest of the family. This is a dick move, and the Bible paints him as a dick. Interestingly, the Muslims think Jacob was just the swellest, but I haven’t read the Koran as yet, so I can’t really comment on that. Either way, it’s the story of a jerk acting like a jerk and getting away with it. Y’know, cuz there are no takesies-backsies with blessings…

Our Psalm is of a theme that I have read regularly, and that is the appeal to God to help us win victories. I find this notion absolutely laughable. There are just too many stories of God simply not doing this, of his letting the devoted and prayerful succumb to others. I suppose one could argue that this is one of those “strange ways” that he likes to work in, but one could also argue that there is no God to hear these pleas or care about the creations that utter them.

This Bible thing… it sure is confusing. It’s supposed to tell us about God’s power, but all I see is his lack of intervention in the lives of those who beg him loudest for help. It’s supposed to be a moral compass, yet it shows the great successes of the immoral like Jacob. Everything that it’s claimed to stand for falls when you read it, so why do we still embrace those claims?

Jim

Of course, I already knew that. I don’t know what the global proportions are, but I have a feeling on the global scale, the number of purist believers is higher than the regular believers, but here in My Home Town, I’m fairly certain that isn’t the case. Those people certainly represent less of a problem than those loud and outspoken souls who would like our chidren to learn both sides of the manufactroversy around the origin of life, but those people shouldn’t take what I say on the topic too much to heart. When I’m laughing at the Old Testament or the literal word, and they happen to be the words you’ve decided aren’t important, then I’m not laughing at you.

But once you accept that some of the Bible is without merit, I want to know where you draw the line. Recent experiments have shown us that the God we believe in is determined in large part by the way we view the world. As such, you can find in the Bible (or any other so-called holy text) the justification that shows God to be exactly what you want him to be. But what do you do with all of the other bits? Dismissing them as eroneous seems like a cop-out.

It’s like those people who go to see a psychic, and the psychic sprays out thirty different things that are going to for sure OMG happen to them. 28 of those don’t come to pass, but two of them did. They focus on the two that did. The thing about prophecy is that on a long enough timeline, you start to see patterns that match the prophecies. Remember when the two brothers of Nostradamus (or whatever the hell they were) represented John and Bobby Kennedy? Now they supposedly reference the Twin Towers. You would think that a prophecy that can refer either to two Irish rum runners who ascended to the upper echelons of politics or to two giant stone buildings that housed some of the most successful economists of the modern time would make for a prophecy that nobody buys, and yet there are plenty who will gladly accept it.

In the words of the theme song to that from-my-childhood sitcom The Facts Of Life, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life. But religion (and all magical thinking) doesn’t work this way. If one guy drinks the homeopathic remedy and his skin looks better and another guy drinks it and his doesn’t, we like to disregard the second guy and promote the story of the first. But that isn’t real, is it?

I’m a bit all over the place on this, but that’s because this seems to happen everywhere. I’m not pretending to be immune to it, I’m just pointing out where I see it. We expect this behavior from politicians who say one thing when they are the opposition and another when they are the leadership. Why do we allow it from our churches? We can’t simply pick and choose the theology that fits our self interests and disregard the rest. Either the Bible is a book of divine truths or it isn’t. Either a remedy holds a reasonable chance of success or it doesn’t.

I get, though, that this isn’t how the world is. People will go to church and embrace the loving God and ignore the fact that this loving God condemns people to die, hates damn near every one of us, and encourages all manner of evil. It’s how they get through. But when I comment on the stuff you don’t happen to believe in and you get mad at my lumping you in with the evangelicals, understand this: I do it because you fit with them.

In my opinion, religion is dangerous. Any kind of dogma is dangerous if it cannot be held up to scrutiny. It doesn’t matter how absolutely you hold your religions or philosophies, what matters is that you accept them, even a little bit. It’s one thing to say “There’s some good stuff in the Bible amongst all the horrible stuff” and another entirely to say “There’s some good stuff in the Bible that is the word of God, but it’s surrounded by all the horrible stuff that we should just disregard”.

At its core, religion is a means of segregating. Your opinions are not yours, they come to you from God, and anyone who doesn’t share them is in for some trouble.

I remember when I got a call from my ex-wife informing me that she had received a complaint from one of our kids’ school claiming that the child had said something antisimetic. This is not okay with me, so I dug deeper. It turns out that she was listening to grandpa tell her about how Christians get to go to Heaven. She asked about non-Christians, and he said that God would not let them into heaven. She’s a smart kid, and she put her two and two together, then went to school in a panic the next day to save her friend, a Jewish girl. What she said, which was essentially “You have to start believing or you’re going to burn in Hell!” was absolutely discriminatory, and founded on that simple aspect of the Christian faith; if you don’t believe, you don’t get saved.

So it doesn’t matter to me how evangelical, how fundamental, how liberal, or how passive your faith is. You immediately judge me for my lack of faith, and you find me to be a worse person than you. That is unacceptable to me, and I’m not going to make excuses for you. You engage in cognitive dissonance as much as works for you, but please do not ask me to do it for you. You may not believe in the bad stuff or the stupid stuff, but in my eyes, it’s all bad and stupid.

Jim

Now, I accept that people are going to make alterations to language. I’m no linguistic historian, but I assume that language has always shifted shape to accommodate common conventions, slang, and the like. It disgusts me that D’oh is in the dictionary, but I’m clearly not Noah bloody Webster (or Nelly American Heritage for that matter) so I don’t get a say in the process. And I also know that when I was a kid-through-teen, I had all kinds of ridiculous words flop eerily from my lips, a part of some attempt to be cool and use the common lingo.

Still, I hate the way people, particularly teenaged girls, talk these days. And it started with my own daughter. When The Spazz came to live with me, she used the word epic. She had no idea what epic meant, just that it was a word that meant “cool”. This is odd, thought I. I have read several epics, and most of them were not cool at all. I’m looking at you, Homer. I tried to explain to her what epic meant, and she looked at each of my three heads with equal disdain. Clearly, despite being the coolest person on earth, I’m an epic lame to my daughter.

Then she began to play with the word. I’m sure she didn’t do it on her own, and am nowhere near claiming that any of the creations were hers, but she settled on epical and epicalness. The epicalness of my lasagna, for example, was epic. I cringed myself to sleep.

And then I overheard girls talking on the bus. This is their conversation:

Girl 1: OMG [she actually said Oh-Emm-Gee] so this like random guy the other day just like randomly walked up to me and was randomly asking me things.

Girl 2: LOL [in this case, she said lol, as in the short if lollipop] that is so weird.

Girl 1: I know, right? He was so random, and he kept just like randomly asking these random questions, so I was like, “Uh, bro, you’re random” and he had like nothing to say.

Girl 2: That’s so random!

Random. It’s a perfectly sensible word. As a computer geek, I understand random. Hell, as a guy who has been kicked in the slats by life more times than is necessary, I have a good understanding of random. These girls? They did not. And I wanted to sell them to a random slaver who would randomly send them to some random country to live with a random dude who randomly beat them with random weapons. Epically.

I understand the spastic nature of pubescent children. I get that their codes are used for both inclusion and exclusion. I get that this is how they are wired. But still, it pisses me off.

So please, obnoxious children of the world, if you are going to take an already existing word and turn its meaning into something you can comprehend (but that is utterly wrong), wait until I have my headphones in. I just can’t stomach listening to your blather.

Jim

But the point is, sometimes we get funny politicians, guys who know how to push the right buttons to get their point across, and that’s just what the fine people of Virginia have in Janet Howell.

Virginia’s state senate are discussing putting through a bill that requires women to have mandatory ultrasounds before they can abort, because the situation isn’t already horrible enough, and they’d rather torment women while they are down. Senator Howell felt it was unfair that men don’t have needless medical procedures tacked on to their health checks, so she put in an amendment that sadly was voted down by the bloody close vote of 21 to 19, that would require men to have a rectal exam and cardiac stress test (probably not at the same time) whenever they wanted to get a prescription for dick hardeners like Viagra.

I’m not kidding.

All I can say is hat’s off to Senator Howell. There is no necessity to adding an ultrasound, it is intended as a way to dissuade those who could possibly be dissuaded and to slap the faces of those who could not. It is a bullying law, and it is totally without merit. The opponents of the bill have made their case in this respect, but Howell chose a more interesting and (hopefully) effective approach in terms of opening eyes.

That totally brightened up my day…

Jim

Today’s reading, which is soft on hands while you wash dishes, comes from Luke 14.25-35, Genesis 26 and Psalm 19. Oddly, after the last edition’s Psalm, I’m almost feeling like they may be turning a corner. I know that the 23rd Psalm is around the corner, and I remember liking that as a kid. Then again, I remember liking Jesus and not seeing how big a jerk he was, so maybe that was just brainwashing…

This Luke reading is really disjointed. He starts off insisting that everyone love him more than anything else, like family or friends, and then he starts in about how people would go about building a tower or determining if a war was worthwhile. I didn’t get the similarity he was trying to draw, unless it’s that if people don’t love him best, he can’t count on them to be his disciples. Then he says something about throwing away salt that doesn’t taste like salt anymore. Seriously, I have no clue as to what he was trying to explain.

Isaac is his daddy’s son. In this story, he’s married to Rebekah, and because he’s worried that someone might kill him for her, they tell everyone she’s his sister, just as papa before him did to Sarah. This time, nobody marries her, so God doesn’t have to needlessly threaten everyone involved, but why the hell do they do that? I would say that they should have learned Abraham’s lesson, but Abraham got rich off of whoring out his wife to various kings, so maybe Isaac was looking for a little cash money?

Then Isaac’s son, Esau (the one who Jacob ripped off for his birthright) engages in a plural marriage that brings evil to the family. Meh. I don’t care about plural marriage.

Yeah, David wrote this Psalm too, but it’s just a let-down. Lord you are so bloody neat, we really think you’re nifty, and thanks for all the cool stuff you do, man. Lame.

Jim

Today’s reading, which leaves me feeling so cool, so clean, and so fresh, is from Luke 14.1-24, Genesis 25 and Psalm 18. It’s been quite a few of these devoted to Luke, Genesis, and Psalms, and those books all basically feel the same each time.

First, we re-do the “I’m gonna heal people on the Sabbath” trick along with the lesson of pulling Timmy from the well even on a Sunday. Next, Jesus tells us how to employ mock humility to get our way. This is really a surprisingly manipulative part of the Bible, and I hadn’t really expected it much. Essentially, what he says is that as a guest, don’t sit in the best seat because if someone cooler than you shows up, you look like an ass. Instead, sit in the worst seat, so that the host can go, “OMG U R IN RONG SPOT OSSUM GUY CMERE” and make you look like a champ to everyone assembled.

Then Jesus launches into a weird story about a make-believe banquet where all the good friends of the host chose to not come, so the host throws a tantrum and fills his home with vagrants, the sickly, and everyone else he can find. I think we’re supposed to take this as those who turn their back on God, and how God will punish them and reward the lowliest of the low. It’s a lame story, though, because it doesn’t make any sense. A better story would have been to say that he invited rich and poor alike, and when the rich turned their noses up, he cast them out. In this case, all we see is a God who, not getting the people he wanted around, let other people in to punish that first crowd.

Next we get some more exciting lineage-talk! Lots of people had lots of babies, and each of them was nifty times fifty. Great. It’s only in the last section of the Genesis reading that we get any meat (har har), and it’s the story of Jacob and his elder brother, and how Jacob blackmailed Esau to get his rights as first-born son. What a dick.

And finally, the Psalm. This one’s actually kind of neat. It’s was written by King David after he slaughtered a bunch of people in praise of God helping him slaughter a bunch of people. He says, “You are good to me, LORD, because I do right, and you reward me because I am innocent”. That’s a neat thing to say, but I don’t think that slaughtering people and turning nations of people into slaves is the path to innocence. But that’s just me, and we’ve already established that I don’t have that good old fashioned Biblical morality on my side.

Jim

But that just changed.

I hadn’t heard about this, but it turns out that Susan G. Komen for the Cure has pulled its support for Planned Parenthood. Now, you might be thinking that this is a good thing, because the cure has nothing to do with abortions, and that’s all that Planned Parenthood does is hide in the corners waiting for pregnant women they can forcibly abort. But you would be wrong. One of the many services Planned Parenthood provides (and the one that this support funds) is performing breast exams and other related cancer services for free. Here in Canada, I don’t believe the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health provides this function because of our free access to health care, though I could be entirely wrong. But in the US, a lot of poor people have used this service as the only way they can afford to find out if they have breast cancer. That’s kind of a big deal, if’n you ask me.

Now, I don’t have the real details on what went on here, I’m relying on various blog posts like this one, but from what I can gather, it appears that this is the work of religious pressure groups on the right who have been trying hard to destroy Planned Parenthood. Because the organization gives abortions, obviously everything they do is intended to murder innocent babies, and they’ve gone after them (and have, for years and years) in every way they can.

Now, Komen has the right to fund whomever she pleases, and if her personal religious leanings don’t support abortions (I don’t know a thing about her leanings) or her non-profit is being pressured to not support abortions, she has every right to make that choice. Where my disgust comes from is that her money to Planned Parenthood isn’t supporting abortions. It’s supporting a much needed service for the poor which can save lives threatened directly by the cancer that her agency claims to be trying to cure.

Me, I’m a layperson on the whole thing. What I do know is that it looks to me like another religious zealot claiming to be about helping the world, but using their power and authority to undermine women’s health and reproductive rights, and I just can’t get behind that.

So I plan to sink the pink. I will still give the same amount of money as I always have to cancer-related charities, but they won’t be hers. I won’t sponsor people if they want to Race For The Cure, I won’t wear a stitch of pink, and I plan on spreading this to everyone I can. There are other groups who will help us fight cancer, and they won’t throw poor women under the bus for their own religious delusions.

It should be noted, however, that in Canada, Susan G. Komen doesn’t appear to really operate. They do work with the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and have for a couple of years agreed to partner on some programs, but I am in no way saying that we should sink the CBCF.

Jim

This all started with Marc (Boy Infidel, sometimes called Skinnyhead) and me (Big Ugly Jim) sitting over pints talking about our skepticism, our frustrations with the acceptance of religion, alternative medicine, and claims of the supernatural. It was Marc who suggested we start a blog, and the ball was in motion.

Thank you to all of our readers, whether you were here on day 1 or are freshly discovering us. With 966 posts to date, there’s lots to read here, and hopefully we’ve punched some holes in the sacred firmaments of blind faith and unscientific thinking that can prove to be interesting or helpful. Here’s to another 1001 days!

Jim

Today’s reading, which can get the job (but can it do the job, Harry?) comes from Luke 13.18-35, Genesis 24 and Psalm 17. Bring on the bad parables, bad behavior, and bad praise words.

Jesus, ever the yarn-spinner, comes up with not one but two ways to describe the kingdom of God. The first is as a tree that grows out of a mustard seed. This is supposed to imply that it starts small and insignificant, but grows in strength. I’m wondering just how anything about Heaven started small. I mean, God has to fit in it, and he’s pretty freaking big. In the Bible, God creates the heavens and the earth, and you get the impression that the heavens were awful large. So what brings the confusion?

Well, two things. First off, this is just a story. Second, it’s a crap story that doesn’t really relate. Heaven isn’t growing. God hates growth. God only likes the stagnant.

The other story compares the Kingdom of Heaven to yeasty bread. So Heaven rises. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would heaven need to rise? Does it also smell nice? Is it warm? Jesus, help me, I don’t understand!

Next, Jesus tells a weird tale about how a lot of people are just not going to be welcome in heaven. Sure, he’s also said all you have to do is keep the commandments, but the commandments aren’t that bloody easy to keep. Also, if you’re important on earth (like most of the Christian Right), you’re pretty much screwed for a seat in heaven, and you’ll have to just sit there watching Jesus and Abe and Isaac and a whole bunch of other guys having dinner, because God is a dick who didn’t get a big enough apartment in the divorce.

Next, Abe decides to send a servant to buy a family member to be his son’s wife. They just couldn’t get enough inbreeding, could they? Answers a few questions, really… And the servant creates a bloody simple test to find the right woman, who interestingly enough just happened to be the NEXT WOMAN ALONG. He says he’s going to ask for a drink and when someone gives him one and then offers water to his camels, that’s how he’ll know. Really? Beside a water source and all? Using common courtesy? It’s just a freaking miracle!

God damn, Abe. Do we really need to repeat the entire story in the middle of it? I know it’s boring reading, but somehow I manage to absorb what you say without your needing to re-say it, you putz.

Other than that, this section of Genesis is just the story of how Isaac came to be married to Rebekah. There’s nothing particularly interesting to me here. She is given by her parents into an incestuous union with her cousin, traded for some clothing and precious metals, and away they go. It’s ugly to me to imagine that this is how marriage used to work, but that’s probably cultural bias more than anything.

Wow, another boring and unsettling Psalm in the form of a plea for God to smite someone’s enemies. I’ve commented on this so many times in the past, and it always comes down to the same thing: God is my big brother who will beat up bullies for me. Yawn.

Jim

The Christian Marriage designation will be automatically given to anyone presently married who claims to be a Christian, and to all Christians wishing to marry in the future. The Christian Marriage differs from Heathen Marriages because it will follow the teachings of the Holy Bible. This means a few subtle but important changes to their existing relationships:

1. No plural marriages. Sure, the Bible is chock full of marriages that do not conform this rule, such as Abraham’s relationships with Sarah and Hagar, but a modern Christian Marriage is between one man and one woman and that’s final. Mormons wishing to have a disgusting marriage featuring multiple wives may apply for a Heathen Marriage if they so desire.

2. All Christian Marriages will begin with a proper betrothal, wherein the husband-to-be purchases his wife from her father. In the event where a father is unavailable, dowry may be made payable to a suitable male relative or, barring that, to a church official.

3. The woman will, from the point of Christian Marriage onwards, be the chattel of the husband, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of chattel. Her responsibilities will be limited (for her sake) to domestic duties. The man is responsible for providing for his wife.

4. No more divorces. When you were married, you were bound together by God. What God has joined together, let no one separate, and so any current divorces applied to Christians are null and void, and any subsequent marriages are immediately invalidated. Continuing relations with second-or-later spouses for Christian men and women is an abomination that will result in hellfire, as well as legal action in defence of the sanctity of marriage. As well, the previously-divorced couple will now be required to resume their Christian Marriage.

Next, we’ll pass a few more laws. Christian Adultery springs readily to mind, ensuring that any self-professed Christian who has sexual relations (even so much as looking) outside of Christian Marriage shall be punished accordingly. Remember, folks, there’s a great deal of love and wisdom to be found in the Holy Bible, and all we are asking is that Christians, who seem to be quick to hold up their ideal as the definition of marriage, should be allowed to enjoy all that their book commands of them in this and other areas.

For those of us who want a valid marriage that does not involve the domination of the male over the female, permits divorce, and accepts marriages that don’t fit traditional norms, we’ll just have to enjoy our Heathen Marriages.

Jim