Religion
It’s that special time of year, when we celebrate the birth of the Cosmic Jewish Zombie
I was skimming around the blogs and news sites this evening while waiting to hear if Martha Coakley won in Massauchussets, when this post from Riverdaughter made me snort-laugh. She quoted the following Urban Dictionary definition of Christianity:
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever [...]
Jesus who?
This is making me giggle:
Instead, the Christians I’m wondering about are the millions of ordinary, considered followers of a Bronze Age guy named Jesus, a guy who, to my mind, had some pretty specific things to say about the U.S. health insurance industry and its practices.
Who is this Bronze Age Jesus? I [...]
Sorry, I got swallowed by a whale
It was a rough three days, but now I’m back. Covered in stomach juices, it’s true, and far wiser about the digestive tracts of cetaceans than I ever expected to be.
By the way, have you ever read the Book of Jonah? Really read it, in modern translation? It’s a comedy. [...]
Continuing the conversation on Islam
A couple of weeks ago I posted this link to Apostate’s compelling essay, Why Honor Killings Are A Religious Issue. In light of the New Yorker discussion of the extent to which Islamophobia is racist, sassysenora posed the following question:
i agree completely that attacks on Muslims are more than simple racial bigotry. the [...]
Proof of the existence of God (so glad we finally got it sorted!)
From Keith Yandell’s The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1994):
We can now put the view that religious experience provides evidence in favor of [the claim that] God exists along these lines: If one has an apparent experience of God under conditions in which there is no reason to think [...]
Here’s an idea: let’s stop calling it “faith”
The blogosphere is picking up on a story that started coming in over the wires last week: religious vigilantes in Basra have murdered at least 40 women in the past year for various infractions of Islamic law. Typically the victim’s body is mutilated and dumped with a note pinned to it explaining [...]
Our Mother Who Art in Heaven
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this Harris Poll on belief in God, but what intrigues me is the question of God’s gender.
More than a third of respondents think of God as male, while only 1% think of God as female. Most of that 1% is coming from women: 2% of [...]
Personally I think Thor is more plausible than Yahweh anyway
In this amusing interview in Salon, Richard Dawkins discusses why religion is both inane and dangerous. Of course he’s mostly talking about the Abrahamic religions, because as he accurately observes, belief in Apollo and Thor has pretty much died out.
What I’ve been wondering for about 35 years now is why the believers [...]
I hope the next release of Islam will have an irony feature
1. Christian godbag quotes a Byzantine emperor who thought Islam was irrational and violent.
2. Muslim godbags around the world erupt in protest, responding with irrationality and violence (or threats thereof).
A pox on both their houses.
(*By the way, this is the most accessible summary I’ve seen of the Pope’s widely misunderstood [...]
Four flavors of godbagism
According to a new study released by Baylor University, Americans — who are already the most god-sick people in the world, after the Philippines and Vanuatu — actually worship four distinct versions of the Great Godbag in the Sky. Here are the four gods, as defined in the Baylor study (the numbers indicate [...]
