Jesus is the Most Dangerous Game
OK, here’s the deal. I’m off celebrating Easter by hunting down the returned Jesus. Beyonce’ and Jay-Z’s demon baby is paying me to kill him so that Christianity will die and our Illuminati Secret Religion can once again rule the world. Since Jesus supposedly spent a lot of time hanging out with prostitutes back in the day, hunting him now involves spending a lot of time in adult entertainment stores. Especially the kind that have private booths you pay for in quarters every 15 minutes.
So long story short, there’s no real column this week. Instead, you get a short list of updates of stories I’ve covered in this space over the past few months.
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The Houston Chronicle covered some of the controversy leading up to a visit by Nigerian witch hunter Helen Ukpabio. The “Lady” “Apostle” herself wouldn’t comment to the paper, but Pastor Godwin Umotong, one of the preachers bringing her in said that his church was “just like any other” because Jesus also cast out demons.
But last year when a NY Times reporter confronted Ukpabio, she compared her movies about demon posession to Harry Potter, hiding behind the claim that all this witchcraft business she talks about is just fiction. Now clearly it is fiction, but Ukpabio only presents it that way when she has to try to defend her kooky beliefs to a secular institution. I don’t think Pastor Umotong would appreciate having his Bible stories about Jesus forcing demons to possess pigs instead of humans compared to Harry Potter.
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I can’t fap to that.
Another story from the very first post in this column was about the Sri Ram Sena planting a Pakistani flag over an Indian government building in order to fuel the conflict between India and Pakistan. Since then there’s been a much more hilarious story coming out of the right-wing Hindu nationalist scene of India.
Three BJP legislators resigned after they were shown watching porn videos during a state legislators’ session. One had the title of Minister for Women and Child Development. Just a few weeks later, two more BJP officials were accused of looking at pornographic pictures on a tablet device during an assembly meeting. Maybe there’s something especially tantalizing about right-wing Indian politics.
It’s more likely though that these are just more examples of how religious zealots project their own sex issues onto everyone else, giving them their justification for trying to stamp out all ‘immoral’ sexuality by law or by vigilantism. Some might remember the BJP popping up in the news a few years ago when they were peripherally involved in attacks on unmarried couples in pubs and attempts to forcibly marry couples out on Valentine’s Day.
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David Coppedge, the creationist who was fired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for pushing his private pseudoscience-promoting business onto coworkers, testified recently in his wrongful termination suit. Heherped and derped about how some of his co-workers posted comics in their offices that were “mocking intelligent design, mocking conservatives, mocking President Bush and mocking traditional marriage.” And that’s is the exact same thing as haranguing everyone you work with about your website after everyone’s already asked you to stop, repeatedly.
A JPL manager also took the stand recently, saying that Coppedge made “sloppy mistakes” which other staff needed to fix. So it’s looking like this is not some eccentric genius who’s so good at his job that his personal shortcomings can or should be overlooked. If the JPL can be faulted for anything, it’s for hiring this guy in the first place.
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Finally, we’ve got a quick update on Jessica Ahlquist, the student who sued her school district over a banner in her school’s cafeteria with a prayer on it. The judge correctly ruled that this violated the separation of church and state and it has since been removed, which has infuriated such cultural luminaries as Meat Loaf.
But when God closes a door which would have led to a promising career as Meat Loaf’s tour manager, he sometimes opens a window which you can crawl out and get, oh, I don’t know, a $63,000 college scholarship. That’s how much the secular community raised, and by my crude understanding that’s probably enough for four years of tuition and some other expenses too.
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Oh yeah, also Donald Trump is an antivaxer. Are you surprised? No. No, you are not.
That’s about it. Now that those loose ends are tied up, we should be back to a regular column next week. Meanwhile I’ve got a lead on this Jesus guy I’ve got to follow up on. Apparently he spends a lot of time in a dive bar rumored to have an S&M sex dungeon as a secret basement.
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Atheist Hobos 