While I spend every September 11th being reminded that I shouldn’t forget September 11th, I usually spend September 12th thinking about something else. But while we’re still here – September 11th that is – we should make sure that we make this a September 11th to remember!
Suggested Musical Accompaniment: Faith No More – Land of Sunshine
My undies is tight!
Nothing makes me happier than to know that, on November 2nd 2012, Bible-banging Conservatives will be forced to vote for a Mormon or face another four years of Obama. Of course, many of these Christi-Cons still have no idea what the hell a Mormon is. Therefore, in the interest in education, here are five of the most awesome parts of the Mormon religion.
The actress Donna D’Errico has been searching for Noah’s Ark from the Bible. Apparently she has no friends because none of them stopped her by patiently explaining that the story is a myth and there really wasn’t a worldwide flood. To her credit, she’s actually been looking for it personally and not just coordinating the search of a team of outdoorsy types who snicker at her behind her back because she recently fell off a mountain during her search.
Religious right speaker Jerry Boykin recently claimed that there is “no question” that the US Constitution was divinely inspired and that it cites the Bible four times more than any other document. It’s kind of weird that the authors of the Constitution never bothered to mention that it was divinely inspired. That’s the kind of thing you’d think they might remember, right? Oh, hey you guys, by the way all of this stuff came to me from a ghost… in a dream. Yeah, so there’s that.
And of course the Bible is cited exactly zero times in the Constitution. But since four times zero is zero, Boykin is not completely wrong here. Here’s the video:
A Christian book publisher has answered the question of how much bullshit they’re willing to put up with. The answer lies somewhere between the dishonest apologist charlatan Lee Strobel and the dishonest historical revisionist David Barton.
A British MP is pushing for a ban on this preacher’s scheduled tour of England just because sometimes God tells him to beat the crap out of people to cure their cancer. I guess it’s a kind of touchy subject for that MP since he himself has cancer.
As you’ve probably all heard by now, the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg has finally smoked enough weed to have had a “spiritual experience” in Jamaica, as a result of which he’s changed his name to Snoop Lion and converted to the Rastafari movement. Achievement unlocked!
Since we will probably all be following Snoop Lion on this spiritual journey, it behooves I & I to learn a little about this religion. Here are a few fun facts about the one true religion of the King of Kings and All Living Things.
I follow a lot of dirtbags on Twitter. It’s mostly for LOLz, but every once in a while something interesting pops up. This time it’s from the Westboro Baptist Church.
You know the WBC, right? The “God Hate Fags” people? That one practically incestuous cultish church almost entirely composed of a single family that’s headquartered at a compound in Topeka, Kansas that made headlines a few years ago for picketing the funerals of killed American soldiers? The ones who think the people who kill US soldiers are instruments of God’s wrath, and that we therefore should celebrate when members of the American military come home in body bags? The ones even Sean Hannity thinks are “religious nuts?”
Well, they’ve finally found an institution besides their own church that it turns out God doesn’t hate. Can you guess what it is? Can you? I’ll give you a minute to figure it out.
So I’ve finally gotten my first personalized letter from a serious religious nut. And I don’t mean email or blog comments. No, this is an actual letter that arrived via the US Postal Service in my actual mailbox, printed on real paper in an envelope.
I’ll get to some of the text of the letter later, but it looks like he actually wrote it to me personally. The introductory paragraph refers to some of the stuff I had written about in the Humanism At Large column in the current (June/July) issue of Free Inquiry, which is available at fine bookstores near you. The envelope this guy sent me was forwarded from the Center For Inquiry. I guess he just sent it to their PO Box, and they sent it to me.
So I finally got around to reading Jon Ronson’s second book, Them: Adeventures With Extremists. He’s also the author of The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was made into a mediocre movie a couple years ago.
Atheist Hobos 