6 posts tagged “god”

As most of you know, I never really got the whole religion thing.  When my grandmother tried to teach me to pray, I thought she was talking to her invisible friend Jesus.  I was never convinced by the idea that there was some invisible all-seeing, all-knowing entity watching what I did.  I spent a lot of time when I was younger trying to figure it out.  As though it were just some complex word puzzle I needed to think about.  Eventually, I accepted that I don't have whatever gene is required to believe in God.

Still, I'm fascinated by religion and by news stories about religion.  This one really caught my eye: Episcopal Minister Defrocked after Converting to Islam.

Wha?

So, quick run-down.  She's been an Episcopalian minister for more than 20 years.  Not just an Episcopalian, but a Minister.  A couple years ago, she went to an interfaith hooziwhatsit, heard an imam doing the call to prayer and BLAMMO!  Next thing you know, old Jed's a Muslim. Only, she's also still a pastor in a Christian church.  She continues to be both for a couple years, until at last, the Episcopalian Nabobs (or whatever the guys in charge are called) decided she can't be both.  They yanked off her stole and kicked her to the ecclesiastical curb.

Now she says she can simultaneously be both a Christian and a Muslim, but I wonder what everybody else thinks about it.  I mean, is it like me being both a Democrat (in my voting habits and my feelings about "social values") and a Republican (in my voter registration and my feelings about guns and actual fiscal conservatism)?

Or is it completely different?  She claims that the Christian god and the Muslim god are the same god, which I don't know if that's true.  Who gets to decide that?  The Episcopalians, however, say that Jesus is the son of god.  I know Muslims revere him as a prophet, although not as important a prophet as Mohammad, but they don't think he's their god's son, right?  So, is she basically playing Garanimals with religion, like the Jews I know who eat shrimp?  Or the Christians I know who are all about the smiting and not so much into the turning the other cheek?  Just playing mix and match?  Or is this something more sinister, like being a member of the KKK and then joining the Black Panthers?

And what will this do for recent efforts to promote, yanno, interfaith understanding?  I mean, if your minister's in danger of jumping ship to a different religion, do you really want him/her to attend an interfaith hooziwhatsit?  If you're the leader of a religion, do you really want your minions to hang out with minions of other religions? 

Also, how long can a joke be a joke before it becomes a religion?  I mean, how long until the Pastafarians start attending interfaith hooziwhatsits?  What about atheists?  Can I be an atheist and a Hindu?  'Cause I dig Ganesh, but I don't really believe in god.  Is that a problem?  Or is that why Unitarian churches exist?

So many questions... 

I readily acknowledge that at least 50% of all the people on this planet are not particularly bright.  I used to think that of the other 50%, about half of us were crazy.  Since the internet really took off, however, I am rapidly revising my original crazy assessment upward. 

You know how I like to carouse the internet, looking for weirdness--it's one of my callings, like a kind of ministry of weirdness.  Hallelujah.  (Remember Tom Selleck? Or Ted Bundy = Israel?)  Recently, I found this crazy website.  It is primarily a message board where people can post what they consider "prophecies" of the future.  What struck me immediately was that a lot of the people posting on this site described their prophecies as having come to them in dreams. 

I've had a lot of crazy dreams, including ones in which the whole planet was destroyed by a crazy government plan to harvest geothermal energy.  I had a dream where a certain someone who shall remain nameless was assassinated.  I once dreamed that George Harrison had a sex-change operation and married Prince Charles, although maybe that was just an unflattering dream about Camilla.  My people, what can I say?  I have dreamed some crazy things.  Not once, ever, have I woken from a crazy dream and thought to myself: I bet that's going to come true.  That's a prophecy!

Of course, if as Anonymous claims, there's going to be "a catastrophic eruption of lava in central-Northwest- USA on September 29th, 2007.  MILLIONS WILL DIE,"  I'll apologize for having mocked Anonymous.  Unless I'm one of the millions killed.  Oh, and Anonymous suggests that you "PREPARE YOURSELVES."

(And speaking of Larry King, did you see the headline about Paris Hilton saying God had a plan for her in jail.  So, great, even God is riveted by the Paris Hilton story?  We got people being beheaded in Baghdad, people drowning in Texas, and God's busy making plans for Paris Hilton?  Does she think the hierarchy of wealth and fame goes all the way to the top?  My anger over this all goes back to my original instincts that I wouldn't have anything against the idea of God, if so many people who claim to believe in God didn't have completely insane ideas about their deities.)

I am an internet explorer (no, not the software).  I cruise around in the obscure corners of the web, looking for oddities.  Remember the one about Jesus being Tom Selleck?  This one is even weirder:

The folks at Bible Doctrine News would like to present for your consideration, the ways in which Ted Bundy's life is a parallel of the life span of the state of Israel.  See?  I can't make that kind of thing up.  It's too crazy to be fiction.

If you can't quite bring yourself to click on that link, just have a little taste:

Ted Bundy was one of history's most evil domestic terrorists.  A psychopathic necrophiliac and rapist who preyed upon college girls from 1973-75, he was a cold-blooded murderer.  Born a bastard and rejected by his mother, he became the servant of Bel, the ancient god of Babylon. God sent him as a sign of the diaspora, and his life paralleled the birth and rise of the nation of modern Israel.

Not crazy enough for you?  How about that story about the duck who survived being shot and refrigerated for two days.  Here's what Larry Wood--the mastermind behind Bible Doctrine News has to say about it:

The Florida duck survived two near-death experiences in her rise to fame.  Now, with the duck's picture on the weather map, it has become obvious that the angels orchestrated all this.  The duck's rise to fame is somewhat analogous to Nancy Pelosi's.  She became the first woman Speaker of the House this year after the Democrats won the elections.  She was born March 26, 1940, where 26 is for Political Babylon and 40 is for maximum divine discipline.  It was Day 86, for the Arab persecution of the Jew.  Her dad was Jewish, but she is Roman Catholic.  Her trip to the terrorist land of Gad in Asia this weekend corresponded to the Florida duck's picture over the Arizona-New Mexico desert and second near-death experience.

I don't want be too harsh on Larry, but I think he's a nutjob of the first degree.  Of course, Larry has a ready retort for me:

For those who have never made the greatest decision of life to accept the free gift of Eternal Life, please go to the Salvation page.  Otherwise, the information presented on this web site will be meaningless.  Those who aren't saved do not have a human spirit and cannot understand Spiritual information.  What's worse, it is foolishness to them.

Yes, it is, Larry.  Yes, it is.

*shit.  Censoring myself so people can read at work

You can't make shit like this up, people.  As someone who  has quite a bit of personal and professional experience with making up unbelievable shit, I'm telling you that what is about to follow could only exist in the non-fiction world.  No self-respecting fiction publisher or editor would let a thing like this fly.

A few days ago I happened across a post by Miss Scotch about her exciting days as an English tutor for the child of some Italian yoga Hindu cultists.  She posted a picture of their guru that got me started on one of my random internet searches.  That random internet search brought me here: Woman Thou Art God, The University of Mother God Church, presented by its one true prophet, Rasa Von Werder. 

I like having a little fun with religion, and cults are even more fun than mainstream religions, but sometimes...sometimes you don't have to do anything to make a cult funny.  In fact, in some cases, parody is redundant.  (Take Landover Baptist--it isn't a bit funnier than the real Baptist churches it mocks.)

In detailing her many visions and conversation with Jesus (and several other historic religious figures, this is what the website of  Woman Thou Art God has to say:

In 2002 Rasa dreamed about being married. This always means Jesus because Jesus has actually betrothed her with three rings in 1978, and married her in a mystical experience in 1982. In this dream, she's looking at her husband who is standing next to a fireplace. He is dressed in black, and He is Tom Selleck, suddenly she is shocked because she has not really seen her husband so beautiful as if she was blind before. The next scene he is on top of her making love, she knows his penis is inside of her but there is no feeling of grossness...only a feeling a divine love.

That's right, folks, Jesus appeared to her as Tom Selleck.
Here is what Rasa has to say about why Jesus appeared as Tom Selleck:

By the way, Jesus rarely appears rarely looking like the long-haired, robed person in classical art. He appears as we said, as the most handsome, sexiest man that Rasa can conceive of. Handsome and sexy means beauty, and God is beauty. On the other hand, the devil is ugly, and when he appears he is always ugly except in rare cases when he tries to fool you with outward appearance and appears attractive, but there is a sinister feeling to his looks.

Thanks, crazy lady, because regular religions don't already stress the "evil is ugly and ugly is evil" theory.  You're really breaking new ground here.  Had enough?  Me neither, let's read on:

There is a saint named Baba Muktananda that Rasa has had the closest relationship with, next to Jesus.  [One] night, [Baba] was on top of her and he was transmitting the lotion of consciousness into her being. She didn't feel anything like sex or penis, but his being on top was a symbol and a sign that he was downloading grace into her. Another time he appeared as Jean Claude Van Damme, one of Rasa's favorite stars and yet another time as the star from "The Highlander" -another super-handsome man.

Or how about Mohamed came to her in a dream as David Hasselhoff, and he was naked, holding two puppies.  Like this:

Alright, that last one, I made that up...and yet it is not as wacky as the real stuff.  Oh, and to Crixpy or Christina L'Estrange, whoever you are, who originally brought this photo to my attention: you need help.

Perhaps the bizarre part is that beyond all the total fruit and nut religious visions and spiritual sex, the website has some interesting articles on women's empowerment issues, like breastfeeding and polygamy.  

...and religion goes home crying to his mom about what a bully science is.

I went to see Richard Dawkins speak at the university last night. It was a full house, and arriving 5 minutes before the talk was set to begin, we ended up with nosebleed seats, mostly surrounded by students. As Dawkins is a rather famous evolutionary scientist and infamous atheist*, lots of people have expressed surprise that he came to Kansas, primarily because they are unaware that Lawrence is a little blue island in a sea of red.

The most interesting and compelling parts of Dawkins’ lecture have to do with applying simple logic to the question of biological development. Too often, he observes, if science cannot immediately answer a question on some biological complexity, religion is quick to step in and say, “Well, it must be the work of God then.” As though there are only 2 possible answers. What he calls the “default” answer is what gets people into the faux debate about evolution. If Darwin’s theory can’t easily or readily explain natural selection so everyone with an 8th grade education can understand it after a 2 minute explanation, the default answer is God. Don’t understand natural selection? It must be God. (Familiar? Don’t support the War on Terror? You must be a terrorist.)

Dawkins’ main concern is a valid one—that children in America are being indoctrinated, not educated. I got to see that first hand, sitting next to a couple of students, who were forced to attend the lecture, and did not enjoy it. I sat right next to a prime sample of religious indoctrination.

Perhaps because of the size of the audience, but most likely because of the propensity for people to overtalk, the organizers didn’t offer a microphone for questions at the end. Instead, everyone received a little card prior to the talk, on which to write a question. When question writing time came, I couldn’t help but read the question of the student sitting to my right. Throughout the talk, he’d fidgeted in his seat and muttered vague sounds of indignation and disgust to his other neighbor.

(The two had come into the auditorium together, but in true Kansas small-town fashion, they’d left a seat between them. As the place filled up, they’d been forced to scoot together, leaving them both on high fag-rebuttal status, leaning away from each other, careful not to let their knees touch.)

At any rate, here is what my totally-not-gay student neighbor wrote on his card: How can you prove you have a brain, since you can’t see it?

It took a great deal of restraint on my part not to lean over and say, “Hey, retard, we have this thing called an MRI. Let’s us look inside peoples’ skulls. It’s a scientific advance.”

sigh If you have many religious friends, you’ll recognize where Mr. Not-Gay’s question comes from. That’s right, he didn’t even have the religious indignation to write his own question—he plagiarized it from a rather popular Christian indignation/Atheist “mockery” e-mail that has made the rounds many times over the last few years. I put mockery in quotes, because I suppose that’s what the e-mail intends to do, when all it succeeds at is making Christians look rather dumb.

The e-mail goes like this: a grade school teacher tells her kids that God isn’t real, just like Santa and the Easter Bunny. The proof she offers is that you can’t see God. One Christian child in her class oh-so-cleverly retorts that the teacher must not have a brain, because the children can’t see it. Hahahahah! Ha. Ha. The Christian who sent me the Hurricane What? e-mail also sent me this e-mail.

*Actually, I’d go so far as to say that Dawkins is an untheist, a word I coined to describe my own feelings about God and religion. It’s not so much that I simply don’t believe in an omniscient, omnipotent alien overlord. It’s more that the very idea of such a monstrous construct deeply offends me. I don’t disbelieve, I oppose theism, sometimes with a good deal of vitriol. Dawkins is in a similar frame of mind, and in addition to showing how religion has very little to offer the rational mind, he also took a few potshots at religion, including dismissing any suggestion that one need be an expert in “theology” to prove it ill-suited to explain most anything. He pairs up science and religion with astronomy and astrology. One seeks to explain things through observation and research. The other seeks to make a science of ignorance and superstition.

Richard Dawkins will be on The Colbert Report tonight. Hijinks will surely ensue.

Now the Danish Embassy in Syria is on fire. You have to love the Danes, who in their calm, rational way have declined to apologize for the Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed. The basic rationale for declining to apologize: as the Danish government doesn’t control the contents of a free press, it cannot apologize for those contents. Wow. A free press. Wish we had one of those here in the U.S.

To be clear: I have not seen these cartoons, and so cannot accurately comment on the specifics of the offense many Muslims seem to be feeling, but my basic understanding of Islam is that any depiction of Mohammed would be offensive. Even if he were shown kissing a baby or petting a little lamb, rather than with a bomb in his turban. As no one actually knows what Mohammed looked like (because it is forbidden to depict him graphically), if one simply claims that any given picture is a rendering of Mohammed, that would be true. Am I wrong here? Is this, or is this not a picture of the prophet Mohammed and his trusted horse Pokey?

Well, it is if I say it is. I haven't decided yet. It might be Mohammed.
Or maybe these are Mohammed Pez dispensers. Adorable, and so tasty. Allahu akbar.

Right now, the people clearly holding Most Crazy Religious Nutjob status are the wacko Muslims who’ve just lit the Danish Embassy in Syria on fire. But moving up into second place is the Vatican. What a surprise.

"The right to freedom of thought and expression ... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers," the Vatican said.

Whoa. Wait, just a cotton-pickin' minute. My freedom of expression doesn’t give me the right to offend believers? Well, hell.  I guess, for all intents and purposes that means I don’t have any freedom of expression. I estimate I spend about half my time saying things that would offend the average believer…and the fanatical believer…well, if one were around to hear me, it’d probably be wall-to-wall offense from morning ‘til night. Because I work at a church, I crack wise about Jesus all the time, but if I worked at a mosque, I gotta admit, Mohammed would be the butt of my jokes.

So, my applause to the Danish government for holding the line against madness. I hope they keep it up, even if every Danish embassy in every Middle Eastern country goes up in flames. It’s so amazing to witness a government that actually believes in freedom of expression, instead of one which merely pays lip service to it.

To the religious nutjobs, who think my life needs to revolve around their Cosmic Muffin and his one true prophet Bran (or the Cosmic Muffin, the Pancake, and the Holy Whiff of Powdered Sugar), well, have another heaping dose of my contempt.

Let’s think about this: if the main tenet of Islam required all true believers to go around with their left forefingers stuck up their noses, would the rest of us be obliged to do the same so as to avoid offending said true believers?