And Jesus said, "In the Hole!"

In Republican Heaven, there will be golf.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Conscience Clause

A Conscience Clause, law in many states, allows a pharmacist to refuse to fill certain prescriptions based on religious or moral reasons. The most obvious example is the pharmacist who refuses to fill a prescription for birth control pills.

So my question to Santa, CVS and Target is, would a pharmacist of a certain religion (we'll call him El Ron, for kicks) be allowed to refuse to fill a prescription for Ritalin, Adderall, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Cymbalta, etc.?

Or would it only be ok to refuse if it was for a female patient?

Ho Ho Ho

Oral Gone Home

Oral Roberts, finally "called home" by God. Um-hmm.

De children ov de night, vhat muzik dey make.

Your Modern GOOP

Palin'nglui deth'panl! Cthulhu R'lymbaugh wgah'nobama fhascist!

All hail the Great Old Ones Party.

Please note that the three stars at the top of the logo have not been altered. In the actual GOP logo, they really are point-down. What can that possibly symbolize?

I'm not sayin'.

I'm just sayin'. That's a bit weird, don't you think?

That Settles It

What do Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, General Douglas McArthur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, The Vatican, various rocket scientists, a former astronaut, a British Air Marshal, and the director of Project Blue Book all have in common?

The last one should give it away - belief in flying saucers piloted by beings from another world.

Why would the government cover this up? Because of the Book of Revelations.

Exclusive Prophecy!!! The Date When Christ Will Return

Using the sign of the cross and a 10-key keypad, I have just calculated the moment of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

5/15/2333 at 11:59:59 PM

To all you end-timers out there, sorry. The Rapture ain't gonna happen in your lifetime.

Might as well pray for the Powerball.

The Coming Apocalypse

...of Evangelical Christianity is predicted. It can't happen too fast, in my not-so-humble unpastorly opinion.

Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

...We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

They tried to recreate a counter culture of shallow instant gratification in Jesus in order to attract young people into the movement, not realizing that they were targeting young people most attracted to messages of shallow instant gratification. They built their house upon the sand of Stryper!

I have long been disturbed by those commercials for Christian rock band compilation CDs, where you see thousands of kids with their hands in the air and their eyes closed singing along to bad music by crappy bands who couldn't cut it in the real music industry. "My God is an Awesome God"? Teh! Like, totally, d00d. My mom won't let me go to a concert unless its a Christian band.

And do these kids have any idea why they lift their hands when they pray? Or why were they taught to pray "in Jesus name"? Because God won't answer your prayer unless you assume teh correct magical pose and recite teh correct magical phrase.

This, dear children, is paganism wrapped in WWJD shoestrings. I'd rather be an honest pagan than pretend I'm a monotheist who prays to one God in the name of another God for the blessings of a third God. But I suppose you can't build a vibrant cultural movement on a bunch of boring history and theology, especially when a good three-quarters of it contradicts or undermines your political message.

Evangelical Christianity fails not because it attached itself to conservative politics, but because it has only ever been about conservative politics. The main goal of Evangelical Christianity, often stated in various forms by its leaders, has always been to assume absolute temporal political power, to replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments. Jesus has only ever been a message vehicle for the movement, and that's why the writer above says that they have raised a generation of useful idiots. Evangelical Christianity didn't exactly fail. It succeeded in what it set out to do.

The problem is, now they've got an army that only knows how to fight one battle. They thought they were Patton. Turns out they're McClellan.

Not Who You're Looking For

Recently this website received a hit on the search term "pastor Jeff Crook."

I am not a pastor. Just so there's no confusion.

Now go and sin no more.

Don't Be Fooled

Maybe you've gotten an email warning you that the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton are preparing to push through ratification of a 90's era UN treaty on children's rights which will:

• prohibit children from being spanked or homeschooled
• allow children to choose their own religion while parents would only have the authority to give their children advice about religion
• give the government the ability to override every decision made by every parent if a government worker disagreed with the parent's decision
• allow a child to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed
• make it illegal for a nation to spend more on national defense than it does on children's welfare

Much of this "information" comes from a website called ParentalRights.org.

Funny thing is, if you actually read the treaty, it says none of these things. You will also find out that this 90's era treaty was actually written and passed by the UN during the administration of George H. W. Bush, not Bill Clinton. In fact, the treaty protects the rights of individuals to home school, rather than abolishing it (Article 29, pt. 2). In fact, most of the rights guaranteed by this treaty are already current US law, and in many respects it is a reflection of the rights enshrined in our own Bill of Rights.

ParentalRights.Org is registered to the Home School Legal Defense Association, which is a conservative organization that takes stands on issues often not related to home schooling, such as advocating for the nomination of John Ashcroft and in opposition to the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Religious Liberty Protection Act. Not all homeschooling organizations are entirely happy with the dominant role HSLDA has assigned itself.

So why would a homeschooling organization attack a UN treaty that is clearly no threat to homeschooling? I honestly don't know. But before you buy into their frightening story of UN troopers kicking down your door, consider what they don't mention in their 20 Things You Need to Know, items that aren't current US law but would become US law if this treaty were ratified.

Things like:

• Article 18, pt.3 would guarantee child-care services as a right to all children
• Article 24 would mandate health care as a right for all children and pregnant mothers
• Article 27 would establish a minimal standard of living as a basic right of all children, and mandate government-paid child support for poor families, especially in regard to nutrition, clothing and shelter

Whose political agenda is opposed to these things? And why sound the alarm now, when this treaty has sat unratified by the US Senate since 1989? Maybe because President Obama and Secretary Clinton support it?

The UN document speaks for itself. The United States and Somalia are the only two countries not to sign on. Signing it would largely be a symbollic gesture. The treaty is about protecting children from abuse and neglect, not what HSLDA would have you believe. But ratification of the treaty could be used to open the door to healthcare, daycare and minimal standards of living for all children. And we can't have that.

In the Beginning was the Preacher, then Came the Word

If I'm reading this right, religion serves an important social function by establishing nonviolent relationships of dominance and submission through use of religious language, specifically, statement of belief. By signalling your willingness to believe in something that cannot be proven, i.e. faith, you signal your submission to the leader making these supernatural claims. No wonder Paul placed so much emphasis on faith, as it really is the glue that binds the church together. So belief statements are a sort of litmus test, indicating whether you are willing to surrender your better judgment or say you believe something you know isn't true, just to be part of the group, sort of like a psychological gang initiation.

So religion is the human version of wolves biting each other in the mouth and chimpanzees bending over.

Therefore, it stands to reason that religious wars happen because once the leader has established his dominance through the "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes" method, he cannot allow his followers to see that another group is unwilling to accept his supernatural claims, even if they are not a direct threat to his group's welfare, because their failure to believe his bullshit is a threat to his leadership.

Religions are only outwardly tolerant of one another when they are forced to co-exist by a higher power, such as a secular government. Left to their own devices, they must tribalize and conflict in order to survive. Different beliefs are, by definition, a direct threat to the cohesion of the group.


So take something like belief in UFOs or Bigfoot, which can become a sort of religion for some. I have long been baffled by the leaders of UFO groups who will ruin any compelling evidence they may have by making further completely outrageous and unproveable claims, thus destroying their own credibility and the credibility of all their evidence. The above language theory would go a long way toward explaining such apparently self-destructive behavior. Although they may outwardly be trying to prove their case, their primary motivation is to establish leadership and attract loyal followers. So proving to the world that UFOs are real is secondary to marking your territory and expanding your harem.


This would also explain the last eight years in America.

A Theological Question

Do you think God condemns the bonobos to chimpanzee hell because of their licentious greeting rituals? Or are they merely acting the way God made them?

And if so, why is God pleased with uninhibited hairy monkey humping but offended by uninhibited hairless monkey humping?

Maybe what really offends God is hairlessness, not uninhibited humping.

Yes, I know bonobos aren't monkeys. They're apes. Here are some more apes - the truly offensive kind.

'Nother Sign O' the End Times

The Vatican says belief in aliens is cool with them. No problemo.

Hmmm, I wonder why.