Actor re-enacts Judas suicide as part of play, dies.
File this under "dumbass". What is it with religion, does it suck the brains out of people, or does it simply attract people who are already dumbasses?
-- Badtux the Head-shakin' Penguin
16 Horsepower, "Hutterite Mile", from their 2002 album Folklore.
The Hutterites are a sect of "primitive Christians" that try to live in much the same way as Jesus's apostles depicted in the Bible, who held nothing of their own but lived communally and devoted their lives to following Christ (damned hippies! Why can't they be good God-fearin' capitalists like Jesus Dollar Christ!). Their life is hard and full of questions in the modern world, which they live in more than the Amish, though they and the Amish came from the same basic tradition.
This is, if you read the lyrics closely, a song about a spiritual journey. But it is a rather troubled journey. As much as I find traditional religion distasteful, with its general attitude of "don't think, we 'spiritual leaders' will think for you", I must admit that it has inspired many a troubled journey that has led to many a great song by those honest enough to depict their truth.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
I needed gas, and Costco was closed.
That is all.
-- Badtux the Non-observant Penguin
Due to that big discussion with the beer-chuggin' weapon-strokin' dimwits over at 'Nucks place, I've decided that I need a more sustainable lifestyle if I want to survive the coming collapse of the United States. No, I haven't decided to move to a bunker in Idaho and collect weapons. That's just stupidity. Survival in the face of societal collapse requires two things: Cooperation, and community. Neither of those can happen if I'm sitting in a bunker in Idaho. Instead, I have a better plan, stolen from survivalist Dean Ing: Move to a mid-sized town, join a church, start a business, become a member of the Chamber of Commerce, become a pillar of the community, and then bang, you instantly are tied into a network that possesses far more guns and far more ability to marshall and concentrate resources than any individual survivalist can ever hope to bring to bear. The local National Guard armory is at your beck and call, the local constabulary is ready to help defend you against gun-stroking morons like those bunker-dwelling troglodytes, about the only thing that could crush your little town would be a major military movement by former units of the U.S. Army and let's face it, you're no worse off in that case than you'd be anywhere else.
So anyhow, the town in question needs to be in an agricultural area so it can be self-sustaining, and needs to be far enough from a metropolitan area that it won't be overrun when civilization collapses, but close enough and with good enough transportation that I can sustain myself between now and the collapse. And the church needs to be well organized and powerful. So I've made my decision and started on the process (what, you thought the relative silence over the past week was because I was busy at work?!). I have converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and have put down a down payment to buy Delta Motorsports, in Delta, Utah, from its long-time owner Jim Townshend who is retiring. I will be closing down this blog with all its evil hedonistic content as soon as the final paperwork is signed.
You are all going to Hell, by the way. Except my two Mormon readers. You know who you are, and thank you for all your kind words when I let you know my decision.
-- Badtux the Mormon Penguin
Oh yah, and while I'm at it, hey yo, World Nut Daily, I do *not* want to know the day of Jesus's return. If you're a Christian ya oughta live as if today is the day that Jesus comes back and judges ya, i.e., that ya can't just fuck over a buncha people like a real-life Gordon Gekko on crack, wait 'till Sunday, bend the knee at the pulpit to "wash your sins away in the blood of the Lamb", and go to Heaven, 'cuz five minutes from now before you get your chance to bend the knee Jesus, like, levitates from the sky like some skinny-ass kinky-haired olive-skinned big-nosed dress-wearin' Jewboy angel without wings and booms in a big scary voice "you're going to HELL Mr. Sinner for that evil shit you just did" and foosh, down ya go, burning in Hell with folks like Mark Twain and George Carlin whose ass you hate, now ya gotta have them haranguing ya in person, like, forever. If you claim to be Christian and you *don't* live like Jesus is coming back five minutes from now, you ain't a Christian -- you're just some poser liar pretending to be Christian. So don't give me that shit about "knowing when Jesus comes back", if you're a Christian the whole point is not knowing when Jesus comes back, 'cause otherwise why bother tryin' to act like, well, Jesus woulda wanted ya to act?
And for folks who aren't Christian, we don't give a shit when you think some zombie-ass Jewboy is gonna start, like, lurchin' around moaning "brains.... BRAAAAAIIIIINS...." cuz, like, we're already sick of all that zombie apocalypse shit. Zombies are overdone. Jumped the shark, tragically unhip, as over as vampires now that we got fuckin' sparkle vampires (what the fuck? Vampires aren't suppose to fuckin' sparkle!), I mean, we got zombies driving fuckin' Honda Civics, for cryin' out loud. Over. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The Austin Lounge Lizards with some of that good ole' gospel music: "Banjo Players in Heaven", lamenting the poor state of gospel bluegrass music in Heaven.
Sample lyrics:
"It's hard to find a banjo player up in heaven,
There's some things even Jesus won't forgive."
Bwhahaha!
-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin
If forcing Catholic hospitals to pay for "morally offensive" birth control is wrong, why is forcing me to pay for bombs and bullets, bombs and bullets that my religion holds are moral abominations, just fine and dandy?
- Badtux the Friendly Penguin
One of the interesting things I note, looking through history, is that the end of empires corresponds with a huge resurgence in religion. As the Roman Empire was winding down, you had a tremendous religious fervor that resulted in Arianism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Macedonians, and other sects/cults, and the reaction of the Church against them, and the entire empire became embroiled in the question of what was acceptable doctrine and what was heresy. The Byzantines, the Russian Empire, even the Soviet Empire if you consider Soviet Communism to be a religion (which I do, since it was faith-based rather than fact-based and became even more faith-based as the empire crumbled towards the end), in all of these reason gave way to faith in an ideology and the worse things got, the more people double down on that whole faith thing. Whether it was praying for God to smite the Vandals at the gates or fervently believing that the next five year plan would surely bring Soviet industry to a higher level than Western industry despite the fact that Soviet industry couldn't even build a crappy 8085 yet, much less the snazzy new 80486 that Intel had just shipped, wishful thinking replaced any realistic assessment of what was happening and what to do about it.
So, did it work? Uhm. Do you need to ask? Instead of drilling with spears and shields and then marching out and smiting Vandals, the citizens of Rome instead huddled inside their city and prayed to God to smite the invaders. Yeah, that worked out well for them, didn't it? Instead of dumping their crufty ideology and opening up their economy, the Soviets doubled down on ideological purity -- a friend who was an engineer in their missile program during the 1980's noted to me that he wasn't even able to read Western scientific journals unless they'd been vetted for ideological purity by Communist party monitors and half the time so many pages were missing, cut out by the censors, that the journal was useless. Yeah, that really worked out well for them, didn't it?
So now I note another empire devolving into religious fervor -- I mean, what else can you call the collection of religious nutcases that are the so-called "serious" candidates on the Republican side of the aisle? Santorum surging, indeed (giggle!). Thing is, it was predictable. When the American Empire lost its first war in Vietnam -- defeated by a buncha pajama-wearin' gooks in flip-flops, for cryin' out loud -- the rise of something like Reaganism, a faith with no factual backing, was as sure to happen as the shocked withdrawal of the Roman citizenry into religious fervor after the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople. When events seem too huge and horrifying for people to confront and do something about, for some reason they react by withdrawing from the realm of reason and descending into the chasm of wishful thinking, where faith substitutes for fact. And alongside secular Reaganism that rejected reason arose a Christian fundamentalism that in turn rejected reason (despite the fact that no main-line religion rejects reason, even the Catlicks give lip service to reason). The merger of the two was inevitable -- when you have two religious beliefs with such power to explain why things are wrong (i.e., you just haven't prayed hard enough to God / the Free Market Fairy, an explanation which can be used *FOR ANY PROBLEM* with no reasoning required), it became inevitable that the two would end up co-opting each other and breed a mutt offspring that would become even more nasty and vicious due to hybrid vigor.
So anyhow, that's where we are today. The crumbling of the empire has become even more apparent after a buncha Arabs in Iraq beat our noses bloody (and don't say they didn't, why else did our last troops in that country have to creep out in the middle of the night?!), and what that means is that the religious nutcases are just gonna double down on the crazy. Which ain't gonna help a whole lot -- if the Roman citizenry had armed themselves, trained themselves to fight, and taken the fight to the barbarians rather than huddling with their rosaries babbling Hail Marys we'd all be speaking Latin right now, and that's pretty much what Reaganism and Christian fundamentalism consist of, babbling meaningless prayers like late-era Romans rather than doing what it takes to perpetuate the empire. But they have faith, faith I say, in their magical great sky demon and His son, the magical free market fairy, and no amount of reason will ever shake that faith and for some reason people who live in crumbling empires seem to prefer faith to reason so... (shrug). Hang on for the ride, folks. It's gonna be a wild one.
-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin
The Austin Lounge Lizards, insisting that their God is the "One True God" and yours is a fake. Just some Austin snark, y'all ;).
-- Badtux the Snarky Pengui9n
There you have it, folks, straight from the God-botherers at Westboro Baptist Church: Steve Jobs was God, and God is dead.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
That's the tagline on the postcard from a church that was slid through my mailbox door a few days ago. Supposedly you're supposed to go to this church, and they'll tell you what Higher Purpose you're here for, invariably one that somehow ends up with you giving lots of money to this church in exchange for that privilege of serving a "higher purpose".
You want to know what you're here for? Fucking. That's it. You're just an animal like any other animal, with only one purpose in life -- to reproduce and get your genes spread as widely as possible so that they'll live on after you're gone. All this other stuff we've created over the years -- this "civilization" we've built -- all of it has only one purpose: To keep you alive for as many years as necessary to get your offspring well established furthering the next generation of your genes spreading throughout the human race.
Eat sleep fight fuck die. That's it. The reason why civilization, why morality and ethics and caring and all those other "good" things as a whole, are good is because they mean more of your offspring and more of your relatives' offspring will survive to maturity to spread your genes through the gene pool. That's all. That's what you're here for. That's Truth. Which is cold and hard and most people prefer nice warm reassuring lies, but (shrug). This blog doesn't do a whole lot of trafficking in lies, in case you haven't noticed.
Glad I could help!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
This I know, for his joystick tells me so:
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Who knew that Jesus was a Catholic priest?
I can hear the conversation between the product manager and the engineer:
PM: "We need something for the religious market."
E: "How about a light switch cover?"
PM: "I like it!"
E: "I'll make it so you can turn Jesus on."
PM: "What do you mean? How do you turn Jesus on?"
E: "With a finger, of course."
Jesus loves you… he really does.
I am so going to Hell, Michigan, one of these days :).
- Badtux the Heretical Penguin
52% approve of God's job performance.
That's what passes for journalism in today's media. What next, a poll asking whether people approve of the Easter Bunny's job performance? Siiiiiigh.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Boldtext Pew Bible: King James Version (Hardcover)
This book has an incredible amount of sex and violence, including incest, entire cities being destroyed, plagues of frogs and locusts, and even the death of 99.9% of the world's population in a giant flood. Irwin Allen would have had a field day making a television movie of this book, there's just so much entertainment here, much better than Twilight.
But the downside is the incredibly one-dimensional characters (with the exception of that "Jesus" dude, who is this really groovy stoner hippy type who, like, preaches peace and giving up material possessions in pursuit of the spiritual and stuff like that when he's not, like, toking out big time, but also has downer times when he wonders why he bothers), and an utterly disjointed plot where characters pop up, do a few things, then disappear for the rest of the book. Dude. This book really needed an editor, not only for the major, major plotholes (*TWO* different stories about how the Earth was created? Dude!) but for the atrocious spelling, grammar, and rampant run-on sentences. For example, at the beginning of the Book of Matthew there's this one sentence that literally runs on for multiple pages of "begat" after "begat" after "begat"! Which is okay if your name is James Joyce, but this "God" guy who wrote this book isn't anywhere near the talent that James Joyce is. Dude. Get a real copy editor for your next book, 'kay?!
-- Badtux the Book Review Penguin
The Catholic Church now has a new official explanation for why their priests keep fucking kiddies: the hippies made them do it.
Y'now, that excuse didn't wash when I was a kid, if I did something wrong or stupid and I said "my buddy Keith made me do it!" my mother would just shake her head and say "Go to your room, you're grounded for the next two days." It doesn't sound any more mature coming from an institution that's 2,000 years old and supposed to be more grown-up than that...
-- Badtux the Grown-up Penguin
I wish there really was a rapture this Saturday, where all the faux Christians with their fish stickers and creepy smiles and constant "Have you accepted JEEEEEEzus as your LOOOOORD and SAVIOR!" get taken up to Heaven en masse. I must admit that I'm far too nice to the JEEEEEzus people who knock on my front door. Rather than debate the fine points of Tuxology vs. Christianity with them and talk about the superiority of the Great Penguin to Jehovah as the creator of the universe while stroking a black cat and occasionally saying "what's that you said, my pretty?" to the cat, I say "Sorry, not interested, thank you, goodbye" and slam the door in their face. JEEEEEzus!
Update: 10 Rapture tips for Christians. My favorite one: "Keep the sunroof open." I might add the same note about the skylight :).
-- Badtux the Great-Penguin-Worshipping Penguin
So Glenn Beck asks, "Is God sending us a message with the Japan earthquake"?
Err... let me get this straight, Glennbo. Your invisible almighty great sky spirit is omnipotent and all-powerful and shit, but he's not capable of, like, just picking up the fucking phone if he wants to send us a message, and instead, like, decides to just make things shake and waves crash and people die and shit? So you're saying your invisible sky spirit can do all this, but he can't even make a simple fucking phone call like millions of pimply hormonal 14 year olds manage to do every single day? Dude. Bogus. Your magic undies must be cuttin' off the flow of blood to your brain. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
As I've previously pointed out, there's only one kind of person who obsesses about gay sex all the time, and that's someone who's gayer than the gay mayor of gaytown. Scratch a rightie who spends all his time obsessing about gay sex, find a gay person in a closet the size of a fucking ocean liner.
Similarly, there's only one kind of person who's obsessed with sex all the time, who talks of sex incessantly, who constantly pesters people about sex. And that's a pervert. Da Fixer at Alternate Brain points out a couple of right-wing perverts recently caught -- Juan Carlos Amaya who raped a 12-year-old girl who was in the church youth fellowship that he led, and Rev. Grant Storms, the Christian fundamentalist known for his bullhorn protests of the Southern Decadence festival in the French Quarter, who was caught jacking off as he watched children play at the playground.
It's interesting that religious ministries attract this kind of person, but not surprising. Any place that puts you in a position of power over young people, and where supervision is rare or non-existent, would attract these kinds of perverts. Religious ministries just happen to be the easiest way for these people to gain access to their fetish objects, who happen to be children in many cases, who happen to be forever scarred by what was done to them in many cases, but these kinds of predators don't really see their fetish objects as people, they don't actually believe any of the shit they spew about Christian love and shit, they're just in it for the strokes of their pistols...
-- Badtux the Sickened Penguin
I'd think that Newt Gingritch was sincere about his purported "conversion to Catholicism" if he actually embraced Catholic social teaching.
Note that Catholic social teaching holds that citizens have a fundamental right to life and to the necessities of life. In addition, according to Catholic social teaching, every human has the right to what is required to live a full and decent life, things such as employment, health care, and education. Waiting for New the Lizard to agree with the Pope’s teachings on this… 3… 2…. 1…. err. No? Alrighty, then!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
