The Indigestible

GREENSBERG, KANSAS — The tornado that struck here over the weekend and destroyed nearly all of this once-peaceful town, leaving more than a dozen dead, has been blamed on overabundance of prayer, heterosexual marriage and Jesus.

“Look at places like San Francisco, Fire Island — or Calcutta or Tokyo,” said local pastor William “Jimmy” Throbnagel. “They didn’t get hit by tornadoes this weekend, and they’re rife with sodomites and pagans.”

Throbnagel was standing on the site of his former church, reduced to flinders by the power of the cyclone that raged through the heart of Greensberg. “I used to preach right here,” he said. “I used to tell my flock that as long as they prayed to Jesus and did not lie with mankind as with woman, the shielding hand of the Lord would protect them from evil.”

Turning a tear-streaked face to the sky, he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

Several other Greensbergians seemed to feel the same way. “We followed what the Good Book has in it,” said one woman. “And we voted for the President all four times. But it don’t seem to matter. It don’t look like our God is the right God.”

“You’d think we’d be right in the eyes of the Lord,” added a second woman, “after we run them ragheads out of town that was runnin’ the hotel and gas station.”

“Right,” chimed in a man. “And I personally beat up three faggots, but still God done went and sicced a twister on us.”

Asked if he would rebuild, Throbnagel answered in the affirmative, reinforcing the can-do nature of hardy Midwestern stock. “But it won’t be a Christian church,” he said.

What kind of church did he have in mind?

“I was lookin’ at a copy of the Kama Sutra that I confiscated from one of the acolytes,” he said. “I think maybe I’ll give Hinduism a try for a while.”

Q. Why should Michael Jackson switch genres and go to classical composing?

A. Because he obviously enjoys working in A minor.

This is something I drew back in 1999, and is probably too geeky even for the Larson crowd. It’s really only funny if you know about the differing ages of loa and what it means.*

Anyway, here.

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* The more recently-erected loa on Rapa Nui are the crudely-made ones. They also tend to lean or fall over much more often than the old-timers.

Told you it was geeky. I’ve given up on the getting-laid thing, remember?

Because I totally get this post from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

It’s obvious I’m doomed to never get laid again.

Contrast these two images and ask yourself about the value of intellect and rationalism versus “gut” feeling.

The first is an editorial cartoon. The second is another, of a different kind. Both come from My [Confined] Space.

That’s Einstein, bottom center, in the latter image.

Which seems more believable?

Post number 256 (new today!) at XKCD is a map of online communities. And it’s pretty keeno.

So what part of the ’net are you from?

There are immigrants all over the US protesting American immigration policy today, but the LA Times really dropped the ball with their coverage.

In their photolog of the events, on a day guaranteed to raise tensions about illegal border-fence crossings, they ran this caption:

Students climb the fence at Hollenbeck Middle School to join Roosevelt High School students marching to the immigration rally during the Great American Boycott 2007.

With this picture.

Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

Fuck you, George, you traitorous prick. If this were my America you’d be on trial for treason right now.

The Chick mockery that began last week and was most recently done yesterday concludes here, at least for now.

As a professed atheist I’m sometimes confronted with a question that strikes me as being, on the face of it, silly: Why do you hate God?

I don’t hate God. I just don’t believe there is one.

I don’t hate unicorns, or dragons or Shiva or the Easter Bunny or Allah; I simply don’t believe they exist. My world doesn’t lack wonder, joy or happiness, but when I feel those emotions I don’t also feel a need to attribute them to some kind of Higher Power. Denying something exists does not equal hating it; I can say with perfect equanamity that hydras are mythical beasts. The idea of hate doesn’t enter into the equation, any more than I hate a concept such as the square root of a negative number. I can think about it, sure, but I know that such a thing simply cannot be.

But to someone who believes in a god, the declaration that such an entity doesn’t exist is a direct threat to his point of view; when he hears me say I don’t believe what he does he interprets that as hatred of his ideas and projects that hatred onto the thing of which he’s so fond.

If you believe in a god, then, the denial of that god’s existence feels a lot like hatred.

I don’t hate God, nor do I hate those who believe in God; what I hate is the blind pig ignorance that some people suffer from when the idea of God is brought up.

The fact is that belief in God causes airplanes to fly into buildings. The fact is that belief in God causes the murder of abortion doctors. The fact is that belief in God causes gay-bashing, enables slavery and allows choirboys to be raped.

If this sounds terrible, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we allow an institution to continue committing atrocities — not why we sound so hateful when we sit in judgment of it.

After all, which is obviously worse: A few cartoons on the Internet, or a cadre of believers incinerating themselves rather than bow to the will of a secular government?

You have a brain. For God’s sake, USE IT!

Episode 4: “I sure am glad you stopped me from using the Internet to sin!”

BONUS! For holding out to the end, here’s a gift for you: a PDF of the entire tract. Darwinism: The Devil’s Religion (600 KB)

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