Monday, March 26, 2012

48 Things You Didn't Know About Easter

1.       Male rabbits are called “bucks.”

2.       All female rabbits are whores.

3.       Rabbits are not rodents, they’re actually lagomorphs.

4.       We’ll still pretty sure Steve Buschemi is a lemur, which is also not a rodent.

5.       Many of the Christian traditions surrounding Easter, such as Good Friday and the Resurrection, are derived from earlier pagan rituals, most notably involving cults of the god Attis around 200 B.C. in ancient Rome. In areas in which both cults of Attis and early Christians were later geographically located, there were disputes over each other’s god’s authenticity.

6.       Kirk Cameron edited the last fact out of the Wikipedia page for Easter.

7.       Jesus was likely crucified on a post. The idea of a cross had not gained popularity until around 300 years after his death.

8.       Jesus would have made a fantastic “A” in the YMCA music video.

9.       Mel Gibson has a knife to my throat.

10.   Jesus was the true Son of God, Allah is a total sham, and the Holocaust was a fairy tale dreamed up by greedy Jewish bastards to pocket compensatory damages.

11.   Mel Gibson is gone.

12.   63% of Americans would like to receive a chocolate Easter Bunny.

13.   100% of them probably shouldn’t.

14.   The world’s largest bag of jelly beans weighs over 6,000 lbs., or half the circumference of Chris Christie’s stomach divided by the number of times Terrell Owens has used the word “we” in lbs.

15.   Many Neopagans celebrate the Spring Equinox by lighting fires and jumping over them to ensure fertility.

16.   Republicans practice this ritual through birth control restriction.

17.   Liz Jones has been cast to play Stretch Armstrong later this year.

18.   The word “Easter” most likely comes from the goddess of the Saxons of Northern Europe, Eostre. Her name was derived from “eastre” which meant “spring.” However, many Mediterranean religions also had similar names for the Mother goddess.

19.   The word “Sunday” was most likely either derived from the Scandinavian Sun goddess, Sunna, or the Roman god of the Sun, Sol.

20.   Jesus’s mother Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit to a cover of the track “Mandy” by Barry Manilow. He cleverly replaced “Mandy” with Mary’s name in his rendition.

21.   As part of the Trinity, Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit – three in one.

22.   Holy shit, that means Jesus fucked his mom.

23.   Bunnies purr, similarly to kittens.

24.   Fuck cats.

25.   Adult rabbits can be as small as 2 lbs.

26.   Fuck midgets.

27.   Rabbits are unable to vomit.

28.   (showing rabbit “Two Girls One Cup”)

29.   Rabbits can literally be scared to death.

30.   (showing rabbit my lucky rabbit’s foot)

31.   Easter marks the end of Lent, or a 40-day period people publicly pronounce discontinuing a vice in their life while continuing to do said activity in private.

32.   Ashe Wednesday celebrates the illustrious career of one of the first publically accepted black athletes, Arthur Ashe. He was a point guard for the Knicks.

33.   Bar soap just doesn’t feel right in public showers.

34.   Contrary to many of the depictions in the West, Jesus was inevitably dark-skinned due to the region he was conceived (immaculately). However, due to the birth certificate found by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, evidence does seem to suggest Jesus was an American.

35.   The first chocolate eggs were produced in Europe in the 19th century by geese that later migrated to the U.S. and started the hipster movement.

36.   Since that day I pass on the sugar and sweeten my coffee with aspartame just to spite the bastards.

37.   The American Rabbit Breeder’s Association has recognized over 45 different species of rabbits.

38.   Nobody in the American Rabbit Breeder’s Association has seen a human vagina.

39.   Turning bread and wine into flesh and blood is perfectly plausible and happens every Sunday. It’s also not creepy at all that it’s later ingested.

40.   The Pope appeared on Christmas morning wearing Ron Paul’s gold reserves.

41.   No, they don’t actually let the homeless people sleep inside the million-dollar buildings.

42.   The First Council of Mencia in 325 A.D. determined Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon.

43.   They probably copied that from another council.

44.   In Scandinavia, some businesses give employees nearly a full week off for Easter break. I imagine they spend this time having hot, dirty sex with Americans visiting Scandinavia over Easter (fingers crossed).

45.   Duran, Duran spent a week living with a pack of grey wolves and hunting rabbits while preparing the track “Hungry Like The Wolf.”

46.   Oscar Wilde was referring to convincing a herd of rabbits his dick was a carrot by “the love that dare not speak its name.”

47.   Kids’ favorite color of jelly bean is red.

 
48.   Kids should know it was because they whined about which candy they got that their parents were divorced and they need to be frequently reminded in the event that they forget and retain some sort of self-confidence.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Why I'm an Atheist

Why am I an atheist? I always regarded this as sort of a whimsical inquiry. Before responding, I usually prompt the questioner to answer why he or she is a Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc. Why I am an atheist isn’t all that exciting, it’s not due to some atrocity after which I abandoned god. It’s not because I grew up in Finland, Sweden, or Japan – all highly industrialized countries with much less inequality than the U.S., better healthcare than the U.S., higher quality of life than the U.S.,  less crime than the U.S., and consequently less religion than the U.S.  People are often interrogated as to how they could possibly deny the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient deity.  If I had been asked, “Why are you a Christian?” 5 years ago, I’d probably feed you a line about how I’ve read the Bible and believe it to be true as it has had real impact in my life and I have a personal relationship with Jesus. However, is that really true, or some regurgitated drivel I listened to every Sunday? I don’t remember ever having a conversation with god in which he answered me. However, shouldn’t I have come to expect that? If everything is predestined, if god knows what I’ll do before it happens and his Will is going to be done no matter what, why would I expect my prayers to have an effect?


 So why are you religious? Could it be because your parents were? Could it because you were indoctrinated by culture? If you had grown up in Iran would you still be a Christian? If you were raised in the Bible Belt would you still believe Allah was true god? How audacious of you to believe out of all of the thousands of religions ever developed that only yours was correct! Do you ever wonder if god is timeless why your religion wasn’t the first to come into being? Does that mean all religions are indeed true, but just with different names and stories? I’m sure you probably don’t believe that, so are you ready to accept that if only one is true, you should expect damnation because of the vast numbers? If you objectively take a quest into the origins or your religious belief and affiliation, it’s likely to generate some stimulating self-monologue.


 Although in the current state of faith in the world and this country atheism is the idiosyncratic, aberrant position, it should be very clear why someone is an atheist. Deviance does not always presuppose radicalism. When the heliocentric universe was proposed by Copernicus, he was undoubtedly deviant, but the beginning of the death of our egocentrism was by no means radical, it was rational. Believing someone who loves you will damn you to hell for not worshipping them, being so arrogant as to believe your life is so important that it survives death or as Einstein put it, "feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.", restricting the rights of women, homosexuals, and sexual liberality because of an interpretation of a book that is thousands of years old before we had any real knowledge about biology, chemistry, and physics—and if you’ve actually read it we had no sense of morality either—are all the drastic positions.


 Unwavering faith is not something that should be valued, but discouraged. As Nietszche put it, “One walk through a mental institution proves that faith means nothing.” There are two types of belief: faith and hope. Religion is based on blind faith – disregarding scientific advancement, logic, and fact for the sake of the perpetuation of the belief system. Science is built on hope in theory. These theories often leave the “believer” humble as they are in a constant state of revision and scrutiny. Religion thrives in the gaps of science. The problem with religion is those gaps are rapidly disappearing with our innovation. I simply believe that enough gaps have already been filled to disregard the concept of messiahs, creators, parthenogenesis and life after death. One of the things that irritates me most is the notion that science somehow has the task of and consciously tries to disprove religion. Science does what every rational being should do. It disregards religion. Science is unbiased; it has no dogma to appease to, only to ascertain truth. If your belief system is not in consonance with scientific findings, the burden lies with your religion, not with science. Do you ever wonder why in nearly every religion nothing is more insidious than the human acquisition of knowledge? Why were Adam and Eve condemned for trying to learn? Why are women kept from books in many Islamic areas? If we were created with this perennial drive to understand, why is it condemned by our creator? Is it frightening that this same glorified ignorance was what allowed imperialism and abuse to flourish?  Education has been the Achilles heel of every exploitative regime in history.  So in a sentence, I am an atheist because I yearn for truth.  Okay, one more. I am an atheist because not only is religion improbable, but also rather than easing suffering it has caused more than any other ideology in the world’s history, which is not hard to believe considering it flourishes in regions where suffering is highest. How could you possibly pledge allegiance to a belief system whose perpetuation relies on the concept of evil and the world’s ultimate destruction at our hands? Is there hope in that? The more you know, the more you come to know: The world is unquestionably becoming a better place to live in as time progresses. This completely undermines scripture. So why does religion flourish in areas where agony and discontent are ubiquitous?


 “God is the concept by which we measure our pain.” – John Lennon

Saturday, March 24, 2012

E=MCsaved

          According to a Christian who I’m sure doesn’t allow his religious affiliation to infringe upon his commitment to academic and intellectual honesty, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence in the divinity of Jesus was that he professed being God, while nobody else in all of history made that claim. Well, that’d be true if it were, but it’s not. Francis Collins was too busy trying to explain transubstantiation through quantum mechanics and looking at shiny things in store windows to give me an interview; I’ll do my best to try to reconcile his statement with historical accuracy.


                                                        
                                  I reckon I want some French fried potaters

Christianity has been renowned in this country for protecting scientific progress and technological evolution--excuse me, technological creation—to provide plausible explanations for historically infallible events such as 9 million species-sailboat rides and crazy, drunken wedding reception tricks. It goes without saying that Christianity has been THE leader in unequivocal fact-finding like the love child of Sir Isaac Newton and Indiana Jones, but only if it wasn’t gay. I’d have mentioned a male and woman, but women don’t necessarily have the best track record when it comes to the acquisition of knowledge in the Bible. Not to point fingers at any three-letter named biblical characters. Whore.

            So what was Collins talking about?  Collins really meant that everyone who’s ever claimed to be God was actually Jesus! As I’m sure Mr. Collins has a variety of different acronyms after his name, we’d do best to fully accept everything he says and not ask any questions to avoid being enveloped by his highly sophisticated “smart guy” biblical jargon--using terms like “predestination” and “no, it’s only gay if we make eye contact.”

Mainstream Christians don’t typically consider David Koresh or Sai Baba Gods, so taking their word for it, there must be a difference between those claiming to be God today, and those in the past. Wait! That’s it! As time progresses, the “Jesusiness” of those claiming to be God is diluted! Maybe the Jesus of the Bible isn’t the Roger Moore of being Jesus. The Gods today are just less Jesusy! There’s only so much Jesus that can go around, you know. After all, he did only feed 5,000 and what are the odds they’d end up with an even 5 grand?

So the only rational conclusion we can draw is that time is like Jesus Kryptonite. Since the dawn of time, Jesuses have been endowed with a set of attributes separating them from the rest of mankind, which we’ll now refer to as the Prerequisite Repertoire of Every Truly Essential Necessity in a Deity, or PRETEND.  Here it is illustrated in a chart:


  



It’s clearly displayed that the PRETEND of each Jesus decreases as a function of time. This clears up any confusion over the contestation of the divinity of some of the newer Messiahs, like with Koresh. As Collins eloquently stated, David Koresh, professing his own divinity, must truly be God in human form. However, because of his late appearance in the Jesus timeline, his PRETEND was so low that it’s no wonder many Christians were as unconvinced as with obvious liberal ploys to facilitate eugenics and abortion like global warming and the female orgasm.






Even if Koresh did have a little Jesus in him, the problem we had with him is ubiquitous in Jesusic history. We keep fucking killing our Jesuses! From the first parthenogenic conception, we’ve had an uncanny and at times morbidly creative ability to cunt punt any old chap with a Chuck Darwin beard and the heart of a Hugh Grant. He’s just the type of guy you know tells you you’re beautiful after you do it.  

So what do we do? Well, to form the most comprehensive understanding of PRETEND, we have to look throughout history and find the oldest, boldest, turn-the-other-cheekiest son-of-a-bitch we can. Even before the biblical Jesus. With our ability to notice PRETEND, we can spot the next Jesus in our midst before we seal our fates like Marie Antoinette when she didn’t send that spooky Hotmail forward to 10 of her friends.



3. Zoroaster

Zoroaster lived between 6000 BC and 100 BC and like the biblical Jesus, had a beard that rivaled basically anyone who died in the Skynyrd crash. In addition to being immaculately conceived, being baptized in a river, beginning his ministry at age 30, curing the sick and healing the blind and all those insignificant details, he also dropped the –aster and had a short career as a vigilante, inspiring the Zoro franchise. Pretty Jesusy, but we can find more PRETEND.


                                        Can’t you see? What that woman Lord, she been doin’ to me?



2. Attis of Phrygia

Around 200 B.C. the story of Attis appeared: Attis was purportedly born of a virgin on December 25th.  He was slain for the benefit of mankind and his followers ate his body. He was both the divine Father and Son and was crucified on a tree on “Black Friday.” We can look past the fact he was a tree-hugger because apparently his blood ran down to redeem the entire earth. On top of all that he looks like Robin Hood and that makes me smile.  Early Christians often quarreled with Attis’s followers about the authenticity of their Jesus…. If they had only known.


                                    I just can’t be bothered with anything on Arbor Day


1. Horus

Will the Real Slim Jesus please stand up? Born of the virgin Isis. Boom. Begotten Son of the God Osiris. Boom. Birth in a manger and soon after birth an attempt on his life was made by Herut (sounds like Herod, right?). There is a gap in his history from ages 12-30 after which he was baptized by a guy who would later be beheaded. He did all the walk on water/cast out demons typical Jesus act, but what separates Horus from the rest of the pack was that he was worshipped well over 3,000 years before Jesus was born and he totally ran interference on this guy Set who was trying to blow his load on him and threw his semen in the river. Then, in a just fucking totally Jesus move, he came all over Set’s fav. food, lettuce, to exert his dominance over him and because he also thought vegans were douchebags.





                                         Popularized the mascot head before Lee Corso was even born



Now that we have a Jesus prototype, we have all the tools we need to recognize the next Jesus before it’s too late. But until that time, we must do as Edmond Dantes instructed, “Hope and wait….and vote Rick Santorum.”