Zounds! It’s Christfucking Blasphemy Day!
And, decompressing after my bounce dive to Germany, I almost slept through it. Thanks to Keippernicus and a half-dozen science blogs for bringing me up to speed.
Blasphemy Day (“…because your god is a joke”) exists as part of “…a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism.”, to “open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.” Anyone who’s spent more than two minutes on this ‘crawl can guess where I come down on that score: those who believe in creepy all-powerful invisible peeping toms should be relieved of their car keys and urged to seek psychiatric counseling, not exalted as “people of faith” and granted blanket immunity from critique. But that’s just me (and, it would seem, 15% of N’am’s current population— up from only 8% a decade ago, which is heartening). The choice of September 30 commemorates the 2005 publication of a series of Danish cartoons which dared to portray Mohammed in pen and ink (a capital offense, if you go in for that kind of addled thinking). Again, regular visitors may remember that this issue led to my own falling-out with the spineless wonders at On Spec.
So let us commemorate this special time, each in our own way. I myself will make an extra effort towards profanity in the hours remaining, and point out that the two expletives in the title of this post are equally blasphemous: Zounds (“God’s wounds”, a crucifixion reference) was once considered every bit as offensive by the god-fearing as christfucking would be today. I might also mention that The Colbert Report is showcasing Richard Dawkins tonight and Francis Collins tomorrow. The former needs no introduction; the latter, among other accomplishments, wrote a best-selling evangelical tome which left me unimpressed. It should be an interesting double header. Too bad they couldn’t have come on at the same time.
But while blasphemy takes many forms, it has perhaps reached its pinnacle in “The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith’s” Brick Testament. The genius of Powell’s approach is simplicity itself: the most effective way to make the scriptures look silly is to simply quote them verbatim, at length, and with Lego. Yes: Lego. Believe me, you won’t need any Centurion spear to split your sides open.
Can The Brick Qur’an be far behind?
Excellent! My favorite time of the year. Unfortunately, there aren’t any Mormons around today shouting versus from their pseudo-Bible to celebrate with me. I guess I’ll just crank some Porcupine Tree and finish reading the new Dawkins book (Which is extremely good!)
The lolcats bible is a pretty damned nice shin kick as well. Impossible to read for more than 10 seconds at a time but…well i guess ANY version of the bible is like that.
Speaking of lolcats, that Jesus really gets around.
verily and yay!
those who believe in creepy all-powerful invisible peeping toms should be relieved of their car keys
Hm…. North America *is* a major pollutor and a majority of its inhabitants believe in CA-PIPTs – just think what the car-key link would do for air quality.
I’ll be pretending to wear the Dawkinsy t-shirt:
“Darwinism: The Only Game in Town (and the Universe!)”
“The Brick Qur’an”
Didn’t the Beach Boys already do that one in 1964?
Then again, Legos make ANYTHING look ridiculous. The Titanic, World War II, 9-11; there’s nothing that isn’t more amusing if you use plastic bricks to represent them.
http://reasonweekly.com/reasonweekly-originals/are-americans-faking-religiosity
“So, what is the maximum number of seats available at any given time in all of America’s churches? Assuming that all are filled to capacity, that even the smallest of them can accommodate at least 400 people, and liberally adding 20,000,000 extra seats, the total number of available seats in churches across America is 59,045,600. That is just little over a half of what would be necessary to accommodate all the people who claim to go to church weekly.”