|
Gone, But Not Forgotten? What The Internet Will Look Like Under SOPA Fearsgiving Week Jesus Approves of Waterboarding Beware of Asteroids 
All links are current as of the date of publication. All content created by the author is copyrighted 2005-2010, except where held by the owners/publishers of parent works and/or subject materials. Any infringement of another's work is wholly unintentional. If you see something here that is yours, a polite request for removal or credit will be honored. |
� |
Easter WeekendFriday, Apr. 02, 2010 9:54 AMIt's Easter Weekend for the world's Christians, and - sad to say - the Catholic Church continues to demonstrate institutional hypocrisy by denying its role in concealing molestation, an issue that is even tarnishing the halo of Pope Benedict XVI. Even the conservative Catholic League is playing blame-the-gays, as if the molestation of young boys and girls would be just fine under any other light. Politicians argue that we are a Christian nation, condemning acts like abortion, but are somehow fine with torturing prisoners of war. Elsewhere, we have a self-described Christian Militia, who planned to kill a police officer, then strike again at the officer's funeral. We have a court ruling that Rev. Fred 'God Hates Fags' Phelps was just exercising free speech when his group protested near the funeral of a slain soldier. A suit by the soldier's father originally awarded damages, but was overturned on appeal, and the father ordered to pay $16,000 in legal costs to Phelps. (FOX News Bill O'Reilly is said to have paid the $16,000 on behalf of the father, but soft-pedaled an important fact: that this kind of behavior is common to conservative Christians.) In the Philippines, we will doubtless see a parade of the faithful submitting themselves to the same torture that Christ underwent, from flogging to a crown of thorns to actual crucifixion. The History Channel is airing a special about the 'real' face of Jesus Christ, wherein a computer artist takes the Shroud of Turin and extrapolates an image of the 'real' Jesus Christ. So I guess we're supposed to believe that since the shroud really was wrapped around a dead body, that the dead guy had to be Jesus Christ, that everything in the Bible is therefore 100% accurate and true. Yet the Shroud of Turin has never been dated to be of an appropriate age. We're always told, of course, that it's because the Shroud has been patched many times over the years, but no one ever seems to pick an unpatched spot. Desperate to support their faith with physical evidence (a contradiction, no?), there are Christians who invent all sorts of explanations as to why the Shroud cannot be a fake, including one poster on the Huffington Post asserting that the image was imposed on the cloth by the light streaming from Jesus' dead body at the moment of Resurrection. Lost are the teachings of Christ Jesus, among them Instead, we are caught up in a flurry of sacred tortillas and preachers bedecked in wealth who nonetheless find no shortage of time to denounce the secular, material world. We find Christians so obsessed with their eschatological fantasies that they truly believe the world must plunge into ruin before Jesus returns to whisk them all away to heaven and leave the rest of us wallowing in misery. An interesting way to praise a man, a prophet who came bearing a message of forgiveness and salvation, no?
|
