This is the fifty-eighth installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.
Today’s video is a compilation of Bill Maher’s bits on Islam and Christianity.
This is the fifty-seventh installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.
Today’s video is a compilation of various comedians doing bits on religion.
When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!…. There is no God. None, not one, no God, never was.
— George Carlin, Daylight Atheism, Slashed by Occam’s Razor, January 9, 2018
When it comes to protecting and caring for his chosen ones, God is quite schizophrenic. You would think the Almighty would be consistent in his care of Christians, but that’s not the case. Tony Dwayne Albert II, dressed in tactical gear and carrying a loaded firearm, was headed to First Baptist Church in Vidor, Texas to do some killing when police thwarted and arrested him. Mass shooting averted. Amen, right? Amen. Afterward, Terry Wright, the pastor of First Baptist, said: “There is an overwhelming recognition that the Lord protected us and provided for us.” According to Wright, God stopped Albert from killing anyone. Most of us would say to God, Good job. Way to go protecting your followers. Of course, knowing that God has a hard time staying on task, we might also say, keep up the good work, Jesus. There will be other churches that need protecting from homicidal maniacs. Surely they deserve protection too, right?
Well, evidently not. You see God is quite hit-and-miss when it comes to stopping things such as rape, sexual assault, murder, violence, and, well, just about anything that negatively affects the human race. So, Jesus steps up in Vidor, Texas, and everyone pats him on the back. But what about what happened at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Spring, Texas? Devin Patrick Kelley entered the church and killed twenty-six people and wounded twenty others. If God was so loving and caring when it came to the people in Vidor, what does the series of events in Sutherland Springs say about his indifference towards the people there? Why is God Johnny-on-the-spot in Vidor but on an extended vacation in Sutherland Springs? Why intervene in one church, yet leave the other to suffer untold horrors?
That’s God, for ya. He’s been on the job for 6,023 years. You would think that he would have learned to do his job right by now. How hard can it be to stop a crazed gunman from shooting up a Baptist church? God is all-powerful, right? If God can protect the people in Vidor, surely he can do the same for the people in Sutherland Springs, and every other community that will have to deal with an attempted mass shooting in the future.
It seems, at least to me anyway, that God favors certain Christians. What other explanation is there for God’s behavior? I know if I lived in Sutherland Springs, I would be upset with God. Hey God, what did we do to piss you off? You “saved” the people in Vidor from harm. Why did you turn your back on us? Why did you encourage us to pray, knowing that you had no intention of answering our prayers?
I am sure a Christian commenter will attempt to explain me the sovereignty of God, and how God doesn’t owe anyone anything. But I thought God was the FATHER of his children? I know, as a human father, I want to ALWAYS protect my family from harm; and there’s never a time when I wouldn’t do everything in my power to keep them from being hurt. That’s what loving, caring fathers do. Yet, in the Christian family, God the Father plays favorites, choosing to love and care for some of his children, but not others. Don’t tell me how awesome God is, knowing that he stands on the sideline and passively watches as Christians are mowed down by crazed gunmen. A kind, loving father would go to the ends of the earth to protect his children from harm. Evidently the ends of God’s earth don’t extend to Sutherland Springs.
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.
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This is the one hundred ninety-eighth installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.
Today’s Song of Sacrilege is Holy Smoke by Iron Maiden.
Lyrics
Believe in me – send no money
Died on the cross and that ain’t funny
But my so called friends are making me a joke
They missed out what I said like I never spoke
They choose what they wanna hear – they don’t tell a lie
They just leave out the truth as they’re watching you die
Saving your souls by taking your money
Flies round shit, bees around honey.
[Chorus]
Holy Smoke, Holy Smoke, plenty bad preachers for
The Devil to stoke
Feed ’em in feet first this is no joke
This is thirsty work making Holy Smoke
Jimmy Reptile and all his friends
Say they gonna be with you at the end
Burning records, burning books
Holy soldiers Nazi looks
Crocodile smiles just wait a while
Till the TV Queen gets her make up clean
I’ve lived in filth I’ve lived in sin
And I still smell cleaner than the shit you’re in
[Chorus]
They ain’t religious but they ain’t no fools
When Noah built his Cadillac it was cool
Two by two they’re still going down
And the satellite circus just left town
I think they’re strange and when they’re dead
They can have a Lincoln for their bed
Friend of the President – trick of the tail
Now they ain’t got a prayer – 100 years in jail
This is the fifty-sixth installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.
Today’s comedy bit is by Taylor Tomlinson.
A man using the moniker Phaggot Destroyer (PD) sent me the following email:
Does your “wife of 40 years” know that you are on the internet promoting the filthy perversion of the LGBTP?
You also seem to push the fag nonsense that anyone rebuking faggotry in our land must be secretly repressing their own desires for faggotsim. Yeah. That makes sense, idiot.
Only a reprobate mind of a faggot would say such a thing so YOU are therefore the one who needs to come out of your homo closet and admit to your wife and family that you are a sexual pervert so they can start watching the young grandchildren closely when they are around you.
Pervert.
PD says his email address is associated with the God Guns Guts and Glory blog. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but I do know that my post The Sounds of Fundamentalism: Anonymous Fundamentalist Spends Eight Minutes Talking About Sodomite Sex (no longer available) is getting extra traffic of late.
It should come as no surprise that PD and the God Guns Guts and Glory blog are big fans of Steven Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Evidently, PD is outraged over my opinion about men such as Anderson and the producer of the aforementioned video: that IFB preachers who rage against LGBTQ people are often repressed, deeply-closeted homosexuals. Pay attention to what IFB preachers most often preach against. Their outrage is often their tell. What they scream and rail against is often their secret “sin.”
Where does the vitriol expressed by the letter writer come from? Where does Steven Anderson’s hatred of LGBTQ people come from? Such people believe their behavior is consistent with Christianity; that if Jesus were alive today, he too would be anti-LGBTQ and would use vile, abusive language to attack non-heterosexuals. In their minds, they are the true remnant; True Christians® called by God to stand against the faggot horde.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
We have raised our five year old to know that Santa Claus isn’t real. Now that he’s getting old enough to have conversations with his little friends, how do we explain to him what to say to them when they talk about believing in Santa? I don’t want him to crush their dreams but I also don’t want to teach him to perpetuate the lie for his friends.
This is a great question, and one my husband and I also had to address with our own children, since we raised them to know that Santa Claus isn’t real.
Before I tackle your question, I’d like to address Christian parents who tell their children Santa Claus is real, that he is the one who brings their presents, etc.
I’m sure you have the best of intentions and only want to make Christmas fun for your children, but when you tell them these things about Santa Claus, you are lying.
Santa Claus isn’t real. If you tell your children he is, or that he is the one who brings their presents, or that he knows whether they’ve been naughty or nice, you’re lying. The Bible says that lying is a sin, period. There’s no exception for jolly old elves who pass out toys (or for tooth fairies or Easter bunnies, either, for that matter). And not only is lying a sin, it is extraordinarily hypocritical to lie to your children about Santa Claus and then turn around later and punish them when they lie about something. Lying to your children about Santa Claus teaches them that it’s OK to lie (i.e. sin) when you want to or when it would be to your advantage. Excerpted from: The Mailbag: What should we tell our kids about Santa Claus?
And this reader has raised another ripple effect of your sin of lying. You’ve now put your brothers and sisters in Christ in the difficult position of figuring out how not to blow your cover when their child (who knows the truth) interacts with yours. Do they teach their child to take part in your lie, or do they risk their child telling the truth, disappointing your child and possibly angering you? And think about the pressure on a five year old child to try to keep something like that a secret, knowing someone will be disappointed if he doesn’t. You’ve created a no-win situation for people you are supposed to self-sacrificially love, encourage, and edify.
Our sin always negatively affects others.
Michelle Lesley, Mailbag: My Kid Knows the Truth About Santa. What if He Tells His Friends Who Don’t ?, December 3, 2018
Leave it to Christian Fundamentalists to suck the magic and fun out of Christmas (and Easter too).
Guest post by Paul McLaughlin
I’m reading a history book (Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History edited by Euan Cameron) in which there is a section by Robin Briggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Briggs ) about religious thought in the 1600s. I have been struck by how much “modern” Evangelical thinking still reflects the same thought patterns.
The author talks about “the continuing domination of theory over facts; intellectuals used the latter [i.e. facts] to support preformed concepts rather than to test them, so that referential accuracy was still low on most people’s scale of values.”
Doesn’t this describe a lot of Evangelical blather? The pastor says the Bible says X, so anything that doesn’t fit the what the pastor says is distorted or ignored. The important thing is to preserve the myth.
Briggs continues, “For most thinkers of the time change for the better usually implied a return to an allegedly superior past, through the removal of corrupting elements.”
My comment in one word: MAGA.
To quote further:
Significant numbers of both clerics and laity, in all the major religious denominations [of Europe], were making a strenuous attempt to live out true Christianity as they understood it. In the process they rejected numerous traditional compromises, recognized only absolute moral standards, and tried to extend the sacred into all areas of life. These enthusiasts were always a minority, but more tolerant – or perhaps lukewarm – Christians often found it difficult to resist them openly. Scripture, the Church Fathers, and logic itself appeared to be on their side. Their ultimate aim was to turn passive Christians into active ones, who did not just participate in ritual activities stage-managed by others, but internalized the faith as a moral code and way of living. Conversion and a change of life were key concepts here, built around the inspirational power of the word. Preaching and religious writing were to carry the message around Europe, where missionaries were just as necessary as they were in heathen lands beyond the seas.
Remember, he’s talking about the 1600s, not the 2000s.
Ultimately, this type of reforming Christianity tended to fragment as much as it united. The closer the bonding between enthusiasts, the sharper the divisions between them and their opponents; the practice of defining oneself against the ‘other’ was much in evidence here. Internal splits could be ferocious …
On the international scale confessional tensions remained high, for despite the similarities between the creeds they continued to regard one another as mortal enemies, while as churches became more national this hostility might be reinforced by xenophobia [as in, evangelicals wearing MAGA hats]. Different countries vied for the position of the ‘elect nation’ favoured by God [as in, America as the new Jerusalem].
Finally,
There were some obvious motives for rulers to associate themselves with religious reform, which offered a boost to their power and prestige, and a means to trump [Trump?] potential critics.
So next time you are tempted to argue with an Evangelical, remember that you can’t take their arguments at face value. Their thought patterns are rigidly set in a deep layer of brittle concrete that has been curing for at least 400 years, and they can’t yield on anything because one crack can bring down the whole structure.
Purchase: Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History edited by Euan Cameron
There’s a story that’s been in the news about a Christian missionary named John Allen Chau who was killed by an indigenous tribe while attempting to evangelize them into Christianity. Apparently the tribe who live on the North Sentinel Island only number between 50 – 150 people and have refused contact with the outside world. Because they’ve had virtually no contact with the outside world, the Sentinelese people also haven’t been exposed to most contagious diseases. Their immune systems aren’t strong enough to handle even the common cold. Therefore it’s actually illegal to make contact with them – partly for their protection. Despite of this, John Allen Chau – an Oral Roberts University graduate – took it upon himself to go and tell them about Jesus. Apparently he had been there before, shouting “My name is John, and I love you and Jesus loves you” to the bow and arrow wielding tribesmen at which point they started shooting at him. One of their arrows even pieced his Bible, but that didn’t stop him. He went back a second time and this time he didn’t make it out alive.
My first thought is, why? Why would you do that? Why risk your life to go and tell a hostile tribe about Jesus when they clearly don’t want to hear about Jesus? The answer, of course, is arrogance. Here you have a tribe that does their own thing and doesn’t bother anybody and they just want to be left alone. They’re a small community of people; they probably eat healthy as they don’t have access to the processed stuff that we eat. Apparently, they don’t even understand what money is or how to use it. So, they don’t have all the stress that we have that goes along with having money. Maybe they’re backwards, maybe they’re savages and they shoot people with arrows, but are we really so certain that our way of life is better than theirs? Are we so certain that they are lost and in need of saving? And that’s the Christian arrogance that I’m talking about. Because then you have a guy who grew up in a Christian culture, went to a Christian university where he was given a particular worldview and he just assumes that this worldview is the correct one.
….
My second thought involves the sheer preposterousness (is that a word?) of it. Apparently God created this tribe of people, but then he decided that they must go to hell. But at the same time, he loves them, so he’s kind of in two minds about it. He comes up with a solution – he butchers Jesus on a cross, which is supposed to solve the problem, except it doesn’t. Unless someone goes to this island and tells them that God butchered his son on a cross and they believe it, they’re still going to hell. Perhaps the reason why the Sentinelese refused contact with the outside world is because they didn’t want to be corrupted by crazy ideas such as this.
What really got to me is that – when I read some of the comments on the articles covering this story – a lot of people said things like, “This guy is a hero… he has earned a great reward”, “He fulfilled his mandate” and “What a mighty welcome home he received from our Savior Christ the King”. And the Sentinelese people are the backwards ones? Do we still believe in a God who will reward us with stuff if we get ourselves killed against our better judgement? Christians are making out like he died for a worthy cause when the only reason he went there was so that he could feel better about himself and his own relationship with God. That probably sounds very judgmental of me, but I know this because admittedly I did similar things when I still called myself a Christian. I used to do talks at rehabs and my talks involved Bible verses. I don’t think my intention was to convert anyone to Christianity, but a part of me did do it for my own ego.
— Erik Stoop, Voices From the Wild, Did Arrogance get John Allen Chau Killed?, November 22, 2018
Please see my post on Chau’s Death, Who’s to Blame for the Brutal Death of Evangelical Missionary John Allen Chau?
