This will take your breath way!

Last night CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° show saw the debut on the world television stage of Stacey Pritchard, one of the pinhead Christianists who attends the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina. Providence Road has been getting a lot of unwanted (?) attention lately due to Pastor Charles “Kill the Queers” Worley’s recent sermon there about putting gays and lesbians inside of an electric fence until they died. Last night Pritchard went on CNN to defend Worley and the result was TV magic!

It is AMAZING just how stubbornly impervious this woman is to basic facts. It’s like she has an impenetrable bubble all around her where no intelligence can get in or out (Only Cheetos, Mountain Dew and Domino’s pizza can pierce her force field of ignorance. I don’t know what happens on the other end and I don’t want to know).

Mark my words, this is a bravura, star-making appearance by one of American’s most dreadfully dumb people. Of course, I jest, there might be people stupider than Stacey in some dark, backwoods"holler” of America, but do they have her sneering, know-nothing Tea party charisma? Her fashion sense? Her gift of gab?

I don’t think so. A STAR IS BORN.

This woman is already an ICON OF STUPIDITY, even if she doesn’t know what that means…

Why, Stacey Pritchard, you just might be the female equivalent to Joe the Plumber! (Secretly I think you’re better than he is!). Please run for US Congress in your state (you’d win!) and caucus with Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Steve King and your North Carolina home girl/soul sister in MENSA, Virginia Foxx! A Sarah Palin endorsement must be imminent. The abjectly stupid gotta stick together!

“Hey Stacey, phone for you. A guy callin’ ‘eemself Roger Ailes wants to offer yew a contract on the Fox News…”
 

 
Anyone care to hazard a guess at why he’s crying?

Via RightWing Watch:

The Family Research Council is currently hosting its annual Watchmen on the Wall Pastors Briefing in Washington DC, featuring a variety of Religious Right leaders and members of Congress working to mobilize pastors from across the nation.

Today, in between speakers, FRC handed the floor over to Jesse Connors so that he could promote his web-based evangelism tool called TrueLife.org which claims to offer “reliable answers from a biblical worldview via the Web that are non-threatening and easy to understand and directs people to church.”

Connors’ service seems to revolve around producing, for a fee, personalized business cards that pastors can hand out, encouraging people to visit the True Life website where they can learn more about Jesus and the Bible and find local churches.  At least, that was the best we could discern, as it was hard to know just what Connors was talking about as he grew increasingly emotional while discussing the success of the effort and demonstrating a video about struggling with homosexuality.

Get some help, Mary!

I feel really sorry for this fuckin’ guy.
 

 
Allen Quist is the crazypants political mentor to MN Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The two teamed up as Minnesota state representatives in the late 1990s to fight the onslaught of the atheistic, permissive, Marxist totalitarianism society encroaching upon our “freedoms”—or something like that—and to successfully beat back a state school curriculum that would have taught some scientific ungodly stuff they didn’t like.

Now the 67-year-old Quist, an anti-gay crusader and soybean farmer who believes in dragons, that females are “genetically predisposed” to subservience to men and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on Earth (possibly as late as the 11th century), is running for the US Congress to join his former partner in Washington, DC.

“Thanks” in large part to the, uh, zany supporters of Congressman Ron Paul, the Minnesota GOP’s nominating convention, held in April, ended in a stalemate after 14 hours and 23 ballots failed to select a clear winner in District One, meaning that the top two candidates (incredibly, one was Quist, which says a lot about whoever came in third!) will now have to face one another in front of voters in an August primary race. Mother Jones has the story:

As a Minnesota state representative in the 1980s, Quist staked out a position on his party’s far-right wing. At the time, the state’s GOP was undergoing a rightward shift from a party known for its mild-mannered moderates to one populated by family values firebrands. Quist was the tip of the spear.

During his time as a state representative, Quist slammed a gay counseling clinic at Mankato State University by comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan (both would be breeding grounds for evil—AIDS, in this case) and went undercover at an adult bookstore and a gay bathhouse in an effort to prove to a local newspaper reporter that they had become a “haven for anal intercourse.” (A decade later, Bachmann would bring groups of supporters onto the Capitol floor to pray over the desk of a gay colleague.)

Quist’s almost singular focus on sexuality didn’t go unnoticed. “At one point,” the St. Petersburg Times reported in 1994, “a Senate leader suggested he had an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, having devoted 30 hours to it in a single session.”

Quist was a staunch pro-lifer who once argued that abortion should be classified as a first-degree homicide. When his pregnant wife died in a car accident in 1986, Quist had the six-and-a-half-month-old fetus placed in his wife’s arms in an open casket at the funeral. A year later, he married Julie Morse, a former pro-choice feminist who had been reborn as a Republican activist. (Morse had cofounded Minneapolis’ first feminist bookstore, Amazon Books; originally based on the front porch of a women’s collective, it soon migrated to the city’s Lesbian Community Center.)

“When he ran, obviously we looked him up—a very bizarre record. I mean really bizarre,” says Minnesota’s former GOP Gov. Arne Carlson.

Ya think? In 1993 Quist challenged Governor Carlson in the GOP primary on a platform of mandatory AIDS tests for couples wishing to marry and against gay rights:

In one memorable interview, Quist told a Minnesota reporter he believed women were “genetically predisposed” to be subservient to men, pointing to, among other things, the behavior of wild animals.

Quist’s candidacy quickly became a national story—one that sent the state’s moderate party establishment scrambling to avert disaster. Mike Triggs, a former Carlson aide, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Mr. and Mrs. Gopher are going to think [the Quists] are damn weird.” He dismissed Quist supporters as “zombies.” The governor himself played up his opponent’s under-the-covers ops. “Instead of prowling through dirty bookstores, why didn’t he go out and change state spending policy?” the governor asked the Associated Press.

Carlson, who went on to beat Quist by 20 points, is still sore. “Wonderful, wonderful guy—one of the great intellectuals of the 21st century,” he deadpanned when asked about Quist recently. “He’ll do a lot to improve the IQ of Congress. If we can get a Bachmann-Quist team together, they could probably take over the world. Talk about a dynamic duo!”

When Quist and his wife founded the nonprofit Maple River Education Coalition (MREC), to push for the repeal of the Profile of Learning, a state plan to raise educational standards, they got Michele Bachmann to front the group.

With Quist providing much of the intellectual grist, the MREC argued that the Profile was a step toward a United Nations takeover of Minnesota. International Baccalaureate, the global Advanced Placement program, was brainwashing by another name. “Sustainability” was a euphemism for a future dystopia in which humans would be confined to public-transit-oriented urban cores. Schools would be breeding grounds for “homosexual indoctrination.” Even math was under assault by the forces of moral relativism.

In 2000, Bachmann won election to the state Senate with help from the MREC and the Quists. When Bachmann ascended to Congress six years later, Julie Quist joined her, serving as the congresswoman’s district director until 2011.

If Quist can best his opponent, Republican state Sen. Mike Parry—which is entirely possible, Quist has the edge in fundraising—he’ll square off against Democrat Rep. Tim Wirtz, who must be praying he’ll be running against this crazy motherfucker come November:

“Unfortunately,” [former Governor] Carlson added, “what was bizarre in the ‘90s is becoming the centerpiece of this new Republican party.”

Read the whole thing at Mother Jones.

“I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.”

Lord Bertrand Russell’s famous (or infamous if you prefer) 1927 essay “Why I Am Not A Christian” is one of the “classics” of “atheist literature” and one that is still likely to be read to this very day by budding unbelievers trying to inch themselves out of the church pew (It was just such a rite of passage for me, a religious skeptic by the age of twelve).

Russell felt that religion itself was “principal enemy of moral progress.” Saying something like that took a lot of guts back them!

In part, due to his reputation as a “freethinker” and for his controversial positions on matters of sexual morality, Lord Russell, who is today regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and humanitarian activists, was judicially declared “unfit” to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York in 1940. The great philosopher was defended by a host of intellectuals, including John Dewey and Albert Einstein (Einstein’s famous line that “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds ... ” came from his open letter in support of Lord Russell).

In the clip below, taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s archives, Bertrand Russell gives a short but sweet answer to the question he posed himself over 80 years ago, in what is probably today his best-known popular work.
 

 
On a blog post that’s been shared tens of thousands of times in the past few days, Rachel Held Evans, author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood writes of how Christianist haters like Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher and Bryan Fischer are forcing younger Christians to chose between their gay friends and their religion.

From “How to win a culture war and lose a generation”:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

In the book that documents these findings, titled unChristian, David Kinnaman writes: “The gay issue has become the ‘big one,’ the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimensions that most clearly demonstrates the unchristian faith to young people today, surfacing in a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say [Christian] hostility toward gays… has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.”

Later research, documented in Kinnaman’s You Lost Me, reveals that one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends. Eight million twenty-somethings have left the church, and this is one reason why.

Rachel Held Evans has closed comments on her essay, writing “I want to keep this a safe place for conversation.”

You won’t wonder why after you’ve read the responses from some of her supposedly Christian readers…
 

 
Via Dan Savage/Joe.My.God

“Red diaper baby” Barack Hussein Obama II plots world domination.

I’ve already blogged here about the zany new Obama conspiracy theory documentary Dreams From My Real Father which puts forth the ludicrous “theory” that President Barack Obama’s father was not a Kenyan goat herder but rather a radical journalist nearly four decades older than his mother who was also an amateur pornographer…

Now the film is causing a rift in the wingnut ranks as “birther queen” dingbat Orly Taitz (and current GOP candidate for one the US Senate seats for California!) accuses WorldNet Daily and author Jerome Corsi (who himself has a lot—everything—riding on the “birther” fantasy) of “working for” someone else. But who?

TPM’s Michael Lester has made a “trash compactor” cut of the film’s kooky highlights (see below).  It’s a doozy. Via TPM:

“Dreams From My Real Father,” a 97-minute film narrated by an Obama impersonator, weaves the narrative that Obama’s grandfather wasn’t a furniture salesman but an undercover CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she was impregnated by a 55-year-old communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

The fake Obama narrator sets up the tale as the “the story I would have told if I were being honest with you.” Built through archival black and white footage, the film’s disclaimer states that it includes “re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations in an attempt to provide a cohesive understanding of Obama’s history.”

Using that disclaimer, the filmmakers assert that Obama had a nose job ahead of his 2004 run for Senate, that his mother posed for naked photos when she was five weeks pregnant with him and that Bill Ayers nurtured Obama’s career.

The film is produced by Highway 61 Entertainment, the same company behind “Farewell Israel,” “Atomic Jihad” and the mockumentaries “Elvis Found Alive” and “Paul McCartney Really Is Dead.” Director Joel Gilbert, who has spoken at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), writes columns for FamilySecurityMatters.org, a website run by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy.

The film has been favorably reviewed by WND’s Jerome R. Corsi, who wrote an entire book arguing that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and that he was really born in Kenya and ineligible to be president of the United States.

But the suggestion that Obama really was born in Hawaii and that his father was an American citizen has some conspiracy theorists upset. Birther queen Orly Taitz is troubled by the film because it undermines the theory that Obama’s father had to be a U.S. citizen for him to be a “natural born citizen” (a qualification which would have eliminated several other presidents). WND and Corsi, wrote Taitz, are “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

“Who are they working for? What incentive did they get to do so? Please, tell Corsi and Farah to stop this. Enough and enough,” she wrote.

Wingnut vs. wingnut!

Taitz later posted this on her website:

JEROME CORSI IS DESTROYING THE CASE ON WHICH I WORKED FOR 4 YEARS 24/7/365. HE IS GRATUITOUSLY MAKING UP AN AMERICAN FATHER FOR OBAMA. WHAT IS HIS MOTIVATION TO DO SO? TELL WND AND CORSI TO STOP THIS.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Who’s your REAL daddy?’; The new Obama conspiracy theory, mind-rot at its finest

“Madwoman of the Sacred Heart.” Graphic novel by by Moebius and Jodorowsky.

On the heels of sharing The Holy Mountain with DM readers, I thought an Alejandro Jodorowsky documentary might be timely and this is a good one.

In 1994 French film maker Louis Mouchet interviewed Jodorowsky and a bunch of his friends and collaborators, including director Fernando Arrabal, Peter Gabriel, Marcel Marcea and artist Moebius.

Jodorowsky is witty and wise as he discusses his masterpieces El Topo and The Holy Mountain, his failed Dune project, the Tarot, his role as a teacher and reluctant new age guru. He’s kind of like Freud on psychotropics.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating look into the mind of a modern magician and trickster who is constantly evolving and adapting to new technologies and formulating new philosophies. 

“As soon as I define myself I’m dead.” ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Alejandro Jodorowsky- Constellation 1/4 by zindabad7
 
Parts two, three and four here.

 
For any true believers out there who were planning to run up a lot of credit card debt prior to the “end of the world” that was supposed to take place between December 21-23, 2012, you might want to change those plans (or not!) because it looks like the Apocalypse just got cancelled.

Via The Washington Post:

In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thereby predicting the end of the world.

The newly found calendars, which track the motion of the moon, Venus and Mars, provide an unprecedented glimpse into how these storied sky-gazers — who dominated Central America for nearly 1,000 years — kept such accurate track of months, seasons and years.

“What they’re trying to do is understand the large cycles of cosmic time,” said William Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist who led the expedition. “This is the space they’re doing it in. It’s like looking into da Vinci’s workshop.”

Before the new find, the best-preserved Mayan calendars were inscribed in bark-paged books called codices, the most famous being the Dresden Codex. But those pages hail from several hundred years later than the newly found calendars.

It will be interesting to see just how steadfast some people will cling to their beliefs in these New Age theories. Especially the ones who have gone out on a limb promulgating them in public. We’ll never get to hear Terence McKenna’s reaction to still waking up on Christmas Day, 2012, sadly, but what will Daniel Pinchbeck have to say I wonder?

Maybe Daniel and Harold Camping might want to grab a coffee!

Here’s what I wrote about the 2012 nonsense back in 2009 in a post titled “2012 is for suckers (and lapsed Christians)”:

Christian apocalyptism has been projected onto counterculture thought due to a surprisingly widely-held belief that the calendar of the ancient Mayans is going to “run out” and via various New Age theories (Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna) growing in currency since the 1980s and conflating into one giant unstoppable Internet meme.

Y2K and went without a hitch and guess what? Every other previous doomsday failed to materialize also.

Here’s a telling anecdote, it’s all I have to offer you on the subject: In the mid-90s I had the occasion to ask Timothy Leary what he thought about Terence McKenna’s theories about 2012. He sat up in his chair—he was in horrible shape at this point, I should say—fixed his gaze upon me and wagging a finger in my face, sternly told me, “Terence McKenna is a High Episcopalian! He was raised to believe in the end of the world in church on Sundays. There is NO SCIENCE to any of this. He took psychedelic drugs and he interpreted those experiences via his own nervous system, which was pre-disposed to want to believe in the end of the world in the first place due to childhood imprinting about the Book of Revelations! If you believe in these things, why not just become a Christian and then at least you’ll be in the mainstream!”

If you buy into this stuff, you need to ask yourself WHY that is. Is it residual Christianity that you thought you shook off, but didn’t? It’s a valid point.

I’ve talked about this subject with Robert Anton Wilson as well and his take was different, but complimentary to what Leary had said. Bob very simply explained that calendars are man-made constructs. They are based on astronomical observations, of course, and the Mayan calendar is pretty accurate, but the idea of an end date, presupposes a start date and who CHOSE that date? It’s arbitrary and the whole argument starts to fall apart there.

In a 2009 AP article written just before the 2012 Hollywood blockbuster came out, Mark Stevenson wrote about school children and young mothers living in fear (shades of the “Duck and Cover” era of the atomic 1950s) of the imminent the end of the world:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly “running out” on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it’s not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood’s “2012” opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the “Curious? Ask an Astronomer” Web site, says people are scared.

“It’s too bad that we’re getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they’re too young to die,” Martin said. “We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn’t live to see them grow up.”

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

Dat’s right…

Looks like the entire genre of “The World Will End in 2012” literature is about to go on sale for 99% off.

A few months earlier than planned, no doubt, but there was only so long they could milk this bullshit anyway.

Thank you, Steven Otero of New York City, New York!

 
No need to say much more.

Via redditor n8quick in /r/politics

 
There’s so much going on in this painting, titled “Jesus Broke Out the Lambchop Puppet and Hired an Angel to Try and Cheer Up a Clinically Depressed Paul McCartney,” by Kata Billups, that I just had to share.

Instead of breaking this puppy down for you, I zoomed in and took a few detailed screen shots so you can figure out what the hell is going on here on your own.

It’s deep.

From the artist:

This scenario from my imagination shows Jesus visiting a clinically depressed Paul McCartney. He is sitting on Paul’s right side and slides a Lamb chop Puppet in to Paul’s peripheral field of vision. Paul hasn’t bothered to get out of his robe. His white socks dangle off the ends of his toes. He is depressed and disheveled. On the wall behind him is the cause of his plight… Yoko…

Who is the happy, house-cleaning angel supposed to represent, I wonder?

The painting is currently on eBay and has a “Buy It Now” for $177,000.000.

 

 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

Enemies of the State.
 
I’m reading David Ray Carter’s well-researched and fascinating new book Conspiracy Cinema (release date: May 2) and was reminded that it was 19 years ago this month (April 19 to be exact) that 74 members of an offshoot of The Seventh-day Adventist Church (the Branch Davidians) were killed in the Texas town of Waco. More than 20 of them were below the age of 18.

Carter describes William Gazecki and Jason Van Vleet’s 1997 documentary Waco: Rules of Engagement as “surpassing most documentary cinema in its ability to appeal to both reason and emotion.”

Personally, emotion gets the best of me when it comes to Waco. I consider the slaughter of the Branch Davidians to be one of the most egregious cases of government-sanctioned murder (at least domestically) in American history. Every time I drive through Waco on my way from Austin to Dallas, I feel a cold chill and make a point of never stopping in that hellhole for gas or food. I was forced to stop there last year when a score of tornadoes ripped through the area. Tornadoes seem to be attracted to Waco. Perhaps it’s karma.

Transcript from an actual phone call between FBI hostage negotiator Jim Cavanaugh
and one of the Branch Davidians small children…...

(children crying . . . rustling sound as
very young child picks up the phone) Child:
“Are you gonna come and kill me?”

Cavanaugh:
“Hello? hello? No, honey… ” ( long pause then heavy sigh )....

“Nobody’s gonna come and kill you…..”

Child:
“Are you gonna come in and kill me?”

Well, somebody killed that small child and it is disgraceful that the tragedy at Waco seems to have been swept under the rug of our collective consciousness. Even back in 1993, as we watched the mass murder of 74 people on television, the immensity of what was taking place didn’t seem to register with most people. That we accepted it, that we kept quiet, that no one seemed to really care is astonishing. Yes, there were congressional hearings, but it all seemed to be for show, to divest ourselves of any guilt, any sense of shame, any fucking responsibility.

Representative John Conyers branded the April 19th gas and tank attack a “military operation” and called it a “profound disgrace to law enforcement in the United States.”

Representative Harold Volkmer charged the initial attack on the Branch Davidians was part of a pattern of “Gestapo-like tactics” at the bureau. “I fail to see the crimes committed by those in the Davidian compound that called for the extreme action of BATF on Feb. 28 and the tragic final assault.”  Washington Post April 29, 1993

Watch Waco: Rules of Engagement and hope this never happens again. But don’t bet on it.
 

 
Watch Waco: A New Revelation after the jump…

 
I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teenager in school. Though I didn’t buy into his hype for religion, I took much comfort and inspiration from his biography at a difficult time in my life. I was on the receiving end of bullying from a small but vicious clique of wannabe Nazis. I was a peacenik, who confused inaction with pacifism. Instead I should have been smart and quick enough to stop the bullying then and there. I didn’t, and rode it out for 2 years.

Not fun. But it showed me everyone got fucked over somewhere down the line, and made me aware that I could never tolerate that happening to anyone. Or as I read it in Malcolm X’s autobiography:

“Hence, I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

Here Malcolm X is interrogated by a group of hard-headed white men, who can’t get beyond their own prejudice to discuss, as one human to another, Malcolm X’s thoughts on religion, history and life. Throughout Malcolm X is an example of intelligence, dignity and grace, never allowing himself to be goaded by his detractors. Recorded in Chicago, March 17, 1963, for City Desk, with Malcolm X, and journalists Jim Hurlbut, Len O’Connor, Floyd Kalber, and Charles McCuen.
 

 
A pro-gay, Muslim Kenyan socialist or a member of the evil MORMON CULT? Is Satan flipping a two-headed coin with his own face on both sides?  Yikes! Who’s a Christian to vote for in 2012?

According to online Christian evangelist Bill Keller—the proprietor of LivePrayer.com which he claims has over 2.4 million subscribers worldwide—it’s certainly not Obama, but neither is it Mitt Romney, who he reckons would damn a million souls to eternal torment because, to hear Keller explain it, that’s approximately how many Americans would convert to Mormonism if Romney got elected.

The outspoken Keller—who got into hot water with this same issue during the last presidential election when he said that a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan—sent out a press release to ChrstianNewsWire trolling for some attention laying out his concerns:

“The Republican choice will be a member of the satanic Mormon cult who will never have to say a word for his cult to take advantage of their ultimate goal since they were founded 200 years ago, and that is to gain mainstream acceptance, giving them all the ammunition they need to aggressively seek converts to their cults beliefs. Conservative estimates are that they will gain at least 1 million new converts, meaning a Romney election will help insure at least 1 million souls will burn in hell for all eternity! Any ‘Christian leader’ who supports Romney obviously cares more about politics than souls!!!”

It’s going to be interesting to see the in-fighting over this issue as it plays out within the reichwing camps. The Obama campaign obviously doesn’t need to do anything, Romney’s Mormon faith, now that he’s really the presumptive nominee, will be debated enough by the members of his own party and the GOP’s evangelical Christian base.

“Is the price of a million souls worth knocking Obama out?” With Keller and others asking this kind of question, how many wingnut Christian votes will be siphoned off of Romney’s tallies? It’s difficult for me to get inside the mindset of a deeply religious Christian conservative, but this and similar messages will obviously gain traction with quite a number of them. Someone who doesn’t believe in Darwin’s theories will be less enamored of what’s between the pages of The Book of Mormon! Romney might just as well be a Scientologist!!

Keller’s got a new website Voting for Satan that features a “Judas Gallery” of Christian and conservative leaders “who have sold out Christ to back Mormon Cult Member, Mitt Romney.” The list includes evangelist Joel Osteen, radio personality Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, NJ governor Chris Christie and Rev. Franklin Graham!
 

 
Bill Keller on today’s installment of “The Liveprayer Daily Video Message”:
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
If you saw the video that made the rounds recently of the homophobic buffoon yelling stupid shit at Rosie O’Donnell as she left the Super Bowl, “James the Preacher,” as that fuckhead refers to himself, is back and trying to hitch his bigoted wagon to O’Donnell’s celebrity. Again. How desperate for attention can you get? Yelling abuse at someone on the street, videotaping it, posting it on YouTune and THEN a month later going back in for a second attempt at 15 milliseconds of “fame?? That is just fucking pathetic.

During the original encounter, O’Donnell naturally got the better of this witless goon, but now “James the Preacher” is doubling down on the dumb and has posted a YouTube video “apologizing” for not rebuking O’Donnell using “more aggressive words.”

I invite you to point and laugh at an idiot. Ladies and gentlemen, “James the Preacher,” a sad little loser who is a representative of a God who “doesn’t love everybody” and who (repeatedly) refers to his critics as “effeminate” as he spits all over his computer screen. Glory be to the Highest!:
 

 
Via Daily Kos

 
Former Special Counsel to Richard Nixon and the first from his administration to become a Watergate jailbird, influential Christian leader and anti-gay activist Chuck Colson remains hospitalized in critical condition after suffering a brain hemorrhage last week. In Colson’s honor, Joe.My.God. reminds us of the ridiculous Born Again Christian comic based on Colson’s evangelical memoir of the same title.

Quoting from Gamma Cloud:

Published by Spire Christian Comics in 1978, Born Again is the sugar-coated, “feel good” story of Chuck Colson’s suffering and redemption.  It’s a relatively typical tale in some respects, as Colson professes that he was converted to Evangelical Christianity through the help of his friend Thomas Phillips who had himself been “saved” some time earlier.  Phillips provides Colson with a copy of the C.S. Lewis book Mere Christianity and Colson subsequently immerses himself in the text, learning all kinds of Jesusy insight. (Incidentally, despite the fact that he apparently needed “saving,” Colson effectively maintains that he was basically law-abiding – and apparently naïve and blissfully oblivious of the wrongdoing and unethical behavior swirling around him – throughout all of his work with the Nixon administration and CREEP.) While serving time in a Federal prison for convictions related to the Watergate scandal, Colson shares his enlightenment with other inmates and he ultimately decides to start a ministry and devote his life to spreading the word far and wide.

Well…I guess some of that story is true.

The fact of the matter is that Chuck Colson: Born Again is nothing short of a grand and glorious collection of obfuscation and half-truths.  Colson’s yarn portrays the man himself as an pious martyr acting in service of a naively innocent Richard Nixon.  In one of the more laughable parts of the story, it’s inferred that John Ehrlichman learned of the Watergate break-in while watching the evening news.  Indeed, the entire question of wrongdoing and guilt is effectively marginalized through the omnipresent argument that Richard Nixon’s coterie of henchmen acted under the Nietzschean principal that “what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”  With respect to this particular version of the Watgergate story, it’s basically unclear as to whether the “love” that spurred Nixon and co. to action was an unfettered and dogmatic love of country or a just good old-fashioned lust for power, influence and control.

As soon as I saw the cover, I recalled leafing through this silliness at my parents’ church in the late 70s. At the time, I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s then new Jailbird and if you know what that’s about, you’ll laugh at the thought of picking up Chuck Colson: Born Again at the same time.

In 2008, George Bush gave this asshole the Presidential Citizens Medal.
 

 

 
Pat Robertson on Feng Shui:

“You don’t wanna fool with that stuff. At best it’s demonic, at worst it’s just, it’s just superstition. Whatever it is. you don’t need it.”

Of course this is the same man who thinks strength in martial arts comes from “inhaling demon spirits.”

Tai chi is cool, though, sez Pat.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God.

 
Cinema’s master of the macabre defines “happiness.”
 

 
Via Dude Craft

 
German artist Michael Sowa‘s interpretation of Easter.
 
Via every Facebook status update

 
Black Metal Satanica, as you might have already surmised from the title, is a 2008 documentary on the second wave of Scandinavian Black Metal music and its practitioners. Church burnings! Self-mutilations! Grave desecration! Suicide! Satanism! Murder!

Something here for the entire family. I wanna party with these guys…

Delve into the history of Black Metal with this comprehensive documentary covering the origins, the lore, the lifestyle and the contemporary scene of the Viking-based musical genre, from Scandinavian melodies to self-destructive behavior. Director Mats Lundberg’s interviews with key figures shed light on the different Black Metal factions. The film features music by bands including Watain, Vreid, Shining, Svartahrid, Rimsfrost and more.

 
TV and radio “exorcist” Bob Larson’s daughter, Brynne, is now a second-generation demon rebuker herself, along with two of her girlfriends and now Pastor Larson—who has never, ever, been accused of being a fraud or of taking advantage of mentally ill people for financial gain, uh uh, no, not this guy—is trying to sell a TV reality show about them. They’re just “normal girls who do something extraordinary for God.” Well, God and $$$.

So far it looks like um… “enterprising” Papa Larson—who seems to have successfully eluded the laws of karma in this incarnation—is having some good luck with ABC News and Good Morning America picking up on the story. Via Jezebel:

Brynne (daughter of Larson), Savannah and Tess probably look like the girls who were shitty to you in high school (though Savannah was alright that one time you ran into her at The Gap and she was with her mom), but it turns out that they are also pretty good at bullying demons and banding together to form the perfect reality TV package. They are currently shopping around a show that will document their lives, but don’t you dare imply that they’re exploiting people who are at best simple and at worst mentally ill: To ABC reporter Dan Harris, Pastor Larson says, “You’re paid handsomely. So is anybody who has a responsible position in the public eye. And we have to fund what we do.”

Bob Larson. Proof that there is no God. Yuck.
 

Via Christian Nightmares