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Blog the Religions

I’ve been listening to John Hummel’s 52 Weeks, 52 Religions podcast lately. He’s a former Mormon who’s out doing interviews with religious groups around Tampa Florida. About half of his interviews are with various Christian denominations, but he includes Muslims, Jews, Satanists, Pagans, etc in his podcast. It’s interesting stuff if you like hearing people talk about their religious beliefs.

One of the questions that he asks people during the interview is: “do you think the world is getting better, worse, or is it just as it’s always been?” One thing that’s struck me is that virtually every Christian group says that the world is getting worse. Most non-Christian groups seem to pick “better” or “same as always”. It’s remarkably pessimistic of Christians. Afterall, the human condition – in terms of education, health, lifespan, free-time, entertainment, etc – is far better in modern times than it has ever been in history. It seems that the Christian groups don’t really care about those things so much as being completely focused on people following their conservative version of morality and belief in Christianity. I suppose it could also have to do with Christian eschatology – since they believe the world will go to shit before Jesus returns.

His website is available here. The podcast only contains the last 10 episodes, but they’re all available on his blog.

Sadly, I don’t think this is too far from reality:

WASHINGTON—Claiming that the president was preying on the public’s fear of contracting a fatal disease last week when he declared the H1N1 virus a national emergency, Republican leaders announced Wednesday that they were officially endorsing the swine flu. “Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us. Ask yourself: Do you want the federal government making these kinds of health care decisions for you and your family?” Other prominent Republicans opposing Obama’s declaration of emergency include Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who urged residents of his state to continue not washing their hands, and radio host Rush Limbaugh, who made a point of dying of the virus during his show on Wednesday.

Source: The Onion

Medical Marijuana

Years ago, Colorado was one of fourteen states that had voted to legalize medical marijuana. The problem was that the federal government still said it was illegal, leaving it in a legal limbo. With Obama’s recent comment about letting state laws stand, there’s been a kind of gold rush. I don’t know how it’s been in other parts of the country, but the free newspapers have been filled with medical marijuana advertisements. I’ve even seen advertisements taped to newspaper machines. You know — just like other respectable medical treatments.

Personally, I don’t care if marijuana is legalized. But, I think it’s rather amusing to see all these places spring up. It seems like most of them are being run by subscribers to ‘High Times’ magazine. A friend of mine saw one place named “Dr. Reefer”. Here’s a few images from a real ad I spotted in The Onion. They’re obviously not going out of their way to seem like a respectable medical treatment.

MedicalMarijuana1
MedicalMarijuana2

Medical Marijuana for Asthma, ADD, ADHD, or PMS? And, if you don’t have any of those 23 problems, maybe they can find an illness that does require it.

This is an old story, but I just heard about it. Catholic League president Bill Donohue issued a press release back in 2006, condemning Jessica Delfino for her sacrilegious musical comedy. As far as I can tell, she’s a relatively obscure New York comic, but Bill likes to complain. From the press release:

“Jessica Delfino is taking her ‘Merry [Shitmas] Tour’ on the road. Described as ‘rife with Christmas-themed debauchery,’ Delfino worked last night in New York City, appears in Washington, D.C. tomorrow and travels to South Durham, North Carolina on Thursday. Her performance includes the showing of an obscenely-titled video banned from YouTube that features her rapping about her vagina, complete with obscene pictures flashing in the background. Rapping about her genitals, she sings, ‘it will become your true religion.’

“None of this is without malice. And at a time when radical Muslims are accusing Americans of harboring a depraved understanding of liberty, it only provides ammunition to the enemy.”(Link)

Yes, she’s hardening the opinions of Muslim terrorists. (Assuming, of course, that they are even aware of her existence, and can understand English well enough to know that she’s singing about her vagina.) I wonder if Bill Donohue knows that Muslim terrorists had a plan to kill the pope. I guess even the Pope isn’t good enough to placate the terrorists. On second thought, he is a blasphemer against God for believing in the trinity. A Jessica Delfino video:

A related video where the comedian Louis C.K. talks to Bill Donohue about the press release Donohue wrote about his show, Lucky Louie.

[Update: As Bourgeois_Rage points out, this seems to be a hoax letter sent to a newspaper.]

i-hate-atheists

Halloween Warning

Sorry to get this out to everyone so late, but better late than never. I have to warn you about the dangers of Halloween and Halloween candy. I recently read an article by Kimberly Daniels titled “The Danger of Celebrating Halloween”, and needed to share it with everyone. She writes:

The word “holiday” means “holy day.” But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is “hallow,” which means “holy, consecrated and set apart for service.” If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

Note: Beware of other holidays – such as the Fourth of July (set aside for the worship of the United States) and Labor Day (set aside for worshiping the worker).

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed.

Wow, the devil sure is getting high-tech. I thought only pharmaceutical drugs could be time-released. Move over Eli-Lilly.

You may ask, “Doesn’t God have more power than the devil?” Yes, but He has given that power to us.

God’s infinite power has been given to us! Speaking of which, I meant to blame you for not healing grandma. Dick.

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Yeah, I could totally see Hershey Foods and Mars Co. doing that. I mean, hiring witches to pray over food in a when a majority of Americans and a majority of workers are Christians. I mean, that wouldn’t be a public relations nightmare. Nor would any of the thousands of workers ever find out. And Hershey’s has so much to gain from it.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Demons: they promote tooth decay, too!

While the lukewarm and ignorant think of these customs as “just harmless fun,” the vortexes of hell are releasing new assignments against souls. Witches take pride in laughing at the ignorance of natural men (those who ignore the spirit realm).

Decorating buildings with Halloween scenes, dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches are all acts rooted in entertaining familiar spirits. All these activities are demonic and have occult roots.

Yup. Pagan roots. I wonder if she knows the origins of Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies. I guess All-Saints Day and Reformation Day just weren’t quite popular enough to overshadow the pagan origins of Halloween. I mean Reformation Day – what could be more fun than remembering the Reformation?

The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes.

Wait, now danger is not in the scary things we see — like “dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches”? What about “demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities” and “vortexes of hell”?

These activities include:
* Sex with demons
* Orgies between animals and humans
* Animal and human sacrifices
* Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
* Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
* Revel nights
* Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
* Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

Yeash. I’m an atheist, and I don’t even get invited to those parties. Then again, maybe it’s because I don’t have any spare babies to sacrifice. You know us atheists, always short on babies because we kill ‘em all-year-round.

If you or your family members have opened the door to any curses that are released during the demonic fall festivals, renounce them and repent. I already have.

Sorry, neighborhood kids: no candy for you. Worship the devil at someone else’s house.

Ouija Boards

I have to say, this Derren Brown clip uses a pretty clever trick to test a Ouija board.

I liked Penn and Teller’s test as well.

Ghost in Disneyland?

My guess? It could be a hoax, or it could be that the video recorder is re-using old videotapes. The recorder isn’t completely writing-over and old recording, so an old image is bleeding-through the new one. (Kind of like if you record over an old cassette tape and the old recording is still faintly audible in the background.) The fact that the video-cameras don’t move would also help everything align correctly in the old and new recordings.

Then again, I just looked up the Disney Haunted Mansion attraction, and the fact that the “ghost” is leaving the Haunted Mansion makes me think this was faked by Disney to add to the mystique.

I occasionally hear ghost-stories from people I know. I actually don’t believe in ghosts, and on the few occasions where I have attempted to investigate these types of things I’ve always ended up with only two results: either no unusual phenomena happens, or I discover that people are misattributing something normal to a ghost.

Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m always interested when people say that there is some verifiable ghost-phenomena going on. It makes me want to investigate, if for no other reason that the possibility that I am wrong about my naturalistic beliefs and the existence of an afterlife.

Here’s a few of my stories of encountering ghost/supernatural phenomena:

When I was younger, there was a story in my town about a section of woods that was haunted by two spirits. This patch of woods also happened to be directly adjacent to a large cemetery. There were a variety of stories about these woods, and strange things that happened there during the night. One night, I was talking to a guy I knew, and he said that whenever he drove through those woods, you could hear something walking through the woods behind the right-side of the car. So, a group of us went out there and drove through the woods. Sure enough, as we drove through the woods, you could hear what sounded like the faint sound of someone in the darkness stepping on leaves and branches to the right/rear of the car. It kept perfect pace with us, and was genuinely scary and strange. Once we got out of the woods, we were all talking about it, and I got an idea. I jumped out of the car, and told him to drive forward slowly. Sure enough, there was a sound coming from his right rear axle that sounded just like breaking branches. The sound was apparently bouncing off the forest trees, and only seemed like it was coming from off in the distance.

A year or two later, some friends and I went into those same woods around midnight looking for something, anything. At this point, I was very skeptical about the supernatural and I wanted to find evidence that I was wrong. We ended up seeing nothing strange at all.

Another time, just days after I had moved into an apartment in a very old building, I was falling asleep one night when I heard a slight sound coming from the other (empty) bedroom. I turned on the light and went to investigate. But, there was no sound. I went back to bed, and within a few minutes, I heard something again. My hair was starting to stand on end. I snuck into the living room and turned on the light. The sound disappeared, and I checked all the windows. Everything seemed perfectly in order. I went back to bed and waited for the sound again. Within a few minutes, it started again, so I snuck around in the dark. As I got closer to the second bedroom, I heard what sounded like someone slowly crushing a piece of paper. I was very creeped-out. I turned on the light, and a little mouse came running out of my garbage.

A few people have told me their encounters with ghosts. A neighbor of mine said that, when she was in college, they lived in a house that they “knew” was haunted. She said the kitchen towels would disappear, and no one could find them. One night, they had a Ouiji board, and they started asking it questions. The Ouiji board told them to go look under the stairs. When they looked, they found all the missing kitchen towels, and no one knew there was even a space under the stairs. There were a couple doubts I had about her story though. One possibility is that one of her roommates had put the towels there, and controlled the Ouiji board to tell them to look there. The other one involves the fact that this neighbor of mine was a known sleepwalker. She’s been known to walk around her building, sleep-walking and sleep-talking. In one case, she knocked on a neighbors door at 4am and started to have a half-coherent conversation with the just woken neighbor. She didn’t remember what happened the next morning. Given her history of sleep-walking, it seemed quite possible that she was moving the kitchen towels under the stairs in the middle of the night and not remembering it the next morning. Maybe she even subconsciously had the Ouiji board tell everyone to look under the stairs.

This is one of the problems I have with second-hand ghost stories. You never quite know what’s fact, if someone is embellishing or misremembering, or if there are clues that you don’t know because you aren’t there when the phenomena happens. It’s a little like trying to explain a magic trick based on someone’s second-hand memories of what they saw.

Well, just in time for Halloween, Joan Juliet Buck has a story about a haunted apartment where she lived in Paris. I have to admit, if I had a lot more money and time, I would want to track down this place and verify the story. I doubt anything would happen, but it would make for an interesting YouTube investigation nevertheless. And, if I could be proven wrong about my beliefs, that would be a good thing, too. (I wonder how many religious believers would say that?) Here’s an mp3 of her story from The Moth podcast.
Joan Juliet Buck: The Ghost of the Rue Jacob

It occurred to me later that the phenomena Joan Buck experienced could be explained by carbon monoxide.

Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas, but, being colorless, odorless, tasteless, and non-irritating, it is very difficult for people to detect. Carbon monoxide is a product of combustion of organic matter with insufficient oxygen supply and is often produced in domestic or industrial settings by motor vehicles and other gasoline-powered tools, heaters, and cooking equipment. (Source)

At high levels, it can kill you, but at low levels, it can produce “strange visions and sounds, feelings of dread, illness … listlessness, depression, dementia, emotional disturbances, and hallucinations.” (Source) It can also cause vertigo (explaining her dad’s fall). She mentions these things happening in October (10:25), so she begins to experience these things during the night as fall/winter approaches, which is exactly when the windows would be closed and an old furnace would be most active (potentially kicking-out carbon monoxide). Additionally, carbon monoxide is combustible, which would explain why her incense burned especially bright.

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