• “Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19).
Quietly? Marian Catholic High School in Detroit thinks Saint Joseph was a wimp. The school opted to fire a teacher for being, you know — in a Marian way. This sends a clear message: If you want to keep your job with the Catholic church, terminate your pregnancy. See also.
• “I asked [the policeman] for the ordinance number [being violated], because they can’t put handcuffs on you if they cannot tell you why they’re detaining you. I said, ‘Show me where it’s illegal to do this.’ But he would not do it. The officer got mad and grabbed me. Then he told me that I was resisting arrest!“
In defense of the Charlotte police, it should be said that Ty Turner does admit to passing out this subversive literature and that he fully intended to encourage black people to vote. Were North Carolina police just supposed to stand idly by and let that happen?
• Christian Nightmares has been serializing the Dark Dungeons movie (part 1, part 2, part 3) based on the infamous Jack Chick comic in which the demented evangelist argued that role-playing games are a tool of Satan. The tone of this thing is pretty tricky — they’re not parodying Chick’s tract or his ideology, just presenting it as straight as possible and allowing it to serve as a parody of itself.
But for all the howling fantasy of Chick’s warped imagination and all the huge weirdness it presents as fact, I find it’s the little details that keep tripping me up. (Magic missile? You’re a cleric — you can’t cast magic missile!)
• ISIS, the terrorist guerrilla army fighting in Syria and Iraq, says unbelievers must convert to their religious beliefs or be killed. Oh yeah? responds white evangelical “hero” Phil Robertson, same to you: “I’m just saying convert them or kill them. One or the other.”
For Robertson and his fans, you see, ISIS’ “convert or die” message is only morally repugnant because of the sectarian details, not the lethal coercion. He likes the lethal coercion — but only for his side.
Also too, Robertson apparently thinks the only reason the just-kill-all-the-bad-people strategy of the Bush years failed is that we didn’t kill all the bad people hard enough.
• “Surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you — has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.”
Yeah, here’s the thing: mythicism — the theory that Jesus never existed — is staggeringly ignorant. It’s moon-landing-hoax ignorant, and anti-vaxxer ignorant. It’s almost even young-Earth creationist ignorant.
If your column advocating mythicism cites Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in support of this conspiracy theory, then all you’ve demonstrated is that you’ve never actually read more than a single paragraph from Ehrman, Borg or Crossan. All you’ve proved is that you’re unwilling to allow yourself to ever be dragged into a library.
• “Your Brain on Coffee.” The symptoms of coffee withdrawal can be unpleasant, but they are easily relieved by drinking coffee.
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