the Night before Solstice

Twas around winter solstice, alone in the house
I was reading the Bible, as quiet as a mouse.
The stories were thrown in the book without care;
contradictions abounded, mistakes everywhere.

I could not understand, or believe what it said,

its tall tales of people come back from the dead;

original sin, which was such a bum rap,

blood sacrifice, curses, and other such crap.

When deep down inside I knew something's the matter
I sprang to the Web to make sense of such chatter.
Away to the Google I flew like a flash,
to try and make out heads or tails of this trash.

The search engine gave me back millions of hits;

molesters, and con men, and other such shits.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

but hundreds of gods from the earliest year.

With a little old edit, the story of Horus
I knew in a moment it must be the sou-rce.
More numerous than seagulls, gods and goddesses came,
and I whistled, and marveled, and called out their name;

Osiris! Adonis! Dionysus! Mithra!

There's Attis and Ishtar! And Baldr and Krishna!

To the land of the dead! Down to hell they all went,

to the underworld, after their lives were all spent.

Like fertility symbols these gods they all die,
and then get resurrected, back up in the sky.
So back up to heaven these deities flew,
to start new religions, and Jesus did too.

Right there in the gospels, just like you would guess,

a brand new Messiah turned up in this mess.

As I willingly tried to suspend disbelief

from the pages this Jesus guy came like a thief.

He was beat all to shit, from his head to his foot,
and put onto a cross just like Horus was put;
His birth in a manger, and marked by a star,
that's a detail he stole from the Goddess Ishtar.

His magic trick changing his water to wine,
was a ripoff of Bacchus who used to brew 'shine.
He claims to have brought people back from the dead,
 that's just like the other gods—what they all said.

And in some of his stories he acts like a cad:
“Hate your mother and father! Don't bury your dad!”
Sends his guys to steal donkeys, and kills farmer's pigs,
and cusses a tree out for not giving figs.

He's a crazy old preacher, who just seems kind of silly
though I had to admit that his book was a dilly,
that tried hard to steal those old stories by stealth,
and I laughed when I read it, in spite of myself.

A shift of my eyes and a twist of my head,

to the headlines, told me I had nothing to dread:

all the Pope's rules have been shown not to work,

evangelicals picket, and act like a jerk;

They cry “war on Christmas” and make silly fusses,
when we put up billboards, or signs on our buses.
But to all the fanatics I give this epistle,
away from your church people fly like a missile,

And I have to exclaim, on this solsticey night,

that millions of us, without gods, are alright.

Hail, Sol Invictus

 The Freedom From Religion Foundation placed an 8.5-foot-tall Scarlet A monument and banner in downtown Chicago. Here's the banner.

The text reads,

At this season of the Winter Solstice, we celebrate the Birth of the Unconquered Sun--the TRUE reason for the season.

Wait, what does that even mean? The Unconquered Sun, it turns out is Sol Invictus, one of the main gods of the old Romans.  One can only conclude that the stereotypical "militant atheists of the "FFRF worship the sun god.   They've been doing a good job of hiding it, but now that they've outed themselves as sun worshippers, will the christstains still call them godless?

Monsters

A pretty nice performance by Jeremy  Loveday


from Upworthy, hat tip to Margarita del Norte

2ndAmendmentville

A song dedicated to this genius who just blew the shit out of himself.

-----

Second Amendmentville

Fondlin my pistol
nibblin meth crystal
holdin my weapons all covered with oil 

strokin my six gun
sippin a cold one
suddenly felt a loud noise and recoil


Chorus: wasted today here in 2nd amendmentville  
   not really sure if I committed assault 
  some people claim there's a red neck to blame
 but I know, it's nobody's fault


Don't know the reason
I find guns so pleasin
Here let me show you this Ruger Mark II

It's this one I favor
though it shot my neighbor
how it went off I haven't a clue


                    wasted right here in 2nd Amendmentville
  victim of an inadvertent assault
  some people claim there's a red neck to blame
 Now I think, Hell it could be my fault


Blew away someone
while cleaning my shotgun
round in the chamber but I didn't know

But I got a permit
that lets me do dumb shit
with lethal contraptions that boost my ego

        wasted by a responsible gun owner      

        victim of an inadvertent assault

     Some people claim that there's a redneck to blame

    but I know it's my own damn fault

Yes and some people claim that there's a redneck to blame

And I know it's my own damn fault 

Hail Satan

This should be good.  The ACLU is suing to get a Ten Commandments

monument removed from the Oklahoma City Capitol grounds, and now the Temple of Satan applied to donate a monument to go next to the 10 C's.  ROFL!




They've done this sort of thing before. Back when Rick Perry was pimping a bill to get prayer in school they

staged a Satanic rally thanking Rick Scott for endorsing a bill that allowed Satanism in schools, ensuring that children who might otherwise never learn of the Satanic creed could be exposed to it in the classroom. This was a harsh reminder that religious freedom applies to all, and the United States is a nation based upon religious pluralism.

More lulz--some of the ten commandments were spelled wrong. 


So what's the Temple of Satan about? Lucien Greaves explains

Religion can and should be a metaphorical narrative construct by which we give meaning and direction to our lives and works. Our religions should not require of us that we submit ourselves to unreason and untenable supernatural beliefs based on literal interpretations of fanciful tales. Non-believers have just as much right to religion—and any exemptions and privileges being part of a religion brings—as anybody else.

Well that sounds pretty interesting on a couple of fronts.

• Churches aren't supposed to dabble in politics, ostensibly, and these guys are as much a political activist group as a church
  
  
• They reject anything supernatural—yay, them—and most atheists I argue with  talk to insist that
  
  religion = belief in a supernatural deity 
  but they haven't objected that these Satanists aren't a real, atheist, religion. Awkward.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

How to talk to women

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the War on Incubators

If you thought the war on  incubators  women couldn't get any worse than state-mandated rape of pregnant women, think again.

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

This happened in  the Republic of Gilead  Not-So-Great-Britain, but the forced birth crowd here are flies on the same turd, and there's a lot of them.

Margaret Atwood was not writing an instruction manual.  At least, not intentionally.

the War on Solstice

There actually is a war on Christmas, no matter what the Daily Show says, but call it by its right name: Winter Solstice.

Take the CHRIST out of CHRISTMAS

Way long ago the Pagans had it, all over the world. They brought in the harvest, settled back with serious brew and debauchery.  Until a certain genocidal death cult renamed the Solstice after their idol and managed to kill off mostly everybody else.

Then for a couple thousand years nobody hardly remembered  the reason for the season, but the heathens are making a comeback now.  Unlike the suicidal death cult that actively works to destroy the Earth, they actually respect the world we all live in and want to honor it. It's time we get back to basics.

The Bible

 

Page 1

1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Check

2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Hold it. The earth was void? That means it didn't have anything in it. No form, nothing in it; not much of an earth; where's the deep?

 And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Wait, what? We've got heaven and we've got earth, but the earth has no form, nothing in it, but somewhere there's waters, so apparently the earth is made of water? Unless the deep is in heaven—don't know yet, although wherever they are, the spirit of god is moving around on them. Another puzzle: it isn't god moving around, just his spirit. Odd.

The universe looks like a sex ed diagram. Anyway,
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. No problem there. Go, god. 

4And God saw the light, that it was good: okay. and God divided the light from the darkness.
Wait, what? First we had darkness, over the deep, then he created light, but the light wasn't separate from the darkness? How is that possible? Did he make it first as kind of twilight, and then later divided the light into one spot? This is weird.

5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. Good names there, god. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
All right, that clears up about the waters. He's got a firmament, “the arch or vault of the sky” in the waters, so the waters are not in earth, they're in heaven, and heaven is apparently in the sky. Got it.

7And God made the firmament, uhhh, you already said that. Presumably he didn't make two firmaments. I sure hope not. and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
 

8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. Hold it. He created heaven, that had water in it, or was made of water, and he called it 'heaven'. In the middle of it he put this 'firmament' thingy, and says the firmament is 'heaven'. Is heaven still 'heaven' too? How do I tell them apart? 

9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven The 'heaven' heaven or the firmament 'heaven'? be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Huh? The waters coalesce into one lump, and reveals dry land, right up there above the earth. The earth is land, so “the dry land” was already there. Shouldn't he have said “let more dry land appear?” confusing. 

10And God called the dry land Earth; Oh, no! This again? Is god just trying to confuse me? Does he mean the moon? If the moon is 'earth'; what's earth?


and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. That's beginning to be a matter of opinion.

11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
On which earth? Either all this shit is on the new dry land and the original earth is underneath it, or, there's a huge blob of dry land up in the sky with a lot of plants growing on it. Does NASA know about this? 

12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 

13And the evening and the morning were the third day. So now, after three days, earth (one of them) has
(a) grass, (b) herbs that bear seeds (c) fruit trees, (d) no water (e) darkness on earth, light is somewhere else. How do these plants live?

14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven WTF? You want lights in the what? The firmament you now call heaven has a firmament inside it? Lights Where? What?
to divide the day from the night; The fuck?? Day and night have been divided since the first day. God said so already. and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven (wherever that is!) to give light upon the earth: (the original one or the fruity moon one?) and it was so. so that light he made on the first day wasn't on the earth at all. What good was it? 

16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: Huh? He already made lights for the earth. Why's he need another one? Maybe there's two suns? Why the hell not, he just made another moon to go with the fruits & herbs one. he made the stars also. Now that would impress me,ordinarily. I'm getting a little jaded. 

17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven (@#@*#&!!) to give light upon the earth,
18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: (didn't he already do that? and God saw that it was good. Well, at least somebody likes it. 

19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 

 
Ohhhh, kay!
And that's more than we need to know about this book.