Haven’t posted in a while despite the abundance of free time caused by my current state of unemployment in a stagnant market. There’s certainly been no shortage of material, what with the political conventions going on, but even the Palin mess hasn’t really inspired me to the requisite levels of cynicism and sarcasm to actually write something down.

So lieu of another collection of bad metaphors and worse puns from me, I present for your entertainment Mark Fiore’s Latest Cartoon.

Oh, and Roy Zimmerman – whose Delaware performance I sadly missed due to some last-minute babysitter issues – has a new song about McCain’s VP nomination:

… and by “behaving badly”, I don’t mean “being gay”, I mean “being hypocrites”, and not the ancient Greek doctor guy, either.

Yes, it seems that another Republican anti-gay crusader has been exposed as – you guessed it – gay. The “It’s a sin unless it’s me” party has a rather sordid recent history in that regards.

The alleged perpetrator this time is Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who it seems was caught in bed with his male lover by his wife. It’s all rumor at this point, of course, but Troy has not publically addressed the issue yet and there is rampant speculation that he’ll resign over the brewing scandal.

Is there anyone in the Grond Ole Homophobic Party who doesn’t have a gay lover?

The cracker controversy goes on. Though PZ Myers has received multiple death threats over his stated intention to desecrate a wafer, it’s apparently the Catholics who fear for their lives – so much so that Bill Donohue and his Catholic League have felt the need to ask for increased security at the upcoming Republican convention to defend them from those “hysterical atheists”. Apparently atheists’ inability to grasp the obviousness of the bread-product-to-sacred-meat transformation is a sign of violent, unpredictable personalities.

It’s absurd, of course, to expect some sort of atheist-vs-catholic pogroms to break out at a political convention. But, really, I have no problem with the idea of beefing up security. In fact, I think every single attendee at that particular gathering should have his or her own dedicated team of highly paid professional bodyguards… because every dollar they spend on paranoia is a dollar they don’t spend on their election campaigns.

I wonder if the domain name “ChristOnACracker.com” is taken? It could become a Jesus-recipe swap site – I’ll post my Broccoli Savior Casserole! I also wonder at what point during the digestive process the transubtantiation happens. If a low carb dieter, for instance, was to toss down a handful of properly blessed Eucharists, would they turn to meat in time to avoid spiking the eater’s blood sugar? And should there be a “Before/After” type nutritional label to go with those things? I mean, how is anybody supposed to know how many grams of protein and fat are in a single serving of Jesus?

Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.

That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)

But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:

“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.

So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:

Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.

(Wow! Three posts in one day!)

There’s really nothing to say about this picture, but I couldn’t not post it.

A while back I applauded Iowa Senator Charles Grassley for his probe into the finances of several prominent televangelists.

There’s been little other news of this effort because it is proceeding, one would assume, at the usual glacial governmental pace; but this piece of news did come out recently:

Four of the ministers have since complied with the probe, but Rev. Kenneth Copeland, whose congregation recently bought him a $20 million private jet to preach the gospel, is holding out against the inquiry, which he claims is “aimed at publicly questioning the religious beliefs of the targeted churches.”

“It’s not yours, it’s God’s, and you’re not going to get it,” Copeland says of his financial records. He has launched a website to publicize his crusade and has received support from several leading conservatives, including Paul Weyrich and Kenneth Blackwell.

Okay, so it’s God’s money, and therefore the items you bought with it are God’s as well. He must be a really generous guy to keep letting you borrow his stuff.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know more about this “God” person than the Reverend, who obviously knows him well enough that they travel together. But from what I remember reading about him years ago, I’m pretty convinced of one thing: he doesn’t need a plane to get around.

Ah, well, I suppose we can just say He invests in mysterious ways and move on to some praying and passing of the collection plate.

In speaking to a liberal Christian group in 2006, Obama made the simple point that even among Christians there is hardly agreement on what is the correct interpretation of the Bible:

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”

Apparently Focus On Family’s James Dobson knows for sure what every passage in the Bible is supposed to mean, because on the basis of that speech he’s accused Obama of “distorting the Bible“.

Says Jimmy D (not to be confused with Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy):

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

So pointing out that there are many possible meanings to biblical passages and then citing a few examples where there is frequent disagreement is tantamount to deliberate distortion? Or is Jimmy D (not that I have anything against sausage) just throwing a radio-broadcast temper tantrum and shouting “My distortions are better than your distortions!”

Because the larger issue here – and both Dobson and Obama need to have this scribed into some holy book so maybe they’ll start to believe it – is that any interpretation of the Bible as anything other than a collection of fairy tales devised by people who got bored with the old fairy tales is a distortion – a distortion of reality. Lending it any credence beyond what’s due to a mixed-message collection of Aesop’s Fables is a distortion of reason.

So, in conclusion, the best breakfast ever is an omelet with some sage sausage, crumbled up bacon, and the cheese of your choice. Mmmm, that’s good eatin’.

(Please forgive the horrible fake Latin.)

The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the Bush administration does not have the right to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges at Guantnamo. While it’s frightening that four justices would actually vote against something that’s been a legal human right since the Magna Carta, it’s still a victory, and those of us who have watched in disapproval what our current crop of leaders have done to this country have to take what we can get.

Who knows, maybe some day, actual American citizens will have their Habeus Corpus rights restored as well?

Mark Fiore does some great political cartoons; his latest introduces us to Petrotheism. I wish I’d been the one to come up with that term!

Six Nigerian churches were destroyed in May to protest the recovery by police of two Christian girls who were kidnapped by Muslims to marry them off to Muslim men in an attempt to breed more Muslims. To believe that either the kidnapping or the follow-up actions are in any way justified is of course ridiculous and outrageous, and only in a society dominated by ridiculous and outrageous beliefs would anyone even try. It’s a good thing the Christians that are so dominant here in the USA never, ever stoop to such evil tactics as turning children into breeding stock.

The Iraqi woman who fled her home after her husband and sons beat her daughter to death has been gunned down, likely as punishment for not finding her husband’s actions acceptable. Sadly, this will probably be the terrible end of a horrible story, because the odds are against the perpetrators of these crimes ever facing any sort of justice. Maybe we could hook the murdering father up with the Georgia woman who killed her husband because Jesus told her to.

Are you a True Christian? Not if your politics aren’t right, says at least one evangelical organization. You know, if these people can’t even figure out what it takes to be real member of their gang, why should anyone trust them on the whole “existence of God” thing?