Michael's Two Daddies

The blog Jesus' General has been getting some help lately from Miss Poppy, who also runs a wonderful Christian Store on the web, where I have purchased numerous saintly gifts for friends, including anti-masturbation gum and the Jesus ashtray. Her first post there covers the new book, 'Does God Love Michael's Two Daddies?', a fundamentalist riposte to 'Heather has Two Mommies.' (Notably the book covers two gay men, not two gay women, as the Bible actually has very few things to say about lesbianism.)

Miss Poppy complains that there are no good reviews for the book, though of course now some wags are already starting to review the book at Amazon. However, she missed the review by Darby Dameron on the website of the publisher, Apologetics Press, which sad to say is not a parody:

'I am in education and see the trend of teaching tolerance to our young people and this scares me. Fortunately, I am in a school district where these views are not pushed on our children, yet they are still exposed to these ideas in the shows on TV and movies which come out. Myself and some of the other teachers have been looking for a book with a Christian view of homosexuality and I was excited when I picked up my copy of Reason and Revelation to find this book. I ordered it and have shared it with some of my friends. We appreciate the straightforward, scriptural approach to the topic. We may not be able to share it with our children in the classroom, but we can share it with our own chilren, who can then take these teachings to school. Thank you.'

You just can't make this shit up. To top it off, the book is written by one Sheila K. Butt.

Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!

They warned us. And the future is here:

'...The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys...'

Of course, as was predicted, our doom will be of our own idiotic hand:

'...The High Court ordered the city to find an answer to the problem last year...One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques...'

Yes, that's an excellent solution to the problem.

'Math is hard - Let's go Shopping'

I was going to post on something stupid going on in this world, but then I ran into something more stupid:

'...Fashion Fever Shopping Boutique, the correctly named Barbie toy, features a built-in credit card swiper and a life-size credit card for young children to use when buying outfits for their dolls. According to the Amazon website, "Once the balance hits zero, it will reset so you can continue to shop."...'

H/T Feministing, which has tracked down a (poor quality) youtube of the advertisement with the great line:, 'And you never run out of Money!.'

No word yet on the mortgage-fever house-buying Ken doll.

Coney Island

Time to get caught up on some photoblogging, now that I've downloaded some more pictures from the digital camera. These are from a trip we took with the nieces, Samantha and Lianna, to Coney Island, shortly before it closed for the season. Of course this land of trailer park amusement park fun is destined to close, perhaps for good or perhaps it will get a one year extension on life. But fear not, those who like their entertainment bland and inoffensive; plans are afoot to replace the entire 16 acre site with a shopping mall, condos and, yes, a new amusement park, but without all of that unsightly grime. The march to make New York no different than Orange County proceeds apace.

Will Fluffy go to Heaven?

My friend Andrew forwarded me a link to this site, which paints ghastly memorial pictures of Jesus holding your recently deceased pet (done for a fee, of course.) This kind of idiocy does raise, however, the issue of whether or not animals go into heaven. The problem is that the Bible is silent on the subject, as far as actually outright stating whether or not they do.

This seems like a fun group, a church dedicated to getting animals into heaven:

'...Our Mission Is To Prove Without A Shadow Of A Doubt That When God Made Animals He Made Them With Spirits And Souls and intended that they have a place in Heaven...'

I found them doing a Google search on 'will my pet go to heaven.' I could write for months on those search results, but many of them say the same thing, focusing on the book of Ecclesiastes as the scriptural source offering proof that in fact they do. Of course one can also offer countering scripture that hints that in fact animals don't go to heaven. If you're interested, just follow the link.

But what I found funny is the volume of search results - over 2.3 million hits. If you use quotes around the phrase, requiring an exact match, you get 721 hits. So I decided to compare that result to others:

"Will my husband go to heaven." - 2 hits

"Will my wife go to heaven." - 0 hits (Give it a week or so, and the google spider will hit this website, creating one hit - this blog entry)

"Will my spouse go to heaven." - 0 hits..

"Will my parents go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my mother go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my father go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my brother go to heaven." - 4 hits

"Will my sister go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my child go to heaven." - 5 hits

"Will my son go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my daughter go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my neighbor go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my enemy go to heaven." - 0 hits.

"Will my friend go to heaven." - 4 Hits

Again, "will my pet go to heaven" gets 721 hits. As a comparison I used "Is my ... going to heaven" and got very similar results. So there is a lot of angst out there about our pets getting into heaven. And not much about people close to us getting there. So we simply don't give a shit, either because we are convinced we are, convinced we aren't, or don't care about anyone other than ourselves:

"Will I go to heaven." - 805 hits.

Cowboy

This is classic:

'...President Bush may like to be seen as a swaggering tough guy with a penchant for manly outdoor pursuits, but in a new book one of his closest allies has said he is afraid of horses.

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, derided his political friend as a "windshield cowboy" – a cowboy who prefers to drive – and "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life". ...'

To be fair, most other preppies from Connecticut are also afraid of horses. H/T TPM.

Music Lessons

How To Record Music:

How to Play Music:

Class Dismissed

'Everybody likes Ganesh'

It looks like a certain Hindu deity is becoming very trendy:

'...Patel and her family will be one of many to visit a temple to honor Ganesh. Representatives from two of the U.S. temples where Ganesh is the presiding or primary deity say the numbers attending the celebrations are rising.

At the Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple in South Jordan, Utah, 50 people attended the first Ganesh Chaturthi celebration in 1995; about 500 are expected this year. At the Hindu Temple Society of North America in Queens, N.Y., which was built in 1977, the festival has grown from three days to nine to accommodate all the worshipers.

The numbers are not surprising, said Deepak Sarma, an associate professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"There are lots of different sects in Hinduism," he said. "Ganesh overlaps with all of them. Everybody likes Ganesh."...'

Ganesh Chaturthi (Ganesh's birthday celebration) is this Saturday, September 15th. Another good anniversary to celebrate.

9/11

Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in today's Salon. Some choice quotes:

'...Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin...'

This September 11th is the sixth anniversary of the attacks. But it is also the 101st anniversary of the beginning of Mahatma Gandhi's campaign against non-violence. It would be great if we could start commemorating that event. Because as several have been pointing out, we have no need to be made to remember what happened on this day six years ago - we keep having it pounded into our heads every damn day by this administration.

The Back Forty

This summer we've turned the front stoop into the back forty. We're growing four cherry tomato plants, a fajita bell pepper plant and a Serrano pepper plant. The results have been a good success, especially the tomatoes - they're sweet and tasty. The peppers have been a bit more problematic. The output from a bell pepper plant is not huge, so when one ripens, Kathy will chop it up and put it into something. The Serranos have mostly spiced up guacamole.

This 'growing things locally' is quite a trend, though I have my doubts of this project's scalability. Each cherry tomato has about five calories, and the average production of a plant is 50 or so tomatoes. So that's a total of one thousand calories for my entire farm. Or about enough to sustain me for a little more than half a day. It's not going to be cutting down my trips to the grocery store.

The Current Score

One of the most commonly asked religious questions is, "why is there evil in the world?" Some halfway decent answer needs to be arrived at for a religious faith to be taken seriously, otherwise it's just mucking around and wont get any real respect from people.

Of course this question begs an assumption, namely that the world is inherently a good place and that it is in some way contaminated with evil. Which in and of itself is quite an assumption, theologically speaking. So to be fair, one should also posit the question, "why is there good in the world?" This question, of course, makes the opposite assumption, namely that the world is an evil, or at the very least indifferent, place, potentially contaminated with good.

So what do people around the world think? It's almost a gauge for hope or hopelessness in the world. In the effort to find out, I Googled both phrases to see where the population of the world stands, or at least the population with internet access. I used quotes in the search string to count up only results that use the entire phrase.

"Why is there evil in the world" - 967 times

"Why is there good in the world" - 681 times

So people assuming that the world is inherently a good place seem to be leading, 967 to 681. To be honest this is a lot closer than I though it would be, since "why is there evil in the world" is much more of a catch phrase. I'll try to make this study an occasional feature to see how things are heading.

Is our Children Learning?

I am so going to start watching beauty pageants from now on. This is a great entertainment value. H/T Bob Harris, who also notes that this is the winner from South Carolina.