Christian fun for boys and girls

Following links from parabiodox’s – how can I put this? – unique site, I came across some really good Christian sites. Believe it or not. No, really.

(And before you say it, I’m not the fool for carrying on….. I know it’s not April 1 any more. )

I’m not talking about the normal entertainment value you can get from from reading creationist garbage and having a good chortle – albeit, tinged with fear. These really seem to be people who can extract the proverbial urine from themselves.

Ship of fools is a shock. It should probably be on the Atheist blogroll, were it not for the bulletin board that seems to be full of actual Christians. The gadgets for instance, like the dasboard Jesus, from Dogma or the knitted testament redefine tacky.

My temporary favourite is the cat baptising kit. Which seems to be being applied to the evil cat from Cats and dogs.

There is a section called the Fruitcake Zone that might as well be on the atheist blogroll because some of these links really are to the sites of people off the church bell-shaped curve of rationality. As the Ship of Fools site puts it:-

Here you will find the weird, wild and wonderful world of religious fruitcake, with websites that unwittingly put the “fun” back into fundamentalism. And the “mental”, come to think of it.

Related sites include the The religious adherence of comic book characters With an attention to detail that would shame Monk (the TV detective, that is, not a member of a religious order) someone has tabulated a million comic book characters and listed their religions.

They’ve had to strain the concept of religion beyond breaking point to include things like Alcoholics Anonymous, environmentalism, even atheism. (A fair number of the villains turn out to be atheists.)

Some characters like Thor and Hercules are even stuck with worshipping themselves more or less.

There are even linked pages debating the religion of selected characters at such length you may suspect the Bible is the condensed version of the book these would make.

You can spend hours here, being amused, infuriated and utterly baffled at the oddness of the human mind. As I said they are pretty damn good.

Atheist serpent eating own tail

We will now bow our heads in worship of the marvellous Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll (see below right – or elsewhere, depending on whetherTW is experimenting with another new theme at the moment) The serpent eating its own tail bit means that this blog, being on the blogroll, is about to discuss the blogroll.

This blog has leapt from Technorati insignificance to the lower reaches of the blogistocrcay thanks to its magical touch.

Firstly, there are some blogs on the roll that I find utterly infuriating. I’m buggered if I can identify any logical connection between a miltant pro-Israeli stance and atheism, for a start, but there seem to be more than their fair share of blogs emitting very pro-Israeli rants. I’m obviously missing something here, but isn’t Israel by definition a Jewish state?

I seem to remember that Judaism is normally considered a religion. Couldn’t you even argue that the behaviour of Israel has been the biggest single spur to the rise if militant Islamic fundamentalism. Just saying. (There are no problems with the “Jewish atheist” site, which is totally what one would expect to belong on the blogroll. I.e. It’s by an atheist who was brought up into the Jewish tradition.)

I’m going to ignore these odd blogs. Free speech and so on. Instead, I’m going to unfairly pick out the most stunningly brilliant atheist blogs in case you haven’t read them. (Unfairly because this is on only the basis of the most brilliant ones I’ve read recently.)

Blog of the gods God’s own blog, written in the first person. As infernally brilliant as you’d expect from the creator of the universe. Can be almost unbearably funny. The Sycophants section is particularly good, with God slagging off the people who are shamelessly flattering Him/Her to get in His/Her good books. S/He writes a few more new commandments, sends a few deserving people to Hell for all eternity. You are even guaranteed eternal life in heaven if you click on a sponsored link. (This appears to involve you getting pop-up spam, sadly, though, maybe for ever.)

Nullfidian The blog would collectively say Nullfidian was God, were it not for the fact that the Blog of the Gods suggests the post has been filled. Never seen a boring post on his blog. That’s not a challenge, by the way.

There would be some danger of turning this blog into a scraper and just posting content from Pharyngula, Nullfidian or Blog of the Gods, if we let ourselves do that. So I won’t point you to nullifidian’s 2000-years-of-learning/ blogofthegods’ godmen-tyler-durden-meets-ned-flanders/ (These are just tasters, linking to their most recent posts. Trawl the rest.)

I was going to add another half dozen links here, but I started worrying about choosing excellent blog x over equally excellent blog y. Or the list would have been massive, Ah, isn’t that what the blogroll is for?

Technorati goes mental again

Trying to use Technorati, I get this bizarre message,

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again.

We’re scouring the blogosphere attempting to find it. Back in a flash!

This was after looking at the “Blogs that link here” link to the right of this page and getting only linking blogs that had expired 200 odd days ago. Technorati apparently then decided to give up the unequal struggle to provide a service at all. Monster? Yuk and argh.

Why I am I even bothering to tag this?

Great anti-Celebrity Big Brother invective

Apparently having become obsessed with the Celebrity Big Brother racism (Help me, please, quickly), in common with the rest of the country, I have been really impressed by the capacity of bloggers to express creative rage.

Here are a couple of quotes from blogs that I enjoyed for the viciousness of their invective.

Seriously though, a ‘Lord of the Flies’-style gang of filthy dimwitted scrubbers, jealously attacking a successful and beautiful Indian woman over her ‘filthy’ eating habits (i.e. eating with her fingers), calling her ‘the Indian’ and telling her to “get back to the slums”, to “fuck off home” on the grounds that “she can’t even speak English properly” : THIS is something that a national television channel is airing, and defending as NOT being racist? (from http://godfreylazarus.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-big-bitch-nonsense.html)

I want to expand on this point, since this year the cruelty behind reality television has been clearly demonstrated by the racist remarks directed at Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress whose main crimes appear to be “being a bit snooty” (no surprise, she’s the only person left in who’s actually famous somewhere in the world), “eating with her fingers” (apparently the complainants have never eaten a burger in their life), “talking in a funny voice” (according to a Scouser and Jade Goody) and being a “Paki bitch” (in the charming words of Goody’s boyfriend Jack Whohe? There has been some debate over whether he actually said “Paki”, incidentally – the first word was bleeped out. Channel 4 somewhat unconvincingly maintain the bleeped word was “cunt” (http://parma-violets.livejournal.com/192564.html) The rest of this blog article is dead funny and true.

There were lots of other good rants, mostly by people who don’t actually watch Big Brother, but that category must include most of the non-medicated population between the ages of 18 and 85.