Virgin Births (an excerpt from The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas)

The Nativity

‘I wanted to give birth as opposed to being delivered.‘ ~ Ricki Lake

Let’s start with a little game of Virgin Birth. Here’s the way it works: find someone who’s pro-Christian/pro-Christmas. After assuring them that you’re not going to offend them with a bit of historical fact (lie) read the following bits out loud and ask them to guess who you’re talking about. You get one point for pissing them off, five points for being told you’re going to hell, and 25 points (and a mention on my website) if they actually haul off and hit you.

Here we go, Scenario One:

Born on December 25 to a virgin mother, this great man later sacrificed his life so he could save all humanity from eternal torment. He died at Easter of acute crucifixion, and descended for three days into the underworld. On Easter Sunday, he rose again. To commemorate this heroic story, his followers wore an image of him being crucified and he was symbolically eaten by his followers in the form of bread during services.

Answer: Attis, a Phrygian god from Asia Minor. If anyone said Jesus, point your finger, laugh, and sign yourself up for 5 points. That one was pretty obscure though. To be fair, let’s jump ahead a bit to the actual time of Jesus…

Scenario Two:

He was worshipped in Jerusalem in the 1st century. He was the Son of God. The Creator made his mother pregnant through mystic means and his flesh and blood were symbolically eaten in the form of bread and wine by his devotees to celebrate his birth on December 25. The guy’s into healing, saving your soul, and eternal love. Oh… and a star appeared above when he was born. Don’t forget to mention the star.

Answer: Dionysus, the son of Zeus. Dionysian worship was really big in Rome and all the territories that Rome controlled, including Israel/Judea.

Ok, let’s try this one on for size…

Scenario Three:

A savior-god called the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, God of Gods. He is the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, yadda yadda, (you get the idea). Three Wise Men announced his birth. His followers ate cakes of wheat that symbolized his body, and he was worshipped in Judea in the first century AD.

Answer: That one’s Osiris, the Egyptian God who was chopped into 14 pieces as a sacrifice for all humanity. The difference between his lore and Jesus’ is that when Osiris came back from the dead, when Isis helped him out, she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) find his penis. For this reason Osiris is generally portrayed as neutered. Rome had accepted Osiris into the Hall of Gods by the time of Jesus, and Osiris worship was an accepted practice under Rome’s Hellenism. (Hellenism, by the way, was kind of a syncratic mish-mash of all the gods into one religion. Syncratic, by the way, is just a big word for mish-mash.)

Ok… that’s three virgin births and three resurrections, and we’re still not up to the late great JC. Here comes my favorite…

Scenario Four:

A guy born of a virgin on December 25 (popular day for virgin births, huh?). As an adult he casts out demons, cures people and walks on water. He was killed to save all humanity, came back from the dead, then ascended into heaven. He’ll come again to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.

The Answer: Mithra, the god of Mithraism (also associated with Zoroastrianism). It was from this religion that Christianity stole the bulk of its lore. Mithra was the Sol Invictus, or Unconquerable Sun. He did battle on behalf of humanity, died a martyr, and rose again. His story comes complete with 12 apostles, a Last Supper, the Wise Men and the Shepherds bit. His Godly Father, Ahura Mazda, was the One True God (except for that other pesky god he kept having trouble with.)

Ok, tally up your score and see how you did. If you’re bleeding or incapable of writing because you’ve just had your hands broken, don’t bother counting it all up. You win automatically.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

‘The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas’.

Ammunition for the War on Christmas.
Available just in time for Christmas with the in-laws.

The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas
www.heathensguide.com

The Myth of Good and Evil: From Hitler to Mother Teresa

These days, the archetypes of good and evil in our society are Mother Teresa and Hitler, respectively. If you start with these two as the paradigms, it becomes pretty easy to figure out what “Good” and Evil” are really all about.

I admit that I have never met Adolf Hitler. Fortunately for this blog post, however, I have met Mother Teresa. It was in Toronto, Canada back in ’84. She was giving a speech at Shea Stadium and I  (being the ‘good Catholic boy destined for priesthood’) was brought to Toronto to be introduced to a living saint.

The woman was a bitch to me.

I shook her hand and she sneered. I said a few words— basic niceties of some sort— and she just glowered at me. After about three seconds, she turned to the security people with her and said “Get rid of him.” They did.

I suspect I would have done better meeting Hitler.

Years later, I learned that Mother Teresa had a disdain for males. This information came to me as I read about the series of accusations leveled against Mother Teresa shortly before her death. It seems that many in India thought she was misappropriating the funds she had raised, using them to build more convents instead of feeding the poor.  She explained that this was her answer to the cruelty of the streets of Calcutta: The more girls there were in convents, the better things were on the streets.

The problem, of course, was that this policy prevented males, married couples, and any girl who did not want to be a nun from getting food or help. Many were pissed about it, and sought to have her relieved of her duties. The Church and the media basically rode out the accusations until she died, and whitewashed it all with a canonization.

Now, this doesn’t make her “evil” or anything, but it does show some normal, human fuckedupedness in this icon of ultra “Good”.

[I can just hear people out there thinking “He’s not going to try to defend Hitler now, is he?”]

Hitler was responsible for killing lots of Jews, and starting a World War. This makes it a tad hard to portray the man as “good”.  However, I’ve always been of the opinion that Hitler was really just a man of his times. Hear me out here…

Long before WWII, there were pogroms throughout Europe. (POGRAMS were mass killings, usually of Jews. See the WIKI.) The genocide of WWII was basically just another pogrom. This is why Hitler’s plan was called ‘The Final Solution’… other extermination plans had been tried before and failed.  The Nazis reasoned that only a large, coordinated pogrom could achieve the genocide they wanted. It was the ‘final solution’ in a series of attempts, not the stand-alone event that many see it as  today.

Here’s bit of little-known Hitler history for you:

In 1939, before his extermination of Jews began, 937 Jews got onto a boat (the S.S. St. Louis) and tried emigrate to anywhere that would accept them. These Jews, having a good idea of what returning to Europ meant, traveled to every port of call they could find, asking for refugee status. None of the allied countries (who were supposedly appalled by Hitler’s Final Solution) would accept a single Jew into their country. Every one of the 937 Jews on that boat were forced to return to Europe to face the concentration camps.

Follow this forward: During the war, German troops were stretched thin, the supplies were dwindling, and Germany still had hundreds of thousands of Jews in concentration camps that no other country would take off their hands. The Nazis couldn’t feed their own men, and they certainly couldn’t feed the hated Jews in the camps. This is why the corpses of the dead were found so malnourished… Hitler was unwilling to “waste” resources on the concentration camps when his own soldiers were starving in the field. When it came down to it, a prisoner in the camps had to show that they could contribute to the war effort, or they were killed.  The Nazi’s only other option was to keep them alive, but starving.

Is this evil incarnate? As I said, I’ve always seen Hitler as a man of his times. These Jews could easily have been granted refugee status in any of dozens of countries, but were rejected.

Still, when it was all over and the cameras moved into the death camps, the rest of the world was able to relieve their guilt by elevating the evil of Hitler. He was the madman. He hated and killed them all. He was the very essence of EVIL.

We, of course, were the good guys. We “saved the Jews”.  (Except for the millions who could have emigrated to the USA in 1939 but were flatly rejected.)

The point of all this is simple: Good and Evil are just monikers. Every icon has a story behind it. More often than not, the elevated status of saints and demons are created to make us feel the way we want to feel.   Mother Teresa is good and holy because she takes  our $10.00 donation and makes us feel better about poor starving children in India.  Hitler is ultimate evil because he exonerates our own guilt.  In Hitler’s case, his designation even allowed us to feel superior and heroic.

There is no ultimate evil in the world, any more than there is ultimate good. They’re just words we use to get over our own guilt, or to make ourselves look good.  People are people, some more fucked up than others, but all of us fall within that five percent deviation from the norm.

Beware anyone who tells you different.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

www.heathensguide.com

The above post was edited to correct abjectly stupid errors of fact that occurred in the original post. Thanks to v2h3452@mail.com for the one-up.

Steamy Hot, Man-on-Man, Gay Islamic Sex

“When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.” ~The Hadith.

(That sounds like a good motto for a Rainbow Church in San Francisco).

[Author's note: No, I'm not gay.  Just pissed at the Muslims.]

On Nov. 24, a reporter named Adel Hussein was sentenced to six months in jail by a court in Irbil, Iraq. His crime was ‘indecency’. Of course, this is an Islamic court, so their definition of ‘indecency’ is, by default, absolutely bugshit insane.

Case in point: Adel Hussein.

Adel is a doctor and journalist for the Hawlati news service in Iraq. Being a doctor, Adel wrote articles about health. In 2007, he wrote an article about Sexual Health. Part of this article included a detailed description of the physical effects of homosexual sex, particularly anal sex. (One immediately questions the logic of sending someone to prison for anal sex. It’s rather akin to locking up an alcoholic in a liquor store.)

“There are no gays in Iran. We do not have this phenomenon.
I don’t know who has told you that we have.”
~ President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Now, let there be no doubt here that Islam is unapologetic in it’s absolute, bigoted hatred of every gay or lesbian in existence. According to the faith, gays should all be killed  in horrible, twisted, sexual ways that would lead the witnesses to wonder about the predilections of the executioners. But I digress…

The thing is, Adel isn’t even gay. He just mentioned the fact that gay men exist, and that there was a medical opinion to be had about the effects of anal sex. Within Islam, though, this is heresy. “Gay” does not exist. Homosexual acts exist, for which the person should be punished. But there is no such thing as a person who, for whatever reason, prefers to have sex exclusively with persons of their own gender. Apparently the Islamic cable providers failed to secure The Ellen DeGeneres Show for their audience.

So, Adel’s crime was basically reporting on the sexual health of gay men that do not exist. Anal sex does not exist. Hot, steamy, Turkish baths full of naked, single men exist, but are entirely platonic.

This would all just be humorous if it were not for the fact that an estimated 400 men have been executed for being gay in Iran alone. Hundreds more are whipped, beaten, and publicly disgraced every year. I have no misguided belief that Islam will get over themselves any time soon. I don’t believe they’re going to stop believing that they and only they have the power and divine right to lead the world. But, reading the story of Adel Hussein, I just wish they’d learn to get over themselves enough to allow people to at least talk about the reality we live in instead of the fantasy world their religion provides.

Fortunately, here in the West, we are allowed the freedoms that Adel and others lack. Here ya go… knock yourselves out on Adel’s behalf:

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

‘The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas’.

A Field Manual in the War on Christmas.
Available just in time for Christmas dinner with your in-laws.

The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas
www.heathensguide.com

How the Christian Right are paving the way for Militant Islam

You see it on bumper stickers every day: “Jesus is Lord”. “King of Kings”. “Lord of All.” Were people voting with their bumpers, Jesus would win by a landslide.

But when the American right speaks of religion in politics, they are referring to Christianity. When they fight for more religion in the courts and schools, they mean more of their religion..

But the time is coming when fundamental Islamic madrasahs are going to start popping up next to their Christian schools. A time when protesting Muslims, using the legal victories of the Christian right, will have Sharia Law enshrined in the courts next to the Ten Commandments.

What the evangelicals don’t get (and what will come back to bite them in a generation’s time) is that freedom for one means freedom for all. Every law they pass to allow more of their religion into the government will also allow every other religion in. There will come a day when Congress and kindergartners will have to break for Islamic prayer, whether they are Islamic or not.

In fact, anyone with a religion will be able to exert power over the status quo, begging the indulgence of school boards and State funds to make sure their religion is as respected and included under the law as Christianity. And yes, the hardcore anti-Western imams with their hate speech will, in time, be protected under the very freedoms that they are trying to destroy.

There’s nothing fanciful in this. It’s a direct cause-and-effect of the legal precedents that the Christian right are pursuing. Religious inclusion for one sect will be applied to all, and you can bet that the extremists are watching this very closely, allowing the Pentecostals and evangelicals to do the hard work for them.

It bears repeating: freedom of religion must also mean freedom from religion. Only by separating religion and government will we be able to maintain the objectivity and freedom that the West has enjoyed for so long.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

‘The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas’.

A Field Manual in the War on Christmas.
Available just in time for Christmas dinner with your in-laws.

The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas
www.heathensguide.com

Sex and Religion

I was raised a strict Roman Catholic, destined (many said) to become a priest. As such, I learned the basics of Catholic sexuality as taught in my parochial school:

• God hates sex, but loves babies.
• A woman’s virtue is sacred, and any attempt to stain it is a sin worthy of damnation.
• Good people die virgins and go to Heaven. Bad people have sex, get diseases, die young, and go to Hell.

When I was fourteen, I discovered that I was having a theological crisis over these tenets. Surprisingly, my problems didn’t arise from my newly-discovered interest in the girl’s gym class. It came from the iconography that I found on the walls of the church, where I would go to beg forgiveness for my thoughts about the girl’s gym class.

I noticed that in all the religious paintings, the people in Heaven wore robes, while all the people in Hell were naked. And, though my inexperienced mind couldn’t quite fathom the reason for it, I instinctively knew that the tortured expressions on the faces of the damned expressed some passionate emotion that I would not truly understand until years later in a sleazy hotel room in London.

But there they were… naked. Until puberty I had pretty much ignored the writhing figures of the damned, favoring instead the holy, sanctified beauty of the Madonna, or the pious figures of the saints we were to aspire to being. But from fourteen on, it was those souls in torment that held my attention.

For a while I thought that this strange draw I was feeling toward the “dark side” was a burgeoning evil that was slowly overtaking my soul. I confessed this to the priests, of course, who dutifully assigned me Hail Marys and Our Fathers (though in the years since I’ve shuttered to think what the priests did after hearing my confessions). None of this stopped the fascination though. Even as I sat in the pew reciting my penance, I would find my eyes drifting up to the scenes of Hellish torment, scared by arousal I found in them. It became a viscous circle: Sinful thoughts, confessions, prayer, more sinful thoughts, more confession, and more prayer. I was trapped.

It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood that my guilt and fear were exactly what the icons were intended to instill. In my post-Christian phase I’d wondered for a long while why such an anti-sex institution as the Catholic Church would propagate these dark, sexual images of Hell. Surely the laity was going to see them, and at least some deviants (like myself) would be drawn to them?

Herein lies one of the most important lessons I ever learned about religion: Control is more about guilt than punishment.

Look around any church of any creed or sect and you will see it: images of what you should never, ever do. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a church whose iconography involved naked, flailing breasts, but the same idea can be conveyed using greed, avarice, gluttony, or any of the other fun Saturday night activities. You show people what they really want, then make them feel guilty for actually wanting it. It’s a revolving door of guilt and coveting that always leaves the laity looking for relief from the guilt you’ve created in them.

It wasn’t until my break with religion was final that I was able to stop and assess my priorities, based on what I learned for myself was right and wrong for our society. When I did, though, the cycle of guilt and arousal were broken. Sex became a normal, natural part of my human existence, free of guilt and shame.

This freedom from guilt and shame only lasted until I spent that summer in Tijuana, but that’s a whole other story.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

www.heathensguide.com

The Bully Cries Foul: Religion on the Ropes

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) —This week the OIC won United Nations backing for a draft resolution that would outlaw “defamation of religion” throughout the world.
(Read the whole ridiculous article here)

For thousands of years, religions have been saying that Humanity is evil. Because of our evil, we are told that a just and loving God is going to condemn us to Hell for all eternity. Only the “holy” people from their religions are going to go to “Heaven”. To get there, the advocates of religion never miss an opportunity to explain to the world what kind of slimy, cruel, and ugly creatures we are.

They call this human-bashing “ministry”.

In every mosque, church, and temple on Earth, people are educated against the evils of being human. Sex is evil. Gays are to be killed. Heretics should be burned. These are real-life, modern theologies that are preached every day in this modern world. Yet now, as education and awareness are growing (mainly thanks to the internet) these self-same anti-human bigots are at the UN begging for protection from the “defamation of religion”.

The world’s biggest bully, Religion, is now finally being confronted by a people who are starting to think for themselves. Their response? The bullies are trying to call the schoolyard teacher (the UN) to protect them.

It’s bullshit.

As long as any clergyman in any religion is willing to take to the pulpit and tell the world how scummy humans are, there needs to be protections for an equal and opposite point of view. That the OIC now wants the UN to protect them, while at the same time publicly condemning every Westerner for their evil and godless lifestyle, is as absurd as it is offensive.

I’ll go head-to-head with the claims of any religion. But I’ll be damned if I will stop criticizing the bullies because they’re finally getting a taste of their own medicine and can’t handle it. As far as I’m concerned, stories like this are a testament to the fact that we might now (finally) have these power-hungry, human-hating bigots on the run from their own accusations. Now is not the time to back off, shake hands, and be nice. Now is the time to hit harder, challenge every hateful word that comes out of their mouths, and hopefully put an end to their absurd attack on the human condition.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.com.

www.heathensguide.com

An Unapologetic Message to Islam in the Wake of the Mumbai Attacks

After 9/11, the world was coached to understand that terrorism is not Islam. The West slowly came to understand that there were sects and branches of Islam, and that we can not hold the whole of the faith responsible for the actions of a few. President Bush visited mosques to underscore this point. The media rushed to fill the headlines with images of innocent Muslims being attacked for their faith. The violence, we learned, was not your fault.

Except that it is.

Amid all the outrage that I’ve heard in the media during the attacks in Mumbai, there is one voice that remains silent: the peaceful Muslims. If atheists were out there killing people in the name of my beliefs, I’d be the first person to jump up and call the idiots out. I would be furious to have my thoughts and beliefs profaned on the world stage, and I would not stand for it.

And yet, you are.

We hear Islamic demagogues scream for blood and Allah’s retribution nearly every day, and yet there is no Islamic voice offering the world a better vision of Islam… a vision the world can work with. Instead, all we get are the rantings of people who want all of us dead; People who swear to overthrow the governments of the world and instill an Islamic tyranny.

I’ve read the Quran. I know that there are peaceful interpretations of the commandments you find in it. But if I can’t hear your voice explaining this, then I know there are many young Muslims who can’t hear you either. A muffled scowl and a disapproving nod do nothing in the face of the fiery rhetoric and bloody vengeance that captures the headlines daily.

I agree that acts of terrorism like those in Mumbai are not the responsibility of the average Muslim who just wants to live, work, and feed his family. However, with each new atrocity committed in the name of Islam, the voice of average Muslims is becoming weaker, while that of the extremists grows strong.

The world wants to hear the average, peaceful Muslim. I want imams from London to Fresno getting on the news and openly decrying the kind of violence and cruelty being committed in the name of the faith they preach. If Islam is a religion of peace, then it must be reclaimed now, today. The world needs to see the clear light of day between the Muslims they live and work with, and the Muslims they see on TV. More importantly, the next generation of Muslims who are learning much of their beliefs from media rhetoric need to see the difference.

If the Muslim world fails to act decisively to decry these kinds of attacks, the future of the faith will rest in the hands of terrorists, not with your local imam. If that happens, Islam really will become the cruelty that so many already believe it is, and the voice of the moderates will be nothing more than a heresy to the soldiers of a new Islam.

Written by Wm. Hopper, www.heathensguide.wordpress.com.

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Mumbai Attacks Could Be Just the Beginning…

While the world reacts in anger and grief to the terror attacks in Mumbai, it’s vitally important to recognize the environment this has occurred in. Failure to do so will lead to far worse, far bloodier confrontations in the coming weeks.

The government of India is secular… with good reason. The country is populated by Hindus and Muslims who tend to kill each other in huge numbers. In 2002, for instance, the Gujarat Riots resulted in over a thousand people killed on the streets of India. This is far from being an isolated incident. Extremists on both sides are ready to leap on any opportunity to destroy their enemies entirely.

While the Western media is playing this scene as a brazen attack on Western tourists, the Hindus of India are watching as well. It’s they who are likely to respond in the coming days, not the US military. If this happens (and I think it very likely), then there is a very real possibility of a long, sustained, and gruesome war between Muslims and Hindus in both India and Pakistan.

A lot of how this plays out has to do with how Obama and the Indian parliament react to the situation. If this is portrayed as an “evil Islamic terrorist attack”, the Hindus will rise up… with very deadly consequences. The “war on terror” speeches that play so well on Western television will only incite more attacks, more bombs, and many more dead in the coming weeks.

This is Obama’s first true test as Commander in Chief. He has to find a way to draw the people of India and Pakistan (Muslim and Hindu alike) into a dialogue against terror, but not against “Muslim extremism”. It’s a fine line to walk, but if he fails to do so now, tonight, then his years as president may well be eclipsed by outright religious warfare between (and within) two nuclear-armed countries.

By Wm. Hopper, http://heathensguide.wordpress.com/.

Want to understand How Nutbar Scientology really is? Ask Hubbard.

I thought long and hard about what I should write about Scientology. In the end, I decided the best thing I could do to show Scientology up for the fraud it is would be to let L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) do it for me.

Unlike Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Scientology’s founder has left video tapes of his rants. One of the better ones was a one-on-one interview with Hubbard while in exile on his ship, circa 1968. I recommend you watch the whole thing if you want to know what kind of nutbars these folks are.

[Legal disclaimer: My comments above are a personal opinion, and as such is not actionable as liable and/or slander.]

This post was written by Wm. Hopper, heathensguide.wordpress.com.

Atheist Bus Ads

Ah, ’tis the season. The atheists are out in storm this year. Check out the bus ads that are running in New York and London…

[There's probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.]

And my personal favorite…

It’s a truly worthy Christmas campaign. If you have not yet donated, here’s a link for you to do so.

SUPPORT THE ATHEIST BUS ADS

And be good, for goodness sake…

This post was written by Wm. Hopper, heathensguide.wordpress.com.