This just in off the wires:

Dispatch: The Vatican
Date: 2-23-06

Listen up, ya fuckin’ meatballs. I got some news for ya. Muslim countries can lick my sweaty nutsack. I got an offer ya can’t refuse, ya know what I fuckin’ mean? You Muslims, ya got it pretty good here in the West, ya know? I mean, we even let ya use the goddamn salad bar, don’t we? Stop me if I’m wrong.

But in your countries, ya go around torchin’ our churches and whackin’ our priests like we wuz friggin’ moulinyan pieces of fuckin’ shit.

Well, enough of this shit. My man Monsignor Velasio De Paolis ain’t fuckin’ around when he says: “Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves.”

Just in case you got some kinda faulty memory up in yer fuckin’ Mister Potato head, the article I’m linkin’ to says: Jesus told his followers to “turn the other cheek” when struck.

But badabing, badaboom… Do ya really think Jesus would put up with this shit? You burnin’ down a fuckin’ church or makin’ Mary Magdalene wear one of those freakin’ bee keeper’s hats you stick on yer freakin’ broads’ heads cuz yer so freakin’ afraid of yer dick gettin’ hard if ya look at a broad and find yerself thinkin’ she’s kinda pretty? Mingia, and I thought we Catholics were represed. Fuck no. I know Jesus, and Jesus was the ultimate wiseguy. He’d just as soon pop your ass as kiss you on the forehead, ya falafel-eatin’ piece o’ camel shit.

Now don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a man of God. But one good whack deserves another. Ya keep this shit up, yer boy Muhammed will be sleepin’ with the fishes.

Capiche?

Joey Ratzo
The Godfather
Somewhere inside Vatican City

15,000 atheists in London rioted after a blank sheet of paper was found on a cartoonist’s desk.

(From Father Dan.)

Well, it had to happen sooner or later given the tension between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi factions. Since Sunni terrorists were not content with sharing Islam with Shiites, they bombed the fuck out of a famous Shiite holy shrine.

If you’ve watched any CNN as of the minute of this posting, Shiite factions have, of course, instead of waiting for police and military units to take care of business, engaged in gun battles with Sunnis.

I’m constantly impressed that individuals of the same religion can turn into entire factions of hate groups against each other over a disagreement of their holy fanzine. I imagine this was what it was for factions of xians after the division of the Apocrypha from the canonical bibble. Just not with bombs. And guns. And possible chemical weapons.

At least they’re not attacking us- maybe we can ship all the xians out of this country and into the middle east so all of the zealot monotheist factions can battle in a winner-take-all for the same patch of dirt where some goat herder named “jera hoverah” took a piss in 4000 BCE.

We’ve praised Dan Savage here before.

He’s the take-no-prisoners, gay syndicated sex columnist carried by many an alternative paper in the country, who takes particular delight in ripping into straight, reactionary viewpoints and giving them a hearty “fuck you” while actually showing a great deal of compassion (more than most straight Americans would likely show for someone like him).

Anyway, he was interviewed by the Onion A.V. Club in their latest issue, and there was a passage quite relevant to our ongoing discussion here at GifS re: treating people with kid gloves vs. our standing tradition of slapping their asses into next Tuesday and giving them the opportunity to grow a carapace and come back at us with real arguments rather than rote indocrination-babble.

This is a nice philosophy Dan has developed after 15 years of bitch-slapping people in his column. Yeck it out. Kinda makes a screaming curmudgeon feel good about himself:

AVC: You’re still sometimes harsh or dismissive or aggressive with some of the people you deal with. Is there a philosophy to that attitude?

DS: Oh, absolutely. I always think of the column as a conversation I’m having with friends in a bar about sex. And people say, ‘Oh, you’re so mean.’ That’s only ’cause everyone’s so completely pussified by our therapy culture, where anyone who’s seeking counsel has to be fuckin’ nursed at your hairy tit for half an hour before you say a discouraging word—”Ooh, poopy-poopy, it’s so sad.” But if you think about it, if you go to your friends for advice and you lay out the dumb thing you did, the first thing they do is make fun of you for half an hour, or two hours. They make jokes at your expense, they tell you you’re an asshole, they ask you how you can be so stupid and idiotic, and then they give you some advice. I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that’s what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.

There’s an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about some “out” atheists who are trying to start up a movement to protect atheist rights much the same as gay rights and other civil rights movements in the past (and present).

Snippets:

Gathered around the plastic red-and-white tablecloths in the back room of a San Francisco hofbrau, 30 of the Bay Area’s “out” atheists were recasting themselves as the protagonists of America’s newest civil rights struggle.

When it comes to atheism, she said, “we’re not avoiding the word.” affair mp3 1890mp3 minutu w 140 udarowmp3 thugz 11082pm 04 tetris mp3mp3 story 0st westside18l mp3 powodzeniatype id 1491 mp3 track dnstreet 110th mp3 Map

Dan Dennett, America’s Richard Dawkins, has a new book out: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet, but I know the Dennett corpus and line on religion pretty well. He’s more or less like Dawkins, only taller.

But the NYTimes, in their infinite wisdom, gave the book to a theistic non-philosopher (I know, that’s close to redundant) to review; and what they got was this piece of shit by Leon Wieseltier (literary editor of The New Republic) called “The God Genome“. And I was about to write a little rant about the review when, as often happens, I find that both Brian Leiter and P.Z. Myers have already done it better. So just go read both Myers’ “Give me creaturely over preacherly any day“ and Leiter’s “Why review a book of philosophy when you can sneer at it?“.

I’m sure I would have come up with a combination of the two if I hadn’t been busy taking my six-year-old to see Curious George. Really, I would have.

Update:

By the way, just to put things in perspective, the reason Muhammed became such a force in his day was that Islam was spread through violence. The Caliphs came to power and ruled much of the Middle East for hundreds of years because they conquered. Conquering goes way back, ya’ll, on all sides. Nobody is clean.

Sorry, this is a couple of days late, but I just had to post it now that I have a moment…

Iran renames Danish pastries

Apparently, Iranians love danishes, but now they must be ordered as “Roses of Prophet Mohammad.”

Yes, fellow GifSters, the world gets more retarded by the day.

Glad to see our own home-grown politicians would fit right in with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I once sat in a plane on the tarmac at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow (a town, especially in the Soviet days, deservedly associated with the word “waiting”) and gazed out the window at an Iranian plane parked not far away. This was a sight one could not glimpse in America — since, natch, Iranian planes cannot land here.

Looking at the nose of the aircraft, having it thrust in my face so directly and so undeniably, vividly real, I was struck by those words like never before. It actually said “The Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Think about that for a second. A country that is so unquestionably ruled by a religion that is so powerful that, after such a massive undertaking as building a modern aircraft, that religion’s name gets painted onto the plane itself.

Would anyone in their right mind, theist or non-theist alike, want to live in a religious republic? “The Christian Republic of the United States.” That should scare the shit out of anyone short of Fred Phelps, shouldn’t it?

Jeebus, let’s hope so.

As our new GifS pal Steven Andresen says, you can accomplish more with sugar than vinegar.

I guess that’s why a Muslim cleric has offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who will MURDER one of the cartoonists who dared to draw a picture of his ancient, largely fictitious, goat-fucking “prophet.”

And you wonder why we need a place like GifS to vent our outrage.

Steven: if you are out there, I am composing my response to your latest challenge that we become kinder, gentler atheists. Just so you know, I was against the invasion of Iraq (I demonstrated extensively), I am anti-war and anti-violence. I think this is a fair statement to make about most non-believers. We cherish the value of life because we don’t see anything beyond it. I am against the oppression of people in the Middle East, both by the West and their own governments. I deplore what has happened to the people of Palesitine. I deplore the colonial history that led to much of this.

But words are another thing. On this issue I am absolute. No society worth its democratic salt tells anyone to shut up, for any reason. I don’t see even the tiniest fraction of outrage in the world over the activities of Fred Phelps. I mean, the shameless sumbitch even protested the funeral of Coretta Scott King (because she believed “fags” had equal rights). In terms of hate speech that’s screaming for a response, that action alone was far more offensive than 12 cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper published five months ago. Why don’t you go get worked up over that?

By the way — note to Ron: I was at a loss posting this piece of news about this murderous Islamic “man of gawd.” We need a new category: “Hateful bastards.”

Oh, and to quote Rockstar Ryan, Jeebus was a homosexual axe-wielding serial killer.