For Sean, who among many other things, loved history and understood so well why we need to remember it

The Story Thus Far: A forbidden Communion wafer falls out of Spanish Converso Benito Garcia’s pack in front of witnesses on his return trip home from his pilgrimage to holy Santiago de Compostela (see The Pilgrim).

Ever since 1144, when the English accused the Jews of Norwich of stabbing a boy named William to death, all Europe whispered that the Jews sought the blood of Christian children, especially little boys, for their satanic rituals. Rumors ran rife that Jewish sorcerors used this innocent blood and other Christian objects (like Communion wafers) to work magic. When the father of vanished two-year-old Simon of Trentino, Italy, accused the Jewish community of murdering him in 1475, a story circulated that the heartless butchers had killed the child over a large bowl to collect all his blood.

Benito’s drinking buddies knew what to do with a desecrating Marrano (literally, “pig;” despective term for a Christian convert backsliding into Judaism); they immediately dragged the terrified pilgrim off to Astorga’s (see pic) highest Church official, bishop’s vicar Pedro de Villada, who promptly ordered 200 lashes for him. Even though the whip could strip his skin into ribbons and if he passed out, he would be revived for more flogging until the 200th blow finally fell, Benito continued to protest his innocence throughout the ordeal. De Villada then “put him to the question” by moving him onto the “potro” (colt/young male horse) or rack.

The most popular torture device in Europe during the Middle Ages, this rectangular, usually wooden frame stood slightly off the ground. The vicar’s minions stripped Benito nearly or completely naked; laid him on his back on the framework; chained or roped his wrists to a movable bar above his head and his feet to a fixed bar at that end; and began to slowly turn a handle attached to a ratchet, thus also turning a roller on the movable bar where they had bound his hands. This gradually tightened the chains or ropes until they pulled on his limbs – and his joints.

As the interrogation proceeded, the tension increased, and Benito’s wrists, shoulders, ankles, knees, and hips dislocated with excruciating slowness. His tormentors not only listened to his cries of pain and desperate pleas for mercy, but also the loud pops as his cartilage, ligaments, and maybe even bones snapped under the inexorable pressure. They would repeat their questions and threats, and insist he repent and confess over and over…

But the alleged backslider hardened his heart (or maybe God did) and refused to give them what they wanted.

He fought a losing battle; the forces of good, right, and True Christianity ™ had rallied against this obvious diabolical enemy of Church and state; and so de Villada subjected him to the Spanish Water Torture.

Called the “toca,” this favorite involved binding Benito to another rack that hinged in the middle, so his interrogators could set his head lower than his feet and immobilize it with an iron band. After sealing his nostrils and stuffing a thick piece of cloth into his mouth, they poured water onto the cloth. Their prisoner felt like he was drowning, unable to struggle, spit his gag out, or even breathe until they decided to pause to give him a chance to answer their questions. Good torturers knew how to pace and time their gag-and-water application so that their subjects never even lost consciousness during the whole process—and Spain had some of the best in the business.

This finally broke Benito. He “confessed” that along with other Conversos and Jews, he had plotted to use the Host in concocting a magical potion designed to kill all Christians, thus leaving the earth to the Jews. The other main ingredient in their potion?

The heart of a Christian boy.

At once, victorious vicar de Villada sent a report to the Inquisitor General of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia, arguably the most powerful individual in Spain, second only if not equal in power to King Ferdinand himself:

Tomas de Torquemada.

Next: The “Rabbi”

I posted this link in the comment thread for Religion is Big Business, but thought it should go on the main page to be more visible. This goes along well with what we have been talking about recently. How can so many be so blind as to how they are being ripped off in the name of gawd?

No, it’s not a new position for the dirty- Russ sent along an email, pointing out some nifty Keith Olbermann clips concerning David Kuo’s Tempting Faith. I don’t know how many of you have cable, but I don’t and it’s nice to be kept abreast of these fun little snippets that I don’t get on my local news (although via local news I can tell you that Herb Johnson of Bfeville does like his new tractor). Enjoy!

Keith on Kuo, Pt. 1

Keith on Kuo, Pt. 2

We have discussed this subject several times before, and I hope that I am not being overly redundant, but it has become a great irritation to me since a huge country-club-type church was recently built on a large parcel of land a few blocks from where I live. While a private home owner in my town pays more than $5,000 in taxes for a postage-stamp sized lot with a modestly-sized house, this luxurious church building with its massive paved parking lot, beautifully landscaped grounds which needs massive amounts of water to keep “lush”, and sits on ten acres is tax exempt.

Why does religion survive in these modern times of high technology, science and reason? Because Religion is tax exempt BIG BUSINESS and those churches who know how to market make the most profits and prophets.

I have always said, even when I was a xian, that religion was big business. While most pastors, ministers, and priests are looking for a comfortable salary and benefits, there are too many, like those who head big churches and megachurches, televangelists and the like who are always looking for a way to get rich, to gain and hold power.

Here is an article from the website True truths: Helping people find the truth about religion.

Excerpts:

1. Find an existing demand and/or create a demand
Bingo! Religion gets an A+ for this one. First of all, many people seem to have an internal need for believing in some sort of supernatural, all knowing, all-powerful being. I don’t know if people are born with this need or if it just becomes part of them from their life experiences, but regardless of how the need got there, it’s there. That’s the existing demand. But where religion has really succeeded is the corollary – creating a demand. Look what they’ve done. They’ve taken old writings, written some new ones, and have crafted a compilation of “inspired” writings – the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, and many others. In these books people are told how they should act, how they should believe, and what they should do with their money and belongings. In Christianity, they have created a scenario where the demand for the product – forgiveness, eternal salvation, and the love of God – is both an internal demand and an externally created demand.

4. Convince people that if they do not have your product that something bad will happen
This is the opposite of number 3. If you do not have the product – in this case Christianity and all that goes with it – you will go to hell and burn for eternity. God also may make you suffer or do bad things to you while you are here on earth. Christianity’s done a great job here – either you believe as they tell you, or you will burn in hell forever – not a pleasant thought.

Other section titles are:

9. Limit overhead costs
The church can limit costs tremendously because they are not taxed on revenues and because many staff volunteer their time and talents to the church. Not many businesses can be run as inexpensively as the church.

10. Build an infrastructure that will continue the business far into the future

11. Have powerful, persuasive, enthusiastic, credible, dynamic leadership
As in business, most, if not all, successful religions and individual churches have great leaders. Whether it is Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Billy Graham, or the local priest or preacher, a dynamic personality is required to build and sustain a successful church. Just as a successful business must have a dynamic CEO, a church must have dynamic leaders.

As Bolder Landry of Truth Seekers states:

Your property taxes go up each year because church property is tax-free. Will our national leaders do something about this? No! will believers stop giving money to priests? No! How about revolutionary expropriation? Yes, this is possible but not until sleepy Americans are educated enough to shake off their shackles of superstition.

Church financial power has become an economic colossus at our expense. The only way to destroy this inequity is to attack and expose it.

Update: Catherine had posted about this subject not too long ago here: “Who gets special privileges?”

Yeah, the headline is taken from the Animal Planet’s signoff when they run pieces about Steve Irwin: “We’ll, miss you, mate; we’ll take it from here.” Leaves me weeping every time I hear it.

This link will take you to the Amazon page that discusses Carl Sagan’s and Ann Druyan’s new book (no, not from beyond the grave, from somewhat before that), titled “Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God.” It’s paired with Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” for a terrific discount as well as free shipping. I’m so sorry Sean didn’t live long enough to read this, for I know he loved Sagan, as many of us do. And when you read the page – what Vonnegut says, absolutely. If the link doesn’t work (it’s so damned long), just go to Amazon and enter Sagan’s name in the search line.

Amazon.com – The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

I saw a bit of this on television yesterday and wondered “WTF are they up to NOW?” (Other than Pastor Keenan making a bunch of money off xian suckers.) I guess evangelicals feel they just aren’t in our face enough. They must not be able to brainwash sufficiently in their churches and megachurches, they have to take it to the theater level, not just here, but abroad. From what I gather, Hell Houses are the fundies’ answer to a haunted house, a fundamentalist fright night meant to scare the bejesus out of any nonbeliever. These houses of horrors don’t rely on the traditional gimmicks of ghosts and goblins. Instead they recreate scenes that graphically depict such modern day “evils” as botched abortions, AIDS-related deaths, fatal drunk driving crashes, date rapes and drug-induced suicides.

From Gothamist

Starting yesterday[October 1] at the cavernous St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York City is getting its first chance to experience “Hell House”, an interactive spectacle that is fast becoming a Halloween tradition in churches across America.

The theater company staging New York’s Hell House, Les Freres Corbusier, has won awards for their whimsically smart romps through Ibsen (using real robots) and Scientology (using real children).

LINK TO CONTINUE READING INTERVIEW with Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the Executive Director of Les Freres Corbusier

At the end of the production Gawd attempts to lead the audience in a group prayer committing their lives to Jeebus. As one commenter stated “The whole idea is simply to break down their viewers’ resistance with shocking images, setting them up for the big pitch: “Hey kid, be a shame if any of that happened to you wouldn’t it? Well, our man Jesus, he can make sure it doesn’t, know what I mean?”

I think it’s hilarious how “a Los Angeles production of “Hell House” enlisted Andy Richter (as Jesus) and Bill Maher (as Satan) to lampoon Pastor Keenan’s script.”

Additions: A Hell House YouTube promo

AND

Lame Hell House Commercial

I had to pass this one on:

Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times
Oct. 13, 2006 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON – A new book by a former White House official says President Bush’s top political advisers privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as “nuts” and “goofy” while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a non-political effort to support religious social service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.

The assertions by David Kuo, the former No. 2 official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP. advertisement

Some conservatives lamented Thursday that the book, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, also comes in the midst of the scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley’s interest in male congressional pages, another threat to conservative turnout in competitive House and Senate races.

The book is scheduled to hit stores Monday, but the White House responded to its assertions Thursday as excerpts began leaking out.

In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove’s political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. It assails Bush for failing to live up to his promises of boosting the role of religious organizations in delivering social services.

White House strategists “knew the nuts were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness,” Kuo writes, according to the cable channel MSNBC, which obtained an advance copy.

“Sadly, the political affairs folks complained most often and most loudly about how boorish many politically involved Christians were. … National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ridiculous and out of control.”

It is unclear whether Kuo identifies any specific official as using the dismissive language.

The book says that before the 2002 elections, then-White House political director Ken Mehlman issued “marching orders” to use the faith-based initiative in 20 House and Senate races, according to MSNBC. To avoid appearing overtly political, Mehlman said his staff would arrange for congressional offices to request visits from the faith-based program officials.

Throughout the 2002 and 2004 campaigns, faith-based officials would meet with lawmakers in some places in an effort to generate publicity for them, while also hosting conferences in battleground states attracting hundreds of pastors and community activists eager to learn how to apply for federal grants.

A spokeswoman for Mehlman, who is now chairman of the Republican National Committee, said he did not recall the directives mentioned by Kuo. As political director, she said, “it was Mehlman’s job to both engage outside groups and inform decision makers in the White House about support for the president’s agenda.”

Kuo is scheduled to appear Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes program as part of a rollout arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster, which shares a corporate parent with CBS. Despite a publisher-enforced embargo, a copy of the book was purchased early at a Manhattan bookstore by a producer for MSNBC’s Countdown, a spokesman for the cable channel said. Program host Keith Olbermann began reading excerpts on his Wednesday show.

Kuo’s descriptions could do political damage to a Republican Party that has staked its formula for success on motivating the conservative base.

“Here we go again,” said Paul Weyrich, a leading religious conservative with close ties to the White House, referring to the avalanche of negative factors that he predicted would keep “embarrassed Republicans” from voting, just as the Watergate scandal did in the 1970s. “If Republicans win, it will prove God is a Republican, since it will take a miracle.”

Weyrich said Kuo, while still a White House official, told him of frustrations that the faith-based program had become entangled in politics. The initiative had been a signature proposal by Bush in the 2000 campaign but lost momentum amid partisan battles on Capitol Hill and the intense focus on security following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Seems all of their jeebus talk was just to get them corn shuckin’ bible-thumpers into them thar votin’ booths.

Uh oh, somebody better warn Fred Phelps’s animal kingdom equivalent. Animals can practice homosexual behavior. A museum in Oslo, Norway has documented homosexual or bisexual activities in “over 1500 species.” The title of the exhibit is “Against Nature,” which is designed to dispell myths that homosexual behavior is a deviancy or sickness.

With documentation of gay or lesbian behavior among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, whales and dozens of other creatures, the Oslo Natural History Museum concludes human homosexuality cannot be viewed as “unnatural.”

“We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear — homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature,” an exhibit statement said.

Geir Soeli, the project leader of the exhibition entitled “Against Nature,” told Reuters: “Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1,500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them.”

Of course, anything designed to show that being gay is ok is sure to come under the loving gaze of Christian groups.

One radical Christian said organizers of the exhibition — partly funded by the Norwegian government — should “burn in hell,” Soeli said. Laws describing homosexuality as a “crime against nature” are still on the statutes in some countries.

Now this is the useful kind of contribution to the scientific community that I’ve come to expect from Christian groups. This museum does careful research, documents instances of behavior in over 1500 species, puts their findings out there for public discussion and consideration, and all this Christian respondent can’t think of to say is that the organizers of the exhibit “should ‘burn in hell.’” Thank you for that thoughtful response. I’m sure the scientists responsible for this exhibit will now have to rethink the implications of their research due to your carefully crafted refutation of their findings. Of course, South Park had already taught us that there are plenty of gay animals.