Mar
21
2013
Mar
21
2013
Staying Classy in Lincoln County, West Virginia
Mar
21
2013
Dateline West Virginia:
The text of the ‘letter’:
We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers. The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops. You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters.
We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God-fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you.
It’s possible that someone was trolling the newspaper. It’s more likely that there are still plenty of people, including “good, white, God-fearing Christians,” who are just being frank (as long as they can remain anonymous, of course) about their outsized hatred for anyone who’s even the slightest bit different.
God Gives a Clue On TV: Obama = Devil From Hell
Mar
21
2013
According to radio host Rick Wiles, the Almighty has been working through TV producer Mark Burnett to warn people of the anti-Christ in our midst.
TruNews host Rick Wiles on Wednesday explained that it was not a coincidence that people like radio host Glenn Beck thought that “Satan” in the History Channel’s The Bible series looked similar to the president.
Wiles admitted that he believed the network and producer Mark Burnett when they said that it was “utter nonsense” that any resemblance was deliberate.
“I don’t believe they intentionally portrayed the Lucifer character to look like Mr. Obama,” the Christian radio host noted. “I think God guided the hand of the makeup artist and blinded the eyes of everybody on the movie set while it was being recorded, and the spiritual blinders were removed Sunday night when the program was broadcast nationally on the History Channel.”
“How many clues do we need from Heaven to understand that the man in the White House is a devil from Hell?”
Good question. I have a couple of my own. Why would an all-powerful God who wishes to inform us that Obama = Lucifer allow the demon candidate to be elected — twice? Why would the Almighty, instead of dropping ambiguous clues through a second-rate cable show that only about four percent of Americans tune into, not simply appear in the sky and tell us what we need to know? Or at the very least, why wouldn’t he buy some primetime Super Bowl spots to do the same? What’s with all the vagueness?
It’s been this way for more than two thousand years. Would it have killed the Creator of the Universe to give us a book with plain language that’s not open to literally tens of thousands of often competing interpretations? Why doesn’t He just erect an indestructible 200-foot-tall stone display, or several (backups are never a bad idea, amirite?), inscribed in straightforward English — the world’s lingua franca — with what He’d like us to do? This should be absolutely trivial for a Superbeing, no?
Why the burning gay bars bushes and the pictures of His son in blackened toast?
I’m no theologian, of course, so I’ll defer to respected scholars like Mr. Wiles.
[image via Raw Story]
Not So Pro-Life After All
Mar
21
2013
Lindsey Lowe, 26, has always been an exemplary Christian. For three generations, her family attended City Road Chapel United Methodist Church in Madison, TN. Lowe was baptized and confirmed there. She was also a member of the youth group and, indeed, grew up in the church. She is a 2004 graduate of Goodpasture Christian School in Madison. On her Facebook page, Lowe listed the Bible as one of her favorite books. She performed her job at a local pediatric dentist office with pleasant cheer.
She was often seen toting the Good Book, and just the other day she faced her friends and family, pointed up, and said, “I’m OK. I love you all. He’s with me.”
What made her offer them such reassurance? This:
A jury found a 26-year-old Tennessee woman guilty of murder Tuesday in the 2011 smothering deaths of newborn twins found in her laundry basket. The jury of seven men and five women convicted Lindsey Lowe, of suburban Nashville, of felony murder, premeditated murder and aggravated child abuse. …
At trial, jurors saw a video of Lowe telling police she had given birth alone on Sept. 12, 2011, in the bathroom of her parents’ home on a quiet cul-de-sac in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The bodies weren’t found until two days later. A family member discovered one baby dead in a laundry basket at the home in Hendersonville, 20 miles northeast of Nashville. When police arrived to investigate, officers found the second body under a bloody sheet in the same basket.
Lovely detail:
Lowe was engaged at the time but became pregnant during an affair with another man, jurors were told. She hid the pregnancy from her family and friends.
Oh, and also from her fiancé, natch, so as not to “disappoint” him.
When she gave birth to twins, in September 2011, she promptly suffocated them and discarded the little bodies in the hamper.
After the jury verdict on Tuesday, the presiding judge sentenced Lowe to life in prison.
[image via WKRN]
Thangew, I’ll Be Here All Week
Mar
21
2013
There are four people on board of a burning plane: a priest, a young mother, her six-year-old son, and the pilot. The crying mother is persuaded to grab the first of only three parachutes, and jumps. The pilot takes the second parachute, and gives the third to the priest. The priest yells “What about the child?” The pilot yells back, “Screw the kid!” The priest brightens and says, “Do you think there is time?”
BONUS — The most popular joke told at last week’s papal conclave in the Vatican:
Q: What’s the best thing about fucking twenty-eight-year-olds?
A: There’s twenty of them.
And the second-most popular:
A priest and a little boy walk into a forest at night. The child whimpers, “I’m scared, it’s dark in there!” The priest responds: “You‘re scared? I’m the one who has to walk back alone!”
Peaceful Buddhists Burn Down Mosques
Mar
21
2013
Yesterday, in Myanmar,
Two people, including a Buddhist monk, were killed and at least three mosques were destroyed after riots broke out [between Buddhists and Muslims] in a town in central Myanmar, police said. Around 200 people fought in the streets after an argument in a Muslim-owned gold shop turned violent in Meiktila on Wednesday. …
The unrest comes amid heightened concerns over Muslim-Buddhist relations in Myanmar, where communal conflict in the western state of Rakhine has left at least 180 people dead and more than 110,000 displaced since June 2012.
[image via Al Jazeera]
How a Methodical Methodist Got Rid of His Wives
Mar
20
2013
They’ll probably make a movie about pastor Arthur Schirmer (of Reeders United Methodist Church in Pocono Township, PA) some day. But rather than being a celebration of divinity, the flick will feature treachery, lies, adultery, and double murder.
A former pastor was sentenced Monday to life in prison without parole in the fatal bludgeoning of his second wife in 2008. Arthur “A.B.” Schirmer, 64, was sentenced nearly two months after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of Betty Schirmer. The conviction brought an automatic life sentence.
Schirmer is charged separately with killing his first wife, Jewel Schirmer, in 1999. He awaits trial in that case.
Prosecutors said he clubbed Betty Schirmer on the head with a crowbar, then loaded her into their car and staged a low-speed accident in an effort to conceal the crime. …
Local police initially believed Betty Schirmer’s July 2008 death was the result of a car crash. State police began a more thorough investigation months later, when a man committed suicide in Schirmer’s office after learning the pastor was in a relationship with his wife, the church secretary.
Authorities ultimately concluded the fender-bender could not have caused Betty Schirmer’s extensive head and brain injuries. Police also found her blood on the garage floor, along with evidence that someone had tried to clean it up.
[image via Lebanon Daily News]
Something to Reform: Treasurer’s Thieving Ways
Mar
20
2013
Let it never be said that Rudolf van B., the treasurer of a Reformed Church in the Dutch town of Zeewolde, is insufficiently ambitious. Over a period of five years, Van B. (for some reason, Dutch media usually don’t report the last names of suspects or convicts) robbed his own church, and the parishioners. He did so by falsifying records and diverting the princely sum of some 360,000 euros total — close to a half million dollars — to his own bank account.
A Dutch court sentenced him to 240 hours of community service and a year’s probation.
[image by colourbox, via Metro]
Kumaré, the Movie: Filming the Folly of Blind Faith
Mar
20
2013
Vikram Gandhi is an American of Indian descent. He grew up in New Jersey.
As an experiment, the young filmmaker wanted to see if he could credibly transform himself into a guru. He grew his hair and beard to conform to the expected guru look, tried as best he could to embody a spiritually enlightened mystic, practiced a thick Indian accent, and then “came to America.”
In no time at all, he had acquired an ardent following. Luckily for us, Gandhi had a camera crew in his wake the whole time. Watch what transpired.
The movie Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet is now available for streaming on Vudu, Amazon Instant Video, and iTunes (it’s currently just 99 cents on iTunes, for the high-def version no less). You can see the official trailer here.
Bad Baba
Mar
20
2013
Last year, Hindu holy man Baba Shailender Puri, whose real name is Sanjay Kherwar, kidnapped and raped an underage girl who visited his house of worship in Barara, India. A local court just convicted him to 10 years in jail.
It wasn’t the first time the Baba (Father) was ordered behind bars. He’d already been sentenced to a life term in a murder case in Kanpur, but escaped from police custody and started a new life under an assumed name.
Kherwar used to organize religious functions at Shiv Mandir, a Hindu temple in Barara.
[image via Act for America]
Being Gay, Killing People — Same Difference
Mar
20
2013
As Hittman, my fellow Moral Compasser, pointed out in this blog post about Senator Portman’s gay son last Saturday, Traditional Values Coalition president Andrea Lafferty equated being gay with driving drunk.
Not to be outdone, Bryan Fisher, a policy warrior for the American Family Association, corrected Lafferty and wrote that being gay is really more akin to robbing banks.
Today we find that that still wasn’t le mot juste for WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah, whose standout contribution to the debate is that actually, being gay is just like being a serial killer.
Lafferty, Fisher, and Farah: Spreading God’s love
Tune back in tomorrow, when I suspect we’ll hear that Harvey Milk was a homegrown Stalin, and Matthew Shepard a wannabe Pol Pot.
[images, from left, via Fortress of Faith, 10thousandcouples, and Media Matters]