I will buy Harold Camping's company

[caption id="attachment_1209" align="aligncenter" width="690" caption="Click for full size"][/caption]

Yeah, HE is the loony, right?

[caption id="attachment_1204" align="aligncenter" width="588" caption="Talk to your invisible 8 foot tall rabbit friend, you have a mental illness. Talk to a god, you are simply devout and holy."][/caption]

This pretty much says it all

[caption id="attachment_1201" align="aligncenter" width="717" caption="Yep, still here."][/caption]

The Christians are Still Here

*sigh*

Best post-rapture video yet:

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9KlMWzKj4s

To Rev. Camping and Congregation

Dear Sir and Congregation,

I write to you after having received your package in the mail today.  In it were the items I requested from your website this past weekend: books, pamphlets, and information about your ministry.  I must confess I did not expect to receive these materials so soon, if ever.  I imagined you being inundated with requests for the same materials by many people the world over given the considerable media attention your group and its claims have received.  The speed with which you responded, seemingly to get the materials to me before the May 21, 2011 deadline your reverend predicts, convinces me of the depth of your belief and the sincerity with which it is held.

That said, I must also confess to the ulterior motives I had when making the request from your site.  I am an atheist and someone who disbelieves not only your specific claims about the coming weekend, but also the belief system within which you make such predictions.  I was brought up a Christian, devout in my fundamental evangelical beliefs until my late teens.  At that time, questions in my life were not being answered as I thought they would, given the promises of my Bible and the sermons of my pastors.

I found myself alone and questioning, traversing a park green in the middle of many nights, crying and wailing for a god who was not there and, as I came to discover, had never been there.  I was alone in the universe, as were my fellow humans on this planet we call home.  I could no longer abdicate my personal responsibility for my actions to the influences of whims of invisible beings.  I could no longer hope for a reward or fear a punishment and adjust my behavior accordingly.  I could only stand alone with what I had and what I could gain in terms of knowledge and wisdom, to carve out a good life for myself and to help others as I could.  It is a process I continue to this day.

It was not a process without a price.  I paid a heavy toll in the loss of my prior innocence and in gaining a gritty, albeit realistic view of the world around me.  I stared into the abyss and the abyss did nothing at all, because there was never anything there to stare back.  The acknowledgment of oblivion, of endless nothingness awaiting me after death was as profound a shock and englightenment as any spiritual experience I had ever encountered.  I no longer feared death and, indeed, saw my life as being something worth living for the now of it, rather than what it might gain me after it was over.

The process hurt.  I had been a man with profound strength of intellect and will, blinded and hobbled by religion, but lead to the temple to stand between its pillars one last time.  In the agony I experienced in Sherlock Park, Cookeville Tennesse that fateful night,  I shoved the pillars with a strength of questioning and curiosity I had forgotten I possessed.  The temple crashed around me and a part of me truly died.  I felt the death of it acutely, as if something was carved directly from my muscles and bones.  When I emerged from the rubble of my religious tabernacle, I found myself in the world anew.  No longer were questions forbidden or doubts frowned upon.  No longer did I fear some invisible being over my shoulder, pushing and pulling through me in some kind of cosmic wrestling match with some other being.  I was free.

I write to you now in the hopes some of these words are with you during the wee hours of Saturday night and into Sunday morning.  You are going to find yourself there and none of the things predicted having come to pass.  You will be where I was one star filled summer night, in a sleepy little town in the south, and you will find the tears flowing unbidden.  You will have two options: embrace or anesthetize.  Some of you will indeed embrace a new beginning, free of the shackles which chained you to this day for so long.  Others will seek a way of re-establishing your belief, made all the harder by the stubbornness with which your pastor has refused to give an "out" for his coming second failure of prediction.  It is my sincerest hope that you choose the former over the latter and, in doing so, surround youself with outside friends and loved ones, even those who do not believe as you do.  Be open to their counsel and support.  Most of all, be honest and open about any feelings you might have which lend themselves to thoughts of harming yourself others.

With the same passion and sincerity in which you carefully mailed me the materials I selected, I implore and hope you find a brighter path on the glorious dawn of May 22, 2011.  It's a Sunday which might decide the course of the remainder of your life and I wish you well in a new world of light and freedom from dogma.  We have a lot of work to do, as a species, and though you are few in number compared to the rest, we need all the help we can get.  I bid you welcome.  The new heaven and new earth are right here, waiting for us to make them.

 

Sincerely,

Brian McKinley Ragle

Washington DC

May 18, 2011

 

[caption id="attachment_1182" align="aligncenter" width="645" caption="Great Disappointment II, collectibles"][/caption]

P.S.

 

As I feel bad that you went to the trouble and expense of sending me your materials, particularly so quickly, I will be sending you $20 to defray the costs I estimate you incurred.  Please accept it as a compensation of your time and effort and not as a demonstration of faith in your belief.

 

 

 

 

Free Will

[caption id="attachment_1114" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="How is the Christian god any less like al Qaeda or crazy Muslims who threaten to riot and kill innocent people unless we stop defaming their holy book?"][/caption]

Respawn Jesus

Via Buzzfeed:



 

 



 



 

 



 

 



 

 



 



 

 



 

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 8

Whew, another night!  That makes 2 nights and 1 day.  Only 1 more night and 2 more days to go.......

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.  He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.

....wait, what?  It's only Sunday morning!  He's not been dead 3 days and 3 nights yet.  Did someone enter a cheat code?

No, the short answer here is that the Bible is simply not some infallible historical record.  It's a book of myth, lore, and tradition, with some historical elements mixed in.  For example, there was really a Jerusalem at that time and the Romans really did occupy it.  There was even a Pontius Pilate.  There very likely was a Jesus, as it was a common name, and there might have even been one who was something of a rabbi or local cult leader, such as John the Baptist was.

The myths and legends about the man, however, are simply those created by his believers to make him into something he claimed for himself.  It's a bit like how Mormons venerate Joseph Smith and leave out the bits about his penchant for young girls or that he was lynched in jail by an angry mob.  Or how Scientologists leave out the parts where L. Ron Hubbard was a sci-fi writer looking to cash in on the notion of a religion.  Instead, he's portrayed as a wise and noble man, fully in touch with whatever secrets he claimed to be sharing.

Those are modern examples of how any venerated leader is from history.  Muhammed, Jesus, the Buddha....all have these epic stories attached to them which are more like Hollywood movie scripts than reality.  In the end, this small example of an error of the Bible is just another bit of evidence that the book itself is simply like all other ancient books:  penned by fallible humans who wrote or edited in their own agendas and biases or even made stuff up entirely.

Interesting sidenote, on the above account from Matthew.  Nothing further is mentioned about the soldiers.  Nothing.  Neither does Mark, who also changes when the stone was rolled away.  In Mark, Luke, and John, it's already opened by the time the women get there.  Matthew punched his version up by including an earthquake and dramatic entrance by an angel.  Mark has an angel too, but he's already inside when they get there.  Luke has two men who are kind of implied to be angels outside the tomb when the women come back out.  John didn't include any angels all.

But none of them mention the fate of the soldiers.  Were they dead?  Ran away?  Roman soldiers deserting a post would be cause for their deaths.  If they were stunned or killed, it would lead to an investigation and most likely the local Jews would be blamed.  Instead, all the gospel writers choose to just skip ahead with the story like this was nothing at all.

 

[caption id="attachment_1075" align="aligncenter" width="546" caption="Or maybe the cave had a Tardis inside and they are currently flitting around space-time?"][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 7

Another day in the can and we can now make the count 1 night and 1 day.  Two more of each to go.

 

[caption id="attachment_1072" align="aligncenter" width="330" caption="Still guarding. Still bored."][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 6

Okay, Saturday morning, that's 1 night down, 2 more to go for the Jesus prophecy to come true.

[caption id="attachment_1069" align="aligncenter" width="576" caption=""Sleeping? Me? Never! No, I was just resting my eyes.""][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 5

Mark:

And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.

 

Matthew:

When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathaea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple:He went to Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded the body to be delivered. And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed. And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre. Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first. Pilate said unto them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can. So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch.

Jesus is now dead and his followers are scrambling to get him off the cross and buried.  Why?  Because, as Mark helpfully notes for us, it's Preparation Day, the day before the Sabbath, which starts at sundown Friday and lasts until sundown on Saturday.  Matthew even goes so far as to reference the 3 day prophecy, though he leaves out the 3 night part, which is telling itself, especially considering Jesus also said:

Are there not twelve hours in the day?

 

[caption id="attachment_1064" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption=""So, why are we guarding a tomb again?" "The Jews think someone might steal the body." "Why do they think that?" "Dunno, some religious thing." "Do we get overtime for this?" "Hey, don't complain, it beats having to do known-world spanning empire stuff, amirite?""][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 4

Matthew:

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias.  And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.  The rest said, Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him.  Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.

The clock is now started.  Jesus has officially "died" on the cross.  If we go by his prophecy, he will be dead tonight (Friday night), all day on Saturday, Saturday night, all day on Sunday, Sunday night, and alive again sometime on Monday.  Or, if we grant him the daytime of Friday, he will come back alive sometime Sunday night.  Wonder what we will see happen in the story?  Stay tuned!

[caption id="attachment_1061" align="aligncenter" width="428" caption="Heavy on the symbolism, the authors likely added details to make the story seem more significant when it likely was a minor event only at the time."][/caption]

This gives us an opportunity, however, to discuss some of the other elements of the story taking place at this time, notably events which are fantastical and would have a huge impact on the region for possibly years to come.  Let's start with two verses from Matthew 27, linked at the top of this post:

And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

These two verses, just casually tossed into the story indicate a major event occurred which would have affected the entire city, and possibly even the region as the story spread.  People who had been dead, possibly for years or even centuries, were now back alive and wandering around Jerusalem.  The verses indicate they were seen by many people and yet, this seemingly minor plot point of the Jesus story has zero other mentions in any extra-Biblical reference or account.  No one wrote about it, least of the Romans, who liked to write down everything.  No merchant wrote a letter back home, no local historian jotted it down, no one marked the occasion by carving it into a stone somewhere.  It's just a one-off reference by Matthew, with no mention in Mark, Luke, or John.

That in itself indicates the story is an exaggeration or simply an event which grew mythic with each retelling among the line of adherents who passed it along.  A massive historical occurrence in that dead people are shuffling around Jerusalem and Matthews gives it a ho-hum mention in passing.

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs Part 3

As established earlier, the Jesus character has by now been arrested and "tried" by the religious council of the Jews and handed over to Pontius Pilate for sentencing.  Pilate hems and haws and eventually gives into the suddenly formed Jewish mob demanding Jesus' execution, fairly untypical behavior for the Roman occupation at that time.

He was sentenced to die by crucifixion earlier and now, at noon on Friday, is on the cross.  The clock will soon be ticking for his 3 days and 3 nights prophecy.

 

Luke:

And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise. And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

 

[caption id="attachment_1057" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="So, one of the thieves get a "deathbed conversion" right there on the cross. I guess sort of like any homicidal killer could too, right?"][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 2

Why is the 3 days, 3 nights thing important?  It comes from a casually tossed off comparison that Jesus made between himself and the mythical Jonah:

For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

This prediction, while seemingly innocuous and arbitrary, provides a kind of test of the validity of the rest of the story.  The authors wrote these tales down decades, even centuries after they allegedly occurred.  To think they are error free and infallible is beyond ludicrous, yet that is precisely what most modern Christians believe to this day (thanks largely to a vote by the Nicean Council).

Thus, if the story of Jesus can't be trusted to get such a simple detail right, why is it to be trusted by people who should know better and spend their days peering to the sky for the return of their savior god?

 

[caption id="attachment_1051" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Just as we really can't trust Medieval European artists to accurately depict the Middle East."][/caption]

3 Days 3 Nights Easter Eggs, Part 1

As I have written about before (and before), this is the time of year when Christians celebrate the brutal killing, burial, and alleged resurrection of their savior god for the sole purpose that this same god could turn around and forgive them for violating his rules in the first place.  Aside from the absurdity of that story and its implications, the narrative itself was bungled in its telling by the authors who wrote it down nearly a century after it supposedly occurred.

[caption id="attachment_1045" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="I love me some boiled sacred cows."][/caption]

Starting today, Friday April 22 and going through Sunday April 24 will be a point by point reminder of the story's events and their bungled timeline.  The problem centers around fixed points of time referenced in the story.  If the authors had simply been more vague in their retelling of what would have by then been nearly century old tale, they wouldn't fall into the traps they do.  As it happens, by being so specific in naming exact days of the week, they manage to make Jesus' prophecy of his burial and resurrection into a bungle.
The story of Easter actually begins earlier in the week than on the day the Jesus character was killed.  According to the Gospels, Jesus and his disciples observed the First Day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, better known as Passover.  The first and last days of this 7 or 8 day observance are considered holidays and holy to the Jewish people.  This establishes a clear and fixed point in time to start measuring.  The first day had technically began sundown the previous day.

That evening, approaching sundown, Jesus and his crew sit down to their Passover feast.  The night proceeds with Jesus having communion with his disciples, telling of his coming betrayal, death, and resurrection, and then he and a couple of his closest disciples leaving the house to go pray.  Jesus spends most of the night praying, commonly known as the Agony in the Garden.  He is then arrested and hauled before the clerical council to answer to the charges of blasphemy.  They find him guilty and, in another moment of fixing the time, they remand him over to the Romans "when the morning came".

[caption id="attachment_1046" align="aligncenter" width="727" caption="Why do NONE of these guys look even vaguely Middle Eastern?"][/caption]

Pontius Pilate then has a morning of dealing with Jesus and finally has him up on the cross that morning, as Luke makes clear Jesus was already crucified by the "sixth hour", or noon.  According to Matthew, he was dead by the "ninth hour", or 3 PM that day.  And what day was it?

Here we get another fixed moment in time.  It was the Preparation Day, the day before the Jewish Sabbath.  This means Friday, and they had to rush to get Jesus off the cross or risk violating the Sabbath, which occurred at sundown.  Thus, let's back up.  If Jesus was killed on a Friday, the means the previous day was the first day of Passover, which ended at sundown that previous night (which is why the Jews waited until after sundown to arrest him).  That makes the first day a Thursday and Jesus killed on a Friday.  Since the only other Sabbaths in the near timeline would be the weekly Sabbath on Saturday and the end of Passover Sabbath over a week later, we can conclude nothing else.  And that's where the trouble starts....

 

[caption id="attachment_1047" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Trouble starts with T and that rhymes with C and that stands for crucifix..."][/caption]

The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand

Reposted from the Progress Report, by Faiz Shakir, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Alex Seitz-Wald, Tanya Somanader, Travis Waldron, and Jeff Spross.

 

Ayn Rand -- Russian emigre, founder of the mid-century Objectivist movement, putative philosopher, writer of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the inspiration for a small but intensely devoted band of acolytes -- has been enjoying a resurgence of late on the American right. The cultural capstone to this resurgence arrived last week with the release of a filmed adaptation of the first third of Atlas Shrugged, independently financed by a wealthy devotee of Rand's work and pitched explicitly at the Tea Party demographic. FreedomWorks, one of the central organizations in that movement, rolled out a massive campaign to encourage audience attendance and to push the film into as many theaters as possible. The 2011 CPAC conference held the world premiere of Atlas Shrugged's trailer, and the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation hosted an advanced screening of the film. This marketing tactic is understandable. The opening line of Atlas Shrugged -- "Who is John Galt?" -- has appeared again and again on signs at Tea Party protests across the nation. The Tea Party builds the theme of "Going Galt" into its rhetoric -- a reference to the strike of industry titans organized by the hero of the novel. Glenn Beck praises Atlas Shrugged regularly on his various shows, and even held a panel dedicated to asking if Rand's fiction is finally becoming reality. The Economist reported several sharp spikes in sales of Atlas Shrugged since 2007. And according to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of the novel hit an all-time annual record that year, then reached a new record in 2008, with possibly another peak in 2009. By all accounts, Ayn Rand is now one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party.

RAND'S INFLUENCE ON GOP: "For over half a century," says Jennifer Burns, a recent biographer of the novelist, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." And with good reason. Besides her prominence in the Tea Party's intellectual and cultural lexicon, some of the Republican Party's leading lights have cited Rand by name as an inspiration. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said she was the reason he entered public service. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Atlas Shrugged "his foundational book." Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an avowed fan and quotes extensively from Rand's novels at Congressional hearings. His father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told listeners that readers ate up Rand's Alas Shrugged because "it was telling the truth," and even conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography -- and apparently has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The phenomenon holds amidst the right-wing media as well: Rush Limbaugh called her "brilliant," Glenn Beck's panel on Rand featured the president of the Ayn Rand Institute Yaroom Brook, and Andrew Napolitano enthusiastically recounted a story in which his college-age self introduces his mother to Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. John Stossel and Sean Hannity have name-dropped her as well. Going further back, Alan Greenspan -- former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a fierce advocate of free-market ideology -- is an acolyte of Rand's thinking and knew her personally, and Rand was also dubbed the unofficial "novelist laureate" of the Reagan Administration by Maureen Dowd. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Ayn Rand's reach on the right is how unremarked-upon it most often is.

RAND'S PHILOSOPHY: The philosophy, such as it was, which Rand laid out in her novels and essays was a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between "moochers" and "producers," with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry. The "moochers" were more or less everyone else, leading TNR's Jonathan Chait to describe Rand's thinking as a kind of inverted Marxism. Marx considered wealth creation to result solely from the labor of the masses, and viewed the owners of capital and the economic elite to be parasites feeding off that labor. Rand simply reversed that value judgment, applying the role of "parasite" to everyday working people instead. On the level of personal behavior, the heroes in Rand's novels commit borderline rape, blow up buildings, and dynamite oil fields -- actions which Rand portrays as admirable and virtuous fulfillments of the characters' personal will and desires. Her early diaries gush with admiration for William Hickman, a serial killer who raped and murdered a young girl. Hickman showed no understanding of "the necessity, meaning or importance of other people," a trait Rand apparently found quite admirable. For good measure, Rand dismissed the feminist movement as "false" and "phony," denigrated both Arabs and Native Americans as "savages" (going so far as to say the latter had no rights and that Europeans were right to take North American lands by force) and expressed horror that taxpayer money was being spent on government programs aimed at educating "subnormal children" and helping the handicapped. Needless to say, when Rand told Mike Wallace in 1953 that altruism was evil, that selfishness is a virtue, and that anyone who succumbs to weakness or frailty is unworthy of love, she meant it.

PAUL RYAN'S AYN RAND BUDGET: Given that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the lead architect of the GOP's 2012 budget plan, his own devotion to the ideas of Atlas Shrugged and its author are worth noting. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat has dismissed the connection as Ryan merely saying some "kind words about Ayn Rand," which simply isn't a plausible characterization given what we know: Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he described Social Security as a "collectivist system" and cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on the author. "Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism," he says. All of which reflects a rather more serious devotion than a few mere kind words. So it should come as no surprise that Ryan's plan comports almost perfectly with Rand's world view.He guts Medicare, Medicaid, and a whole host of housing,food, and educational support programs, leaving the country's middle-class and most vulnerable citizens with far less support. Then he uses approximately half of the money freed by those cuts to reduce taxes on the most wealthy Americans. By transforming Medicare into a system of vouchers whose value increases at the rate of inflation, he undoes Medicare's most humane feature -- the shouldering of risk at the social level -- and leaves individuals and seniors to shoulder ever greater amounts of risk on their own. But if your intellectual and moral lodestar is a woman who railed against altruism as "evil" and considered the small pockets of highly successful individuals to be morally superior, it's a perfectly logical plan to put forward.

Michael Onfray

[caption id="attachment_1033" align="aligncenter" width="614" caption="You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance, you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that everyone of us treads toward extinction. As long as men are obliged to die, some of them, unable to the endure the prospect, will concoct fond illusions. We cannot assassinate or kill an illusion. In fact, illusion is more likely to kill us - for God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction."][/caption]

Nothing More to Talk About

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J4ZuHEYXkk

When Trolls Get Trolled

Poe's Law: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

Pouring over the graphic videos coming out of Japan over the last several days, showing the devastation and sheer human toll the Japanese are still enduring, I also was drawn to the usual places to gauge reactions from others.

There were the expected "it's a message from god" jabs from the likes of Glenn Beck. Gilbert Gottfried got fired from his gig as the voice of the duck in the AFLAC commercials.  And then I found this young lady:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUbY_M3HURQ

For those who didn't click the video, it stars a girl named Pamela who goes into a monologue extolling how her god answered prayers during the Lent season to open the eyes of atheists by striking at Japan, a country with a large non-Christian population.  It's part of a series of videos she had on her YouTube channel, which is now closed.  The other videos were similar monologues of her expounding on various topics in the news or in her alleged personal life, and from the viewpoint of someone clearly a fundamentalist, extremist Christian.

The folks over at 4chan fell for it, as did a lot of other people.  They didn't spot the obvious patterns of her subject matter or her mannerisms which gave away her schtick.  She was trolling the religionists and, as it happened, the atheists too.  Richard Dawkins even featured the video on his website, though without comment.  It made the rounds of Facebook and other social media and obviously on the boards at 4chan.  The result?  The children inhabiting those forums poked into her personal life, revealed her personal information, and then proceeded to harass her by having pizzas delivered to her house.
They couldn't have been more Bart Simpson-childish if they had simply lit a bag of dog poop on fire on her steps and ran away after ringing the bell.
And all because they couldn't spot what amounts to one of their own giving them a lesson in just how indistinguishable parody can be from the thing being parodied if it's extreme enough.

Wherever and whoever Pamela is, I hope she finds another outlet for what is a clearly brilliant mind for satire.  The following is a letter I sent her on YouTube just before she closed her account:

Oscar worthy performances

I have now perused through several of your videos and I think I have a pretty good bead on precisely what you are doing.

To that, I say BRAVO.

Yours is quite possibly the best example of Poe's Law I have ever encountered. I realize you can't (and probably shouldn't) respond to me, given that it might blow your cover. But I felt compelled to write after watching what I consider a parody of even myself (from many years ago).

I grew up a fundamentalist Christian. My summer bible camps? Yeah, we all sounded just like you do in your videos, even without hitting all the political talking point. In retrospect, it was quite strange that we were otherwise bright and growing young people so willingly turning our brains off.

I got over that and found myself "coming out" as an atheist some years later in my late teens. I have never looked back, though I often find myself turning around to combat the rather insidious spread of fundamentalist thinking wherever I find it.

To close, I wish to once again tell you I found your performances Academy Award winning and if you are not an aspiring actress, I certainly hope you are writing all of this down. It's gold!

 Pamela signed off her account with this, rather sad video, coming clean about her previous trolling and basically begging off from the infantile reaction by 4chan and its adherents:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBZMCtIXjIA 

The Hard Life of Christians

[caption id="attachment_951" align="aligncenter" width="546" caption="It's particularly repulsive when every story becomes one in which Christians portray themselves as the victims of religious persecution. I swear, I think some Christians long for the good old days when they had to face lions for being believers, as quickly as they play the Martyr Card."][/caption]