Bible comics

In case you haven’t heard, R. Crumb the 1960s iconic underground comics guru is releasing a new comic book of (get this) the first book of the bible (Breisheit/Genesis). It is due out this fall, and apparently was started in the traditional Crumb style, but morphed into an “illustration project” using the complete text (not sure which version of the text though). Personally, I can’t wait to see it.

In the meantime, I also discovered (thanks to repeated pokes from good friends) Stoogepie, who also does a wonderful job of interpreting a few of the bible stories. Check him out here: http://www.stoogepie.com. Seriously, if you’re up on your bible lit, this guy has some wonderful points. If you’re NOT up on your bible lit, take a perusal anyway. You’ll see some of the bible that is usually kept pretty quiet.

Yeah, I know that this is a pretty tame post (at least for me), but these guys deserve some recognition for the hard work they’ve done.

Share and enjoy.

13 year old strip searched for Ibuprofin?

OK folks, get this:

A student at a junior high school is caught with Ibuprofen. The school has a zero tolerance policy for ANY medication. The student claims that the pills belong to another girl. The second girl is called to the principle’s office, and is subjected to a search. Not just her backpack and locker, but her body – a full strip search.

So, we all know that the whole “war on drugs” thing has gotten so extreme that it borders on insanity, but folks, this was IBUPROFIN, and I’m sorry, there just isn’t anyway to justify a strip search – especially based on the accusation of some other kid who is trying to stay out of trouble. Think about it – if YOU knew that you were facing the likes of a strip search, and all you had to do was point your finger at someone else (especially in middle school), how fast would YOUR finger be flipping out?

The thing that is even more amazing is that the courts have (for the most part)  supported the school’s right to carry out this search. Fortunately, the Supreme court had the decent sense to actually uphold the fourth amendment (which protects you from unreasonable search). Unfortunately, they also upheld a lower court ruling that the perpetrators could not be held personally liable for their actions. Sorry folks, even in the army in a war zone, following an order that you know is illegal will get you in a rash of hurt. “Just following orders” didn’t cut it at Nuremberg, and it certainly doesn’t hold water here.

I don’t know what has happened to the school officials involved in this incident – it took place in 2003 in rural Arizona. At the very least, I hope they lost their jobs. What SHOULD have happened is that every single school official involved (including the school board members and teachers union members that supported the perpetrators) should have simply been lynched. Now THAT is a nice clear message that no school official in the country could possibly misinterpret. Couple nice news pics of a bunch of bureaucrats hanging from the local live oak would make national headlines and make sure that any school official thought twice about this type of abuse of power. If lynching is too strong for you, I guess I could settle for burning them out of their homes, applying a liberal dose of tar and feathers, and running them out of town. Lets face it folks, in any other venue, these  thugs would have been labeled as sexual predators, face major jail time, and a lifetime of being labeled as perverts. Of course, in this case, it would all be justified.

Folks, our school systems suck, and they are eviscerating anything resembling our children’s civil and constitutional rights. As citizens, it is our responsibility to make sure that the legal system does not simply sit idly by and allow this type of abuse. If and when the legal system DOES let criminals like this off the hook, it is OUR job as citizens to protect our children from these predators.

“Rural Arizona” is an area that tends to have a large number of folks that understand the failings of the legal system, and I certainly hope that a few of them had the balls to polish off their shotguns and demonstrate that in some cases, vigilante justice is not only justified, it is necessary. Ladies and Gentlemen: lock and load. If I ended up sitting on the jury considering the prosecution of an individual involved in the appropriate disciplining of these perverts, I’d be proud to make a finding of “innocent”, and I’d be proud to to shake that persons hand.

Christian Fundies and Evolution – how stupid do you have to be?

Intelligent design, creationism, magic, call it what you will, the christian fundamentalists are at it again (or more accurately:  still). The same folks that have finally admitted that the Earth revolves around the Sun ares till trying to convince folks that creationism is real science. And if they CAN’T convince people that their particular fantasy is real, they’ll do their best to legislate it into existence.

Turns out that there are STILL places where the Fundies swing enough political power to force schools to teach creationism instead of evolution. A few years ago the pope finally admitted that Galileo was right. I guess god has been really busy because it only took him 400 years to get the message to the pope (the pope does, after all, talk to god). That particular message must have gotten lost in all that other important stuff – like how to hide the fact that priests are regularly buggering their alter boys, while pontificating about the evils of homosexuality. Ya know, it takes a LOT of effort to keep that kind of hypocrisy under cover, and even god had his hands full keeping all those alter boys shut up. ( I could go on for pages, but its just too easy to find the many places that the fundies get it wrong, and then make idiots of themselves trying to cover it up or justify it, so back to evolution.)

So, anyway, it turns out that in March the Texas School Board approved a new set of “science ” standards that allows the fundies to teach that evolution simply can’t be real because (get this) it is too complex. Yep, after having been shot down in every rational venue they’ve tried, the fundies have fallen back on the “I can’t understand it, so it CAN’T be true”. Of course, the whole basis of christian fundamentalism is to simply accept what you’re told without any thought or reality checks, so I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, these folks just realized that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. Of course, the fault doesn’t lie entirely with the fundies. The folks on the school board, those that elected them, and pretty much anyone that happens to live in the state of Texas holds some responsibility. Makes you wonder how Texas manages to survive – either the rational people have all fled, or they’re so scared of the fundies that they stay quiet. Course, when they’re competing with idiots like these, it probably also means that they’re rich enough to send their kids to private school (where they’ll get something that resembles an education), and let the fundies wallow in their ignorance. If this is allowed to continue, we have potential for a truly ironic situation: social evolution driving the fundies into extinction. Think about it. In today’s world, you need to be able to operate at SOME level of rationality. The fundies in Texas are forcing their schools to teach fantasy, so the smart families are going to send their kids to private school, leaving the fundies in the schools that teach the kids that ANYTHING they believe is real. After a while, those kids will grow up, and base their decisions on the stuff they learned in school. “Really, if I just pray hard enough, god will fix my hard drive” “god will find me a job” “Don’t worry Timmy, god told me it was OK, now just drop your pants and bend over”. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be living in the 21st century, and the fundies will end up living in trailer parks waiting for the next tornado.

And they wonder why the rest of the world is laughing at them. Just god’s will, I guess.

those wacky Christians. Ghandi had it right.

“I love your Christ, but I hate your christians” (slightly paraphrased from the big G).

Speaking as a Jew (actually, as a Jewish Carpenter, I feel particularly qualified to spout on this topic, seeing as I have pretty much all the same qualifications as that Jesus dude…)

Anyway, the whole idea of what being a “christian” means is a good sight different from what Rabbi Jesus suggested. See, Jesus was would today be considered a conservative (or maybe right wing reform) Jew. He took the Torah and ‘modernized’ a couple parts of it – mostly as an intellectual exercise – the same way rabbis have been doing for the past 6000 years (give or take a few). The problem is what happened after he died.  See, there was all this political turmoil, and J’s followers (who still identified themselves as Jews) had a couple of radical rabble rousers, who figured that he small differences between the sects of Judaism (and there were a ton of them -maybe even as many as there are now) presented a pretty cool tool to use to advance their political agenda. The whole “Us” and “Them” concept. Politicians have been using it for ages – from Bush, t0 the Muslim Jihadists, to the Nazis, to pretty much every political leader in the history of the modern world (including our own revolutionary war folks, and the folks on both sides of the civil war, war of 1812, Spanish American war, etc. etc. etc.).  So, as these rabble rousers started to gain a foothold, they felt that it was time to start identifying themselves as something other than Jews (this wasn’t until a few hundred years after the Big J bit it).

So, these guys get together, write a collection of Jesus’ “sermons.” Really, after 100+ years of political posturing, they hadn’t changed a bit, and were still the same exact words… Really. trust me on this. I have a college degree, and besides, God told me it was true. Don’t get me started on that whole virgin birth thing – my bet is that either Mary was getting a bit (or maybe a lot) on the side, or Joseph finally got fed up with that whole “saving myself for god” thing, and set her straight. Anyway, suddenly a set of documents appear that really prove that Jesus’ followers are really not Jews (even though J kept insisting that they were, and the4 Jewish population pretty much agreed that they were too). But hey, who cares what reality is when political power is involved? To make a long story short, these guys succeeded. The following few thousand years of “christian” history pretty much continued this trend, with the church completely ignoring any and all of its tenets in order to secure and maintain political power. Holy wars, crusades, even the fun witch hunts within the different sects of christianity make the Muslim Brotherhood look like a couple of guys out on a street corner having an argument. The christians have the blood, terrorism, murder, rape (it’s not rape if the victim isn’t christian – check out your history – particularly during the crusades and medieval period), and otherwise nasty stuff down pat. And when they’re not actively involved, they’re sitting on the sidelines either ignoring, or quietly supporting the actions (recent examples include the vatican’s response to the Holocaust, the KKK, and other hate groups).

So, what IS there to love (or even like) about the christians? There are actually some of them that have managed to bypass the history and teachings of the church, and are dece3nt human beings. ‘Course, that can be said for any group, so it doesn’t really hold much water. Probably the best thing that can be said is that they’ve finally started to realize (as their political power has slowly slipped away) that they have to start playing nice, or they’re going to quietly get laughed into oblivion. They’ve already (in most of the world anyway) slipped from a major political power to a  fringe group that is mostly laughed at. Yes, there are local concentrations of them that continue to cause problems (the wackos in Texas and other parts of the deep south that are still trying to force schools to teach creationism are good examples). Yep, ignorance is the only way to continue to try and force folks to buy the christian point of view. Course, that has ALWAYS been the case – if the masses are too uneducated to actually read the bible and question it, the mother church can fob off whatever blather suits them at the moment. However, for the most part, the truly ‘dedicated’ have faded into the comics page of life.

So there ya go: the basic premises of Jesus’ teachings are pretty much universal, and for the most part taken directly from the Jewish Torah: treat others as you wish to be treated, be accepting of other points of view, and in general just be a decent person. Sounds like most major religions, which is not surprising as the monotheistic religions are the main religions now, and they all originate in Judaism. Maybe that’s why the christians have such a hard time with the Jews – they don’t like to admit that the ‘christian’ ideals are really the same as the Jewish (and by the way, Muslim) ideals. Anyway, christianity has become a great example of a good idea that completely failed in execution. Of course, ‘execution’ is an idea that the christians really liked – they are the only monotheistic religion that has consistently given people the option of “convert or die”…..