Seriously though – I may not be any connoisseur of wrestling, but these people are pretty good; they even have the chairs-and-ladders-being-used-as-weapons thing down:

Now all we need is a fake plot with a powerful and amoral wrestling industry mogul to turn this into a man-drama.

Great news! BASS is the SSA’s Best Website award winner! We not only get a plaque but $300 dollars as well!

From the SSA site:

Best Website-University of California Los Angeles -Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. Check out their great site.
Roy Natian of the group said of the website:
“The guiding principle behind the site is this: Function, Function, Function. The site has to be easy to use and to update. In planning ahead for BASS’s future, I wanted to make sure that we had a solid infrastructure. By making the site require minimal maintenance, I’m allowing future BASSiers to focus on more important facets of the running of BASS (such as planning educational events). An added benefit of having the site be easily updateable is that the site actually gets updated!”

Thanks to Joe, for pushing me to make the BASS website in a blog form, Robin for posting so much, thanks to the future posters of this blog, and thanks to Wordpress for making such an awesome blogging software!

Next stop: BASS will work on winning the other awards!

This is a FOX Opinion News Network documentary propaganda piece featuring Newt Gingrich that appeals to their right-wing audience and runs through all the talking points of why church and state should be joined at the hip. They never mention specifically what kind of religion the US should adopt, but it’s pretty obvious by looking at the logo.

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If you ever needed another case of an exemplar of the religious right engaging in depraved behavior that s/he has spent his/her life decrying and passing legislation against*, then look no further than GOP Congressman Vito Fossella of New York.

According to Ontheissues.org, Fossella is a “hard-core conservative” who voted for mandatory school prayer in public school, is a hard-liner on reproductive rights, and has the following ratings from the following advocacy groups:

Americans United For Separation of Church and State – 0%

Human Rights Campaign (Pro-LGBT) – 0%

NARAL Pro-Choice America – 0%

National Right to Life Committee (”Pro-Life”) – 82%

Christian Coalition (Pro-Theocracy) – 81%

But aside from Rush’s drug use or Larry Craig’s Minneapolis lavatory trysts, this story probably takes the cake. According to the New York Times, Fossella got drunk as hell at a local watering hole and got pulled over with a blood alcohol level of 0.17%, three times the legal limit.

Mr. Fossella was asked to recite the alphabet between the letters D and T. “The subject immediately started and said ‘A, B,’ ” the officer wrote in his report. After the officer explained the test again, Mr. Fossella started: “D, E, F, H, G, H, I, J, L,” and then was able to finish.

As a result, the Congressman may have to spend a mandatory 5 days in jail. But suspicions arose of an extramarital affair when Fossella, possibly still drunk, called a woman by the name of Laura Fay rather than his wife to pick him up from the police station while claiming that he was going to go see his 3-year old daughter. One thing led to another, and Fossella eventually admitted not only to the rumored extramarital affair, but that also said 3-year old daughter was a love child between himself and Laury Fay.

According to the same NY Post article, Fossella’s wife no longer sees him as a muscular, gun-toting bull-riding conservative family values man-hunk but rather a bespectacled latte-sipping NPR-loving liberal swinger who drives a Prius, and rumors are that she plans to leave him.

*If you’re wondering why I omitted Mark Foley, it’s because he was actually quite socially moderate even for the GOP – he was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans and even voted against defining marriage as between a man and a woman; clearly his case is another matter.

Despite not being Korean myself or having any family members in the quixotic Communist regime, I have expressed an interest in what many consider to be the last Stalinist regime in the world – North Korea. Kim Jong Il, as many of you know, is the absolute dictator of the nation and inherited the dynasty from his late father, Kim Il Sung.

So what does this have to do with religion? Well, as with most figureheads of conventional religions, the Kims have enjoyed a cult of personality during their reign essentially elevating both leaders to the status of God-Kings. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all of this is that – despite being impoverished and starving – the North Koreans look upon the two leaders as God-Kings who can do no wrong. Yes, Lil’ Kim has his own creation myth:

But harmless myth is one thing. Importing luxury Mercedes Benz automobiles and hundreds of thousands of dollars of Hennessey a year while your people starve is another. As with many countries run by egotistical dictators, such measures were not taken in the interests of the nation, but rather to preserve the image of Dear Leader as a dear leader. In this last respect, North Korea tries (but fails) to hide from the rest of the world the consequences of living under a delusional God-King -
(WARNING: At least ten times as sad as the Joy Luck Club, and 100% real to boot)

Premise: Cypher (Bibleman’s African-American sidekick) stops a bunch of homosexual thugs from burning a bunch of Bibles. Because burning Bibles is way more evil than murder or genocide. Bibleman, Cypher, and Biblegirl then join forces to defeat the “Wacky Protester”, a liberal college atheist who has an evil plan to turn all the world’s children to atheism. Because nothing could be more evil than a horde of atheist toddlers spreading their ungodly influences on this upstanding God-fearing nation.

But if you thought that was bad, there is an even more shambolic computer game based on this very same episode. Obsolete 15 year old graphics and obviously terrible gameplay FTW -

Bibleman’s other foes include Jewy McJewstein, a stereotypical New York Jew who just can’t get off his case. Way to create inter-faith dialogue, CBN…

This is from an HBO documentary called “Friends of God” by Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi). In other news, that Whitefro at 5:26 may be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen – it’s far worse than that of the painter guy who used to be on PBS.

RH Reality Check notes that the report was posted on a Friday on an obscure government site, a tactic for keeping a story out of major headlines. It’s no surprise that the Bush administration would find this embarrassing considering it has allocated $87.5 million per year exclusively for these programs, which are explicitly forbidden from discussing contraception (except absurdly exaggerated failure rates, of course).

Incidentally, I am in the middle of a book about the Christian right titled Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg. Goldberg explains that the predominantly Christian proponents of abstinence-only education (our President, for instance) don’t care whether the programs are actually successful and that they are held to virtually no standard of accountability. The following revealing passage from the book explains why.

At Reclaiming America for Christ, [Pam] Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate–a question she regarded as risible. “What he’s asking,” she said, “is does it work. You know what? Doesn’t matter. Cause guess what. My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public schools’ job should not be to keep teens from having sex.”

Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, “Our job should be to tell kids the truth!” [135-136]

The “truth”, she explained, is that “AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence … is the enemy.”

So let me get this straight. We shouldn’t help prevent the spread of AIDS and STDs, but we must make sure that everyone afflicted with these diseases knows they are going to hell? How’s that for some good old fashioned Christian compassion?

Opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of BASS or its other members.