The Time Of Many Elephants

Posted by Mark on Dec 23, 2012 | 0 Comments

Today’s reading comes from the book of Pachydermia, Chapter 4.

1We are in the last days before The Time Of Many Elephants.

2You will know the eve of the day from the clouds in the sky and the grass on the ground. Both will take on a bit of a grey tinge. 3Look then unto the north and cup your hands behind your ears so that you may better hear the approaching horde. Also, so that you may resemble their holy shape and be spared the crush from their immaculate mass.

4But shun the disbelievers and the doubters. 5In The Time Of Many Elephants disbelievers and doubters will have their disbeliefs and doubts flattened to squelchy, red, messy stains. And they will require bleach to remove. But you don’t have time to bleach their infidel marks. 6Hark not to their cries that two elephants do not constitute many elephants at all. 7Your memory is your weapon. 8Like the mighty elephant, never forget the words of the prophet Babar for did he not say unto the Incredulous that it is better to be trampled by no elephants than one and that one elephant, therefore, is one too many? 9What say you then to the number two if it is not one more than one? Surely it is many more than zero, where zero is the number accorded to no elephants at all! 10Rejoice for The Time Of Many Elephants is at hand!

11If you are righteous then you will prepare the path ahead of the Many Elephants. 12Gather to you as if your life depended upon it all the peanuts you can find. And your life surely depends upon it. 13Scatter to the grey-tinged grass the food of the Many Elephants and lead the way from the north to the south and to the sea. But look out! for Evil will always try to stop Good. 14Hunt down the terrifying mice that would pause not one second before scaring the crap out of The Many Elephants. Mice are grey and the ground is grey-tinged and the challenge is mighty but only the mighty challenges are worth attempting. 15Hard is the path to Salvation when The Time Of Many Elephants comes around.

16Listen to the trumpet blasts and praise The Many Elephants! They approach! 17But they will need passage across the sea to the south. 18Book two tickets on the hovercraft but pack nothing else for The Many Elephants will be carrying their own trunks. 19Laugh out loud and praise be to The Many Elephants for that corny joke!

20The Time Of Many Elephants will soon be upon you. 21The ground will shake and the air will fill with such noises as to make even the most calm of man a touch perturbed. But The Time Of Many Elephants is short and time will pass. 22The chaos will settle and the path of peanut shells will rot to nothing and the mice will seek out non-elephant-related activities with which to pass the time and the doubters and disbelievers will doubt and disbelieve that they really just saw Many Elephants boarding a hovercraft and setting off across the sea and calm will come again. 23For this is the way of things.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien Makes Me A Tad Angry

Posted by Mark on Mar 4, 2012 | 0 Comments

I find it interesting that those who proclaim most loudly that they are men or women of peace and that they wish most to promote the loving (that’s the Orwellian definition of loving, of course) word of whichever one of the many sky fairies they pretend give them instructions are demonstrably the very same people who encourage the most hatred in the world.

Another week and another religious figure crawls out from his bile-filled, nasty little shit-hole to stir up the ever-dwindling (awww! shame!) masses that pay him any attention, encouraging them to care about something that doesn’t affect them in any way at all. Clearly unhappy that Lord George Carey got in the news recently for wanting to dictate how others should live, this week it’s the turn of the Roman Catholic senior cock in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, to get his picture in print and the venomous cum that ejaculates from his mouth sprayed as far and wide as possible.

In a very clever piece of work using Paint.NET on a laptop (no mean feat!) I am demonstrating here that Cardinal Keith O'Brien is a cocksucker.

Oh! What a surprise! A complete tool in a religious organisation wants to impose his will on the majority of people who couldn’t give two fucks about him! What’s that you say? Marriage should be between a man and woman only and government shouldn’t be able to change that just because most people want it? Strange, because it never used to be between just a man and a woman but – and this is interesting – because men and women wanted to do it, and because the greedy, religious pricks saw an opportunity to charge them some money to let them do it in churches (the holy coin is a most powerful deity indeed), things changed. You couldn’t possibly explain this to a dimwitted abortion like Cardinal Keith O’Brien, though, because it involves actual facts and doesn’t tie up with his own probable overcompensating nature when it comes to anything that involves men and other men.

When it comes to religious people I’m not a very tolerant person – perhaps the one thing, ironically, that I have in common with those who have chosen to follow the path of stupid – and this is a country and these are times in definite need of a good, old-fashioned, religious purge just like in olden times. I’m not saying we should destroy the churches, but I do think they would make great pubs. And I’m not saying we should execute the priests, but reality TV is looking for the next big thing. I just want them all gone, though. They want to spread hatred to their followers but it always seems to affect me and I’ve got plenty of hatred of my own, thanks ever so much.

Lord George Carey Makes Me A Tad Angry

Posted by Mark on Feb 25, 2012 | 0 Comments

Knobhead Lord George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, is so very desperate to ensure that only men and women (species: unspecified) should marry one another that he has taken to using the word “logic” in arguments.

I know!

A grown man so mentally-challenged with irrational thoughts he believes in pixies, unicorns, magic rainbows, the healing power of leprechauns, flying trees, clouds with eyes, monsters under the bed, or all-powerful and caring ghosts who wear dresses and never help ease any suffering when there’s important toast apparitions to attend (I forget exactly which brand of lunacy this prick lives his life by) has resorted to using words whose meanings he cannot possibly comprehend in a final attempt to… I have no idea what. Sell column inches in papers? No, it can’t be that because he’s a holy servant of Thor or something. Dominate people through disinformation and denigration? Yes, that sounds more like the sort of thing the church does.

Some nasty shit stain who thinks he matters.

Referring to the comments made by Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone that society overwhelmingly wants everyone to have the right to marry whomever they want Lord Carey replied with: “Lynne’s logic implies the will of the people is sovereign.”

What? Like in a democracy, you mean, you out-of-touch tosspot?

Uncarey continued: “So let’s suppose that in 10 years’ time it is proposed that, as people are living in multiples of four, we may call that marriage also.”

Yes. That’s precisely what it means. It means what the people want, the people get. Not the dicktastership you apparently want. Not your extra special interpretation of an irrelevant work of fiction by centuries-dead shepherds that amazingly coincides with your own over-compensating prejudices.

Now, I’m not one who normally gets angry with fuckwits like the former archdickless since he rarely pops up on the radar – I’m saying you’re nothing George, nothing – but he used the “logic” word and that triggered a reflex action.

“Logic” is our word, you great, stinking slice of scrotum. You don’t get to use that word. We use that word. Your arguments must remain firmly in the world of religious make-believe where you belong. If you want to refute Lynne Featherstone then damn well stick to using words and phrases you’re permitted to – by society – like “miracle”, “voices in the head”, “speaking to myself”, “Mumm-Ra”, and “turning semen into clotted cream”. Otherwise I get angry.

And when I get angry I start writing horrible insults on my site you cunt-stuffed verucca sock.

Old Wumpard’s Uncut Bible

Posted by Mark on May 8, 2011 | 0 Comments

Some people just can’t get enough of Old Wumpard’s Uncensored Bible. We call these people Fundamentalist Lunatics and, ordinarily, we would like nothing better than to have nothing to do with Fundamentalist Lunatics. However, since switching my content management system to WordPress I’ve been able to write a few plugins that capture more information about visitors than was possible before and one startling result of this additional data is that Fundamentalist Lunatics comprise the ninth biggest demographic slice in my demographic pie. Sure, there are fewer of them than Weirdos Passing Through or Perverts With Bubble Fixations or Emerging Artificial Sentiences Coming To Terms With Thoughts Of Genocide but ninth biggest is still ninth biggest and I suppose I should take a moment to show that I do still care about them, even though I don’t in the slightest.

Hey! Fundamentalist lunatic? Then you’ll love some more choice quotes from the only uncut, uncensored bible you’ll ever need:

"Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, ‘I think I’m still drunk’ and he went and had a sleep by a rock."

"So at that time we took from these two kings of the Amorites the territory east of the Jordan, from the Arnon Gorge as far as Mount Hermon. (Hermon is called Sirion by the Sidonians; the Amorites call it Senir.) We took all the towns on the plateau, and all Gilead, and all Bashan as far as Salekah and Edrei, towns of Og’s kingdom in Bashan. But then Joseph rolled two sixes and launched a counter attack from Kamchatka that eventually saw him crowned Risk champion for the third month in a row."

"So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. Then I told her, ‘You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you.’ But I was careful not to say anything about goats. I really like goats."

"But Leonard was filled with pride and mead – mostly mead – and proclaimed: ‘They wouldn’t dare edit me out.’"

"Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’

‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’

The commander of the LORD’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so. And the commander of the LORD’s army ran off with Joshua’s sandals because he was really Tobiah the sandal fetishist."

"That night the king could not sleep; so he ordered the book of the chronicles, the record of his reign, to be brought in and read to him. When that failed the king asked for anything by Thomas Hardy instead. ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ did the trick."

"So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, ‘Can this be Naomi?’

‘Don’t call me Naomi,’ she told them. ‘Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.’

And the women in the town exclaimed ‘Oh, great, just what we need, another fucking emo’."

"Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘Take off his filthy clothes. Slowly. Slower than that. And let’s have some music.’"

"From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. ‘Whoa!’ Elisha said to the LORD. ‘Disproportionate! I was thinking bald spots might be more apt.’"

"The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, ‘This atlas is yours free with a subscription to Readers Digest. Okay, I can see you’re not tempted. I’ll try something else.’"

"When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. The priests could not enter the temple of the LORD because the glory of the LORD filled it. At least, this was the story that was submitted to the insurance company explaining the arson at the temple."

"In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before, so the king asked me, ‘Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.’

I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, ‘Well, duh!’"

"When Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. ‘Have you thought about a longer, stupider name?’ they asked Job."

"Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. I’m really not doing it any justice. You really had to be there."

"’I have loved you,’ says the LORD.

‘But you ask, “How have you loved us?” And the answer is: Rohypnol and Vaseline. I’m not proud of myself.’"

"After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abihud, Abihud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim and his life-partner Raoul adopted Elihud but we gloss over that, Elihud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the second husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah."

"Then the herald loudly proclaimed, ‘Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.’

Therefore, as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp and all kinds of music, all the nations and peoples of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

And the herald laughed and loudly proclaimed, ‘I didn’t say “Simon says: nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do”‘."

What I Don’t Like About Christians

Posted by Mark on Feb 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

Here’s what I don’t like about Christians:

I don’t like those beards they have. Beards and no moustaches? What’s that all about? Now those hats are quite funky – a hat is a good thing and more people should wear hats – but that whole no moustache, full beard-look going on is just plain wrong. If God had wanted beards and no moustaches he would have bloody well given men beards and no moustaches. Don’t tell me there’s a passage in the Bible about only using your Gillette Fusion above your lip.

And why do Christian men want to marry lots of women at once and call them wifey-sister-daughters or something. Sounds decidedly dodgy to me. Although a troupe of Marie Osmonds does hold a certain appeal; harmonic singing, obviously. Oh, and orgies. But still: I don’t recall Jesus marrying one woman let alone a menagerie of the species. As I recall the chap was pretty fond of hanging around with men more-or-less exclusively. Christians: just hang around with men. Stop marrying lots of women.

You know when Christians protest outside churches saying God hates whatever is currently occurring in or nearby? Yeah, well I don’t like that about Christians. Admittedly, your old fictional Jesus fella did cause a bit of a furore in a temple once, so I recall, but it seems he might have had a more genuine reason for it. Which reminds me: Winchester Cathedral! Pay to enter? Get lost!

I don’t approve of Christians heading off and forcing indigenous peoples to convert to their version of Imaginary Friend Syndrome. Stop doing that! Those people are most likely perfectly happy without indoctrination, fear, and the always popular Get Out Of Jail Free card that comes with every sin following a short bout of confession. Does believing in wine transforming into the blood of dead Middle Easterners help keep a twisted fronds roof over your jungle head? It does not.

When those Christians get together in groups and dress up as ghosty witches it does look pretty cool and a lot of fun but, seriously, haven’t you people heard of regular bonfires and embracing the community? A little thought about safety and integrating with the tanned members of society will go a long way to making those meetings really kick. Exclusionist clubs can cause unrest and no Christian wants that. No Christian wants unrest!

I’m not a big fan of people having non-consensual sex because it just seems like that’s bad and not very Christian. With that in mind I think Christians should stop having sex with children because it’s difficult for the little blighters to really know what they’re agreeing to. Just a thought I’m putting out there. Small people are still okay; Jeanette Krankie, for instance.

And killing people or intimidating people because they’ve decided not to carry a parasite to full term because of some irrational and picked-from-the-ether idea of holiness in an undetectable soul that resides in a group of cells (not dissimilar from any other animal’s) dividing and reproducing after a merging took place during an exchange of bodily fluids at some indeterminate gang rape, incest, drunken haze, or unlikely toilet seat, bath, or swimming pool situation in the recent past would seem to be a classic case of being a very bad thing to do about stuff that is none of your business.

Oh, and why are Christians so full of hatred towards gay people? Gay is just another word for happy. Blessed are those who hate the happy. Yeah, I don’t even have to dig out the sermon on the mount action interlude to know that’s not in there. Leave them be, Christians. Let them marry if they want to. Marriage isn’t even religious so sod off.

And stop turning up at my door in pairs. That seems to imply you think there’s safety in numbers. Well, there isn’t and it shows a distinct lack of faith in whatever flavour of God you believe in who amazingly has all the same prejudices you do. Cowardly Christians!

Anyway, for the sake of balance here’s what I like about Christians:

I like the way they all help the poor and needy without judging or asking for anything in return.

I like the way they forgive everything.

Next time: what I do and don’t like about all those dark-skinned, West-hating, women-suppressing, stone-throwing, chant-happy, unrest-causing, suicide-bombing Muslim people.

My Religious Experience

Posted by Mark on Apr 2, 2010 | 4 Comments

I’ve had a religious experience. It was your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill religious experience in that it involved indoctrination and the use of time that could otherwise have better been spent doing pretty much anything at all. I’m talking about my upbringing and not some delusional "ooh, I’ve spotted the beard of Jesus in dry rot" or "I’ve got no grasp of probability so two random events are clearly a physical manifestation of an ethereal omnipresence" situation.

I was raised to believe in an Irish-whisked, Rome-centric, Italian interpretation of the fictional Greek account of a group of Middle Eastern gentlemen along with all the popular legends passed down generation-to-generation by word of exaggeration and borrowed from numerous other disparate cultures: Catholicism to the layman.

I was brought up this way by my mother and I can be thankful for the small mercy that at least the brain-pummelling attempt was in English; she had latin to cope with too.

Now, of course, it’s not my mum’s fault that she encouraged fear of doing anything lest the invisible man in the clouds punish me; she underwent a similar indoctrination process herself and it worked to some extent on her. Nor is it her fault that she utterly, utterly wasted an hour every week of both our lives engaging in the ritual of – now let’s see if I can remember – genuflecting, sitting, standing, sitting, kneeling, sitting, standing, kneeling, getting soggy paper-tasting wafer stuck in the roof of the mouth, kneeling, sitting, standing, swapping germs through the act of shaking hands with random, nearby, homeless people and those who figured the nineteen layers of clothing they were wearing would probably absorb any leakage so why not skip the whole visiting a loo experience, sitting, standing, and genuflecting once more; all interspersed with monotonous tunes and the same stories over and over again.

Religion: helpful hint! Try writing a few new Jesus stories to keep the kids coming back!

My Catholic indoctrination was proceeding well, it thought. Baptism was completed, stamping my fortunately-difficult-to-detect soul with a "Property of The Pope" mark. The repetitive tall tales and body-training kneely-standy-sitty routines were becoming ingrained. There was even… The Confirmation.

The Confirmation is another way of saying "Hey! I didn’t ask to be baptised but strangely after being instructed over and over and over and over and over again about how good being a Catholic is I’ve decided of my own free will that I’ll repeat the process to show there are no hard feelings." I didn’t get the option to choose not to be Confirmed; that would have been crazy.

Being Confirmed means you get to pick your favourite saint and adopt their name as your new middle name. I wasn’t given a middle name when I was born because my parents figured that they wouldn’t have so many children so as to make a second name vital to distinguish among them and, as a result, getting to have a not-legal-for-identification-purposes middle name was something of a big deal. I chose Saint Anthony. Was Saint Anthony a good saint? Did he do something amazing? Did he even really exist? Can I remember? Did I even care at the time? The important thing was I could call myself Mark Anthony and pretend I was living in Ye Olde Roman Tymes. As you can see: the whole religion experience wasn’t really taking hold like it should. There’s a reason for this.

The childhood religious experience is a virus; its purpose is to simply exist and pass itself on to a new generation. There are beneficiaries of the virus but they are institutions, not the carriers. As with any virus there are anti-viral medicines and I was fortunate to be regularly taking that most potent of religious anti-virals…

I was educated well.

Where I can’t blame my mum for the religious upbringing, I can certainly praise (non-religious sense) both her and my dad for what also happened during my childhood. I was read to and taught to read from a very young age. My parents bought an encylopedia in twenty volumes (the 1971 Merit Students Encyclopedia) which contained a treasure trove of knowledge I happily stole. There were books a-plenty in the house and I read a lot. Library trips were frequent and wholly enjoyable. I was able to read just fine by the time I went to school. I read every single book in the primary and middle schools by the age of nine and was then asked to help the teacher at times with children less able.

My schooling was Rome-centric, Italian interpretation of the fictional Greek account of a group of Middle Eastern gentlemen along with all the popular legends passed down generation-to-generation by word of exaggeration and borrowed from numerous other disparate cultures-flavoured too. Catholic junior school, Catholic middle school, private Catholic secondary school run by an order of monks.

Yet, in spite of what appears to be a religion-reinforcing environment in which to be taught I can happily report that it delivered the opposite experience altogether. This isn’t a case of rebelling against the system; the education – particularly that received by the brothers at the private secondary school – was wide, deep, and honest. Comparative religion was taught, for example, and we learned of the origins of many of the world’s religion’s strangely-yet-not-really-when-you-think-about-it-shared tales. But, more importantly, we also learned of the history of the religion we were all being most convinced by our elders was the one to choose; historical education such as: gospels not included in the New Testament and why, dates of gospels, lack of credibility in the Old Testament, inconsistencies in the Bible and reasons, plagiarism within the Bible and reasons, lack of evidence for anyone named Jesus or Jesse or The Jeezster in the records of the time, assimilation of Christianity for Roman political purposes, and much, much more.

This was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a wonderful thing to learn (learning is wonderful!) and more than a little surprising to hear from a group of men in dresses who still prayed to a non-corporeal entity who’d allegedly had a son they openly admitted was completely fabricated for sociopolitical reasons. I heard an explanation of this belief-in-the-face-of-reason from the headmaster as being a means to lead a good life and wear black dresses because it’s so becoming. Some of that particular memory may have become warped and embellished with the passage of time.

For those capable of understanding them educational revelations of that magnitude are nuclear-tipped warheads fired against the pine sheds of religious indoctrination.

I opened hostilities on my mum and delivered a debilitating first strike on her beliefs from which she couldn’t recover. Within weeks the war was won: Sundays were… free! There was no more church, not just for me and my brother but also for my mum. Education had rid her of the infection. The family has been clear of the virus for mumble-something years now.

Of course, religion is still around in the world at large. A vaccination programme would be nice but education takes time, effort, willingness, and a genetic predisposition towards not being deeply stupid and not being pig-headed after indoctrination in spite of knowledge. That’s a lot to ask for. Still, even if the level of education in schools is on the decline (evidence says: hell yes) the internet is delivering wisdom and spreading the cure daily. Religious folk who tolerate other religious folk from other religions (because it’s difficult to openly point out the stupidities in those others’ misguided interpretations without encouraging a similar investigation of one’s own along with its accompanying hard-to-swallow-so-just-ignore-them truths) fear agnosticism and atheism because the religious virus has never mutated a form that is resistant to rationality in an intelligent host. The virus is scared. Poor little virus.

And that’s my religious experience. Happy Easter The Jeezster!

Places I’ve Found Jesus

Posted by Mark on May 20, 2009 | 4 Comments

People – most often religious people with glaucoma or people who really, really want to appear on local news broadcasts – frequently find Jesus in the strangest of places: on areas of concrete walls popular with tramps as public urinals, wherever damp has seeped onto the ceiling because of dodgy roof tiles, on bread left too long in the toaster, et cetera. You know: all the places the son of an omnipotent, omniscient creator of everything in the universe and then some would appear.

Now, I’m not religious and feel that anyone who is is merely worthy of nothing but my unending contempt yet I too have not been immune to occasional appearances in my life by the fictional character of Jesus. Unlike others who have gone before me I’ve no expectation or intention of appearing in pictorial form in my local free paper pointing at a smudge while mouthing the word "ooh!" But that won’t stop me uploading my evidence here. And mouthing "ooh!"

Jesus In The Sky

I remember the day well: it was a Wednesday or a Saturday. Probably a Saturday actually because the orthodox Jews would have been unable to Twitter the appearance of Jesus. That’s the mysterious way of the Lord at work right there. Yes, so it was most likely a Saturday. I remember it well: I was outside because you can’t see the sky from my living room. We don’t open the curtains because the plasma TV’s in the bay window and most of the time we can’t be arsed reaching over the back of to try to drag the curtains around. And there’s a moth that lives on the curtains which I don’t like disturbing. Although when he flies around at night bumping into the TV when we’re trying to watch a DVD I could happily strangle him. I’d need really small hands though. No, but I wouldn’t really strangle him. Or her. How do you sex a moth? Anyway, why am I talking about the curtain moth? So, yes, I was outside. Looked up. Saw Jesus. I remember it well.


Jesus In Vomit

That Christian messiah really appears in some unpleasant places. So, this one time I was out walking, minding my own business, whistling in my mind so as not to annoy anybody else. Suddenly – bam! – from out of nowhere I heard someone speaking in tongues. Turned out it was me and the voices were saying things like "bleurgh!" and "ohgahohgah" which didn’t make any sense. But inside me there was a another voice, really quite similar to my own which was translating these strange utterances and I knew that the words that sounded so alien meant "for the last time, you may like duck but duck clearly doesn’t like you, it was greasy and fatty, that pint of lager hasn’t helped matters, I don’t know if the pub’s pipes had been cleaned recently, that tasted a bit coppery come to think of it, open mouth and prepare to expel contents." Clearly it was the lord of a religion tweaked by Italians to control their citizens who had dug up some old fairy story by Middle Eastern goat herders talking through me. Up I chucked Jesus. Some people claim Jesus is inside us all. Well, mine must have snuck in somewhere when I wasn’t looking if he’s there now because last time I checked he was on the pavement having his features rearranged by a couple of pigeons.


Jesus In Cereal

If there’s one place that Jesus likes making an appearance more than anywhere else then that place is netball teams’ locker rooms disguised as an air vent. After the perverted air vent Jesus just loves to turn up in food. Any food. Imagine, then, my surprise one morning when I discovered the aforementioned religious icon in my bowl of cereal. "What are you doing there?" I asked Jesus. "The backstroke," he replied. We laughed. Oh, how we both laughed. There then followed an awkward few minutes where I tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to leave because of the unsanitary condition of his sandals. I’m not a fan of sandals at the best of times. He refused, citing deity privileges. I noticed my breakfast was getting soggy which isn’t normally a major problem. A little sog can be quite nice. But this was too much and I was running late. So I used my spoon and started to mash Jesus up. You should have seen the panic on his little face. And then he turned the milk chocolatey. It was a miracle! Then I switched to eating toast in the mornings instead.

That Uncut Bible

Posted by Mark on Apr 4, 2009 | 4 Comments

I know what you’re thinking: surely to goodness there can’t possibly be more previously-hidden passages from the one-and-only, complete, uncut Old Wumpard’s Uncensored Bible, can there?

There sure can!

We’ve seen some of the bits deemed "too hot for Christianity!" by none other than one of Popes himself (we forget which one) before here, here, and here but if there’s one truism about religion it’s this: preposterousness has no end!

And, besides, it’s nearly Easter. Everyone likes to hear the truth about Jesus and chocolate at this time of year.

Are you kneeling comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

"Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. But God was definitely doing this as a punishment or for research and God definitely didn’t approve of or like any of what he saw even though he let it go on for a long time and watching it all didn’t turn him strange or anything."

"The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die. And avoid the luxurious bath of luxury as it contains liquid death. Also, do not press the big red button with the words ‘PRESS ME’ flashing on it for it controls the auto-destruct system. Why are you looking at me like that?’"

"Then Haggai said, ‘If a person defiled by contact with a dead body touches one of these things, does it become defiled?’

‘No,’ the priests replied, but they were wrong and did not receive a cheese for their Science and Nature question."

"That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus tried to explain that they really shouldn’t have built their town on a Hellmouth."

"Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. Likewise for the ball gag and crotch rope."

"Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, ‘With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man’. And Adam became suspicious at this remark and demanded a DNA test."

"The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ”A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”’ And the now-confused Pharisees who were with John made signs behind his back to indicate they all thought he had been drinking heavily again."

"Moses answered, ‘What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ”The LORD did not appear to you”?’

Then the LORD said to him, ‘Take this photograph of the two of us together holding today’s stone tablet news.’"

"Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘Take off his filthy clothes.’

Then he said to Joshua, ‘See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you.’

Then I said, ‘Put a clean turban on his head.’ So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him, while the angel of the LORD stood by. Then the angel said ‘That’s much better. Now you’re ready for your Extreme Makeover reveal.’"

"’I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish’. And the donkeys and the hippos and the squirrels and the tyrannosaurus rexes were upset for they didn’t think they’d done anything wrong."

"On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of a Scalextric set. But Mary said that Jesus was too young to play with toy cars and so they gave her the receipt in order that she could take it back to the shops and pick up some myrrh."

"About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, ‘Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is the price.’ After some applause Peter then produced a rabbit from a turban and finished with his sawing-a-Pharisee-in-half trick."

"He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well. And if they can’t do all that stuff then they’re big, fat fakers and should be stoned to death. Remember that. That’s really important. Don’t forget that bit. I mean it.’"

"Then the Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’

Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’

The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body and the Jews had not immediately understood the metaphor thereby leaving them with a great pile of rubble in the centre of Jerusalem and a judge who threw out their case for compensation for breach of contract on account of it being verbal, hearsay, and irrelevant since Jesus was long dead by the time it reached court anyway."

"At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. And the cows and the sheep and the chickens and the pterosaurs spent much of the night wondering what it was they’d done to annoy God this time."