Eros Flowing Like Crazy With Penn Minister

There’s plenty to talk about the election today — okay, not really — but let’s begin with a story that’s better than politics. It’s about religion and sex. Usually, that means “priest sex scandal,” but this is good religion and sex. At Penn, the Rev. Beverly Dale mixes religion with, uh, “erotic passion.” Now here’s a religion I could get into!

Rev. Dale says she’s attempting to break the right-wing’s stranglehold on Christian imagery, even though she’s the only one she knows of doing this sex/God mashup. “The erotic is an incredibly powerful urge that can be exploitative, and the fear is it cannot be controlled, but of course it can be,” Dale told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “But rather than help people channel the erotic, the Church has historically repressed it in a limited, legalistic way.”

Hey, this sounds both crazy and perfectly sensible at the same time. Hey, if I can find somebody who tells me God wants me to have a better sex life, sounds good to me. As Dale says: “If you have a marriage license, Eros is supposed to flow like crazy, but pieces of paper do not guarantee a satisfying erotic life, and the real issue is that the Church has cut off the body from the spirit.” Sign me up.

Missing Mayor Comes Out Of Hiding, Kinda

Hey, they finally found missing Atlantic City mayor and fake Green Beret Bob Levy! He was at a psychiatric facility for a little over a week after his Sept. 26 disappearance and has been recovering at home ever since.

The revelation of Levy’s whereabouts came just after his wife spoke (exclusively) to CBS 3. “I’m concerned about his health, we all are,” Hazel Levy said. “Our family loves Bob very much and we’re going to get through this because we have a lot of faith in a higher power.”

Ah, it was only a matter of time ’til God got involved in this mess.

Missing A.C. Mayor’s Whereabouts Revealed [CBS 3]
Exclusive: Wife Of Missing Mayor Breaks Silence [CBS 3]
[Image via HarryHurley.net]

Phillies To Take On Rockies, God

Well, guys, the Phillies might not have much of a chance in the series against the Rockies. I know, I know; you can be excited, but there isn’t much of a chance for the Phillies to win.

The Rockies, you see, have God on their side:

No copies of Playboy or Penthouse are in the clubhouse of baseball’s Colorado Rockies. There’s not even a Maxim. The only reading materials are daily newspapers, sports and car magazines and the Bible. Music filled with obscenities, wildly popular with youth today and in many other clubhouses, is not played. A player will curse occasionally but usually in hushed tones. Quotes from Scripture are posted in the weight room. Chapel service is packed on Sundays. Prayer and fellowship groups each Tuesday are well-attended. It’s not unusual for the front office executives to pray together.

Yes! An article in USA Today last year wrote about how after a Rockies pitcher was arrested for soliciting a prostitute a few years ago, the team decided to only sign guys of character. (Because sex between consenting adults is a horrible thing; you think they’d want to sign players who were smart enough to not get arrested for soliciting a prostitute, especially since they’re rich.)

So, anyway, I don’t know if the Phillies need to make a deal with the devil to win, but it does seem like they’re going to have a tough time playing against Angels in the outfield.

Baseball’s Rockies seek revival on two levels {USA Today]

Fast Food Nearly Kills Someone Quickly This Time

Yesterday, NBC 10 ran a breaking exclusive story of a man who choked on an onion ring and then crashed his truck because of it. Miraculously, though, the crash saved his life because it dislodged the onion ring.

Basically, this story encompasses everything one needs to know about America: giant automobiles, fast food, God and stupidity.

Bryan Rocco has a hunger for fast food but never thought a Burger King onion ring would almost kill him, NBC 10’s Ted Greenberg reported. “I was eating my lunch on the road,” Rocco said, adding that he soon found himself “gasping for air.”

Nice lead-in. Wouldn’t that work for every story where someone dies or nearly dies? “Bob Smith liked skydiving, but he never thought his ‘chute wouldn’t open!”

More »

You Can Own A Little Slice Of Goo Gio God

Yes, you may now purchase the “God” eggplant on eBay! (Eggplant slices, you will note, cost $20 to ship.) The “Holy Eggplant” — as the sellers have dubbed it with great sacrilege — has an opening bid of $1,000, and will most certainly be purchased by an online casino or something, closing the chapter on the greatest miracle of all time.

Holy “God” Eggplant [eBay]

God Communicating Solely Through Eggplants

Earlier this week we were introduced to the “GOO” or “GIO” eggplant, which some people also said might spell “GOD.” One wonders why, exactly, God would chose to communicate through Solanum melongena, instead of the more traditional forms of prophets, Bibles and sleazy TV evangelists. But one also can’t really question the Big G. I mean, what are you gonna do, tell God it’s lame to communicate through eggplants? Yeah, you go ahead, I don’t want to be vaporized like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

You see, we now have another God communication through an eggplant. A Camden County woman says she found three angels in an eggplant, clearly a sign that the almighty wants her to go on television and talk about finding angels in her eggplant.

And that’s what she did, to 6 ABC, your #1 source for heavenly eggplant communication. (They even have an update of the previous story, about how the “GOD” eggplant might go up for sale! “And God said, sell this plant to GoldenPalace.com…”)

Vincenza Martino bought the eggplant earlier this week from a vendor in Jerz, and as she was slicing it up, she found the seeds formed angels, or at least whatever Western view we have of angels (cloaked in white, etc.). But I assume God knows what we think angels look like, so He knows what pattern to move those seeds into.

Martino even gave a slice of the holy eggplant to a customer who is very sick. (He cried.) 6 ABC reports she works seven mornings a week and doesn’t go to church, even though the deli she works at is plastered in photos of Pope Benedict. She says the deli is her temple. “God is here, like he’s in the church,” Martino said.

This is sort of Bible-centric. I believe the quote is, “Do this in memory of me… and if you have to work or something, then just eat eggplant instead.” Except in Aramaic, I guess.

New Jersey Woman Finds Angels In Eggplant [6 ABC]
Holy Eggplant! [6 ABC]

Come On, Come All! Lessen Your Time In Purgatory!

In case you didn’t read the story associated with yesterday’s Catholic vs. Protestant poll on Philly.com, here’s the 411: The Vatican has approved a plenary indulgence available to all Philadelphia Catholics in honor of the Archdiocese’s 200th anniversary. While the church used to sell indulgences, now it simply makes people jump through hoops to get them: For the Philly indulgence, one must make a pilgrimage to a shrine (take the El to Girard, it’s just a few blocks to where St. John Neumann is buried), receive the sacraments of penance and communion and pray for whatever the Pope wants you to.

The Catholic church gets a little angry when somebody brings up the point indulgences were never mentioned by Jesus, except in the apocryphal Sermon on the Mount of Gold Doubloons.¹ even going so far as to say for about 400 years that anyone who disagreed with indulgences was going to hell. (Really.) Lots of people, though, believe indulgences are a free path to heaven, which they’re not. Geeze, you idiots: Indulgences simply lessen one’s time in purgatory.² (Wikipedia hilariously summarizes: “God has mercy upon sinners who repent their sins, but like some parents, His justice still requires that the sinner be punished for the wrongdoing.”)

You also have to be actually sorry for masturbating³ to get the indulgences, so tough luck, everyone.

¹ I may have made this up.

² I’m already in the clear here, since I wore a scapular for nine weeks a while back, and as such the Blessed Mother is going to bail me out of purgatory on the first Saturday after my death.

³ Or for using a condom with your AIDS-stricken husband.

Spiritual gift for Catholics in Phila. [Inquirer]

Cloning Gays Is Totally Out Of The Question

It’s nice to know (for me, at least) that if I do take a week off, there will be plenty of material waiting for me when I return. But more on this later; new material has simply appeared, like magic, in today’s Inquirer. I speak, of course, of Faye Flam’s “Carnal Knowledge” column.

Today’s piece is about gays, and why people hate them. The headline is pretty clear: “What fuels the hatred of homosexuality?” What makes the column more interesting than usual: There’s no mention of the Bible at all. It’s like writing a column about the cause of the American Civil War and not mentioning slavery.

Flam instead focuses on the “ick factor” of (for the most part) straight men, who abhor the idea of two men kissing or assfucking or whatever. This makes sense, of course; to be honest, I feel men are so disgusting I can’t even understand how straight women find men attractive. (I suppose if they didn’t it would be the end of the species; mankind is saved because not everyone is as neurotic as I am.) “Isn’t it kind of babyish to declare gays immoral because you think their sex lives are icky?” Flam writes. Of course, what if your all-knowing and all-powerful god decides two men shouldn’t hook up? Hey, I don’t get it either, but who are we to doubt omniscience?

Okay, so lotsa men don’t like gays (and, therefore, gay marriage) because they feel it’s icky. After finally mentioning religious teachings, Flam also cites a study by Leon Kass, who worked with President Bush: “Kass’ essay focused not on gay marriage, but on human cloning, which, he wrote, makes us uneasy for a reason.” This is like citing an essay on the Panic of 1837 in my hypothetical Civil War column.

But, really, it all comes down to one thing: We (not me, but the royal “American”) hate gays because we hate smokers. And, ah, carnivores.

Rozin suggests that liberals tend to go after smokers partly for the same reason. It’s far from a perfect analogy, and I’m not really bothered by smokers. To me, slaughterhouses are disgusting and cast doubt on the morality of buying supermarket steak (although not enough to stop me from eating a hamburger at a barbecue).

And what do they call cigarettes in England? I rest my case.

Carnal Knowledge | What fuels the hatred of homosexuality? [Inquirer]

Lawmakers Think They Suck As Much As We All Do

With America pretty much failing at every war it decides to join nowadays — Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs, literacy, obesity, etc. — it appears lawmakers have decided to, much like the rest of us, give up.

Case in point: The new bipartisan proposal asking Americans to pray every day. Nothing wrong with praying every day, but when the head of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, J. Randy Forbes, says he wants to “build a spiritual prayer wall around America” that will not stop “until God heals our land,” well it appears Congress has outsourced illegal immigration to God.

(Well, how else do you explain the “spiritual prayer wall”?)

There’s even a website, prayercaucus.org, where one can sign up to pray for America and hope God’s able so solve all the problems in the world since politicians obviously can’t.

Of course, since this is Congress asking us to pray, I expect the United States to be destroyed by a giant flood in the next couple of days.

Lawmakers want Americans to pray 5 minutes each week for the nation [Camden Courier-Post]

Philly Mint Strikes A Blow For Secular Humanism

Back in the middle of last month, the U.S. Mint began its plan to release dollar coins with pictures of the presidents on them, in an attempts to get us to think about using a dollar coin for a week before we go back to using foldin’ money.

Well, the mint in Philadelphia apparently made a mistake, thereby attracting our attention again. (I had even forgotten there were new dollar coins!) You see, some of the new dollars went out without the inscription “In God We Trust” on the side, making them evil, godless dollars that will probably never meet Barbaro in heaven. Oh, and it’s also missing “E Pluribus Unum P 2007.”

Naturally, all the coins that have been found so far were struck in the Philadelphia Mint. About 150 million of the new dollars — with Washington on the front — have been made in Philadelphia, and maybe about 50,000 don’t have the inscription on the side. They’re selling for about $40-50 on eBay.

The lack of inscriptions may upset some people, like one Bonnie Alba, writing on some blog/online publication called “The Conservative Voice”:

Is there a possible correlation between this coin and the ongoing actions in all areas of society and our court system to delete any public reference to God, to Christianity, and the transition of our nation to total materialsim with a State religion of Humanism? Without God? Without reliance on God’s providence?

We now have a coin which has pushed God and our once heartfelt unity to the edge. Does it have anything to do with the constant blatant attack on history and our Christian heritage, revised and disseminated in government schools? Voiding the mention of God in education has affected and influenced millions of children and produced adults with no inkling how they were indoctrinated with a reinterpretation of America’s history.

Yeesh. Nobody tell her about these new coins without the words on them. Her head might explode.

A striking omission on a bunch of new dollar coins [Inquirer]
Feb. 15: Mint Hopes New Dollar Coins Will Capture Americans’ Interest For Whole Week This Time