Plastic Jesus Disks

"You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god..." PZ Myers, Pharyngula

PZ is talking about Roman Catholic Communion Wafers. Catholics, for those of you not in the know, believe that the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass turn into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus Christ when the priest utters the appropriate magic spell over them.

Yum.

Now, my own Christian upbringing was in the Anglican Church. Most Anglican churches use the same flattened disks of bread that the Catholics use, but don't go quite as far in what they believe happens during the consecration. The wafers and the wine are sort of special and have to be treated with unmost reverence, but are not actually considered to be body parts. Fortunately.

As a child I avoided the church. My family was nominally Anglican but didn't go to church. Dad wasn't a believer and didn't make any fuss about it. He admired Anglican traditions in a cultural way though. Mum was and still is a sort of a believer in a vague sort of way. Yes, she believes. No, she doesn't have any interest in going to church.

My church avoidance centred around the simple fact that I had not been baptised and mum figured I eventually should be. My older brother was baptised as a baby but somehow I missed out, and was in no hurry to catch up. The idea that I would have to stand before a bunch of people and recite lines in a scary ritual and have water poured over me filled me with kiddie terror!

I was however, baptised when I was 19.

Attending Teacher's College (Wagga Wagga 1972) I fell in with a bunch of Anglicans who also resided in my on-campus dorm. Kevin and John and a couple of others talked me around to it. They were progressive in their beliefs and didn't think lack of official Confirmation in the faith should stand in the way of heathens taking part in the Lord's Supper.

So it was that one Sunday they carted me off to St John's Wagga, a quite beautiful country church overlooking the Murrumbidgee River. The priest was Archdeacon Arnold Osborne a truly lovely, gentle man who joined the church in response to the horrors he had experienced as an airman in Europe during World War II.

Cutting now to the Holy Communion. My First. Ever.

Kevin and John had instructed me on how to hold my hands to receive the Host. I was ready. This was it. I knelt and held out my hands in the Proper Way. Archdeacon Arnold came along and pressed a perfect, circular, pure white disk of plastic into my palm. "The Body of Christ" he intoned, and moved on.

I stared at the disk of plastic. It stared back patiently. The cup of wine was approaching. What do I do with this? Is it symbolic? Yes! It must be symbolic of bread! They like symbolism here.

I stealthily tucked the plastic disk into my pants pocket. No one noticed and with relief I was in time to take the wine. That was real! Aaah. Port - not bad. Mission accomplished, I returned to my pew and forgot about the plastic disk.

That afternoon I was talking about the experience with Kevin and John and raised with them the issue of the plastic disk. "So what was I supposed to do with it?"

"You were supposed to swallow it - (pause) - you DIDN'T? What did you do with it?"

Kevin and John exchanged a a slightly worried glance.

I went to get the pants I had been wearing. Kevin grabbed them and started searching the pocket.

Alas, our symbolic Lord had crumbled away to a couple of tiny fragments. Kevin and John laughed nervously, shrugged and then carefully explained to me about how communion wafers are made. I think they were a lot more careful with later newbies...

Kevin graduated as a school teacher, and later became an Anglican priest, working in the NSW Prison System.

Archdeacon Arnold went on to baptise me in the Murrumbidgee River (another story), and was never told about my little error. I do think he would have coped. Arnold retired, and in the "It's a small world" department, 15 years later, here in Canberra, I had the pleasure of being wildly seduced by his daughter-in-law every night for three weeks, to the deliberate and painful point of "Erectus Interruptus" in a production of the naughty ancient Greek comedy 'Lysistrata.' Oh, I really loved the Theatre. :-)

I don't take plastic Jesus disks any more. The practising Anglican bits of my life were mostly good times. The ritual and the people were good. But the Message behind the ritual? I guess I really am my father's son, after all...

Fiction

(crossposted from Ficly - short stories in 1024 characters)

Worth Waiting For

Mary, the last Christian lay dying.

No priest stood beside her to administer the Last Rites. No Charismatic Fundamentalist was there to condemn her to Hell. Sick of waiting for the Rapture, the last of them had committed ritual mass suicide four years ago. The Zion-Mecca World War over the last decade had cleaned out the belfrys of both of those houses of religious adherence. The Hindis and Buddists were still out there however, just getting loonier and loonier. Ah well.

Mary died.

Awestruck, she walked down the blue tunnel of light to meet her maker – the One True and Only God.

The One True and Only God sat on His throne at the end of the tunnel, observing Mary’s approach.

And so it was that Bumba, the Congo God of Vomiting arose and looked down on His newest angel.

“Welcome to the afterlife!” Bumba intoned, and projected a massive torrent of steaming emesis at Mary.

“You were expecting Thor?”, He asked rhetorically, before repeating His Godly speciality, and not for the last time…

Pareidolia Party #1

I love pareidolia. You skeptics out there already know what that is. For the benefit of the pre or non-skeptic, pareidolia is the human ability to recognise patterns or pictures in random information.

A really good example surfaced recently: The face of Christ in the cross-section of a Kit Kat bar. What amuses me is that this is not the usual face-of-Christ in a shadow or a toasted sandwich, but the face-of-Christ as depicted in the Turin Shroud. Here is the Kit Kat:


...and here is the Turin Shroud:



The Turin Shroud image is a photographic negative, since the Catholic/deluded believers think he looks more believeable and worshippable that way. I agree, assuming it is not Photoshop'd (Annie thinks it is), that it is a pretty good match, even is if it IS missing the blood splatters. I picked a Turin Shroud picture already tinted a nice dark brown so as to match the Kit Kat better.

Proof positive of the Divine Influence of GOD on a chokkie bar!!! Yowza!!!

...but wait...

The Shroud of Turin has been pretty conclusively debunked. It is a medieval fake.

Unless, of course, you are a credulous member of the aforementioned Catholic/deluded faith.

So, God has chosen to create the image of a forgery of the image of Jesus, in a chocolate bar. If so, he is displaying a rarely obvious sense of humour here.

Let us gaze on another recent Jesus sighting:

It would seem that The Lord is confused about what he really looked like on his brief stop-over in human history. This is a slab of concrete with an oil stain on it. Its owner managed to extract over $1500 off some religious idiot for it.

To put it another way, if God was REALLY planting happy-snaps of himself in and around our planet, you would think he would keep the image vaguely consistent. These things always have beards (the Jesus ones, not the Virgin Mary!). Beyond that the resemblances are pretty thin.


Is this yet another Jesus revealing himself in a mysterious way, or a baby in a bonnet sitting on daddy's knee?

Sheesh, people can be thick...

It's Official - God is a murderous scumbag - Fred said so

A blessing of enlightenment from the most pious of all earthly Christians, the Reverend Fred Phelps, head of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas:

God is getting it off, creaming his jeans and rolling on the floor in hysterics, about his successful campaign to kill off Australians in the recent Victorian bushfire disaster. More than 210 and counting. All the dead Aussies: women, children, animals and pooftas hurled on an express plummet into the Lake o' Fire. Australia brought it on itself, says Fred, because of Heath Ledger (now also fashionably burning and screaming in Hell forever) and his fag promotin' film "Two words…..BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN!!!!"

So, as befits a nation of hateful non-bible-believing fag enablers, Holy and everlasting God Almighty is killing Australians every way He can. Read all about it here.

So there you have it - the Most Reverend Fred Phelps has revealed the truth. That God is a vicious, hateful, murderous, sadistic, homophobic, vile and treacherous scumbag who, I'm absolutely sure, Fred would agree should be sentenced to DEATH!

Com'on Fred - you know supreme evil when you see it! Sentence God to the DEATH He clearly deserves! Throw His holier-than-thou spook body, screaming, into an industrial meat grinder! You know you want to.

You have been calling God a hateful shit for years - so put your blame where it REALLY belongs and screw the stinking magical cock-sucker in the sky! It's only fair. You know - to follow His Holy Example...