Religion makes people happy. Why can’t atheists just let people believe what they want to believe? Why do people need to attack religion?

Oh wait.

So as I posted on the forums, Ray Comfort has apparently found GHF and posted a quote from our very own Brian on his own blog. Now, of course this doesn’t make him a fan or even a regular reader - it only makes it incredibly amusing. Now, since in his own blog Ray takes to “quote mining atheists” for the entertainment of his readers, I figured I would quote mine some of Ray’s recent blog posts.

In his ignorance he searches for what he believes are “mistakes” in the Bible to justify his godless beliefs. He is like a man who diligently searches (with a magnifying glass) for a tiny fly dirt on the Mona Lisa, so that he can justify discarding the whole painting as junk.

Yes, Ray. The blatant contradictions and atrocities in the Bible are only tiny specks.

If a man is playing the hypocrite and feels okay about looking at pornography (committing adultery in his heart–see Matthew 5:27-28), he probably feels okay about lying also.

And if you’re willing to lie, you’d probably feel ok about murdering children too.

Using His name as a cuss word isn’t the only way to deal with this problem of Jesus of Nazareth. There are other ways to wash your hands of Him. You can do what the Mormons did. Make up your own “Jesus.” Make him the brother of Lucifer. Nice. Or you can do what Islam did. Create a Jesus that didn’t die on the cross.

Obviously all other religions are only making up their saviors while Jesus is the One True God.

Ray Comfort’s blog is a cesspool of irrationality, but that can be entertaining. It’s tough to quote-mine him since his entire entries are based on mind-numbing pseudo-logic that simply boggles the mind; no one line tends to stand out. One entry I will point out is where Ray Comfort compares atheism to denying the sun exists.

If you’ve never heard of Ray Comfort before, you should check out this clip of him, which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I saw it years ago and it’s still funny.

The first true sign of the LORD: Jesus on the top of a beer bottle.

The drunk- er, devout Christians at the bar saw the sign immediately.

“When I saw it I got goose pimples,” 35-year-old Mr Cartwright said yesterday. “I have no doubt it is the face of Jesus. You can even see his beard and hair.”

However, the devil is constantly at work to stop these signs from spreading.

“It ended up getting collected by a barmaid when no one was paying attention and thrown away,” said Mr Cartwright.

Jesus appears in potatoes.

This heathen originally mistook Jesus for a rotten potato:

Renee says she had been looking for an excuse to get out of making potato salad. “I was hesitant about making the potato salad because Sister Frankie makes the potato salad at church and I said lord if it’s not for me to make potato salad then send me a sign.”

She thought she got her sign right off the bat. “The first potato I split in half and put it to the side because it looked rotten.

It was her 10-year-old granddaughter who made her give the potato a second look.

I think that speaks for itself.

DocFrance on the forums started a thread about this interesting story:

Lawmakers in the nation’s capital may be wringing their hands about record high gasoline prices. Others are putting their hands together — praying for help from a higher authority. Volunteers from a Washington, D.C., church soup kitchen launch a movement called Pray at the Pump.

A similar story happened late last year, when the governor of Georgia called for people to pray for rain. This one struck me as particularly absurd as it reminded me of stories of ancient tribes dancing around the fire to ask the fickle gods for rain. While everyone would consider the dancing to be ridiculous, on an intellectual level they are both asking for magic to make the world work differently. And that sort of conduct was much more excusable in ancient times when people didn’t understand how the world worked.

Why, exactly, do people think prayer works? People balk at the idea of magic or voodoo or anything like that, but how is prayer any different? There was actually a large study done in 2006 which concluded that prayer doesn’t help the sick. The thing that is most troubling about that study is that it ever had to be done in the first place.

I suppose that some people think prayer, the thought that god can help them, is comforting. However, the idea that some higher deity could at a whim mess around with how reality works is one of the most startlingly uncomfortable ideas I can think of. I will take my knowable reality any day.

As promised, the famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sammich.

The woman who made the sammich took a bite after it and then noticed it bore the image of Mary (who appears to be sporting a nice Hitler mustache). Then she kept it for TEN YEARS before selling it for a ridiculous amount of money to a casino.

A woman who said her 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bore the image of the Virgin Mary will be getting a lot more bread after the item sold for $28,000 on eBay.

Duyser said she took a bite after making the sandwich 10 years ago and saw a face staring back at her. She put the sandwich in a clear plastic box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand. She said the sandwich has never sprouted a spore of mold.

Of course not. Mold cannot destroy the almighty mom of God/son of God/whatever!

Jesus shows up on a spoon.

Gee, I wonder what happened to it.

The spoon is now for sale on eBay but Davis doesn’t have a clue how much it may go for.

I’m sure the LORD will make sure it goes for a lot of money. But wait, there’s something even more absurd at the end of the article, where it mentions other weird stories.

A Doritos chip shaped like the Pope’s hat had people talking.

On the topic of the Ten Commandments, commandment number 10 (or number 9 and 10, depending on how your favorite sect numbers them) says:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

That short phrase says so very much about the status of women in the Bible. Let’s see…

1. “Your neighbor’s wife.” That is, the wife that belongs to your neighbor. The wife he bought fair and square. In the time when this was written, women were indeed little more than property; property of their fathers, until the father sold her to a man of his choosing, for a sheep or two.
2. Women are listed right between “house” and “donkey”. What a lofty status wives hold in God’s eyes! Not only are they property, they aren’t even first in the list. Women are a dime a dozen after all, but a good farm is priceless. Good to know my wife should rank right up there with my oxen though.
3. The phrase should more accurately be “your neighbor’s wives” given rampant polygamy in the primitive tribal society that spawned this lovely moral teaching. And maybe it should include concubines and female slaves, if we really want to get into specifics.
4. This short phrase makes it clear that the Ten Commandments are God talking to MEN, and men only. There’s nothing about coveting your neighbor’s husband, is there? (Well, to be fair, God may also be talking to lesbians here.) But of course, this makes sense in a society where women have no sexual identity other than to crank out babies and keep their mouths shut. Surely women don’t covet anything anyways; their brains aren’t developed enough.

Yes, the Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws, aren’t they? What glorious moral lessons we can learn from them. Given that women couldn’t vote in the US until 1920, I think in this case it may just be accurate to say that for a long time our laws were indeed based on the same archaic bigotry and sexism that is clearly evident in the Ten Commandments. Until we all grew brains and learned better, and decided this stupid book was WRONG.

(Bonus: “Manservant” is a very loose translation. It could rightly be translated “slave“. This commandment was used by many to justify slavery in the US.)

A resolution currently in the House of Representatives will call the first weekend in May the “Ten Commandments Weekend.” Another related resolution would honor the Ten Commandments Commission, an organization dedicated to educating the public about the Ten Commandments.

This first quote in the article struck me as odd. The House resolution would congratulate the TCC for its:

… key role in promoting and ensuring recognition of the Ten Commandments as the cornerstone of Western law.

Really? We can forget for the moment the ridiculous violation of the Establishment Clause these resolutions present. Of the Ten Commandments, only two are actually law (and arguably a third if you read the “don’t bear false witness” one as committing perjury). Some of the rest, such as not committing adultery, are still considered moral, but about half of them would now be, in and of themself, considered nonsense by a reasonable majority of Americans. Oh, they would deny it of course, but if you went up to someone and said “you can’t say ‘oh my god’ or you will be punished” or “you can’t do anything productive on Saturday,” what do you think their reaction would be?

This isn’t like the Bible, where everyone says it’s so important but never actually read most of it or learn about its history. The ten commandments are everywhere, and yet many Christians still profess how great they are. I don’t understand; have they actually read them?

From my understanding of Old Testament history, the Ten Commandments weren’t even that big of a deal to ancient Jews; they were simply more laws among the hundreds of other laws in the Pentateuch, the first five books (mostly Leviticus). Why the modern interest in these ten laws, most of which are not even considered relevant today? Why do people obsess over these all-important rules, when if they actually analyzed them, they wouldn’t even agree with some of them? Why aren’t they just ignored like the rest of the crazy laws in the Bible?

The Ten Commandments were not the foundation of Western law. The actual laws related to them, against murder and theft, are not values that originated with Christianity, and to try and argue that is ridiculous. Of course, some Christians also claim that democracy/republicanism was founded in Christian values, so I guess people will believe whatever they want to.

Interesting note: the first hit for a Google search for “the ten commandments” is the imdb page for the Charlton Heston movie. At least internet nerds have their priorities straight.

PZ Meyers has requested that lots of sites link to a website exposing the movie “Expelled” as the lie-filled crap-fest propaganda garbage that it is. I’m much obliged.