Great Stories of the Bible 4

Happy Easter everyone. I mean, everyone who is a Christian. Or Happy Pesach to you Jews out there. If you’re a Muslim, too bad you don’t have a holiday.

Because, for much of the world, today is a big-assed holiday, it’s time for another Great Story of the Bible. But this time, I’m going to take my great story from the New Testament.

In the past, I have only done Great Stories of the Bible from the Old Testament. That’s because the Old Testament is a collection of stories that don’t overlap all that much. There’s some overlap and plenty of plagiarism from other stories — Moses gets commandments from God twice in Exodus and then there’s a rerun of that episode in Deuteronomy just for good measure — but you can usually do a story from the Old Testament and not need to mention any other stories.

The New Testament is different. The New Testament is also a collection of stories but the four gospels overlap a lot. They are mainly plagiarized but inconsistent versions of the same stories. So, if I do a Great Story of the Bible from the New Testament, I need to do all the competing versions. And that sucks ass.

That said, I decided to do a New Testament story this time, lest you think I am not giving Jesus his stoogepious due.

Today’s Great Story of the Bible is the very short story of Jesus and the Fig Tree. The first version you will get is the version by the author of what we have named The Gospel According to Mark. There is no evidence that it was written by anyone named Mark. That’s just the name people gave the gospel after it was written. Let’s call the author Stanley. Assuming that Jesus was actually a historic figure, Stanley wrote his gospel at least a few decades after the death of Jesus and it’s been tampered with since then.  But Stanley’s is the earliest version of the fig story.

There is also no evidence that the Gospel According to Matthew was written by anybody named Matthew. Let’s call the author Eugene. Eugene wrote his gospel long after Stanley wrote his. In fact, Eugene’s gospel is based in part upon Stanley’s gospel, with some parts just outright plagiarized. But Eugene didn’t really understand where Stanley was going with the whole fig tree episode so Eugene kind of fucked it up.

You know, Stanley wasn’t writing about an actual miracle. Stanley’s fig tree story was a parable in which the fig tree is Israel, which will bear no more fruit due to its corruption. That’s why Stanley threw the whole temple episode into the middle of the story: it’s a literary device connecting the two stories. Well, Eugene didn’t get any of that.  Eugene may have been the first dumb-ass fundamentalist.  He took everything Stanley wrote seriously.  And, being a good Christian, he set an example for generations of future Christians by changing the facts in his Gospel to make the whole fig tree episode just a little more miraculous.

And that’s the end of the fig tree stories involving Jesus. The unknown author of the Gospel According to Luke, whom we’ll call Ethel, ignores it, even though, like Eugene, she uses Stanley’s gospel as source material. The unknown authors (it looks like there were more than one) of the Gospel According to John also never mention the fig tree story.

But Ethel does include a parable allegedly told by Jesus about a fig tree in the Gospel According to Luke. It appears in none of the other gospels.  Jesus, unfortunately, did not get a role in Ethel’s parable.  Rumor has it, Jesus fired his agent shortly thereafter.

So that’s it for stories about fig trees.

Now, what does all of this mean?

And that’s our bible lesson for today.  I hope you have all learned something valuable about Jesus on this highest of Christian holidays.

Yo, for those of you who haven’t gotten enough religion today, I have a great new website to share with you. It’s for people like you and I who would like to hedge our bets but really don’t want to waste a lot of our precious time worshipping. It’s called WorshipEngine. It harnesses the power of the internet to worship for you. Go check it out.

That’s all I have to say about Jesus and religion right now. Now be fruitful or something. But don’t multiply.

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Great Stories of the Bible 3

It’s time for another inspiring episode of Great Stories of the Bible, and this one is a totally epic double header! You will be so fucking religious by the time you finish reading this that you just might want to cut off your own dick. Unless you’re a woman. If you’re a woman, you might feel so religious that you want to grow a dick. Because, as you will see throughout the bible (and as you saw in Great Stories of the Bible 1 and Great Stories of the Bible 2 in particular) God loves nicely cut dicks and sort of hates women.

Most of you have already heard of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a touching and rousing story of two of the most pious men ever to walk the earth: Abraham and his nephew, Lot. I invite you to read this story and try to walk in the mighty shoes of these noble men that God finds so righteous.

You might notice that one of the scenes here is a lot like the story in Great Stories of the Bible 1. That might seem a little crazy since the scene seems wildly fucking unlikely to repeat itself. Yeah. God plagiarizes his own shit a lot. But he can do that. He’s God.

Anyways, here is the brand stinking new Great Stories of the Bible Double Feature. Enjoy or whatever.

Yo, that had to be safe for work, right? I mean, it’s straight from the fucking bible.

Okay, so that’s all I have to say about the bible right now. Go make God a sandwich.

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Waterboarding Camp

You don’t have to look too far around the blogosphere to find people who love torture. According to some, torture is just awesome. Pretty much, conservatives love torture and liberals hate it. This difference of opinion baffled me for a while. I mean, conservatives believe that the government needs to be greatly limited and that government is full of corrupt, self-serving politicians as evidenced by the more than 11,000 pork barrel projects. The government we installed in Iraq is corrupt. The government we installed in Afghanistan is corrupt. Meanwhile, here at home, corruption is so widespread it can’t even be calculated: in Illinois alone, the cost of government corruption to taxpayers is estimated at $500 million a year. I mean, the government can’t even order the president a goddamn helicopter without fucking it up.

That’s why so many conservatives are so dead set against nationalized healthcare. Yeah, it’s true that here in the US we spend more than twice as much as other industrialized nations and yet we suck ass compared to them when you look at major health indicators like life expectancy, infant mortality, and immunization rates. But the mega-corporations now providing us with insurance and medications who care so very much about our well-being are making healthy profits. I mean, consider the fact that former UnitedHealth CEO William McGuire got $1.4 billion in stock options while the company made $30 billion in after-tax profits and spent $32 billion in insurance underwriting and marketing costs. Healthy! Oh, and, by the way, you have a preexisting condition so your claim has been denied. Sorry. Please pay the 87% increase in your premiums over the last six years, though, or you’ll be among the uninsured in less time than it takes to say, “not covered: elective,” loser. Do you know why we didn’t have a bigger outbreak of swine flu? Because we couldn’t afford it. Yeah, it’s true that Obama’s plan would merely be competitive with existing plans, so your health coverage would not change. It’s also true that businesses would benefit because they would no longer have to pay high insurance premiums or carry the administrative overhead for employees that opted into the single-payer program. But still, government is bad! And politicians cannot be trusted!

That’s why I’m kind of surprised by the conservative reaction to torture. I mean, if you don’t trust the government to pay for your fucking prescription, how can you trust it to secretly subject people to torture? I mean, okay, the government has awesome power all the time, but why would you give a government you don’t trust tyrannical power?

I think that, for moral guidance, conservatives often ask themselves what Jesus would do. Regarding torture, many apparently already have. And it turns out that Jesus loves torture! According to a poll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that “the use of torture against suspected terrorists to gain important information” is often or sometimes justified. Only sixteen percent of that group believed that torture is never justified. That number was lower than any other group polled. There was also just as strong a correlation between regular church attendance and support for torture. A similar poll last year offered pretty similar results, finding that 57 percent of white Southern evangelicals believed that torture was often or sometimes justified. Other polls give similar results. And note that the Pew Forum didn’t ask about “Harsh Interrogation Techniques” or any other euphemism for torture. It asked about plain old “torture.” So, Jesus is all over torture. Jesus hearts torture!

But, still, while this explains that some Jesus-loving people love torture, it doesn’t explain why. Then I saw a survey of the best and worst things liberals and conservatives could imagine. It explains a lot.

Source: Frank G. Musket & Harvey H. Temple, The Douchebaggery of the Masses: Political America from Ignoramississippi to Dumbfucklahoma, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1191, 1207 (2009).

Many who are in favor of waterboarding argue that it works. But, really, who gives a shit whether it works or not? I mean, it’s not torture, right? Listen, the so-called “torture” memos released by Obama give all the US law that matters. They all agree about the definition of torture. The most important US law, 18 USCA §§ 2340-2340A, defines torture as an act that inflicts “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Another important US law, 28 USCA § 1350, also discussed in the memos, governs civil suits for torture and its definition is pretty identical: “severe pain or suffering ... whether physical or mental….” That’s a fine definition of torture in my book.

The memos go on to find that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever.” And, since it’s a “controlled acute episode,” it can’t be said to cause any suffering either. In addition, though “waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death,” it causes no “prolonged mental harm.” That’s all from the “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” torture memo of August 1, 2002, written by Jay Bybee, by the way. But all the other memos agree.

So, waterboarding is kind of like riding a roller coaster or something: no physical or mental pain or suffering whatsoever. Just thrills and chills. That’s why it’s not torture and that’s what makes it so awesome. Okay, when the CIA tried waterboarding on their own operatives, the operatives lasted only an average of fourteen seconds. And conservative shockjock Erich Muller only lasted six seconds and afterward he said it was “absolutely torture.” But we all know how sensitive these rightwing radio dudes can be. I mean, the memos — written by lawyers — tell us it’s not even painful! And since when do any of us, conservative or liberal, have any reason to not trust lawyers? It must be as they say, a kind of awesome amusement park ride where you feel panic during it but afterward you laugh and laugh. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that we don’t have detainees begging us to waterboard them. At the very least, if we just explained to the detainees how much fun waterboarding is, we could probably get their consent to waterboard them and then none of this would be an issue.

Jay Bybee, who wrote that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever,” was then Assistant Attorney General under Bush but he is now a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, one step below the Supreme Court. That means that, in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State, waterboarding is perfectly legal as long as Jay Bybee is your judge. It’s also legal in Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, wherever the fuck that is. Oh, and Alaska, too, but you already knew torture was legal there.

And here is the truly awesome thing: I looked up the definition of child abuse in California. And child abuse occurs when someone “causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon, unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering” according to California Penal Code 11165.3. So, instead of “severe,” child abuse is “unjustifiable” physical pain or mental suffering. But that doesn’t matter because, according to the Jay Bybee memo, waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever!” So, you don’t even need to justify waterboarding your kids! In fact, waterboarding is more appealing than spanking as a way to discipline your children. After all, spanking hurts! Even Bybee agrees: he writes that a facial slap “may hurt.” But waterboarding doesn’t hurt at all! No pain and no suffering!

So, I was thinking about this, and about how conservatives and Jesus are all loving torture almost but not quite to death (usually), and I decided that there is a money-making opportunity here. So I’m going to open a summer camp for kids in California. Judge Bybee’s got my back and it looks like Obama won’t prosecute anybody for any of this shit, either. Here is the brochure for stoogepie’s Waterboarding Camp. Please pass it along. And don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Sign your kids up today.

Or you can just click on this link to download the brochure. Hurry. Water won’t be around forever.

That’s all I have to say about torture for right now.

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A Crissy and stoogepie Fairytale

I haven’t been around much lately so I haven’t been posting much. Crissy over at crissyspage.com was nice enough to offer to help out by working with me on a comic. We even got a subtle product placement deal worked out. See whether you can spot it.

You probably already figured it out but, yes, here is our sponsor.

Thank you Bag O’ Dicks!

And thank you, Crissy! Swing by Crissy’s and leave her a comment or squeeze her tits or something.

That’s it for me and fairytales for a while unless another sponsor forks over some cash.

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Great Stories of the Bible 2

This Great Bible Story is a lot different from Great Stories of the Bible 1. But I still think it’s a pretty great bible story

See, that last bible story was a good story for the whole family, but might have been more interesting to adults. But this Great Bible Story is one the kids can enjoy in particular.

You’ve all heard of David & Goliath. David kills this giant and saves the day. But what you might not know is the story right after that whole David and Goliath episode in the bible. It’s a magical story with kings and princesses and royal intrigue.

So, if you thought all these bible stories were going to be adult-oriented just because the bible is full of smut and pornography, you were wrong. Share this story with the little ones.

See! I told you! It’s like a fairy tale! And like all the happiest fairy tales, it ends with David marrying the princess. Teach your kids: never, ever underestimate the value of dickmeat!

I’m working on another fairy tale of sorts, too. I’ll have news about that in a few days if I can get off my ass and finish it. But for right now, that’s all I have to say about that.

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