Nicolae Car-GAY-thia!

So exciting, he, the Disco Antichrist.

If you think that would work, I have a large orange bridge spanning the Golden Gate you might want to buy.

tom robbins tells a story in one of my favorite books, Another roadside attraction, his first and by far best. A guy invents a religion, gets disciples and converts, has a huge mass rally and tells his multitude of followers that he made the whole thing up. (Telephone call for Ron Hubbard!)

They kill him and go on believing it anyway. This kind of religion is not amenable to reason, because it involves, like all good fiction, the willng suspension of disbelief. If he were interested in reason, or consistency, or logic, he would have gone that way a long time ago.

The most entertaining way to make an idiot of this ludicrous Alaskan preacher, as with any fundamentalist, is to ask him how old he believes the earth to be. Does he think Dinosaurs and man existed at the same time, like Sarah Palin does? (the religious right pumps huge amounts of money into cheap PR campaigns aimed at pretending we did not evolve).

What fundamentalists believe will happen, though concerns me even more. Why is it that these people gleefully look forward to destruction? They just cannot wait for this life to end. The problem is, in Iran, on the verge of going nuclear, its president is also waiting for the second coming, not of Jesus Christ, but of the 12th Imam.

Apocalyptic weaponry + non compatible messianic prophecy = end of civilization.

My guess, is that religion can be a bit like alcohol consumption. The vast majority of moderate religious people get great comfort and joy from their faith, just like most drinkers can savour the occasional glass of wine. Some people cannot control their alcohol intake and cause much misery to others. Hamman’s faith is exactly like that, rabidly out of control – and I think it would be better for everyone if he were helped to lose it (through regular doses of critical thinking and evidence based reasoning).

The best advice for Hamman to take is the words of St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (King James if needs must):

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Put away the legends of Genesis and Revelation, and pick up any book by Carl Sagan.

Also a small note– yet another reference to the existence of other gods, not just the jewish one. “Thou shalt have no other god before me.” A clear indicator that Yawveh himself was aware the he was not the only one. Not idols, not “false” god– don’t even go there– but “other” gods.

Clearly the ancient Hebrews believed there were other gods, also supported by vairous gnostic beliefs.

Hmmmm.

Seems to be par for the course for anti-gay right wing Christian preachers.

A) Hamman could have found the first usage of the word “homosexuality” pretty easily, had he bothered.

2) “Historical revisionism?” Of what? “Sodomy” and “homosexuality are different words meaning different things. (And sodomy, of course, has multiple different meanings.) And the only times the word “homosexual ” or its derivatives appear biblically are in editions by anti-gay Christian translation teams. Is that what he’s talking about when he uses the phrase “historical revisionism”? If so then I tend to agree with him, but I don’t think that’s what he was shooting for there.

Never mind the ugliness of Hamman’s thesis: I’m honestly more offended by the poor formulation of the arguments supporting it. Poor guy’s all over the place. He should at least run his screeds past a good writing center tutor before he puts them online.