A short video showing a creepy woman praising God for the tragedy in Japan recently circulated in Facebook. In the clip, the woman almost orgasmically praises God for "shaking" the atheists in Japan, and hopes he turns his attention to America sometime before Easter. "Oh my God, I can't even begin to think of how vengeful he's going to be on America, because we have a lot of Atheists here in America," she says. "I mean Japan is a fantastic place to start."
I was among those who reposted the clip, calling the woman mindless and stating the clip reaffirmed my decision to “stray from the flock.” Turns out the video was a fake. The woman, Pamela Foreman, posted another video saying she was fessing up ‘cause she was tired of pizza. (I guess if you post controversial content on the Internet and you live in Tampa, your diet is restricted by local officials.)
I don’t feel duped because I’ve met people like the woman Ms. Foreman so effectively parodies. I’ve crossed paths with zealots and fanatics who are downright scary and place what seems to me like an excessive amount of emphasis on their relationship with the Old Bearded Guy in the Sky. Terrible things have been done in the name of religion, as anyone who worked in the Twin Towers can tell you if they managed to survive a Boeing 747 flying into their offices. A provocative YouTube video seems like a relatively minor offense. Yet some Christians are responding with furious indignation at how they’ve been portrayed, as if this is the biggest issue facing religion.
Pedophile priests sexually molesting little boys with the consent of their superiors, some wacko in Florida becoming an international celebrity by threatening to burn the Koran, Fred Phelps and his trailer trash disciples humiliating themselves at funerals by preventing families from saying their last goodbyes in peace and love, a United States congressman resurrecting McCarthy-like methods to persecute followers of Islam, women still struggling for the ability to control their own bodies 38 years after the Supreme Court granted them the right……this is what I think of when “religion” comes up. I can’t remember who said, “Religion was created by Satan to keep people from God.” (Some higher power must not want me to know because nothing comes up when I google the quote.) But this is how I feel.
For the record, I know some incredible people of faith. My cynicism is weakened by the way one friend in particular lives her life: she seems to make the world a better place just by the force of her charming personality, good energy and quiet but firm commitment to her religious beliefs. Clearly, faith works for some people. In my life, however, they're few and far between.
I do respect your right to believe in whatever makes you happy as long as it doesn’t infringe on my rights or anyone else’s. But as long as licensed medical doctors like Dr. George Tiller are gunned down in cold blood while serving as ushers during Sunday morning services at their churches for performing legal medical procedures after being harassed for years by anti-abortion activists, I’ve got to err on the side of rejecting organized religion.
Christianity: the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree... yeah, makes perfect sense.
~ Urbandictionary.com
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