A challenge to Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made headlines yesterday when he called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on.” Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that Trump is being such a wishy-washy, namby-pamby weakling.

Let's face it, ALL monotheistic religions are pretty frightening. How can you not be frightened when somebody declares that all gods but his own are false? History shows that every monotheistic religion has carried out wars of aggression against members of other religions, and justified their actions by claiming that their enemies worshiped false gods.

Therefore, I call on Mr. Trump to prove that he's serious about defending the United States. We need to ban all followers of monotheistic religions from entering this country until our leaders can "figure out what is going on." Anything less is just setting ourselves up for more attacks by religious fanatics.

No sex please, we're right-wing fundamentalist Christians

The internet has been abuzz with news that soon-to-be-former NFL quarterback and noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian Tim Tebow and his now-former current squeeze Miss USA and Miss Universe pageant winner Olivia Culpo are calling it quits. 

Apparently, when Tebow first got a hankerin' for Miss Culpo and sent her cute love notes and won her adoration, he said to her, "Olivia, my darling, my love for you knows no bounds, but as a noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian, I am required by my even greater devotion to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to remain celibate until marriage." And then Culpo answered, "Oh, Timmy, you say the most darling silly things! Now please fill me up with all your hot sticky professional-sportsball-player jizz!" And then Culpo learned to her astonishment that Tebow was totes serious about the whole no-sex thing, and after that there was nothing for it but to have their respective PR flacks send out press statements announcing that their eternal love had turned out not to be so eternal after all, and the pair was taking a road trip to Splitsville, USA.

However, I would be deficient in my duties as a guide to the behavior of my fellow white men if I failed to warn Miss Culpo that this may not be the end of it. There's a certain species of white man, particularly noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian white men, who do not regard women as autonomous human beings. They feel that any woman who is "theirs" remains "theirs" despite anything the said woman herself might think. We call this certain species of white man "stalkers", and they have been known to hound, harrass, and even physically attack any woman who tries to remove herself from their sole possession.

Now I'm not saying that Mr. Tebow is going to continue haunting Miss Culpo's footsteps until she either succeeds in having him imprisoned, or he succeeds in murdering her. I'm just pointing out that he fits the profile like a really creepy, stalkery glove, and that if Miss Culpo has any sense she should make sure that her bodyguards are on high alert for the next, like, fifty years.

Heresy!

My excellent friend Nomi Hurwitz points me to this post at the Breaking Burgh blog on a doctrinal dispute that has arisen among adherents of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarianism. The Pastafarians exist to help safeguard the Constitutional separation of Church and State by demanding equal time whenever members of a Certain Other Religion try to get their doctrines taught in public schools by disguising them as science. Any public school officials who are trying to promote their religious beliefs by stealth suddenly find themselves having to explain why they're not letting His Noodliness in the schoolhouse door too. They usually get the message.

But, as Gulliver at Breaking Burgh declares, the Church of the FSM is being torn apart by the question of whether plastic collanders are acceptable Sacred Vestments, or whether only traditional metal ones are pleasing to His Noodliness. Gulliver notes that the holy war is currently confined to reddit threads, but expresses understandable concern that the dispute may spill over into physical clashes.

I admit to being of two minds about this growing controversy. As a man of peace, I abhor the thought of Pastafarians committing Magdeburg-style atrocities against each other. On the other hand, as a student of history, I can't help thinking that a brutal, destructive holy war over a pointless doctrinal dispute may be just what the Church needs to ramp up recruitment. Let's face it, a religion hasn't really made it to the big leagues until some of its members start slaughtering each other in the name of the One True Faith. Once the Pastafarians cross this vital threshold, they'll start getting the respect they deserve. They might even get invited to sneak their doctrines into science classes.

How to offend everyone (and get arrested)

South Park creators/producers/voice actors Trey Parker and Matt Stone are in trouble again. This time, a two-part episode that depicts Mohammed, Prophet of God and founder of Islam, in a bear suit, has prompted a previously unknown group of religious fanatics in New York City called Revolution Muslim to issue a death threat against the pair.

However, we here at the Johnny Pez blog think that offending the world's billion Muslims doesn't go far enough. That's why we wish to make the following suggestion to Parker and Stone: what they need to do now is air a cartoon showing Mohammed having sex with his nine-year-old wife Aisha. That way, in addition to offending Muslims by depicting the Prophet of God, Parker and Stone can also offend Christians by depicting a fifty-two-year-old man having sex with a nine-year-old girl. As an added bonus, by producing a cartoon that "depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct and is obscene", Parker and Stone would also be liable for criminal charges of child pornography under Federal Law 18 U.S.C. 1466A, which would be particularly badass.

So think about it, guys. There's a perfect storm of offensiveness (including blasphemy and lawbreaking) just waiting to happen, if you've got the nerve.

The Footnotes of God

Back in college, I took a course in Japanese history, and among the assigned reading was The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon. This was basically a blog written on rice paper by a thirtysomething lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Japanese court around the year 1000. The edition I read was the 1967 translation by Ivan Morris.

Morris' translation included copious endnotes and appendices on life and culture during Sei Shōnagon's lifetime, including information on the calendar, festivals, government, geography, chronology, clothing, musical instruments, and so on. It's a good thing he did, too, because the milieu in which Sei Shōnagon lived was so different from life in our current industrial age that otherwise it would be difficult to understand a lot of the things she wrote about.

Although it's a classic work of literature in Japan, The Pillow Book is pretty obscure in the English-speaking world, which is what you would expect of a cultural artifact from such a distant time and place. And yet, there's another cultural artifact from an even more distant time and place that holds such an influential place in our culture that we refer to it simply as The Book. The reason The Book is so important while The Pillow Book is so obscure is that The Book is at the center of our culture's main religion.

The Book's oldest narratives go back over 3000 years, and even its most recent ones go back nearly 2000, all of them set against a milieu even more alien to us than that of The Pillow Book. However, unlike The Pillow Book, The Book is usually published without any notes explaining the alien culture that produced it. And what's particularly troubling is that a lot of this country's most powerful, influential people think that they can just crack open The Book and start reading, and they'll understand everything it has to say.

Even worse is the fact that these people have adopted an ideology that requires them to believe that there is absolutely no ambiguity to be found in The Book. They insist that The Book contains no metaphors, no similes, no figurative language of any sort. (Well, they actually do admit in an abstract sense that The Book contains figurative language, but they refuse to accept that any particular passage might.) Everything in The Book has to be read literally -- except, of course, for the parts that don't, especially the parts that contradict their ideology.

This is why it might be useful to require that anyone who reads The Book be required to read The Pillow Book first. The experience of trying to understand a product of the culture of Heian Japan would make them less certain that they understand everything they read in The Book.

Playing With the Banned

From Reuters comes this story about an attempt by the German government to ban Scientology.

German federal and state interior ministers declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional on Friday, opening the way for a possible ban on the organization.

They said Germany's domestic intelligence agencies should continue gathering information on the legality of Scientology's activities in Germany so that a decision could be made about a possible ban next year.

But the domestic intelligence agencies have been closely monitoring Scientology's operations for a decade and see little hope of amassing sufficient evidence to justify a ban.

Citing unnamed domestic intelligence agents familiar with the Scientology issue, Der Spiegel magazine reported that German authorities where having little success infiltrating the organization.

The magazine also said Scientology's membership in Germany had stagnated.

Germany does not recognize Scientology as a religion and regard it as a cult masquerading as a church to make money.

To be sure, the Germans are right about Scientology. It is a cult masquerading as a church to make money. It's a racket, plain and simple. The problem is, how much more of a racket than other religions does Scientology have to be before it becomes banworthy? There's a certain amount of racketry to all organized religions, just as there is in any human institution.

If the Germans ever do come up with a formula for determining the outer bounds of racketry-within-religion, I'll be very interested in seeing it. It might prove useful here in America.