October 29 2008 was apparently “The Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies”. WTF:
“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.”
See also: more photos from the prayer, a video, The Charging Bull statue
[via:Pharyngula]
Swedish pedestrian signs carry message from God
“Anyone living in Sweden or the Nordic countries will almost certainly have seen the image of a hand pointing upwards to encourage pedestrians to press the button before crossing the road. Prisma Teknik AB, the Swedish company behind the pedestrian signals, has now admitted that the hand is meant as a hidden symbol for God. [...] ‘We want to show that there is only one way to reach God and that is up and through Jesus”, CEO Jan Lund told The Local.’”
See also: Prisma Teknik AB
62-year-old Catholic monk and heavy metal rocker
“62-year-old Friar Cesare Bonizzi is a Roman Catholic monk by day and heavy metal crooner by night. Known by the stage name, “Fratello Metallo,” he and his band just released their second album.”
The above news story has a video attached to it. A terrible sounding handheld bootleg live recording can be found on Youtube.
[via:About Altreligion]
Time: Was Jesus’ Resurrection a Sequel?
“A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation” could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus’ followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day”
[via:About: Altreligion]
Man electrocutes pickle, demonstrates power of Christianity
Electric tomfoolery provided by Grandpa John. Poor pickled cucumber.
[via:BoingBoing]
Right-wing news site autoreplaces “Tyson Gay” with “Tyson Homosexual”
American Family Association, a well known promoter of ridiculously conservative “family values” in the USA, choses to automatically replace the word “Gay” with “Homosexual” in stories syndicated from Associated Press on the news section on their web site. Anyone with any common sense whatsoever should know that auto replacement of words will cause some interesting effects in the long run. This time, it was a report on sprinter Tyson Gay’s achievements that bit them.
Funny Cthulhu tract parodies religious propaganda
Fred Van Lente has a great pamphlet that attempts to convince the reader that Cthulhu and the hideous Old Ones, the ancient masters of the earth in H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, will return to enslave humankind. In response to learning this, any sensible person is expected to go insane and kill any loved ones and herself to be safe from the horrors of the Universe.
For some examples of what is being made fun of here, take a look at the works of e.g. Chick Publications (example) and Truth For Youth Ministries (example).
From the Flickr-set “Darth Vader Joins a Cult” by Karl Gunnarsson:
http://flickr.com/photos/karlg/2568097109/
