Breaking Something

Yay, my official school year is over. So I celebrated by making a silly picture. Enjoy 🙂

Funny and Weird

When God comes down to do miraculous things, people fall over. Or is it just that religion makes people weird? A little while back I wrote about my experience of NOT being “Slain in the Spirit”, as pentecostals like to call it. If you want to see an extreme version of this, here are two hilarious videos featuring Benny Hinn. Hinn is somewhat controversial as he preaches a “health and wealth” message which many Christians consider goes counter to the actual teaching of Jesus. “God wants you rich”, and needless to say, Hinn is fairly rich.

Anyway, these are funny.

Benny Hinn, Dark Lord of the Sith:

Great music, “Let the Bodies hit The Floor” by Drowning Pool:

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Is anyone else disturbed by this? What do you think?
I do want me one ‘o them holy lightsabres 🙂

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The Universe Is Out To Get Me

Funny news, especially in light of our discussion on what “The Universe” might be:

Universe Admits To Wronging Area Man His Entire Life

‘Dave’s Got A Right To Be Angry,’ Says Cosmos MINNEAPOLIS—Following decades of allegations from the 44-year-old data processor, the vast conglomeration of all matter and energy known as the universe admitted Tuesday that it was directly responsible for every single hardship in the life of Dave Schwartz, and apologized for continually foiling him at every turn. “Dave has good reason to say the universe is conspiring against him, because, well, it is,” said the cosmos, acknowledging that it has thwarted Schwartz’s hopes and dreams from the moment of his conception. “He may sound melodramatic when he goes on and on about the whole world having turned against him, but he’s actually not that far off. The forces of time and nature genuinely want him to fail at life, and fail hard.” “So, yes, his anger and frustration are totally understandable,” the universe added. “Pointless and futile, but totally understandable.”

The rest of the spoof is at the Onion. Seriously though, what do people mean when they talk about “The Universe”? You can read about that here.

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Atheists Have No Songs

Check out Steve Martin and a talented Bluegrass ensemble performing a humorous hymn:

Of course, atheists do have songs, I’ve written about atheist music and atheist spirituality.

Even when I was a Christian I came to detest communal singing as a form of worship. So 19th century, dahling. Frankly, I don’t LIKE most christian songs. For me, connecting to the transcendent requires other kinds of music. For example, my friend Ginger’s brand new hard trance track. Go have a listen.

Ailenni | Lost In Love (Original by Legend B)

I think he’s giving it away for free, I will update with the download link once I find it.

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Does singing do it for you? What about humour?
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I’d Like Your Advice

Y’see, there’s a birthday coming up. Spritzophrenia will be ONE YEAR OLD on December 22nd. How about that? So I’m wondering how I might celebrate this, and hoping you have suggestions.

* Guest posts? * Look back to an early post and see what I have and haven’t achieved? * A subscription drive? I’d really like to get more regular readers. * A Year Of Spritzophrenia: A Retrospective? * Give away a prize? What could I give away? (Sorry, my virginity’s already been taken.)

I’m sure you can come up with other ideas, I’ve got a month to plan it which still feels way too short. Of course, this may all be much too hard and give me a nervous breakdown. I might just settle for getting drunk in the corner.

Tell Me

Any ideas? Rabbits Out of a Hat?
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I couldn’t work out why this song has been on my brain this morning. Suddenly I clicked, “Why”. Duh.
Blink 182 What’s My Age Again? (Live)

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Dying for a Laugh

Or, How to Curse Really Well.

One of the disadvantages of being born in a country with no large wildlife is the lack of good swear words. “You’re a Kakapo’s bum” doesn’t compare with the exotic combinations of “Elephant”, “Donkey” and “Mother” which pepper Urdu and Hindi. Well, I suppose the early Maori may have cursed about the Moa or the Giant Haast Eagle? “Your father is a Moa’s toenail. Now cook the man some eggs.”

My knowledge of Hindi was vastly improved by a work colleague who taught us how to swear in his language. This was mainly to tease another co-worker, by threatening to phone her mother and use these words in the conversation. She was a good Indian girl as far as her distant family were concerned, “Don’t you dare tell my parents about my boyfriend”. I think we did try out one or two phrases on a cab driver when we were drunk.

Boy, those cultures can really swear! Think of a body part, multiply by a large animal, insult its intelligence, give it a foul disease and have sex with it. That’s what a real insult is, none of this mild Anglo-Saxon rubbish. Perhaps even in their blasphemies the English are too polite.

Except the guys in Four Lions are also English. My knowledge of Pakistani swearing, which seems just as gleefully vile as Hindi, expanded by watching this film. Some time ago I listed top ten spiritual movies. I’ve discovered a few more, and this one would definitely make it into the list. Not because it’s spiritual as such, but because the story takes place within the current political and social climate of westernised Islam and offers wicked social commentary. Better than that, it’s hilarious.

Four Lions is the story of four English men wanting to martyr themselves for their faith. Unfortunately most of them are incredibly inept. At first I was concerned their failure and stupidity could appear racist, but it’s clear that other characters are also mentally challenged, for example the dim white girl who flats next door and the bumbling English authorities who deal with the group. I wonder what different Muslim communities think of this film? There are some poignant human moments too, and the social commentary is deeper than it first appears.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so all I’ll say is: It’s funny— see it!

Four Lions Trailer

Guess what? There’s another fantastic movie about suicide bombers, I posted that here.

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Door-to-Door Laughs

Everyone else seems to think merely posting a video is a valid “blog”, so I will do likewise 😉 It’s kinda like slapping down a large smelly fish, and saying, “Eat that, I can’t be bothered writing anything”.

Does door-to-door religion bother you? May I present John Safran, an Australian. I think he’s funny.

[Translators note for Americans: When he says “beezniss”, that means “business”. When he says “feer dinkum”, that means “I’m from a small country town, and I really believe this”. I would like to point out that I’m from a different country, and I don’t talk like this at all. Well, not much.]

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? What do you do when salesmen come to your door?
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The Multiverse Returns, or “Daddy, Is There A God”?

Some of you may know I’m a fan of webcomics. That’s why I have the link to Dr McNinja down there along with the more “serious” ones. Via Twitter, Iain introduced me to Scenes from a Multiverse:

If you’re wondering what a “multiverse” is, see my preview of The Grand Design.

And while we’re on the topic, I’ll quote one of “The Thirteen Missing Explanatory Links in the Atheist v. Theist Debate” by one of my favorite agnostic bloggers, Prometheus Unbound:

Universe/multiverse. If you are an atheist, the multiverse hypothesis is a godsend. As cosmologist Bernard Carr told Discover magazine, “If there is only one universe you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” Like the God hypothesis (or Linus’s Great Pumpkin hypothesis), the multiverse hypothesis is a tidy catch-all for getting out of every thorny dilemma of probability: Life’s beginning? “With God the multiverse all things are possible.” Consciousness? ”Ditto.” If you adopt belief in The Great Pumpkin the multiverse, it makes every implausibility inevitable. But how the multiverse multiplies itself, or ever arrived at its spectacular powers of creation, who knows? If atheists have a god in the closet, it’s Fortuna, their Great Pumpkin.

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Funny Famous Last Words

I came across a very cool little book yesterday, of “fond farewells, deathbed diatribes and exclamations upon expiration”. Some are tragic, some are uplifting, some are plain ironic:

“I wish I had drunk more champagne” John Maynard Keynes The British Keynes was not your average economist. Keynes, whose eponymous theories influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal and the rise of the European welfare state, was also a member of the famously liberated Bloomsbury group. He was politically liberal and sexually liberated, sleeping with many of the bohemian men in his circle and, of course, drinking champagne. Of that, and government spending, Keynes thought there could never be enough.

“I’ve Never Felt Better”

Douglas Fairbanks

After suffering a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57, “The King of Silent Hollywood” (Robin Hood, The Thief of Baghdad, The Mark of Zorro) reassured an attendant while resting at home, then went back to sleep and died that night. Fairbanks was an athletic movie star known for his charm, good looks, and— apparently— an inability to gauge his physical condition.

“The couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist— “

General John Sedgwick

General John Sedgwick was a corps commander of the Army of the Potomac who enjoyed a reputation among his men as a good-humored guy and relentless optimist. At the Battle of the Wilderness, while other men were diving for cover from Confederate sharpshooters, Sedgwick scoffed at the danger, stood up, and caught a bullet in his face.

Some “last words” in the book are official goodbyes, written before the author popped their clogs. Do you have any final words planned? I hope mine will be “Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

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Twelve Steps for the Recovering New Ager

I’ve been researching a popular New Age writer who, it seems to me, hasn’t been entirely honest about her past. More on that in the future. In the meantime, a New Age believer who’s ditched a lot of her former beliefs shared this on one of the forums I was reading.

Step One “We admitted we were powerless over the New Age and that our Higher Selves had turned us into flakes.” Step Two “We came to believe that a powerful bullshit detector could restore us to sanity.” Step Three “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our lower selves and a good psychiatrist.”

This is not a joke.

Step Four
“Made a searching and fearless disposal of our crystals, tarot decks, incense, angel cards, rising signs, wands, spells, medicine wheels, pendulums and lottery tickets.”

Step Five
“Admitted to God, our Guru and our seminar leader the exact nature of our delusion.”

Step Six
“Were entirely ready to take back our mind, body and spirit.”

Step Seven
“Humbly asked our Higher Power to f**k off.”

Step Eight
“Made a list of all the New Age assholes we’d been nice to and vowed to treat them all like sh#t.”

Step Nine
“Insulted the New Age wherever possible, especially when to do so made us look bad.”

Step Ten
“Continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly relished in it.”

Step Eleven
“Sought through television and newspapers to improve our conscious contact with humanity, concentrating only on our ability to understand what the hell was really happening in the world.”

Step Twelve
“Having avoided a paradigm shift as the result of these steps, we vowed to carry the NAA message to New Agers everywhere and to practice being ordinary in all our affairs.”

You can find lots more here.

By the way, that picture up there? I found it with a random search. The guy is serious!

What do you think?