Happy Blasphemy Day!


I hope you’ve been spending your Blasphemy Day thinking irreverent thoughts and committing sacrilegious acts. I’ve been at a humanist conference where we damned religion to heck, and I’m about to board an airplane where I will spend the flight putting finishing touches on a profane pro-science and anti-religion (anti-moderate religion, even) column for Free Inquiry, and I’ll try to find a few minutes to cuss out the non-existent angels who are not holding my airplane up in the sky.

But also, this is serious business. Consider the young Greek man who has been arrested for mocking a cleric; Alexander Aan, arrested in Indonesia for denying the existence of god; Alber Saber, arrested in Egypt for linking to a stupid movie that mocked Mohammed; Rimsah Masih, accused of desecrating the Quran and facing hateful death threats; Asia Bibi, sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan; and too many others to list. Consider that the European Union has just called for “full respect of religion” and “the importance of respecting all prophets” — blasphemy laws are spreading.

So blaspheme today! Assert your right to deny bullshit loudly and honestly!

Comments

  1. Ogvorbis: broken and cynical says

    I told Wife and Boy that today is Blasphemy Day. Boy said, “Done.” Wife said, “Goddamnit, why didn’t you tell me?”

    It works.

  2. matlee says

    Blasphemy day is god damn awesome. I wish we would average had this back when I was a kid. Early Indoctrination to Lutheran school would have been a lot more fun.

  3. tbp1 says

    As I said over at Dispatches:

    I struggle to understand why people who are confident in their religious beliefs are so often desirous of making it a crime for someone to hurt their widdle fee-fees. You’d think they aren’t really all that confident after all, and need the force of law to defend that which they cannot defend themselves in the marketplace of ideas. But that couldn’t be, could it?

  4. opposablethumbs says

    Every day is blasphemy day. Fuck the whole bloody lot of ’em, load of people-hating shite misogynistic homophobic xenophobic bollocks that they are.

  5. Zugswang says

    I’ll continue my tradition of not harassing/beating/imprisoning/attempting to murder my next door neighbor because the god they don’t believe in didn’t tell them to not mow their lawn on the day someone else’s god said they couldn’t.

  6. says

    OK, this is easy.

    All of you worthless, invisible, do-nothing gods:

    Punish me. Go ahead, punish me for *thinking* my blasphemous *thoughts*.

    I’m feeling masochistic, I want to be punished.

    I’m waiting…

    c’mon jeebus, beat me…

    waiting…

    Shit, I guess I’ll have to go back to making obscene art.

    Fucking worthless, stupid gods.

  7. says

    While the comments here are always amusing, what can one person do, really, to make a difference in the face of so many people who believe such bullshit?

    Fer christ fucking sakes we, as a species, have got to get a hold on this tendency of ours to buy into any and all bullshit and figure out a way to make it fucking well stop, or it will be the end of us eventually.

    What the hell can we do?

    Are we to forever remain in this intellectual dark ages drawn and quartered between an unpleasant truth and a sugar coated lie regarding the nature of reality?

    Goddamn that all to hell!

    One last time: How the hell does one reach people who are afflicted with this ‘true believer’ sickness?

    Inquiring minds concerned about the future of our species really want to fucking well know.

  8. Janine: Hallucinating Liar says

    Thank you for correcting that, slowdjinn.

    Watch it.

    Watch right now!

    It will make you very happy!

  9. slowdjinn says

    As an atheist, wearing mixed fibre underpants, living in a converted former dry methodist chapel with a fridge full of grog, pork products and shellfish, whose partner is divorced and often stays the night for unmarried nookie …it’s just another day for me.

    Nevertheless I’ll put the effort in. *drumroll*
    ALL GODS ARE FRAUDS!
    ayethenkyew.

  10. says

    I was wondering about masturbation, myself.

    Pretty kinky thinking *how did mary get preggers?* thoughts.

    It should be the ultimate big O masturbating to “impregnate me, god”.

  11. Dick the Damned says

    I send this poem to religious folk who are pushing their nonsense on others.

    Here’s a Hudibrastic verse on woo,
    for superstitious folk like you.

    The Christian’s Jehovah, an Almighty God,
    is a capricious and cantankerous clod;
    and, so far as I can tell,
    the Christian often is as well.
    Confused by dogma, the god-fearing fogey
    can’t fathom the nature of that Bible Bogey.

    Is it a father, his son, and an apotropaic ghost too?
    Well, it should be obvious that’s ridiculous woo.
    Yet Christians claim this god, in its Empyrean lair,
    is omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and fair,
    but, with the unresolved problem of theodicy,
    their dogma is eristic, Christian idiocy.

    The Jew’s Yahweh, that meshuggeneh, the jerk,
    set Jews strict rules on when to work,
    how to dress, and what to sup or sip,
    and giving baby boys the snip.
    The myths of Bronze Age, goat-herding nomads,
    have them, metaphorically, by the gonads.

    The Moslem’s Allah, a fierce great djinn,
    demands under ‘Islam’, literally, ‘Submission’.
    Apostasy is treated just like a crime;
    they’ll threaten to kill you, to keep you in line,
    and if you dare draw Mohammad in a comic cartoon,
    there’ll be riots and killings from here to Khartoum.

    Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist,
    Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
    Confucianist, Shintoist, and Taoist too,
    Spiritualist, Wiccan, and the New Ager into woo.
    Yea, verily, those of each and every religion,
    are mired in the miasma of superstition.

    The gods from the Bronze Age up to modern times,
    and from the Arctic down to tropical climes,
    have inspired theology that’s unsubstantiated twaddle,
    on what an invisible and silent god’ll
    devise as its inscrutable, eschatological plan,
    but all the gods were made in the image of man.

    So, why should yours be the “One True Faith”,
    in a magic, phantasmagorical wraith?
    Belief, without evidence, is just plain crazy,
    ignorant, stupid, or thoughtlessly lazy.
    When evolution happens, it’s due to Natural Selection,
    so life derives no purpose, at a theistic god’s direction.

    The evidence is we have just this one life,
    with all its pleasures, challenges, toil, and strife.
    As social beings we evolved our moral sensibility,
    combatting selfishness, lust, and venality.
    Religion misunderstands, and so invokes the supernatural,
    while Humanism strives to promote the good and rational.

    Here’s why I care about your crazy, faith-based thinking:
    I object to religion’s anachronistic social sanctioning.
    Aristotle’s eudemonia, (human flourishing), conflicts
    with the social engineering that religion inflicts
    on societies that should democratically endorse
    rationality-based ethics, mores, and laws.

    But there’s no need for you to blame your genes;
    your religion’s the fault of social memes.
    They have a life entirely of their own,
    purpose, to them, being quite unknown.
    So give them up, that you may be free
    to revel in your humanity.

  12. says

    @ WMDKitty (Always growing and learning)

    You might be needing some *FORGIVENESS* for a link fail, but the content redeems you.

    As an agent of gawdamity, I (ahhhchoo) forgives you.

    Jesus Krist on a pogo stick, people tell me I look just like him.

    GC and JC both.

  13. markr1957 (Patent Pending) says

    Watching the Saints vs. Packers game is more than enough to encourage blasphemy – jeez, this Saints defense is god-awful! They haven’t got a fucking prayer!

  14. Charlie Foxtrot says

    Oh well, missed it. So from here in Day-after-Blasphemy-Day land, I just found this Onion article linked from ‘Jesus and Mo’.

    No one murdered because of this image

    Its a bit naughty… so I’ll slap a NSFW sticker on that link. (Depending on where you work, I s’pose. Obviously OK over at the Onion…)

  15. johnhodges says

    The purest form of blasphemy:
    “Your religion is false. You have been swindled.”

  16. says

    I worked on the Sabbath, does that count? Unfortunately, I worked at a festival of gospel music, but I did lust after some of the performers. Mmmm, forbidden fruit…