Mr Deity and the stereotype

Uh-oh. This episode of Mr Deity will fire up some denunciations. Take a deep breath, and remember, he’s satirizing religious attitudes.

Listen through to the end, though — he has an excellent suggestion. This weekend is Thanksgiving, and instead of sitting through another football game, put a Mr Deity episode on, and get the whole extended family talking about irreverence. Come on, it’ll be fun! There might even be a food fight!

Mr Deity brings me solace and hope

To get this, you may want to look at the last episode of Mr Deity, in which Jesse and the Deity struggled with the implications of the trinity — it was hopelessly confusing. This is the blooper reel from the making of that episode.

That was hard. It makes me feel good, though, because these guys are pros…and my little incursion into their world left me impressed with how difficult it is to put together even these shorts.

If they ever put out the bloopers from my episode, though, I’m going to have to cry.

The Atheist’s Revenge!

As you’ve already heard, the Atheist Foundation of Australia was hit with a denial-of-service attack earlier this week (you can learn more about it in this interview of Jason Ball by Catherine Deveny).

I rather like their planned unofficial response.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) & 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

Please join us in this important task, with any luck it will take God a while to get back online, ensuring us at least a few days of godless peace. It will also give the Westboro Baptist Church some much needed time to catch up on paperwork.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to join in, because whatever I have planned for that time, whatever it may be, will be far more interesting and productive than babbling to an invisible man. I’m pretty sure I won’t be needed, though; I understand all modern prayers are first funneled through a 110 baud modem, then passed further upstairs by telegraph, then pony express riders gallop it over to the Pearly Gates, and then a rewritten version is passed on to a team of long-dead Sumerian scribes for transcription into cuneiform on wax plates, and then and only then is it in a format that a bronze age patriarchal deity can understand. I don’t think it’ll take much to swamp the celestial bandwidth (which actually explains a lot, if you think about it.)