Colbert and Buttars

The war on Christmas is heating up. Look: here’s Colbert mocking atheists. He sneers at our atheist Christmas cards, and even laughs at our letters to our families.

And then there’s Chris Buttars of Utah. Somebody get the memo to him, stat — doesn’t he know that the War on Christmas is to be waged with humor and sarcasm? He’s taking it seriously! There is a bit of humor there, though. Advertisers and legislators in Utah — Utah! — don’t seem to be taking him very seriously.

Turnabout

The Mormons have this arrogant practice of posthumous baptism — one of the motivations for their huge genealogical libraries is to help them go through the old records, find the names of dead people, and ‘convert’ them to Mormonism. It’s silly and pointless, but it can also be insensitive and offensive, such as when they start baptizing Jews killed in the Holocaust.

So here’s brilliant reversal: convert dead Mormons to…homosexuality. I love the idea. It really doesn’t matter what their sexual orientation in life was, it doesn’t even matter if they were raging homophobes…death changes a lot of things, so let’s simply declare them to have found joy in same sex relationships in the afterlife.

I hope there is an official roster being maintained somewhere. I’m pretending that Brigham Young is a squealing poofter right now, having a wild party with Joseph Smith, dressed in a dusting of sequins and nothing else. That’s an image the elders of LDS need to keep in mind when they’re playing their sanctimonious games with the memory of other people’s revered dead.

Collect them all!

Getting in on the collectable card game fad, the New Humanist has published a set of religion cards. Here’s a familiar one:

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Here we are:

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Unfortunately, while they have all those stats on the cards, they haven’t given us any rules! I don’t know how to play the game, other than to mix all the cards together in a bag, and set fire to them. At least that has some real-world verisimilitude to it.