Ray Comfort is great at demeaning the whole of Christianity by doing all the stuff you imagine that not even a Christian would stoop to doing. His latest: targeting the elderly with cards to remind them of their mortality and imminent need of salvation.

The card, published by livingwatersnewzealand.com, was addressed to her by name and asked her to fill in the date and time of her death.

“Please don’t forget to call me on the date you’re going to die, then we can discuss your eternity,” it says. However, the cards do not have a contact name or phone number printed on them.

“Hey, lady, you’re old and are going to die soon. Come to church now! Put us in your will!”

Living Waters is also the organization that sponsors these morbid booths at our county fair where kids are asked to take a test to determine whether they’re going to heaven or hell. The answer is always hell…so they’d better follow Living Waters orders!

Whenever I hear apologists tell me that religion brings solace to the sick and old and despairing, I always think of Living Waters and their mission of making sure everyone is dreading their demise.

The Pope visited Scotland recently, to the great disappointment of all. They hired him at extravagant cost to do a magic act in a park, and all he did was wave his hands and mumble some Latin…and now they’re getting the bill.

Scottish Catholics will be told this weekend that they have to make up an £800,000 cash shortfall for the cost of the papal visit.

Congregations were already asked in the run-up to the event in September to donate cash to an appeal target of £1.7 million to fund the historic first state visit by a pontiff.

Wow. The Scots got snookered.

Michael Voris and his Vortex (of Insanity) have been mentioned here before, but now he’s profiled on AP News. He really is nuts: he runs a YouTube channel and makes these strange videos where he demands that America become a Catholic dictatorship, all with a straight face.

Last time I mentioned him he got pricked by all our incredulous disgust with the Catholic Taliban, so he even made a clip all about us angry atheists, taking care not to link to any of our sites.

I hope this is representative of a tiny minority in the church, but I don’t know…last time I crossed Catholicism I was exposed to all the madness within it, so I’m not so confident that the fascist Voris doesn’t have more support than we expect.

Mary MacKillop has been officially canonized as an Australian saint on the basis of two purported miracle cures — two women reportedly dying of cancer had spontaneous remissions after praying to her. Adele Horin puts them in context.

At the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world’s worst famines.

Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of a million in the Yugoslav wars.

The connection between these two women praying for healing and the dead MacKillop was so tenuous to be nonexistent, while millions beg in vain for a reprieve from day-to-day misery. Praise the gods.

It will be interesting to see if anyone squawks about this revelation: Army Chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy seems to have a wild and frolicsome sex life, while writing pious little books promoting Christianity. There’s absolutely nothing suggesting male homosexuality in his online personal history, but isn’t the occasional menage a trois or voyeurism session as sinful to an evangelical Christian?

Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard has written a book in which he reveals Catholic thinking about AIDS.

The Archbishop who is seen as a conservative does not pull his punches. Speaking about AIDS he says that this is a kind “immanent justice”.

I note that the archbishop is probably mortal, and appears to be aging. If he someday suffers miserably from a prostate cancer that is ripping his guts apart, I hope he finds comfort in it as a kind of “immanent justice”. If he should suffer a massive stroke and his brain should bleed and fail, I hope he has a last moment of awareness to appreciate the “immanent justice” of his fate. I hope that if one day he is crossing the street and suddenly finds a bus roaring implacably in his direction, that the destination on the bus’s sign reads “Immanent Justice”.

We’re all going to die. Labeling our ends as the conscious acts of a vengeful god and treating the inevitable as an outcome contingent on our respect for religious mores is one of the oldest tricks in the book of pious lies.

An Italian woman, Nosheen Butt, and her mother were resisting the idea of an arranged marriage, which annoyed the men in the family. So they took action to put the women in their place.

The daughter, 20-year-old Nosheen Butt, was hospitalised with head injuries and a broken arm after her 19-year-old brother beat her with a stick in the courtyard of their building in Novi, near the northern city of Modena.

According to Modena prosecutors’ initial findings, the father Ahmad Khan Butt, a 53-year-old construction worker, threw his wife to the ground and beat her with a brick while the brother Umair attacked his sister. The father had been in Italy less that 10 years and was the owner of the local mosque.

The mother has died for defending her daughter’s autonomy.

What the hell is wrong with these benighted fanatics? Trying to murder your sister or your wife because they aren’t your obedient slaves is screwed up in more ways than one. Doesn’t this single incident alone shatter Peter Hitchens’ argument for the necessity of religion to foster morality?

There has been a recent rash of publicized suicides by young gay people who have been bullied and intimidated and shamed by their peers…and we’re also getting a rash of Christian apologetics by the blind bigots of homophobia who simultaneously declaim their pious regrets that these poor children of God couldn’t find their way to redemption, while continuing the slander of damning their sinning lives. It’s hard to get more unctuously hypocritical than the odious Albert Mohler, who whimpers ‘think of the children!’ while protesting that as good Christians they must condemn the sin, and he sadly wonders where the good people to tell the suicidal that their lives are worth living are to be found (not in your ministry or any priesthood, that’s for sure…if they want humanity and caring, they need to turn to Dan Savage).

Mohler has some competition now, though: it’s from Daniel Spratlin, another of those purblind preacher boys. It’s not entirely in the article he has written, though —

Rutgers student suicide highlights growing sin problem — which is just another pile of fuzzy love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin BS, but in the comments where he opens up to complain about the criticism his article recieves. This is where he exposes the dementia of his chronic fuckwittedness.

I don’t (nor do the majority of confessing Evangelicals) believe homosexuality to be abhorrent because my “religion says so.” Rather, I believe it to be so because God says so.

I have no doubt that America will eventually accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. Nor do I have a problem with it. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not equal to American values. Never has been and never will be. This world has to be destroyed in the end and I welcome it. That doesn’t mean, however, that I won’t stand firm in my position and continue to shout.

Do I want homosexuals to “feel isolated and ashamed to the point of suicide”? Of course not. I want them to feel isolated and ashamed to the point of repentance.

Look at the awesome arrogance of that first paragraph, the ridiculous gall of claiming that he and his fellow fundie sphincter-lipped wardens of the public morality have the one true hotline to the mind of their omnipotent god. Remember this every time someone accuses an atheist of being arrogant — we don’t claim to be speaking for a cosmic tyrant who will torture you for eternity if you don’t obey us.

And then he proudly announces that he welcomes the necessary destruction of the world. This is one of the most perniciously vile doctrines promoted by the Abrahamic religions, not just that an apocalypse will occur, but that believers should be actively working to bring it about. Agents of destruction like that are objectively evil; if such creatures were to appear in a fantasy novel, you know that they’d be the orcish villains.

The bottom line is that he wants gay people to “feel isolated and ashamed,” period. Suicide is to be regretted because a body count is bad PR, and it’s a lie when an idiot prancing towards armageddon claims that he grieves over the death of one. He wants the death of billions, and he’s also happy to spread misery through oppression while he’s waiting for the last trump.

We’ve all heard about the Chilean miners trapped in a cave-in, who have been sustained for over two months by supplies delivered through a narrow tunnel drilled down to them. Their rescue is imminent, with an escape tunnel being drilled and almost at their position — they should be out this week. Personally, I credit technology with saving them, but…three religious groups are squabbling over which version of god deserves thanks.

The three Christian denominations have each claimed credit for what they say is divine intervention in the survival – and expected imminent rescue – of the 33 men who have spent 67 days beneath the earth.

“God has spoken to me clearly and guided my hand each step of the rescue,” said Carlos Parra Diaz, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor at the San Jose mine. “He wanted the miners to be rescued and I am His instrument.”

Yards from where he spoke Caspar Quintana, the Catholic bishop of Copiapo, prepared an altar to celebrate an outdoor mass for a small congregation of miners’ relatives and phalanx of TV cameras. “God has heard our prayers,” said the bishop. “I have received comments of encouragement from all over the world. Let us give thanks.”

A litte bit further up the hill of Camp Hope, the improvised settlement of miners’ families, rescuers, government officials and media, an evangelical preacher, Javier Soto , wandered from family to family with a guitar and songs of praise. “He listens to the music,” said the pastor, gesturing to the azure sky.

You know, the drill hasn’t quite reached the miners. Maybe we should just shut down the machinery, withdraw all the tools and the laborers, and have Mr Diaz, Mr Quintana, and Mr Soto stand above the men and use their magic to complete the rescue. That would be impressive.

I’d also like to see the three frauds step forward and take the blame for all mining deaths, as well.