And secondly, I have to say that your invitation to hell sounds like a bit of a come on

I’m going to fill my bathtub to the brim and give myself a full immersion baptism (”…in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holey Spigot, amen).

If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll end up burning in Hell. See ya’ down there, Jack. We’ll have a hot, hot, HOT time!

1. See Tiffany’s post about Prop. 8 and the California’s “Negroes”. That bespeaks a genuine bitterness.

2. The June Gordon character: since when does a semi-literate master html? (”she” performs font style and color changes that are not provided for automatically by wordpress.)

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thingPoe’s Law

Incidentally, Ollie, one of the clinchers was when I followed the link from your comments on the site to your personal site and realised that at least your RFC persona did not match the tone on your personal site.

Someone needs to google “Poe’s Law”.

There’s a difference between a voluntary sacrifice (e.g. the sacral high kings of ireland, who believed they were serving a higher purpose, or someone who performs a heroic act to rescue another with the expectation it will result in their death) and the sort of sacrifice where an unwilling victim is hauled out to have their throat cut.

Christianity in this case is, as I understand it, a case of Jesus (whther person/God/person+God/whatever) allowing himself to be sacrificed for our sins: the moral equivalent of the heroic rescue – the idea that mankind is redeemed by his sacrifice, as opposed to simply being worse off.

It’s amazing that people still believe this. The idea that you can sacrifice one person for the good of a community is called scapegoating. I don’t mean the modern variant where a community consciously “appoints” a scapegoat (for example when a political party dismisses a leader after a defeat in the elections), but the spontaneous social process where a community in distress turns against a (more or less arbitrary) individual, and believes that the end of the crisis has a causal relationship with the physcal elimination of that individual.

Jesus, by his good deeds, is the opposite of an individual that causes harm, so his death makes the crowd guilty of eliminating an obviously harmless victim rather than eliminating a threat to the community. His death should throw a spanner in the works of the scapegoat mechanism, but neither the Church nor the atheists (with few exceptions) got the idea. Check out René Girard’s book The Scapegoat, or The Girard Reader (and Wikipedia) for a fuller explanation.

The scary thing is that some of the commenters, pro- or anti-, might not think so…