Shelley Powers (aka Burningbird) took and posted this photo.
If you read this weblog, you know why I’m posting the photo. If you read Shelley’s weblog, you know that this is not representative of her exquisite talent for capturing remarkable images.
And we all know, in this age of Bushite media manipulation, image is everything.

From todays New York Post: Go and read the whole article, which begins:
A delusional man who apparently believed he was Jesus Christ built a wooden cross and tried to nail his hands to it in a horrific bid to re-create the crucifixion, police say.
But after hammering a spike through one palm, the man realized there was no way to hammer his other hand to the cross – so he dragged himself to the phone to dial 911 with his free hand.
Asked if he’d recently seen “The Passion of the Christ,” the 23-year-old man, from Hartland, Maine, answered no, but said he had been “seeing pictures of God on the computer.”
What a world! What a world!

While others are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I’m celebrating Bring Back the Snakes Day (preferably, green ones).
It’s not easy being green.
Or a snake.

Some disempowering of an American Bushite missionary at MoveOn.org:
A year ago today, the Bush Administration was making its final push toward war in Iraq. We know now that much of what we were told about the threat that Iraq posed was untrue. And rather than own up to their distortion of the facts, Bush administration officials are denying they ever said such things.
But this Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got caught blatantly contradicting his past statements, and we have the video clip. You can check it out at:
http://www.moveon.org/censure/caughtonvideo/
I’m repeating here my suggestion to give the Bush boys a SimAmerika game to play, plug ’em in, and let ’em go at it and let the rest of us get on with saving what’s left of this country.

Hah! I’ll bet you think that this post is about sex. Sorry about that.
Since times of olde [sic], Christian missionaries have purposely invaded other cultures and manipulated their religious symbols and rituals in a brainwashing attempt to “convert” the people to Christianity. So, back in those really olden days, the archetypal gods and goddesses were transformed into saints, the Great Mother into the Virgin Mary, the Female Trinity of Virgin-Mother-Crone into the patriarchal Holy Trinity.
And now, (well, not only now because it’s been going on for a while in various forms), there’s the Jews for Jesus movement.
My aged mom, who watches a lot of the Catholic television channel, keeps telling me about the Jewish man they feature who has turned into a Catholic.
If she were astute enough, if she had eyes that could deal with reading for any length of time, I would print out the information on this site and hope that she might come to see that it’s the missionary position of Christians that has kept the fires of bigotry and intolerance blazing destructively throughout the world.
If she were so inclined, she would read that:
In the year 325 CE, Constantine (a non-baptized Pagan) convened the Council of Nicea to settle disputes in the Church. The council changed Jesus from man to God in the flesh, they changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and the Passover was changed to Easter. Among the nearly 200 Gospels circulating in the first three hundred years of this era, the Catholic Church canonized only four. Origen, the great Catholic father, confirms this fact: “And not four Gospels, but very many, out of which these we have chosen
[snip]
Christian apologist Richard Sisson states:
“In fact, after the death of Jesus a whole flood of books that claimed to be inspired appeared…. Disputes over which ones were true were so intense that the debate continued for centuries. Finally in the fourth century a group of church leaders called a council and took a vote. The 66 books that comprised our cherished Bible were declared to be Scripture by a vote of 568 to 563.
I am always amazed at how little Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, really know about the history of their religions as institutions that are as political as any major govenment. (Another, more scholarly perspective is here.)
(Of course, now that Bush equates “American” with “Christian”, the whole invasive missionary thing has really escalated.)
Now, understand that I’m not anti-Christian, I’m not anti-any religion. What I am is anti the missionary position (in addition, of course, to being irreligious and irreverent).
The Missionary Position is the antithesis of freedom in any context.
And my mother, who has no idea what that means, keeps lighting candles and praying that I will return to the faith of my fathers. And I help her light the candles, and I smile through her lectures, and I then blog my own version of prayer, of hope for a world free of missionaries..