Your Sunday Sermon - The Sun Goes Round the Earth

Hey guys, this is Richard Peacock. Many of you don't know this, but my cousin Thaddeus is the reverend for a small church in my hometown. When he heard that I help out with this "Godless" web site, he insisted he be allowed to do a weekly sermon, to set everyone "back on the right path." So please keep in mind his views and opinions don't represent the rest of us here at AmateurScientist.
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My friends, welcome once again to my gentle presence. Yes, that's it, come closer... closer still... closer... Devils be gone!! Ha! Got you. Yes, my flock of sheep, it is I, your humble shepherd, the reverend Thaddeus Peacock. And it is time once again for me to scare the bejesus into you!

This past Thursday, when I would normally be setting up hidden cameras in the local gym to look for signs of homoerotic pugilism, I was taken ill by a ghastly case of the squirts. Curse that yellowed egg salad from Mrs. Jefferson! As I sat atop my Lay-z-boy, I flipped through the local television channels, and happened upon a lie more ghastly than Mrs. Jefferson's insistence that egg salad is "supposed to be that color." I happened upon a daytime drama program titled: "As the World Turns"! It showed an image of the Earth, in spherical form, spinning out in space! Devils be gone!!

For as we all know, my fluffy followers, the Bible tells us that the world is not in motion at all, but is a stationary realm in which the Sun orbits it! Look here: "Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved." (1 Chron 16:30) and here: "The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises." (Ecc 1:5) It was on the validity of these most factual versus that, hundreds of years ago, the Catholic Church correctly concluded that the homosexual/witch (assumed) Galileo was so very wrong! Hallelujah!

Oh, my friends, I was so distressed by the hideous lies on my television screen, that I had to calm myself by watching the previous week's hidden locker camera footage again and again until my humors had returned to balance. Let this be a lesson to you, dear readers. Never believe the hideous lies spread by either that heretic Galileo, or that charlatan Mrs. Jefferson.

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The Reverend Thaddeus Peacock is a licensed Churchologist with advanced degrees in Biblology, Jesusence, and Brimstoning. He may be reached by emailing his cousin Richard at richard@amateurscientist.org.

Mixed Up

Look, whatever you do, don't call Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell a racist. Yes, he refuses to grant marriage licenses to interracial couples. Yes, this is the year of our Lord two thousand and nine. Yes, this sounds illegalish. But far from being a bigot, Bardwell's just looking out for the children. Specifically, mixed race children, who he believes will grow up in a society full of ridicule and torment from racists, of which he is not one. Look, he'll prove it to you. "I have piles and piles of black friends," he says. "They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else." That may not sound like much, but you've obviously not seen Bardwell's bathroom (pictured). He just doesn't believe in "mixing the races that way". Throw them all in a room together? Fine. Make them wait in line to use your marble shitter? No reason not to. Just don't allow them to enjoy the same freedoms other consenting adults enjoy. "I try to treat everyone equally," Bardwell explains. And by that, of course, he means he treats all mixed-race heathens the exact same way. Like a douche. More details here.

The Curse of Halloween

Rev. Jonathan Campbell, a Methodist minister in Northern Ireland, is appealing to his local community to cancel their plans for the annual Halloween carnival before it's too late. Rev. Campbell claims Halloween in one of the two most important nights for Satanists and that celebrating the holiday will place a curse upon the town. He's desperate to rip off Halloween's veil of fun, fancy, and innocence to expose its festering corruption of children and devilish promotion of the occult. Lest your cynicism convinces you Rev. Campbell just needs to loosen his collar and chillax, you should know that every year the effects of the Halloween curse have been felt on the town of Derry for weeks after the turn of October 31st. Fortunately, those effects seem to mostly involve an unusual concentration of candy. More details here.

I (Symbol for "Don't Understand") Vandals

President Obama has been mistaken for many things: a Kenyan, an Indonesian, a socialist, a Muslim, a terrorist, a transformative figure of hope and change. And like anyone who's disliked by a large group of people, he's also been mistaken for a Nazi, since "Nazi" is as ubiquitous an insult in politics as "doo-doo head" is on the playground. I think the "Obama is a Nazi" idea is what some vandals were trying to get across when they carved "I [swastika] Obama" into a Boston area country club's golf course earlier this week, but I really can't be sure. "Swastika", you see, isn't a verb. Unless these people fashioned a metal shuriken in the shape of the Nazi symbol, used their ninja stealth to infiltrate the White House, and planted a pointy calling card between the president's shoulder blades, I don't see how they could have swastikaed anyone. Not that it makes any grammatical sense, but this graffiti also has a sort of familial tone. It's almost as if these vandals believe Obama is a Nazi and want to show that they're right there with him. Apropos of seemingly nothing, some have wondered whether the "I" actually stands for "Israel". "Israel [swastika] Obama"? Please be more clear next time, insane dipshits. More details here.

Idiocy is a Choice

Oh, Republicans. Even when I agree with you, I still think you're batshit insane. Case in point: House Republican Leader John Boehner (pronounced "Hard-cock"), who defended his opposition to new hate crimes legislation by claiming that while homosexuality is a choice, religion is not. Let me clarify for those of you who don't speak moron. A new hate crimes bill sailing through congress would allow the federal government to prosecute crimes motivated by sexual orientation bigotry in addition to the protections already afforded for crimes based on race, religion, and nationality. Like Rep. Erection (R - His Own Ass), I'm also opposed to this legislation. I believe that it's unnecessary, since it's already illegal to both assault and murder people for just about any reason. Like the ACLU, I also think it's a dangerous infringement on free thought, since it provides stiffer penalties for people who happen to hold racist, homophobic, or otherwise douchebaggy beliefs. And I don't think there's a real need for it considering the fact that the people who committed hate crimes against the two victims after which the legislation is named (Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.) were all successfully prosecuted under existing laws without any need for federal involvement. But while Rep. Woody agrees with me on hate crimes legislation equating to thought crimes legislation, he also holds the intellectually conflicting view that hate crimes laws should protect religious belief, since religion is an "immutable characteristic". In other words, you choose which naked genitals make your nipples hard, but you don't choose which church you drive to every Sunday. Like I said, Rep. John Pants-tent is batshit insane. More details here.

Boson to the Future

The Large Hadron Collider, that particle accelerating doomsday machine buried in the deepest bowels of Europe, has suffered its fair share of setbacks since its completion. Originally meant to whack the very fabrics of the universe into one another just to laugh in the empty eye sockets of Armageddon, the machine has been shut down for months due to pesky technical glitches. Annoying, but not too unusual for what amounts to the single most complex machine ever built. OR IS IT?? According to physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, the universe itself may be sending back luck back through time to prevent scientists from ever discovering the elusive Higgs boson, one of the main theoretical subatomic particles the LHC is designed to produce. I'm on the borderline of mentally handicapped, so I don't understand the physics involved, but something about this strikes me as a little too fanboyish. I'll buy Spock being sucked into the past by a Red Matter-induced black hole, but temporal luck? That's the kind of crap they'd pull in season one TNG. More details here. (Thanks to Brad for the link.)

Ray Pulls an O.J.

You may have heard that two people recently died in a sweat lodge operated by new age bullshitter James Arthur Ray, author of the bestselling "Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want". Ray's book and teachings have been featured on the "Oprah Winfrey Show", "Larry King Live", and in "The Secret". Like "The Secret", Ray claims in "Harmonic Wealth" that you can receive fame and fortune just by wishing hard enough. It's really that simple. Which seems especially odd considering Ray's fame and fortune has come from writing and selling books and charging up to $10,000 a pop for spiritual retreats. It was at one of these retreats outside of Sedona, Arizona where Ray crowded over fifty people who had just come off a long fast into a plastic-covered lodge, jacked up the heat, and killed two people. Nineteen others were sent to the hospital for burns, dehydration, breathing problems, and kidney failure. The police are looking into whether Ray and his company can be prosecuted for criminal negligence, but Ray says he's not sure he's to blame. He's so not sure, in fact, that he's hired his own independent investigators to look into the deaths. No word on whether these are the same investigators hired by O.J. Simpson to find his wife's real killers. And, curiously, no word yet from Oprah, who used her massive media presence (not a fat joke) to push Ray's nonsense on America. She's probably too busy wishing this never happened. James Arthur Ray, that miserable piece of shit, is probably doing the same. I'll let you know if it works. More details here.