Well here's one I can send up...
Honestly, I really despise people who take their faiths too seriously – and then somehow manage to not take them seriously enough. It’s as if they read all the wrong parts. I’ve read the Bible straight through many times, and it’s really painful to have to listen to idiots mangle the words or twist them to justify whatever inhuman or depraved act is on their mind. I’ve had a great deal of fun repeating parables to them that explain that they are no better than the Pharisees, and proving to them that Pilate would have rather not have killed Jesus, and that their religion is based on older information (Gilgamesh and the stories of Ishtar).
And it all started with Mormonism… When I was a boy, my mother got divorced from a very abusive and dangerous individual who happened to be Mormon. Imagine any aspect of abuse not murder, it happened; to my mom, me, and my brother. She divorced him, returned to her parents, and got married to another Mormon (she was alternatively Mormon and not-Mormon – and really quite stupid). This guy was all right, big fire-fighter type, into Black Sabbath and marijuana, and a big fan of Joseph Smith, too ( I didn’t say it wasn’t weird).
Well the new guy’s mother (also a long-time Mormon and in high social standing in the Church) didn’t think that it was right for her baby boy to be running around with a shameless divorcee, after all, Mormons don’t get divorced. So she cooked up a scam with her Mormon friends in the school district, the local Child Protective Services (CPS), and the heads of the local church. Allegations of abuse were fabricated by her, brought to the attention of her Mormon friends in the CPS, by the Mormon school principal and I was whisked away from my new family at the age of seven and incarcerated in a series of foster homes that had several previous complaints of abuse and then forced to wait out the rest of the illegal (2x as long as usual) waiting period in an adolescent juvenile hall. It could have been worse – I could have been killed.
My parents were told that the Church would see what strings it could pull to get me out – on the condition that if they were to obtain an annulment, they would both be reinstated as members of the Church in good standing and that I would be returned to my mother. They refused and were both ultimately excommunicated.
Or so I thought.
They couldn’t prove the religious connections, (that’s how Mormons work), so the dust from the litigation they pursued and ultimately won had settled for years before I found out the full story from my uncle, a nice drifty old dingbat who generally hates his family but was his mother’s confidant throughout this period of time. I had come to suspect as much. Turns out the Church lied about the excommunications, too – they were supposed to burn all records and expunge my parents from the rolls, never to return. But my dear old Dad started feeling his age and fearing the end – at fifty, the old coot! – checked up on it, and they were sealed in the Atlanta temple two years ago, some twenty years after the last court appearance in the lawsuit against the state we were living in at the time.
After years of therapy and institutionalization, I had normalized to the point where I wanted to find out why God had abandoned me. I read the Bible, made notes, and started reading the mythologies of other faiths as well. I decided to worship Zeus and Lucifer. That led me to worshipping Pan, and establishing a nodding acquaintance with Artemis, Urania, Hermes, and Poseidon. They actually seem to answer prayers with more regularity – I don’t know, maybe they try harder because they’re not #1?
I believe the Universe was created. I don’t believe in Creationism, no, it’s up to us to figure out how he/she/it/they did it. I believe science is the sincerest form of worship, and working to reverse-engineer the Universe is the greatest honor to our Creators. I believe that our faith and our deities can only do little things, like give us that little push over the top. The story of Hercules helping the one merchant who was trying to pull his stuck cart out and ignoring the one who stood on the side crying to him for aid stuck with me when I was twelve. I think that we can take these stories to heart and work to make this planet and this Universe the best it can be. Despite the shortcomings that we see, I have seen too much beauty and had too much pleasure to believe that there could be anything better than this. A world with beer, whiskey, snowy mountains, and humans in it is paradise enough. Oh, and steak. I forgot about the steak.
I don’t have anything against anyone else’s faith – I don’t want you following me, either. It’s mine, I made it, and I think it’s right, for me, and it doesn’t specifically exclude you from my Paradise, whether you’re a Muslim or a Pastafarian or an atheist.
(aeon chicken Like the Millenium Falcon, only slower and noisier, Sun 22 Mar 2009, 22:30, 1 reply)

Evil church
Hope they get a taste of the hell they believe in.
Good luck with your...ideas, sir.
(tweebianmonkey Should be known as Widget, Sun 22 Mar 2009, 23:01, closed)