If you’re someone who celebrates Christmas because you’re, um, maybe a little bit Christian or something, you may wonder why you should concern yourself with the annual celebration of Hannukah. I mean, beyond being all Christian-like and tolerant of other people’s faiths and whatnot. Well, let’s take a moment to remember a few things, some of which you may already know, some of which will surprise you. First, you wouldn’t even have a saviour, if it weren’t for those Hannukah celebraters. Jesus was Jewish, you know. Very Jewish. And for that matter, if you believe what you read in scripture, the WHOLE WORLD might not be here if it weren’t for those folks who wrote the bigger part of your favorite book. Moses? Noah? Yup. Jews. So while you’re all busy being tolerant, remember that they were here first, and so actually they’re being tolerant. They don’t believe in your God man, but rarely give you any crap about it. In fact, as this Slate piece points out, they’ve gone out of their way to play nice and do the gift giving and tree thing. I don’t think Jesus recommended those activities anyway, but whatever. It’s the thought that counts. So if you don’t know anything about Hannukah, take some time to read up, kids. Because without the people that celebrate it, you wouldn’t have on the Levis you’re wearing while you sip that Starbucks coffee as you take a break from buying DKNY and Kenneth Cole gifts at Macy’s. And while you’re reading up, put on some nice Jewish music. This will be easy, because as we pointed out the other day, most of your favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews.

The answer to that will probably remain open to speculation. If you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll probably say “Nothing. He’s dead, if he ever existed“. If you do believe in Jesus though, I’d hazard to guess that you’d agree that he’d say something like “Let’s stop all these wars and heal some sick people with the money we save“, unlike the Christian Right (Why do they call them that anyway? They never are.) which continues to believe in torture and war while attacking the idea of saving lives. On a more personal and practical level though, I’d like to address this Obama fellow, and his handling of the continued irrational ranting of the far right. Hey White House staff! Did you learn NOTHING from the last eight years? Somebody let me at that Napoleonic twit Rahm Emanuel. I’ll kick his midget ass six ways to Sunday and start a new media blitz where the White House DOESN’T moronically defend itself from the psychotic ramblings of a bunch of health and insurance industry funded astroturfers. FRAME THE DEBATE Mr. Obama. Don’t even directly address the idiocy that extreme conservatives and the health/insurance industries spew. Keep talking about change, and MAKE IT HAPPEN. If you keep up the ignorant and ineffective tendency to chomp on every piece of insane spin-bait they throw your way, your agenda remains doomed. Which I wouldn’t mind, except I thought when I voted you guys in that your agenda had something to do with our agenda. I also thought you were smarter than this. Is it too late to take my vote back? Unfortunately, this is not a battle over principles, it’s a battle over the media, and the current administration is losing. Routinely. C’mon you guys, you’re smarter than this. President Obama has more intelligence in his pinky than a county full of red state values voters. Let it show.

With the state of the economy recently, it may have occurred to you to sell your soul to put an end to your financial woes. We were doing a little research along these lines to help you out when we ran across an interesting company that made us ask ourselves the question: why not just put it in cold storage until you decide? Unfortunately, it turned out upon further perusal that in spite of the fact that the company even has a Facebook page – which of course always lends a great deal of credibility to an organization’s brand – it is in fact itself the worst form of selling your soul (at least if you’re on a team assigned to marketing a product), a slightly botched viral marketing campaign for the movie Cold Souls, due for release in August. Actually the film looks promising, see a trailer here. But if you came here more interested in selling your soul than storing it, here are some quick guides to help you get on that road to hell. This page looks credible; it gets right to the point with red text on a black background, a “666″ in the URL, and a form you can fill out right away. This rambling guide, presented by the a member of the British Church of Satan , also looks promising. After rambling on for awhile about how to do it, it then suggests Satan doesn’t exist. Which, as we all know, is exactly how Satan works. They also provide a handy Amazon link to the Satanic Bible, like we just did. But oddly enough, the Weekly World News page on the topic had the most practical and to-the-point information, with reminders like “Remember to demand the life-extension clause“. And lastly, in the interest of maintaining the high journalistic standards of fair and balanced reporting established by organizations like Fox News, get a Christian point of view before signing anything. Happy selling!

If you don’t want to sell it, you might consider cold storage:

One of the only things I really want in life is to understand people, and to be understood. I think this is true for many of us. Understanding is a lot like love, and I feel safe in saying, therefore, that all many of us want is to love and be loved. When you have a lot of love and understanding, you usually find some peace, and if you put the three together, you get a great tune like What’s So Funny ’bout Peace Love & Understanding. Lately though, I’ve felt a little frustrated around two topics that come up a lot in social dialogue: God and homosexuality. On the God topic, I get frustrated because I feel like spiritual beliefs are something you share when someone asks you to do so, not something you run around screaming about. I just never see much of anything good happening whenever anybody actively expresses their beliefs about the origin and meaning of human life before it comes up through simpler conversation. And likewise, although I have close friends who pretty much cover all the gender orientations, I don’t really care much whom you want to have sex with unless you and I know each other and it’s somehow germane to the conversation. I’m just tired, really tired, of people telling me whether they believe in God or not when I didn’t ask, and people proclaiming their beliefs on homosexuality, whether they’re hatemongering freaks like Fred Phelps, the bent Baptist behind the “God Hates Fags” movement, or just a friend trying to further their civil rights in an obviously socially immature country. And all of this, it seems to me, has a simple basis: a kind of emotional immaturity that drives people to put the contradictions of life that they can’t accept into polarized perceptions so that they can find their “safe zone” and proceed to take some kind of high ground attacking things that make them nervous. The grounds for a lot of contempt for Christianity seems to be the simple fact that a lot of Christians misrepresent their own documents to suit their discomforts. The limited references to homosexuality in the bible, for instance, simply lump it together with other sex acts that are not for the purpose of procreation. You simply don’t see rabid fundamentalist Christians protesting prostitution, fornication or adultery the way they do homosexuality. And on the other hand, the more rabid atheists out there seem just as obsessive about attacking religion in a simplistic way that more than anything, sells books. This Salon interview with Chris Hedges explores, as Salon puts, it why “Atheists like Christopher Hitchens are as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists“. If you’re an admirer of “The New Atheists”, you might want to give it a scan; it’s not especially pro anything; in fact Chris Hedges at one point says – referring to Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens – that “what they had done for the secular left was to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right“. So, I have to ask. In a world where Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler has to make a plea to remove rape from the manufacturing process of cell phones, don’t we have plenty of other hot topics that we could agree on and actually get to work, instead of spending all our time ranting speculatively about morality and religion, like I’ve just done here?

Well, if God is the one highlighted in the film Jesus Camp, you should be afraid. Very afraid. I usually find it in poor taste to denigrate the faiths of others (admittedly, I’ve made an exception for Mormons and Scientologists), but in the case of Kids In Ministry International (the organization featured in the film), I don’t see how I can keep my mouth shut. From the opening scenes, in which the rather hefty, third-generation Pentecostal preacher Becky Fischer preaches about fasting while her gut seeks escape from her waistband, to the creepy scene in which a church full of children reaches out their hands and weepingly prays to a life-size cutout of George W. Bush, the rather even-handed documentary calmy reveals a horror of child indocrination into a politicized, bellicose form of Christianity that is only equalled by the stories one hears about the madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With no voiceover or commentary, the film paints a picture of an overweight, ignorant, and self-righteous group of people convinced that their militant, idioglottic (see Becky Fischer’s bizarre and convoluted rationalization for speaking in tongues) form of Christianity will save the world from itself, and probably within a generation. If you haven’t seen a chilling horror film in a while, Jesus Camp should be on your list. Because of the friend who recommended it to me (thanks a bunch, Sasha!) I think I’ll be having nightmares tonight.

One of god’s little warriors:

Well not much, if you were Jesus. On the other hand, it’s pretty cool in another way, because it’s one of those rare moments when two world religions have a chance to realize how connected they are, instead of getting into a “my god is better than your god” debate. I say “a chance to realize”, because historically, it’s gone the other way. I find it a little scary that to this day, thirty-seven percent of Americans agree that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus Christ. Wake up kids, Jesus was a Jew. And your precious Easter Dinner? You’re just adding bunnies to the traditional Passover dinner that Jesus himself ate. So let’s all take a minute to remember that if you believe in God, and believe there’s only one God, y’all probably believe in the same God. And for those who haven’t picked their favorite religion yet, please refer to The Big Religion Chart By the way, if you’re Jewish, Christian, Other, Or Agnostic, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Atheists need not apply, you’ve had enough press time lately…