Jimmy Page’s Trousers

It seems that everybody on the net is writing about poor old, dead, Heath Ledger. I had no intentions of following suit (maverick, me) but when I found an article from the Westboro Baptist Church, stating that they would be picketing his funeral, my ire needed release. I’ve linked to a repost of the article as their site is incredibly slow. To be honest, it’s probably better that most right-thinking people steer clear of their site, tolerantly named godhatesfags.com, anyway.

The Westboro lot are that shower that are generally pissing off most people by doing things like protesting (for whatever moronic reason) at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. It seems that these fucksticks will also picket Ledgers’s funeral because he was once in a movie where he played a gay cowboy. Well, they’ve certainly thought that one through. Yep, flawless. Fucking morons.

Predictably, they have cited a verse from Leviticus in order to justify their tasteless, mindless, insanities. Leviticus 18:22, The sin of Heath: Thou shalt not act in a movie as one who would lie with mankind as with womankind ‘cos it’s an abomination, innit.

Leviticus is great if you’re a nutjob. Pretty much anything you want to feel religiously aggrieved about is in there. It’s one of the most intolerant books of the Old Testament (which is saying something). Deep within its overwritten verses we have all sorts of ridiculous shite. Today’s lesson then, A Look At Leviticus or Fuck, Some People Are Stupid.

Lets start out easy - what you can eat. Don’t leaven your buns. Don’t eat old meat (there’s lots of stuff about either eating or burning various foodstuffs and animals). However, whatever you do, don’t eat stuff like pigs or anything fishy that doesn’t have scales (and I really like prawns too). Also hares, vultures, owls, bats, dogs, weasels, mice, lizards, snails, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on and on. You can eat beetles though.

As you can imagine, it being concerned with religion, sex is well represented:

Don’t uncover the nakedness of your dad, sister, auntie, monkey, etc. Menstruating women are unclean and you shouldn’t uncover their nakedness, not that you would because you’d obviously have banished them for seven days. And if you did happen to uncover her nakedness during her ’sickness’, well you’d both just have to be turfed out of town, wouldn’t you. Could be worse though - it could have been death or the curse of dying childless.

Oh, women are also unclean for a week after having a baby boy or a fortnight if it’s a girl (’cos girls are dirtier than boys - everyone knows that). To be purified, they need to leave the blood and mess of childbirth on themselves for a week (or a month, I can’t remember). No showering now ladies.

Bestiality gets a look in: Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion. Not in that film I saw. Everyone seemed pretty sure about what they were doing in that. Wanking: Don’t let your seed pass through the fire to Molech? Now that’s confusing.

Don’t eat fat or blood - incidentally one of the reasons that the nutty Jehova’s Witnesses refuse transfusions. It doesn’t say don’t get it intraveneously, twats. If you’re going to take this twaddle literally, don’t cherry-pick.

What else? Oh, yeah, thou shalt not put stuff in the way of blind people (really, it’s there). Just because it’s funny, doesn’t make it right. Don’t chop off the corners of your beards. Remember to burn prostitutes. Don’t let anybody with any physical deformity aproach the alter - anything from a dwarf to someone with a flat nose counts. And as for you, Potter, don’t be a wizard or it’s bleedin’ stoning for you, me lad. We also have God murdering children (Aaron’s kids) for gross misconduct and forbidding their father to grieve, various other sacrifices, stonings, and murders. Also pestilence, rape, slavery, and kidnapping get a look-in.

So, quite a mixed bag of sin, then. Hurrah for Leviticus and it’s very sane, reasonable and measured approach to religious law. Oh, how I hate the complete, fucking morons who quote the ramblings of dead, fucking morons to justify their fucking insane fucking beliefs. Fuck right off, Westboro Baptist Church. Fuck right off, anyone who reads shite like Leviticus and thinks, “Hmmmm, maybe these insane ramblings make good sense.” Fuck right off. Stupid bastards.

Lot of ‘fucks’ there, but I stand by it.

I’m surprised it took me over a year to start having a go at religion on here.  Oh well.

I felt that a short note was in order to explain any apparent dichotomy between my slagging off religion and my frequent use of phrases like ‘For Christ’s sake” or “Jesus wept” and so on.   My use of these phrases should not be taken as an endorsement of the teachings of Jesus or of those institutions set up in his name.  Rather, it is the result of having grown up in a Catholic country whose people like to swear profusely.

I too like to swear profusely and exposure to swearing invoking the names of Christian deities in order to get a really good swearing out is ingrained in me more indelibly than the actual ramblings of the Catholic church.  Which is funny really.

So, therefore, any mentions of Jesus and god should be read as expletives and blasphemies.

Many of you will probably have heard of the case, before the High Court, of the Jehovah Witness who has taken action against the Coombe hospital for transfusing her, against her wishes, after she haemorrhaged dangerously during childbirth. Apparently, she lost 80% of her blood and the doctors told her that a transfusion was the only way to save her life. As she felt that to receive a transfusion would be some sort of affront to god, the doctors went ahead and did what they’re supposed to do and saved her life by transfusing her anyway.

Damn right too. I’m so completely pissed off with this pussy-footing around religion. If she’s dying and her life can be easily saved, it’s a no-brainer. The fact that her religion has cherry-picked its particular set of forbidden taboos and has decided that life-saving medical procedures are not allowed because the random page on which they opened their bible expressly mentions it shouldn’t enter into the matter.

Over at Fat Mammy Cat, she makes the argument that if it’s a reasoned, adult decision that it should be respected and likens it to a situation where, hypothetically, she herself may be told she has breast cancer and a mastectomy would be required to save her life. Is her refusal of this operation the same as the Jehovah Witness lady’s refusal of a transfusion. I say no. I don’t think that the term reasoned can be used by anyone refusing treatment for religious reasons.

Fucking religion. It just fucks up people’s lives. This woman is beside herself with guilt simply because her life was saved in a manner of which her religion disapproves. How incredibly ridiculous is that? I’m not trying to pick on what Jehovah Witnesses believe in particular - I think that all religions are ridiculous and nowhere more so than when they try to convince you that it’s better to die or fuck up your body than to disobey some divine tenet. If you want to carry the argument of religious interference with people’s heath beyond those who Witness, we could look at the practice of female circumcision and infibulation across a lot of Muslim Africa (or, many would argue, myself included, the circumcision of male infants for Judaic belief). Or the condemnation of the Catholic church in particular, and of some Islamic authorities of condom usage across AIDS-ridden countries around the world. Or Nigerian mullahs issuing a fatwa declaring polio vaccinations a plot by the US to sterilise good, god-fearing Muslims. And that’s not to mention pretty much all of the major religions telling us that masturbating would make us blind (still 20-20 despite substantial effort, by the way).

Everyone’s so worried about offending someone’s religion. Nobody wants to just tell them all (and I do mean all of them - I’m not singling out any particular religion here) to just fuck off. You’ve fucked up the lives of our species for long enough. The less daft of us have had enough. Your days are numbered but unfortunately, the number isn’t small enough for me. Do us all a favour and fuck right off.