Seeking A Metaphor: Lazarus, Phoenix, Atlantis...

The Macho Response blog, recently put behind an "objectionable content" wall, has been removed by Blogger. Its publisher, The Crack Emcee, is a friend of mine from long ago and eventhough I often vehemently disagree with his viewpoint on many many things it's still a viewpoint worth exploring. His anti-cult, conservative, atheist angle on culture and current topics was unique -- not unusual, unique -- in the blogosphere.

I sure hope he shifts to a more broad-minded server soon. Then again, maybe it's a glitch. and he'll be back on-line in few hours.


UPDATE: Maybe the metaphor is Rasputin rather than Lazarus, you just can't kill the guy. He's here now.

Missing The Boat

jpg via Biblical Christianity blog

Biblical Christianity blog has a few comic panels on the extinction of dinosaurs, the top one is my favorite, but see Far Side's and Bizarro's takes. Blogger Dan Phillips takes his faith seriously but not so seriously as to prevent him from see humor in its applications in the world around him. He's got some general interest pop culture stuff going on and some random liberal-bashing politics and he can get a little overwrought, for example a post on "Soul Surfer", the movie about the surfer who lost an arm to shark and is sustained by her faith, is stuck into a jeremiad of "why doesn't Hollywood represent good people of faith" -- similar points made on Know Beliefs here and here -- but is compelled to ascribe the worst motives:

"... part of it is simply that Hollywood blends well with the world-system, and the world hates the real Jesus and His people, period.

More charitably, I've simply wondered whether none of the big wigs and creative minds knows any actual practicing, card-carrying Christians."

And despite that charity it is, of course, absurd. How could 80(ish)% of America not be a majority of the entertainment industry too?
SOURCE:

Cracking A Whip

Niceness is the work of the devil, according to the dictionary-deprived logic-gymnast video blogger atop this post at The Macho Response, where the site's Crack Emcee (amazing bio) tears into a murderous voodoo grandma and the unrequited love women have for religion plus some arty zoophilia prints, not porn exactly but not family-friendly either.

In a different time and place, Crack and I knew each other pretty well and his work over there inspired me to put my efforts here. Though more political and sociological than this site, he covers a similar ground from a non-believers perspective, but is unabashedly conservative politically. Check it out, but it's deep dark water;  the feints may be indistinguishable from the sincere (like the anti-Muslim, anti-nice, pro-Christian video)  and it's not for the faint-of-heart.

Nine Countries Could Grow To Be Virtually Religion-Free

I see there are benefits for some people to have faith -- not the least being that we know where people are on a Sunday morning -- but the human drive to be a member of the larger group which served religion for millennia is the same motivation that is causing a group of Western democracies to become post-religious societies. 

jpg via GetReligion.org

Via Releasing Religion, a very fine blog whose mission -- so to speak -- overlaps with this one somewhat.

Religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

It won't die out completely, but "religion will be driven toward extinction" in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

The mathematicians say it will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland.

Because the U.S. Census doesn't survey religion, numbers could not be adequately compared,  but seeing data from university and think tank polls inspired the trend analysis.

Studies suggest that "unaffiliated" is the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, with about 15% of the population falling into a category experts call the "nones."

They're not necessarily atheists or non-believers, experts say, just people who do not associate themselves with a particular religion or house of worship at the time of the survey.

The root of the trend analysis comes from the human propensity for people to move toward the opinions the majority and the universal, long-term trend (in one case back to 1860) of people moving from affiliated to unaffiliated.

SOURCE: CNN.com Belief blog