But lets go beyond this, shall we? The idea that gay marriage will create “anarchy” is complete and utter nonsense. Anarchy is not created by two loving people committing to each other for the rest of their lives-squashing the right of commitment will. When I read that David Tyree had said gay marriage would bring about anarchy I couldn’t help but laugh. Are people really that stupid? Apparently so.

Gay folks have been living in marriages all a long. The only difference between their marriage and a heterosexual marriage is the paper work. Handing someone a legal document stating that a government built on the idea of equality doesn’t equate anarchy. Inequality creates anarchy.

What gets me the most about the equal marriage fight is that those who are fighting so hard against equal marriage don’t realize that they are setting the stage for everyone else to vote on their marriage. Did ya catch that? When you think you have the right to vote on some one else’s marriage, remember, you are setting the legal stage for them to vote on your marriage. This means, that any given time, a homosexual could file a law suit against the federal government stating that heterosexuals don’t have the right to get married because more than half of all marriages end in divorce anyways, costing too much money in the court system, and that heterosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to get married because of the many thousands of couples who cheat- I’m looking at you Schwarzenegger/Clinton…etc…

Human beings have this misconception that marriage is a sacred institution. There’s nothing sacred about it. A marriage certificate is just a piece of paper that states legally you can file your taxes jointly. Oooh…real sacred.

When will the stupidity stop? I mean seriously?” Sanctity of marriage”? Seriously? The sanctity of marriage doesn’t and can’t exist as long as people continue to vote on whether or not PEOPLE can get married. The sanctity of marriage exists when marriage is allowed and those individuals involved in said marriage actually make it in their marriage. STAYING married is what brings about the sanctity of marriage.

So the next time you decide on someone else’s marriage remember that you are opening the flood gates for them to decide about yours.

On Christmas Eve people gather in churches
Decorated with trees, lights, garland
Bought tax free from local merchants
They tell stories of a star baby
Born in a manger long ago
And ignore God’s rules: No Christmas trees!
So at least the Bible tells me so
They tell stories of wise men following a star
And avoid Jeremiah who says
Don’t be as the heathen are

But when those who point out flaws
Interfering with the spread of the gospel
The believer heralds the Christian Clause
Believe the Nativity
Believe it well
Or when your life does end
You’ll be in hell
Exchange your gifts, have your fun
But unless you believe
Then grace you shall have none
Go on, spread your Christmas cheer
But pardon me if I humbug and sneer
For I can do away with the season
Toss it aside, shut it out
And all with good reason

Stupid is the vehicle that perpetuates violence in this country and the world over. Stupid is the universal language of those too lazy to think for themselves: case in point with the “Reverend” Terry Jones.

Terry Jones, the fanatical pastor threatening to burn Qur’ans on 9/11/2010, gained a ridiculous amount of attention from the American media. High profile figures spoke out against him fearing Islamic retaliation. Way to succumb to terrorism…

I am puzzled as to why America got it’s panties in a bunch over this. First of all, the Westboro Baptist Church, ya know Fred Phelps cult, burned Qur’ans in 2008. No one gave a damn. Why? Because everyone knew that it was a publicity stunt. Second of all, since when did America care about its world image? Was it before the US Military acted on orders of a white, Christian president, attacked Iraq and killed thousands of innocent people or after the government realized it was in its worst economical crisis since the 30’s and was going to need world help financially?

Why hasn’t anyone stepped back and said the obvious? Each group believes God is on their side; the rich know He is.

Beyond the whole book burning ordeal this week, the nation has watched the battle over whether or not a mosque should be built over a quarter mile away from Ground Zero. Seriously, why is this even an issue?

Overlooking the fact that is the Islamic community’s CONSTITUTIONAL right to worship in any building wherever it happens to be in the way they see fit, let’s consider some historical points as to why this is completely hypocritical of American citizens.

September 11^th, 1857: Mormons in Utah massacre over a wagon party headed to California, killing over 100 people from Arkansas and Missouri. Has Missouri and Arkansas band the Mormon Church from building houses of worship in their states? NO

Dark Ages: The Catholic Church tortured and killed anyone who questioned their authority. Some of America’s earliest colonists sought to escape such tyranny. Is the Catholic Church allowed to build cathedrals in the US? YES

WW II: The fanatical racial ideology of Nazism resulted in the mass murder of millions of Jews and others. Are neo-Nazis in America today denied the right to assemble on the Capitol steps in Washington D.C.? NO

April 19^th, 1995: A Christian by the name of Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal government building in Oklahoma City killing hundreds. Would a Christian church be allowed to build near this site? YES

So how come when a white, Christian president invades a PROVEN innocent nation killing more than a quarter of a million people, it isn’t assumed that the rest of the world views America as an evil white Christian nation?

What does the scripture say? He who has ears let him hear…

In the last 9 years has America really learned anything about peace? No, not really. Americans are still arguing over whose imaginary Friend is better, turning the wheels of stupid that led to the events of 9/11 in the first place.

Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote of thy brother’s eye…

I’d rather be dreaming than living
Living’s just too hard to do
It’s chances not choices
Noises not voices
A day’s just a thing to get through
Living’s just too hard to do

I’d rather be dreaming than talking
There’s nothing to hear or to say
With ears covered, mouth closed
The world is opposed
Nothing gets in or away
There’s nothing to hear ot to say

I’d rather be dreaming than thinking
Thoughts are small comfort to me
Dreams might be pretend
But at least dreams end
And I just can’t stop thinking, you see
Thoughts are small comfort to me

I’d rather be dreaming than sleeping
Just sleeping you’re just as well dead
In dreams I can fly, in dreams I don’t die
That’s why I lie here in this bed
Just sleeping you’re just as well dead

I’d rather be dreaming…

There’s nothing really that can compare

Than sitting with sweet ones

Quietly embraced in each other’s stare

How simple life can all become

When in a moment

Our eyes can lock as one

Captured together in a look

A moment in time

A simple pleasure took

The peace that can be gained

Too often forgotten

And yet all together hard to obtain

There’s nothing really that can compare

Than sitting with sweet ones

Quietly embraced in each other’s stare

With our eyes to each other say

I love you

A single moment becomes a day

Let it be from me to you

A secret

Something just in our view

Together captured there

A loving moment

Our embrace, a tender stare

There’s nothing really that can compare

Than sitting with sweet ones

Quietly embraced in each other’s stare

So this Sister Missionary who I have met has laid the foundation for a rather convincing argument that the Biblical Jesus did live. I have not questioned like this for about three and half years.

Three years ago I had a life changing event occur that caused me to abandon all my previous Christian belief. In a very short amount of time, I virtually stopped believing in everything I had ever been taught as a child. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no God and that the divinity of the Bible was not true.

Over the next three years I developed my own beliefs about matters of religion, did lots of reading and research and eventually was inspired to write my book Holy Shit: A Brief Look at Christianity’s Problem. Since that book’s publication, I have continued reading, studying and developing my own beliefs. Honestly, I thought I was settled about things.

Now as I prepare to write a series of books, I have been brought into deep reflection about many things. Right now, I’m blaming the compelling arguments from the Sister Missionary I have met.

I think it is a good thing to go back and question what we believe and why we believe it. It’s not a setback, but rather it’s a way to examine who we are as individuals. Personal growth and development comes through focusing on who we are, what we believe and why we believe it. It’s nothing to fear.

While I am still certain about many things about my personal beliefs, there are things that I simply don’t know about and I am not afraid to say that. I will continue to study things out ad keep plugging away and perhaps someday I will come to more positive conclusions about things. It won’t be through some profound happening, no, I anticipate these revelations being quite simple.

Ideas like multiple gods, a god-father and a god-mother, a pre-existence, the beliefs about Christ and etc. I need to get on the ball and take notes for my book, just to make it that more interesting.  (If anything it shows that Joseph Smith wasn’t original in his doctrinal teaching.)

So regarding my trip to Nauvoo…

I have exchanged a few emails with the Sister Missionary from the print shop and it seems that she would like to send me an article about the Sacred Grove, ie the location that Joseph Smith supposedly saw God and Jesus Christ. It’s in Palmyra, New York (a place I hope to get to this summer).  Anyway, she has also challenged to re-read the Book of Mormon and highlight any reference to Jesus, anything that Jesus spoke, his attributes and the doctrines and principles found in the Book of Mormon. I suppose this challenge has come to convince me that the Book of Mormon is a second witness of Jesus.

The thing is however, I don’t believe the first witness. I don’t believe in Jesus. Sure, a rabbi may have lived named Jesus, but there are no historical records indicating that the Biblical Jesus ever lived.

Considering that I just read the Book of Mormon, collected notes and am ready to work on writing my book, I don’t think that I’m going to pick it up and read it up to read it cover to cover again anytime soon.  It’s a boring read to begin with and is so ridiculous that it is difficult to study with any sense of sincerity.  (So are the Gnostic texts, but at least that can be dismissed with the superstition of the ancients…)

At either rate, this is becoming an interesting ordeal and has given me material to work with for my upcoming book.

I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening.

Our tour guide as a bright and cheerful lady, eager to share information about how a printing press worked in the 1800’s and was happy to share her testimony that she knew that Book of Mormon was true and that Joseph Smith was a true prophet.

I listened quietly, smiling when appropriate and biting my tongue throughout most of it. She had asked me if I had read the Book of Mormon and I admitted that I had and she asked me what I thought. I told her that from a literary stand point I thought the book was awful but found it interesting that it answered questions that were common in the 19^th century. Of course her reply was that it was written for our day.

Stopping myself from rolling my eyes, we discussed a little bit religion, history, LDS history and my various studies of the LDS Church and historical places I had been. She asked me why I didn’t believe already. I never really bothered to answer the question. She proceeded to tell me that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from ancient reformed Egyptian through the gift and power of God and that she knew it was true. I wanted to tell her that there was no such language and that there wasn’t a linguist in the world who coincide her story. However, I kept my mouth shut.

This wonderful lady told me that I had a destiny that I can’t even begin to imagine and that she wanted me to call her when I got baptized. She was about as subtle as a gun. Her idea that I have a great destiny makes me chuckle. Zip-lock baggies are complicated for me. I don’t think that I have a great destiny. I’m just me.

I admire her zeal for her religion but am totally put off by her ignorance concerning what the LDS Church has asked her to believe.

The story of the LDS Church doesn’t start off with a woman being tricked into eating an apple by a magical talking snake as Judaism and Christianity starts off with-No… The LDS church’s story starts off with the story of a young man who purports to have see God and Jesus Christ tucked away in the woods a little ways from his house. This story comes from a man who was known for his tall tales and from a man who wrote about 9 or 10 different versions of his first vision before publishing the official account in the LDS Church’s scripture, Pearl of Great Price.

Well I left Nauvoo chuckling, freezing, but successful as I at least have all the pictures I need for my upcoming book.

About three and half years ago this all changed as I ran into issues confronting my faith. I stopped believing and became an atheist quickly.

Over the next several months, I literally deprogrammed everything I originally had learned about Christianity, Jesus, the Church and God. I started reviewing all sorts of things and became a sponge, soaking up information left and right. I determined that if there was a God, I wanted to know.

I read Sylvia Browne’s The Mystical Life of Jesus and while I in no way accept Sylvia Browne as a scholar on the life of Christ, her book led me to think about things I had never even considered living as a Christian.

As a Christian I never thought that Jesus was married and I certainly never thought that he had a child. I never thought that he survived the crucifixion or that he left Jerusalem and went to France.  I certainly never thought that he traveled to India and I was always under the impression that he was poor.  What I gained most from Sylvia Browne’s book was the ability to open my mind to new ideas without the fear of going to hell for thinking about what I was being asked to believe in.

This led to blether of studies.

At the end of2007 I began researching and writing my book Holy Shit: A Brief Look at Christianity’s Problem in which I walk through Christianity and pick it apart using nothing but the Bible, a little bit a history and a lot of common sense.  It took nearly a year to write and throughout the course of my researching and writing I discovered that not only was I an atheist, I was a complete non-theist. The idea of a god, any god, was just preposterous to me.  But yet I still wondered about the man called Jesus.

You see, up to this point it never occurred to me that Jesus may not have existed at all. Most scholars could agree that there was a historical figure of Jesus even though they couldn’t agree how he died, when he was born, or even what form of Judaism he practiced. The gospel accounts weren’t much help in trying to figure this stuff out either.

Shortly after my book was published, I was going through the Bible again, looking over various verses and stumbled across Hebrews 8:4. I know I’ve read this verse hundreds of times before because the passage is highlighted in my Bible (I’m sure I was using this to show that the Mormon priesthood was false at some point), but I never really caught what it really said until May of 2009.

If he were on earth, he would not be a priest…

The “he” in this passage is of course Jesus Christ.

What did Paul mean ‘if he were on earth’? Was he talking about that exact point and time? Or was Paul suggesting that Jesus never lived on the earth, but rather he was a spiritual being? My imagination ran wild.

When I considered the writings of Paul I realized that never at any given point did Paul talk about Jesus’ early life. He only talked about three main events: Jesus death, burial and resurrection.  He never mentioned a virgin birth, Jesus being found in the temple at age 12, never mentioned his miracles, never mentioned his parables- in fact Paul never really gave Jesus any human attributes at all. It almost seemed as though Paul thought of Jesus as this cosmic Christ who never took on a human form. In fact, there was never a mention of Jesus’ early life until about 75 CE when the gospel of Mark appeared on the scene.

I considered the gospels and recalled what I had learned previously and put in my book:

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels found within the page of the Bible. Three of these gospels are so similar scholars refer to them as the synoptic gospels, which means “to see alike”, while the fourth is a “spiritual” gospel, often thought originally Gnostic in origin….

What we know is that we don’t know by when, where or by whom the gospels were written. Scholars can guess the dates based on what is written in the texts themselves but no one is for certain. The gospels are anonymous texts, and later scribes added the names currently on the books. (Dauson Lovi, Holy Shit: A Brief Look at Christianity’s Problem pp. 9)

Realizing that the gospels were written well after the time frame that Jesus supposedly lived, I realized it was absurd to think that the texts were eye witness accounts like the Church had always taught me as a child. Indeed, the authors of the gospels were not the apostles of Jesus as I had been taught and no one really had a clue who they were.  It was quite probable that the texts found within the gospels were nothing more than allegorical literature.  Beyond this, if the texts weren’t eyewitness accounts, evident as the gospels are written in third person, not first person which meant they were accounts based only on hearsay.

I quickly realized that the Bible couldn’t answer my question as to whether or not Jesus ever actually existed.  I turned to history to see what history had to say regarding Jesus and quickly discovered that anything ever written about him was written well after his life. I found this troubling considering the gospel accounts stated he was well known in his time.  Wouldn’t have someone picked up a quill and parchment and scribbled something down about him?

I dug through the writings of historians and discovered that some 40 historians who wrote books during the first and second centuries never mentioned that Jesus existed in the first century.  Now, when I point this out, often I find that people are quick to point out the writings of Josephus who wrote Antiquities of the Jews in 93 CE.

The passage that I’m often referred to is as follows:  About this time arose Jesus, a wise man, [if indeed it be lawful to call him a man. For he was a doer of wonderful deeds, and a teacher of men who gladly receive the truth.] He drew to himself many [both of the Jews and of the Gentiles. He was the Christ]; and when Pilate, on the indictment of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at the first did not cease to do so, [for he appeared to them again alive on the third day, the divine prophets having foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things about him.] And even to this day the race of Christians, who are named from him, has not died out.

The problem with this quote, however, is that the parts in [] are the parts that scholars believe were added by an unknown Christian. They believe that this is a forgery and that what has been added breaks the flow of the original text. Beyond this, another book Contra Celsum by Origen states that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was the Christ:

“For in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer [Josephus], although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple …”

The issue was further compounded for me when I realized that there was no Roman record (and these guys kept records of everything) of Pontius Pilate ever executing a man named Jesus. If there was Yeshua (Hebrew for Jesus) he was one of but possibly 10,000 Jews in the first century who met this same fate.

With history saying nothing about this man before the time of the Catholic Church and the Bible being altogether inclusive I was forced to conclude and agree with Bertrand Russell who wrote: “Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.” (in his book Why I’m Not a Christian)

To be quite honest I hate the New Year’s. Somehow I get all reflective and wonder: What’s this life for? Sure life is what we make of it but on the grand scale of things, what is life really for? This question is life’s eternal mystery and I don’t think it can be thoroughly understood until death.

So, December 31^st 2009, I finished reading the Book of Mormon. It took me 22 days. Why would read it, you ask. Because writing books often requires reading books you don’t particularly care about. I read the Book of Mormon, took notes, wrote down random quotes, and laid out a list of questions. This is in preparation for a book that I’m currently working on.

My first book dealt with Christianity and I most likely only touched on a fifth of the issues surrounding the Christian religion. My second book is going to deal with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m still in the planning stages of the book and am not exactly sure where I want to take it, I only know that I want to write about these curious brand of religionists. Granted I already have a humorous book out about the Mormons (available Here) but I want to do something a little more serious. A little more on the scale of PBS’s series, The Mormons.

Mormonism has always fascinated me because of its rich history. Key events in its rich history happened right in my home state of Illinois.  Whether it’s my love for history or religious curiosity that has attracted me to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’m not entirely sure, but I know that I have a passion for learning about this curious brand of religionists.

Now I’m in the stages of reading, researching and collecting notes and standing on the verge of writing perhaps my books work ever. Who knows, maybe this work will get me on the map. We’ll see what 2010 will bring.