L.A. Boondoggle

Before I get started, let me explain something about the picture above. Originally I was going to have Jesus receiving anal sex from Mohammed but Mr. Vandal decided that wouldn’t be too funny. The reason being that Mohammed would end up getting Jesus’ poop on his dick and “that’s just not funny”. So, After much deliberation, we decided that although it would be a funny picture, it would probably get us killed by Christian extremists. Option number two was to have Jesus and Mohammed in 69 position, fully clothed with the caption “Can’t we all just get along” underneath. I figured I might as well not sponsor a competition between the Muslims and Christians as to who can firebomb my apartment the quickest. You all might be wondering why these groups get so bent out of shape over cartoons, it can’t be that they’re a bunch of dickheads, it must have something to do with the religions themselves. In my continuing effort to educate sane public on what crazy people are up to, I’m going to give y’all a little Religion 101.Christianity

Cover Story: The Supreme Ruler of the universe, nicknamed “God”, sent his only son, Jesus, to die for the sins of mankind. Believing in God and Jesus grants you eternal salvation in Heaven instead of being sent to Hell, which is supposedly a really uncomfortable place. Hell is the place that you and most of your friends will probably end up, which seems cool at first but I hear they only serve warm Coors Light there and the bartender is ugly.

Supposed Real Story: The Jesus story was made up around 400AD as a way for the Romans to conquer the Germanic and other northern tribes since they couldn’t do it militarily. The entire thing was fabricated and the Jews still have an outstanding invoice with the Roman Catholic Church for the use of “God” as their deity. Kind of makes sense, do you think a guy that turns water into wine at parties would sacrifice himself for a bunch of random douche bags?

The Capn’s Take: Christianity seems like the meme that just won’t die. At an estimated 2 billion strong, this religion is definitely a testament to persistence and brilliant marketing. When you’re the only one with salvation for sale, you pretty much guarantee all customers in that market are going to come through. Christianity has various retails outlets that all have a different take on the store in the form of its many denominations. Among the things for sale are marriage, baptism, and funeral service. Basically it costs a lot of money to keep your birth, fucking, and dying right in the eyes of God. If you’re looking for an easy way out, I’d go with this one since supposedly you can be a big fuckup and still be “forgiven” in the end; it kind of operates on the “All pricks go to heaven” principle. Their human leader is said to be all seeing and is rumored to be able to do whatever he wants and basically “get away with murder” - figuratively speaking of course but you never know when the Pope might take up human hunting as a hobby. The pope gets to cruise in a pretty cool car that has a bullet proof display case and he wears a large pointy hat. The fact that the pope looks just like Golem, however, is an obvious indicator that he just can’t be trusted. Some of the clergyman have a thing for small children but boys will be boys, right? Christians might get upset when you ask them how Jesus could be the messiah when he was born of Mary.

Islam

Cover Story:They nickname their Supreme Ruler of the universe, “Allah”, but he’s also the same one that Jews and Christians worship. Getting confused yet? While they don’t think that Jesus was the son of God or Allah they do think that he was a prophet. Muslims can take their p’s and q’s from Allah via the Qur’an, which was supposedly a collection of verses revealed to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) and transcribed by his companions sometime before his death in 632. The overall gist: There’s only one god (Allah) and Mohammed is his prophet. Slight differences between Muslim texts and the Torah/Bible are explained by saying that the Christian/Hebrew texts have become corrupted over time and through translation.

Supposed Real Story: Not much here, the texts were written by Mohammed and claimed to be of divine origin. Although some scholars have argued that Mohammed probably didn’t write the whole thing and that there’s no way to prove it since the earliest compilations of the Qur’an come from about the 9th century.

The Capn’s Take:Supposedly the Qur’an is a peaceful book with the same loose messages as the Bible; I’m assuming that all the guys strapping bombs to themselves and murdering innocents have a different copy or something. I can relate, I once grabbed a bear trap in place of a whoopee cushion at the local Trap and Fake Flatulence Store. Although I laughed at the results I can’t say my unsuspecting victim shared my amusement at the situation. Although it’s not the best example it just goes to show what kind of damage a miscommunication can do. I’m not sure why many Muslims in the Mideast are upset at the U.S. It may be because we supply Israel with weapons and cash and Israel in turn uses those resources to kill more mideast Muslims but I’d like to think that they’re grown up enough to let something petty like that go. That’s about as far as I’ll go into it, as with many other things, if it can’t be completely explained within 10 minutes, it’s not worth learning. I’d say join it, but only if you speak Arabic, otherwise it looks like more trouble than it’s worth.

Judaism

Cover Story:They nickname their Supreme Ruler of the universe, “Adonai”, but you can call him “God” for short. The believe that they descend from their ancient relative, “Abraham” and that God made a covenant with Abraham saying that his people would thrive and all that good stuff so long as they rejected polytheism and only embraced one god. Abraham soon realized that God might have skipped over a few crucial parts of the covenant when God asked him to snip the foreskin off of his newly non-gentile tallywacker. Abraham’s descendants have been finding more and more fine print over the ages, something about enslavement in Egypt and near annihilation in Europe. The God of the Jews likes to test people and mess with them and punishes them severely for failing said tests. God justifies this by basically saying, “What? I’m God, What’re you gonna do about it?” The Jews pride themselves in having a God with balls which is why they all carry around guns.

Supposed Real Story: Jews weren’t always monotheistic and there’s evidence that shows that many of them were polytheistic for a time. They considered God to be the sole Creator, but not the only god in the game. It was around the time of 323 BC to about 281 BC that Jews started saying that God was the only God and that the Torah was full of universal truths that even non-Jews should obey.

The Capn’s Take:Judaism seems the most laid back of the Abrahamic religions. They rarely speak of burning in hell for not agreeing with their beliefs and their beliefs and principles have them accepting a lot which Muslims and Christians would consider sinful or taboo. I suppose when you’re one of the oldest religions in the game, you really don’t worry too much about what the young upstarts are up to, even if their numbers are really good. Jews like to eat a lot which is pretty evident if you’ve ever witnessed a Passover or a Hanukah dinner. Jews also like to smell their food since it tastes and smells great; this is why their noses are typically large. Centuries of oppression have toughened up the Jewish sense of humor, sense of survival, and mental capacity and as a result Jews generally make good bankers, lawyers, comedians, and musicians. I’d say it’d be a good religion to join but unless you’re born into it, their conversion process amounts to religious hazing. Who really wants to read from the Talmud while a rabbi is chasing you with circumcision scissors and a crowd of masked Jews are chanting “To-Rah, To-Rah, To-Rah”, Oy Vey! Not much else can be said but rumor has it that you can fit every Jew in the world inside the ash tray of a Volkswagen.

Mormonism

Cover Story: Joseph Smith had visions of divine origin and transcribed his new Book of Mormon from a set of buried golden plates. Mormonism talks of a parallel history of Christianity on the North American continent and Jesus even makes a few appearances as well. Mormonism is all about bringing about what they call, the original gospel of Jesus Christ, and bringing back the original Church of Christ. They also believe that their leaders are prophets, receiving direct word and vision from God and have the power to change their laws and creeds at the behest of said visions.

Supposed Real Story: Joseph Smith made the whole damn thing up. The only debatable part is whether he’s a liar or just insane.

The Capn’s Take: Mormonism is weird, it’s like a teeny sect of Christianity that people would talk about if they knew what in the hell the Mormon’s believed in. I’ve heard a number of different stories, most of them talking about Jesus teaching Indians how to be less hell bound. From what I gather, Mormons worship the god “Mormo”, who resembles a 9 ft tall albino black man with downs syndrome. Mormo likes to eat children which is why polygamy is prevalent; so that the Mormon’s can continually feed Mormo with more children. Food sources usually consist of child cancer clinics and local schools. Mormo used to not like black people despite his own appearance because he believed them to be imposters which is why Mormons didn’t allow African Americans to be priests for quite some time but this issue was resolved in 1978 when Mormo finally came around after hearing a Bill Cosby bit for the first time. Despite being an all-powerful deity, Mormo’s Downs Syndrome inhibits his counting ability which is why certain Mormons have no problem marrying girls in the 13-17 age demographic.

Scientology

Cover Story: L. Ron Hubbard learned the secrets to a somewhat spiritual form of healing and started a religion based after it. In Scientology, Dianetics (self-improvement techniques) are used to rehabilitate the human spirit. A few of the tenets of Scientology include the fact that we’ve all lived past lives that we’ve forgotten. Most of the sessions that they have with people involve finding out past aberrations and traumatic experiences that one might have had in their past lives that could be affecting them today. They do this by conducting audits where they ask questions of the auditee while measuring their “galvanic skin response” on a device that they refer to as an E-meter. Legally speaking, the E-meter does nothing and is completely spiritual but the Scientologists still use it since it has an obvious spiritual purpose. The only weird things about Scientology are the beliefs that we came here at the will of an evil space tyrant named Xenu, who banished some 13.5 trillion or so beings to Earth around 75 million years ago. Apparently he killed all those beings with hydrogen bombs that were placed in volcanoes, then trapped their souls and implanted memories onto them via movie theater styled implant stations. The images implanted all had to do with the modern religions of our day so basically all other religions are misrepresentations perpetrated by a since removed evil alien overlord.

Supposed Real Story: Look at the above, it’s all true, how could any of that be refutable? Check out their website: Scientology.org.

Capn’s Take: You might be saying, “L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction author, of course he made that all up” or “It would be impossible to detonate enough explosives to vaporize 13.5 trillion people” or “this is just stupid”. I’m telling you, it’s just coincidental that L. Ron Hubbard is a science fiction author, the story about Xenu is real, he got it from his repressed memories of the saga. L. Ron Hubbard was also a racing pilot of sorts in his past lives and he broke many interstellar race speed records. Some of you might be wondering about Xenu but I wouldn’t worry about him. Supposedly Xenu is now imprisoned in a mountain that’s protected by a force field that is powered by an eternal battery; perhaps we’ll interview him later. This seems like the most fun of all the religions but I hear that it costs a lot to move up in its ranks and learn about all the cool stuff. As for why Tom Cruise might not like gay people, L. Ron Hubbard firmly believed that “no social order will survive which does not remove these people (homosexuals) from its midst.” Now sure, it might be possible that scientologists love gay people and yet still want their eradication but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say that it’s even more possible that L. Ron Hubbard disliked homosexuals as well. Like I said before, if you have the money, go for it. This seems like the only religion that makes sense to me.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

Cover Story: The universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. This was brought to light by a young Bobby Henderson who revealed the gospel of FSM in response to Intelligent Design advocates wanting their theories taught in public schools. According to Bobby, the Flying Spaghetti Monster changes scientists’ carbon dating results with his “noodly appendage” and this is why objects seem to be older than they actually are.

Supposed Real Story:This one is irrefutable as well, there isn’t really any way to disprove it unless you’re a huge fan of Ocham’s Razor. The gospel can be found here: Venganza.org

The Capn’s Take:Bobby hit on something good here; this one ranks right up there with Scientology in my opinion, although FSMism sounds slightly more plausible. I assure you that FSMism is not a device by which to mock Intelligent Design advocates and Creationistic Scientists. I can say this with absolute certainty: FSMism is as much of a tried and true religion as Creationism is a legitimate science. . . Period Comma Bitch! Those last three words really send that idea home too.

Well, I hope this bit of reading enlightened y’all, or at least took up time you’d be spending doing mindless cubicle work instead. There are a lot of religions out there, I’d recommend that everyone try a few or try none at all, it really doesn’t matter. Whether you choose a multi-millennia long guilt legacy or a space odyssey or nothing at all, the choice is always up to you and no one can change that. This is The Capn’ saying You Stay Free, America, You Deserve It!

---