Muhammad Ali turns 70

heyoscarwilde:

Happy 70th Birthday Muhammad Ali

scanned from Superman: The Complete History :: Chronicle Books :: 1998

(via comicsalliance)

laughingsquid:

Louis C. K.’s Working-Class Roots and Success

Jesus fans have an Axe to grind with Johnny Depp

Actually it’s Johnny’s Axe grinding to a new song by the band Babybird, titled “Jesus Stag Night Club,” that has many Christians “outraged.”

According to Lee Douglas, spokesman for “The Christian Coalition,” Depp has committed the crime of blasphemy and “one day, Johnny Depp and his cronies will face the judgment of our Lord and they will burn in hell for this filth.”

That seems to be a pretty harsh sentence for a victimless “crime” but I guess even in our more enlightened age, there are still some Christians who get off on watching people burn.

Song and lyrics posted below.

Saw a man in a bar with his hair like a lady
Bloody thorns ’round his ears like he was a crazy
He had holes in his hands and a cross for a spine
Crushed a berry in his Perrier and called it wine
He said, “There’s great sadness in life, but don’t sit there and blub:
Here’s some tickets for your friends to the Jesus Stag Night Club!”
I can’t remember where I was last night
Think I was hanging naked off a church spire
Tied by my ankles to a weathervane
Felt like I was Jesus on fire

Cuffed to the bumper of a big truck
I begged my dad (?) to take me to a strip bar
Drank kerosene slammers through my eyeballs
Drove myself home in a stolen car
Turn a bird upside down and it lies in your fingers like a dead man
When you throw it in the air it’s resurrected from your hand
We went to a motel, he showed me his Bible
I said, “Tell me the truth,” while he looked me in the eyeball

He said, “There’s great happiness in life but don’t just sit there in love:
Here’s some tickets for your friends to the Jesus Stag Night Club!”

I can’t remember where I was last night
Think I was getting on a night bus
Lyin’ on the laps of my good friends
Judas Priest and Lazarus

I’m getting married in the big bad morning
But it feels like I’m giving birth
I feel so happy I could scream
“This is my last few seconds on Earth”

Saw a man in the street lying on the floor beaten up
He had a fish finger sandwich and a yellow-handled (?) coffee cup
I bent down drunk and tried to pick him up
But when I turned around I could see…it was Jesus…

I can’t remember where I was last night
Think I was hanging on a church spire
Tied by my ankles to a weathervane
Felt like I was Jesus on fire

Cuffed to the bumper of a big truck
I begged my dad (?) to take me to a strip bar
Drank kerosene slammers through my eyeballs
Drove myself home in a stolen car

I can’t remember where I was last night
Think I was getting on a night bus
Lyin’ on the laps of my good friends
Judas Priest and Lazarus

I’m getting married in the big bad morning
But it feels like I’m giving birth
I feel so happy I could scream
“This is my last few seconds on Earth!”

Katharine Hepburn explains how one can be good without God on the Dick Cavett Show.

“These people who are making a big deal about gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of. Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.” ~Clint Eastwood (October issue of GQ Magazine)

(Source: reuters.com)

Novelist, Philip Roth, On Religion & God

Award winning author Philip Roth, also dubbed by many as “Americas greatest living novelist,” was interviewed on CBS News while promoting his new novel Nemesis. During his conversation with Rita Braver the subject of religion came up and here is how it went.

Reporter: “Do you consider yourself a religious person?”
Roth: “No, I don’t have a religious bone in my body,”
Reporter: “You don’t?”
Roth: “No.”
Reporter: “So, do you feel like there’s a God out there?”
Roth: “I’m afraid there isn’t, no,”
Reporter: “You know that telling the whole world that you don’t believe in God is going to, you know, have people say, ‘Oh my goodness, you know, that’s a terrible thing for him to say,”
Roth: “When the whole world doesn’t believe in God, it’ll be a great place.”

Bazinga!

I guess I can add Roth to my list of corrupt fools who can do no good and who’s deeds are vile.

Francis Farmer and God’s Mundane Demise

Frances Farmer, a Seattle, Washington native who won a creative writing contest with her essay, “God Dies,” as a high school junior at age 16, is truly one of the unsung heroines of American freethought in the Twentieth Century. This essay, reproduced below, earned her $100 ($1,400 in today’s money) and resulted in a national wire story: “Seattle girl denies God and wins prize.” In the conclusion of this brief essay about becoming an atheist, Frances wrote: “I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from anyone. It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too.”

Here is her essay, as published in The Scholastic on May 2, 1931.

“God Dies”

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I’d had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. “I am clean, now. I’ve never been as clean. I’ll never be cleaner.” And somehow, it was God. I wasn’t sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn’t religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn’t get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn’t last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, “God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children.” That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn’t God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, “I am clean. I am sleepy.” And then I went to sleep. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn’t there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. “Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings.” It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn’t spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn’t have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

Farmer later became a Hollywood starlet after spending four years as drama student at the University of Washington.  She appeared in over a dozen movies and several Broadway plays before her career was ruined by a sequence of unjust commitments to mental institutions.

In spite of her undeserved ignominy, Frances’ life story has inspired many young feminists over the years as well as musicians, authors, actresses and filmmakers.

I encourage you to visit the links below to learn much more about this freethought heroine.

• Dazzling Divas: Francis Farmer
• Frances Farmer Hollywood
• Farmer, Frances (1913-1970)
• Always in Her Shadow
• Come Back As Fire And Burn All The Liars: Frances Farmer
• Freethought of the Day: Frances Farmer