The Atheist News Podcast

I like apocalypse movies just as much as the next guy, but this one was far better than any other I have seen in quite a while.  Left behind, the end all of Kirk Cameron christian apocalypse movies, I laughed! I cried! It was better than Cats! And yes the Russians are the bad guys, why not they were the bad guys in all other christian movies, plus all older christian guys love Red Dawn.  Apparently Jesus was against communism, he didn’t much care for the whole people living equally thing, and he hates the color red.

So Kirk Cameron is playing a guy named Buck Something, we will just call him Buck Futt.  Before I get started I just want to point out that no matter how many times Buck Futt gets injured below the waist they manage to patch him up with out taking hit pants off, by I shit you not, stitching him up through the hole in the knee of his pants he got when he was standing next to a car bomb.

So buck Futt is a reporter, and some guy in the middle east makes some grow all drug thing that makes shit grow in the desert.  So he is covering the story in Isreal and there is some giant fucking attack, like 100,000 planes, seriously there are more planes in the movie than there are on the entire planet (including scrap yards, museums and the ones on the bottom of the ocean).  Then somehow he gets dragged into this “top secret” underground base and then all the planes blow up very dramatically, apparently God found out how shitty the special effects were and decided to unleash some wrath onto the cgi set.

So then Buck Futt is on a plane heading back to the us, he didn’t get hurt, hes fucking Kirk Cameron, and holy shit half the people on the plane dissappear!  (I should mention that this movie jumps around a lot, making it nearly impossible to follow).  Apparently  the Rapture (a mythical mass abduction discribed in Revolations) happens on the plane.  At this point Buck is not a Jesus freak, I can just imagine him doing an interview about the movie saying something about how it was really hard from him to play a non-christian on screen, overall being a pretentious prick.

So he gets home and guess what a russian sniper is following him and his buddies around  (all his buddies that didn’t get “left behind”).  There is a confusing mass of informants he uses and blah blah blah, they all get killed, some shot, and some in car bombs, which is how he get injured and subsiquently healed through a hole in the knee of his pants, It was just to riscay to take his pants off on screen, he didn’t want to put naughty thoughts into any little girls heads.

So then throught a Buck Futt in the story line, Buck Futt gets to go hang out with the “anti-christ” whose name is Nicholai Carpathia, Like I said earlier, the russians are bad bad people.  The movie ends quite soon after when Nicolai shoots some world leaders in the head, yeah he has some mind controll shit going on too.  I really wish that Tbn was having a marathon and showed the other movies in the series because I really want to keep drinking and yelling at the television into the wee hours of the moring.  But alas I have to save my 40ozers of PBR until next sunday when they continue to Buck Futt public access television.

Ps… If any of you know any religious movies I should watch and then make fun of, let me know I am open to anything I can find in a video store or on the internet…

Today I watched a show called Breakthrough With Rod Parsley, who, if you didn’t know, is John Oregano’s little brother.  He looks and sounds like a nice good ol’ boy from Kentucky - apparently they have a saying down there, “don’t straddle the fence, especially if it’s barbed wire.”  He once wrote a book called Silent No More which was a, “shot over the bow of humanistic non-believers,” which raises the question: who the hell is this guy?

So, Rod cuts us to a clip from a 2005 sermon entitled No More Parades, where he is talking about not just drawing a line in the sand but invading the other side.  Now, I really don’t understand why all these pastors want to take what Jesus said, and flip it on its side.  You see Jesus DREW and line in the sand and then said, “he who has not sinned, throw the first stone,” he didn’t fucking invade anything.

Parsley then goes on to talk about John Harper.  Harper was (allegedly) a pastor who was on the Titanic, how this story ties into not having parades, I don’t know.  But this horse’s ass of a man goes into this great description with, I shit you not, tears.  He talks about how John Harper started preaching as the ship was sinking, he was the guy who caught Jack and Rose screwing in the cars, remember?  Anyway, Harper was preaching and there was an extra spot on a life boat and he turned it down because there were other people on the other side of the boat that hadn’t heard the “Word of Christ.”  He didn’t turn the spot down to physically give it to the people who need actual saving, nope, he turned it down so he could yell at them about pretend saving.  Needless to say, John Harper dies in the end of the (ok, alright, it was touching) story; but this asshole Hot Rod Parsley was crying and yelling and doing this whole song and dance about Harper being possessed by the spirit of the lord (hypothermia is another option, oddly not mentioned by Parsley).

The program brought us back to Hot Rod outside, and as he’s babbling about something he starts to prove to everyone that he is a vain, cocky, jackoff when he says, “but I can’t start preachin’ now there’s a road out there and all the cars will slow down just to hear me preach.”  DICK HEAD!  First it’s No More Parades, then it’s cars slowing down to hear him talk?  I thought that was the basis of a parade.  This guy is like on of those car salesmen that pisses you off to no end and the next clip get under my skin like nobody’s business:  Parsley is all about numbers and money, which is obvious since he is talking about how we must pack all the churches with people.  He goes into an elaborate rant about opening up new churches, how every time he passes an open lot he prays that Jesus will send a church so the homosexuals of the neighborhood can repent (shit you not).  Leave it to the superchurch pastor to solve all our problems, if our only problems are that our hair stylist was a total bitch that last time and we really want him to meet Jesus so he won’t work there anymore.

But wait, there’s more!  If you give TBN a, “gift,” of $79 you can get the 8 disk set of Hot Rod’s, “best sermons.”  To be honest I couldn’t care less what you believe as long as you don’t contradict yourself, demean others, or force your ideologies on me.  But when people like Hot Rod show up and say shit like this, it feels like they are almost purposefully trying to piss me off.  It’s not right to make a living off of people looking for a faith, it goes against pretty much the whole bible.  Hopefully, someday I will be able to run out of material for this site, but with people like this struttin’ their shit everyday I don’t think it will happen anytime soon.

It’s just like a movie, but much more violent, a hell of a lot shorter, and with crumby metal music playing.  What is it?  You guessed it - heavy metal Christian music videos!  Nothing says, “I love Jesus and I genuinely care about the well being of other people,” like death metal and disturbing images of murder and mutilated animals (you know basically everything the Christian Church stands for).  But I do have to give the bands props for finding a new way to, “praise the Lord,” by getting a bunch of crazed teens to punch each other in a mosh pit.

The first band up is called The Reaping.  Everyone in the band is thrashing around playing their music, but in-between the fantastic shots of the would-be-singer, “singing,” there are disturbing images of a decapitated pig.  Eventually, after more headbanging, it is evident that there is some sort of butchering going on for a feast; so the pig head was for dinner, it’s ok!  Then the man at the head of a table keels over and dies.  Oh no it’s a poising!  Just like the twelve apostles did to the Pharisees right?  Did I miss something here?  Why does a, “Christian,” music video have someone being poisoned in it?  Oh, sorry, I forgot that Jesus poisoned people all the time, that’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about, right?

I’ve never been a big fan of music videos; short, plotless, confusing films have never really been my bag, but i have to say the next video intrigued me.  It’s by a rather popular band called Norma Jean.  The video isn’t necessarily violent but has a what-the-fuck-is-going-on feel to it.  I can just see the producer pitching the idea to the band: “Ok, so there is this underground bunker, right?  Yeah and there are two really skinny boys riding stationary bikes that are powering machines and there is a screen on the back wall showing weird plants and animals.  Rad, right?”  There are some mild torture scenes where they inject the kids with hypodermic needles and what-not, but nothing too bad.  Although, one has to wonder what an underground testing facility would have to do with Jesus, maybe Nike was in charge of this video?

The church I grew up in used to brag about how they, “loved everyone,” and that violence is not the answer, yada, yada, yada; everyone has heard this schpeil.  I understand that in order to convert all the young guns they need to be hip-for-Christ, but I thought most of the time the Church tried to hide all the horrible violent acts they committed in the past.  The really ironic thing is that one of the commercials in between videos is about being a, “peaceful warrior.”  So why the violence?  Why decapitated animals and tortured kids on bikes?  Do these videos have anything to do with religion at all?  I turned off the television confused at the meaning behind the videos.  So if I am missing something here, if there are biblical references that I am missing out on, please let me know, let me in on the secret.

Recently I had the distinct pleasure of viewing a skateboarding documentary on television.  The channel was “JCTV,” and the documentary was called “D.O.P.E.”  At first I was turned off to the whole concept simply because it was on the cool young adult version of TBN, but as I forced my self to watch the whole thing I was pleasantly surprised by the first hour and the second hour wasn’t half bad.

The film follows young professional skateboarders in the 70’s and 80’s when, “sidewalk surfing,” morphed into the sport I know and love today.  Blah, blah, blah, all the skaters spiral into a heavy drug addiction - and it all started when they took that puff of weed (if only they hadn’t inhaled, they could have became governor of California).  Their lives take a one-eighty, they start hitting harder and harder drugs like meth and coke; I really shouldn’t have to explain this part, all anti-drug documentaries have the same middle section where they interview the mother and father and they say something like, “I couldn’t believe my son/daughter  was taking __________(insert drug of choice here), I had no idea until it was to late.”  Then the friend is interviewed and he says something along the lines of, “yeah I saw him taking _________(drug) and I told him to stop but he wouldn’t.  The _________ had such a strong hold on him by that point…..”  But instead of blaming it on the person’s addictive personality and the mental bond said person’s brain made between the drug and happiness, the narrator decides that it is all Satan’s fault for giving these poor kids a crack pipe.  Now the movie was all fine and dandy until this point. But at that pivotal moment I realized why it was showing on “JCTV”.

I assume everyone has been preached to at one point in their lives, if not I salute you for avoiding the mega-church scare tactics I preached for the majority of my young life.

Getting back to D.O.P.E… By this point in the film Satan had a grip on all the young skateboarders through drugs and, by golly, he was not going to let go without a miracle.  But he only saved a couple guys.  Some of them had to hit rock bottom like normal people and go to rehab and relapse and go back to rehab, I think a couple of the non-influental characters actually died, but God forbid the director focus on them - if Jesus didn’t save them, they’re not important.

So God miraculously saves these, “survivors,” from their addictions, and replaces that empty hole with another addiction: preaching in prisons, or doing crummy documentaries.  But don’t mind that they all get together at the end for a friendly BBQ to reminisce about that one time they were famous and had money, and women, and really really good crack.