Scientology Strikes Again

More Tom “I may be a crackpot but I’m not gay” Cruise news: apparently Viacom pulled last night’s scheduled repeat of the high-rated “Trapped in the Closet” South Park episode after Cruise threatened to cancel all publicity for Mission Impossible 3 if Comedy Central aired the episode that satirizes Scientology and mocks his sexuality again.

eBay Atheist

On eBay: Send an atheist to his local church!

Everytime I come home, I pass this old Irish church. I promise to go into that church every day– for a certain number of days– for at least an hour each visit. For every $10 you bid, I will go to the Church for 1 day. For $50, you would have me going to mass every day for a week.

Current bid: a whopping US $280.

Scrupulosity

This sounds like a Police album but in fact scrupulosity is “a debilitating form of obsessive-compulsive disorder which takes the form of excessively fastidious religious observance, often in completely arbitrary ways, and fear of not being sufficiently devout or virtuous.”

Null Device:

Fortunately, drugs such as Zoloft and Paxil can be used to treat scrupulosity. I wonder how many potential saints the world loses every year to modern psychopharmacology.

Got God?

New research indicates that belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

Somewhere, FZ’s nodding “told you so”.