Holy Moley

Just the thing for the kids! What little Dick and Jane need in the way of promoting values and all the other good things religion brings to life is to spend their family vacation in Orlando Florida watching a half naked Jew being tortured to death so that their miserable, sinful and damned little 6 year old souls won't go to hell to be tortured in perpetuity by God's evil twin. That's what the Holy Land Experience amusement park is about - that and converting the Jews, of course.

Holy Land Experience isn't like Disneyland, stinking with tolerance for gay people - it's for Christians and Christians like their blood, pain and suffering as realistic as possible - for the kids' sake of course. As CNN reported yesterday, the Holy Land Experience has been having financial problems and has had to close a few times, but now that Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world's largest Christian television network has bought the place and given it plenty of advertising, business is brisk again and thanks to the money they have spread around Florida's biggest amusement operation: the Florida Legislature, the government is going to allow you to support them with a tax exemption. I wonder if putting a bleeding Jew on a pole in front of my house will get me a tax break too?

Now what of those who would take Jesus as a teacher of morals, giving an ear to his words rather than reveling in gruesome torture? That's a matter of little profit and an affair for those of letters not of superstition. Should anyone venture to criticise me for mocking God or Christianity or Christians, and I'm sure someone will; it's those demented primitives who attend such preposterous passion plays and the mountebanks, charlatans and grifters who milk them of their meager assets and force us to assist them that I mock and mock enthusiastically.

Nothing but free argument, raillery and even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush. 21 April 1803