Italian museum defies pope over crucified frog

The Catholics are crying persecution again over what they see as a blasphemous mockery of a symbol of “God’s love”.

Boo-fucking-hoo! The wooden cross was a bloody, gruesome execution device, people! Wake up!

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian museum on Thursday defied Pope Benedict and refused to remove a modern art sculpture portraying a crucified green frog holding a beer mug and an egg that the Vatican had condemned as blasphemous.

The board of the Museion museum in the northern city of Bolzano decided by a majority vote that the frog was a work of art and would stay in place for the remainder of an exhibition.

The wooden sculpture by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger depicts a frog about 1 metre 30 cm (4 feet) high nailed to brown cross and holding a beer mug in one outstretched hand and an egg in another.

Called “Zuerst die Fuesse,” (Feet First), it wears a green loin cloth and is nailed through the hands and the feet in the manner of Jesus Christ. Its green tongue hangs out of its mouth.

*snip*

Pope Benedict, who is German himself and was recently on holiday not far from Bolzano, obviously did not agree.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope’s name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture. Pahl released parts of the letter, which said the work “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love”.

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

“Surely this is not a work of art but a blasphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people,” Pahl told Reuters by telephone.

“This decision to keep the statue there is totally unacceptable. It is a grave offence to our Catholic population,” he said.

Art experts defended the work.

“Art must always be free and the artist should not have any restrictions on freedom of expression,” Claudio Strinati, a superintendent for Rome’s state museums, told an Italian newspaper on Thursday.

I think this froggie is amusing, and think it’s even funnier how superstitious people get their panties in such a knot so as to make themselves sick over one person’s artistic expression. When they do this they draw even bigger attention to the artwork. I am sure the artists welcome their public protests.

Is prevarication a course in seminary colleges? Or do the liars and frauds just naturally navigate toward the ministerial profession? Our special today comes to you from Adelaide, Australia. Yes, we envy our friends in Oz for their lower numbers of Crusaders for Christ, but someone turned over a rather large rock and look who crawled out:

Disgraced pastor Michael Guglielmucci, porn addict (since age 12, no less), who for two years pretended to have cancer and used his “disease” to fleece his flock and get support. He even made a recording of a song, called “Healing,” sung at one point with an oxygen tube coming out of his nose. Here is a YouTube video of the song, with lyrics subtitled. It’s a painfully long and droning, repetitive POS. But I supply it to highlight the delightful irony of the lyrics juxtaposed to the situation Mr. Guglielmucci finds himself in.
>Healer-Guglielmucci-Planetshakers-Hillsong

From an interview with Michael’s father Danny Gugielmucci in The Australian,

“When he was about 12 he did vomit all the time, he’d get really really sick,” he said.

“He was in the Adelaide Children’s Hospital for seven weeks at one stage; he didn’t eat and we thought we were going to lose him.

“They took out his appendix, thinking that it might be that, but they realised that it wasn’t.

“They gave us the option of putting him in a psychiatric ward to see if there was something psychological but we felt uncomfortable with that at the time. (emphasis mine)

“We signed him out from hospital and then he would go a few months and then he would get sick again.

“We’d always take him to hospital; we’d always do the proper thing but they couldn’t get to the bottom of it until now.”

Mr Guglielmucci said he and his wife were in “absolute shock” to discover their son was not terminally ill.

“We have watched our son go through what we thought was cancer,” he said.

“My wife and I, over the past two years, have watched him vomit in buckets, having nosebleeds, and even his hair fell out in clumps at one stage. What the hell kind of porn is he into?

“Every time we saw him, we saw symptoms. He stayed with us for a while where we had to put a special air-conditioner in one of the rooms because he would heat up so much in the middle of winter.
I hear porn will do that for ya.

“He had this cold air-conditioner blowing on him to try to keep the heat down. As a professional minister I’ve stood in front of my congregation and cried and said to pray for my son.

“I’ve travelled the world asking people to pray for him. Can you imagine what a horrible thing it would be if I was playing a game? Well, it’s not like they invested anything in it…or did you pass the plate for him too?

“To be honest, I ask myself as a father, ‘What did I miss, what did I not do? What could I have done better?’ ” Um, maybe let him be analyzed and get therapy back when he was 12?

It seems the stress of living a double life guilted Michael into confessing to his minister father and his mother about the fake cancer and his 16 year porn addiction. They thought he had called them urgently to his side because he only had a short time to live. They were shocked- SHOCKED!- to find out he wasn’t dying! His wife of seven years was clueless also. He is NOW getting the psychiatric help he needs and the docs concur that he’s a pretty sick puppy. Wifey’s getting counseling too; “hasn’t made any decisions yet”.

The parents were last seen wandering around and mumbling, “He’s addicted to porn? Why couldn’t he just be dying? ”

Hat tip to my buddy “What” over at NGB for suggesting this post.

Update:

PASTOR Michael Guglielmucci has been told by church officials to report to police, who will investigate what has happened to money raised during his cancer deception.
The Australian Christian Churches told The Advertiser yesterday (Aug. 22) that it was auditing Mr Guglielmucci’s bank accounts, which included money donated from people touched by his hit song Healer.
{snip}
The ACC has promised that all money raised deceptively will be returned or donated to charity.
The Assemblies of God, Australia’s largest Pentecostal movement, adopted its new name of Australian Christian Churches in 2007.

The former pastor with one of Australia’s biggest youth churches, Planetshakers, inspired hundreds of thousands of young Christians around the world as he performed with an oxygen tube in his nose.

Healer became an anthem of faith for believers, many of whom are suffering illnesses and were praying for Mr Guglielmucci. The song, featured on Hillsong’s latest album, debuted at No. 2 on the ARIA charts.

In a YouTube video, he tells how the news from the hospital that he had “quite an aggressive form of cancer” inspired his song. “I just went home. I knew I had to go home and needed to get alone with God,” he says in the video.

“I walked into my studio at home and for some reason. . . I sat at a piano and began to worship.

“I sang that song from start to finish. I was crying. I just realised that God had given me an incredible gift and I realise that song was going to be my strength.”

Church community sources said Mr Guglielmucci attended his medical appointments alone.

Here is news in The Guardian concerning atheist UK foreign secretary David Miliband possibly becoming the next prime minister. It will take about 400 more years for the U.S. to get to this point, I am afraid.

In this climate of quarrels between religionists and secularists, there are very many reasons to hope for a non-believer at No 10

When Labour cabinet members were asked about their religious allegiances last December, following Tony Blair’s official conversion to Roman Catholicism, it turned out that more than half of them are not believers. The least equivocal about their atheism were the health secretary, Alan Johnson, and foreign secretary David Miliband.

The fact that Miliband is an atheist is a matter of special interest given the likelihood that he may one day, and perhaps soon, occupy No 10. In our present uncomfortable climate of quarrels between pushy religionists and resisting secularists - or attack-dog secularists and defensive religionists: which side you are on determines how you see it - there are many reasons why it would be a great advantage to everyone to have an atheist prime minister.

Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq.

Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from laws, and having seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism, satire and challenge.

Atheist leaders are going to be more sceptical about inculcating sectarian beliefs into small children ghettoised into publicly funded faith-based schools, risking social divisiveness and possible future conflict. They will be readier to learn Northern Ireland’s bleak lesson in this regard.

Atheist leaders will, by definition, be neutral between the different religious pressure groups in society, and will have no temptation not to be even-handed because of an allegiance to the outlook of just one of those groups.

*snip*

Despite appearances, the world is not seeing a resurgence of religion, only a big turning-up of the volume of religious voices. This is itself a response to increasing secularism among people tired of the disruptions, obstructions and conflicts religion so often causes. Public acknowledgement of atheism by a senior politician who might soon lead his country is just one indicator of the fact that the tide is actually running in the opposite direction: and that is a welcome and hopeful sign.

Maybe the “tide is running in the opposite direction” in the UK, but it certainly isn’t here in the U.S.

Ed note: To clarify–I did not post this to endorse Miliband as prime minister or his policies, I posted this to show that the UK is not afraid to elect an atheist and religion is not the centerpiece of politics there. We are centuries behind them in that regard.

Nothing major, just this comic site I found via conversation at a sports blog- of all things. Make sure your mouth is empty of liquid and spend a few moments in the archive here. Here’s an example, just a little sample:

Thanks to the Rational Reponse Squad for providing the link to one of the biggest Christian asshats on YouTube. (Atheists make him sick, btw.) I did some digging around to make sure this wasn’t a parody, and most of whom I read are taking his stupidity as legitimate ignorance. It’s been awhile since we have had this big of a dickwad to make fun of. He lacks even the most basic science education and is one of the most ignorant dumbfucks I have run across in awhile. Just read the comment section of his YouTube video:

I thought I posted this already, but I couldn’t find it.

Tasteless? Perhaps. But it still cracked me up…

Online Videos by Veoh.com

It seems that for hating pornography so much, Christians sure spend a lot of time and energy thinking about it (and more than just thinking about it in many cases) and overly-obsessed about what legal activities adults do in their free time and what they purchase with their own money. Vjack from Atheist Revolution once again brings attention to another bit of interesting news, this time about Christian Morality Police in Indiana who have nothing better to do in life than to camp out in front of a porn store and take photos of the patrons who go there, and also taking photos of their license plates numbers…AND posting them online! What sad lives they lead if this is all they have to do all day. With all the problems in the world, starving children, poverty, and people in need, this is what they choose to do with their time. Maybe they are trying to catch their own spouses or pastors going there? (Probably quite a few have been caught.)

I love the suggestion one person had that the patrons should have a little fun with these paranoid morons by dressing up as priests and nuns when they visit the store. And love the shirt that vjack says he would wear. LOL!

Fire reported at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church

TOPEKA | The Topeka Fire Department is investigating a small fire outside of a church whose members protest at soldier’s funerals.

A fence and garage at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church became engulfed in flames early Saturday, according to the Topeka Capitol-Journal Web site. The fire did not spread to the church building.

darn!

Topeka Fire Marshal Greg Bailey said the cause of the fire has not been determined. However, a spokeswoman for the church, Shirley Phelps-Roper, said she believes it was deliberately set.

Maybe goddidit!

Members of the church frequently picket military funerals, arguing that the deaths of U.S. troops overseas are part of God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Bailey said damage is estimated at $10,000.

What does the Phelps family have to say about this on their Westboro Baptist Church blog?
“Yo, dummies! God is on his way and he’s got fire coming out his nostrils!”