Holy crap

"RELIGION!"

The End Times are upon us, my children. Well, maybe not, but it's been quite the theological fortnight for me.

A few weekends back I had a much belated co-birthday party with a cult theme, which was visited by some angels and demons and non-denominational unearthly figures. Fun stuff. I call this guy Pig Jeebus and I'm pretty sure he's what the future of the human race will look like once we sort out all this human-pig cross-cloning business which is surely what's keeping the eggheads from attending to the global warming stuff.

Then on Friday night I ended up at a bar which might well be one of Dante's circles of Hell. At one point I was wandering around a room that looked like Heironymous Bosch had eaten the palace at Versailles and then upchucked all over Tony Montana's Miami mansion, when I turned to a friend and said "this is horrible". He immediately replied "I was just thinking 'horrific'". It was the kind of place you'd see in an 80s straight-to-video flick starring Mickey Rourke in which his investigation of a mysterious and big-haired femme fatale takes him deep into a labyrinth of passion and murder. The title would be some combination of the words "obsession", "naked", "deadly" and "hidden" and he'd end up at this club that masks a cult of demon-worshippers who perform unspeakable rituals in the basement. The club would be supposed to come across as all decadent and evilly lavish, but you'd be thinking "No, that's Mickey Rourke, and like him it just looks tasteless and cheap."

So that's where I ended up on Friday. If you want to know what circle of Hell you belong in, go here.

Saturday over lunch I was somehow talking about Satanism with someone, who was idly pointing out that it rests on pretty solid and non-baby-sacrifice requiring philosophical principles. But we agreed that it's probably not worth pursuing too seriously. He pointed out that even if it is sound in a theoretical way, you might be better off just not taking the risk. If you turn out to be wrong, well, you've really blown your chances. I just pointed out that it's really, really uncool to tell people you're a Satanist.

Yesterday I opened the newspaper to find a story on Pastafarianism, which struck me immediatley since I'd been explaining it to someone on Friday. That was eerie. I hadn't thought about the Flying Spaghetti Monster in years, and here is was, twice in less than a week.

But all of this is nothing compared to the strangeness of the new Christian web revolution, which seems aimed at taking absolutely everything you can find on the internet and God-ifying it.

Conservapedia is great. Some people noted that wikipedia was really a godless hive of anti-Christian slander, and was in fact "six times more liberal than the American public". Conservapedia replaces wikipedia's pagan bias with the true voice of the Lord, so you'll find articles explaining how kangaroos made it from Noah's Ark to Australia. They probably got here on rafts made of matted vegetation, apparently.

And since YouTube is all wicked teens miming to The Rapture and people videoing their warcraft battles, it's no wonder that some good soul came up with GodTube, which allows people to spread the word of the lord by uploading nice religious videos. It's awesome.

Here's someone explaining how proof of God's existence can be found in the humble banana, though you could very easily use his explanation to support something else.

And here's someone's take on the classic, if not quite Jesus-positive song "Baby Got Back", now changed to "Baby Got Book" (or "Baby Got Bible" - it's not entirely clear.)

Ladies? “Yeah!” Ladies? “Yeah!” Do you want to save people from Hades? “Yeah!”

I think I'm converted.