Hi, this is the Almighty. Do you have 5 minutes for a short phone survey?

"Fine, we'll put God in charge of the data collection." – overheard, Harvard Yard

Because Whitey Bulger cockblocked him LAST time he was in the Pope's bedroom

"I want to have some really high-profile Catholic students soon. Then I can visit the Vatican by myself, without anybody from the mob. I don't want to meet the Pope or anything like that. I just want to see his house and his bedroom and stuff." -- guy talking on his cell phone, Harvard Square

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive those who trespass against us . . . --Molly
Oh, you know Lauryn Hill too! --Abbe

Dinner conversation at the Christian Fellowship house

Guy 1: Those two have been dating for 6 years. It's basically like they're married.
Guy 2: Um, except there's one thing missing.
Guy 1: What's that?
Guy 3: The ring!
Guy 1: Ohhhh.
Guy 2: Well, then there are TWO things missing.
Guy 1: What's the other thing?
Guy 3: The other ring!
Guy 1: Ohhhh.

Do unto others

Overheard in line at Target, from a "dude" looking college kid:
I was babysitting my boss' cat and Sean, my weird roommate, he hated the cat. So when he leaves the house, I put the cat in his room! He came home, he's all, "How'd the cat get in my room?" I'm sitting in the living room, reading my Bible.

"You want an A-minus?! Pfft. I only gave Jesus Christ a B+, you know." -- my supervising teacher, to a student

I can already picture God sitting in his office dreaming up his plan: "I'll make him a famous musician. Then I'll give him millions of dollars. Then I'll give him Petra Nemcova. And then *cracking up* and then I'll put him together with Paris Hilton *laughing hysterically* and when his penis falls off I'll jump out from behind the clouds and scream 'Punk'd!'"

--The Superficial on James Blunt

This is where I come from, people

It's Jesus vs. Satan on Rubber Avenue

BY PAUL SINGLEY

Copyright © 2007 Republican-American

A battle between good and evil is brewing on Rubber Avenue.

Workers at two neighboring businesses in a small shopping plaza at 195 Rubber Ave. have differing opinions about whether or not people should show support for Jesus. An owner of a shop that puts photos onto DVDs placed a sign in front of a parking lot, which is used by both businesses, that says, "Easter: Beep for Christ."

A tattoo artist next door countered Friday with a sign that says, "Honk twice for..." and shows a caricature of a red devil underneath the text.

And so the battle began.

"Beep! Honk, honk!" Those were the sounds that blared all day from the cars of hundreds of commuters who traveled on Rubber Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the borough. Some beeped twice, while others gave just one toot on their car horns.

Claudette Soden, a devout Christian and owner of Photos Onto DVD, fired the first shot last week when she put up her Easter sign. Phil Young, who works at No Regrets next door to Soden's business, countered on Friday morning with his satanic sign.
Soden says Jesus is her "partner in business," and she wants everyone to know it.

"His sign is not bothering me, but I know it's bothering Jesus," she said. . "And children are going to pass by that sign and say, 'What is that? It looks like a devil.' And what are parents going to say to that?"

Young said his clients come from a range of religious backgrounds and cultures, and he doesn't want them to feel alienated from his business.

"My main point is that we share a parking lot, and what goes on in this parking lot represents not only hers, but both shops," he said. "What she does inside her business is her business. I would not tell her to get rid of the sign."

He said he is not a satanist, and respects every religion, adding that he has friends who follow several different religions.

"More people have been killed in the name of God than over anything else, and so I don't think people should fight about religion," he said. "Satan is part of the same religion as Christ, so it's a contrast, not a competing religion."

Both signmakers say they simply have a difference of opinion, and respect each other's right to freedom of speech. They just want commuters to know what they're honking for because neither wants to take down their respective sign.

At the risk of being offensive...

"So God was like, 'Kill your son.' And Abraham was like, 'OK, I'll do it.' And then God was all like, "Bitch, you just got punk'd!!!' "

- me telling a Bible story

More about sheep

"But the question is, how do you transfer the holiness from the Jew to the sheep?"

--Professor (during a class on Chaucer)

O We Like Sheep

"Like Barking Cats? Bees, Honey and Religion in Judges 14:8"

--name of a biblical studies article

They say don't mix religion and science in an educational context, but I think my professor does it well

This is, verbatim, what my professor said during our first genetics lecture:

"In the beginning, there was Mendel. And he said, “Let there be peas.” And there were peas, and it was good. And he put the peas into the garden, saying unto them, “Increase and multiply. Segregate, and assort yourselves independently.” And they did, and it was good. And now it came to pass that when Mendel gathered up his peas, he divided them into round and wrinkled, and he called the round ‘dominant’ and the wrinkled ‘recessive’, and it was good. But now Mendel saw that there were 450 round peas and 102 wrinkled peas. This was Not Good, for the law stateth that there should only be 3 round for every wrinkled, and Mendel said unto himself, “Gott im himmel, an enemy has done this! He has sown bad peas in my garden under the cover of night.” And Mendel smote the table in righteous wrath, saying, “Depart from me, you cursed and evil peas, into the outer darkness, where thou shalt be devoured by the rats and the mice!” And lo, it was done. And there remained 300 round peas and 100 wrinkled peas, and it was good. It was very, very good, and Mendel published."

The New York Times is crowing about a St Paul evangelical-megachurch preacher who is taking the politics out of his sermons:

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses. “I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

rest of article

The Da Vinci Code: The Legacy: The Musical

Some woman cornered me and wanted to talk privately after the lecture. She pulled out scrolls and scrolls of photocopied material from the Torah, in Hebrew, and insisted that the spaces between the characters was some kind of code. Then she pulled out a map of the middle east with certain boundaries blackened. "What's that look like?" she asked, indicating something vaguely like the outline of a grilled chicken burrito.
"The Gaza Strip?" I asked.
"No. It's Noah's Ark, can't you see? And this one?"
"Er...Jordan, perhaps?"
"No. It's the face of Christ." and on and on.
It seems the Masons are assassinating people who are trying to crack the code, but there is a code (what it conceals I never found out) revealed in mysterious ways. Could I help her by assisting in the unearthing of documents that would prove whatever it was she was trying to prove? (She broke down and cried a few times and I promised not to finger her to the Masons)

-- e-mail from my mom

Culture Blend

Don't let Jesus catch you "ridin' dirty".

- On a billboard at an A.M.E. Church near my house in Detroit

That does kind of encapsulate Loyola

I was on hold over there, and the phone played a song by Hootie and the Blowfish and a song from Jesus Christ Superstar.

another (sac)religious quote

Times like this, I think, yes. Yes, there is a God. And he is a malevolent and wrathful deity.

--my dad, waxing philosophical as the two of us sit in a campground in Chattanooga, TN, in a car with a burned-out transmission, consuming red wine and waiting for a tow truck.

Word, A.O.

But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python.

--Maybe I'll wait for the DVD

In Which This Blog Does Not Deviate From Its Recent Obsession

I gave [this homeless guy] a dollar, and he was really happy. And then
I looked back, and he was gone. Well, he walks on crutches, and
there's no way he could have gotten out of there that fast unless he
had a car. I thought, Well, I'm out of this. He is not Jesus. I wanted
to go back there and say to him, "You're not Jesus!"
--a woman in my ethics class

Church voicemail is patently wack. --Kate

grace and peace be with you, this is b----- baptist. for pastor
e-----, just wait for the beep, and remember Jesus loves you and has a
wonderful plan for your life.

--Kate's rendering of one such message