God Had A Wife?

We have been watching the brilliant Lucifer and all the Biblical characters are there, Satan, Mazikeen, Lilith, Cain, Eve, Uriel and other named Angels and demons and then suddenly up pops God's wife and i was 'God had a wife?'
As i have a man of the cloth literally on my doorstep i went and asked him and got the vague answer that in the old Jewish texts, when God was going by the name of Yahweh, they ruled side by side as a divine man and wife and her name was Asherah and there were statues to both everywhere in ancient times but for today Christian's and Jews there is only God, so what happened?
'Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together' according to an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion so it seems that she was edited out of the Bible when the Christians began taking bits and pieces from the Jewish text for their own religion, in some cases referring to her as a sacred tree in an effort to hide her although references to her did have to be edited out in later versions of the Bible because they missed a few references such as in Deuteronomy 33.2-3, when she is said to be 'at his right hand his own Asherah'.
After being written out of the Christian Bible, to further kick her further away from her ex-husband, she became morphed into a Pagan goddess and worshiping Pagans was a huge no-no and any statues to her had to be destroyed because of the whole False Idols bit of the commandments.
Obviously, today's Christians don't want to know that their top banana has an ex-wife knocking around and definitely don't want to acknowledge the 70 kids they supposedly had together, preferring to concentrate on the 1 Godly offspring which was a result of making a 14 year girl who was betrothed to another pregnant because that is so much better apparently.

Raising Something For All The Saviours And Sons Of God Crucified

Today is Good Friday, or to give it it's full name here in the UK, 'Wahoo, a day off work' but i did find out something and that that Jesus supposedly took his last breath at 3pm or as it states in Mark 15: 33:34, 37: 'At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And at three in
the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last'.
If you are reading this before 3pm today then lift a Hot Cross Bun and toast the guy who died so we can have a day off work, go shopping and drink latte's in Costa's (it is what he would have wanted afterall) but if it's after 3pm then bad luck, you missed it but don't despair because religion is chock full of  messiah like 'saviours' who were crucified before ascending to heaven and they all got into the act long before a certain long haired Carpenter.
The Sumerians can lay claim to starting up the whole nailing up the savior thing when Inanna/Ishtar was crucified in 3400 BC and if that was good enough for one iof the first religions then it was good enough for later ones such as Thulis of Egypt who was also crucified on a cross in 1700 BC, as was Krishna of India in 1200 BC and Crite of Chaldea in 1200 BC although in 1170 BC the Phrygian's of modern day Turkey didn't bother with a wooden cross and just nailed him straight onto a tree.
Thammuz of Syria found a cross with his name on it in 1160 BC, the Druids God Hesus/Eros was given a lamb and an elephant when he was crucified in 834 BC but Bali of Orissa had no such animals when he was hung up in 725 BC.
Indra of Tibet died on a cross in 725 BC, Iao of Nepal had a very close up view of a tree trunk in 622 BC and Buddha Sakia of India not only had the bad luck of being pinned to a tree by an arrow in 600 BC, but the tree then split at right angles to form a cross that hung the body.
Persian God Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace and died on a cross in 600 BC whereas Quezalcoatl of Mexico wasn't even given the comfort of a cross and was cruified on a rock in 587 BC unlike Indonesia's Wittoba of the Bilingonese in 552 BC or Greek God Prometheus who was not only crucified in 547 BC but had his liver grown back after being eaten by an Eagle everyday.
Quirinus of Rome never saw 505 BC as his crucifixion but as his life left his body, the whole earth was enveloped in darkness but the Thracian God Zalmoxis only pretended to be crucified in 500 BC and turned up years later in a 'ta-da, im still here' moment.
So in all, don't feel bad if you missed the 3pm Christian Crucifixion because there are so many 'Saviours' and 'sons of God' who have died for our sins/given human's fire/bumped off by enemies that whatever the time is, there is a good chance that one of them died about now anyway.

Fall To Your Knee's America

I didn't catch his name but there was a leader from an American Christian fundamentalist Group on TV today who proudly said that Christian Nationalism was on the increase in America and the time was ripe to push to make America a country that literally lives exactly as the Bible states.
A recent Gallup survey put the amount of Americans who interpret the Bible literally as the actual word of God at just over a third which in a nation of 350 million is a lot of people taking the what the Bible says as literal including i assume the bits about talking snakes, dragons (some with the head of a rooster), unicorns and multi-headed, fire breathing sea serpents.
So if the Christian Fundamentalists do have their way then there will be some big changes coming to America such as the diet because Leviticus 11-13 is very clear on what you can, and can't eat and especially animals which chew cud.
If your diet currently includes camel, rabbit, pork, eagle, vulture, kite (red or black), raven, owl, gull, hawk, osprey, stork, heron or bat, weasel, rat, lizard, gecko, snake, crab, oysters, whelks, octopus, squid or mussels then you had better buy another cook book.
You can eat ox, sheep, goat, deer, gazelle, roebuck, wild goat, ibex, antelope and mountain sheep as well as anything from the sea that has fins and scales and locust, katydid, cricket and grasshoppers.
After your dinner you can then set about feeding the women who have been isolated as unclean because they are having their period (7 days isolation), have given birth to a boy (40 days) or a girl (73 days) and once the isolation has ended, you can always sell them as per Leviticus 27:2-5 which sets out the scales as a woman aged 20 to 60 is worth 30 shekels and 10 shekels for a female aged 5 to 20.
Obviously one of the big Commandments is number 6, Thou shall not kill but the Bible does make some exceptions so God gives his blessing to kill gays (Leviticus 20:13), People Who Don't Listen to Priests' (Deuteronomy 17:12), Witches (Exodus 22:17), Fortunetellers (Leviticus 20:27), anyone who hits their parents (Exodus 21:15), anyone who curses their parents (Leviticus 20:9), adulterers (Leviticus 20:10), anyone who follows another religion (Exodus 22:19), non-believers (2 Chronicles 15:12-13), Women Who Are Not Virgins On Their Wedding Night (Deuteronomy 22:20-21),  Blasphemers (Leviticus 24:10-16), and Sunday workers (Exodus 31:12-15).
So you have eaten your Grasshopper stew, sold your wife and machine gunned down the sinners at the local gay nightclub but the Bible isn't finished yet because sins come in many forms including wearing gold jewellery having braids in your hair (1 Timothy 2:9) ripped jeans (Leviticus 10:6) and having a tattoo (Leviticus 19:28)
So by now you have thrown out your ripped jeans and sent all your jewellery to Cash 4 Gold and the only thing left in your wardrobe is a selection of polyester blend skirts. Oh dear, two kinds of material mixed together is a no-no (Leviticus 19:19) and that short back and sides haircut, hell awaits (Leviticus 19:27) as it also does of you own an American football, a pig skin American Football (Leviticus 11:7-8).
Obviously, to live your life according to the literal Bible doesn't sound much fun so it must come as a relief when you sit down and actually give the whole idea of religion some proper thought and realise, hang on, it's all a load of nonsense and live your life properly knowing there is not a loving and caring invisible man in the clouds wanting you to kill that guy who served you in Walmart last Sunday or banishing you to burn in hell for eating a Whelk or wearing those earrings you got for Christmas. Lucky eh?

Pornographic And Indecent Bible Ban

 As it says in the Bible, you reap what you sow although not that schoolchildren in Utah will be able to see it because it has been banned in a brilliantly hilarious bit of reaping and sowing.
As the right wing famously like to do, they ban books that may open peoples eyes to the absolute nonsense they spout and Utah’s Republican lawmakers decided to clamp down on pornographic or indecent texts in school books and the law was written so vaguely that any parent could object to any book and they would have a look and remove it but where the Utah numpties had all things LGBTQ+ or race related in mind, one switched on parent took full advantage and said that there is one book which is full of objectionable material, the Bible.       
Armed with eight pages of examples of incest, masturbation, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape and even infanticide, the parent presented their case, the Governors reluctantly agreed that there is some really messed-up stuff in the Bible and removed it from its elementary and middle schools.
Got to love that.

Religion In Retreat

Britain has never been that religious a country with under 1% attending Church with any regularity so the latest results from the 2021 Census that the no religion box was ticked by 37.2% of the population, up from 28% a decade ago, is no surprise although the Churches answer of making Christ more widely known is because i am of the mind that the more you look into the writing of the Bible, the more you realise what a load of cobblers it is.
Most people come to religion through their parents who introduce it to their children from birth and have it reinforced through visits to Holy places, school and other grown ups although some, when they are old enough to think for themselves, question what they have been told and arrive at the conclusion that  it isn't what they were told.
I always think if you have looked at the 'evidence' and still believe, then you haven't looked hard enough because it all falls away once you have a serious look at it and the way that it came about and the damage that is does around the World.
With Christmas fast approaching, it is common knowledge that the Church shoehorned their guy into the Roman Saturnalia Winter Festival, the Church even fudged the date of birth of their man to cash in on an established festival which they also did with Easter which was another Spring Festival celebrating the Pagan Fertility Goddess Eostre.
Almost every tale in the Bible was plagarised from existing religions when the Christian Marcion of Sinope created the Bible by pulling together all the best stories from the other religions and erased the original names and inserted his own so Jesus's birth to a virgin was 'borrowed' from India's Buddha and Romes own Mithra, Garden Of Eden from Persia's Ormuzd, Noah's Ark swiped from Babylonian's Utnapishtim and Jonah and the Whale plagarised from the Hindu's Saktideva but it gradually evolved to the Book that gets thumped today.
Religion of all flavours has easily been the cause of most death and destruction on the Planet in some God or anothers name, watch any news station or read any newspaper to see how that is continuing today so i would love to know what the religious folk have seen, heard, read, watched or been told that makes them believe despite knowing that it is just the Johnny come lately on the religious scene with great PR despite being it blatantly being begged, borrowed and stolen from other religions.

Special Guest Blogger: St Hildegard von Bingen

Lock up your Communal Wine and wave those rosary beads in the air like you just don't care because St Hildeberg is coming to town for a night of Praise and Worship hymns that’ll have you shoving your fist in the air because i was the 12th Century's music maestro but when i wasn't rocking the aisles, i was writing down prophesies given to me directly from God and some bits of medical information.
The youngest of ten children, when i was 8 my parents placed me in the care of a Benedictine nun and not long after i began to experience visions and wrote them down and the nuns were so impressed that they made me the Superior but our little church got so popular, especially as i was very handy with the herbs and medicinal arts that we had to move to a new, bigger convent.
The Abbot assigned a monk to document everything i saw and the Pope himself got wind of it and my fame began to spread all throughout Europe and people traveled near and far to hear of my visions and seek help, especially men who seemed particularity afflicted with phlegm and we all know why, a certain man in a certain garden eating a certain forbidden fruit. Just saying if man had remained in paradise, he would not have had the flegmata within his body which introduces infirmities to the human body.
12th Century Medicine was particularly advanced, i knew all about the stones found in the gizzards of swallows hung around the patients neck cured epileptics, insanity and lunatic patients and mandrake root left in a spring for a day and then prayed over cured depression and for men experiencing problems with their testicles, they should burn a swallow’s egg in its shell, grind it to a powder, add some chicken fat, and mix until a paste and rub into their testicles.
It was about this time that i began composing my songs, you may have heard of 'Ordo virtutum' which was the very first Opera and a popular little ditty i knocked out and Pope Benedict XVI gave me the name Doctor of the Church which is pretty cool name although the rock n roll lifetyle caught up with me during
a four date hymn and anthem tour of Europe and i was found dead in my bed aged 81.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Achilles

When you are the son of a king and a sea goddess, unkillable and prophesied to be stronger than either Zeus or Poseidon, it would be expected to be a bit up yourself but it wasn't that i was arrogant, i was just better at everything than everyone else.
Greece was a time of Gods and demi gods taking each other out and the Fates had prophesied that i would be killed at Troy so my mother trained me to be a fearless warrior and sent me to the Chiron School For Heroes and in order to make me immortal, she dipped me in the waters of the River Styx, thereby making my whole body invulnerable, except for the heel by which she had held me which would become a pretty important mistake later.
With a sword and shield made by the blacksmith to the gods himself, Hephaestus, i poo-pooed the Fates and led an army into battle against Troy and was cutting a swathe through the Roman army, arrows zinging off my unpenetrable skin but when i heard that Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae whose side i was fighting on gave away my wife as part of a peace deal, i laid down my sword and refused to fight anymore, deciding to see out the rest of the war sulking in a tent.
There was then a scuffle and my good friend Patroclus was killed by Hector, the eldest son of the Trojan king, so i picked up my sword and Hector soon found it being forcibly shoved through his throat and his body dragged behind my chariot around the tomb of Patroclus and then thrown onto a rubbish heap.
Back to the mowing down of Trojans by the wheel-barrowful, i helped the army raide some towns on the outskirts of Troy and took a young girl called Chryseis prisoner who just happened to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo who warned that as such, Apollo was on his side and would strike down the Greek forces with disease if we didn't release her.
Obviously we never and although Apollo had 'God of Plagues’ on his CV and disease and pestilence did strike the Greek forces, i was busy being challenged by Hector's little brother Paris who was ticked that his brother ended up with a sword shaped hole in his neck and his dead body dumped on a rubbish tip.
Now as an almost unkillable demi-God armed with a weapon made by the gods, i quite fancied my chances against a mere mortal armed with a puny bow and arrow even if he did have Apollo in his corner but it is said that pride comes before a fall but the before in my case was the twang of a bow string followed by a sharp pain in my heel, the heel my mother forgot to make invulnerable.
I should have been a legend but as it turned out, what let me down was a leg end.

Church Still Obesessed With Same Sex Marriage

I have never got Religion or the religious at the best of times, to me if you believe in a God then you obviously haven't given it enough thought, but more than anything i don't get the refusal to accept same sex marriage.  
As long as two people love each other, why should it matter if they are of the same sex and if your only objection is the question of sex between same sex couples, then why is what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom any concern of yours? If you were so obsessed about sex between a man and a woman then there is a name for that, you would be a Pervert.
The Church of England Website states that: 'Ministers can not carry out or bless same-sex marriages' and  ahead of their Conference, some Ministers have been calling around delegates to propose that they reaffirm the position that 'marriage is between a man and a woman and legitimising or blessing of same-sex unions is not permissible'.
Many Ministers have refused to agree to the position, saying that they should be able to bless two people joined together in holy marriage, regardless of gender and have been contacting the President of the Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, to discuss the issue although Welby has already sparked anger among some in the church by banning partners of gay clergy from the event.
Some members of the General Synod have issued a letter saying that opposing same sex marriage will irreparably damage the trust between LGBTQ+ members and the Church of England and they seem to understand that religion is becoming more and more irrelevant to many as Science has done its best to show faith for the nonsense that it is and by keeping with their outdated and primitive views it will only usher in a time when future generations will look back on it as a peculiar curiosity.
As religion has been responsible for more wars and deaths throughout history than any other cause, that would probably not be a bad thing.

Danger To Religion If Life Found Elsewhere

The Curiosity Rover found that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support living microbes and the Perseverance Rover which has been trundling around the Martian landscape since 2021 has not only discovered proof that the rocks on the Red Planet interacted with water multiple times over the eons, but they also contained organic molecules.
The Perseverance Team are quick to temper expectations that organics is not a confirmation that life once existed and there are both biological and non-biological mechanisms that create organics and they won't know for certain until the samples are returned and studied here on Earth, in 2030, but it does throw up some very interesting questions, especially for those of a more religious persuasion.
For centuries the domain of the church has been chipped away at as Science challenged the events of the Bible, people such as Copernicus and Darwin, and religion has had to adjust itself to try and stay relevant but at some point in the future we will discover life on other planets, or it will discover us.
With advances in telescopes, space exploration and the discovery of even more exoplanets which could sustain life, it is only a matter of time before we find evidence of life elsewhere amongst the trillions and trillions of other planets which should prove uncomfortable for the God squad.
The likely answer would be the religious leaders would 'find' the answer written in their holy texts somewhere but if the other life is intelligent enough to have it's own theories how how and why they are there, it could get interesting.
Science has done its best to show religion for what it is, a man-made concept to explain things they did not know how to explain at the time, but the discovery of life in the other reaches of the Universe should be yet another body blow to religion on it's way to becoming something that future, enlightened generations will look back on as a curiosity.

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu God Yama

People can be quite intimidated when they first meet me, i'm a Death God afterall but i sort of got the job by default, as the first human i was also the first to die so with no other candidates i just got handed the job.
Being the first dead person in the Underworld was very strange and very lonely at first but there was no shortage of mortals arriving to keep me company since and my job is to have a bit of a nosy at what you did in your life and then decide one of three fates for you based on Karma.
So what can you expect when you finally get here? Well my porter Vaidhyata will take you to my two attendants Kalapurusa and Chanda who will usher you to me for an audience and then my scribe Citragupta will read all your worldly deeds from the Agrasandhani where everything you have ever done, good and bad, are logged.
Then it's my job to weigh it all up from my throne of judgement, or Vicarabhu, allocate you a score and consider the three options that i have at my disposal.
Depending on how good or bad you have done when the score is totted up, too low and i escort you to the 21 levels of Naraka which is our version of hell where you are tortured for a bit and then once you are suitably rehabilitated, you come back to me.  
If your Karma score is not too shabby or you have been through Naraka, i offer a route back to the World in the form of a re-birth so you can have another go but be warned it may not necessarily be as a human, you could be a cow or a chicken or whatever i feel like that day.
The highest scorers get the best option which is to be given immortality by drinking Soma made from mushrooms and sent to live forevermore with the wise and saintly spirits of the departed ancestors of Hindu culture to enjoy eternal happiness and shine as stars in the celestial heavens.  
You are probably now worrying about all the things you have done and yep, they have all been written down but there is a loophole to spare you the justice of my court, you just need to make sure that you die in a holy place so as long as you can arrange to draw your final breath in a Temple then that time you stole all that stationery from work or scribbled your ex-boyfriends telephone number on the toilet door in the local pub need never be mentioned.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Bertha of Kent

When Ethelbert proposed to me he asked me if i wanted to help him rule over England and my first reaction was to say hell no, i'm a sophisticated French woman and your people live in huts made from their own dung and they pray to trees and things and would the occasional bath kill them but when he explained that he was only the King of Kent which is a small bit of it on the side, then i agreed as long as i didn't have to do any of that pagan nonsense and could stay Christian and have my own Church to pray in.
I was therefore the first Christian queen of England and hubby gave me a former Roman church in the City of Canterbury although it was only mine for a short while, a visiting Priest from Rome sent by Pope Gregory to bring Christianity to England took it over.
The Anglo-Saxon period followed the Roman withdrawal which left UK with a power vacuum that was filled by warlords with violence, foreign invasion and occupation and Pope Gregory expected me to not only convert Ethelbert but introduce Christianity myself but i said i'm not going into their dung houses, ugh, how disgusting. A commoners doody on the sole of my boot. I shall have to find a patch of grass to wipe it on! Probably get shunned in the Palace, sorry about the pong you fellas, trod in a peasant house and couldn't get rid of the whiff and anyway, the place is swarming with Anglo Saxons with massive battle-axes so i'm not doing it.
So he sent monk Augustine instead and i persuaded hubby to meet him and not immediately shove a sword into his stomach and he gave him the freedom to preach and live in Canterbury, in my church.
I did get the hump but then Pope Gregory wrote to me personally to thank me for my actions in giving him my church and not allowing my husband to gut Augustine as soon as he stepped off the boat and i was all you're very welcome, it was only a Church etc etc.
He did have some clever ideas about how to do it, allowing the Pagans to keep their weird festivals but changing the name and slipping in  Jesus instead of their pagan Gods but they never really noticed, too high on the fumes from their own dung houses probably.
As England went on to become a Christian country, i started off events which fundamentally altered the course of history in the British isles although i have since been canonized as a saint, they still haven't sorted out a feast day for me which is pretty shoddy seeing as i have been dead for over 1500 years.

Special Guest Blogger: Mary Magdalene

I may be only the second-most famous Mary in the Bible but i wasn't Jesus' only female disciple, there was also Joanna, the wife of Chuza and somebody named Susanna, so for a man with facial hair and sandals, Jesus was actually pretty popular with the ladies.
Obviously all of us women were overshadowed by the men but i seem to have morphed into a prostitute whom Jesus forgave, and i proceeded to follow him around, washing his feet and redeeming myself from a life of sinful whoring.
I was always Christ's favorite but the myths surrounding my life came about when people started confusing me with other people, on account of the fact that there are just too many damn women in the Bible named Mary, me, his mum, Mary of Bethany who cooked Jesus dinner because it seemed the polite thing to do after he resurrected her brother, and a woman who lived a sinful life who may or may not also have been named Mary, and whom Jesus forgives to the confusion of his apostles who are aghast that he let her filthy mitts touch him, dumping perfume on his feet and wiping it off with their hair, which was a thing people did back then.
The medieval Catholic Church, deciding that there were just way too many Mary's in the Bible and that people were likely to get confused by them all so the Pope made an official decree that all three of us were the same person, called Mary Magdalene.
It all comes down to good old fashioned sexism because being the owner of a pair of boobs made you a lesser human in the World of the Church and they didn't want a woman being the equal of the men and they really hated that it was me there at all the big events including his crucifixion and resurrection.
It has really stuck in their craw that out of all the disciples and holy men, it was me who Jesus came to after he was resurrected although at first i thought he was the gardener and ignored him when he called me over.
He sent me to tell the other apostles the good news of his resurrection although they never actually believed me at first, Peter especially but then he was always jealous because Jesus would speak to me more than him.
The church retracted the claim in 1969, but because most people don't keep themselves up to date on the minutiae of Catholic dogma, the myth remains in Western cultre that Mary Magdalene is the 'sinful woman' who scrubbed Jesus' feet with her hair.
What did happen was my original statues and paintings had me all covered up in robes and looking Saintly but after the mixing me up with the other Mary's and my new job title of prostitute and sinner, my image began showing my naked body so i'm probably the only one of Jesus's disciples who's boobs you can look at although the chubby Peter had a fine pair himself so although he called me the bitch with tits, the only difference was i was supposed to have them, you wasn't Petey.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Abraham Kidunaia

As a young man i had everything i could ever want, a wealthy family and an excellent education and a beautiful girlfriend but what i didn't have was any damned peace and quiet and so i said to my girlfriend look, you're a lovely girl and all that but i want to go live in a cave, stay a virgin and dedicate my life to God.
My bride accepted it a little too easily but i took my things and found a nearby building and blocked up the doors and windows, leaving just a small hole for food to be passed to me by my family.
Ten years later my peace was shattered by some neighbours who informed me that my parents were both dead and i had inherited immense wealth and their estates but i patiently explained that i lived in a bricked up building so what good was that to me and told them to give it all away.
Not long after there was another rude interruption to my peace when a bishop from the local diocese came for my help with some hoodlums in the area causing trouble so i reluctantly went and told them to stop being such sods and then prayed that God would send the village a decent pastor and returned to my solitude.
Finally some decent me time i thought but oh no, my niece had gotten herself into some trouble so off i went again and tried to convince her of the the error of her ways and convert her to change her life but she wouldn't so i dragged her home and built a cell near my own but far enough to not hear her wailing about being locked in a bricked up building and returned to my own.
So i said right, i don't care who dies, which relative is in trouble or if the town gets overrun by demons, don't disturb me and you know what, they never did and the next time i left my home was to go to my own funeral.

Special Guest Blogger: Pagan Godess Sheela Na Gigs

I was lewd, rude, nude and very crude so perfect to be a Pagan Goddess and i represented so many aspects and did it all with my vagina.
I was originally called Cecile in France and was popular for being a wise woman who people would pray to if they wanted to avert ill luck or were possessed by an evil spirit and i would chase away anything demonic or bad by showing them my Bajingo because we all know that woman's genitals are scary, it's not like men enjoy looking at naked women or anything.
When i came to the UK with the Normans during the conquest thingy, i was particularly popular in Ireland and they changed my name from Cecile to the Irish name 'Sheela' and 'Gigs' is English slang for lady parts and what amazing lady parts they were, hence why i was so famous for them.  
The Christians, not having a proud Vag showing diety of their own, adopted me and carved me into their Monasteries, Churches and other places of religion, placing my image of completely naked, legs open with private parts on display above doors and windows to ward off evil spirits but i also had a secondary role as a fertility Goddess and the Early Christians used my figurines at weddings and births, showing my wares to all and sundry.
So, what happened to this bawdy, sexually liberated, very wise—goddess?
Well over time i became a warning against the sins of lust, a reminder for churchgoers to keep their minds pure and firmly on Godly things and not on how much longer they have to listen to this guy banging on lust being hideous and sinfully corrupting before they can get back to doing some sinful corruption of their own.
At some point the Christians got their rosary beads in a knot and decided that having a naked female showing off her glorious foof alongside scripture images was a tad too much even for them, and remember that this is an institution which has more scandals than saints, so they decided they would take their chance with evil entering the building and began to remove me from their places of worship as un-Christian.
I doubt many people have heard of me now and i have gone the way of most Pagan deities but i like to think that i was a sacred symbol of women’s nurturing and a life-affirming reminder of female power...with a very nice Vag.

Perverted Church Views On Conversion Therapy

If there is one group who are preoccupied with what people get up to in the privacy of the bedroom it is the religious crowd and it is they who tried to force the Government to allow conversion therapy and they were partially successful because the Government backtracked on their promise to ban it and then did a u-turn on their u-turn and announced that they will ban gay conversion therapy after all, but not trans conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is a form of 'treatment' that aims to change a person's sexual orientation or suppress a person's gender identity based on the theory that being lesbian, gay, bi or trans is a mental illness that can be 'cured' by techniques which include chemical castration with hormonal treatment, aversion treatments such as electric shock, nausea-inducing drugs and masturbatory reconditioning.
When the conversion therapy ban was promised in the Queen's Speech last year, the government said "these abhorrent practices" can cause mental and physical harm and at last year's Tory conference, Boris Johnson claimed he was "completely committed" to extending LGBT rights.
The NHS and other professional bodies have warned all forms of conversion therapy are 'unethical and potentially harmful' but that doesn't seem to bother the Churchy types with the Christian Institute saying the initial reports that the government was to ditch the ban was 'welcome news', the Evangelical Alliance, which represents 3,500 churches, said the ban would restrict religious freedom and 2,500 church ministers and pastoral workers signed a letter to say that imposing a ban on conversation therapy was a clear breach of their legal right to manifest their religion.
Quite why the creepy religious lot are so obsessed with other peoples sex lives, if it was heterosexual's they watched so closely they would quite rightly be labelled as perverts but it appears they get a free ride if it is men or women but we know the religious view on most things are outdated but if anyone is abnormal, it is them with their keenness to force their awful and twisted views on to other people.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Longinus

You probably know me as the Roman Centurion who pierced Christ with a spear but in my defence, we were rattling through a lot of crucifixions at that time and it was a Friday and the weather wasn't great and i just wanted to get home, it was fish for supper and besides, every criminal we stuck up gave some excuse, some argued that we had the wrong person, most said they were a victim of a mis-trial and we had more than a handful of the sons of god and with my bad eyesight, how was i supposed to know this was the actual one?
I had spent my life fighting alongside my fellow soldiers throughout the Roman lands but my eyesight was so bad that i was practically blind and ended up in Jerusalem helping out with crucifixions.
Crucifixion is a bit of a drawn out affair so my job was to poke them with a spear in the side to hurry things along as that was the only job i could do with such poor sight and when Jesus shouted down to forgive us for we know not what we do, i replied, i know exactly what i'm doing, i'm jabbing you in the side with my spear.
It was when the blood and water gushed out onto my face and my eyesight was miraculously cured that i began to suspect that this wasn't just any old hippy nailed up before me so when they took his limp, lifeless body down from the cross, i assisted in cleansing the guy's body before we shut him in a cave.
Turns out he came back anyway after three days when the stone was removed from the entrance of the tomb and when Christ walked out i began to ponder on what if this whole Christian thing is true so i converted, left the army and became a monk preaching about Jesus instead which wasn't a particularly wise move in 1AD Rome, the Emperor said he was disappointed and proved it by having me arrested and forcibly removing my teeth and tongue but i didn't let a little thing like that stop me and i drew pictures instead so they lopped off my head which did finally stop me.
The Christians, being a forgiving bunch, made me a Saint which is nice of them considering i was the guy who actually killed their saviour but what i did that day added another religious holiday to the calendar even if nobody actually knows what it is for.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Augustine

In the late 6th century, i was pottering around in Rome just doing everyday religious things when Pope Gregory came up with the great idea of sending a group of us to England to convert the whacky Anglo-Saxons from believing whatever nonsense they believed in and start believing in our Christianity instead.
The 6th Century Europe was a great time, we had the shiny new Georgian Calendar, matches had been invented and we were making clothes out of silk so the last thing i wanted to do was travel to rainy old England to try and convert a bunch of smelly Anglo-Saxons so halfway there we got cold feet and decided to turn back.
We sent a messenger saying we were coming back and Gregory sent his own replying no you ain't and that's why two years after we left, we arrived in Kent and were met by King Æthelberht.
Before he could balance our heads on a pike, we held up a silver cross and a panel painted with the image of Christ and said we would bring peace to his land, please don't chop us up and he never, actually was nice about it and gave us some land in Canterbury to use as a base.
Still having a head was the first obstacle passed but we still had to go around and tell the people who built huts out of their own dung that Jesus was the guy for them so we came up with the idea of sneakily allowing all the old, heathen festivals and beliefs to remain intact, but superimpose Jesus and Christianity on them.
It worked a treat because when we rolled up saying you look like a decent British bloke, i'll park the old booties on you if that's okay all they cared about was they could still get drunk as newts and stuff their ugly faces at certain times of the year so they didn't care who it celebrated so gradually, the main heathen feasts became days honouring Christ or one of the Saints who we had ready for any eventuality.
Over several centuries, all the big piss-ups were converted to Christian festivals so Imbolc became Candlemas, Sam-hain on 31 October when the dead relatives popped back for a visit quickly became All Souls’ Night, followed by All Saints’ Day and the 12-day festival of Yule at the end of December became Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth although we had to fudge the dates a bit for that one.
However, one festival that was so ancient and so deeply entrenched in the pagan psyche that we didn't dare change the name of was Easter although it became less in celebration of the goddess Eostre and more about Christ being crucified and we quickly mumbled something about the eggs and bunnies being some Jesus related thing.
I did such a good job that i was made the very the first Archbishop of Canterbury and kickstarted the whole rubbing out the original Gods and pasting in our own guy thing.

Losing Our Religion

Hear that sound? It was the noise of Rosary Beads being dropped in shock all over the UK as the Commission on Religious Education have said that Religious Education in schools needs a major overhaul and should be renamed Religion and Worldviews and include the study of Atheism.
The conclusion is based on less pupils taking religious studies at A-level and new data suggesting that more than half the population has no religious beliefs whatsoever.
The recommendations have been presented to the Department for Education and includes an increase in government funding to train new and existing teachers in Atheism but i could save them a few quid over the course of a 39 week school year so the first lesson in Week 1 is: 'Listen up kids, there is no God, the whole religion thing is a massive myth so you can now spend the next 38 weeks learning something which is actually useful to you'.
As usual a few of the more excitable religious groups are attempting to putting a holy spanner into the works, the Catholics complaining that: 'The quality of religious education is not improved by teaching less religion' which is sort of the point, it shouldn't be improved, unless they have some proof to back up their guy, it should be presented as a 'belief' as in you can believe in this, or that, up to you, you choose.
The Board of British Jews said the report was 'flawed' and would 'dilute religious education through the inclusion of all worldviews in an already tight teaching timetable' so their concern is the extra lessons and not that people would realise just how crazy their views are, that's nice of them.
A report from Germany who scrapped religious education in the 1970's found that abolishment significantly reduced religiousness but there was no impact on moral or ethical views.
Religion has hugely shaped our societies for millennia and not for the better as any look at a history book or a glance at what is going on in the name of religion on the news so its decline should be welcomed.

Celebrating All Asses Today

It probably won't come as a surprise that the early Christians tagged their guy into most Roman Festivals such as Christmas and Easter and today is another where they saw the Pagan celebration of Cervulus where they would dress up as animals and dance through the streets and thought, we should have some of that so created the Feast of the Ass to celebrate all the donkey-related stories in the Bible.
Now you probably think there can't be that many donkey stories in the Book but there are 72 including the story in Genesis where Abraham asks two young men to keep an eye on his ass while he goes for a bit of a pray. Later they 'laded every man's ass' and then there is the story of Issachar who is a strong ass and Moses was no weakling in the ass department because he put his wife and his sons upon his ass
and took them to Egypt.
There is the famous bit in Exodus about not coveting other people asses and how anyone trespassing for ass 'shall come before the judges' so they were pretty strict on ass trespassing in those days although it does say later that you can rest you ass on the seventh day.
In Numbers Moses tells God that he has not taken, nor hurt, any ass although Balaam did, he smote it a few times with a firm stick but God wasn't so happy about that, Numbers 22:28 shows he sent an Angel to 'open the mouth of the ass'.
Deuteronomy asks that 'What shalt thou do with asses?' and then answers it own question by saying thou should  'lift them up again' but no plowing else the ass shall be: 'violently taken away' so leave the ass plowing to another day Christians.
The book of Joshua 6:21 is not so kind and tells of when all asses in the city were utterly destroyed but they get their own back in Judges when Samson and his ass slay a thousand men.
In Samuel, someone called Jesse took an ass laden with bread to Saul and one person in the book took his ass to the King for his lame servant although in Kings-1 13:13, a king told his sons to saddle his ass to ride and whilst out riding came across a lion who respectfully left his ass untouched.
Job shows that all the wild ass was let loose and in Hosea, Ephraim only has a wild ass for company but they had no problem in Zecharia, they had a plague of ass and in John, Jesus finds a young ass so there you have it, the Bible is full of asses so celebrate the Feast of the Ass, i am reliably informed that Sticky Buns are in order.

NASA Invites Religious Folk For A Chat

I have never stopped a stranger in the street to try and convert them to Atheism but that doesn't stop religious folk bouncing up to me with their Bibles to try and convert me which pretty much always ends up with me patiently explaining why their man in the clouds is a bunch of hooey.
Not that it does any good, they just continue to ignorantly chunder on at me about whatever it is they believe in a one way conversation, uninterested in any debate which may open a chink of light in their closed mind but NASA has not waited for a overly cheerful loony to come to them, they have gone to them and invited Religious Scholars their views on their beliefs about divinity and creation if life was found on other planets.
Science has always challenged the Religious dogma from the Earth being at the Centre of the Universe to Evolution and the religious have had to adjust the to survive and at some point in the future we will discover life on other planets, or it will discover us, and that may be the step too far and finally the scales fall from so many eyes for those of the opinion that God's sole intent was to create people in his image here on Earth.
The invited include Christian Priests, Jewish Rabbi's, and Islamic Imam's who have accepted and stated that 'teaching would not be affected by the discovery of alien life'.
Science has done its best to show religion for what it is but the discovery of life in the other reaches of the Universe should be yet another body blow to religion on it's way to becoming something that future generations will look back on as a curiosity but i expect the religious leaders would 'find' the answer written in their holy texts somewhere amongst the Unicorns, dragons and horses with the heads of lions, creatures that are half-rooster and half-snake and fire breathing sea creature with multiple heads.