Whoever wrote this email needs his or her own radio show.  NOW.

I didn’t know that the General Jack D. Ripper and Dr. Bronner had a love child.

how do you know they don’t already have one?

...“morfadites”...?

I’m thinking more Thomas Malthus and the TimeCube guy.

I’m going to be a snarky atheist and remark on the fact that the feelings you’re experiencing reading this we tend to experience whenever any religious person opens their mouth about their own belief system…

(So let me get this straight: God became a human being, then sacrificed himself to himself, except he didn’t because he rose up again 3 days later, in order to punish himself in our place for breaking laws he made up himself?)

Morfadites appears to be an archaic version of hermaphrodite.  Which is itself pretty archaic at this point.

I think the same screed got sent to PZ Myers last month.

About 25 years ago, I worked in a retail electronics store. The manager had a wicked sense of humor and one day, he received a letter with the return address of the state mental hospital. He handed it to me and said, “Here’s your sales lead for the day.” I opened tihe envelope and found a long, hand-scrawled missive with pictures and diagrams and a number (I think it was 19) written in various forms and designs all over the page. Much of the letter described voices the writer heard and discussed a global conspiracy to read our minds with radar guns. After about twenty pages of this, the writer came up with a perfectly lucid paragraph describing the AM/FM/cassette player he wanted me to send him. He didn’t mention how he was going to pay for it.

I only bring this up because I still remember the odd feeling I got when I read that letter. The letter about evolution, incest and bestiality reminds me a little of that long-ago incident, but I can’t help but feel that this writer is worse off: he didn’t describe the AM/FM/cassette player he wants Pam to send him.

Everything I have to say is on a t-shirt.

Except concerning ‘morphodite’; which, as far as I know, is first attested to in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird when the Finch’s neighbor describes their attempt at a snow-woman as “some sort of morphodite” as a mispronunciation of ‘hermaphrodite’ and, later, Scout berates Jem with “You damn morphodite, I’ll kill you!”

so if all sex is incest, why not just have it ALL the TIME?

Milton disagrees, and has Adam and Eve copulating in the Garden before the Fall in “Paradise Lost”, if I remember correctly.  I’m just saying that it’s sad when someone makes a bona fide Puritan look sexy.

Wait, if it was sex with his own flesh wasn’t it masturbation?

Is this whole screed the new script for abstinence only education?

I just checked my email.  He sent it to me and Auguste, too.  For some reason, Jesse was spared.

that’s a lot of hot air to ‘justify’ racism and sexism. so procreation is evil now? apparently he wants the entire human species to die out. that’s the only logical conclusion.

morfadites

Holy kiwi-mango Jesus, now I must change my pants, because I have peed in them.

Wow.  He said “morfadites”.

Holy shit that’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve read all day.

I just want to know what this person does for a living, with free time, etc.

Actually, forget the one about free time cause this is clearly it. But whats the family like, the parents?
Oy Vey.

Another tragic failure of American mental health institutions.

So, Pam, how has Rod Dreher been, anyway? Crunching away, I see.

“Weren’t there whole villages in the Middle Ages that didn’t breed because they believed they were living in the End Times? And all died of old age with no offspring?”

I very severely doubt it.

Well, one good thing -

According to this person, God does not want him having sex or having children. I think we may have found something on which we can all agree.

I want to laugh out loud, but I try to imagine myself in a place where all of this makes sense and laughter just doesn’t work.

Wait a minute.  Human birth defects are a product of incest, but freakish individuals in the animal kingdom are just “born that way”?  Dude, you totally had me until then.

So let me get this straight: God became a human being, then sacrificed himself to himself, except he didn’t because he rose up again 3 days later, in order to punish himself in our place for breaking laws he made up himself

Blackbloc, consider that line stolen!  Thank you.

What’s scary to me is I went to private religious grade/high schools and I swear I had teachers who were about as deranged as this guy.

“The wooly mammoth was just a group of elephant that happened to wonder into the United States at the top of Africa when they were connected.”

...believes in Plate Tectonics?  Interesting.  All of the religious nuts I knew/know believe somehow The Flood was responsible for all the things that are considered evidence supporting Plate Tectonics.

And, one more:  I’ve heard my grandfather and my dad use “morfodite”.  In fact, if I asked him to say it now, I bet my dad would say “morfodite”...

purpleshoes might be thinking of the Cathars, dualist Christian offshoots.  They believed material was evil, and spirit was good and holy.  THere’s some stuff about Jesus not dying on the cross, the long and short of it is that they did believe in not having children, and practiced contraception.  The rest of Europe called them buggers, from which comes the English [removed]I forget the original French).  In the 1200s the Pope called a Crusade against the Cathars, during a lull in the Crusades against Islam.

That’s pretty hilarious.  I don’t really know what else to say.  Wow.  I wish I was a high profile blogger so I could get the crazy in my inbox, too!

I Love Rock’n'Roll says: I only bring this up because I still remember the odd feeling I got when I read that letter. The letter about evolution, incest and bestiality reminds me a little of that long-ago incident, but I can’t help but feel that this writer is worse off: he didn’t describe the AM/FM/cassette player he wants Pam to send him.

I almost choked!  I think he’s expecting Pam to send him an 8-track player, perhaps?  Or maybe a couple of cases of tinfoil.

When God saw the evil he warned Adam and Eve not to eat from it or they would surely die.

Which is a lie.  They didn’t die.

The rest of that stuff about Lucifer?  Not Genesis.  John Milton.

I do like the bit about Christians rising up to smite Jesus.

I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created.

Isn’t this a version of the “What if your mother aborted YOU?!!111!!” argument?  Only this time you’d be happy?

Caren beat me too it (again!) but yeah, God was the one who lied to Adam and Eve in the Garden (though once again that depends on your translation. In one version he says “on THAT DAY you shall surely die” and another it’s “you’ll die” and a lot of people take that to mean just getting kicked out of the garden because they could no longer eat from the tree of life, which made them immortal, even though it still took them hundreds of years to kick the bucket)

I would find this funny just for the sheer outlandishness of it all, but I know too many nutters who believe some stuff like this.

PZ got this same email two weeks ago.

We must all remember that the Serpent told the truth to Eve about the fruit while God lied about it. It’s all there in Genesis.

Wow…that’s so much mental acrobatics that it’s almost beautiful, like watching contortionists at the circus. I got lost about the time Adam and Eve were/weren’t having sex with their own children, and I think I still got the full effect of the twisted logic—I’m dizzy.

I applaud you for being able to read it through at all, much less share it with the rest of us, Pam.

I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created.

They didn’t ask to be born, now did they?

I’m gonna say one thing:

Poe.

I knew where Lucifer came from; I read Sandman.

And if you read that in the voice of a four-year-old announcing that she can now tie her shoes all by herself, you’re reading it right.

“So we are worse than worse than incest and what ever you create is closer than closer than closer flesh.”

There’s something oddly beautiful about these parts. like he’s aspiring to Spinoza’s prose.

What??! I’d agree with the religious nut thing, but I don’t know of any religion that believes in the “Adam and Eve were never meant to have sex, because that would be incest” idea. This seems like someone who grew up going to a fundamentalist church, but never attended a service without first huffing gasoline.

I think my favorite theory about the garden of eden and ‘the Fall’ is that the knowledge of good and evil came into the world when man created religion. I read that archaeologists found an ancient temple in Turkey that had glyphs describing this, the temple was later buried by people. Apparently the burial was too late though, religion was set loose upon the world, now we get whackos like this.

Now long before Jesus was born the white people created what they believed to be birthdefects. They looked different from the whites. Everytime one was born the whites would cut the nerves in the tongue so they couldn’t speak. They would grow them up and use them as slaves. The reason they cut their tongues was because the whites were afraid these people might plan some kind of over throw.

So apparently, long before Jesus was born, white people were speaking english in the Middle East.

Hunh.

I’m gonna say one thing:

Poe.

What does a one-and-a-half-hit wonder from the 90s have to do with…nah, never mind.

That joke was worse than worse than incest.

agolden, re Cathars: I think the name you’re trying to remember is Bogomils.  They were a dualistic sect that blended Gnostic Christianity with Manicheanism which started in Bulgaria sometime in the 10th century; they spread to France by the 12th century.  They believed that the world was so inherently corrupt that any furthering of it’s wickedness by procreation was evil; thus, no kids.  Also, no meat… not because harming the animals was cruel, but that the animals were themselves the fruit of sexual reproduction and therefore a part of the corruption.  Their extreme views earned them the nickname “Cathars” from their propensity for emotional and physical catharsis, the literal and metaphorical purging of impurities.  It was believed by some that if one must indulge in the sins of the flesh, non-reproductive sex was preferable, which garnered them the reputation for “deviant behavior” you’re referring to, and was the source of much of the propaganda against them leading up to the Albigensian Crusade.

I wish that we wouldn’t jumpt to allusions to state mental hospitals and the mental health system in order to explain and dismiss this guy’s e-mail. It presents a very stereotyped and limited idea of people with mental illness (and I say that as someone who has worked in mental health for a decade). At best, it’s tasteless bullying. At worst, using mental illness as a way to designate “useless, incoherent crazy who is amusing and who we don’t have to take seriously” contributes to the discrimination experienced by people with that category of disability.

Personally, I don’t really see the point of piling on against this guy. But I don’t mind it until it starts to seem like a general dismissive attitude toward people with mental illnesses. Whether or not this writer is one of them (and I can’t tell from this letter), they deserve respect and compassion.

I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to hold and express such thoughts while still participating fully in our society. Does this guy make enough money to have an ISP account? Or did he send it from his local library?

Wow.

Just…  wow.

This is the kind of guy who takes a big piece of cardboard, writes manifesto’s like the above in tiny print with the words all running together & stands on street corners digging the wax out of his ears constantly.

I suppose if one were to look at this in a positive light, he won’t be breeding & passing on the crazy. Because, you know… that’d be incest.

I hate to make fun of the writer, because he is probably mentally ill but:  Goddamn he reminds me of some of the Republican legislators here in AZ.

upon rereading the whole bit about…bigfoot, mammoths etc…i am not entirely sure this isn’t some bizarre prank.

Nods to Dymphna—I have your namesake on a medal myself.

Personally, I don’t really see the point of piling on against this guy. But I don’t mind it until it starts to seem like a general dismissive attitude toward people with mental illnesses. Whether or not this writer is one of them (and I can’t tell from this letter), they deserve respect and compassion.
Dymphna on 03/23 at 11:46 PM

If this guy isn’t mentally ill, he is a wretched and disgusting bigot. It is less insulting to call him mentally ill.

Belief in god is a mental illness, as far as I’m concerned.  Whether it’s fairies, spirits, gods, angels, aliens, spirit guides, bleeding garden gnomes, dogs that cure hepatitis, or imps, they’re all from the imagination of crazy people.

Crackpot racial and conspiracy theories are also the products of mental illness.  But alas, so is the thinking that exposure to logic will cure them.

You know, the sad thing is, is there’s more consistency to his version than a lot of other religions. And underneath the frenetic style and racial issues, there appears to be some intelligence. He’s taken information and ideas from many sources and sieved them through his personal sex phobia to try to understand his world.

I wonder why he chose atheists to receive his screed? Perhaps after being rejected by his religious friends, he’s trying other audiences to see who may find it believable.

Overall, I find the letter amusing, but I feel sorry for the guy. I hope he gets help—even if he’s not mentally ill, he’s got serious issues.

For me, I was reading along, having happy memories of my pre-atheist childhood (a dark era).  A lot of the weirder shit in there is the kind of stuff I obsessed over, with noone in my religious family or circle of friends willing to answer: how exactly was it that two people, without any kinda dirty weird incestual couplings, created the human race?  Then I grew up, realized it was mythology in the same vein as the classical mythology of Rome and Greece and felt better.

BUT THEN!  A WTF moment comes when suddenly people are speaking English in ancient times (I’m a Latin teacher, and have kids every once in a while ask why they didn’t just speak English back then!), coupling with orangutans! (for N. Americans!) and gorillas (for Africans!)  Holy shit, my head a-plode!  All happy memories of childhood innocence (snark!) shatter in a bugged-out rant.  That’s where my silly childhood logic would have led?  No shit noone ever answered my questions!

Thanks for posting this…I think.

“I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to hold and express such thoughts while still participating fully in our society. Does this guy make enough money to have an ISP account? Or did he send it from his local library?”

I’m with chibi above. If something sounds to good (or too crazed) to be true, what is it likely to be?

If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS?

He’s not very Biblically correct:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”

3letterjon  on  03/24  at  06:30 AM
Belief in god is a mental illness, as far as I’m concerned.  Whether it’s fairies, spirits, gods, angels, aliens, spirit guides, bleeding garden gnomes, dogs that cure hepatitis, or imps, they’re all from the imagination of crazy people.

By this logic, on its face, the vast majority of humans are mentally ill and always have been. And since the logic implicitly claims that all misapprehensions of reality are mental illness, then all humans have been and are mentally ill and have been since the beginning of time.

Crackpot racial and conspiracy theories are also the products of mental illness.  But alas, so is the thinking that exposure to logic will cure them.

And now you’ve basically claimed that a particularly immoral act—racism propagation—is always mental illness. Since you can’t be morally responsible for behavior that is the direct result of sickness, you’ve pretty much annihilated that too.

If no one is mentally healthy, there is no way to define mental illness. I do not think 3letterjon knows what mental illness is.

rea:

First rule of Biblical bullshittery:

Do not read the Bible.

Actually, this is a good method when bullshitting about any text.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”

...no, no, no!

When God said that (in English, of course), he didn’t mean sex and incestuous reproduction, as any good Bible scholar could tell you.

What He actually meant was mankind should grow fruit, and learn their multiplication tables…

upon rereading the whole bit about…bigfoot, mammoths etc…i am not entirely sure this isn’t some bizarre prank.

If you google the guy’s e-mail address, it’s pretty clearly not.

This guy’s making the rounds.  He’s hit Pharyngula, and I think Skepchick, as well. 

He’s a loon.

What He actually meant was mankind should grow fruit, and learn their multiplication tables…

My 4th grader (quasi-step-) grandson tells me this passage implicitly bans long division . . .

That whole e-mail sounds like it needs to be prefaced with a cloud of smoke and the voice of “The Cybernetic ghost of Christmas Past from the Future” from ATHF…

“Thousands of years ago, before Sigourney Weaver…”

At first I thought “just a religious nutjob”, but upon further reading I think the religious nutjobs would disown him.  This is some of the best entertainment I’ve had all day.

If only all the wingnuts agreed with this guy, they’d be gone in a generation.  Sigh, I can only hope.

I still think the funniest loon is the Nostradamus nut who’s been making the rounds of all the atheist and skepticism forums and blogs posting his screeds against James Randi and the Randi foundation. I forget his name, and dare not repeat it here anyway since it might result in him descending from heaven and infesting this place, as well.

Haha, Crapture, I was thinking the exact same thing while reading it.

Wow.  Just wow.

Important revelations:  shemales and “morfadites” are not the same thing; being blind, deaf, or mentally retarded are not the same thing as being handicapped; transvestitism is a birth defect or deformity.

And what the hell is a “skunk ape?”  It sounds like something Napoleon Dynamite would come up with.

“Now everyone thinks of Lucifer as the devil or satan from hell. Well there is no devil or satan from hell. That is a fairytale that has been handed down through generations. The real truth is that Lucifer was one of God’s angels.”

Lucifer isn’t FROM Hell. He’s from Heaven. He just works in Hell.

“at 33 [Jesus] came out and found 12 single virgins like him and he tried to tell everyone that in the eyes of God they were all brothers and sisters and they were committing incest by getting married.”

This must have come as a great shock to Peter, him being married and all. And to the bride and groom at Cana, with the water to wine schtick - he must have been the hit of the reception. “A toast to the newlyweds! Here’s some extra wine, let’s toast the incest they’re about to commit!”

Don’t you just love how all wingnut theology is based in some form on an Omnipotent Deity incapable of saying “Stop that!” and having it stick?

“...THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, before the dawn of man as we knew him, there was Sir Santa of Claus, an ape-like creature making crude and pointless toys out of dinobones and his own waste, hurling them at chimp-like creatures with crinkled hands regardless of how they behaved the previous year. These so-called “toys” were buried as witches, and defecated upon, and hurled at predators when wakened by the searing grunts of children. It wasn’t a holly jolly Christmas that year. For many were killed…”

No One of Consequence,

Most people have some level of irrational beliefs, see patterns in randomness and randomness in patterns and otherwise look for outside influence where there is no evidence of such.  It’s irrational, but it’s also irrational to expect that exposure to truth will cause people to give up unreasonable beliefs.  Mental illness and “normality” are on a sliding scale, so the question isn’t necessarily whether or not someone is nuts but more importantly, whether their beliefs are harmful.

Most irrational people are harmless, as are most rational people.  But add stress to anyone, and the results, whether sane or insane, can be awful.

If people continue to over populate and the ozone layer disappears your future generations will be in one “HELL” of a disaster. It will be like a freight train going 200 miles an hour running into a steel wall 100 foot thick. There won’t be any survivors. So if you don’t want that to happen then I suggest that you stop creating and tell your children when they grow up not to create. Tell them if they get married they can always adopt. I am 100% sure your future generations will appreciate not being created.

The amazing thing is that after all that bullshit, the author manages to come to this pretty reasonable conclusion. It’s like he’s picking up the zeitgeist subconsciously but he doesn’t know how to integrate it consciously into a rational narrative.

And since the logic implicitly claims that all misapprehensions of reality are mental illness, then all humans have been and are mentally ill and have been since the beginning of time.

I’m almost comfortable with that postulate, and it might be sanity to take it more seriously.

I am not a scholar but there are two stories of creation in the Bible: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. In the other version not discussed in the e-mail God creates man and woman at the same time, and both from dust.  The e-mail writer needs to do some more reading and less bitching

In the other version not discussed in the e-mail God creates man and woman at the same time, and both from dust

This isn’t the Bible, but according to biblical scholars, that first woman was Lilith.  She wanted to be on top while they were doing it, so Adam complained and God got rid of her.  Then Eve was made out of his rib to be more submissive.

Biblical scholars? Or New Age kooks? That story was written down no sooner than 300 years after the New Testament was finished. It is from the Alphabet of Ben-Sira. It’s a ret-con.

but what about Skunk Ape? I want to hear about skunk ape!