Barack Obama and the wacky zany ratbag fundamentalists calling for his demise ...

It being Sunday, we love to stray into strange remote parts of the intertubes, and see the love at work.

The Christian love, of the kind that Chrisopher Pearson showed jolly Joe Hockey (see sidebar) and now it seems certain Christians in America show towards their President.

Of course if an Islamic fanatic wished death to the President, and a life for him and his family of impoverished anguish, misery and despair, you might dismiss it as the rantings of a ratbag.

But the joyous thing about fundamentalism is that everyone has the right to be a ratbag and the tweedledums and tweedledees of extremism belong to Muslims and Christians with a rare unanimity of purpose:

ratbag n. Australian slang: An eccentric, crank, fanatic

(Live with the word, or better yet, get over it).

Now having just read the pious stupidities of Pearson in relation to Hockey, and how wonderful Christianity is compared to sundry other religions full of zealots and loons, it's worth taking a look at the latest craze to grip fundie Christians, and their Republican extremist overlords in the USA, and naturally enough it comes from the Bible. Here's the King James version of the psalm doing the rounds, for the poetry of the threat:

109:8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

Then if you read on the following lines, you better catch the drift:

109:9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

109:10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

109:11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.

109:12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

109:13 Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

109:14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.

109:15 Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

109:16 Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.

109:17 As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.

109:18 As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.

109:19 Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

109:20 Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the Lord, and of them that speak evil against my soul.

Well as cursing goes, it doesn't get better than that. Just as well you have that kind of god on your side. Just the ticket for a religion lacking in any sense of revenge or vengeance, proving how mild and full of fuzzy warmth, and why there's only one word to the job, overflowing with niceness, Christians are when it comes to spreading the love.

Yet it seems that the fringe have been whipping themselves up into a frenzy of excitement, thinking that they're being terribly clever in their extremism, by plastering the psalm reference over all kinds of bumper stickers, key rings, Tees, and such like, in much the same way as more amiable loons go around sticking John 3:16 all over the place.

But however you cut it - by either wishing Obama a terminal illness, so that his days be few, or that he gets taken out by an assassin's bullet, so another may take his place of leadership (Joe Biden?), it's such a bizarrely silly, irrational and deeply full of hate example of loonacy that when the penny dropped a few stores decided not to keep trolling for extremist trade.

Apparently when Rachel Maddow pinged the loons (video here) CafePress and Zazzle decided they'd stop selling the trinkets, on the basis that it might be deemed against the law, by urging physical violence against the President of the United States.

But when I rolled up to CafePress they still had some items on their site for sale, though I didn't bother to see if they'd process the order. Why I could just head off to a radical Islamist site for the same kind of thinking, but likely not the same kind of handy junk, probably minted in China at a cheap job lot price.

Perhaps Al-Qaeda should borrow some tricks from American fundamentalism, dollied up by good old American marketing, and get the message out. May America and its president's days be numbered, and someone else take over ruling the world.

But whatever it is, it's hardly a surprise. The kind of ratbag thinking inspired by religious extremism is there for all to see in the Bible, except presumably by the likes of Christopher Pearson, who surely prefers everything to be kept in the mystical, opaque language of Latin. After all, the Catholic church has long held suspicions about letting people read the word of god directly, preferring their own samplings and the infallible teachings of the church as a way of avoiding trouble.

But why not trot off to Deuteronomy 13 for guidance on how to treat the wicked unbeliever? Watch out Joe Hockey, with all that talk of false gods:

13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;

13:7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;

13:8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:

13:9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

13:10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

Oh yes, nothing like a family stoning to whet the appetite for blood.

If you want further guidance, look no further than the sceptic's bible, wherein you can find handy advice on stonings for all the family, and other wacky zany advice from the old testament about many important matters. Including the deep desire to see the President of the United States assassinated.

Meantime, we felt it was long past due for us to hop on the Jesus dinosaur meme. Seems Christ's got more love for raptors than some Christians in the States have got for Obama.

Oh and welcome to the looniverse ...