A bizarre melange of US politicians, Miranda the Devine and the Jensenist nepotics on an indolent, insolent Sunday contemplating belief systems ...

(Above: an oldie but a goodie. More xkcd here).

Speaking of US politicians, as the xkcd cartoon does, and ignoring the release of all the Sarah Palin emails - why is the US media obsessed with her, why they're worse than the Melbourne media obsessing over footballers, agents and teenagers - we move right along to awarding the loon pond weekly 'loony' to U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who on a visit to Baghdad suggested that Iraq pay back the USA for the money spent on the invasion (Dana Rohrabracher, U.S. Congressman, Suggests That Iraq Pay Back U.S. For War Costs).

In what qualifies as an understatement, the accompanying report noted:

The idea of repaying the United States for a war that the vast majority of Iraqis had no role in bringing about would likely gain little traction with an Iraqi public that harbors mixed emotions about the U.S. invasion. While many Iraqis are glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, they blame the United States for the chaos and sectarian violence that followed.

You don't say.

Well done Rohrabacher, clear winner, despite strong work by other candidates, such as Tracy Morgan.

It seems Morgan recently delivered to the world a series of excellent stand up jokes. Like how he'd stab his own son to death if he spoke in a black voice, and taking blacks to task for whining about something as insignificant as bullying, and how being black was a choice and something that kids learned from the media.

Or some such thing, perhaps I got the content muddled as I read Tracy Morgan apologises for anti-gay jokes.

Meanwhile, commiserations seem to be in order for Richard Glover, who suddenly discovered that climate sceptics are as rabid a set of trolls and hate mongers as ever to grace the intertubes, as he notes sundry death threats in A climate change wave of hate.

Funny, after reading the monotonous relentless Tim Blair, I alway thought it was the true believers in climate change, who were part of an international leftist conspiracy in consort with corrupt scientists, who carried on like a rabid pack of attack hounds, but it seems there are other kinds of true believers, ratbag denialists carrying a death threat or three handy in the old kit bag ...

Which brings us to our Sunday meditation and the matter of beliefs and why the worst or the silliest are always full of passionate intensity.

There's some good reading to be found on beliefs - the wiki here is as good a starting point as any - but you can imagine the shock to discover that in New South Wales the HSC concerns itself with belief systems and even uses Hinduism as a focus study.

Oh the wretchedness of post modernism and world awareness. We're all doomed.

So how did the pond end up in this godforsaken 'society and culture' alleyway?

Well in part it was the absurd hope that a study of belief which would explain why Miranda the Devine pines for the return of former Chairman Rudd and now imperiously commands his return to fix everything.

Yep, it's all there, at great and astonishing and tedious length in Time to round up Rudd.

The Devine stamps her foot three times, and doesn't end up in Kansas, but in a serious hissy fit as she demands Rudd stop all his unseemly foreign travel and attend to local issues:

The Prime Minister signs off on all his travel. She should suspend his long-haul privileges and order him to concentrate on our neighbours.

And if he won’t do what she tells him, he should be sacked.

Uh huh. For a minute there, I'll bet the Devine had you going.

You might even have believed that she really did believe that bringing back the former chairman would sort out the live stock trade and fix up Australia's position on refugees, most likely by embracing Tony Abbott's extraordinarily humanitarian Nauru solution.

But you see every day is April Fool's day when reading the commentariat.

The Devine is just bringing out a rich piñata for a routine bashing:

Just because the government hangs by a thread in the current parliament is no excuse to hold Australia hostage to the bruised ego of an aggrieved former prime minister.

You reap what you sow, and Australia is still paying for Julia Gillard’s treachery a year ago.

Poor fellow our country.

And she has the cheek to use a biblical quote and misuse and abuse the title of Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country without the slightest indication that she understands Herbert's book was an indictment of how Australia threw away its chance of becoming a true commonwealth, and achieving the dream of Australia Felix.

Long before former Chairman Rudd took to leaving on a jet plane, and leaving the business at hand to the relevant ministers in charge of the portfolios dealing with matters like the live stock trade and immigration.

But that's the way it is with belief systems, and the desire to hurl kitchen sinks at anyone who stands in their path.

In this world, talk of accepting the weight of evidence, and changing ideas if the weight of evidence changes, will get you very short shrift in the world of the commentariat, who are much more comfortable talking about international conspiracies of leftists and scientists.

That's how you can arrive at the strange notion that nine billion people will fit on the planet, carry on the current campaign of looting, pillaging and developing, and all will be hunky dory, and any talk to the contrary is a leftist conspiracy or scientists after tenure and government grants.

And somehow, as if by magic, and this being a Sunday and a meditation on belief systems, we're now transported to the Sydney Anglicans website, to consider other matters of strange beliefs.

When last we dropped in, poor old Michael Jensen had scribbled Is God a Monster?, and by week's end he'd copped a monstrous 130 comments, and found himself in the middle of theological wars.

Jensen was very worried about the public relations involved in the old testament god turning out to be an unforgiving type inclined to ethnic cleansing and war mongering.

Amazingly, not one of his correspondents noted that in the matter of Noah, the old testament god was indeed a genocidist of the finest water, and all because she felt displeasure:

God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of her heart was only evil continually.
And it repented the Lord that she had made man (and woman) on the earth, and it grieved her at her heart.
And the Lord said, I will destroy man (and woman) whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man (and woman), and beast (which might include woman), and the creeping thing (certainly woman), and the fowls of the air (woman?); for it repenteth me that I have made them.

Let the genocide games begin. Probably did over the dinosaurs too.

Now of course you can treat this as a kind of myth-making - which still happens to support genocide as a handy solution for wickedness and repenting of mistakes made - but then wicked atheists tend to latch on to the notion that the entire bible might happen to involve plenty of myth-making, especially in the matter of miracles. Or even the ultimate genocide currently being planned by the long absent lord ...

Which naturally brings us to another Anglican, one Jodie McNeill, scribbling The coming relationship crisis, in which he expounds on the benefits of 'corporate worship', and concludes thusly:

People are hungry for relationships. They need to know and enjoy their relationship with God. Yet, it is when this relationship with God is grown in the company of others that the full dimension of life-in-the-last-days can be experienced.

Life in the last days?

Uh huh. But according to some recent calculations, the sun will only expand and swallow the earth in some 7.6 billion years down the track. (Earth's Final Sunset Predicted), and even if it gets hotter before that, there's still at least a billion years of 'life in the last days' that earth could look forward to.

Unless of course you have an entirely irrational doomsday belief system, and a willingness to embrace myth-making.

Which perhaps explains how at the end of Kara Martin's review Relationships rather than sex, in which a return to biblical sexual and relationship values is urged, you can get this kind of comment:

The context of the first union between a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, who I believe were real people, in the Garden of Eden - a paradise, shines a very bright spotlight on the potency of sexual relations in marriage.

Yes indeed and the resulting wickedness and degeneracy and sinfulness of these 'real people' resulted in a repenting god wiping their offspring from the face of the earth in the very first genocide (excluding the dinosaurs of course).

So where does this leave us on a Sunday?

Well first of all repenting that yet again we've read Miranda the Devine, and yet again we've visited the Sydney Anglicans.

And second of all, celebrating the wondrous diversity and bizarreness contained within human belief systems.

Accept the weight of evidence?

On the reading of most of the texts that come before the pond, the weight of evidence is that the weight of evidence counts for three fifths of fuck all ...

(Below: so that's why we need mechanics?)