“Good Friday” wasn’t so good for Jesus of Nazerath, because it was the day he was beaten, tortured and then had spikes driven through his feet and wrists to nail him onto a crucifix where he was left to die in agony. I don’t see a damn thing good about it.

One thing that’s good, he at least can’t be blamed for creating Christianity. That was a Roman piece of work. The Jewish slaves of the Romans took up the worship of Jesus as a son of their god and then their masters began to accept this new faith. Finally Christianity became so widely accepted that the priests of the various Roman gods gave up, “converted” to Christianity and claimed to be the ones that this god spoke through. They literally highjacked the religion from the Jews. From there they made up all sorts of lies about Jesus and saints and holy popes and all manner of crap, much of which they borrowed from their old pagan practices. Like Christmas. Jesus was born in the summer, actually. Christmas is a pagan holiday.

This is how and why the Roman Catholic Church came to power. Those priests, in succeeding centuries, caused the deaths of many thousands, if not millions of people through their crusades and inquisitions, in their attempt to dominate the world using religious terror and control. A lot like the following religion:

About 600 years after Jesus passed away, Mohammed came along and purposely created a new religion, Islam, and made sure that he was worshipped as it’s prophet. Countless millions of people have been tortured and murdered in the name of Islam and still are.

The problem with religions is that they kill people. They push their beliefs onto people and usually do so very aggressively, although Islam currently holds the title of Most Aggressive. Islam is deliberately that way and has been since it started, but the rest have been perverted by the priests, who control them, from the original teachings of the people they’re based on.

Buddhism was started by a guy named Siddhartha Gautama about 600 years before Jesus came along. His teachings are much the same as Jesus’s were, about living in peace and finding truth. It was the Roman priests who took Jesus’ teachings and the early books written about him, sorted through them for what they liked and called that bunch The Holy Bible. There’s a lot of early scripture detailing the life of Jesus that most people have never read because the priests don’t want you to know the stuff that conflicts with their bullshit.

Some religions are pretty peaceful, like some kinds of Paganism, although they can get carried away too, getting into sacrifices and bloody practices. Basically the problem with all religions is that they always lead to conflict, disagreement, bitterness, death, outright war.

Religions started as fear of the dark, fear of death, things that go bump in the night. Too bad they didn’t stay like that, we would have a lot less of sucking our wallets and purses dry and a lot less to fight about.

It baffles me how we can smugly tell our kids that the Tooth Fairy will leave money for that tooth and that Santa Claus brings gifts, when we know that it’s all silly fantasy, then turn right around and suck up the same sort of make-believe ourselves as being real.

Believing in a deity is fine. Claiming that your deity is the only, the One True Deity, and your faith is the only One True Faith and that there is life after life and you don’t get to share in that unless you bow down before the effing priests and swear that you believe…

now, that’s a load of crap.

Stacy Knutson of Moorhead, Minnesota was told by a departing customer to keep the customer’s take-out box of food. When Stace looked inside she found $12,000 in cash.

Stacy’s family was having hard financial times and she figured that someone had done this to help, but like a “good citizen”, she told the police about her find.

Well, the cops happily scooped up the money and then told her it was part of a drug investigation. That means, “Thank you for all the nice money”. Fortunately for Stacy, the case drew a lot of attention and finally the Assistant Clay County Attorney, Michelle Lawson, admitted to reporters that the money WAS NOT connected to any drug investigation, and that Stacy was going to be issued a check for the full amount.

It has never been my experience that cops are more honest than the rest of us. In fact, I think they’re a lot less honest. Roughly 90% of everyone in law enforcement are either alcoholics, or have an alcoholic parent, or come from an abusive or otherwise dysfunctional home. Check that out for yourself, it’s true. Dysfunctional people do not tend to be paragons of virtue.

If some stranger gives you a wad of cash, WHY IN HELL would you turn around and give it to the cops instead of keeping it? Lucky for Stacy, she got it back, but only because pressure was put on the cops to justify keeping it for themselves, which they ultimately couldn’t do.

Being a cop is just a job. There are far more dangerous jobs, crab fishing for just one example. Cops are not heroes, no matter how much they try to make themselves look like heroes. What most cops are is arrogant and power drunk. You can trust them to do the job they were hired for, in at least a half-assed fashion, the same as you can trust a body shop or a plumber to more or less fix something. But that’s it. NEVER hand over a gift of money to a cop. I mean, would you hand it over to your plumber?

The online video-gaming accounts of more than 3,500 convicted New York sex offenders have been abruptly yanked, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced yesterday.

Participating companies include Apple;Blizzard Entertainment; Disney; Electronic Arts; Microsoft; Sony and Warner Bros.

Parents might want to make note of those companies and make sure their kid’s games are made by one or more of them.

Back when I first started gaming, we used Kali, which was a sort of locus for joining others online to play some of the early games, which back then were mostly board-type games as they appeared on your desktop. Those evolved into 3-D effect games like Descent and Duke Nukem, then to the subscription games like Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft.

During all this, every once in a while in pretty much every different game I played, someone would come along trying to get me to talk about sex. The first time, I honestly thought it was some teenager, but it soon became apparent that these people were trolling the games looking for young victims. I was a Guildmaster in a few games and took pleasure in booting the trolls from my guilds, as well as spreading the word to other guilds to keep them moving on until they finally gave up and left.

So I’m happy to see the next stage of evolution in online gaming. It’s way past time this action was taken, but better late than never. Now we need the same thing in social networking sites, to clean out not just the pedophiles and perverts but also the bullies. That latter can be easily accomplished by adding a Bully Review Board to all social networking sites where people can post their complaints. I’m all for cleaning up the sites that kids use so much. No one has a right to be on these sites and restrictions can be legally applied. Like a driver’s license. Too many tickets and you lose it, and the same should apply here.