I’m a non-practicing Atheist type of Jew with a specific distaste for this particular holiday but even I cannot resist a Passover mix that includes Joy Division, The Velvet Underground and other non-trad delights. Don’t forget to smear lamb’s blood on your doorway and watch out for falling frogs and locusts ! I’ll find the Afikoman before you do !
 
Richard Tucker, “The Kiddush”
Darondo, “Let My People Go”
Socalled, “The Four Questions”
Moe Jaffe & Henry Tobias, “Passover Time on the Range”
G-d Is My Co-Pilot, “Dayenu”
Steven Bernstein, “Manishtana” (vs. The Wonder Kids)
Bas Sheva, “Caravan”
Joy Division, “Passover”
Rabbi Kahn, “Your Passover Seder” vs. Flying Lotus
Harold Stern, “Jewish Cowboy”
The Carter Family, “On My Way To Canaan’s Land”
Charles Mingus, “Freedom”
Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”
Gershon Kingsley, “What Does It Take (The Ten Plagues)”
Socalled, “Dayenu”
Egyptian Lover, “Egypt, Egypt” vs. The Malavsky Family
Ray Barretto, “Exodus”
Benjamin Lapidus, “Las Cuatro Preguntas”
Ray Charles, “Where Can I Go?”
James Harman Band, “The Four Questions”
The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free”
Roosevelt Charles, “Let My People Go”
 

   Exodus 2.0: Idelsohn Society Passover Mix 2010 by The Idelsohn Society
 
via The Idelsohn Society

Anderson Cooper is launching a weeklong investigative series about Scientology tomorrow. Looks excellent.

Anderson Cooper is launching a weeklong series about Scientology Monday, covering many of the allegations against the controversial religion already reported by RadarOnline.com.

Anderson Cooper 360, the CNN anchor’s nightly news show, is looking at Scientology’s “history of violence,” especially allegations that leader – and Tom Cruise best friend – David Miscavige has personally physically abused his followers.

Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, son of actress Anne Archer, is interviewed by Cooper and claims that while there has been violence committed against members in the elite Sea Organization, the guilty offenders are those very people now making allegations against Miscavige.

Scientology is increasingly coming under attack by top-ranking members who’ve left the organization.  Interestingly, none of the top Hollywood stars who support Scientology, including Cruise, John Travolta, Jenna Elfman and Kirstie Alley, have commented.

(Radar Online: Anderson Cooper tackles Scientology)

(Anderson Cooper: Dispatches from the Edge)

Excellent clip of Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher taking a welding torch to the Catholic Church’s current policy on dealing with molester priests.

The Catholic Church is in serious trouble and may have nowhere to run, depending on who you ask.

“I warned them about all of this,” declared author Christopher Hitchens, appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night. “Nothing good can come of a church that has as its’ slogan, ‘Leave no child’s behind.’ And then they went and chose as pope the man who was personally responsible, in his dioceses, and institutionally responsible for the cover-up. So now, there’s no escape.”

The child rape scandals that have savaged Catholic ranks for years starting in the United States, then flaring up in Ireland, Germany, Italy and other locations around the world, have finally come to implicate Pope Benedict XVI, according to recent reports.

At time of this writing, the most recent scandal flare-up involved a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, where up to 200 boys were molested by a man whom Hitchens said “was allowed to walk free and was buried with full honors as a priest.”

(Raw Story: Christopher Hitchens vs. Pope)

(Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

 
Above, the amazing opening credits for Dave Allen at Large, a show I absolutely loved when I was a kid. Almost unknown in this country, Dave Allen was an Irish raconteur, who did most of his extremely popular show each week sitting in a chair, smoking and drinking. He hated, I mean hated, religion and it gave his comedy a fantastic edge for the day. No popular American performer would have been able to get away with anything even remotely similar to what Dave Allen did. Allen was hardcore about his Atheism. Even George Carlin didn’t start taking on religion as hard as he did until late in his career. And Lenny Bruce never said religion was stupid, he just said it was corrupt.

Dave Allen said religion was stupid and he said it over and over again throughout the many years of his television career. For a while he was even banned from Irish TV. He was hardcore, Dave Allen.

But the song! What about that fucking groove? It’s a song called Blarney’s Stoned by Alan Hawkshaw, an appropriate title for a song for Dave Allen, to be sure.

A lot of Hankshaw’s best work ended up in commercial music libraries where it could be licensed for film, radio and television. The video below, which I saw on Lady Bunny’s blog today, is a clip of Paco Rabanne’s collection of 1969 from a German TV show.

According to the YouTube poster the music is from the library label KPM 1169 - ARP ODYSSEY and the title of the track is Transcendental Meditation:
 

 
In the early 90s I wrote to every single one of the crazed loners and weirdo organizations listed in Rev. Ivan Stang’s wonderful book, High Weirdness by Mail. I mean to say that I wrote to every single address in that book. I wonder how many of his readers did that? I did, using a form letter. Some were returned as undeliverable, but most made their mark. I got some kind of goofy letter or package in the post nearly every single day for a year. The best were from these total hillbilly crackpot UFO freaks asking for donations to build out a “UFO watching porch” addition on to their mobile home They would also send me insane cassette tapes of channeling sessions where the aliens would speak through them and say racist and anti-Democrat shit!

I also got stuff from various televangelists, the best being a ‘prayer mat’ from Peter Popoff that instructed the user to kneel within the dotted circle, take out their wallet, place that in the circle, too and pray for money. The reader was told that Popoff and his father would also pray for monetary bounty to rain on their new friend. It was so fucking blatant—almost a joke—that only an absolute moron would believe it in. That was the point obviously. Someone with even a tiny portion of a brain would take one look at something like that and toss it, instantly. That person in the .00009 lowest percentile of idiots in this country WAS the target. I’m not so sure that the people sending in their donations got much out of Popoff’s and pere’s prayers for the gelt, but the reverse is certainly not true, I’d wager.

Some were more professional and upscale than most. Like an organization called Share International, started in the 1950s by a Scot named Benjamin Creme, now 87, a guest from time to time on the George Noory radio show. Share International’s mission is to herald the arrival of the world messiah Maitreya, variously described as a reincarnation of Christ, the Messiah, the fifth Buddha, Krishna, or the Imam Mahdi.
At one point Creme said that Maitreya was the representative of a group of beings from Venus called the Space Brothers.

Their letters and books were fairly well-designed and printed. They’d send me short books and newsletters about Maitreya’s imminent arrival on the world stage. From what I could tell, that seems to have been the message for nearly 30 years: HE is coming. Eventually, I guess Creme thought he had to shit or get off the pot, because in 1988 Maitreya was spotted and was supposed to be this guy, a supposed miracle worker seen in Kenya, (see picture above) but his arrival on the, um, world stage fizzled out apparently.
 

 
Here’s where it gets good: British Raj Patel, well-known economist and author of The Value of Nothing, was on The Colbert Report in January. Soon afterwards he began to receive emails from members of Share International, He was also paid a visit by two members of the group. Their mission? To meet the Maitreya… That’s right: Raj Patel.

Patel’s response: “I’m not the messiah… I’m just an economics expert!” The Sun got it right: This is The Life of Brian redux:

The confusion began after Raj, from Golders Green, North London, appeared on TV in January to plug his book on the global financial crisis, The Value Of Nothing. Two days later, Share International founder Benjamin Creme, 87, announced the chosen one his cult calls “Maitreya” had arrived, telling followers: “Maitreya recently gave his first interview in America. “The master of all the masters for the first time in human history himself came on a well-known television programme on a major network. But undeclared as Maitreya, just as one of us.”

Raj was mis-identified soon after as he shares many of the prophesied characteristics of Maitreya.

Both are dark-skinned, were born in 1972 and grew up in London;

Maitreya took a flight from India to the UK in 1977, which matches the date Raj flew back from a holiday there;

Maitreya would appear on TV and speak with a slight stutter - which Raj did on The Colbert Report show;

Frustratingly for Raj, it also states the Maitreya will immediately DENY his identity.

Raj, who was raised a Hindu, said: “I started getting emails saying ‘Are you the world teacher?’ Then it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’ It’s absurd to be put in this position when I’m just some bloke.”

Although Raj swiftly rejected his holy credentials, two devotees from Detroit flew 2,400 miles to meet him at a book signing in his current US home town, San Francisco.

Raj said: “They were really nice, straightforward people. They said they thought I was the Maitreya. They also said I had appeared in their dreams.

“I said, ‘I’m really flattered you came all the way here, but it breaks my heart you spent all this money to meet someone who isn’t who you think he is.’”

The cult was founded by Scotsman Creme in the 1950s. It believes that the 18 million-year-old Maitreya - who combines elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam - has been hiding in the Himalayas for 2,000 years. His arrival will unite humanity and improve life for everyone on Earth. Share International has its HQ in Amsterdam with offices in London, the US, Japan, France and Germany. Creme has refused to confirm or deny whether he believes Raj is his saviour.

Meanwhile Raj has had to remove contact details from his website and refuses to talk further about the Maitreya.

He said: “It frustrates me it might disappoint those looking for Maitreya that, in fact, I’m just an ordinary bloke.”

Patel reappeared on The Colbert Report, but refused to play along as if he really was the Maitreya.

But that’s what the real Maitreya would say, as Colbert adroitly pointed out.

Gina Welch is the author of In the In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church. Raised a secular Jew by a single mother in Berkeley, Gina spent two years “undercover” in Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA trying to understand, for herself, Evangelical Christians. Her insights will surprise you.
 

 
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
 
Thanks, Nico!

 
Here’s an awesome quote from the Christian-themed movie Second Glance.
 
(via Unique Daily)

The Archbishop of Vienna has linked priestly celibacy to the rampant sexual abuse which plagues the Catholic Church. You think? As some weirdo or another said… “A god ignored is a demon born.”

In an article for Thema Kirche, his diocesan magazine, Christoph Schonborn became the most senior figure in the Catholic hierarchy to make the connection between the two and called for an “unflinching examination” of the possible reasons for paedophilia.

He wrote: “These include the issue of priest training, as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution.

“It also includes the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of the church and of society as a whole.”

Schonborn is not the first person to suggest a link between celibacy and paedophilia – the theologian Hans Kung has made the same assertion.

(Archbishop: Priestly Celibacy Leads to Sexual Abuse)

(Related: Chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says Devil is in the Vatican)

 
OK, so it wasn’t Adam Gadahn that they caught. Whatev. But within the brief ripple of time that “Azzam the American” was on the radar again (oooo be scared, kids) my wise old pal Ron Nachmann pointed me in the direction of this article from last year pointing out that Gadahn’s father is none other than Phil Pearlman, psych-folk private press LP maker extraordinaire under such guises as “The Beat of The Earth”, “The Electronic Hole” and the delightfully monikered “Relatively Clean Rivers”. Since most of the links to the music in the original article are now dead I have tracked down a bunch of samples of said music to peruse for the sake of the edutainment of us all. Really nice stuff, truth be told.