Feb 3, 2009  TW wrote:

Dear Klaus,

I got your email about one day late. Who knows which system or computer is doing what? There is still much work to do to prepare the show, but it honestly seems as though everyone is being both fast and serious (and very optimistic) about it.

Meanwhile, since I have a little time right now, here are a couple of religious and anti-religious aspects you might consider for your book on atheism, or just to annoy people:

A strong argument for atheism is a mathematical/logical one: an atheist believes in one god less than each religious believer. Each believer puts forth their ‘logical’ ‘reasons’ for not believing in all the many other gods except their own. The atheist can simply use all those religious arguments to reduce the number of gods to zero.

A different, more specifically Christian, puzzle was recently written up in The Journal of Urology (really). Although the Bible says that Jesus was circumcised 8 days after he was born, medieval scholars went crazy trying to determine what happened to his foreskin. -Did Jesus’ foreskin stay on earth? Was the foreskin reunited with Jesus and go to heaven with him? Or did the foreskin go to heaven separately on its own?

The first argument had much weight to it, as some 21 churches are known to have claimed to have the foreskin. Also, St. Catherine of Sienna was said to have worn it as a ring on her finger. Which finger we do not know.

However, an Austrian nun, Agnes Blannbekin (1244-1315) eventually became so obsessed with this important issue that she claimed to have “felt the Lord’s foreskin on her tongue, and swallowed it with great sweetness” some 100 times. Rewarding her devotion, Jesus revealed to her that his foreskin was resurrected with him on Easter. -So those other guys were just bullshitting!

BUT, later, in the 17th century, the hard-working theologian Leo Allatius seems to have settled the whole problem after a lifetime of thought: Jesus’ foreskin definitely ascended INTO (not necessarily TO, you’ll notice) the heavens at the same time as Jesus and then became the rings of Saturn. Which would show that Jesus was a bigger man than we thought.

Well that’s all the free time I have for today. I hope all this helps.

Prost!