July 22, 2015 5:26 AM

News that makes my head hurt: Why do the dumbest among us tend to be the most religious?

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

(apologies to Keith Olbermann)

Jessica Eckerdt

Big box chain Costco has eliminated a dinosaur birthday cake from its bakery offerings after an Arizona mom with a vivid imagination complained that it promoted Satanism, reports The Frisky. According to Jessica Eckerdt of Queen Creek she purchased the cake from Costco for her son’s birthday party, and after lighting the candles and preparing to sing “Happy Birthday To You” noticed that the legs and feet of the blue and green dinosaur looked like the number “666,” the Sign of the Beast…. In an email to Costco she wrote: “I was extremely shocked and upset to see a demonic symbol written clear as day on my six-year-old son’s birthday cake. What was supposed to be a whimsical dinosaur became something very distasteful. I was extremely surprised at Costco for allowing such an inappropriate joke be sold to an unsuspecting victim.”

Next on “News That Will Make Your Head Feel As If It’s About To Explode,” the story of a woman so thoroughly intellectually deficient as to be functionally brain-dead. How else would you describe a woman who seriously believes Costco would sell a cake with…GASP!!!!…the Mark of the Beast © on it? Seriously?? It’s one of those things that leaves me speechless. How could a woman with at least a handfull of functioning brain cells with a straight face claim that her dinosaur cake was made with a “666” on it? Even worse is that she’s a mother, charged with inculcating her unsuspecting progeny with her hyper-religious, overly sensitive, and thoroughly ridiculous ideas…so she can pass them along to her children.

And you wonder why I fear for our future?

As if Ms. Eckerdt’s silly, overcooked hyper-religiosity wasn’t bad enough, Costco enabled and validated this ridiculous narrative by caving in and pulling the cake. So, the moral of the story is that if you choose to make a fuss over something patently ridiculous, eventually a company will cave to your lunacy in an effort to placate you? So if I were to claim that I saw the face of Satan in one of their take-and-bake pizzas, would I be within my rights to expect Costco to stop selling pizza? Where do we draw the line? When do we stop encouraging, enabling, and caving in to those sufficiently ignorant and arrogant enough to believe that their narrow moral agenda should be OUR moral agenda and that their tender sensibilities should dictate the conversation for the rest of us?

It’s a birthday cake, not an advertisement for the Devil, not an attempt to recruit your children to The Dark Side ©, and certainly not an attempt by Costco to slyly push the company’s heretofore secret Satanic agenda.

“I was extremely shocked and upset to see a demonic symbol written clear as day on my six-year-old son’s birthday cake”. And I was extremely shocked that someone could be so unbelievably stupid, arrogant, and ridiculously self-righteous that she’d seriously believe her son’s birthday contained a secret endorsement of The Dark Lord ©.

I suppose if you’re prone to overt self-righteousness and intolerance, you’re probably also disposed to finding things that pose a clear and present danger to your faith…even when they in no shape, manner, or form actually do. Ms. Eckerdt gets her 15 minutes of “fame” for being a total loon, someone whose faith is evidently so fragile that she sees threats to her moral and spiritual well-being…even when she has to cobble together those threats out of whole cloth.

As much as I try to understand those whose thoughts and beliefs come from different places, this is the sort of thing that escapes me. When one’s world view comes from a place of ignorance, intolerance, and hyper-reliogisity, how can one reasonably expect others to take them seriously and, more importantly, respect their beliefs? Ms. Eckerdt is certainly free to believe what she will, but when she starts seeing the Mark of the Beast © in a birthday cake, it’s time for her to get back on the Thorazine.

What’s Costco going to do when someone claims to hear the voice of Satan emerging from a television purchased there? Stop selling televisions? Or perhaps tell them to stop watching HBO? Where does the silliness end?

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on July 22, 2015 5:26 AM.

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