I received one of those icky religious ones the other day from my neighbor, forwarded from his mother. But it wasn't in the smily-emoticon vein. It was a list of people, famous and not-so-famous, who had made frivolous remarks about God or Jesus... and the terrible fate that had befallen each of them. Eek!

I wish I hadn't deleted it; I'd love to have been able to reprint it here for everyone's amusement. Here are two stories that I remember from it, that made me chuckle at the people who build their faith on sand like this:

(1) An anonymous teenaged girl was about to go riding with her friends. Her mother was concerned and said "God be with you". The daughter said jokingly that He would have to ride in the trunk because there was no room in the passenger compartment. You guessed it: the car was wrecked, so badly wrecked that the make and model of the car was unrecognizable, and yet the only part of the car that was intact was (gasp!) the trunk (doesn't that generally have the car name on the lid?). Inside the trunk was a carton of eggs and not one egg was broken, (No explanation as to why teenagers were joy-riding with eggs in the trunk!)

(2) John Lennon said in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. "Later" he was shot several times. No more details were given in this story; the reader is naturally expected to assume that Mark David Chapman acted as God's emissary, rather than acting on his own disturbed obsession with Lennon's remark (made 14 years earlier).