American VI: Ain’t No Grave, recorded by Johnny Cash and producer Rick Rubin in 2003, was released this week in time for what would have been the Man in Black’s 78th birthday, and in time for this reflection by Lisa:

He was also the old style American Christian I wish we had more of. He recognized his frailties, once saying, “Some people know just how to go straight to Heaven. I’m someone who has to get there one half mile a day.” He had a strong faith, but never waved it in anyone’s face or forced it on anyone. He just lived it. And that was inspiration enough. When he sang, with the voice of an Old Testament Prophet, you just had to sit up and listen. Rick Rubin, his last producer and a Jew, tells how Johnny once asked if he could take his hand and pray with him. It became a ritual with the two of them, even during telephone conversations. Rubin says he felt blessed to be so honored by a man of faith and included in that faith, even if it wasn’t his own.

We could use a lot more of that, along several different vectors.

Of course, his work and concerts in prisons are the stuff of legend. Based on that, I’ve heard some call Johnny “the original Punk”. But he wasn’t — at least if you define a Punk as a nihilistic criminal. Johnny’s lyrics always packed an Old Testament wallop. In a Johnny Cash song, you could break the law, but you paid the price. You might “shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die” but then you’d have to acknowledge “I know I had it comin’, I know I can’t be free”. You could “be in the arms of your best friend’s wife” but then you’d get hung and your paramour would have to “walk these hills in a long black veil”. There was no free lunch and no Gangsta Life in Johnny Cash’s world. And he stood up as the premier example of a man who’d had to pay for his sins.

Only once did Cash ever seem to get away with it: in “One Piece at a Time,” his 1970s tall tale of working at a GM assembly plant and sneaking out an occasional auto part in his lunchbox, until after a couple of decades he had enough to build the Cadillac of his dreams. Then again, what with model changes and all, what he wound up with was, shall we say, not entirely dreamy-looking. Payback is still a bitch.

Still, the title track on the new collection is decidedly New Testament: as Brother Claude Ely used to say, “There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.”

Sports as a form of religion? Well, maybe, but not quite the way you might have thought:

For me, being a Los Angeles Clippers fan for over twenty years has taught me firsthand about the spiritual dimensions of faith and suffering, and has helped me better understand my own Hindu tradition. According to the Bhagavad Gita, a pan-Hindu theological text, we should act righteously in each moment and relinquish attachment to future rewards. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna counsels Arjuna on the battlefield and instructs him to act in the present moment without being attached to the fruits of his labor. In this context, Hinduism shares an Indian philosophical worldview with Buddhism that focuses on the process as opposed to the goal, the present as opposed to the past, and the journey as opposed to the destination.

The Clippers have long been derided as the paradigmatic bottom-feeding NBA team. Indeed, in a famous cover story, Sports Illustrated called them the worst franchise in sports history. But their perennially disappointing seasons are a powerful lesson in Hindu philosophy for Clippers fans. We have no championship banners, no MVPs, no retired jerseys — we don’t even have our own arena. As Clippers fans, we’ve never been attached to the fruits of our fandom because we don’t have any fruits to be attached to!

Maybe it’s karma. Lakers coach Phil Jackson certainly thinks so:

He astutely stated that the Clippers aren’t cursed but rather they suffer from the negative karma accrued by their ownership and management. In Sanskrit, the word karma means “action,” and as a philosophical term, karma refers to causality. Karma is cause and effect — a metaphysical caveat to Newton’s third law of motion. Given that the Clippers have historically been managed from a business perspective instead of from a basketball perspective, the effect has been a financially profitable franchise with only a handful of winning seasons.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland Cavaliers follow the King James version of things.

(Via TrueHoop.)

Yeah, yeah, we know: seventy-two virgins. That’s part of the reward for a suicide bomber, along with, among other things, a Crown of Honor and a Get Out Of Jahannam Free card.

If the bomber is male, that is. The rewards for women who sacrifice themselves in this manner are not so clear:

The Quran itself describes little about the specifics of the afterlife, but it does note that believers will find huris, or maidens “of modest gaze, whom neither man nor jinni will have touched before them.” (Every believer can end up in heaven; martyrs just get there faster.) Respected commentator Al-Tirmidhi said in a hadith that every man will have six dozen huris in heaven, but very few commentators enumerated the rewards for women. Ninth-century scholar Al-Tabarani did argue that women will be reunited with their husbands in the next world, and those who had multiple husbands can pick the best one to be their eternal spouse. (Other commentators added that a woman who never married can marry any man she wants in paradise.)

This doesn’t sit well with contemporary Western concepts of equality, though:

After all, a contract is a contract and ten pounds of Semtex are ten pounds of Semtex, no matter who is thumbing that button.

I believe that, for the sake of fairness, the number of males provided to the female martyr should be the same. Only one minor correction, though: I would suggest to dispense with the notion of providing 72 virgin males. I mean, who needs the hassle?

Then again, what woman wants six dozen men of any description?

Jason Boyett does his first audiobook, and inadvertently discovers a Great Truth:

Never, ever write a book that includes long names like Zoroastrianism or Mictlantecuhtli if you plan to read it aloud some day. One of my chapters uses Zoroastrianism and Zoroaster about half a dozen times apiece. My goodness, this was a big mistake. Eventually I just started saying “Zorizzle” and “Z-dog” as replacement words. My apologies, Zondervan.

It could be worse. Zoroaster proclaimed Ahura Mazda to be the Lord of Wisdom, and Ahura Mazda had 101 names, an array well short of that once posited by Arthur C. Clarke, but still a lot to read.

An atheist group is unhappy that the US Postal Service is putting Mother Teresa on a stamp:

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is urging its supporters to boycott the stamp — and also to engage in a letter-writing campaign to spread the word about what it calls the “darker side” of Mother Teresa.

Says spokesperson Annie Laurie Gaylor:

“Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can’t really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did.”

Not that they’d object to, say, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X:

She said they were known for their civil rights activities, not for their religion. Martin Luther King “just happened to be a minister,” and “Malcolm X was not principally known for being a religious figure,” she said.

And how likely would they have been engaged in civil-rights activities had they not had religious affiliations? Black churches were at the very heart of that movement. And Malcolm X was, for all intents and purposes, the public face of the Nation of Islam. Sounds like a religious figure to me.

So the Foundation’s objections, I’m guessing, are twofold:

• Mother Teresa actually sought converts to Catholicism;
• Mother Teresa took a dim view of abortion.

In the meantime:

The Foundation is encouraging its supporters to purchase the new stamp honoring the late actress Katharine Hepburn, who was an atheist, instead — or any of the other 2010 stamps, which include cartoonist Bill Mauldin, singer Kate Smith, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, painter Winslow Homer and poet Julia de Burgos.

I sure hope they don’t find out Micheaux once made a film called The Virgin of the Seminole.

(Via Steve B.)

There are, generally, two places where you’ll find the phrase “spiritual, but not religious”: the About (or similar) page on someone’s blog, and in a profile on a dating service.

The latter, at least, is a means toward an end:

A sweeping new psychological survey has come to the conclusion that North Americans tell others they have spiritual beliefs to appear more attractive, especially to prospective mates.

People subconsciously paint flattering pictures of themselves by revealing they have inner spiritual beliefs, according to Constantine Sedikides, a social psychologist at Southampton University in Britain.

The strong link between spiritual convictions and social attractiveness is based on Sedikides’ overview of 57 different international studies, which recently appeared in the prestigious Personality and Social Psychology Review.

And for some reason, this link is strongest in the US and Canada. The reason for this is apparently unclear:

Sedikides wonders if people believe the self-worth of a person rises if they believe themselves, or others, are valued in the eyes of a divine reality.

Other evolutionary psychologists have speculated self-enhancement expands when people assume, rightly or wrongly, “spiritual” people may be more trustworthy, believe in something beyond their own self-interest or are inclined to monogamy.

It might even be simpler than that: some people are resistant to the very idea of dogma, at least to the extent that it’s alleged to be handed down from on high. (Horizontal dogma, otherwise known as “All my friends have the same delusions,” is just fine; just don’t introduce a vertical component.) Besides, how different, qualitatively quantitatively, is “spiritual, but not religious” from “promiscuous, but not slutty”?

And I suspect that if people could be persuaded that they’d get laid more often if they bore the image of the AT&T Death Star on their bodies, there’d be a worldwide shortage of blue tattoo ink inside of a week.

Update: Fixed an inappropriate word.

The following is excerpted from the eulogy by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., given in Birmingham, Alabama for the four young girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in September 1963.

May I now say a word to you, the members of the bereaved families? It is almost impossible to say anything that can console you at this difficult hour and remove the deep clouds of disappointment which are floating in your mental skies. But I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

A simple “Preach it, brother” is all the response I really need make here.

A distinction with a difference, by Steph Waller:

My personal philosophy is that I am the driver of my body-vehicle, not the vehicle itself. That’s what has made aging easier for me than it was before I really grasped that idea. Like a car, my body ages, but I, the driver inside, am the same age I ever was — I am ageless. My dreams brought this home to me this morning because in my dreams I am never any younger or older than about 30. That means something to me and, as I step into the final phase of my time on this planet, it’s a comfort.

I hadn’t thought about this before, but my own dream experience is similar: unless it’s spelled out early on that it’s the childhood version of me, there’s no real indication of my age in any of my dreams. Certainly the infirmities of age don’t play any role therein.

As for driver vs. vehicle, this sounds something like C. S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” And there are worse things in life than sounding something like C. S. Lewis, whether or not you subscribe to Lewis’ particular faith.

You should read the whole piece; there’s much in it about the place dreams occupy in our lives, and why they’re there in the first place.

A late lament for the top of the food chain, a place we used to embrace.

And it seems to have filtered down to the bishops, too:

The Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin has banned [Rep.] Patrick Kennedy from receiving Communion following his attacks on the Catholic Church last month.

Kennedy slammed the church for opposing the Democrats’ pro-abortion nationalized health care plan in October.

Lest you think this action was unnecessarily precipitate, you might want to revise that estimate:

The Roman Catholic bishop of Rhode Island says he asked Rep. Patrick Kennedy to stop receiving Holy Communion in 2007 because of the lawmaker’s stand on what he called moral issues.

Emphasis added. Kennedy evidently declined the bishop’s request, on the basis of — well, your guess is as good as mine. DaTechguy blames the Prince of Darkness:

Kennedy’s soul and a bunch of others are what he is after. Of course it’s hard to convince people who don’t believe in the soul that it could be his reason.

Of which there are an abundance of late, I note.

There is no shortage of musical groups which contain no original members, perhaps an inevitability if a group lasts long enough. For instance: the Dixie Hummingbirds have been a working singing group since 1928; founder James B. Davis died in 2007 at ninety-one. Then again, the Britpop group Sugababes, which dates only to 1998, has no original members remaining, though apparently they’ve always been a fractious bunch.

Regarding the latter, Andrew King muses:

Which mythical hero’s conveyance links the Sugababes with a river and George Washington’s Axe?

The river in question is the one mentioned by Heraclitus, the one you can never step into twice because it’s never exactly the same river. The vessel, of course, is the Ship of Theseus, as described by Plutarch:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

Where this gets convoluted is in a later analysis by Thomas Hobbes, who wondered: if you gathered up all the original, discarded planks, and built a ship from them, can it legitimately be called the Ship of Theseus?

Until Starfleet Command can reassure me on these matters, I’m not setting foot in a transporter.

(See also this contemplation of Washington’s axe.)

The Unreligious Right turns up some shots of Hot Atheist Girls.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. On the other hand, I tend to suspect that this is one of those “mysterious ways” in which the Lord works.

(Via Jenn1964.)

And by “here,” the city of Phoenix, Arizona means anywhere in a neighborhood zoned residential, even if you’re a church:

A Phoenix ordinance banning charity dining halls in residential neighborhoods withstood a challenge by a north-central Phoenix church.

Retired Arizona Supreme Court Justice Robert Corcoran, serving as a hearing officer, ruled Monday that feeding the homeless at a place of worship can be banned by city ordinance. The decision affects all Phoenix churches with underlying residential zoning.

Over the summer, city officials maintained that CrossRoads United Methodist Church, 7901 N. Central Ave., violated Phoenix zoning code by feeding the poor and homeless on its property, a use that can only occur in commercial or industrial zones. City officials said the decision is effective immediately.

Oh, and this isn’t for the reason you think it is, we are assured:

Paul Barnes, a Phoenix neighborhood activist who spoke at last month’s zoning-adjustment hearing, said churches must be mindful that zoning rules and restrictions apply to everyone.

“It’s not a homeless issue, per se, it’s the fact that you need to have some control, and that’s what the zoning ordinance provides,” he said. “It’s not a problem with homeless people in wealthy neighborhoods. That would be a matter of prejudice. This issue would be setting churches up to avoid zoning ordinances.”

As if, says Coyote Blog:

[W]e all know what a problem it is when churches are organized solely to evade zoning regulations. Why, just last week the First Baptist Church and Gas Station as well as the United Methodist Church and Topless Bar opened right in my neighborhood.

Caesar, asked for comment, said that he was pleased with the rendering.

Jennifer finds an oddity on Facebook (yeah, how unlikely is that?):

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Founation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

You might want to be careful with that, guys. Prayers can be answered in unexpected ways.

Julie R. Neidlinger gets some return on her investment while watching Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story:

[W]hat really hit home, was his direct dealing with how American Christianity has somehow become tied into capitalism when, really, what Jesus preached had nothing to do with anything capitalism espouses.

I have to agree: I don’t think Jesus would have been a capitalist. He expected us to work and take care of each other. Have money? Give it to the poor. The poor will inherit the kingdom. Jesus, who had no home of his own, has more in common with the newly foreclosed-and-homeless than anyone. So, I appreciated that segment of the film the most, and wished it had been longer; it is a topic I’ve been chewing on for years. (I’d recommend reading Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President book — it’s a book I read when it first came out, and have read more than once since).

To be honest, I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with having “In God We Trust” on our money, because it seems like a bit of a conflict of interest.

“Render unto Caesar,” and so forth.

Then again, Caesar and his successors never did quite get the hang of looking after the poor, something Christians, and, yes, non-Christians, take to heart. A single Andrew Carnegie was, and is, worth an entire battalion of writers of rules and pickers of nits and exploiters of institutionalized poverty. Not that Michael Moore is likely to notice.

It might not have surprised C. S. Lewis:

“What are all these animals? A cat — two cats — dozens of cats. And all those dogs … why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”

“They are her beasts.”

“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”

Of course, it was all a dream. (“Of course”?)

Then again, Will Rogers once said: “If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” Maybe they’re in some place parallel to where the cats are: “…where there are endless birds to chase, cans of tuna to eat, and sunbeams to sleep under.”

This is admittedly more sentimentality than theology, but I’m okay with that. I think.

Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?

No, we’re not asking Tom Hanks. This is serious business:

Apparently, the Koran or some of its promoters discussed mermaids at some point, therefore they are presumed to exist. The question is then a reasonable one: if you throw a net over the side of your dhow, and haul in a mermaid along with a nice catch of ordinary fish, is she halaal? Can you chop her up, sell her at the market, or take her home to the family for dinner?

There is a fatwa on the subject of eating mermaids that cites many scholarly Islamic sources.

I trust this revelation will put an end to the sniping at those Western philosophers who seek to determine the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin — which question, incidentally, has already been answered.

(Via Amy Alkon.)

(Note: I’m not actually sending this to Sally Kern, but I figure I have at least as many movers and shakers reading this as she has signing on to her proclamation.)

It is true, there is some sort of Biblical antecedent to the present-day recession, but it’s not precisely where you think it is.

Try this instead:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

Were it not for envy, and the noxious form of politics it spawns, we’d never have had anything like the bubble that burst under our very noses.

Then again, as previously demonstrated, your capacity for threat assessment is, shall we say, somewhat limited.

Not that I’m going to support your removal from office or anything. Then again, last time I went house-shopping, one of my criteria was “Not in District 84.”

(For readers who haven’t seen the proclamation: Tyson Wynn has reprinted it. He’s not signing on either.)

Well, actually, it’s called HorizonOne™, and it’s the first truly nihilist iPhone app:

When you first run it, it won’t even open. The icon will pulse and move — seeming, almost, to grow — before becoming still, cold, and dead. The color will fade from it — a condition that will spread to other icons nearby.

The more you use it, the more it uses you:

The shopping list you keep in Notes will be amended — “milk, eggs, deliver my eternal soul from nothingness.” Horizon One™ will send you e-mails from a you that is apparently drifting in a void, asking for help. They will become increasingly desperate, and frenzied. You will receive these e-mails until you realize that the void is life, and you are caught in its grip. Upon this epiphany, Horizon One™ will brick your phone, allowing you to see only the lock screen. The wallpaper has changed — a picture of you, in chains, forever screaming. Slide to unlock. Slide to unlock.

And inevitably:

Also Twitter integration.

But of course.

(Recommended by Patti.)

Trouble is, so does certainty, sometimes.

It didn’t bring Rachel Lucas down:

I’ve always had a thing for stained glass, and does it matter if I don’t believe in Mary’s virgin birthing of Christ, or of the Garden of Eden, or of the serpent, or original sin, as is shown in this window according to our tour guide? It’s still wonderful to look at. Still makes you think about all creation and what exactly we’re doing here.

Which just may have been the whole idea all along.

So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them: “The Lord thy God hath given unto thee the following Ten Commandments, which thou mayest now receive on thy cell phones.”

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

As it happens, you probably wouldn’t have found many actual Samaritans on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem back in New Testament times.

Then again, one is more than enough to make a point.

Cathedral bells in Liverpool resound with John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

Churchmen in Liverpool say they carefully considered “sensitivities” surrounding the lyrical content of the former Beatle’s 1971 hit — which begins “Imagine there’s no Heaven” — before allowing the performance at the city’s cathedral, which boasts the highest and heaviest ringing peal bells in the world.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the cathedral to hear the tune, which Lennon, who was murdered in New York in 1980, described as “anti-religious, anti-conventional and anti-capitalistic”.

And he should know, right?

I’m a tad baffled by this. On the one hand, it’s a genuinely lovely tune, and I trust the ringers did it justice. (And the Liverpool airport, renamed for Lennon in 2002, already quotes from the song: “Above us, only sky,” says the logo.) But there’s something a trifle unsettling about it, like sending KFC coupons to all your vegan friends.

(Via Christopher Johnson. Previous thoughts along these lines here.)

A tale of prophecy fulfilled, truth revealed, and American Express, thoughts for a rainy Easter.

Having already plugged Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste, and having speculated wildly about the Chinese-language version thereof, I figure the very least I can do is mention the new Polish version, Dreszcz czystości, for which she’ll actually be doing a book tour later this month.

Contrast and compare: Chinese cover, left; Polish cover, right.

Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah.

Somehow I suspect this isn’t quite, um, Orthodox.

(Seen here.)

“The man of faith has more influence than he knows,” says Betty Duffy, “especially if he’s good looking.” Apparently one such has materialized:

A consequence of this Marlboro man spending his social times at Church is that other manly men feel comfortable doing the same. Church is no longer just a place for old folks and nerds. Our Parish is undergoing an awakening where young attractive couples and singles actually want to be there. Of course Christ is at the heart of this renewal, but it doesn’t hurt to see attractive people at Church.

This must be one of the “mysterious ways” routinely attributed to the Lord. Doubt it not.

I would even go so far as to say that attractive people have a responsibility to be present in their Churches. If you’re blessed with good looks, wouldn’t you rather reach the end of your life with a group of people who followed your charisma and beauty to Heaven rather than Hell?

Maybe I’m just a shallow sucker for good looking people, but it’s food for thought.

Not everyone with good looks necessarily views it as a blessing, though I’m suspecting the studly fellow in this example is properly humble. As for me, were I any shallower, I’d be bas-relief.

From Francis W. Porretto’s Rumination this Sunday:

A couple of days ago, I revisited an old favorite piece of contemporary music: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. An unfortunate number of persons dismiss it as a mere firework, a showcase for Oldfield’s multi-instrumental virtuosity. Yet it’s much more than that. If you have the opportunity, listen to it closely, with full attention. I’d be surprised if you were to come away without the sense that a great, overarching theme had been expressed in its melodies and harmonies. My only quarrel is with its title; it should have been a Mass.

Could it have been a Mass? Surely Oldfield didn’t intend it to be, but it’s not so hard to find a Mass within it.

The pay gap between men and women in the European Union is 17.4 percent, and several explanations are proffered:

The pay gap is linked to a number of complex causes which are frequently interrelated: the undervaluing of women’s work, segregation in the labour market, traditions and stereotypes, and problems in balancing work and private life. The gender pay gap is the consequence of all these factors and inequalities in the labour market.

Or not:

The real surprise is that the most Catholic countries in Europe, traditionally considered as “backward”, such as Poland, Italy and Malta, have the SMALLEST gap (a statistically insignificant 4.4% in “macho” Italy and a tiny 7.5% in Poland), while the allegedly more “progressive” and “feminist” countries, such as Holland, United Kingdom and Germany, find themselves with the LARGEST gaps (in Holland men are paid 23.6% more than women). Even Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark have pay gaps that are larger than the EU average of 17.4%.

This is not an East-West divide (Estonia is the worst country in Europe with a 30.3% gap). Rather, the results seem determined by religion: the seven countries with the smallest gaps are all Roman Catholic, followed by Eastern Orthodox ones, while the Protestant nations are among the worst offenders.

Not being aware of any specific commandment to the effect that “Thou shalt pay women less,” I am a tad perplexed by this finding.

Incidentally, that second link should be considered NSFW, which is why you’re getting it on the weekend.