Christians to stop celebrating birthdays

The latest trend to sweep the nation originates from an unlikely source. Groups of Christians around the country have stopped celebrating birthdays – including those of friends, their children, and their own – in a bid to finally put paid to their whimsically sound belief that the soul enters the body at conception.

This generalization is admittedly somewhat misleading; by ‘body’ I of course meant ‘cell’, as there really is no body to speak of instantly after fertilization. In fact, the fertilized egg is so small a target that it can be notoriously hard to hit for novice souls recently out of flight school. Since the zygote unfortunately does not wait for the soul’s entrance before it begins to develop, it’s thought that inevitable misses have been responsible for producing some of history’s more soulless characters, Martha Stewart being only the most recent example.

Believing that birthdays detract from the significance of conception, many Christians agree with the view put forward by a spokesman today that “the birth itself is actually an unremarkable event in the life of a person.” He added that, “especially when compared to the miracle of conception, a miracle which we finally understand thanks to science, birth is pretty mundane.” Indeed, the clinical tile of a hospital is almost a ubiquitous experience in birth these days. Celebrating conception, however, will allow copulating couples to personalize the event, perhaps with asses scratched raw by hay, or the enthusiastic burst of a punctured condom.

Addressing criticism that this sidelines the role of women in nurturing children, the spokesman agreed that this was really the secondary aim. “Women have kept their stranglehold on birth over the centuries by pretending that it’s painful, but since they’re the only ones who ever experience it, we don’t really know that it hurts,” he explained. “I don’t even think it’s all that bad,” concluded the spokesman.

The new convention will thankfully also cut down on home videos of childbirth, a genre of film frequently classified as ‘torture porn’. Since the spawning female is at the ugliest stage of her life cycle since her dental headgear-laden teenage years, the trend is expected to be widely applauded.

As the standard by which ages are determined will have to shift forward accordingly, Mormon parents are reportedly thrilled to be able to get their girls out of the house and married nine months sooner. “It shaves nine months off the risk of her wanting a career!” enthused one parent.

The move is, however, not without its losers. Twins, triplets, and other iterations of superfluous clone children are expected to suffer most from the policy. Since they won’t all be entitled to celebrate their birth anymore, children will have to fight it out between themselves to determine who is the legitimate inheritor of the soul. While not all parents are thrilled at the prospect of facilitating natural selection within their own homes, most are satisfied with the chosen moniker of ‘moocher’ to describe the losing children.

Misogyny Meter for this article a comfortable 8/10