What an attractively symmetrical graph:
People who don’t go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in “agree for the most part” category have since gotten smaller.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He’s afraid we’re going to put a human brain in a rodent’s head. No, really — it’s not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals “before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.” Now, seriously, his worry isn’t that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.
The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.
They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!
A “visionary” is recommending a new way of seeing “visions” of the Virgin Mary: stare directly into the sun. It works! Sort of.
Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.
Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.
“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.
I have a “vision,” too — if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer really, really hard, you’ll see Jesus! That makes about as much sense as Zackey’s. Who, by the way, is reported as being “happy”, and is “inundated with people seeking prayer and healing.”
Here’s your course of action. First, tune up your brain with Encephalon #25. Feeling smart now?
Next, browse The Carnival of the Godless #69. Now you’re smart and aggressively, skeptically godless. Sharp as a knife.
Now you’re ready to read Revere’s Sunday Sermonette. You will be entertained. It’s an account of a Georgia pastor wrestling with theodicy, and he refreshingly concludes that a) yes, god is screwing with you and making you suffer, and b) his explanation is that god is making sure you don’t forget him. God is a petty tyrant who torments you to remind you that he exists.
You should be feeling pretty cocky at this point. These theological arguments are so silly and shallow and superficial, and you can just slice right through them.
Unfortunately, Greg Laden is going to slime you with a loogey gun next. Watching Michele Bachmann talk about god is agonizing—god was apparently “focused like a laser beam” on her congressional race; the omnipotent omniscient ruler of the entire universe thought a political contest in a small Minneapolis suburb was the most important event in the whole cosmos, and was personally wielding his vast power to get a babbling boob into office.
Hah. What good does all your brain power and reason and logic do against that, I ask you? If there were a god, Michele Bachmann would be evidence that he is evil and he is screwing with us.
What is wrong with these people?
Be sure to catch the cute little toddler’s solo at the end. Tell me, is this child abuse yet?
Why, this must be the smartest dog in the universe.
Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times.
To prove this wasn’t a fluke, the couple and a friend tossed out more math than teachers during exam time. Micah consistently pawed the correct answers, appearing to solve such problems as square root division, finding the numerators and denominators of fractions, multiplying and dividing, even basic algebra.
“He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German,” Cindy Tuten said.
Never underestimate the power of small groups of crazy people. All it takes is motivation, small-mindedness, and persistence, and any group can promote ignorance and limit people’s choices.
A 7-year old boy is traveling around the country, standing on street corners and preaching hellfire at passers-by (you can hear him in a recording, too). He’s part of a caravan of Baptists making an expedition up to the land of the Yankees to tell us all we’re going to hell.
Is this abuse? The poor kid is wasting time on the Bible and haranguing random people at the behest of his parents. Oh, excuse me, at the behest of God.
It wasn’t that long ago that we got to hear lots of wailing about how secular/liberal values led to the Virginia Tech massacre (although, to be fair, most of the wailing was of the “god works in mysterious ways” sort). We had Chuck Norris blaming the “secular progressive agenda”.
Though one can point to Cho’s own psychotic behavior and our graphic slasher media as potential contributors to his deplorable murder spree, we must also hesitate to consider how we as a society are possibly contributing to the growth of these academic killing fields. I believe those who wield the baton of the secular progressive agenda bear significant responsibility for the escalation of school shootings. Even conservatives who refuse to speak when evil flourishes must acknowledge some culpability.
We had church groups claiming that restoring prayer to the schools would fix everything.
American Family Radio has raised a similar battle cry, claiming in a video that events leading to recent years’ school shootings in places like Jonesboro, Ark., Springfield, Ore., Littleton Colo., and Blacksburg, Va., “started when Madalyn Murray O’Hair complained she didn’t want any prayer in our schools, and we said ‘O.K.'” That is an apparent reference to Supreme Court decisions that have outlawed government-sanctioned prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools.
Now we have a federal agency releasing a profile of the killer.
Cho, 23, of Centreville, whose family was religious and had sought help for him from a Woodbridge church, repeatedly made religious references. He said that he had been “crucified” and that, as with Jesus, his actions would set people free. He called himself a “martyr” who would “sacrifice” his life. He wrote that he would go down in history as the “Jesus Christ of the Weak and Defenseless.” He thought his actions would inspire others to fight back and get even.
Ooops. I predict that, just like Tim McVeigh is conveniently forgotten when it’s time to characterize terrorists as brown and muslim, Cho will be forgotten when it’s expedient to pretend Christianity is a religion of peace and love.
Salman Rushdie has been awarded a knighthood—it’s well deserved, I say, as he is an excellent writer—but some people have reacted insanely. (Warning: Irony rich environment ahead.)
