A real racket

Collectable card games are evil: if they get you hooked, you find yourself throwing money at little foil packets of randomized bits of cardboard, feeding the variable reinforcement schedule. The New Humanist has stumbled onto compounded evil, combining collectable card games with religion. Fortunately, they’re giving the images away for free. If they ever start selling booster packs, though, it will be time to descend on their offices with pitchforks and torches and root out the wicked.

Billy Graham answers his email

Billy Graham has a column in which he answers letters — he’s a kind of evangelical agony aunt, I guess. A recent letter will make you laugh.

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are in the dark, and he alone in our family has found the truth. — S. McM.

That’s a real problem, and I’m sure we all know someone who has gone off the deep end with some weird belief. That’s not the funny part; the good bit is Graham’s oblivious reply.

DEAR S. McM: One characteristic of cults is that they strongly believe they alone are right in their beliefs and everyone else is wrong. Thus they reject the central truths of the Bible that Christians have held in common for almost 2,000 years and substitute their own beliefs for the clear teaching of Scripture.

Shorter Billy Graham: The difference between their cult and mine is that they think they have the absolute truth, when I know that I do.

At last, a school board agenda I can fully support

Our local school boards tend to be institutions of endless tedium punctuated by madness. One bold innovator seeks to change this situation by increasing the insanity.

“Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits,” West said. “Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond.”

I like it! It definitely beats the usual creationist lunacy.

I failed this test

It’s hard, you try it: it’s the Religion 101 final exam. I sure hope they post the answer key sometime.

Although…if it’s evaluated in the same way religion is, maybe any answer will do, and I’ve actually aced it.

Oh, wait — I answered it the atheist way, which is to leave it blank. That’s probably the one way you’re guaranteed to get stern angry looks from the teacher and expulsion from the whole school.

Atheists now rule most of the world

Who knew that all you had to do is change the definition of “atheist”? Put on your sunglasses and visit this site—the color scheme is classic fluorescent kook—and you will discover that atheists are people who deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. Period. Which means…

  • James van Praagh, loopy psychic medium and newager, is an atheist!
  • All Jews…atheists!
  • Muslims…atheists!
  • Martin Luther King…atheist! (Wait, what?)

I like this game. Atheists also deny the divinity of Thor, which means…Christians are atheists!

There. Now that we’ve taken over the world, I think I deserve to go have some ice cream.

Who is buying all that porn?

An analysis of the consumption of internet pornography found that there are only small differences between states, but that there are some patterns. The patterns will not surprise anyone.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.

…

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

So Republican states gobbled up more nekkid pitchers than Democratic states… but of course, one could argue that it was just the few Democrats in Utah who were slavering most obsessively over porn, while the Republican Mormons were being upright (no, wait, maybe that’s the wrong word…) Montana is a conservative state, too, but maybe the ready availability of all those cows helps slake their forbidden lusts.*

What about those good Christians?

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

Heh. Now we all know what “values” is a code word for.

*Uh-oh. Here comes all the hate mail from Montanans.