You have been very, very naughty…

…and you deserve to burn in hell for eternity. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve done — you’re damned. Take The Good Person Test and find out! It’s standard evangelical Christian nonsense in which they hammer on any niggling divergence from absolute perfection, followed by quotes from the Bible that prove that if you fibbed once, you deserve eternal torment.

One fun thing about this “test” is that you don’t have to take the bait — go ahead, deny committing any of the sins they want to accuse you of, and then it will announce “The Bible says all men are sinners, until you’re ready to admit that you can’t continue this test.” So what do we need the test for?

The Hovind Scale

This will be handy around here: The Hovind Scale. It’s a metric for calculating the craziness of a creationist’s comment from 0 (scientific and honest) to 100 (dishonest insanity). There’s even an online calculator to simplify it for you!

I did a quick spot check on a few of our local loony commenters, and found that 16s were pretty common, and a few of the egregious old trolls who’ve been banned got up into the 40s. Unfortunately, the scale is flawed by one subjective measure: you have to interpret whether the kook is knowingly lying or not. I tend to view most of them as stupid but sincere, which means they aren’t going to hit the highest scores.

Ambitious vandalism!

A couple of college students in Toronto (what is it with those ferocious godless heathens coming out of that city?) took offense at the patent absurdity of the “Bible and Bible Studies” section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. Then they sent me a photo of the end result.

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That’s Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation sitting all alone there.

I can’t really condone this kind of behavior — think of the poor clerks who have to look everywhere to find and restore the bibles to their little ghetto — but it is funny. It’s also godless Canada, so maybe nobody noticed for a few weeks or months. Maybe nobody cared.

Here’s the other side of the story.

The book-shuffler also explains his side.

Biology needs to explain gravity?

Is your lunch hour safely over? If not, wait a while before watching another interview with Ben Stein. I can’t believe what an idiot this man is; it’s not just that he’s ignorant, but that he has these bizarrely inappropriate notions about biology. He complains about “Darwinism” because it doesn’t explain why are there laws of gravity and thermodynamics, or where physics and gravity come from (Bonus lunacy! He claims Darwin said gravity was intelligently designed!). He keeps making these insane assertions in interview after interview, too; does he ever think, or notice that gravity is not a product of biological processes? Did someone tell him gravity was produced by sucking or something?

We all know, after all, that gravity is actually produced by the 4th dimension, which is not what you think it is. Just ask a smart rabbit, who even shares some other sentiments with Stein.

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(Whatever you do, don’t send that comic to Ben Stein — he might think it’s a serious hypothesis.)