Maybe baby Jesus is playing with Dad’s branding iron again

This is Ali, a six month old baby in Southern Russia.

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It’s a miracle! Every Monday and Thursday, fresh quotations from the Quran ‘magically’ appear on his legs, belly, or arms when he’s home alone with his mommy and daddy, and then the pilgrims show up in the thousands to give the happy family lots and lots of attention. I simply can’t imagine how red marks might appear on the delicate skin of a young baby while under the care of doting, attentive parents, or why anyone might cheat and fake a miracle…can you? The only possible explanation is that the omnipotent, omniscient master of the entire cosmos occasionally gets bored overseeing the fusion of hydrogen in stars, and just has to come down to visit Ali and dickishly inflame small regions of his epidermis. I can understand that; if I had the power to end a wasteful war in the Kizlyar region, I’m sure I’d just use it to torment babies instead. But hey, I’m an atheist. What’s God’s excuse?

As testimony to the importance of this miracle, the site has not one, but two online polls. Journalists are going all out on this story, I can tell!

Do you believe in miracles?

Yes 64%
I’m open to the possibility 21%
No 15%

Do you consider yourself religious?

Yes 70%
No 30%

Watch out, though. God is plainly a bit bored right now — he might take a break from getting fancy with rashes on babies and instead start doing something more appropriate to his vast power and glory…like playing games with internet polls.

Nah, who am I kidding? Nothing could be more fun for God than abusing babies! That never gets old!

Fun with Twitter

Apparently, twitter tracks hot trends in the tiny little conversations flying about, and the #1 hot topic today was “No God”. The amusing reason why is that someone posted that boring and fallacious cliche, “Know God…Know Peace. No God…No Peace”, a lot of Christians retweeted it, and a few atheists contributed to the confusion by saying “no god”, and that’s all it took to single out that one phrase and turn it into the top few words being bandied about.

Just to make it even more hilarious, various Christian twitterers (or whatever they call them) freaked out and started frantically submitting their magic mantra even more, which just blew it up even higher. And all the atheists are sitting back laughing and writing “no god” again!

Combine stupid text searches with a human feedback loop, and look at the silly behavior it can evoke.

You only have a few days left…then you’re going to DIE!

Last month, we were told that the Rapture was coming on 21 September. It didn’t happen. You know that there must have been some little mistake in their calculations.

The prophets have double-checked their numbers and found the error, and fixed it. We now know without error the date of the end.

THE RAPTURE IS COMING ON 21 OCTOBER!!!!

Scurry and flee, everyone. They can’t be wrong everytime, can they? This might be it.

I get email

I suppose it’s nice to know I’m not forgotten, but it’s still a little weird that I occasionally get email from Bill Donohue, just out of the blue. Like today.

secular sabotage

PZ,

Just to let you know, I did not forget you when I wrote “Secular Sabotage.” You made the cut the old fashioned way–you earned it.

Bill Donohue

I don’t know what prompted that, but it is good to know that I have a reputation for working hard. I wouldn’t want to be thought to be a mere welfare heretic, coasting along on handouts from theological anti-patronage, you know.

Impeach Obama?

The news that Obama has won a Nobel peace prize was weird — and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he has done badly at promoting peace, I just don’t think he’s made the kind of exceptional effort that something with the prestige of the Nobel ought to reward — but here’s something much, much crazier: WhirledNutDaily has begun a campaign to impeach Obama. You might be wondering on what grounds they would commit this act…but they don’t seem to have anything specific. I just got email from WND begging for donations for their little crusade, and here’s the best reason they offer, from some wingnut radio personality, Tammy Bruce.

“… ultimately, it comes down to… the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated.”

That ranks right up there with the “he looked at me funny” excuse for starting a fight.

The whole piece is a detestable incitement to take any action necessary to bring down Obama. Look at their ‘reasoning’:

Make no mistake. We’re now in the middle of a bloodless coup –
the takeover of an entire nation by the hate-America crowd – a cold-blooded gang that despises American’s
prosperity, our standing in the world, our trust in God and our generosity and goodness.

    
America is a monument to the triumph of freedom. When Barack Hussein Obama thinks about freedom… he sees a world in which some people, due
to personal initiative and good fortune, will do better than others… live better than others.

    
And in that regard, he is right. But Barack Obama sees that as unfair. Where you see freedom, liberty and the opportunity for
any American to be all that he or she can be, Obama sees greed and bigotry.

    
And, like so many on the far-left before him, going all the way back to Karl Marx, he believes that it’s his mission to promote
“equality of outcome” over
“equality of opportunity”
even if Americans must learn to live in chains to make it happen
(in fact, servitude to the iron will of government will be required).

    
That worldview makes Barack Hussein Obama a very dangerous man and one of the greatest threats to your personal liberty today.

    
That dangerous worldview also explains why he has already gobbled-up major banks and why the government now controls more and
more of our money – yours and mine.

    
And if you wake up one day to discover you’re broke… don’t be surprised…
and while you’re at it, don’t feel bad either because at least everyone will be broke…
destitute… under the iron yoke of government… but everything will be fair
and equal… that’s what extremists, like Obama, mean when they use
the term… "social justice."

    
And he’ll make it happen… he can make it happen… he’s already started to
make it happen.  Barack Hussein Obama is Bernie Madoff with the political power of the presidency at
his disposal.

    
That dangerous worldview explains the sudden and shocking erosion of your freedom to make a living, to run your own business,
whether a Mom-and-Pop grocery store or General Motors.

    
That dangerous worldview explains why his Attorney General, Eric Holder, despises the 2nd Amendment… why, if he had his way,
he would take away our guns, leaving us defenseless against gangs and hoods – and, more to the point, against Obama’s own
shock-troops from
ACORN or SEIU. Remember, it was the healthy and rational fear of government that led to the inclusion of the
2nd Amendment in the Constitution of the United States.

    
And that dangerous worldview explains why Obama intends to take away your freedom to choose your own doctor… your own
treatment. Wherever government controls health care, bureaucrats decide who gets treatments… who gets transplants…
who gets dialysis… who gets costly medication… and who needs to die for the common good.

    
What can we do to stop this monomaniac… this American dictator? There’s only one answer.

    
Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution reads: “The President, Vice President and all civil
officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery,
or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It goes on and on like that — you can just picture the authors frothing at the mouth.

So I guess I’d have to say that maybe a Nobel was a useful counterbalance to the lunacy going on here.

Obama wins a Nobel?

I know this award is heavily politicized, but this is ridiculous: Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. I don’t think Obama’s efforts for peace have been particularly notable — the wars still drag on with no end or even promise of an end in sight, and there has been some sabre-rattling over Iran from his administration lately — but I guess all you have to do is follow after Bush and not blow anything up for a year, and presto, you look like Gandhi.

Oh, well. It’s definitely more appropriate than the award to Kissinger, but that isn’t saying much.

A priest, a rabbi, a Baptist, an Episcopalian, and an imam walk into a bar…

It’s not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous ‘infographic’ (‘infographic’ is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group of representatives of each faith in a bar, with a graph superimposed on each. The bar photo is busy, distracting, and adds nothing but visual noise to the data. However, one thing stands out.

The members of the different faiths are sitting around on bar stools. Guess who represents the godless? A hot tattooed chick…and she’s the bartender.

I wonder if the photographer reads Jesus & Mo?

The goggles! They do nothing!

Ouch. What a painful piece of right-wing kitsch.

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I had no idea that Jesus personally delivered the Constitution, or that it was a religious document.

If you go to the site hosting this…thing, you can mouse around and it will spell out the symbology behind all those figures. I rather like the professor; he’s the one on the far right, near the shadowy figure, Satan.

He tightly holds his “Origin of Species” book by Charles Darwin. This represents the liberal lefts control of our educational system. His smug expression describes the attitude of many of the educational elite. There is no room for God in education. There is contempt for any other viewpoints. Humanism dominates the educational system of America and I believe that is wrong. Notice that he is the only one sitting on the top step. He tries to place himself on an equal footing with God, but he is still nothing next to the intelligence of the Creator.

There’s that smug thing again. It’s hard not to be smug when you see this kind of ham-handed kitsch, you know.