Religious People

Why Religious People Make Me Nervous (Warning, Graphic Content)

I think there's always going to be a fundamental gulf between people like myself, who relate to the world in a (mostly) Rational, Humanist fashion, and religious people. We start off from different places about our ultimate understanding of the world. While we might be able to come to terms on basic things like law, government, and the structure of society, at the drop of a hat the whole world can change for them, and everything we had agreed upon before is now null and void.

There's no stability in your worldview when it stems from the belief in supernatural forces beyond human ken. Today God says to love your fellow man; tomorrow he says to murder the unbelievers and put their heads on pikes. Who are you to disagree?

Case in point:

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- One of Liberia's most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked, has returned to the nation his troops terrorized to confess, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths.

Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned this week to face his homeland's truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie. His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon's practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.

...

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he told The Associated Press on Saturday. He appeared before the commission Jan. 15.

...

In 1996, while charging naked into a battle, Blahyi said God appeared and told him he was a slave to Satan, not the hero he considered himself to be, according to an earlier interview with The Associated Press.

He became a born-again Christian and for a while, traversed the war-wracked streets of Monrovia selling cassettes of his sermons.

Satan tells him to kill, and he does. God tells him to stop, and he does.

What happens when God or Satan tell him to start killing again?

This is why I get the shivers when I go past a church, or see the Jesus fish on a car, or hear a pro-lifer talking about life beginning at conception (life meaning 'the soul we can baptize' for them).

They might be all smiles today, but tomorrow they could be waving machetes, brandishing rifles, setting fire to my home.

The worst part? They could still be all smiles.

Source: CNN.com

Waiting on Some Sign (News)

If magic was soaking your spine, you'd probably be in trouble. That's supposed to be cerebrospinal fluid, I think.

Huckabee Stands By 'Christ Comment'
I stand by pledge to hate him. It all works out.

For reference:

Mike Huckabee, a Republican relying on support from religious conservatives in Thursday's hard-fought presidential caucuses, on Sunday stood by a decade-old comment in which he said, "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."

Source: Raw Story

Is the Universe a Cosmic Snowflake?
Warren Ellis must be having kittens. There's a very untested theory out now that the universe is a 57 dimensional object containing 248 dimensions of symmetry. It's typically depicted as a snowflake sort of thing.

Example

Some days it really does feel like we're living in an issue of Planetary. Though it's a fairly tame one. Probably filler.

Source: The Telegraph Online

The Kids are Alright
So a new study finds that library use among adults decreases with age, not increases, and that libraries are increasingly being used as information depositories, rather than merely as stacks of books.

Which is what the university environment has been saying should happen for years and years. The purpose of a library should never have been about *books* per se; books are a storage medium for content. Libraries should be places to archive, organize, distribute and analyze that content. If they function that way, there's no reason to fear their obsolescence, unless we, you know, all snuff ourselves, Twilight Zone style, leaving just one guy with bad eyes and no large print books.

Source: Reuters

TSA: Keeping Up Your Fear Quota
So now they're rather severely restricting the number of lithium batteries you can bring with you when you travel, and making you carry all of them on your person, not checked.

(Ostensibly, one supposes, their rationale is that lithium batteries can go into thermal runaway and burst, emitting smoke and so forth. If this was the reason for banning them though, since it can happen to about all chemical batteries, why just the lithium? For that matter, why not focus your ban on the brands that have actually malfunctioned in the past, if any, rather than a blanket restriction?)

Bizarrely, though, you can check them if they're plugged into a device, and hence active, and hence, generating heat. (Wtf?)

In the best Orwellian tradition, they don't ban them by anything the end consumer can measure; they ban them by the weight of the lithium compounds inside the battery. The uncertainty and fear should keep the plebs on their toes.

The especially cynical among you might note that professional photographers and the intellectual class use these batteries when they travel, and cracking down on their use might be helpful to a government not particularly interested in free expression. Shame on you.

Source: Department of Transportation

Ohio National Guard's Biggest Deployment Since World War II
Not that we're in an unwinnable, endless conflict or anything. Go buy something! For 'Merika!

Source: The Toledo Blade

PS: Is it just me, or does this sound a bit menacing:

As a result, the Guard is beginning or strengthening:

• A youth mobilization camp that allows military children to meet other children in their same situation.

Personally, I don't like 'mobilizing' our youth. That's creepy.