Those African Christians sure do seem to be a devout bunch, making a name for themselves through amusing escapades such as getting lost at sea on a balloon chair for God or the persecution of accused child witches.

Not to be outdone by Balloon Boy, one Franck Kabele, apparent recipient of a vision from God informing him it was time to go out and perform a miracle, led his congregation to a beach and told them he was going to walk on water.

Astute readers will probably already see where this is going.

So Mr. Kabele strolled out into an estuary, brimming with his love and faith in Christ… and drowned.

(This piece of news dates back to 2006, but for some reason has been making the rounds in the last week or so. Maybe his followers have finally tired of waiting for him to come back from the dead?)

Want something a little more recent? Check out http://www.paliban.org, a new site spoofing those whose belief system might be frighteningly similar to that of our former potential vice-president.

My domain disappeared for a while because it expired without warning and the e-mail account the registrar was sending password reminder e-mails to has been defunct for a while. Anyway, everything seems to have been straightened out now, and in the meantime I’ve finally found a new job after the one I’ve had for 11+ years disappeared in August. It’s a pay cut and a more annoying commute, but I really like the new place and it’s a good career move overall; assuming the overall economy can survive the next few months, in the long run it’ll probably all work out for the better.

It seems that just last night I was speculating on what the Bush folks would be up to in the waning days of their disastrous administration.

Someone at the New York Times had a similar thought, apparently, because the paper’s Opinion section ran an article on Monday titled “So Little Time, So Much Damage“. It seems there are still plenty of civil rights to be taken away, environmental regulations to repeal, and reproductive rights to challenge before the game is over.

There’s even time to squeeze a few more unqualified candidates into politically appointed positions! Pretend for a moment that you’re Michael Alix, a high-level executive in charge of risk management at Bear-Stearns. Your company has been run into the ground, presumably by taking risks it shouldn’t have - which means you haven’t done your job very well. It’s a good thing you’ve got a sweetheart golden-parachute deal worked out, because with “helped bankrupt a large financial house” on your resume, your short-term job prospects aren’t too rosy.

Not in BushWorld! No, here in the land of manufactured reality, you’ve earned yourself an important position at the Federal Reserve! In related news, Michael Jackson has been hired to conduct children’s tours through the White House, and Army intelligence operatives have mounted Sarah Palin on a tall pole on the Alaskan coast to serve as an early warning system should the floating head of Vladimir Putin darken the western sky.

No, I’m not talking about the fall of right-wing dominance in our government. Nor am I talking about the election of a president who is anything other than a wealthy white male.

I’m talking about something much more deep and profound: Opus.

Yes, Opus the penguin, star of Bloom County, Outland, and eventually a comic strip of his very own. He retired this week; his creator, Berkely Breathed, decided that the world is going downhill fast, and he wanted to save Opus from being corrupted by what is to come. In a letter to the LA Times, he says:

I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.

and:

With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.

I’ve been a Bloom County (etc) fan since I first saw the strip in the 80s; in my mind it along with Calvin & Hobbes and possibly The Far Side - all tragically lost to us now - are the comic strips to which I’ll always compare all others, and probably to the newcomers’ detriment. Opus and his cohorts are childhood friends I’ll likely never see again except in old pictures, but in the years to come, whatever they hold, I’m sure I’ll think of them often.

Opus’ final comic strip is here.

A letter from Breathed on his web site has this to say:

Opus is napping. He sleeps in peace, dreaming of a world just ahead brimming with kindness and grace and ubiquitous bow ties.

Sleep well, Opus, and may your dreams come true for all of us. Except for the bow ties.

As of this writing, Obama’s carrying 333 electoral votes to McCain’s 156; even Fox news has declared him the next president. The totals aren’t all in yet, of course, and those numbers are based in part on exit polls, but even should the GOP decide to challenge many of the results, Obama has won an electoral landslide that’s likely going to hold in spite of whatever efforts the right may make to try to invalidate it.

Democrats will now have solid majorities in both houses of congress; under other circumstances, I would call this a bad thing - too much power in the hands of one faction can become a dangerous thing. In this case, though, I’ll have to make an exception, because taking the power out of the hands of the crazy people has to override those more generic fears.

My new worry is that the Bush admin will use the fact that nobody cares about them anymore to launch a scorched earth policy to make the incumbent’s job as difficult as possible. At any other time in my life, had someone suggested this as a legitimate worry, I’d have laughed; but I with BushCo in its last throes, I can’t help but think it could happen.

Yes, it’s a historic victory in a historic election, for numerous reasons that will have been covered in a thousand other places. So I’ll just close by offering congratulations to Obama and Biden, and good luck to them in facing the massive challenged that await them after January 20th.

(Oh, and Nevada was just called for Obama, making the count 338-156.)

I’ve taken the core code from the WordPress SkeptiQuote plugin and used it to build a simple Drupal block module. Like its predecessor, it picks a random quote from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible and displays it on your page.

SkeptiQuote for Drupal ZIP

SkeptiQuote for Drupal tarball

Forget the War on Christmas(tm)… we as a society have forgotten the true meaning of Halloween!

(Yeah, so I’m a day late.)

I’ve noticed lately after looking at a lot of blog and content management packages that random Bible quote plugins are widely available, but I couldn’t find anything equivalent for skeptical sorts like me - so I made my own.

It’s called SkepiQuote, and it’s currently available as a simple WordPress widget, though versions for other packages are planned. It picks randomly from a selection of quotes stolen borrowed with permission from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.

From the readme file (typos and all… grrr):

SkeptiQuote Wordpress Plugin
@2008 by Don Lloyd
Version 1.0

Updates and variations will be found at http://www.drl2.com/blog/?cat=8

Tested on WordPress 2.5 and 2.6.3

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I’ve been tinkering with various blog and CMS packages lately and noticed that almost every one of them has an available plugin that displays random quotes from the Bible and/or other holy books. Unfortunately there was nothing for those of us of a more skeptical bent, so I decided to create one to exercise some long-atrophied PHP muscles (I’ve been stuck in the .NET world since PHP 3 was new) and to get a little familiar with the world of plugin creation.

The included quote file is built from a collection gathered from the Bible, the Quran, and the Book of Mormon by Steve Wells of The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/) and highlight some of the… let’s call them unsavory aspects of those tomes.

————-

INSTALLATION: Just put the SkeptiQuote directory into your WordPress plugins folder, then activate the plugin and place the widget via the WP management console just as you would any other widget. Check the WordPress site for widget install instructions if you’re unfamiliar with the process.

————-

This software comes with no warranty, guarantee, assurance, promise, or suggestion of stability, functionality, or magical powers. It comes only with the statement that it’s worked for me so far.

Feel free to use and abuse SkeptiQuote any way you want. Setting it up as a generic random quote engine is easy - just follow the instructions in quotes.php to add your own text.

I do have a couple of requests of anyone who uses this:

- If you keep the supplied quotes, please keep the links to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ intact - Steve undoubtedly put a lot more work into collecting those quotes than I did in stealing them (with premission) from javascript files on his site.

- If your site is related to skepticism, atheism, etc., a link to my blog (http://www.drl2.com/blog) would be a nice gesture… I don’t have nearly enough people showing up to batter my fragile ego by disagreeing with me!

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TO(possibly sometime eventually if the mood strikes)DO list:

- Implement some more advanced formatting capabilities such as optional category/source name display (quotes.php is built with separate sources already in anticipation of this)
- It strikes me as rather inefficient to load in a huge list of quotes every time the code is run; would be better to pick a number then randomly access the quotes file to find the corresponding line. Need to think about how to do this without compromising easy end-user quote editability.
- Add an optional refresh or “next quote” type button and Ajax-ify the refresh.

————-

Versions of SkeptiQuote for other CMS., etc. packages are planned. Check http://www.drl2.com/blog/?cat=8 for the latest.

Download SkeptiQuote here in whichever file format you prefer:

SkeptiQuote Widget .tar.gz file

SkeptiQuote Widget ZIP file

Look up in the top right corner of this page to see the widget in action!

There’s a vocal subset of American Christians who delight in whining about an imaginary “War on Christmas” and proclaiming that “militant atheists” are waging a battle to outlaw their beliefs. From the depths of their persecution syndrome they’re unable to see that what they’re really complaining about is that they don’t have free reign to force their nonsense on everybody else (we have nonsense enough of our own to deal with already, thankyouverymuch).

I’d like to suggest that these folks look to recent events in India for a taste of what real persecution is like. Hindu extremists have driven more than 50,000 Christians from their homes, killed dozens at least, and forced many conversions at knife- or gun-point.

All because two groups of people disagree on which variety of invisible magician to believe in.

This sort of action is unforgivable, whether it’s done in the name of Ganesh or Allah or Jehovah or Odin or no god at all, no matter what religious or ethnic group is the target.

“This is what’s coming to America!” will argue the craziest of the conspiracy theists (a phrase which I hope I’ve just coined for the first time, because I really like the way it sounds and would like to take credit for it!), their heads filled with visions of demonic atheist hordes herding believers into forced abortion camps. Never mind that we live in a nation where it’s nearly impossible (and, in fact, illegal in several states) for an atheist to hold political office, and many elections for the highest positions in the land have boiled down to who can squeeze God into the most speeches.

These last 8 years under Bushevism have driven home the lesson that “it could never happen here” is a short-sighted statement, so I won’t say it here. But it’s clear that we’re a long, long way from becoming a society that would allow real persecution of Christians. On the flip side, we have politicians openly seeking endorsements from vocal anti-semites who celebrate the Holocaust, open rejection of the idea of a Muslim (or someone whose name sounds Islamic) holding public office, bad actors turned bad pundits suggesting atheists should be tattooed for identification, and even a former president making the claim that atheists are neither citizens nor patriots.

As an American atheist I don’t feel persecuted - certainly not in comparison to what’s going on in India - but if violence of that sort does come to this country, I can make an educated guess at who the targets might be.

Well, God’s money, that is.

It seems that a bunch of ministers have decided risk losing their tax exempt status by endorsing a political candidate in a move they’ve dubbed Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Apparently the idea of church-state separation has been completely lost on these people (not that I’m shocked in the slightest).

Someone will have to challenge this action, of course, or political endorsements by religious organizations will become commonplace - as if they weren’t already, though now only in slightly-less-subtle-than-a-blow-to-the head, “unofficial” ways - and the challengers will of course be painted as evil god-hating pagan atheist devil-worshiping liberals who are waging a war on Christmas and want to outlaw Christianity, but hey, we alleged servants of Satan get that all the time anyway.

The thought of churches losing their tax exempt status over this is a pleasant one, though. Let ‘em endorse all they want, but they’ve got to pay taxes. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if many of our financial problems couldn’t be solved by simply dropping those religious tax exemptions altogether. The down side would be of course that many of the charitable services provided by churches - soup kitchens, shelters, etc - might suffer, but there’s certainly no reason that such services couldn’t be moved to secular non-profit organizations that would retain their tax breaks.

I wanted to look into this matter a bit more, but recent, comprehensive statistics on church income seem to be sparse. I did find a report claiming that evangelicals in the US collected approximately 2.66 trillion dollars of income in 2000. That’s a figure that has probably risen since then, and leaves out, one would assume, the Catholic church, thousands of non-evangelical Christians, and organizations of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, as well as all the other groups out there who collect donations in support of mythological figures.

Taxing this income could pay for the entire Iraq war in only a few years, so our children and grandchildren (and so on) don’t have to. It would provide a vast new source of wealth for improving infrastructure, addressing health care costs, improving education, etc - in short, it could be put to much better use in improving the quality of life for all Americans than it currently does. Of course, a few preachers might have to sell their Jaguars.

I’m aware that barring some awesome breakthrough in anti-aging science, there won’t be an America within my lifetime with the political will to even try this. I suppose I could hope that, instead, these organizations could back up their tremendous electoral influence through the pushing of issues and platforms and all-but-open candidate endorsements by actually ponying up some cash to help pay for the actions our elected officials take in their names… but that, of course, would be asking for a bit too much of that personal responsibility stuff that the right-wingers always want everybody else to take.