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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Rationalwiki defines Poe’s law thusly:

Poe’s Law states:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

Someone has put up a web site called AntiSpore to protest the new game in which players create life forms which evolve over time – apparently the idea that it embraces evolution and the fact that it’s technically possible to build creatures with appendages that resemble human genitalia is an affront to God and Christians everywhere.

This entire game is propaganda aimed directly at our children to teach them evolution instead of creationism, or “intelligent design” if you go for stupid PC terms.

The object of the game is to evolve from a “spore” into demon-like intelligent space creatures that violently take over the galaxy.

I can’t decide whether this site is for real, or just somebody having a little Poe-inspired fun.

Haven’t posted in a while despite the abundance of free time caused by my current state of unemployment in a stagnant market. There’s certainly been no shortage of material, what with the political conventions going on, but even the Palin mess hasn’t really inspired me to the requisite levels of cynicism and sarcasm to actually write something down.

So lieu of another collection of bad metaphors and worse puns from me, I present for your entertainment Mark Fiore’s Latest Cartoon.

Oh, and Roy Zimmerman – whose Delaware performance I sadly missed due to some last-minute babysitter issues – has a new song about McCain’s VP nomination:

… and by “behaving badly”, I don’t mean “being gay”, I mean “being hypocrites”, and not the ancient Greek doctor guy, either.

Yes, it seems that another Republican anti-gay crusader has been exposed as – you guessed it – gay. The “It’s a sin unless it’s me” party has a rather sordid recent history in that regards.

The alleged perpetrator this time is Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who it seems was caught in bed with his male lover by his wife. It’s all rumor at this point, of course, but Troy has not publically addressed the issue yet and there is rampant speculation that he’ll resign over the brewing scandal.

Is there anyone in the Grond Ole Homophobic Party who doesn’t have a gay lover?

It’s a frequent tactic of theists to post video “refutations” of atheism to YouTube but to either turn off comments altogether or so systematically delete any rebuttal that didn’t share their viewpoint.

The video you’re about to watch was one of those, but thanks to a new service called BubblePly, I was able to create a point-by-point “live” reply!

(It’s my first attempt at pop-up video, so forgive me if there are quality/timing issues)

The cracker controversy goes on. Though PZ Myers has received multiple death threats over his stated intention to desecrate a wafer, it’s apparently the Catholics who fear for their lives – so much so that Bill Donohue and his Catholic League have felt the need to ask for increased security at the upcoming Republican convention to defend them from those “hysterical atheists”. Apparently atheists’ inability to grasp the obviousness of the bread-product-to-sacred-meat transformation is a sign of violent, unpredictable personalities.

It’s absurd, of course, to expect some sort of atheist-vs-catholic pogroms to break out at a political convention. But, really, I have no problem with the idea of beefing up security. In fact, I think every single attendee at that particular gathering should have his or her own dedicated team of highly paid professional bodyguards… because every dollar they spend on paranoia is a dollar they don’t spend on their election campaigns.

I wonder if the domain name “ChristOnACracker.com” is taken? It could become a Jesus-recipe swap site – I’ll post my Broccoli Savior Casserole! I also wonder at what point during the digestive process the transubtantiation happens. If a low carb dieter, for instance, was to toss down a handful of properly blessed Eucharists, would they turn to meat in time to avoid spiking the eater’s blood sugar? And should there be a “Before/After” type nutritional label to go with those things? I mean, how is anybody supposed to know how many grams of protein and fat are in a single serving of Jesus?

Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.

That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)

But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:

“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.

So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:

Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.

Catholics worldwide are apparently up in arms about a guy trying to walk out of a church with an uneaten communion wafer. And while it’s not even clear what his motivation was for doing so, it hasn’t stopped the death threats from rolling in. As summarized by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula, after evading attempts to physically wrest the God-cookie from him, Webster Cook has been accused of a hate crime, his actions compared to kidnapping by one priest.

Sometimes I wish I had my own news show (I’d call it somethng like WTF?TV) to cover stories like this. Here’s how the talking head on my station would read this news:

Blasphemy or a simple search for steak sauce? That’s the question being debated tonight after UCF student Webster Cook fought his way through a throng of worshipers to carry off a poor, defenseless bit of transubstantiated Savior-flesh.

Church spokesman His Holiness Reverend Father Cardinal Bishop Patsy O’Nambla, himself no stranger to oral consumption of small bits of male meat, had this to say about the incident:

“I just don’t understand what would motivate a person to do something like this. I mean, here we are in the middle of our ritual cannibalistic devouring of the flesh of the big guy on the stick, and this kid decides to leave church property without finishing his portion? What is this guy, crazy or something?”

Said Cook, in his defense:

“I really didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that… well… the eucharist is kind of bland, and I like my Jesus-loin with a little bit of Wooshter-… Worstecesterer-… Worchest-… uh, some A1. Was going to come back and eat Jesus, I swear! I guess from now on maybe I’d bring a little plastic bag with some seasonings to avoid this kind of mix-up in the future. ”

In related news, Catholic League president Bill Donohue’s head exploded today on national television. Again.