God Exists! Check out hundreds of proofs for His existence, compiled by the Internet Infidels [here]. Some of my favorites:

ARGUMENT FROM MONTY PYTHON (1) Graham Chapman appeared in a film that made fun of Jesus. (2) Graham Chapman died of a horrible, incurable disease. (3) Therefore, God exists. (3a) And has no sense of humor. ARGUMENT FROM UPPERCASE ASSERTION (1) GOD EXISTS! GET USED TO IT! (2) Therefore, God exists.

It appears as though conservatives are on the cusp of doing what they've dreamed of for over 70 years: getting rid of everything related to the New Deal. Bush accomplished a big part first thing in office by obliterating the budget surplus. And his administration has been slowly but surely ensuring that the country will be bankrupt for years to come. And these same right-wingers are everywhere. Here in California, my beloved bastion of rationality, we are about to vote on whether to recall our damn governor. California's problems are varied and legion (both ancient and recent), and Gray Davis's extreme unpopularity is strange to me. Blaming Davis for the state's ills is like yelling at the sheriff of Tallahassee for not stopping the hurricane. What's essentially happening is that Darrell Issa, a wonderful, stalwart Repub from my own corner, is trying to buy the governorship. Make no mistake. I could never have raised enough money to pay for people to gather signatures in front of malls all over the state, but Issa can. And, as we've noted several times before, people are fucking stupid. Several of the people cavassing in my neighborhood had two petitions, one for those who think that there should be a recall vote, and one for those who wanted to go on record as saying that the recall vote would be an asinine waste of money in the middle of the worst budget crisis in decades. Canvassers want people to sign both. And some of the conversations I've had with my fellow Californians about the recall would make your fucking head spin. You thought creationists dabbled in logical fallacies...

This is why politicians ignore public opinion: "The number of people who have endorsed the idea that homosexual relations should be legal has dropped from 60 percent to 48 percent since the [Supreme Court] ruling, and only 40 percent of Americans say they now would support civil unions for homosexuals." [CNN] If the public was sitting here with me, I would ask it "what changed between then and now, other than getting what you pretty much wanted?" It would probably say, "ah gee, I don't know." And then I would smack it and call it a dumbass. Maybe I'd tell it to go back to school, or get a job or something.

I meant to post this message from the abortion thread on christianity.com. Sometimes the way christians think is downright miraculous:

[Arthur R:] "What God has joined,let no man seperate." Math.19:6,Mark 10:9. That includes a baby(fetus) with it's mother. And any cells joined together (even a human fetus hours old)are joined by God ,not to be destroyed or seperated.They are a sacred thing. Albert Einstien regreted assisting in revealing the knowledge of how to split the atom.He realized too late the error of seperating what God has joined. That simple act created the most devestating weapon of mass destruction on Earth,just as seperating a fetus from its mother destroyed over 40,000,000 children in America alone since Roe vs. Wade.

I attempted a respectful reply to this on the thread, but it was deleted. I therefore don't feel bad about proposing this alternative, more amusing, reply:

Einstein himself had little role in the atomic bomb project. The bomb was ultimately developed at the insistence of the president and military of the United States (a Christian nation). It is true that Jews are a sinful lot who have caused all sorts of maladies over the centuries due to their refusal to convert to Christianity (even when tortured!). But in this particular case the Jew was somehow not to blame.

I realize this reply would be something of a non-sequitor, but so was the original message. I'm also aware that fundamentalist christians today consider themselves somehow allied with conservative jews. But I wouldn't want christianity to get separated from its long history of violent anti-semitism. After all, "what god has joined, let no man separate."

Another interesting RIAA calculation: this one is from a letter to the inquirer:

"When might this actually start affecting us? When 1 out of every 10 is affected? That would mean they'd have to sue six million people. That would take,...(6,000,000/75 = 80,000)... 80,000 days.. or 219 years! They'd have to sue our great grand children!" [inquirer]

I might suggest that everyone will feel "affected" when 1 out of 100 people are sued. It will still take them more than 20 years just to serve all the subpoenas.

I just got some more email from Christianity.com. Apparently the "no posting doctrines we disagree with" policy is new. One moderator noted that the abortion thread had been started a year ago, and said:

A year ago we had different guidelines as to what was acceptable to post than we do now. Creating a thread arguing that God is not against abortions is now at Terms of Service #17 violation and will be removed. Hope this clarifies. winter_crow Administrator

So that I have record of it, this was my reply:

This clarifies that it is your policy to supress discussions which pertain even to doctrinal issues within Christianity. You seem to know the mind and intentions of God beyond what is in the Bible. Kudos to you. I noticed that your web page link contains an article from CRI. Dr. Walter Martin, whom I referenced in my deleted post from the abortion thread, founded CRI in 1960. He did not believe that life begins at conception. It is apparent that his opinion would not be welcome at Christianity.com. I suppose you must have heard more from God since Dr Martin's time. If you are so certain of your doctrinal interpretations then they should be able to sustain an open and fair discussion. Instead you employ a bully tactic of silencing opinions which differ. The only rationale for such behavior is the fear of finding out that you are wrong. "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei

This site is becoming more and more of a disappointment. It confirms my suspicions that the religious right is getting worse, i.e. more insular and less tolerant of disagreements. Three hundred years ago the mainstream protestant sects were executing Baptists and other "overly protestant protestants" in public. Now the fringe claims to have taken over, and is trying to sell the line that the mainstream, liberal Christians don't actually exist. Numerals polls reflect otherwise. Less than a third of Baptists believe the bible is inerrant, and fewer believe in the devil. And the numbers are declining. Congregations don't believe their pastors any more. I hope the psychos don't get to make too much trouble on their way out.

Last Wednesday I developed an addiction to forums on Christianity.com. That addiction was short-lived, though, because they are a little censor-happy over there. This is an excerpt from their Terms of Service:

Do not make statements either by posts or posting URLs to other Websites which advocate activities, beliefs or teachings contrary to those of Christianity as articulated by the historic creeds, as understood by Evangelicalism, and as interpreted by ChristianBBS.com/Christianity.com its sole discretion.

I noticed early on that a lot of non-Christians were complaining about the Terms of Service in threads related to creationism, and in threads with titles like "Attention Atheists, Skeptics, Agnostics, etc!!!!" Apparently we're only allowed to make restricted replies in such threads. Yesterday I responded to a thread on abortion. I linked to a site called ReligiousTolerance.org. Specifically, my link was to a page on that site which contains a long list of Bible verses with pro-choice interpretations of them. You can read them here. Because the Christians kept insisting that "God says abortion is murder," I and others simply asked, "where and how did God say that?" This morning I was sent this message by one of the moderators:

One of your post in this thread has been removed for violations of TOS #17. Please do not post links for Religious Tolerance again. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please e-mail them to the site producer at community@christianity.com Thank you, His_child, moderator

I forwarded this message to the rest of the moderators, noting that they were censoring a site which promotes religious tolerance, has a pro-life news ticker on it, and consists of Bible verses. I ask if they were out of their minds. There response was (paraphrasing), "yes." So, in conclusion, Religious Tolerance is an activity, belief, or teaching contrary to Christianity. I guess that shouldn't be very surprising. I might still participate in some of the fora over there. They're a little too fun at times. I get to come in contact with people who believe things like this:

DanielGordon: Hey Genesis being right is a whole lot more likely than science being right! Genesis is not false in any way, if it was then it could be said by someone not Christian that Jesus wasn't real or such. Science is Mans understanding of how the world works outside of God our Lord. Yes I know it isn't true for all scientist but it is true for most of them. The Bible is from our Lords understanding and knowledge. If we can't fit the Bible and science together then it means that science is wrong, since the Bible is NEVER wrong! But if you just say sure anything is possible then I'm just wasteing my time.

or this:

[Sir Goric:] OK lets try this again. I started a thread the other day that wound up just being an arguement... What I want is to hear from Christian Scientists or those that have Scientific facts on creation. Im not looking for scriptures, but actual scientific data on why the earth had to be made just a certain way in order for life to exist. In the previous thread, I received one responce of what I was looking for. Im hoping that I will do better with this one. Here is an example of what I received and what I am looking for. [reply from user named "science":] "Christian Scientists" are followers of Mary Baker Eddy.

I'm also participating in a discussion with a professional theologician/apologeticist who has invited atheists to ask their "tough questions." My main question, as yet unanswered, was for him to provide a formal definition of "God." This exchange, concerning what we can know a priori, is typical:

[Theologian:] A priori reasoning isn't empirical either, but it does tell me that something cannot come from nothing. So on that, it it hard for me to think that Darwinian evolution is true. That doesn't mean that Christianity is true, but it does remove the latch from the door that many atheists think is sealed shut. [Me:] Strictly speaking, a priori reasoning doesn't tell you that something cannot come from nothing. That is at best an axiom, a premise, or an assumption. A priori reasoning also doesn't help resolve the worries of Cartesian and Humean skepticism, which are, roughly, that experience is illusion, and that cause-effect relationships can never be inferred. The fact is that virtually the same a priori difficulties exist whether the universe has a god or not, and whether there is evolution or not.... Because everything which occurs must occur at some point in time, the origin of time itself isn't something that can occur. Reasons like this are why physicists say we can't reason about the origins/predecessors of the big bang. Our reasoning just isn't adequate. [Theologician:] The classic a priori examples are 'All ravens are black' and 'a bachelor is an unmarried male.' We know these things a priori, that is, from all the cases we've ever seen, there seems to be no reason to think otherwise about future cases... What I am saying is that based on the a priori reasoning against something coming from nothing , I have yet to see one case of it happening otherwise.... Do you have a case where something comes from nothing? Let's not quibble over nuances of a priori reasoning. [Me:] You ask me not to quibble over a priori nuance; but this problem contains nothing but a priori nuance! You claim to have never observed "something coming from nothing," but I doubt that you have ever had the opportunity to observe "nothing." Even theoretical physicists find it difficult to define "nothing." Even a vacuum is full of activity, including the spontaneous generation of particle/antiparticle pairs. We must therefore conclude that either (1) the vacuum is "something" (in which case we have no model for "nothing"), or (2) something can come from nothing. My real point is that we have no actual experience with "nothing," so your conclusion must genuinely rest on a priori assumptions. [and so on...]

If anyone else is interested in joining this discussion, the full thread is located [here]

Berkeley psychologists publish study on conservatism.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin... The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies... Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm," Glaser said. [Berkeley]

This press release was posted on Fark earlier today. The comments thread very quickly mushroomed so that now the number of replies is listed as "infinite." It didn't take long for a reply article by David Limbaugh to show up. Judging from his article, there was no indication that he actually read the study, or that he even read the complete press release. He responded to the study by calling the authors "liberals," asserted that they have a "manifest ignorance of political theory," and then went off on a long chain of non-sequitors.

Surely the professor can do better than that. This example tends to demonstrate the liberals' lack of nuance more than the conservatives', as do many other examples I'll give you. Can't these paragons of complexity understand that Bush's words were at most ill advised based on disputed, not phony intelligence? Don't they understand that a lie involves the intent to deceive, not just arguably erroneous information? Further, can't they grasp that this was not even one of the major reasons we used to attack Iraq? [town hall]

Of course the political views of the authors are not indicated in the press release, so Limbaugh must either have some inside information, or be in possession of great powers of divination. It would be interesting to see a study on what motivates liberals, but it would be difficult to formulate, since "liberal" typically means "all proposals outside of the currently accepted conservative platform." So it seems that a study of liberals would fundamentally be a study of conservatives, and why many people are repelled by them. It would also be interesting to see a study exploring why conservatives seem incapable of making pointed, logical arguments. The replies on Fark were as expected. No one seemed to read the articles before they chimed in. I liked what this Farker had to say:

Conservatives suck. But I'd hit it.