"Mathematics," says Jason Rosenhouse of EvolutionBlog, "is unique in its ability to bamboozle lay audiences, which makes it well-suited to creationist ends."

Mathematician John Allen Paulos explains how this should be so.

Not to mention the fact that when one path is taken, all the alternatives to that path are summarily erased and can't be counted in the aggregate. (If the first Powerball number is, say, 10, combinations that don't contain a 10 are out of contention for the Big Bucks; if you have a 10, your chances have just improved markedly.)

Besides, probabilities don't quite combine in the manner we tend to think. For instance, the chance of someone standing next to you having any particular day as a birthday is 4/1461 (which is easier to look at than 1/365.25), or 0.274 percent. The chance that two people in the room have the same birthday obviously increases with the number of people you have, but it becomes a better-than-even bet when the twenty-third person comes in. (Really.)

My own thinking here is that God understands the numbers better than we do.

(Via white pebble.)

No, not wedgie issue. Pay attention.

Eric Sapp sees the potential:

And what issue might do that? Why, pr0n, of course:

I've regulated streaming video on my cell phone: I've got a phone that won't receive it.

But Sapp has a point: when the big-bucks and the Dr. Dobson segments of the GOP base are in conflict, bet on Mr. Moneybags to win out.

Editorial comment by the Telegraph:

And the enablers of this loss chant in unison: "But discrimination is wrong!" As, of course, they must; having misappropriated the word for their own purposes, they must now enforce their trademark.

Islam has swords; Scientology has lawyers. Deprived of these, neither of them would dare pose as a religion, let alone demand a role on the world stage.

Yes, I've heard about those "moderate" Muslims. I think I've even met one or two. Until they figure out some way to shut down — and shut up — the maniacs in their midst, they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

(Muchas gracias: Scribal Terror.)

This morning I found a plastic bag by the front door. Being in a rush to get to work (yeah, right), I tossed it on the counter.

So the opening was left for this afternoon. Inside I found a 5.5-by-8.5 postcard and an audio CD, both bearing the indicia of Grace Covenant Church, about a mile from me on the other side of the Northwest Distressway.

The CD, which ran a little over eight minutes, featured a pitch by Pastor Lance Gutteridge and a couple of songs by Worship Pastor (I leave it to someone with more expertise than I have to explain this term) Kyle Cantrell. It was definitely a professional-sounding package, up to the last couple of seconds, where things cut off a bit abruptly; as outreach methods go, this strikes me as a pretty good one. Oh, and according to the card, they're having a Good Ole Tent Revival and Ice Cream Social this coming Sunday at 6 pm.

Amusingly, CDDB reads this CD as Barry White's Just for You.

Especially blogs by teenagers. Here's why, from the Restored Church of God:

Current mood: chortling.

And how dare those little...those little...non-adults have a "tendency to want to have a voice"! Who do they think they are? Us?

Oh, wait, we're not allowed either:

My luck, that asshole Moloch will be late with the frigging checks again.

(Link and title swiped from Cruel.com.)

Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, he who provides a "full warranty" (anything less is a "limited warranty") must include all of the following:

• must, as a minimum, remedy the consumer product within a reasonable time and without charge;
  
• may not impose any limitation on the duration of any implied warranty on the product;
  
• may not exclude or limit consequential damages for a breach of any written or implied warranty on the product, unless the exclusion or limitation conspicuously appears on the face of the warranty; and
  
• if the product, or a component part, contains a defect or malfunction, must permit the consumer to elect either a refund or replacement without charge, after a reasonable number of repair attempts.
  

I'm sure Frank Moss and Warren Magnuson, way back in 1975, never envisioned this:

"Good afternoon, One Brimstone Place." The voice was unusually dark.

"You're answering your own phone now?"

"It's hard to get good help these days. Was there something You wanted?"

The Lord God read the paragraphs above. "What do you think? I'm tempted to send a plague of toads."

The Prince of Darkness whistled. "That's some slick guarantee there. Maybe You should just sue them or something."

"Oh, right. Where am I supposed to find a lawyer?"

"Hey, I'm just doing my job," Satan complained. "There's always Google. I hear they're trying not to be evil these days."

"Thank you, Lucifer, you've been as much help as ever."

Click.

(Via Church Marketing Sucks.)

One of the first things on the agenda after the arrival at Plymouth was the establishment of the Parish Church, and as we are reminded today, its membership was a fairly strait-laced bunch.

That church exists today: as a Unitarian Universalist congregation. No one is likely to accuse them of being strait-laced, and Alexandra suggests how things might have changed over four centuries or so:

Were I in the mood to be snarky, I might characterize this as "evolution in action," but not today.

If there's a religious gender gap, what's behind it? Bryan Caplan takes a stab at it:

I'm not inclined to go hunt down a stake and a bag of Kingsford just yet, but something about this seems a little disquieting, despite the distant echo of the ring of truth.

(Via Michael Katsimbris.)

For one thing, there's that business about those leaves in the Garden of Eden.

(Courtesy of Mike's Noise.)

"It's okay to let go."

You wouldn't think five words would require a lot of rehearsal. I kept saying them, and saying them, and saying them, and never once did I sound like I knew what I was talking about.

The night nurse let me in and directed me to the sign-in sheets. Even the ones with a lot of names on them seemed awfully empty.

He was sleeping, or trying to; the machine was running full tilt trying to keep up with the demand for oxygen by two long-since-worn-out lungs. And he was small, barely the size of a ten-year-old boy, hardly the Superman who loomed over us when I was a ten-year-old boy. The cycle, I thought, is nearly complete; were there a scepter, it would now pass to me. And, dear Lord, what would I ever want with a scepter?

I thought of his wife. She is my age: fifty-three. She has spent half of those years, half of her life, at his side. She has been preparing for this moment for many months now. Her voice is soft, measured, deliberate. Are there screams inside of her, waiting to take her by surprise, to knock her down while she tries to stand? I do not know. It is not for me to ask.

I couldn't bring myself to wake him: what if the sudden appearance of a large, dark figure in the room beside him should be the last thing he would ever see? No. Better this way. Let him rest. He's fought more battles than any of us ever dreamed of, in this, his eightieth year; better that he should just slip away, away from this world, into the peace that lies beyond. I bowed my head, then looked off into the distance for a moment.

"It's okay to let go," I said, and I realized that I wasn't saying it to him at all.

Nothing further need be said.

Later: Well, there's this:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." — Revelations 21:3-4

God, as Albert Einstein noted, does not play dice with the universe, but I suspect He's not above short-sheeting some of us now and then, jokester that He is. And when I get a packet from these folks * on the first day of a three-day ice storm, I have to figure that somewhere beyond the background noise there's a celestial giggle.

Which got louder when I opened the gas bill, I suspect.

* Link may not be safe for work.

Follieri Capital, which specializes in financial products for Roman Catholics, and Washington Mutual have teamed up to offer the World Missions VISA, which is being launched this week via major advertising campaigns in Catholic publications. One percent of card purchases will be donated to the Church's Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1822, which supports Catholic missionaries in 120 countries. That's the World Missions VISA. Don't leave Rome without it.

I've spent a fair amount of time in this space talking about the local Habitat for Humanity chapter and what it's done here in the Big Friendly. Recently I discovered that my old high school back in South Carolina is supporting the Sea Island chapter on Johns Island: there's a full-fledged student club, under the direction of Brenda Buckley-Kuhn, doing volunteer work, including the brick-and-mortar stuff, for the chapter once a month (Saturday, 8 to 4). There are about thirty members of the club, which obviously didn't exist when I was in school: Habitat was founded in 1976, long after I'd escaped into the wild. As an alumnus and occasional donor, I'm happy to see that the Auld School is still on the path of righteousness.

Courtesy of Happy Catholic, the Top Ten ways the Bible would have been different if it had been written by college students:

It is not true, however, that part of those forty years in the desert was spent at Burning Man.

Yes, we have a tie again, but then it's been a couple of weeks since we had a QOTW at all.

This first one is a long one, but Will has a long title: 7th Degree Bi-Cosmic Hermeticist and First Deputy in Charge of Doctrinal Enforcement.

Which I've always suspected. Not that I'm exactly enlightened or anything.

Now he tells me.

Received at the door yesterday — they didn't knock, or I'd have seen it before — a flyer from this church announcing a Back to School Extravaganza called Transformed.

Now that's prime — one might say, Optimus prime — marketing. And, well, it's probably not above the Prince of Darkness to deploy an occasional Decepticon, if you know what I mean.

Yet here it is. Compare and contrast with this: "The High Priestess represents wisdom, or an interest in knowledge, intuition and education. She is the feminine consciousness — the virgin goddess, the moon daughter. She challenges you to find what is hidden below the surface of a situation and remember the possibilities you hold inside. It signifies a time to uncover secrets in life because something in the unconscious is waiting to come out. Be guided by intuition and inspiration. She is a bridge to higher plane. Passive and receptive, she guards the gate of the unconscious and connects you to dreams, psychic powers, lunar cycles, and female mysteries. She is a subtle but powerful connection with the collective unconscious or world soul. Sometimes the High Priestess represents an enlightened and chaste woman. She can also represent a mysterious woman, a femme fatale, sexual and charismatic without emotional involvement. She also represents feminine principles and grace. She also can be a signal for the need for solitude, seclusion and meditation as well as wisdom and education." Maybe we should just turn it upside down.

Evidently so:

I think I liked it better in the original Klingon:

For some reason, Firefox's ostensible spellchecker is choking on some of the Klingon text, but on none of the Lolcat text. What can we learn from this?

(Note: Firefox's ostensible spellchecker is also choking on the word "spellchecker.")

This banner has been flying outside Cornerstone Christian Fellowship Church in Chandler, Arizona, to promote their Greatest Sex Ever series, because, well, where else would you go for a series of lectures on sex? The Home Depot? Still, there's something disquieting about the whole thing, quite apart from the fact that it's yet another manifestation of the unfortunate fact that church marketing sucks. Maybe it's the missionary position? Or perhaps it's just the idea that someone feels it's necessary to push the envelope, as it were, to get people's attention to what are supposed to be Eternal Truths and such. More to the point, I object to the very idea of "bringing sexy back": contrary to popular belief, it never really left.

(Via Dawn Eden.)

Wise words from Nate:

Hmmm. Last weekend I slept in until 10 and — um, never mind.

And I suspect I'm mutating into the kind of person who wakes up every morning and gives thanks, mostly out of delight that I made it through another night. Being this old has that effect, especially if you can't imagine being this old, as I can't.

Srsly. Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 3:

Note: In 6, "kitah" is evidently a variant spelling of "kitteh."

La Shawn Barber sees down to the undercurrent:

Something like the reverse was true half a century ago. Gospel chords and harmony and the occasional shout abide at the very heart of rhythm and blues — there was a reason they called it "soul" music, after all — and the secularization of the process to produce actual pop hits may or may not have incorporated a spiritual message. There was, however, some question about the propriety of this kind of transformation: for instance, when Sam Cooke temporarily stepped aside from the Soul Stirrers to put out a pop tune ("Lovable," 1956), he used a pseudonym, lest the gospel fans be upset.

And "seeking something deeper" is a universal human experience. It even worked on Motown's assembly line: your attention is invited to Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (Soul 35022, 1966). As I wrote in Vent #206:

Even allowing the dumpee a certain measure of hyperbole, though, doesn't account for lines like "I walk in shadows, searching for light / Cold and alone, no comfort in sight."

If R&B today seems about as spiritual as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, it's due to cold calculation on the part of its vendors — or maybe it's just wandering in the desert, in which case things should get back to normal in about forty years or so.

It took longer, I suppose, but the transit of Saul of Tarsus, persecutor turned theologian, can be seen in the life of Norman Mailer, atheist turned, well, Mailerian. What this means, more or less:

And one month after On God was published, Mr. Mailer was invited to — or disinvited from — the heaven whose existence he questions. Maybe. It is not for you or me to know his final destination.

But I'd like to think that he gets credit, his rejection of orthodoxy (or his concept thereof) notwithstanding, for coming up with a perspective that actually admits to the existence of evil, a notion highly unpopular with some and routinely mislocated by others.

It's traditional to come up with something heartwarming for the holidays, and, well, you know how well that works around here, racked with cynicism as this place generally is.

Not this time, folks:

Here are some of the blessings that were spread around.

The cynic might say, "Must be nice, if the church has thirteen grand to spread around like that with no guarantees." But faith never has any guarantees, at least of the sort covered by Federal legislation. Nor is faith a slot machine, where you hope to get the right combination for a payoff.

This church easily could have committed these funds to Yet Another Outreach Program. Instead, they chose to trust the congregation to pay it forward, and so they did. Now that's faith. In action, even.

And how often do you get to see that?

Karl Rove was reportedly nowhere near Parliament at the time.

(Spotted by Emalyse.)

You have to wonder what George Lucas must be thinking right about now:

For this to work, contact with the likes of Jar Jar Binks must be strictly forbidden.

(From TheForce.net via Fark.)

Clayton Jones proposes a new statute:

It occurs to me that if we had reasonable copyright laws — which would require, among other things, getting rid of the DMCA, a task at least as difficult as dislodging Xenu — we wouldn't have to care about how the Thetans operate.

Besides, I'd expect even some of your non-insane religions to object to this proposal, and I have some serious qualms about the whole idea of empowering a government body to declare who is and who isn't a religion. (I won't mention any names, but its initials are I.R.S.)

Still, I admit to a certain amount of nostalgia for the time when Tom Cruise was just an actor with very white teeth.

Who knew? Apparently Satan uses TurboTax:

I have no idea whether he files on time; inasmuch as he's not an Oklahoma public official, I assume he does.

Then again, maybe not:

And so there isn't. There is also no New Testament precedent for air conditioning, but not a lot of churches pass it up.

Still, this is a conservative denomination, and were I a member, I might look askance at any break in tradition, however seemingly minor. However, I don't think I'd buy a page in the local newspaper to advertise my displeasure, and I definitely wouldn't be claiming something special about my own particular pulpit:

Does this portend an Anglicanesque schism? I don't think so. But it does remind me of how much authority I have in spiritual matters, which is none.

Disclosure: I was once married to a Freed-Hardeman girl, so I'm more familiar with this than you might think.

Right out of the Rituale Romanum, via Niall Mor:

The embedded +, of course, represents the Sign of the Cross. Translation:

Notice the resemblance between the Latin "cerevisa" and the Spanish "cerveza." Also note that this is not the traditional Lager Prayer.

I admit, though, either seems to border on overkill if what you're serving is [fill in name of horrid swill that barely deserves to be called beer].

The only Italian I understand is "Monica Bellucci," and that not particularly well, so I'm not going to attempt to decipher this very-1996-looking page from L'Osservatore Romano, but I will point you toward what appears to be a Vatican attempt to expand the existing list of sins:

Um, no, it doesn't. Gail explains, under a better title than mine:

I believe the rule here is "Do whatever steps you want if / You have cleared them with the Pontiff." Somehow I have my doubts that Girotti has Benedict's blessing on this matter.

Coming soon to eastern Kansas, the Mustang Church of America:

So far, the only automaker actually named after a god is Mazda.

Top Ten new religious movements of an automotive nature:

10. The Porschetarians
    
9. Chevrolaity
   
8. Seekers of Infiniti
   
7. Office of the Archmitsubishop
   
6. V-Sikhs
   
5. LaSallevation Army
   
4. Gnashticism
   
3. Subarutherans
   
2. GTOrthodoxy
   
1. Society of St. Prius X
   

Jesus, we may assume, was partial to Hondas; in Acts 2, the disciples managed to get to the first Pentecost in one Accord.

(Via the heretics at Autoblog.)

We open with Matthew 6:19-21 (English Standard Version):

Dr. Lisa Keister has now discovered that religious conservatives tend to take this seriously:

This really shouldn't surprise anyone, though:

But the bottom line is purely Biblical. Think "faithful steward":

Not to mention their unwillingness to render it unto Caesar.