Courtesy of The Raving Atheist:

"All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts -- of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener -- inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below."

-Sam Harris, The End of Faith

This election has officially become full-blown batshit crazy.

An 18-year-old Marine recruit in Lake Worth, Florida, became enraged when his girlfriend told him she was leaving...and was going to vote for John Kerry. The young man, a vehement Bush supporter, took her hostage and threatened to stab her in the throat with a screw driver, telling her, "You'll never live to see the election." Police arriving at the scene were forced to subdue him with a stun gun.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't remember this kind of murderous insanity during previous elections. I know this guy is obviously a sick man, and that the election issue probably just set off a pre-existing condition, but it still amazes me how strongly this election has polarized people. After all, he wasn't yelling at her about leaving him, he was yelling about the bloody election. No pun intended.

Jesus loves the little children...

A dispatcher in Tacoma, Washington received a 911 call from a soft-spoken little boy who said, "My daddy killed me with a knife and I'm gone." Anthony Sukto, age 8, asked if the dispatcher could "please send the Army men or an ambulance" and told her "my mom is already dead and I am the only survivor."

The boy's father, Tony Sukto, has been arrested for the murder of his wife and the attempted murder of little Anthony.

If one were to believe the Christians in America, God is an all-knowing presence, and God chooses to bless people with children. This means that God "blessed" Anthony's parents by choosing to have him born to them, and that he conferred that "blessing" with full knowledge of the fact that Anthony's father would go on a murderous rampage and nearly kill the child. In America, if a parent knowingly places their child in a life-threatening situation we remove that child from their custody, and usually take any other kids in the home as well...too bad nobody else seems willing to hold God similarly responsible for the abuse and neglect of his human children.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania today, President Bush told an assembled crowd of supporters in Lancaster that "a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."

The paradox of this statement was so powerful that the entire town of Lancaster immediately collapsed into a singularity.

My man Bistromath shared this three-years-old post that tickled his fancy, and, while the tickling of other people's fancies is not normally something I discuss on this G-rated page, I just couldn't resist passing it along:

We're More Nuts Than You

To those extremists that perpetrated this crime against our nation, I have a warning for you. There are those of us who look at your actions as irrational, twisted, and completely inhuman. By all measures, what you have done can only be seen as insane.

I have news for you. We're more nuts than you, and it should scare you s***less.

You may think that when you die for your cause, you go to Paradise with 72 virgins, can leave reservations for 70 members of your family, all your sins are forgiven, and you sit at the side of Allah. Big deal. We had 39 guys who rented a Beverly Hills mansion, cut off their nuts, built a web site, and proceeded to poison themselves to death to hitch a ride with aliens out on the Hale-Bopp comet.

You shoot guns into the sky to celebrate victories over enemies, and people are killed by the bullets raining down on them. We not only do this for New Year's Eve in some cities, but we burn houses down, tear up streets, loot and sack our stores, and beat our selves senseless when our sports teams win championships. Sports teams!

We made a sequel to Police Academy 5. We gave an award for singing to two guys who never even sang. We put little sweaters on dogs. We shot John Lennon six times and didn't even aim for Yoko Ono. We think Elvis is still alive. We put Braille on drive-up automatic teller machines.

We think that a simple button on a web site that says "Do not click if you're under 21" will do anything but cause a person under 21 to click on it.

We sell hot dogs in packages of ten and the buns in packages of eight. We can't even decide if pitchers should have to bat for themselves or not. All those baseball fields we've got. none of them are even remotely the same size.

We gave millions of dollars to a guy that told us that God was going to kill him if he didn't raise enough money. When he didn't get enough money, he didn't die. So we gave him more money in celebration of the fact that God didn't make him die.

We've managed to keep the formulas for Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken secret for decades, we encrypt the most banal communications on our Information Superhighway, and yet we given away our most important nuclear secrets to the Chinese and Russians at the drop of a hat.

And yet, with all this on the A-1 Psycho balance sheet, you still think you're more nuts than us that this won't result in your complete and utter annihilation? One way or another, your way of life will be over, period.

Freedom's kind of a crazy, kooky, nutty thing when you look really close at it and all the bizarre and loony things that can result from it, but it's better than any other ideas anybody else has come up with. It's been that way since 1776, and built to last no matter how insanely we try to screw it up on a daily basis. We are even so nuts and ruthless enough as a nation to start insanely tearing at those of ourselves that even remotely resemble you in such rancorous, deplorable, and angry ways that will make you wonder if Allah has enough glue to piece enough of you back together for a flesh paperweight in Paradise.

We may not know where you are now, but when we do I guarantee you that the majority of our high school children will still have no idea where on the globe where you are or where you will end up being buried. But we will send them anyway, and we will allow those of them that went into the armed services because they didn't manage to get into college still rain down Hell and fire on your worthless hides. It will all come down on you, because we're nuts enough to give all four of our branches of military services extremely powerful and deadly aircraft even though only one of them is actually called the Air Force.

Picking a fight with the most insane nation on Earth with the hope that your message and influence will spread throughout the world, well, that's just downright stupid.

The GOP is raising our irony threshold yet again, by ejecting three people from a Bush rally because they were wearing t-shirts stating "Protect Our Civil Liberties."

The three "protesters" were school teachers who obtained tickets to the rally through normal channels, and who made it past all three security check points without any problem. They made no attempt to hide the t-shirts from view as they were passed through security, assuring the staff that they had no intention of causing any problems, and the president had not even begun to speak when a volunteer stopped one of the women on her way to the bathroom and informed her that her t-shirt was "obscene." The women were not arrested, but they were escorted out by state police officers who warned them they would be arrested if they tried to return.

What is really priceless is that "Protect Our Civil Liberties" was the only statement on the shirts. They didn't say "Bush is Destroying Our Civil Liberties," but that is what the Bush supporters automatically read; if you will forgive the punnish metaphor, the three teachers displayed a general garment and the Bushies declared it was cut to their fit.

This just in: Little Boy Disproves Existence of Loving God

TEXAS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, Texas -- When little Cody Johnson was diagnosed with bone cancer at the age of 6, he said, "I want the worst kind of cancer there is so that when God heals me, everybody will know it was God who did it." On September 10th of this year, Cody died.

His parents' constant prayers that Cody be allowed to grow up and take "the Christian wife he and his mother had prayed for" were denied by the Almighty, who prefered to kill Cody slowly and painfully. But never you fear, because his agnonizing death is being touted as his "triumph over cancer" by the congregation of his own Spring Baptist Church. (How you can manage to see an agnonizing death as a triumph is beyond me, but we must keep in mind that these are the people who believe the ultimate demonstration of love was when their diety watched its own child tortured to death.)

Though their years of prayers did nothing to alter the initial prognosis from his doctors, the Spring Baptist Church wasted no time in exploiting his death for their own gain. Tales of Cody's "miracles" over the course of his illness were widely circulated as proof of Jesus' powers, such as a case where the little boy awoke in the night screaming with pain and could only be calmed by prayer. Of course, that prayer was performed after the administration of two doses of pain medication, but his family is quite sure that it was the prayer that did it.

At Cody's funeral, Pastor Mark Estep used the little boy's death as an opportunity recruit new members; after informing the assembled audience that Cody liked Jesus and was now in heaven, he invited anybody who had not asked Jesus to come into their life to do so because their submission to Jesus "would have been what Cody wanted."

Praise Jesus. Can I get a Hallelujah?

Never let it be said that the age of supervillany has passed us by.

WASHINGTON, DC -- One of the world's largest rubies goes on public display for the first time Saturday, the newest star of the National Gem Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The 23.1 carat Carmen Lucia stone "is the largest and finest faceted ruby on public display," according to the curator of the gem collection.

I came across this item in the newspaper just as I was ruminating on how to obtain a large, red, fine-faceted object with which to power my Doomsday Device.

List of things that make me sad, item #35900873:

Today in class my professor explained why cytochrome C is like the "Frodo" of the mitochondrial membrane pathway...and the analogy made perfect sense to me.