It's a Miracle!

[Fred Colon] rummaged in a pocket and produced a very small book, which he held up for inspection.

"This belonged to my great-granddad," he said. "He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-grand gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, 'cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, 'cos he couldn't afford armour, and next day in battle -- whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole."

"Pretty miraculous," Carrot agreed.

"Yeah, it was, I s'pose," said the sergeant. He looked ruefully at the battered volume. "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really."

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Just like the miners in West Virginia. One minute it is a series of miracle, the next they only get one miracle. I wish I would have thought of this in grade school.

Mom: Why did you get this 'D+'?
Me: God didn't want to grant a miracle today.
Mom: Oh, bless your heart!

I bet all of the people killed by the bomb and thanking whatever god may be for that miracle. I bet they are honored just for being near such a glorious occurance.

Oh man, believe it or not I've never heard that Woody Allen bit before. That's gold. Whenever I think of Gideon bibles, though, I can't help but think of one of my favorite Bill Hicks routines. I'm paraphrasing of course, but you know exactly the bit I mean: "Who are the Gidons? Have you ever seen one? What are they, ninjas?! I'm going to capture a Gideon, call down to the front desk: "Hello, I don't seem to have a bible..."

The Worldnet Daily piece is of course laughable. Sure, nine people died. But apparently God wanted them to die. See, if only they had been carrying around bibles in their pockets they would have been A-OK.

Does Worldnet Daily publish anything worthwhile? I admit I happen to like Neil Boortz quite a lot, and I know he has a semi-regular column in said paper, which I don't actually read. Is it just in matters of science and religion that Worldnet Daily is so ignorant? Or does that awful level of "journalism" permeate the entire paper?

It is for precisely this reason that I carry copies of [i]Origin of Species[/i] in each hip pocket -- just in case. Yet, for some reason, nobody wants to pop a cap in my ass.

This yields a rather testable hypothesis. I propose we take a group of people representing each religion, as well as an atheist control group. In each group, we place the appropriate holy text in a shirt pocket (each text being printed in the correct typeface to yield equal sized books), and a randomly selected secular novel for control group. Next, we fire some shrapnel at each group. We then take the ratio of shrapnel embedded in flesh to srapnel stopped by the books, and compare each group. Whichever book catches the most shrapnel is declared the correct religion.

Get the Templeton people on the phone!

Wow. Ya suppose the families of the nine dead people are impressed too?