A few links...

Catholic preaches to Mormons about evangelizing and says "faith's beauty can lead even athiests to God."  I guess if you can believe in a talking snake and Paul's psychotic experience on the road to Damascus you can believe that too.

 Thursday's school shooter had been bullied.  CBS belittles the kid's experience then quotes witnesses confirming it.   Well, so much for anti-bullying campaigns's effectiveness.  Of course lessening the anguish of the victims was never the true inspiration for those campaigns anyway, it was just to keep kids from snapping and killing the cool kids.  Seems it didn't work at all!

Perhaps evangelical leaders supporting more gun control will keep the cool kids safe from the revenge of the nerds.  ...assuming evangelicals will still call themselves evangicals.  This WaPo editorial says the word needs to be rebranded.

Not new, but new-ish:  Mormon women declare "wear pants to church day."  I have always found the insistance on dresses for women and pants for men really stupid, considering Christ is always pictured in a caftan, a.k.a. a dress!

I ran across the above link after reading this article about the religious objection to contraception coverage at the same site.  The author is Howard M. Friedman, of The Religious Clause blog, which I follow.  I highly recommend the blog and the article.

Catholics and Protestants are going at it again in Ireland.

Being "spiritual" without having someone else's ancient delusional writings to frame and justify your magical thinking is supposedly related to mental illness.   (This article includes a link to a Businessweek page of LOL graphics about Correlation vs Causation)

Huge study being headed up by atheists.  This guy calls Dawkins "philosophically uninformed," which makes me wonder about his aim to study religion's place in human evolution.  I look forward to Dawkins' review of their publication.

Ex-Scientologist talks about how she stalked suppressive persons

A new series on Investigation Discovery channel called "Dangerous Persuasions" opens with an episode on Scientology. Wednesday, December 16, 10:00 p.m. ET/PT Here's the blurb:

Devoted Scientologist Nancy becomes an undercover spy to root out The Church's enemies. Little did she know she'd become immersed in the organization's secret war against its critics. Will her mission lead to her mental breakdown?

It's very courageous of her to do this.  I think this one is worth DVR-ing in case Scientology gets to the owners of Discovery channel!

Amazing Crash Video

This is so scary. I have driven many many miles on roads in this condition (but I don't tailgate, which is what the SUV driver was doing)

One time I was on I-71 in Ohio during a blizzard, and a Chevy Suburban crossed a very very wide median, came within feet of front-ending me, then veered back onto the median. They were so close I could see the driver's & passenger's faces, and I had nowhere to go! This video reminded me of that time.

LOL wut?

I don't know if this has been turned into a meme yet, but It got me photoshopping as soon as I saw it.

The Original:

My immediate thought:

...and I couldn't resist:

...and then I thought the pope needed commentary:

Fox and (Best) Friends?

2013 LadyAtheist Awards

Why?  Because I can. 

First, the good awards:
Woman of the Year:  Candy Crowley for smacking down Mitt Romney in the debates.

Girl of the Year:  Malala Yusafsai

Man of the Year:  Last-minute winner is Joe Biden, for knocking heads in Congress today

Boy of the Year:  Sorry, can't think of one.  Any ideas?


Religion of the Year:  Mormonism, because it became "mainstream" this year

Event of the Year:  Indian public bus rape-murder

Puppet of the year:  Big Bird.  Geoff Peterson was a shoo-in until Big Bird got a mention in the presidential debates.  Keep working at it, Geoff!  You've come a long way, dude!  Just lay off the booze and you'll be fine.

Song of the year:  Gangnam Style, of course!

Video of the year:  The 47% video.  It may have changed history

Shoe of the year:  Yves Saint Laurent's red shoe with the red sole.  Suck it, Christian Louboutin.  Maybe you can start worrying about women who get shot in the face for going to school or raped and killed for riding a bus instead of whether someone else puts a red sole on a pump now.

Meme of the year:  Fresco Jesus

Now the other awards:

Douche of the year:  NRA's Wayne Lapierre

Fool of the year: Mitt Romney

Dumbass of the year:  How to choose?  how to choose?  It has to be Todd Akin, but Mourdock is a close runner-up.  Oh wait, Karl Rove.  No, every member of Westboro Baptist Church.  *sigh*  Let's just call 2012 the Year of the Dumbass.

Ignorant harpie of the year:  Michele Bachmann

Loser of the year:  Honey Boo-Boo, who will look back on her show years later and cry

Disaster of the year:  The Mayan Apocalypse.  It was off by 500 years or so.  They failed to see Cortez coming & got the date wrong!

Thugs of the year:  the creeps who raped a woman on a city bus in India. 

Sports team of the year:  m'eh who cares?  It's just a game.  Which game?  They're all just games!  Why do people care about sports????  It's not like it matters who wins, unlike Project Runway.

Facebook meme of the year: ecards.  They're getting old.  I still like some of them but they're getting old.

Holiday Links wheeeee

Frankenfish?  Genetically engineered salmon won't get into the food chain because it will only be sold to people who can be trusted not to let it escape?  I'm not a foe of GMOs but this one is a little creepy.

Letters to the L.A. Times after the Newtown shooting.

And whose fault was it?  Atheists' of course.

"I was Adam Lanza," essay by a formerly troubled teen who identifies with Adam Lanza.  "We can be stopped.  We can be saved."   I hope his words have an effect.

Single women, and single men to a point, trend overwhelmingly Democrat.  

Mormon Senator (R-ID) Crapo arrested on DUI charges.  I wonder if he accepted an offer of coffee at the pokey to help him sober up.

The New York Post is duped by a fake Facebook account for the surviving Lanza brother.  Really?  They didn't know FB accounts could be hoaxes?

Oates bites Hall on the face

Non-Christians celebrate the holidays, sometimes.

A Catholic artist works out her ambivalence & issues in some creepy looking works.

Sister Wendy looks at Christianity through the eyes of better artists.

Vulnerability is power.  That is, when Christmas coincides with the mass murder of children.

I love Judaism sometimes.  A reader asks the rabbi, is it acceptable for Jewish workers to go on strike?  In case anyone wonders why there are so many Jewish lawyers (assuming that's really true), the answer is in stuff like this.  A long history of applying the Torah to modern problems and issues has honed the legal methodology you'd need to interpret other laws.

The woman who was gang-raped in India on December 16 has died.  Her attack sparked demonstrations.  I hope her death will inspire reform of India's laws and culture.

The New York subway push captured on video turns out to be a religious hate crime of the most ignorant variety:  the woman who did this pushed this Indian Hindu because of 9/11.  I have always considered bigotry a mental illness.  This proves it.

Links to Brighten your Solstice... if you haven't been abducted by Mayans

A lot of these links are related to last week's school shooting.  I grouped them at the top so you can scroll down if you're past the saturation point on this incident:

Indiana man threatens to kill his wife then wipe out elementary school kids... the night before the Newtown shooting!   The police chief didn't take the threat seriously (though the guy was jailed).  I wonder if he'd feel the same way if had happened on Saturday.  (Some news sources are reporting this as a copycat plan)

Scientific American Mind made a 2007 article free online after the Newtown shooting:  Deadly Dreams: What Motivates School Shootings?

A law enforcement site offers its analysis of schools as targets from the perspective of terrorism.  That's basically what mass shooters are, but with personal agendas instead of group goals.  They offer this chilling analysis:

when seeking to cause the greatest psychological, emotional and lifestyle impact on an entire nation, through the deaths of large numbers of the most innocent, no target offers terrorists as much impact as the killing of children

Journalist's Resource has a link round-up for research on mass shootings (some are pay-per-view articles, though)

Mother Jones has a guide to mass shootings. 103 semi-automatic handguns or assault rifles vs. 39 revolvers or shotguns.  (I found this while arguing with someone on FB who said changes in gun control wouldn't have prevented Newtown)

But you don't have to trust them.  The FBI puts homicide data online.

And the other Sandy Hook, the Sandy Hook Gateway National Recreational Area in New Jersey was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy:

Two sea turtles with hypothermia were rescued in Oregon.  It is doubtful whether one of them prayed as she was missing a front flipper, so couldn't do the prayer pose.

The video of a golden eagle attempting to kidnap a toddler was a hoax, but it was fun while it lasted.  Popular Science had to one-up the golden eagle story by writing about a huge extinct eagle of New Zealand.

An evangelical preacher bemoans his faith's decline in America.  ... without mentioning creationism.  The guy lives in New York so maybe he's not as familiar with teh crazee branches here in the Midwest.

Pakistan wanted to name a college for Malala.  She asks them not to.  Because of humility?  NO, because it would threaten the lives of other girls.   grrrr

Pakistan has lost U.N. support for polio vaccination after nine volunteers have been murdered.  What a fucked up country.