Recent headline roundup

I've been away from the blog several days, but the slack has been more than capably taken up by the rest of the team. Thought I'd pop by with a quick post today with my observations on some recent events in the news and around the globe.

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A: Nothing fails like prayer.

Just in is this report about the imprisonment of a Tunisian charter pilot in Italy. It seems that, instead of taking the proper emergency measures when his plane started going down, he chose to pray instead. Result: 16 dead. Now, Christians might gloat that this fellow was Muslim, and therefore this proves that Allah (who is just the Abrahamic God in a different outfit, but hey...) is a false God. And they would, of course, be ignoring all the times that their own prayers fail. But there's an easy way to test this. The next time a Christian finds himself in an out-of-control aircraft plummeting towards a fiery doom, then he should simply pray. We'll see how well he gets out of it.

B: He must be really counting on that "forgiveness" thing!

And here's a hilarious piece about Baptist minister Henry L. Lyons, who is running for the presidency of a prominent organization of African-American Baptist churches. What's the big deal? Well, only that ten years ago, he held that very position, only to be forced out of it when it was revealed he'd been embezzling millions from the org in order to support his luxury lifestyle, which included more than one mistress. Ah, that superior Christian morality! Can you get enough of it?

Anyway, it all went sour for Lyons when his wife twigged to his extramarital dalliances and burned down one of the homes he shared with a mistress. Go girl! Lyons was later convicted of racketeering and fraud and did some time. And now, he's not only a pastor once again, he running for the same office he stole from! The man must need a wheelbarrow to carry around balls that big.

"I prefer building on the present and the future and being as positive as possible and really don't want to go back to that era and talk about those negatives," says Lyons. We'll see if Baptist voters share his forward-looking positivity.

C: Reeeding iz hawrd!

In Dallas last weekend, an ambitious Christian Book Expo was held, with the goal of connecting "publishers and authors directly with readers in the evangelical Christian market." I expect they overestimated the actual existence of readers in said market, because the expo was a dismal flop, drawing only 1,500 attendees. The hoped-for numbers were in the 15-20,000 range.

Well, is this such a surprise? After all, how many different updated Bible translations does one need? After all, the damn thing's been translated into everything from hip-hop slang to LOLcat, so where else can you go after that? Klingon? And since everyone there has probably already slogged their way through the Left Behind saga, what's the big draw? Oh well. Maybe they just weren't promoting Ray Comfort's new book enough?

D: Uh-oh! Is atheism vanquished?

It looks as if we have ironclad proof of God's existence after all! I mean, I don't what else you could possibly call this!

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And a quick PS: Only 16 more T-shirt orders needed to get the second print run going. Thanks to all!