http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Two-car_head-on_collision_snarls_281.htmlCan’t prove it didn’t happen. Ergo, according to religionists, it must be given serious consideration. Consider this.

The driver of a pickup that struck a woman’s car on the South Side Friday morning is being evaluated by psychiatrists because he thinks God told him to drive in excess of 100 mph to take the other car off the road, police said.The bizarre incident that shut down southbound U.S. Highway 281 above the Medina River happened about 7:25 a.m.“He just said God said she wasn’t driving right, and she needed to be taken off the road,” said Lt. Kyle Coleman of the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.The woman was driving her sedan northbound when the pickup rear-ended her vehicle. The pickup’s driver told deputies that was driving in excess of 100 mph at the time, Coleman said. The impact caused both vehicles to spin across a median before they came to a stop along a barrier in the southbound lanes. No other vehicles were involved.Though both vehicles were badly damaged, the drivers suffered minor injuries.“God must have been with them, ’cause any other time, the severity of this crash, it would have been a fatal,” Coleman said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/us/25charity.html?em

OK! Can we please say what we all know? Religious “Charities” need oversight, just like the secular ones. Religious “Charities” usually don’t benefit non-adherents, except to attempt to convert. Religious “Charities”, when left unchecked, lead to crime, hate, cults, and sometimes terrorism — all at the expense of EVERY TAXPAYING CITIZEN IN THE COUNTRY.

Five Convicted in Terrorism Financing TrialBy GRETEL C. KOVACHDALLAS — On their second try, federal prosecutors won sweeping convictions Monday against five leaders of a Muslim charity in a retrial of the largest terrorism-financing case in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.The five defendants, all leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, based in Richardson, a Dallas suburb, were convicted on all 108 criminal counts against them, including support of terrorism, money laundering and tax fraud. The group was accused of funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, an Islamist organization the government declared to be a terrorist group in 1995.“Money is the lifeblood of terrorism,” Richard B. Roper, the United States attorney whose office prosecuted the case, said Monday in a statement. “The jury’s decision demonstrates that U.S. citizens will not tolerate those who provide financial support to terrorist organizations.”The defendants argued that the Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Muslim charity in the United States, was engaged in legitimate humanitarian aid for community welfare programs and Palestinian orphans.The jury, which deliberated for eight days, reached a starkly different result than the jury in the first trial, which ended in a mistrial on most charges in October 2007, after nearly two months of testimony and 19 days of deliberations.The government shuttered the Holy Land Foundation in December 2001 and seized its assets, a move President Bush heralded at the time as “another step in the war on terrorism.”

http://news.aol.com/main/obama-presidency/article/obama-skips-church-for-gym/258627

Obama Skips Church for Gym(Nov. 23) – Since the election, future President Barack Obama has traded Sunday morning pews for some quality time at the gym. The Obamas have refrained from public prayer for fear their large retinue would disturb the church service, according to an anonymous aide who spoke with Politico.com. “They do not want to draw unwelcome or inappropriate attention to a church not used to the attention their attendance would draw,” said the aide, according to Politico.Since the election, Obama has been focusing on building his administration team. Monday, he introduced members of his economic team, and urged the incoming Congress to act quickly on a stimulus plan.The Obamas haven’t belonged to a church since the spring, notes ABC News, after Barack Obama split with Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ because of controversial sermons by the pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. A videotape from one of Wright’s sermons showed him damning America. Churches, especially African-American houses of prayer, played an important role in Obama’s candidacy, notes the Associated Press and Politico. Obama made campaign stops in churches. Congregations prayed for him on Election Day, and celebrated his victory, the Associated Press reported. Now, churches in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to lure the Obamas to their pews, reports the Associated Press — even if Obama hasn’t attended church in weeks.

Now, we can talk about this one for a while.We knew he wasn’t very religious, and we knew the religious vote held little weight. I frankly didn’t expect him to so blatantly skip the PR. Maybe we will have to wait for a Lewinsky Incident for him to show up on a pew, talking Jesus. Nah.My favorite part is the selfish money-grubbing churches who want the prestige of having a president attending, causing all this attention in the first place. They are literally trying to apply pressure on him to go, so they can fill their pews with on-lookers. They want to cash in. Looks like Mr. Obama has more important things to do than to pray to air and tithe a corrupt institution.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081120/sc_afp/sciencephysicseinstein_081120235605PARIS (AFP) ? It’s taken more than a century, but Einstein’s celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

I feel like crap today. The nose, the head, the chest — it’s all bad. Yes, we can use illness (or natural disasters, etc) to show that an all-powerful deity isn’t up there, but today my stuffy head turned to Ontology, probably due to all the cold medicine.The ontological argument basically states that if one can imagine a most perfect entity, that such an entity either exists or does not exist. Since existence is more perfect than nonexistence, then the most perfect being must therefore exist. A poisonous little gem of confusion. Many have offered their counter arguments, but my runny nose makes the point.You see, if disease exists, and a perfect god exists, then that god bears responsibility for the disease. BUT, if a deity does not exist, then he cannot (obviously) be responsible. It is this responsibility, indeed for all things bad, which makes an extant god LESS perfect than a fictional one, for a deity which created all this crap in my head would have some explaining to do (a murderer is less perfect than a non-murderer).So beyond all the arguments of Dawkins and Descartes, this damn cold which has infested my family proves the point in the simplest of ways — a fictional deity is more perfect than a real one, given the real problems we have.