In the "Christian" Witness union, yet another anti-Catholic thread has been started. And the lies. Oh, the lies! Catholics started the World Wars! Jesuits started the American Civil War! Eucharist is a wafer god and a false idol!

And this from someone who is supposedly college-educated. One would hope that with higher education comes the ability to do at least a modicum of critical thinking and analysis of evidence, but apparently this is not always the case. And I'm not of a mind to even start on how disgraceful it is that such a body of lies is being propagated in a forum supposedly dedicated to Christian witness.

Ugh.

The kicker? The initial poster cites Jack Chick as a credible source, on the basis that Chick uses Bible quotes in his workand delivers a consistent message.

Know what else uses Bible quotes in its body of work and delievers a consistent message? The Catholic Catechism.

Oops! Someone needs to refine his criteria!

...in the coming week, I will fisk this pig-ignorant lie.

"The thing about the pope is, he is evil, he works for evil, he has nazi connections, just look at the evidence, he was in the hitler youth group. The vatican was behind both world wars, the dark ages, the crusades, not christians."

In the finest tradition of Uncle Screwtape, this is the worst and most damnable sort of lie -- it mixes truth with its falsehoods. How shameful that a supposed "bible Christian" should be the one to have uttered it.

I'm going here.

Then here.

I'm buying fruit wines and mead. Especially mead, which I've never tried before.

Did you know, O Reader, that mead is an effective argument against Young Earth Creationists (the 6,000-year flavour, at least)? Records concerning mead production date back at least 7,000 years -- it is one of the oldest known fermented beverage types.

I tell you -- one particular union on Gamespot is a gold mine for this sort of thing.

Started by the same person, no less, who made the pig-ignorant comment below! Of course, I'm not sure how much one can expect from someone who relates to, and finds personal validation for his faith journey, in the movie Robocop...but that's another matter entirely.

I mean...Robocop?

"Even us christians know that catholics created religion to control the population in babylon."

This is kind of one of those "so dumb I don't know where to start" comments.

The obvious criticism is to point out that a myriad of religions existed prior to the foundation of the Church; Judaism is the most obvious (and, for Christians, relevant) example. The slightly less-obvious historical criticism is to point out that the rise of the Church had a lot to do with Rome, and then Constantinople/Byzantium. Although Christianity -- through Catholicism -- eventually spread into what was in ancient times called Babylon, that was hardly the place where it was founded, nor was reaching Babylon the impetus behind early evangelization.

But really, it might almost be pedantic to even say that much. Anti-Catholic bigotry is not exactly the home of the reasonable or rational.

Frankly, I'm not surprised.

It's still a bit early to tell, but it would appear that Jim Adkisson — charged with first-degree murder after a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church that left two dead and several wounded — was something of an anti-religious bigot.

The man being questioned by police in a deadly church shooting was a "nice guy" who became upset when the subject of religion came up, according to his neighbors.

Jim Adkisson's neighbors in a Knoxville suburb described him as quiet and helpful, but sensitive about certain topics.

"I was telling him about my daughter graduating from Bible college and I was a Christian and stuff, and he just automatically almost turned angry," neighbor Karen Massey told WVLT-TV, a CNN affiliate.

"He was angry with his parents because they had made him go to church all his life," she told the station.

"When the subject of Religion came up, it set off like a light in him or something I noticed," Massey told WATE-TV, another CNN affiliate. "And at that point I thought I'd never bring up religion again."

Adkisson, 58, is charged with first-degree murder after the shooting at a Unitarian church during a children's play Sunday morning, officials said.

Oh, and yeah…he was a quiet loner and a "nice guy" (let's leave aside the fact, I suppose, that nice people don't typically shoot other people in cold blood). But it would appear that he harboured a deep-seated hatred of all things religious as well. One wonders if his manifesto, found in his car at the site of the attack, will read like an excerpt from God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens?

I've stayed away from various bits of political humour related to Barrack Hussein Obama, but this was too good to pass up:

Personally, he wouldn't have my vote. But that's another matter.

Update: finder's credit

I fully accept that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, and the fullness of revelation.

But having said that, I don't presume that God, having finished inspiring the various texts that make up the Bible, has run out of things to say to humanity.

And that's another problem I have with Sola Scriptura. I accept that the Bible is the foremost revelation God has given to humanity, but I find it hard to believe that it is the only source of revelation He has ever provided. Surely God has had at least one thing more to say in the 1900 (or thereabouts) years since John completed recollecting his vision in the text we now call Revelation?

Or is our God a silent one who has nothing more to say to us?

This is an image I'm rather particularly proud of, as it is probably my most successful experiment with HDR (high dynamic range) photography ever. And funnily, I didn't use anything like Photomatix or Qtpfsgui to compose it — this was entirely done in Photoshop.

When I took the initial set of three photos that I had intended to stitch together, I exposure-bracketed the shots by +/- 2 eV, which is a huge range of exposure values. That resulted in one image in which the buildings were very properly exposed (as was the hillside), and in which the background was entirely washed out; it was the easiest thing to use the "magic wand" selection tool to remove the sky from that image. The other shot had a properly exposed sky, and placing the buildings overtop of that image was similarly easy.

A bit of egde blurring to blend things together was matched by some negative Clarity adjustments in Lightroom, giving the image a slightly diffuse, dream-like effect. I also (as the Reader can doubtless see) tweaked the colour saturations a fair bit, in particular focusing on bringing out a deep blue sky (visible, in places, through the clouds).

Anyhow, I'm proud of this one. And if the reader is interested, I'm open to the idea of selling higher-resolution copies of the shot.

Why not start your own?

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about this that doesn't sit well with me.

Still, I suppose it's a logical consequence of Sola Scriptura.