Best Penalty Of The Year

This has to be the best description to a penalty I have ever heard.

Category: Sports

Fire Bike Stunt Goes Bad

Shockingly this guy discovers that tying a burning bag of stuff to the back of his bike as he rides down hill, is a bad idea.

Category: Entertainment

Reporter Is Really Good At Sledding

If WCCO Minneapolis reporter John Lauristsen ever wants to quit his career in hard hitting news, he can easily switch to professional sledding.

Category: News & Politics

Flexible Girl Playing Pool

An extremely flexible girl plays some pool. Chalk up your cues in case she gets stuck.

Category: Howto & Style

Dog Humps Kid Playing Wii

Some little kid is enjoying his Wii when out of nowhere his dog comes up from behind and humps the crap out of him. That kid pretty much just got raped, he will definitely need counseling.

Category: Pets & Animals

The Circle Of Death

This is a pretty sweet stunt. A couple cars and... (more)
Added: December 03, 2007
This is a pretty sweet stunt. A couple cars and motorcycles pick up enough speed to drive on the side of a wall.

Category: Autos & Vehicles

Bad Case Of Diarrhea

This is a hilarious video about how the Japanese people learn to speak English.

Category: Entertainment

Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

In Book 10 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? (“Ah, why should all mankind / For one man’s fault… be condemned?”) He answers himself immediately: “But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?” Adam’s Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime – they did not eat of the forbidden tree – its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.
God, of course, could have restored them to spiritual health, but instead, Paul tells us in Romans, he “gave them over” to their “reprobate minds” and to the urging of their depraved wills. Because they are naturally “filled with all unrighteousness,” unrighteous deeds are what they will perform: “fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness . . . envy, murder . . . deceit, malignity.” “There is none righteous,” Paul declares, “no, not one.”
It follows, then (at least from these assumptions), that the presence of evil in the world cannot be traced back to God, who opened up the possibility of its emergence by granting his creatures free will but is not responsible for what they, in the person of their progenitor Adam, freely chose to do.
What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy – the existence of suffering and evil in a world presided over by an all powerful and benevolent deity. The occurrence of catastrophes natural (hurricanes, droughts, disease) and unnatural (the Holocaust) always revives the problem and provokes anguished discussion of it. The conviction, held by some, that the problem is intractable leads to the conclusion that there is no God, a conclusion reached gleefully by the authors of books like “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great” and “The End of Faith.” (See discussion here, here and here.)
Now two new books (to be published in the coming months) renew the debate. Their authors come from opposite directions – one from theism to agnosticism, the other from atheism to theism – but they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.
Bart D. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies and his book is titled “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Ehrman trained to be a scholar of New Testament Studies and a minister. Born-again as a teenager, devoted to the scriptures (he memorized entire books of the New Testament), strenuously devout, he nevertheless lost his faith because, he reports, “I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the fact of life . . . I came to the point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge.” “The problem of suffering,” he recalls, “became for me the problem of faith.”
Much of the book is taken up with Ehrman’s examination of biblical passages that once gave him solace, but that now deliver only unanswerable questions: “Given [the] theology of selection – that God had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him – what were Ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as planned or expected? . . . . How were they to explain the fact that the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?”
Ehrman knows and surveys the standard answers to these questions – God is angry at a sinful, disobedient people; suffering is redemptive, as Christ demonstrated on the cross; evil and suffering exist so that God can make good out of them; suffering induces humility and is an antidote to pride; suffering is a test of faith – but he finds them unpersuasive and as horrible in their way as the events they fail to explain: “If God tortures, maims and murders people just to see how they will react – to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame – then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship.”
And as for the argument (derived from God’s speech out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job) that God exists on a level far beyond the comprehension of those who complain about his ways, “Doesn’t this view mean that God can maim, torment, and murder at will and not be held accountable? . . . . Does might make right?”
These questions are as old as Epicurus, who gave them canonical form: “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil.”
Many books of theology and philosophy have been written in response to Epicurus’s conundrums, but Ehrman’s isn’t one of them. What impels him is not the fascination of intellectual puzzles, but the anguish produced by what he sees when he opens his eyes. “If he could do miracles for his people throughout the Bible, where is he today when your son is killed in a car accident, or your husband gets multiple sclerosis? . . . I just don’t see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of malnutrition.”
The horror of the pain and suffering he instances leads Ehrman to be scornful of those who respond to it with cool abstract analyses: “What I find morally repugnant about such books is that they are so far removed from the actual pain and suffering that takes place in our world.”
He might have been talking about Antony Flew’s “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.” Flew, a noted professor of philosophy, announced in 2004 that after decades of writing essays and books from the vantage point of atheism, he now believes in God. “Changed his mind” is not a casual formulation. Flew wouldn’t call what has happened to him a conversion, for that would suggest something unavailable to analysis. His journey, he tells us, is best viewed as “a pilgrimage of reason,” an extension of his life-long habit of “following the argument no matter where it leads.”
Where it led when he was a schoolboy was to the same place Ehrman arrived at after many years of devout Christian practice: “I was regularly arguing with fellow sixth formers that the idea of a God who is both omnipotent and perfectly good is incompatible with the manifest evils and imperfections of the world.” For much of his philosophical career, Flew continued the argument in debates with a distinguished list of philosophers, scientists, theologians and historians. And then, gradually and to his own great surprise, he found that his decades-long “exploration of the Divine ha[d] after all these years turned from denial to discovery.”
What exactly did he discover? That by interrogating atheism with the same rigor he had directed at theism, he could begin to shake the foundations of that dogmatism. He poses to his former fellow atheists the following question: “What would have to occur or have occurred to constitute for you a reason to at least consider the existence of a superior Mind.” He knows that a cornerstone of the atheist creed is an argument that he himself made many times – the sufficiency of the materialist natural world as an explanation of how things work. “I pointed out,” he recalls, that “even the most complex entities in the universe – human beings – are the products of unconscious physical and mechanical forces.”
But it is precisely the word “unconscious” that, in the end, sends Flew in another direction. How, he asks, do merely physical and mechanical forces – forces without mind, without consciousness – give rise to the world of purposes, thoughts and moral projects? “How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends [and] self-replication capabilities?” In short (this is the title of a chapter), “How Did Life Go Live?”
Flew does not deny the explanatory power of materialist thought when the question is how are we to understand the physical causes of this or that event or effect. He is just contending that what is explained by materialist thought – the intricate workings of nature – itself demands an explanation, and materialist thought cannot supply it. Scientists, he says, “are dealing with the interaction of chemicals, whereas our questions have to do with how something can be intrinsically purpose-driven and how matter can be managed by symbol processing?” These queries, Flew insists, exist on entirely different levels and the knowledge gained from the first can not be used to illuminate the second.
In an appendix to the book, Abraham Varghese makes Flew’s point with the aid of an everyday example: “To suggest that the computer ‘understands’ what it is doing is like saying that a power line can meditate on the question of free will and determinism or that the chemicals in a test tube can apply the principle of non-contradiction in solving a problem, or that a DVD player understands and enjoys the music it plays.”
How did purposive behavior of the kind we engage in all the time – understanding, meditating, enjoying – ever emerge from electrons and chemical elements?
The usual origin-of-life theories, Flew observes, are caught in an infinite regress that can only be stopped by an arbitrary statement of the kind he himself used to make: “ . . . our knowledge of the universe must stop with the big bang, which is to be seen as the ultimate fact.” Or, “The laws of physics are ‘lawless laws’ that arise from the void – end of discussion.” He is now persuaded that such pronouncements beg the crucial question – why is there something rather than nothing? – a question to which he replies with the very proposition he argued against for most of his life: “The only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind.”
Will Ehrman be moved to reconsider his present position and reconvert if he reads Flew’s book? Not likely, because Flew remains throughout in the intellectual posture Ehrman finds so arid. Flew assures his readers that he “has had no connection with any of the revealed religions,” and no “personal experience of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or religious.” Nor does he tells us in this book of any experience of the pain and suffering that haunts Ehrman’s every sentence.
Where Ehrman begins and ends with the problem of evil, Flew only says that it is a question that “must be faced,” but he is not going to face it in this book because he has been concerned with the prior “question of God’s existence.” Answering that question affirmatively leaves the other still open (one could always sever the Godly attributes of power and benevolence, and argue that the absence of the second does not tell against the reality of the first).
Flew is for the moment satisfied with the intellectual progress he has been able to make. Ehrman is satisfied with nothing, and the passion and indignation he feels at the manifest inequities of the world are not diminished in the slightest when he writes his last word.
Is there a conclusion to be drawn from these two books, at once so similar in their concerns and so different in their ways of addressing them? Does one or the other persuade?
Perhaps an individual reader of either will have his or her mind changed, but their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike.
In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule.
(In an article published Sunday — November 4 — in the New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer more than suggests that Flew, now in his 80’s, did not write the book that bears his name, but allowed Roy Varghese (listed as co-author) to compile it from the philosopher’s previous writings and some extended conversations. Whatever the truth is about the authorship of the book, the relation of its argument and trajectory to the argument and trajectory of Ehrman’s book stands.)

Monkey Business

In a case now pending in a federal court in Brooklyn, Mamie Manneh of Staten Island stands accused of having brought smoked bushmeat – known colloquially as monkey meat – into the United States without proper permits, in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Ms. Manneh’s defense is that in her religion the eating of bushmeat has both a cultural and a spiritual significance. In an affidavit, 17 of her co-religionists declared, “We eat bushmeat for our souls.” Manneh’s lawyer, Jan Rostal, has analogized the African-based practice to the consumption at a Passover seder of foods like bitter herbs “that might have some reference to the Exodus.” In a motion to dismiss, Rostal said that the case, while apparently novel, “represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”
No, it doesn’t. It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?
John Locke posed that question in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), and his analysis of it remains relevant today. Locke asks if it is lawful for Meliboeus (a name borrowed from pastoral poetry) to slaughter a calf and offer it as a sacrifice at a religious meeting. It depends, he says, on whether slaughtering a calf in order to put food on his family’s table is lawful. If it is, then killing the calf for ritual purposes is perfectly allowable, for “what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice.”
But the logic also holds in the opposite direction. Suppose, Locke imagines, a disease had destroyed a large number of cattle and the government decreed that no more could be slaughtered. The prohibition would surely extend to religious rituals, not as a specific target of state action, but as a practice swept up in the wake of a general law.
That law, Locke observes, would not be “made about a religious matter, but about a political matter.” It would be true that some people would no longer be able to engage in behavior they considered central to their religious life, but because that would not be the result aimed at — the good of the commonwealth would be the concern — the government could not be accused of contriving to harm religion, even if that were an unintended consequence of its action.
Nor would it be wise to exempt persons of certain beliefs from the general prohibition; for that would amount to bending the law to the preferences and desires of particular citizens, and once you begin to do that there is no logical place to stop and the rule of law would be destroyed.
The upshot of Locke’s argument is that religious practices flourish only at the sufferance of the state. In theory you have the right to worship in the manner dictated by your faith, but should an aspect of that worship run up against a duly enacted regulation, the regulation, provided it is neutral in intention, trumps the demands of worship.
This same line of reasoning can be found in religion clause cases stretching from Reynolds v. United States (1878) to Employment Division v. Smith (1990). (There is an alternative tradition of “accommodating” religion in cases like Sherbert v. Verner and Wisconsin v. Yoder.)
In Reynolds the court considered the argument made by a man convicted of practicing polygamy that it is the religious duty of male members of the Mormon Church to engage in plural marriage, and that the penalty for failing to do so “would be damnation in the life to come.” The court observed that the prohibition against polygamy was general and not directed at any sect, and asked, “can a man excuse” his illegal practice of an interdicted behavior just “because of his religious belief?”
The answer is swift, firm and Lockean. “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” In such a circumstance, the court concluded, “government could exist only in name.”
The same logic rules in Smith. Here the issue was the ingestion at a Native American religious ceremony of peyote, deemed a “controlled substance” by the laws of Oregon. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, notes that the Native American celebrants “contend that their religious motivation for using peyote places them beyond the reach of a criminal law that is not specifically directed at their religious practice and that is concededly constitutional as applied to those who use the drug for other reasons.” In short, the demand is that the law be applied differently to persons with different beliefs — you can’t use peyote as a recreational drug, but I can use it because I consider it sacramental — and this Scalia refuses to do.
The intention of the Oregon law, he points out, was not to curtail anyone’s free exercise of religion, and the fact that the free exercise rights of some people happened to be impacted negatively is “merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid principle.” If the affected believers are unhappy, Scalia concludes, let them turn to the “political process” and try to get laws passed that will address their concerns.
That is exactly what happened on two fronts. Congress passed a law making the use of peyote in religious ceremonies an exception to the controlled substances regulations. And the same Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), which transferred the burden of proof from the religious practitioner to the government.
Where the assumption in Reynolds and Smith is that the state need only be innocent of the intention to impede free exercise, the distinction between intentional effects and what Scalia calls “incidental” effects is RFRA’s first casualty: “Laws ‘neutral’ toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise.” Whatever the source and pedigree of the burden, whether it is designed or accidental, those who suffer it must have a legal recourse.
Accordingly, in any instance where the burden is “substantial,” the state must demonstrate that the law in question “(1) is in furtherance of a compelling government interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” In other words, the fact of a law duly passed by the appropriate bodies is not enough; with respect to a particular class of persons – religious believers – that law cannot take effect unless it can be shown that the highest state considerations require that it be applied without exception.
While RFRA was hailed as a victory for religious freedom by many, others saw in it the realization of the fear expressed by the Reynolds and Smith courts, the fear that any law could be lawfully disobeyed by someone who asserted that it interfered with the free exercise of his or her religion. In effect, they complained, the rule of law was being subordinated to the private convictions of an ever expanding set of citizens. For, as Scalia observes in Smith, who can tell another that a certain practice is not central to the free exercise of his religion? Prison inmates can claim that their religious requires them to eat porterhouse steak every day. And Meliboeus must be allowed to slaughter his calf even when his non-religious neighbors are prevented from doing so.
This brings us back to Mamie Manneh and monkey-meat. How will she fare in the courts? Her attorney is mounting an RFRA defense, but the act was weakened in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), when Justice Kennedy challenged Congress’s ability to pass it. Congress, he said, has the power to enforce rights, not to create them: “Legislation which alters the Free Exercise Clauses’s meaning” – by creating a special right of exemption from general laws – “cannot be said to be enforcing the clause.” Moreover, said Kennedy, “if Congress could define its own power by altering the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning, no longer would the Constitution be ‘superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means.’” In short, saying what the Constitution means is our job, not yours.
That might have seemed the end of it, but in a 2006 case (Gonzales v. O Centro), the Roberts court interpreted Boerne as invalidating only the application of RFRA to the states. Given that Ms. Manneh’s case is being adjudicated in a federal court, an RFRA defense is at least plausible, although the fact that bushmeat is associated with diseases like ebola will likely be enough to satisfy even the “compelling interest” test and give the government a victory.
But no matter how the case turns out, we can be sure of one thing: it won’t be the last, because the issues Locke identified and analyzed will never be resolved. In her dissent in Boerne, Justice O’Connor wrote, “Our Nation’s Founders conceived of a Republic receptive to voluntary religious expression, not a secular society in which religious expression is tolerated only when it does not conflict with generally applicable law.”
Yes, that’s the question. Do we begin by assuming the special status of religious expression and reason from there? Or do we begin with the rule of law and look with suspicion on any claim to be exempt for it, even if the claim is made in the name of apparently benign religious motives? From Reynolds to the present moment, everyone has had an answer to that question, but I predict that no one will ever have the last word.

20000 Stuffed Animals Thrown On Ice

Portland Winter Hawks fans threw a world record 20,372 stuffed animals on the ice after what they thought was their teams first goal of the season -- a goal which officials later disallowed.

Category: Nonprofits & Activism

Awesome Toothpick Fork Trick

This is a really cool trick that I cant wait to try at a party. Balance 2 forks on the rim of a glass using a toothpick, by burning the toothpick at one end.


Category: Howto & Style

Talented Dart Tossing Elephant

You got to be at least somewhat impressed with this big ass elephant and his ability to toss a tiny dart thirty feet in the air and pop a balloon.

Category: Comedy

Dude Tazed Fifteen Times

From what I understand this drunk dude actually... (more)
Added: December 02, 2007
From what I understand this drunk dude actually got arrested and charged with only the crime of resisting arrest.


Category: Comedy