08 April 2011 - The Mad Filkentist (original) (raw)

April 8th, 2011

**05:37 am - A letter**The Grace Baptist Church in Pepperell, Mass., currently has a roadside sign declaring: "THE FOOL SAYS THERE IS NO GOD." This led me to write the following letter to the church's pastor: I regularly drive by the Grace Baptist Church on my way to work and usually notice the signs there. I haven’t always been impressed, but in the past at least you’ve avoided outright bad taste. Now you have sunk to plain name-calling.Let’s suppose you’re right. Let’s suppose there is a God, and that I’m a fool for not seeing the blinding evidence. Do you really think that insulting people is going to win them over? Perhaps you’re just playing to your own congregation, encouraging them to feel superior to everyone who doesn’t think as they do. If so, you might want to read the Gospel of Matthew, 5:22, where Jesus is quoted as saying: “But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire.”By your own standards, your example is leading your followers into Hell.

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**05:41 am - The attack on LJ**A number of sources are speculating that Russian politics was behind the DDoS attacks on LiveJournal this week, though no one has a smoking gun. Dimitri Medvedev has condemned the attacks. Deutsche Welle (in English) Time: "online carpet bombing" Moscow Times I've been critical of LiveJournal on a lot of occasions and have occasionally encouraged migration to other hosts, but when free speech is under attack is not the time to do that. If the attackers can drive us away from LiveJournal, what makes Dreamwidth any safer, other than greater obscurity?

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