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My, my, what a coincidence. As expected, yet another shooter turns out to be a militant anti-theist:

According to a law enforcement source, the man professed to “hate all Christians,” and reportedly left a note or letter that he intended to murder as many Christians as possible.

Large-scale murder or small-scale slaughter, it’s simply amazing how often these killers turn out to be self-identified atheists, especially given the fact that this group is such a small percentage of the population. Correlation may not be causation, but when this sort of statistical improbability regarding the behavior of a tiny minority becomes not only reliable, but downright predictable, that just may be the first clue the relationship is causal.

What I find most interesting is the inevitably defensive reaction of their fellow atheists. Instead of taking a scientific approach by examining the available evidence and then formulating a testable hypothesis to explain it, too many atheists take a philosophical approach similar to that of the medieval philosophers in attempting to ignore the evidence and focusing on the abstract logic of the matter. The relevant question isn’t why WOULD atheists possess a predilection for committing murder, but rather why DO avowed atheists commit mass murder at a much higher rate than agnostics, other non-believers and theists.

In light of the recent discussion which involved atheists crowing over converting the younger generation away from Christianity, it appears that the killer was just such an example of such a conversion to faithlessness: “The gunman was identified as Matthew Murray, 24, who was home-schooled in what a friend said was a deeply religious Christian household.”

Isn’t it interesting that the media feels the need to mention the fact that the man was home-schooled a quarter of his life ago? Of course, it’s inevitable that some will try to claim he was a Christian, on the same familial basis that applies to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

On a tangential note, it’s definitely worth noting that this female parishioner showed far more courage than did the cowardly cops at Columbine. She was certainly not given a spirit of fear. Nor are any of us:

Jeanne Assam appeared before the news media for the first time Monday and said she “did not think for a minute to run away” when a gunman entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and started shooting….”I saw him coming through the doors” and took cover, Assam said. “I came out of cover and identified myself and engaged him and took him down.”

Assam had several years of experience in law enforcement and is licensed to carry a weapon. She attends one of the morning services and then volunteers as a guard during another service. “I give credit to God,” Assam said. “God was with me. I didn’t think for a minute to run away.”

When the time came, she stood in the gap when others failed. There is no higher praise.

UPDATE – After reading through the link above, one thing stands out to me. In these situations, stalk-and-shoot applies. Don’t issue any warnings, just take the guy out.

UPDATE II – Yes, my dear defensive atheists, the shooter does really appear to have been one of you. It’s hard to argue that I’m making a No True Christian argument considering the evidence about the end of Murray’s faith. If one can never abandon one’s faith, then what in the name of Charles Darwin is the point of all this New Atheist evangelism?

“You Christians brought this on yourselves,” Murray wrote on a Web site for people who have left Pentecostal and fundamentalist religious organizations. “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. …God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Like previous atheist converts from Stalin to Dawkins and Hitchens, Murray rejected Jesus Christ and found nihilistic hate in his atheism. I would think Murray might be regarded as an atheist hero, considering common atheist beliefs such as “religion poisons everything” and Christians “are to blame for most of the problems in the world….”

My point not that Christians cannot and do not do evil things. They can and do, and the mere fact of evil-doing is not sufficient to deny an individual’s Christianity; if that is the metric then there are no Christians on this planet. As I previously wrote, these church shootings could have been a divorce gone bad, a jealous boyfriend or a delusional individual operating under the belief that he was the Angel of Death sent on a mission by God. But the probability is that a shooter is an atheist is nearly as high as the likelihood that he is young and male. It’s obviously a relevant factor.

I can only assume that Rg was referring to today’s column:

You are not only insane but evil!!!

I have to admire his ability to be so succinct, anyhow. JW, on the other hand, asks a relevant question:

It’s clear you don’t like Bush, and that’s fine. There are many things to be disappointed about with this administration. You’ve written fine columns giving us your valid reasons for not supporting him. But in this latest column I have to wonder if you have finally let your personal feelings color your judgment. How can Bush simultaneously be the idiot that can’t even speak English, and the evil genius that was able to fool most of the country and a lot of the western world into going to war to satisfy his insatiable lust for power? Next you’ll tell us you have determined once and for all that George W. Bush masterminded the 9/11 attacks.

The problem with this apparent dichotomy is that speaking ability is not intelligence. I don’t believe Bush is stupid, far from it. His military records show that he was smarter than John Kerry, with an IQ of around 115 to 120. In fact, many people who are much more intelligent than a single SD above the norm don’t speak very well, I’m not particularly eloquent on the radio myself.

But I don’t believe Bush is a grand mastermind either. The central point of the column was to remind everyone of how he was once supposed to be the heir to Reagan, and how he has fallen far short of that in office.

Imagine how many people would have died at New Life Church if the church had insisted upon a no-gun policy like Virginia Tech:

The gunman at the New Life Church was shot and killed by a church security guard after entering the church’s main foyer with high-powered rifle shortly before 1 p.m. and opening fire, Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers said. Four others were wounded, and one later died.

The church’s 11 a.m. service had recently ended, and hundreds of people were milling about when the gunman opened fire. Nearby were parents picking up their children from the nursery.

Police arrived to find that the gunman had been killed by a member of the church’s armed security staff, Myers said.

Needless to say, if your church has an anti-carry policy, you should definitely bring the subject up with the elders. I remember at Woodland Hills, the church security was volunteer, but better trained than any police. The two men that I knew who served in this manner were both ex-Rangers.

So, any doubt that it’s more angry atheists responsible for these mass shootings? It may not be, for all we know it’s the violent fallout of a divorce or whatever, but the odds are that it’s another violent nihilist ending his meaningless existence with a bang. Say what you will about the danger posed by American theocrats, there aren’t any Christians going to atheist meetings with the intention of murdering them.

Among other things, it looks as if the Brits are pulling out of the neocons’ adventure in Mesopotamia:

GORDON Brown yesterday delivered a stirring festive message to Our Boys in Iraq: “Happy Christmas – war is over.” The PM was cheered as he praised UK troops and revealed combat operations in Basra will end “within two weeks”. Iraqi forces will take over as the 4,500-strong British force switches from front-line duties to a training role. By early next year, our contingent in Southern Iraq will be cut to 2,500 – and may be withdrawn completely in March.

I think this could be interpreted as the official announcement of the start of George Bush’s lame duck period.

Could this be the game that Adrian Peterson goes for 300? I doubt it, I think they’ll give him 15 carries and rest him for the playoff surge, but the possibility is there.

A most excellent parody of Hugh Hewitt:

Here’s the objective measure: When was the last time that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and me all focused on the same subject and all agreed on the merits? It is literally impossible to imagine a more wildly diversified group of 50-something Republican pundits. Even in our most agreeable moments we are endlessly roiled in rancorous disagreements on everything, from the NFL replay rule to the merits of the Four-In-Hand versus the Windsor knot, yet here we spoke with one unanimous, harmonious voice:

Rush Limbaugh: “Pretty good speech. I think it will help him.”

Sean Hannity: “I didn’t see it myself, but Lee Greenwood told me it was nice.”

Michael Medved: “I think it probably helps Romney with Evangelicals.”

Fred Barnes: “I’d venture Romney will probably pick up 2 to 4 points in the next Iowa poll.”

Charles Krauthammer: “He certainly didn’t hurt himself.”

Me: “As the magnificence of His words burst forth, I fell to my very knees and wept with utter overwhelming joy; not just for me, but for the entire human race.”

That’s about as reasonable and convincing as any argument I’ve heard yet for supporting Mitt Romney. He’s tall! He has executive hair! He is opposed to murdering children, at least, he is today! And he wears some seriously awesome underoos!

Actually, I would think much better of Romney if he simply admitted to wearing Joseph’s Secret, and said “Look, we all believe in something halfway crazy, this just happens to be my particular idiom. At least it’s men’s underwear, you know it could be a lot worse.”

We thank the Good Fraters for bringing this special moment in political history to our attention.

Actually, Rotten Tomatoes has it Narnia 76, Compass 43. I can’t say that I’m surprised that The Golden Compass is failing at the box office. One can’t expect any more from a third-rate Lewis rip-off, its muted anti-Christian theme notwithstanding. I only wish they had done it as the openly hate-filled propaganda vehicle it was originally conceived to be.

Nor am I saddened at the disaster that was the feeble attempt to put The Dark is Rising on film. (RT: 13!) All you had to know that it would bomb was that the director moved the story to America; when will filmmakers learn that “relevance” to the modern movie-goer is completely beside the point? People go to movies to ESCAPE their daily lives, not to relive them.

There’s so many great stories out there, it’s such a pity that Hollywood is so determined to ruin them by putting them through its peculiar filter. The only rule of success in entertainment is this: no one actually knows anything. But sticking with the story that made the movie possible in the first place instead of having an incompetent writer rewrite it does make for a pretty good guideline.

That being said, I’m rather looking forward to seeing Prince Caspian. Judging by the trailer, it looks like the combat will be more reflective of LOTR than The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

It’s always amusing to watch atheists attempt to use logic. It’s rather like watching an orangutan try to waltz. Consider the most recent example here, courtesy of Anon, who insists that atheism is growing rapidly and may make up more than one-third of the world’s population:

There are probably over 1 billion agnostics and atheists in the world today. In fact, there may be over 1 billion agnostics and atheists in China alone….

Specifically, atheists comprised only .2 percent of the world’s population in 1900, whereas atheists now probably comprise 15% to 35% of the world’s population….

But the percentage of atheists in the world may not be as high as 35%. A lot depends on the percentage of Chinese that are atheists. A recent poll estimated that only 31 percent of Chinese 16 or older are religious, putting the number of believers at roughly 400 million. The rest of Chinese would presumably be atheists, agnostics or those who haven’t thought about the issue, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese. So maybe 800 million to 900 million Chinese are atheists or non-theists….

By my calculations that is 15% of the world’s population. But if there are 800,000 million Chinese atheists, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get to 2 billion atheists total in the world, because there is such a larger percentage in Japan, Korea and Europe. And there are probably 25 million to 30 million in the US. A lot of Japanese are Shinto. They don’t believe in God. It is ancestor worship….

Anon makes all the usual errors. In this case, it’s clearly logical ineptitude, whereas in others, it is outright intellectual dishonesty. In any case, here are the logical blunders he makes as he attempts to avoid stumbling over his own words:

1. Failing to distinguish implicit Low Atheism with explicit High Atheism. Of course, this is only done when attempting to inflate atheist numbers, the two are always held to be two different groups when adding the two groups together demonstrates that atheists have lower IQs and greater criminal proclivities. In reality, High Atheists only account for around one-twentieth of the collective non-religious, secular population. The greater Church of Secularism is much larger than the small, but influential denomination of High Church Atheism.

2. Mutating definitions of atheism. Anon asserts that there is no God, but then backtracks and says that atheism is a mere lack of belief in God. Both of these definitions dance around the fact that most atheists also include a lack of belief in the supernatural, the human soul and anything immaterial as inherent aspects of their atheism.

3. Mathematical generalities. Forget “probably”, I can state with absolute, 100 percent certainty that between 0 and 100 percent of the world’s population is atheist. This is only marginally less meaningful than saying “atheists now probably comprise 15% to 35% of the world’s population”. One cringes at the thought of asking Anon for his estimate of the actual probabilities of that “probably”.

3. Attempting to claim the practitioners of Chinese folk religion, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto as atheists. This is absurd on its face, but more importantly, it is a demonstration of a Christopher Hitchens-like self-refutation that completely demolishes his own argument if accepted. Anon is trying to claim atheism is growing globally based on the idea that it once accounted for only .2 percent of the world’s population in 1900, but this argument relies on counting the estimated 12.69 percent of the global population that practice those Eastern faiths as theists in 1900 and atheists a century later. Sam Harris makes a very similar mistake on this basis in his second book.

4. Ignorance of demographics. There is a great detail of data indicating that neither atheist societies nor individuals are capalbe of reproducing successfully. Most secular researchers fail to note that atheists and the irreligious convert to religion in the years after college as readily as theists convert to atheism during college. I am myself an example of this, as are both of my college roommates. It would be interesting to study the twin phenomenons and see how they relate when combined with reproductive tendencies.

5. Ignoring the development of new and numerically less-significant religions. The supposed growth of atheism from .2 percent to 2.35 percent is impressive. Even more impressive is the growth of hitherto nonexistent religions from 0 to 2 percent. And as it stands, according to the 2005 Encylopedia Brittanica, there are still nearly twice as many people around the globe practicing indigenous tribal religions as there are atheists.

But even if one assumes that atheism has grown quickly over the past century, this is much more indicative of its relatively trivial status than anything else. Many small companies have growth rates that dwarf those of Intel, Microsoft and Apple combined; it would be mathematically impossible for Christianity to grow anywhere nearly as fast as either Atheism or Scientology.

As I have stated previously, the New Atheism is actually indicative of a peak, not a trend. I’d still be interested to see projections from those who believe otherwise, though. If atheists are now, on average, 25 percent of the global population – the second largest “faith” group in the world – what do you project will be the global percentage of atheists in 2050?

In any event, the reliability with which one can count on atheists making the same logical and factual errors over and over again leads me to wonder if perhaps they are evolutionarily challenged in ways other than the merely reproductive.

In China it is known as the “sacred doctrine” and it has become one of the country’s bestselling books. Yet it has nothing to do with the thoughts of Chairman Mao and its teachings have been in conflict with the forces of Communism for generations.

Demand for the Bible is soaring in China, at a time when meteoric economic growth is testing the country’s allegiance to Communist doctrine. Today the 50 millionth Bible will roll off the presses of China’s only authorised publisher, Amity Printing, amid public fanfare and celebration….

Authorities at the officially approved Protestant and Catholic churches put the size of China’s Christian population at about 30 million. But that does not include the tens of millions more who worship in private at underground churches loyal to the Vatican or to various Protestant churches.

This sort of thing, which is also in evidence in countries from Nigeria to North Korea, makes a complete mockery of the idea that secularism is a growth stock. As with most stock markets, the public get the most excited about a stock when it has reached its peak.

History moves in waves and cycles. Dawkins’s misguided belief in historical progress towards secularism is perhaps the most fundamental example of his near-complete historical ignorance, to say nothing if his inability to do the demographic math. There are more Christians in atheist China than there are atheists in America. In two generations, there will be more Christians there than there are atheists in all of the lands formerly known as Christendom.

The reason that feminism has gotten as far as it has is because far too many men simply have no balls. Or self-respect:

Betty Friedan ruined a Super Bowl party in my very own home by wearing a black leather miniskirt and swinging her (not bad) legs clad in fishnet stockings back and forth in front of the TV screen so that nobody could see the plays. She radicalized a sizable bunch of neutral men into committed anti-feminists that day.

I had to laugh when I read this. I’m trying to imagine what would have happened to any woman who tried to do that when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly and I were watching a pre-season game between Carolina and Seattle, perhaps the two NFL teams in whom we are collectively the least interested. I can’t, to be honest, but direct action would be taken with alacrity.

However, I do know that if any woman – or man, for that matter – tried to do anything like that during the Super Bowl, we would have stripped them naked and thrown them outside. In January. In Minnesota.

And I’m not exaggerating. During past Super Bowl parties hosted at the Digital Ghetto, certain men were forced to strip, don a pink taffeta gown and dive into snowdrifts from a second-story deck for far less egregious offenses. Not that I’m naming any names, Mr. Big City Investment Banker… although BCIB did salvage a few shards of dignity by doing a flip instead of the basic bellyflop.