Undeception

My four-year-old was given this worksheet in Sunday School posing the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Children. The answer (“God”, duh!) was supposed to be written on the line within the cloud…a shape that my daughter somehow visualized as a sock monkey’s head.

Answer: My ape-like ancestors God

Despite appearances, my daughter was not actually trying to make a statement in favor of common descent; I haven’t even broached that topic with her yet.

But I can’t help dreading some sticky questions coming from her PCA Sunday School teachers if they inferred the same thing I did!

With all due respect to James McGrath, historical skepticism never gets quite this bad.

Courtesy of SMBC (click image for original)

Presumably one would have to go to the beginning of the universe to find the answer to that other, oldest question in the universe.
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Trying so hard not to spoil the fun of this by over-analyzing it. If I can…just reach…the publish button…

You may have your beefs with apologist Alvin Plantinga – and his evolutionary argument against naturalism certainly needs some work – but there’s no arguing with him here at least. Being without an air conditioner is no way to start the summer!

H/T Glenn Peoples

Actually, it was the cosmic wet blanket known as Cognitive Discopants who burst my weather balloon. Not so much with the site he linked to (which made a couple of critical errors, IMO), but because in the comments of that page, I found a much more thorough debunking.

“The truth is out there, Mulder, but so are lies.”

~ Agent Dana “Discopants” Scully

Hottel, who was in charge of the Washington field office in 1950, reveals that a US air force investigator had stated that “three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico”.

The investigator gave the information to a special agent, he said. The FBI has censored both the agent and the investigator’s identity. “They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter,” said Hottel. “Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall,” he added.

The bodies were “dressed in a metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.”

via ‘Aliens landed in Roswell’ – The Times of India.

Here’s the FBI release.

All I have to say is better said by Brandon:

Fanboy’s Dream Come True by movieclips

In conjunction with the original post at Pithless Thoughts, Steven Robinson quotes Orthodox monastic Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain:

The person that is struggling to the best of his abilities, who has no desire to live a disorderly life, but who, in the course of the struggle for faith and life, falls and rises again and again, God will never abandon. And if he has the slightest will not to grieve God, he will go to Paradise with his shoes on. The benevolent God will, surprisingly, push him into Paradise. God will insure that he take him at his best, in repentance. He may have to struggle all his life, but God will not abandon him; He will take him at his best possible time.

I know a few people who fit that description and would be assured to hear of this view!