Yahweh Does Not Issue W-2s

Young earth creationist Kent Hovind and his wife has been arrested in Florida on charges related to tax evasion.

Kent Hovind, who often calls himself "Dr. Dino," has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.

The guy even had his guns confiscated.

Over Kent Hovind's protests, the judge took away his passport and guns Hovind claimed belonged to his church.

Oops! I mean his church's guns. Exactly what kind of church has guns?

Here's some more good news. Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper, is reporting that Muslims are giving their blood to Hindu in Mumbai instead of trying to take it:

Indian Muslims queued for hours on Wednesday to give blood to their Hindu neighbours wounded in the Mumbai train bombings, in a rare show of harmony in a city with a long history of communal bloodshed.

Finally, there's a recent interview with Sam Harris up at Salon. There's no revelations here, just more restatements of his arguments. But, since they're worth reading, I present some select quotes:

We have a society in which 44 percent of the people claim to be either certain or confident that Jesus is going to come back out of the clouds and judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years. It just seems to me transparently obvious that this is a belief that will do nothing to create a durable civilization. And I think it's time someone spoke about it.

There's no document that I know of that is more despicable in its morality than the first few books of the Hebrew Bible. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, these are diabolical books. The killing never stops. The reasons to kill your neighbor for theological crimes are explicit and preposterous. You have to kill people for worshiping foreign gods, for working on the Sabbath, for wizardry, for adultery. You kill your children for talking back to you. It's there and it's not a matter of metaphors. It is exactly what God expects us to do to rein in the free thought of our neighbors.

The problem is, the books never tell you that you're free not to read them literally. In fact, they tell you otherwise, explicitly so. Therefore, the fundamentalist is always on firmer ground theologically and -- I would argue -- intellectually than the moderate or the progressive. When you consult the books, you do not find more reasons to be a moderate or a liberal. You find more reasons to be a fundamentalist.

The person who's sure that Elvis is still alive and expresses this belief candidly does not wind up in the Oval Office or in our nation's boardrooms. And that's a very good thing. But when the conversation changes to Jesus being born of a virgin or Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse, then these beliefs not only do not exclude you from holding power in society; you could not possibly hold power, in a political sense, without endorsing this kind of thinking.