The Invisible Library

The revised Player’s Guide to the Catholic Church is about to be released and there are a few changes to the Doctrine of the Faith that old Pope Rat has seen fit to make. Most noteworthy is the abolition of Limbo, which has many die hard players up in arms.

“I have sent countless souls to limbo!” exclaimed one adamant young player named Adolf, “Now where are they going to go?”

“what’s next?” asked a skeptical Bishop, “Reduce Vampire hitpoints from holy water?”

While the Pope acknowledged that some of the revised rules are controversial, he has stated publicly that it is all simply to make game play more streamlined and easier for new players to pick up the rules quicker, “It’s hard to attract new players to a system that is so outdated. All the other religions have already switched over to the 20d system, for Christ’s sake! All I’, doing is modernizing the Church’s rules a bit while keeping the same flavor of play that our fans have come to expect.”

No news yet on whether or not the rules restricting use of altar boys to seventh level clerics and above will stay the same.

seriously though, if the Pope can just change the rules of theology, just because they are unpopular and no one believes them anymore, than maybe we can really streamline this whole religion thing down to just the bare bones, maybe a few deacons in casual wear offering pamphlets with a few words of generic advice and a stern foot rub.

Why stop with Limbo? After all, most Catholics hardly take the Pope seriously anymore and it’s been decades since anyone has mentioned the whole Infallibility thing, so maybe it’s time to retire the funny hat as well.

Via Boing Boing:

Dear Friends, my God, what can I say. I am dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and totally stunned by the charity and compassion that has poured in here the last three days.

To steal from Jack Benny, “I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don’t deserve them either.”

Because he was a kind man as well as a funny one, Benny was beloved. I find it hard to believe that I am equally beloved and especially that I deserve such love.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, know that my love is with you.

You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.

Blessings.

Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson, philosopher, author and all around bright spot in the cosmos is in dire straights. He’s no spring chicken and due to health problems, has very little of the long green needed to make his last few months on planet Earth pass comfortably. if you can, please help. Nickles, dimes, whatever you’ve got.

There’s absolutely no reason that a great mind should have to scrape and beg just to have a warm bed and a decent meal as his body slowly falls apart, so please, if you can, contribute.

I can’t tell you how much Wilson’s writings mean to me. He opened my mind to ideas and possibilities that simply didn’t exist to a sixteen year ld in suburban Virginia. Space exploration, mind expansion, conspiracy theories, science, and epistemology. The Big ideas that make our heads spin, he tackled all of them with wit and vigor and it’s in large part because of him that you are reading this now. he made me the wide eyed, wooly weirdo, struggling to write his own novels and share his thoughts with the world. And he needs us, even if just for a little while longer.

I haven’t written anything on the Torture Bill moving it’s way through Congress because of the simple fact that I shouldn’t have to state explicitly that I think torture is a bad idea. No one should. But that’s the level we’ve sunk to. So: for the record, I think torture is wrong, worthless, undemocratic and evil. I believe that the democratic freedoms upon which the US Constitution is based are Universal, Inalienable and apply to everyone, even those who wish to do us harm. Freedom is free. All you have to do is take it. And you can either take it for yourself or give it up for the illusion of safety. But if you give up your very real and tangible freedoms for a snuff of pixie dust in the form of a promise of safety than, as my hero, Ben Franklin said, you deserve neither.
Wil Wheaton elaborates on this sentiment:

What the House did yesterday, the Senate looks to do today, and the President will surely enact as soon as possible, is a direct assault on American values, and contrary to everything our country stands for. Though cynically and cowardly enacted as a purely political tool during an election, those who supported this bill do not speak for me, do not act in my name, and do not reflect my values.

Torture is not an American value. Torture is a totalitarian, sadistic value. Suspending access to courts and the right to face your accuser is not what Americans do. It is what tyrannical dictators and despots do, not a democratic republic like the one I was brought up in and love. Time and again, torture has proved unreliable to prevent or solve crimes, and it reduces our country to the level of the very terrorists we are supposedly fighting.

I believe in the right to a speedy and fair trial for everyone, even the most repugnant of defendants. No, especially for the most repugnant of defendants, because if we, as a society, can’t guarantee the most hideously accused among us that right, what is it worth to the rest of us?

George Bush and his enablers in the congress — Democrat and Republican — has done more damage to our country, and our once impeccable moral standing in the world than all the terrorists combined. President Bush and his Republican allies in congress like to say that “they hate us for our freedom,” but President Bush and his Republican allies in congress have spent the last five years working very hard to take that freedom away from the people they supposedly work for, and vest that power in something they call the Unitary Executive. If the Democrats won’t stand up to stop torture, what will they stand up for? If Congress won’t do its constitutional duty now, then when?

I don’t know when they will stand up, but if it isn’t soon than perhaps they deserve to loose their precious jobs and we’ll vote for some other party, as yet to be formed.

Update 11:09 PM:

As usual, the Onion puts things in perspective. You’ll cry laughing. Then you’ll just cry.

This little piece of GOP Astroturf has been circulating through people’s email inboxes for a few weeks now and my father-in-law sent it on to my wife:

Cindy & Chavez
Venezuela Dictator Vows To Bring Down U.S. Government

Venezuela government is sole owner of Citgo gasoline company

Venezuela Dictator Hugo Chavez has vowed to bring down the U.S. government. Chavez, president of Venezuela, told a TV audience: “Enough of imperialist aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire. We have to bury imperialism this century.”

The guest on his television program, beamed across Venezuela, was Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist. Chavez recently had as his guest Harry Belafonte, who called President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”

Chavez is pushing a socialist revolution and has a close alliance with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq, the issue here is that we have a socialist dictator vowing to bring down the government of the U.S And he is using our money to achieve his goal!

The Venezuela government, run by dictator Chavez, is the sole owner of Citgo gas company.

Sales of products at Citgo stations send money back to Chavez to help him in his vow to bring down our government.

Take Action

Please decide that you will not be shopping at a Citgo station. Why should U.S. citizens who love freedom be financing a dictator who has vowed to take down our government?

Very important. Please forward this to your friends and family. Most of them don’t know that Citgo is owned by the Venezuela government.

To which my wife replied:

Ummm, dictator?
He was elected by a landslide by the people of the Democratic republic of Venezuela. He has angered a lot of US private companies and politicans in the government by taking away their profit from the oil they were exporting out of the country only giving back 10%. He may say stupid things, but so has Bush. But he is trying to do what is best for his country in keeping the money to create social reform which is so badly needed. He isn’t hurting our country by doing this, he’s hurting the private companies run by CEO’s who are making huge profits from his country and who have the US government giving them tax breaks because of the “oil crisis”, eventhough, they released reports showing a 30% profit this year.

Of course there are a lot of people in the US who want us to believe that he is a crazed lunatic. Of course he is, he is thinking of the social welfare of his people who have been taken advantage by their government and ours for years. This is not a capitalistic way of thinking, which is profit for profit sakes. Lay off your workers, but hire new CEOs. I would rather buy from CITGO than from BP, who knew about the problem in the pipeline in Alaska for years, but never addressed it until it cracked.

Don’t believe everything on the internet…there is always two sides to everything.

Chavez has, like most people of power, a strange and sometimes bewildering mixture of good intentions and completely absurd rhetoric. Calling Bush the Devil at the UN was a little over the top. Bush is mendacious, despicable, and a god damned liar but the devil he is not and we don’t need overheated religious imagery to make this point clear. But Chavez is very religious and that sort of hyperbole is innate to the religious mindset. But he is not trying to undermine the US government, just point out that Bush is bad for our country, something he and Sheehan (and myself and thousands of others) have in common. So yeah, if you think that US oil companies should pad their own wallets at the expense of the welfare of both US and Venezuelan people, than sure, boycot Citgo. But realize that your doing so, not as a patriot or a Christian but as a tool of Big Oil and the Bush Administration’s greed.