Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Long time listener first time caller…
  What is the proper way to bludgeon a co-worker without getting in trouble or looking like an asshole?
- the quiet one
Dear quiet one,
  Physical violence, while often satisfying for the soul, is a hobby that you can’t really engage in without being punished. You’re better off employing the threat of violence to change a co-worker’s behavior. If your description of the threatened injury is sufficiently explicit, you can generally bend people to your will without the effort (or evidence) of inflicting actual harm. This tactic also allows you more flexibility, since you can threaten poisoning or other methods that aren’t predicated on actually being able to overpower your workplace nemesis.
  This is how a lot of the torture that our intelligence agencies absolutely do not engage in would work if they ever dabbled in it. You convince the victim that she will be injured in messy, painful or rude ways if she doesn’t cooperate. If you’re persuasive enough, your captive begins to squeal like a newborn piglet.
  The advantage you have over our hypothetical agent is that you’re not looking for information. You won’t have to corroborate testimony that may have been fabricated to avoid torture. Once you convince the offending cubicle-jockey to stop tapping her pencil, or humming aloud, or eating celery at her desk, your work is done.
  Don’t forget to cover your tracks. Include the caveat that you’ll pass out pain like a supermarket free sample if your co-worker tells anybody about your coercion. Fear is a fantastic motivator, but fear of losing your job should motivate you to be discreet when threatening to maim a co-worker.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Who would win in an advice column fight to the death: Ask LBB or Ask A Ninja?
- fadingembers
Dear fadingembers,
  Ask A Ninja’s expertise seems to be focused on ninjary in all its deadly splendor. I have the advantage in that I don’t have any expertise. I’m free to shoot my uninformed mouth off about any topic I feel like, from animal husbandry to zoophilia, and everything in between.

  Of course in an actual fight to the death, the Ninja would slaughter me before I’d even finished the thought of challenging him. I bet my entrails would be prettier than his, though.

  Meet Ken Ham, president of biblical literalist foundation Answers In Genesis. On Monday, Mr. Ham shared this insight with the world. Science class leads to hopelessness, which leads to rampant abortion, which leads directly to EVERBODY MURDERS EACH OTHER OMFG!!1!

  In his own words:

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.”

  I wonder how Mr. Ham would react to this piece by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. First published in March by The New Republic, the essay ties together conclusions from several studies which suggest that the modern world is far less violent that it was in the past. But Mr. Ham, shouldn’t a society like we live in now, founded in part on the separation of church and state, and excluding religion from the science classroom, be a more violent, awful place to live?

  I’ll be the first to admit that a correlation between greater respect for and belief in science and the increased civility of the world doesn’t mean that one has caused the other. Still, it’s at least noteworthy that the world has become an empirically less violent place as science has supplanted religion in our education.

  It also flies in the face of the typical fundy claim that nonbelievers are inherently amoral, because we don’t have a supernatural being handing us our codes of conduct on a stone tablet. Surprise, Mr. Ham. Im in ur society, not believing in ur god, and yet millions of people just like me manage to get through every day without going on a murderous rampage. Apparently, the world has become a far less nasty place since our ideas have gotten more influential. The next time you’re tempted to connect horrible violence to the teaching of evolution by drawing a line through abortion, try to keep that in mind.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why oh why? Delilah?
- Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,
  Samson has been asking himself the same question since Long Ago, BCE. Delilah was Samson’s wife; she coaxed him into revealing that his long hair was the secret of his Herculean strength, and then gave him a quick trim and betrayed him to his enemies. Fortunately for Samson, Old Testament God (before he got all New-Agey and lame) was cool with guys who bludgeoned hundreds of non-believers to death, so he got his revenge in the end.

  I always think of this story when Trolling Fundies decry the morals of modern entertainment. Here’s a tale prominently featuring thousands of beating deaths. At the end, the hero commits what can only be called a low-tech suicide bombing; he pulls the Philistine temple down on himself, killing “many more as he died than while he lived.” (Judges 16:30). But if someone says “fuck” on TV, the world will explode and we’ll all be cast into hell. Or something.

  When I was a kid, I had a set of View-Master discs featuring illustrated bible stories. The only thing more awesome for a pre-adolescent boy than a picture of hundreds of beating victims and their jawbone-wielding assailant is a picture of hundreds of beating victims and their jawbone-wielding assailant in 3-D!

  In other news, Wikipedia has an entry for hair. Seriously? Does anybody sophisticated enough to look things up in an online encyclopedia not know what hair is?

I pulled this CNN.com screenshot at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday 28 July:

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The same weekend that Iran’s freakazoid religious police are hanging people for dealing drugs, being intoxicated in public, and committing adultery, someone in Tennessee goes to church and starts shooting. The grisly scene in Tennessee — where apparently even the Unitarian woo-woos aren’t safe — is the fourth time in 15 months that a freakazoid Christian went to a house of worship and started blowing people away.

My point, and I do have one, goes thusly: On the one hand, you have the state religion authorizing, no requiring periodic waves of particularly cruel, slow, public executions (i.e., suspension hanging by cranes) for infractions of social norms that civilized people would consider minor. And on the other hand, you have the quasi-state religion, kow-towed to by politicians and spoken of with superstitious reverence by the entertainment industry, that also isn’t safe from murderous fanatics.

The guy in Tennessee went to a Unitarian church because the worshipers weren’t Christian enough. That’s logic for you. They don’t follow Jesus as closely as he does — so he kills them. If that’s not a Christian message for you, I don’t know what is.

Ever seen a headline that reads anything like “Shooting spree at atheists’ gathering shocks community”? I sure haven’t. So in the interest of serious, in-depth research, I googled “atheist shooting spree.” Here’s what I got:

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Here’s another recent headline for good measure: “Israeli parents forget daughter at airport.” The ultra-Orthodox couple — and ultra-Orthodox anything tends to involve keeping the woman at home as a baby factory, even in the States — had multiple bags of duty-free shopping, 18 suitcases, and 5 kids. Guess what got left behind? One of the kids.

[T]he parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air.

Let’s work this backwards: Forty minutes in the air + time spent waiting on the tarmac + boarding the plane and waiting for everyone else to board the plane (did they board early as a party with special needs?) = probably over a full freaking hour that they didn’t notice that one of their kids wasn’t with them! And a 3-year-old, at that! And because it’s that kind of blog, I blame their religion. Any freakazoid belief system that requires you to have so many kids that you forget — or “forget” — to take one of them on vacation with you should just be banned and its practitioners caned. The Yahoo! news URL references the comedy film Home Alone; instead, it should reference something like the documentary Jesus Camp.