Month: May 2013

Yesterday, not only did Pope Francis make it clear that you didn’t have to believe in God to be a good and righteous person, he believes even atheists will be redeemed.

I have problems with this Pope and organized religion in general, but this was very decent of him and it came at a particularly important time.

“The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can… “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”.. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

In a world where some people are denying other people’s basic human rights, or worse, hacking to death those with different beliefs, this is a GREAT development. Jesus preached love. (The opposite, for instance, of this very un-Christian Christian.) I think it’s enormously compassionate of this Pope to envision a God that will not punish me for my disbelief, but instead embrace me for being a good person.

Whenever someone has told me I’m going to go to Hell (and I get told this from time to time) I always think that’s so insane. Even if I was wrong about there being no God, I can’t imagine that God would be so petty as to condemn a basically decent person like myself to be burned for all eternity. It makes no sense.

In other miraculous news, the Lion (Bleecker) laid down with the Lamb (Finney).

SiSSYFiGHT 2000, an online game produced and released in 2000 by the online magazine, Word.com, is poised to return! There was absolutely nothing like it at the time, and it’s still relevant today.

From their Kickstarter page:

“In the mystical years of the late 90s, a little game called SiSSYFiGHT 2000 was born on the web. Hundreds of thousands of players fought as bratty little girls, teasing and tattling and licking their lollipops on the playground. An amazing community sprang up around the game, in which players became fan artists and storytellers, reporters and celebrities, criminals and vigilantes.

“There was something special about SiSSYFiGHT. It was one of the first multiplayer games with real-time chat in a browser. It was a social game with actual social gameplay, long before “social games” on Facebook existed. Its stylishly primitive visual look preceded the rise of big-pixel indie games by almost a decade.”

Please help SiSSYFiGHT 2000 to return!

After seeing yet another wandering dog in a news report I came online to see what was being done about missing pets in Oklahoma. Via a tweet, I found this subreddit that was created to help reunite owners with their pets. Please help spread the word. For easy cutting and pasting, here is the link:

http://www.reddit.com/r/missingpetsinmoore

A picture of a found dog from one of the posts.

Keep your spirits up, New York City loves you too.

Eldad Hagar came back to South Carolina to visit Shaggy, the dog he and others rescued four months ago. There’s a livestream of his visit, which is offline at the moment while he buys shears to give Shaggy a summer trim. Hopefully he will be back soon and we’ll get to watch.

Eldad is not in this screenshot, alas. This is Shaggy and her various toys, and Chance, one of the members of her new family. To keep up with the adventures of Shaggy, his adoptive mom has a Facebook page where she posts videos and pictures almost every day.