My second book just became available. It's a look at what the Bible actually says concerning salvation and the final judgment.

The title is:
Who Really Goes to Hell --- The Gospel You've Never Heard?
What a Protestant Bible written by Jews says about God's work through Christ (A book for those in the church and those offended by it)

You can read excerpts at: www.WhoReallyGoesToHell.com

For anyone interested in the idea of a woman's role in Christianity and/or the Church, I recently cobbled together a post on my new blog about it:

Click to read

For anyone interested, the first chapter of my next book [a look at what the Bible _really_ says about Judgment and Salvation] is online at http://www.biblicalheresy.com/Excerpt.html

A recent poll supposedly indicated that about 2/3 of Americans blame the price of gas on big oil companies, approximately the same percentage blame foreign oil producers, about half blame speculators, half blame Bush, and about 1/3 blame Democrats in Congress.

It's part of human nature to find causes for your distress. To the typical American, gas prices have gone up about 30% in the last year. We don't see anything different happening over here, so we have to assume there is some primal mover causing the same gas we bought a year ago cost 30% more today.

In reality, this whole farce is another example of Americans being out of touch with the rest of the world. We use far, far, far more gas [per person]than any other large (by population) country. A typical American uses fourteen times as much oil as an average person in China...who uses twice as much as a typical person in India.

And those are today's figures...it used to be even more skewed. Now that some of those highly populated countries are beginning to develop and use more oil...and those are very large countries. So of course that means the price is increasing because demand is all of a sudden increasing.

And it will probably get worse as China and India develop more.

Does that mean we can blame China and India? Of course not; that would be even more hypocritical than Americans normally are.

Instead of finding others to blame, we should realize that it is unrealistic for everyone to use as much oil as we do [on a per-person basis], and we've been living in a dream-land the last few decades where we used as much gas as we wanted while the majority of the world's population used less than one tenth as much

So, if anything, blame the Hummer, the SUV, and ill-conceived perspective that brought those into popularity here....or blame the millions who choose to live 45 miles away from work so they can have a house three times bigger than they need...or blame all the other similar ideas that have grown up in the prosperity Americans enjoy without admitting it.

For that one percent of one percent of women who are seriously interested in chess, check out www.zukertort.com

If you were camping in Northern Australia and were fortunate enough to have a compass, from approximately which cardinal direction would you expect to see the sun rise?

• The South.
• The West.
• The East.
• West in summer - South in winter.

The correct answer is not there.

East in summer and South in winter. Sadly, the writer (and reviewers) of this question managed to get stuck in the No-Man's Land between a simple [East] and more complicated answer.

When people seek advice from you, what do they usually get?

• Good advice.
• Average advice (or some good and some bad).
• Bad advice.
• I do not give advice.

Who honestly believes he gives bad advice?

Would you consider dating a person who has the same first name as you?

• Yes.
• No.

Okay, we have a new winner in the "Stupidest question ever on OKCupid" contest.

Is it better to live by your own moral standards and allow others to live by theirs, or is it better to press your moral standards upon other people?

• Live and let live
• Press those morals!

The idea that one's own moral standards should not be pressed on another is itself a moral standard. Which means anyone who holds such a moral standard and judges others by it suffers self-contradiction.

Have you ever thrown away something that belonged to someone else because you thought they didn't need it?

• Yes.
• No.

My guess is that this refers to things that the "someone else" actually would like to keep. Otherwise, anyone who has thrown out his roomie's expired milk would say "yes."