Theocrat hornet's nest stirred

Remember when I was all "So this is just a trap and we can expect a huge flood of letters (especially in conjunction with tomorrow's "black mass") in the coming days coming to the defense of Christianity" regarding that "No unicorns, no god" letter a few days ago?

Don't say I didn't warn you!

• "Wiser and safer way to live" (Lame Pascal's Wager bit)
• "He conquered the grave and death" (First off, since "the grave" is just a metonym for "death" isn't that phrase redundant? It's like saying "Wall Street and huge finance firms ruined the economy!" Anyhow, this letter is just grade school apologetics-- there has to be a cause = Christian god!)
• "Love can't be measured" (More sophomoric apologetics, somehow saying that since we can't measure emotions (!) but emotions exist, then ipso facto the Christian god is 100% real. Or something. Also, since medicine doesn't always work, we believing in science is flawed. Finally, Pascal's Wager.)
• "We can't know what we don't know" (Again with the can't-measure-love line. But a least a sensible send-off acknowledging that at least in the US someone can actually voice anti-Christian sentiment and not be killed.)
• "God has revealed himself with hundreds of fulfilled prophecies" (Plugs some easily-refuted Christian apologetics books (I mean, Lee Strobel? Really?? Somehow, for Christians, the atheist-turned-Christian thing is compelling proof of god even if the far-more-common Christian-turned-atheist thing is just an example of people rejecting god. So stupid.), and then the Since-I-don't-know-science-it-must-be-god! argument. Including fucking thermodynamics-- grade school arguments.)

So there it is-- fucking five letters as the theocratic pushback. And I'd wager (with Pascal?) that this isn't even it. But that's the point: the Oklahoman didn't run Robert K. Sock's letter because it represented a common voice from Oklahoma (as the letters section claims to do). They ran it for this very reason: to rile up their theocratic base. Hell, we even got to see some of the usual suspects, as the author of the hundreds-of-prophecies letter wrote in earlier to defend Creationism.

It's a cheap ploy that no real newspaper would engage it. But the Oklahoman is just a propaganda machine for the plutocrat/theocrat alliance so this is all par for the course.