For those of you who think that Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo is one of the coolest games since Pac-Man, you can now play “Super Smash Flash” — an online, flash version of Super Smash Bros!

It’s a little tricky to figure out the controls, and it does look 16-bit, which I supposed lends a degree of authenticity. Maybe this will keep Nintendo-lovers mostly satisfied until the Wii comes out.

Here’s the link: Super Smash Flash

The Wired News article, Battle of the New Atheism, is frightening to those of us who believe in the divine. I’m a Christian; I believe in God, in the need for all human beings to be redeemed, because we are all fatally sinful and in need of help, and in the sacrifice of Jesus as the way to get that help.

What some atheists desire, however, is for atheism to be the new religion — faith that there is no God. Since the freedom of religion is fine, that’s not scary by itself. Here are some of the scary points that show up in the article (mostly in its interviews and book quotations):

• You must be anti-reason and/or stupid to believe in God. As Richard Dawkins says, “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists.”
• Belief in God should not be tolerated: “Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them.”
• Parents should not be allowed to teach their religious beliefs to their children, says Richard Dawkins: “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”
• Religious faith (a “supernatural crutch”) is a slippery slope, whose end is basically terrorism. “As Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, ‘As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.’”
• “[Sam] Harris argues that, ‘unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end.’”
• Harris also tells the article’s author, “At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.”

After throwing all of that out there, the author, Gary Wolf, describes his visit to a “landmark of modern Christianity”, a “charismatic” church in Echo Park, California called Angelus Temple, which says on its web site that the renovation completed in 2002 includes “new cushioned theatre seats, Ferrari red carpet, modern stainless steel fixtures, acoustical absorbers hung decoratively from the ceiling similar to the Royal Albert Hall in England, a state of the art panoramic video screen [...]“, and so on. Wolf notes these church features before he describes the call to give money to the church. He seems to see all of the attendees as teenagers and writes the following:

The altar call is a moving spectacle, and even we adults, we readers of Dawkins and Harris, we practiced reasoners and sincere pilgrims on the path of nonbelief, may find something in it that makes sense. Notwithstanding the banality of the doctrine, its canned anecdotes, and its questionable fundraising, Pastor Matthew offers a gift to his flock. They sow their seeds [i.e., give money], and he blesses them. It is a direct exchange.

The “direct exchange” sounds very much like the awful medieval practice of the Roman Catholic Church called indulgences, which, for a time until 1567, were given as a sort of “Get out of jail free” card in exchange for money. The practice is wholly condemned today. But that may be part of the point of mentioning the “direct exchange”; Wolf also discusses the tendency of certain Christian individuals to be “personally wild and doctrinally flexible”. “The idea of bribing God is rank heresy — no trained theologian in any Christian tradition would endorse it. But such deviations are generously tolerated in practice.” Perhaps that it true in some circles, but I have not come into contact with them.

Wolf ends up moderating in the end. He says he has “decided to refuse the call [to] this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism.” Even though “everyone who does not join [the New Atheists] is an ally of the Taliban,” Wolf rejects those who would stamp out religion, choosing, instead, to stick to a more comfortable relativism: “no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.”

The conclusion highlights a basic difficulty in the argument of the “New Atheists”; they are choosing to believe in an absolute atheism. Their beliefs are informed by reason, sure, but so are mine. The difference is that I acknowledge that my belief is a combination of faith and reason. The two are not diametrically opposed. There is no slippery slope that causes you to fall into atheism when you start thinking logically.

What, I wonder, is the end of the chain of beliefs that start with this “New Atheism”? A distinction must be made between a totally intolerant extremism and a belief system that holds that some people are wrong, but that those people can insist, personally, on being wrong.

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My wife and I are now the proud owner of a teeny-weeny kitten. She’s cute, cuddly, and fits in the palm of your hand. Check her out, for the first time ever on the web.

You can click on the picture of the fuzzball to see more of our new little friend and the third member of our household. Right now we’re calling her “Sydney” (which apparently means “wide island” in a variant form in Old English).

That also reminds me, I’m adding a Photos page to my blog. You can visit it by clicking on the link toward the top of this page. I’ll be putting more photos online in the coming days.

Missed the second episode of the new season of Lost? You can read a synopsis of the episode on Yahoo! News. Of course, even better is watching the episode, and ABC will show it to you for free, online.

For those of you that have seen both of this new season’s episodes, the big question is: will Jack buy into Ben’s promise?

We should know better than to trust Ben, even though we did find out his “real” name. He and the rest of “the Others” clearly have some sort of agenda that drives them to use often ruthless means. Whatever that agenda is, the show will be hard-pressed to convince viewers (especially me!) that the end justifies the means. Of course, that begs the question of whether Sayid’s means can/should be justified. He tortured Sawyer and Ben, after all, and is clearly prepared to do it again.

All Jack has to do is “cooperate” — and likely forget about his friends and island-mates — and Ben will take him home. There could be a play on words there: Ben could mean “home” as several different things:

• where the heart is
• Jack’s tent on the beach
• back in the USA
• death (especially if there’s some wacky religious belief driving what the Others do)

If Jack does buy into Ben’s promise, he’ll most likely end up pitted against Kate, Sawyer, and the rest of the gang. Because Kate and Sawyer are not being included in the conversations with Jack, there’s no chance they’ll believe Ben’s story. Of course, Ben is the man behind all the television consoles, watching all of his “subjects”, so he surely is planning something that we don’t expect.

Of course, one big question is why Kate isn’t running yet. Sawyer seems to want to escape, though he also seems to enjoy picking at his captors, but Kate is the one who always runs. Why isn’t she running now? Surely it’s more than just the dress she is made to wear.