You may have wondered where we were for the past few weeks. It's an interesting story, and one we want to share with you all. As we noted, we have been having numerous problems with our site lately, and that was the original reason for our absence. But as we were struggling with those problems, and becoming increasingly frustrated, a friend of ours stepped in and made a suggestion. It was simply this: rather than spending so much time and energy on fixing this site, why not put our efforts toward more worthwhile goals?

We were willing to try anything to get out from under the weight of our website problems, so we agreed. We ended up helping our friend coordinate a charity event that went very well, and we made a lot of new friends along the way. We're planning to do more charity work with his group in the future, and we're looking forward to it immensely. The surprising thing was that the charity event was coordinated via our friend's church. Now, we've always been clear that it is religion that we have a problem with and not necessarily religious people, but we were a little amazed at how decent and fun these people were.

To make a long story short, we've come to a realization. Although we don't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and although we may not currently believe in the physical existence and divinity of Jesus Christ, we do recognize the good that the Christian religion can do, and we like being a part of that. There's simply no other source for good deeds that can equal the Christian church as far as we can see, and that means something. It's just something that we've been loathe to admit for a long time, apparently. And, whether he was real or fictional, Jesus was a pretty cool guy that we can all learn a lot from.

...

Nah, we're just fucking with you. Other than our technical problems and the fact that not all religious people suck, everything else above was a crock of shit. In truth, our website problems have sucked up all of our time lately, and we've been banging our heads against these issues for weeks. In addition to the simple fact that troubleshooting has been a severe drain on our free time, there's also the fact that we have been trying to move the Rants to a new home. As such, every time a new post or comment was added, we had to re-backup the files — yet another reason for our relative silence since the beginning of the month.

In fact, our technical problems still aren't even remotely resolved, and it may take many more weeks to get everything sorted out. However, we've reverted to a semi-stable site build for now, and we've decided to try to get back to business as usual for a while since that's a lot more fun than wrestling with MovableType's strange (and exceedingly frustrating) idiosycrasies and the neverending tide of incompetence and low quality that seems to characterize nearly every fucking web hosting provider on the Intarwebs.

And for the record, lest someone try to use our tongue-in-cheek essay against us, we are involved with various charities and non-profit groups, and there are plenty of great organizations out there that have no religious ties. And let's be frank: Indiana Jones is a far, far cooler character than Jesus could ever be.

Holy fucking shit--you got me. "What? No, these guys too?!" I guess after Raving Atheist and now (alas) Michael Shermer's unfortunate attempt at reconciling conservative Xian beliefs w/ evolution in his new book, I'm just waiting for atheists to bail out and declare, "Hey, those guys aren't so bad at all!"

Nicely played, sirs. Now, what make you of this Pope fiasco?

You got me, too. I was this close (picture me holding my thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart) to falling on my knees and rapturously crying "Praise Jesus", because if it's good enough for TPC, it's good enough for me.

Nah, I'm just fucking with you. I'm afraid I have to decide on my own what is important to me and what has meaning to me. I will throw you a bone and confess that TPC is very near the top of my list of influences that affect how I think about things. And, if nothing else, you are always intelligently witty. No small thing in these days of mean-spiritedness.

I was right there with Will E. too, I thought shit, now i gotta unsubscribe from these guys too. I was bummed to, cause i really like the site. I find myself nodding along with most of what I read. I guess thats why I like the site [ duh]. Stay sane please.

Please, please don't ever do that again, you scared the fuck outta me, "arrrgggh no!, I thought these guys were sane".

Damn!

That's the third monocle that's popped out this week! Plus, I now have cola spray all over my monitor.

Curse you and your inappropriate lightheartedness..

Hook
Line
Sinker....

Bastards!

:)

Sorry, all — we couldn't resist. Weeks of wrestling with web hosts and poorly designed blog code put us in a devious mood. We even thought about linking to some Christian rock to help make the illusion complete, but we just couldn't listen to any of that crap for long enough to pick a song to use. Besides, that might have really scared people off. Especially if we embedded that crap without a "Mute" button.

Just so you know, while we can't guarantee that we'll stay sane (if another idiot wins the 2008 election, we may go over the edge), we can guarantee that, even if we flip out, we'll never turn to Jesus. Seriously — ewww.

And as for the Raving "Atheist," there's a reason that he was never on our blogroll — we saw his spiral toward idiocy beginning years ago. It was shortly before we started our site that we first saw his "Unaborted Atheist" crap. It wasn't that he held a different opinion from us that pissed us off, either — it was the fact that his usually impeccable logic was tossed aside completely whenever he discussed abortion. When he did that, he became just another "true believer," peddling moronic bullshit. Another nail in the coffin was his claim that no one could prove him wrong that he was the first person to think about the first person to think about self-awareness. That whole ludicrous episode (a month before we started 2%Co) was when we stopped even bothering to visit his site. We're just surprised that his eventual complete meltdown took so long.

I have to second Interupt. You bastards. I can't recall being so relieved in a long time when I got to: "Nah, we're just fucking with you."

Anyway, good luck with those technical issues.

<3