The Atheist Blogger

The Friendly Atheist reports on the story of a girl saved by a watermelon. A gunfight broke out in Indianapolis and stray bullets were fired through a car containing an elderly lady and her two great-granddaughters.

One bullet went through the door and hit a 10 year old girl in the stomach before going clean through a Bible and finally coming to rest in a watermelon, held in the lap of the 13 year old sister. The great-grandmother reckons

The word of God and the Lord’s power saved. He sent the bullet into the watermelon.

Yup, that’s totally what happened. Obviously if you fire a bullet through a Bible it gets soaked in the word of God and can be divinely diverted. With this kind of logic it makes you wonder how a “God” wasn’t able to control the bullet in the first place. Do we really need to start shoving things through Bibles to get them blessed? Perhaps if I bore a hole through Genesis and kept a lottery ticket there it might win, perhaps not.

Even if this “God” she so adamantly believes in were able to control the bullet, you would think that such a powerful being would be able to either (a) stop the bullet in mid-air, or (b) “guide” the bullet around the entire car. No, it seems to me that something other than the Judeo Christian God was at work here, and here’s how I think things went:

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I have a rather monotonous way of sharing posts for this blog. Once I’ve typed it all up, added useful and relevant tags, and put it all into categories, I submit the post. I then check it all looks good on the actual page, and start my submission process.

This usually starts off by submitting the article to Digg, then to Del.icio.us, Reddit, and finally The Atheist Spot. If you want your blog to get popular quickly, I highly recommend this strategy (it helps to actually have something readable as well). I would say that the precious few minutes I spend submitting content to sharing sites like these is one of the reasons I get so many hits and responses.

I regularly check my stats for the blog, and visitors per month has increased exponentially since February 2008 when I started. My technorati authority has likewise increased, and I am awaiting the day it finally reaches the first milestone of 100 (at the time of writing it is at 90). What I am concerned about is The Atheist Spot, the newest sharing site I’m using, but also the most useful given the common topic.

The Atheist Spot is a Digg-like site which operates by user votes. When a blog article is submitted it gets 1 vote (from the submitter). People who read the article and like it can vote it up, and people who hate it can vote it down. As soon as an article gets 5 votes or more, it can get a place on the homepage, which shows the “top” articles.

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