OK, so I’ve got less than a month left to clear out all the bookmarks from Google Reader. Here are a bunch of them, including: Why biblical inerrancy isn’t biblical; the biblical reasons for covering your poo; for God so likes the world; personal responsibility for the powerless, but not the powerful; and more.

Torture is ineffective and corrosive, and a certain path to military defeat.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib — and the revelation that this goes far, far beyond the actions of a few “bad apples” or “morons” — has forced every American to react in one of two ways. We are either made to feel ashamed of our country, or else we are forced to rationalize away that shame by reassuring ourselves that we can condone torture and still be good people, and that anyway Saddam was worse.

David Dark: “If the powers that be are the boot which, to borrow Orwell’s phrase, presses down upon the human face forever, apocalyptic is the speech of that human face. Apocalyptic denies, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, the ‘forever’ part.”