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The actor and comedian Robin Williams was found dead today at his home in Tiburon, California. Police say it appears to have been a suicide. Williams was 63 years old.

Williams first rose to fame from the stand-up comedy circuit in the 1970s, with a manic improvisational style all his own. He appeared on the sitcom "Happy Days" and then starred as a lovable alien on its popular spin-off, "Mork & Mindy," from 1978 to 1982.

Williams went on to prove his serious acting talents as well, with critically praised performances in films like "Dead Poets Society" and "Good Will Hunting," for which he snagged an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/actor-robin-williams-dead-at-63-apparent-suicide/

BUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Angry opposition supporters in Nigeria's Muslim north set fire to homes bearing ruling party banners Monday and heavy gunfire rang out in several towns as election officials released results showing the Christian incumbent had gained an insurmountable lead. (Scroll down for photos)

Results from Saturday's election released live on national television indicated President Goodluck Jonathan had a commanding lead of more than 10 million votes with only two states left to be announced. The Muslim north had largely voted for former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.

Buhari's party brought a formal complaint Monday afternoon to the nation's electoral commission over vote tallies, alleging massive rigging in Jonathan's homeland. The letter also alleged that the computer software used to tally results had been tampered with in northern states to favor the ruling party.

"What is being exhibited to the world is not collated from polling units but , a lot of manipulations," the letter read.
In a statement, the federal police blamed the violence on "persons who failed to accept the results," denying it came from religious or ethnic roots. Election officials said they would finish releasing election results later Monday regardless of the ongoing violence.

Witnesses said youths in the northern city of Kano were setting fires to homes that bore Jonathan party banners. Heavy gunfire also could be heard. An Associated Press reporter there saw hundreds of youths carrying wooden planks in the street, shouting "Only Buhari" in the local Hausa language
What I am looking for now is rescue, the mob is still outside. I need rescue," said Mark Asu-Obi, who was trapped inside his Kano home with his wife and three children. "There are hoodlums all over the place. It's not just my place that they are attacking. I am not a politician. I am an independent observer."

In Kaduna, home to the oil-rich nation's vice president, angry young men burned tires in the streets and threw stones at police and soldiers trying to restore order, witnesses said.

"Right now, I'm holed up in my room. There's gunshots everywhere," said Shehu Sani, a civil rights leader. "They are firing and killing people on the street."
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Kaduna state police spokesman Aminu Lawal described the fighting there as an "uprising." In neighboring Katsina state, a mob attacked a prison and freed 42 inmates, police spokesman Abubakar Mohammed said.

Federal emergency management agency spokesman Yushua Shuaib declined to release casualty figures out of fears it would further stoke sectarian violence.

"Such a thing can encourage a reprisal attack," he said.

Over the weekend, opposition supporters also rioted in the northeastern state of Gombe. Protesters burned down the house of the local chairman of the ruling party, two hotels and at least two buses there. The rioters accused Gombe's ruling party government of rigging the results to ensure that Jonathan got at least 25 percent of the vote.

Police chief Suleiman Lawal said Sunday that there had been a "complete breakdown of law and order" there.

Nigeria's elections have long been marred by violence and rigging. But voting in the Saturday presidential election had been largely peaceful apart from a hotel blast that wounded eight people and the fatal shooting of a police officer at a polling station.

Nigeria, a nation of 150 million people, is divided between the Christian-dominated south and the Muslim north. A dozen states across Nigeria's north have Islamic Shariah law in place, though the area remains under the control of secular state governments.

Thousands have been killed in Muslim-Christian violence in the past decade, but the roots of the sectarian conflict are often embedded in struggles for political and economic dominance.

Jonathan, who became president after his Muslim predecessor died in office last year, has long been considered the front-runner. His ruling People's Democratic Party has dominated politics in the West African giant since it became a democracy 12 years ago.

However, the country's Muslim north remains cold to Jonathan as the Christian from the south who took over after the death of the country's elected Muslim leader.

Many of the north's elite wanted the ruling party to honor an unwritten power-sharing agreement calling for a Muslim candidate to run in this election, yet Jonathan prevailed in the party's primary.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/18/nigeria-vote-presidential-election-goodluck-jonathan_n_850517.html#s265447

[flash=200,200][/flash]Wait! Don't answer that question too quickly. If you do, you'll likely judge the Bible's veracity by categories established 1,500 years after it was written. Perhaps I should explain.

Disillusioned by the religious fervor that fed the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the early architects of what would later be called the Enlightenment demanded that all claims about the natural world be verified by the exercise of human reason rather than dogmatic pronouncement. In doing so, they distinguished between values (things one may believe but can't prove) and facts (things one can, and therefore should, prove). For these early modernists, both values and facts represented truth claims, but each of a different order. Over time, however, rationally verified facts -- and the scientific method to which they led -- became so productive and influential that it wasn't all that long until notions of truth became associated almost exclusively with facts.

This preference for facts over values created a crisis for many religious traditions during the 19th and early 20th centuries as biblical scholars, embracing the rational-critical methods of scientific, historical and archeological study, realized that many of the descriptions and claims of the Bible did not withstand critical scrutiny. The sun, as it turned out, did not revolve around the earth, and the world was not created in seven days. Moreover, it became apparent that not only did the Bible provide unreliable historical and scientific information but the biblical writers also often contradicted each other. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, for instance, Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem shortly before his crucifixion and dies on Passover. In contrast, according to John, Jesus clears the Temple at the beginning of his ministry and is crucified on the day before Passover.

The dubious nature of biblical "history" and "science" and the multiple discrepancies among the four evangelists led to a great schism in Christianity, each side assuming that truth is equated unequivocally with facts. On the liberal side of the divide, scholars concluded that because the Bible was not factually accurate it was in a profound sense not true. Witness, for instance, Bart Ehrman's recent post on who wrote the Bible (and, for that matter, his entire literary career). Conservatives, on the other hand, asserting that the Bible was obviously true, concluded that it therefore must be factually accurate. Hence, they have written tomes that rival the Bible itself in length that engage in intellectual gymnastics in order to iron out all the "so-called" discrepancies in Scripture.

Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls "an orderly account" so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels -- and, indeed, all of Scripture -- do not seek to prove but to persuade. And so John, convinced that Jesus is "the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" (1:29), portrays Jesus as clearing the Temple of money changers at the very outset of his ministry because he, himself, is God's sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation at the exact moment the Passover lambs are slaughtered. John's aim is thoroughly theological, not historical.

For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon "verifiable facts" -- a notion largely foreign to ancient writers -- we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger "truth" that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is "true" based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/is-the-bible-true_b_841949.html
What do you guys think,

where is the Heaven? and how do you know there's one?

Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies?

Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha."

You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie."

And that's what such writings are. Whoever wrote the New Testament book of 2 Peter claimed to be Peter. But scholars everywhere -- except for our friends among the fundamentalists -- will tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that Peter wrote the book. Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter. Scholars may also tell you that it was an acceptable practice in the ancient world for someone to write a book in the name of someone else. But that is where they are wrong. If you look at what ancient people actually said about the practice, you'll see that they invariably called it lying and condemned it as a deceitful practice, even in Christian circles. 2 Peter was finally accepted into the New Testament because the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote it. But he didn't. Someone else did. And that someone else lied about his identity.

The same is true of many of the letters allegedly written by Paul. Most scholars will tell you that whereas seven of the 13 letters that go under Paul's name are his, the other six are not. Their authors merely claimed to be Paul. In the ancient world, books like that were labeled as pseudoi -- lies.

This may all seem like a bit of antiquarian curiosity, especially for people whose lives don't depend on the Bible or even people of faith for whom biblical matters are a peripheral interest at best. But in fact, it matters sometimes. Whoever wrote the book of 1 Timothy claimed to be Paul. But he was lying about that -- he was someone else living after Paul had died. In his book, the author of 1 Timothy used Paul's name and authority to address a problem that he saw in the church. Women were speaking out, exercising authority and teaching men. That had to stop. The author told women to be silent and submissive, and reminded his readers about what happened the first time a woman was allowed to exercise authority over a man, in that little incident in the garden of Eden. No, the author argued, if women wanted to be saved, they were to have babies (1 Tim. 2:11-15).

Largely on the basis of this passage, the apostle Paul has been branded, by more liberation minded people of recent generations, as one of history's great misogynists. The problem, of course, is that Paul never said any such thing. And why does it matter? Because the passage is still used by church leaders today to oppress and silence women. Why are there no women priests in the Catholic Church? Why are women not allowed to preach in conservative evangelical churches? Why are there churches today that do not allow women even to speak? In no small measure it is because Paul allegedly taught that women had to be silent, submissive and pregnant. Except that the person who taught this was not Paul, but someone lying about his identity so that his readers would think he was Paul.

It may be one of the greatest ironies of the Christian scriptures that some of them insist on truth, while telling a lie. For no author is truth more important than for the "Paul" of Ephesians. He refers to the gospel as "the word of truth" (1:13); he indicates that the "truth is in Jesus"; he tells his readers to "speak the truth" to their neighbors (4:24-25); and he instructs his readers to "fasten the belt of truth around your waist" (6:14). And yet he himself lied about who he was. He was not really Paul.

It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth. But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realize just how human, and fallible, they were. They were creatures of their time and place. And so too were their teachings, lies and all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/the-bible-telling-lies-to_b_840301.html

Nairalanders, I want to know your opinion.