Some days, you really wonder if the pulpit thumpers really think about what they’re doing to people…

Idaho man saws off, microwaves his hand after he sees "mark of the beast" on it

A Hayden, Idaho man who believed he bore the "mark of the beast" used a circular saw to amputate one of his hands, cooked it in a microwave and summoned authorities, Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies say.

The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when deputies arrived at his home in this north Idaho town Saturday afternoon, and neither he nor the severed hand bore any noticeable tattoo or other mark, sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger.

"It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived," Wolfinger said.

Maybe this is what that poor man was taught to be afraid of…

I have described the hand when it uses a tool as an instrument of discovery…we see this every time a child learns to couple hand and tool together – to lace its shoes, to fly a kite or to play a penny whistle.  With the practical action there goes another, namely finding pleasure in the action for its own sake – in the skill that one perfects, and perfects by being pleased with it.  This at bottom is responsible for every work of art, and science too; our poetic delight in what human beings do because they can do it.  The most exciting thing about this is that the poetic use in the end has the truly profound results.  Even in prehistory man already made tools that have an edge finer then they need have.  The finer edge in its turn gave the tool a finer use, a practical refinement and extension to processes for which the tool had not been designed.

…The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.  Civilization is not a collection of finished artifacts, it is the elaboration of processes.  In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.

-Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man.

And in the end, this is exactly what fundamentalism hates most of all:  All that is possible to us as human beings, that we discover on our own, by way of the pleasure we take in action and discovery for its own sake.  More then any other pleasure, even sex, this is the one we must be denied.  So that our spirits cannot soar.  So that they will not be left behind.