I find it hard to believe that God would demonstrate His existence solely through selective and ambiguous appearances.

How else could He do so? The only way we could ever come to know about God would be something in the world that looked like one would expect given God, and not like one would expect given atheism, i.e. a miracle. Now, one could ask why He doesn't do blatantly obvious miracles all the time to remove any ambiguity, but if He's to demonstrate His existence, presumably miracles are going to be involved.

When I'm sleepy enough, I usually think that my brain has Internet access.

Can you replace "bitch" with a word that isn't gendered please?

Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I'm fairly sure that when I was a kid, if one of my relatives or parents' friends gave me a thick book for my birthday and told me it was educational, I'd probably never read it. Even if I was perfectly capable of doing so. "Ugh, just another one of those presents that aren't really presents."

I'm not sure how to overcome this problem.

Does it take longer to ad 7+7+7 than to say "Seven times three is twenty-one" and "three times seven is twenty-one"?

You're right that Cowen got it backwards, but you're wrong about this:

Acceleration is what causes the opposite, e.g. turning the spaceship around to come back

Acceleration is not the cause. The reason the astronauts age less is that the path they follow through space-time corresponds to a smaller proper time than the path followed by people who remain on the Earth, and the proper time along a path is what a clock following that path measures. So it's a geometrical fact about the difference between the two paths that causes the asymmetrical aging, not the acceleration of the astronauts.

To make this obvious, it is possible to set up a scenario where another group of astronauts leaves Earth and then returns, accelerating the exact same amount as the first group, but following a path with larger proper time. This second group of astronauts will age more than the first group, even though the accelerations involved were the same.

A lot of elementary presentations of relativity identify acceleration as the relevant factor in twin paradox type cases, but this is wrong (or, more charitably, not entirely right).

Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests that there is no fact of the matter as to when “now” is. Any measurement of time is relative to the perspective of an observer. In other words, if you are traveling very fast, the clocks of others are speeding up from your point of view. You will spend a few years in a spaceship but when you return to earth thousands or millions of years will have passed. Yet it seems odd, to say the least, to discount the well-being of people as their velocity increases. Should we pay less attention to the safety of our spacecraft, and thus the welfare of our astronauts, the faster those vehicles go? If, for instance, we sent off a spacecraft at near the velocity of light, the astronauts would return to earth, hardly aged, millions of years hence. Should we—because of positive discounting—not give them enough fuel to make a safe landing? And if you decline to condemn them to death, how are they different from other “residents” in the distant future?

Tyler Cowen, ‘Caring about the Distant Future: Why it Matters and What it Means’, University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (Winter, 2007), p. 10

C) a man who appears to be hiding his sexual attraction from a woman is it's own kind of creepy.

Creepy casts a wide net, but that seems to me the key differentiating aspect to me. It's the unasserted desire for increased levels of intimacy or physical contact that makes for creepiness. Asserted, it might make someone uncomfortable with dealing with it. If there is a question about whether he would use force, it is more threatening than creepy.

Holy shit. You're not even kidding! Check out the definition here. Under the definition, it says that it includes (among other things) anything that is a 'destructive device' as defined here which in turn includes,

any type of weapon...by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter...

This is so funny, it's not even funny.

Note: the above links say it's a U.S. Code prelim (i.e. some revisions might happen). But I found similar things here.

The solstice rituals didn't look quite right: according to the reports it seemed that people were taking them too seriously.
But at least you could have given them the benefit of doubt: these people came from Christian or Jewish backgrounds and missed their traditional holidays, so they invented a replacement.

But group confession sessions are way beyond the rituals of mainstream religions, they are outright cult practices: http://www.prem-rawat-talk.org/forum/uploads/CultCharacteristics.htm