Archive for September, 2009

Sorry for taking up space with this announcement. I mentioned this on the Atheist Experience yesterday, but I know a lot of people skip past the announcements. Someone left a watch on the boat after the bat cruise ended on Saturday. I have it. If you think it may be yours, email [email protected] with a description, and we’ll figure out how to get it back to you. I’m sure this needn’t be said, but please don’t waste time trying to be funny and pretend the watch is yours when you know it isn’t. Also don’t claim it in the comments on this message, as it is more likely to be noticed via email.

…But I’ve activated comment moderation again, at least until a certain mentally ill Canadian gets bored and fucks off. It’s just easier to run interference on his unhinged ravings than be constantly logging on all day to delete them. To all our loyal regulars, just consider things business as usual. Don’t let moderation keep you from commenting. Either Kazim or I will approve your posts, no problem. Yes, “Mr FreeThinker,” we’ll even approve you, because even though you couldn’t argue your way out of a wet paper bag, you are not to my knowledge a known psychotic or wannabe domestic terrorist. And your comments do keep the threads lively.

As promised, I attended a lecture by E. J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist, at a Baptist church tonight. Dionne was there under the auspices of the Texas Freedom Network, promoting his new book, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right. Here’s what the incredibly gaudy church background looked like. Everything Else Atheist was also with me, and she might write up her own reactions later. The lecture was about what I expected, which is to say, promising but ultimately disappointing. Dionne believes that religion has a solid place in public discourse, and it has been shanghai’d by the religious right unfairly. He told a joke in which a Republican asks a Democrat what the Democrat would do if Jesus ran as a Republican. The Democrat replies “Why would Jesus change his affiliation after all these years?” Dionne was full of praise for the importance of religion in people’s lives, saying that religion grapples with mysteries that science and politics cannot address. (Well yes, in the first place, many of those issues are addressed by science and politics; in the second place, just because religion grapples with them does not mean that it successfully addresses any of them.) He also leveled a great deal of criticism against what he perceives as the unfairly dismissive attitude toward religion by many liberals, saying liberals assume that all religious people are “busybodies obsessed with sex” based on the prevailing opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Dionne did make a good point about the way that “moral values” tend to be framed in politics. He cited a clearly slanted 2004 exit poll which asked voters what issues most strongly influenced their vote. The options included such things as “moral values,” “education,” “the Iraq war,” etc. Dionne rightly pointed out that if you describe either of the latter two as your most important...
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By now I’m sure everyone knows about Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort’s plan to give away their own edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, complete with their own 50-page introduction packed with contemptible creotard lies, at 50 college campuses this November. UT-Austin is one of those campuses, and you can bet I’ll be there to get my copy! I heartily encourage Atheist Longhorns and literally everyone from the university’s Biology department to snap up copies as well, until they run out. And of course, make sure the uneducated drones giving away the book’s are appropriately humiliated and schooled. They evidently haven’t considered the likely consequences of showing up in an environment where people are, by and large, well educated, and trying to spread their ignorant twaddle. Let’s ensure they leave with a full understanding of those consequences. Jim Emerson’s Scanners blog (Jim edits rogerebert.com, and both he and Ebert are outspoken science supporters) offers a very funny takedown of Kirk and Ray’s idiocy, and I think it’s a good thing that this whole exercise receives as much derision in advance of the actual event as possible. What an awesome thing it would be if those dispatched to give away these books encountered, at all 50 universities (and I’ve read reports there may be more than 100 universities by now), a horde of fearless and outspoken experts in science who calmly shoot down their foolishness and lies, like shooting clay pigeons out of the sky. This ought to be an event they live to regret.

You’d think it was lame enough that the Read more
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