Falwell’s funeral was yesterday, and apparently there were demonstrations — which seems highly inappropriate to me, now matter which side they were arguing — and a Liberty University student was arrested for bringing homemade bombs to the funeral. Bombs. To a funeral. There’s just something insanely religious about that.
Worse still was his excuse: “to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service.” Yeah, people waving signs and chanting slogans at a funeral is tacky and disruptive, but you don’t enhance the solemnity of the moment by setting off explosions. Replacing chanting with the screams of the maimed isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the event. Well, except maybe in Falwell’s case…but hey, let’s not stoop to his level.
It’s not even clear who attended that funeral. The Republicans snubbed him. Was it just Liberty University drones and the Rev. Godhates Phelps and his crew? If so, maybe a pitched battle with a little bombthrowing would have left the world a better place.
“Godhates phelps”
Priceless, simply priceless.
The bombs were set off to diffuse the resurrection. Falwell shall return, for our judgement day is at hand.
I can’t imagine anyone besides Phelps actually protesting this guy’s funeral. I mean, sure he spread enough hate and theocracy to choke America to death, but what exactly would I be protesting? That he’s dead? (no.)
Apparently the bombs were made of ‘bathtub napalm’, so they wouldn’t have exploded so much as melted flesh.
Yeah, I bet if Dawkins was protesting you wouldn’t care so much, PZ.
Dawkins wouldn’t protest. That’s the thing. He’s a rationalist.
Maybe he was just hoping to help light the Eternal Flame?
The top republicans didn’t go because Falwell is politically controversial. Politicians only want media coverage which “sells” their image in a positive light to as many of the voting public as possible. They are whores for public approval.
RE: “Yeah, I bet if Dawkins was protesting you wouldn’t care so much, PZ.”
I can’t seriously imagine Dawkins cooking up a mess of bathroom bombs to protest the protesters at someone’s funeral.
Dawkins does his “protesting” with words.
Okay. He’s got his Liberty U Crazed World-view and Intro To Martydom 101 class requirement done. Now, to qualify for Advanced Martydom, and land that coveted DI Fellowship scholarship, he needs to develop techniques and strategies to whine about it, and of course place blame on the Liberal Media for their War on Christianity.
From the Lynchburg paper:
“Preliminary investigations reveal that he may have been aware of people that were protesting Dr. Falwell’s funeral,” Gaddy said when asked about Uhl’s motive.
The Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, which claimed Falwell was sympathetic of homosexuals, protested across the street from the funeral without incident.
Investigators determined that Uhl had issues with that group, Gaddy said.
Link here.
Now, so far the ONLY protesters I’ve read about in any of the funeral coverage were the Westboro nuts. And Uhl’s ex-roommate told the newspaper that Uhl had problems with the Phelps crew. So it looks like sectarian violence to me. Also, it looks like it wasn’t bombs but homemade napalm — nasty stuff.
Russell over at Dispatches makes a good point.
The attendees were a nasty bunch. Via Chicago Tribune (AP):
Paying respects Many Christian conservative icons attended Rev. Jerry Falwell’s funeral Tuesday, but no Republican presidential candidates were present. Among the attendees:
Pat Robertson, televangelist and former presidential candidate
Gary Bauer, former presidential candidate
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council
Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition
Roy Moore, Alabama judge who lost a battle to display a monument to the 10 Commandments.
Paige Patterson, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth
George Allen, former U.S. senator from Virginia
Tim Goeglein, White House liaison to religious groups
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-falwell_23may23,1,5599608.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Once more, with links to examples of their nastiness:
the entire Axis of Evil gathered.
By the way, am I being VERY inappropriate for blasting “Jerry Falwell’s God” by Roy Zimmerman ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw ) from my speakers right now? After all, it gives a quite correct account of Falwell’s opinions.
One of this young man’s relatives turned him in. Kudos to them. This nation is polarized enough without something like this happening. I’m still trying to get my head around Phelps protesting at the funeral (I’m still trying to get my head around anything that man does), let alone retaliation. I dislike Phelps intensely, but again I must confess – this never occurred to me.
Ecuador certainly has its share of problems, but coming back and seeing the amount of anger, rudeness, and violence in America is just jarring. It’s got to stop. We are experiencing “extremist creep.”
Oh God, I love a good funeral!
(emphasis mine)
Ha! Pure hilarity! Let’s see, Falwell only wants gays to burn and hell, and Westboro Baptist Church, oh, let me guess, wants them to burn in hell with lots of little papercuts all over them?
That Falwell, what a softy!
As far as I can tell, the problem is that Falwell used “hate the sin, love the sinner” rhetoric. So he was hostile to gay people as-a-whole, but he could be friendly to some of them as individuals. (Notably Mel White, his former ghost-writer.)
Phelps’ position is that you’re required to hate sinners. He also condemned Falwell for being insufficiently hateful towards Jews, Catholics, and non-Calvinist Protestants.
Much, much more at: http://godhatesamerica.com
“If we stopped preaching, the stones would cry out against you (Luke 19:40)! What would you do then? Sue the stones? Pass anti-stone speaking laws? We have but one word for you: HA!”
John Danley wrote,
Or perhaps to deffuse it?
Gahh..
The link that should be in #19 above:
http://jswynne.typepad.com/gropes/2006/07/i_wrote_somethi.html
Okay folks, how many of you have actually ever met any undergrads from Liberty University? I met six of them last fall when they attended our Dodos screening at William and Mary, then came to the reception afterwards at a professors house and talked until midnight. They weren’t the sort of zombies you’d expect. Yes, they had been indoctrinated through their upbringing, but they had the standard devious, irreverent sense of humor and talked about all the ways they have of getting around the rules at Liberty. And I could see that with a little more exposure to the outside world they could be led to broaden their horizons.
Sorry, but I get a little tired of the evolution crowd sitting up in their ivory tower hating the outside world. It’s kind of like in August of 2005 when the evolution blogs were on fire with rage against intelligent design, then our producer Ty Carlisle went to the I.D. conference in Greenville, SC that had 600 people attending, but not a single evolutionist.
There’s an awful lot of hating from afar that goes on in this isssue.
Was Mark D. Uhl one of the six?
Yes, there are smart kids attending Liberty U, but there are also stupid ones who are mollycoddled and encouraged by a painfully restrictive worldview promoted by faith-based glorified chapels like LU. We can’t just sit back and pretend all institutions are the same, they don’t matter, they’re all teaching the same thing — they aren’t. Liberty U teaches young earth creationism, for one thing; while individuals at that pitiful excuse for a school are worthwhile individuals full of promise, we are doing them no favor if we refrain from mocking their wretched, pathetic ideological isolation chamber.
Better that they feel a little shame and leave to attend a better school.
Hardly a random sample.
well randy perhaps you are right not everyone at liberty has to be stupid. naive maybe.
but who the hell wants to pay $55 to hear ID’ers crow about Jeeesus? not me. i skipped it when they came to my town.
“evolution crowd sitting up in their ivory towers”…Huh! Here I am, a furniture designer and builder, blue as a collar can get, coming home smelling of sweat, sawdust, and steel with my feet aching. However, because I also read about and try to understand our actual reality and make my decisions based on facts I guess I’m tossed into the “ivory tower” group. Who would have guessed that being frustrated with people who live their lives by superstition would make me a hater.
Don’t confuse being inquisitive and having a lack of patience with people who aren’t with hate. I (with many others) am frustrated in the way a good parent is with a child who rebels in self-destructive ways. I want better for them, for us. That’s not hate. That’s an adult reaction to immaturity.
Funny, it so often turns out that the indoctrinated never follow much of the rules they supposedly find so fundamental. Yet, they feel comfortable preaching about these rules to others.
Maybe that is where the “hating from afar” comes from. The hate of hypocrisy combined with bigotry, that so often pervades Falwell and his ilk.
I wonder who got stuck lugging the 300 pounds of crap to the hearse.
Randy, believe me, I don’t caricature these kids. How easily I could have been one of them. I’m a dork and did not grow up in any ivory tower and believe me, I feel cowed and embarrassed sometimes about my creeping-charley-league education compared to the people around me. I know what it’s like to straddle the blue-collar/academic world and am all too familiar with the “impostor syndrome” that this makes one feel. But I think you are engaging in reverse caricature here.
What does the word “evolution crowd” mean? (Am I one of the evolution crowd? I’m a secretary with an English degree.) Come on. If you want to be an ambassador of understanding, be less absolutist in your characterizations of “us.” I’m relieved to read that you thought these kids just needed some exposure to new ideas in order to change theirs. I think that’s what we’re all trying to do here. Maybe grant us the same ability to grow and change, huh?
Randy, is this like the Sodom and Gomorrah thing? You found 6 “just men” at LU, so nobody there can be labeled as stupid for doing something massively unhinged and stupid?
True enough — blue collar born and bred here, too. My father was a lumberjack, railroad worker, and diesel mechanic with grit and grease ground into his hands. That I worked my way through college and earned this cushy job pushing papers doesn’t mean I’m now a patrician snob.
Randy, Randy, Randy!
Don’t Be a Dodo!
I am also soooo not an “ivory tower” kind of guy! I don’t care if your six students all came down from the cross and changed your bottled Dasani to a saucy little Merlot. Stupid is as stupid does, and if you goes to Liberty, you pays your price.
Don’t Be A Dodo – Kick an ID believer today! (Metaphorically speaking ONLY of course!)
A.) Where the hell did you get the idea that we hate the outside world? At worst some of us hate a tiny subset of the world: certain Americans who want to turn the country into some sort of benighted theocracy. The rest of us abhor that philosophy but can understand why people can get sucked into it and sympathize; “love the sinner hate the sin” in other words.
B.) Funny, “hating the outside world” is more a hallmark of the fundamentalist Christian mentality. See: most of Paul’s letters, the constant railing against the “liberals” who run the world and oppress the poor Christians, etc.
Uh, Randy, how many “outside world-hating evolutionists” in “ivory towers” bring homemade bombs to funerals with the specific intent to maim people?
Daniel R. Hanson:
Well said, sir.
Egads! That should be Hansen, not Hanson. They must be decaffeinating the caffeine around here.
J-Dog:
Am reminded of ancient wise man saying. Ancient wise man say, you see blind beggar man starving in gutter, you kick him. Why you be kinder than God?
I saw a funeral in China during which a lot of firecrackers were set off. I also saw firecrackers set off in temple there.
I saw a funeral in China during which a lot of firecrackers were set off. I also saw firecrackers set off in temple there.
I seem to recall that the firecrackers at a Chinese funeral are set off to scare away evil spirits. To have the same effect at Jerry Falwell’s funeral, I think you’d have to arrange for a public gay orgy. Don’t forget to stop by Costco first for a barrel of caramel sauce!
I wrote this in a moment of calm.
http://knotmyline.wordpress.com/2007/05/17/i-am-not-happy-that-jerry-falwell-died/
But if they had warded off evil, nobody would have been attending the funeral!
My junior college is notably lacking in both ivory and towers.
Damn.
I don’t need to dip my face in shit to know swimming in a cesspool is a bad idea.
Phelps is getting on up there. I don’t wish anyone evil, but in thinking about his eventual funeral, I wonder who’ll be protesting it… and with what.
I was also a secretary with an arts major, by the way, but that didn’t stop me from recognizing a fact when I saw one.
Haven’t seen Uhl’s myspace page posted here yet so here it is: http://tinyurl.com/29gcvs
He can’t spell “beauty”, he liked The Lion King and he wanted to meet Jesus, Osama and Walt Disney.
He was hoping to be an Army chaplain. Sadly, even with a “moral waiver” he’s not going to be a good fit.
As far as the five IEDs go, slow burning does not make an incendiary weapon ineffective. If you’re a terrorist and going after people, slow burning would be desirable.
And a guy with 5 IEDs in the trunk of his car planning to employ them at a public gathering is a terrorist.
To me, Liberty U. is as Ivory Tower as it gets.
It’s a little haven for fundies, where they can study their idiotic bibles without fear of being challenged on the merits of doing so, and where many can expect to be whisked up into a fundie-loving government.
True snobbery is Jerry Falwell creating an exclusive Christian Culture at Liberty U. from which he could thumb his nose at all the groups he detested.
The students there deserve to be trashed. They enabled Falwell by by attending his university, by sitting in his pews and listening to his screeds, and by not doing more to openly questioning his exclusionary, mean-spirited, un-American Christian fundamentalism.
Yeah, and I bet none of you lot that believe six million Jews were butally murdered by the Nazis went to that Iranian Holocaust Denial conference either.
Fucking hypocrites.
Oh, yes. After all, most of us are at universities which require the faculty and staff to swear oaths of ideological conformity, and don’t permit their students to live off-campus where the outside world might contaminate them.
Wait, no, that’s Liberty University I’m thinking of. Come to think of it, your “ivory tower” allegation makes no sense whatsoever when applied to “the evolution crowd.”
Ah, so the ivory tower encompasses the entire world except for ID conferences? Doesn’t matter if you give public talks, teach at public universities and high schools, go on TV and radio…if you don’t show up at conferences to argue with a few hundred true believers, you’re an elitist isolationist?
Liberty U is simply a Madrassa and look what happened in Pakistan when education was left to the Mullahs. Xtian terrorism is the logical result of a Xtian Madrassa.
Randy, of course you are right to caution against painting all LU undergrads with the same broad brush.
But…
Evolutionists ARE the outside world in the sense you mean. If the day ever comes when evolutionists are forced to circle the wagons for one last stand, you’ll know it’s already far too late to do anything to stop the final intellectual massacre, and far, far too late to choose sides.
Don’t mistake scorn for hate. Don’t mistake criticism for damnation. Don’t mistake anger and frustration for self-righteous fury, or accusations of dishonesty for disingenuous cries of persecution and censorship. Hate growns strong and healthy in the rich compost of zealotry and ignorance. Where do you think one might find such a substrate? In a college biology lab? :-)
Randy:
“There’s an awful lot of hating from afar that goes on in this isssue.”
You said it, bub.
Raging Braytard,
The difference between the likes of Dawkins and yourself is that Dawkins does not rejoice in the death of others.I doubt Dawkins is sorry Falwell is dead but I also doubt he is rejoicing about it either. If anything it is probably a matter of indifference to him. Of course that is probably just what Falwell would hate, I imagine he would much rather people hated him rather than had total indifference.
Two more comments if I may?
Looks like Randy is going all Fox News Fair and Balanced on us, and
Falwell would sell his soul to the devil right now for another jelly-filled donut! Oh. Never mind.
Why would you come here and mock my pastime?
One thing about that ID conference or whatever without evolutionists showing up: Well, it’s kind of like my blogging friends not showing up to a parapsychology conference.
If they’ve been unable to gather evidence or even make consistent claims and predictions, why should we waste our time? ID is just another pseudoscience zombie: It won’t lay down and die, and it was never really alive to begin with. Eternal limbo.
Looks like Randy is going all Fox News Fair and Balanced on us,
No, he isn’t.
But he is coming down on some of the hypocrisy in the anti-creationism camp–some of the same oppositional attitudes are pretty much the same on both sides.
What he’s saying is that going to Liberty University does NOT mean that this precludes the graduates from ever getting enlightened. But the attitude that they are somehow “other”, they are inferior, they are ignorant IS going to be a big barrier to them getting enlightened.
They’re thinking people. There’s every chance for them to leave behind the foolishness of youth. But not when the scorn that they see seems to be directed AT THEM, and not at the ideas–and I’ve seen a lot of attitude directed at the individual and not at the ideas.
One idiot does not represent an entire university. Most of our fine colleges and universities were started by religious men as religious institutions. Harvard. Yale. Rutgers.
Stupid people also attend Berkley. Have you seen videos of the “People’s Park”. Utter nonsense.
Gwangung, Metaljaybird, why do you insist that we “evolutionists” should not be allowed to be upset by a person who, in his alleged duty as a Christian, felt compelled to build and bring explosives to a funeral with the intent to maim and kill people who disagreed with him, or even feel scornful towards a community whose members all think that the idea of “descent with modification” is a hell-bound comedy of evil sinners, while the idea that the last mammoths were killed by New Jersey-sized fragments of a magic levitating ice dome is sound and logical?
I don’t know if anyone else caught this or not, I just got the tail end of it, but yesterday during the general speeches in the House Rep. Goodlatte (represents the Lynchburg, VA area, not Seattle) and Roy Blunt were eulogizing Falwell. Goodlatte issued a statement on his web site about Falwell, I wonder how much he was in for with Liberty U, and Blunt has all sorts of things about the ways that those evil Democrats are spending money at his site, conveniently forgetting who was doing the spending for the last six years and that the democrats don’t have a 2/3 majority to override anything that Skippy might want to veto so consider the source.
Love the creationist, hate Creationism?
It’s interesting to say that evolutionists are the ones walled away in ivory towers when they’re the ones actually going out and getting their hands dirty documenting all of the evolution that’s happening in the real world, and the IDists are the ones who sit at home with one single book and refuse to ever look at anything else in existence.
Sorry Randy, you are way off base. I am not one of those ivory tower types, I work for a living (sorry PZ ;-)). I don’t hate creationists. I believe in live and let live. They can believe anything they want. By the way, I also like sci-fi/fantasy so I actually enjoy listening to the outlandish tales they spin. However I will not let them lie to our children and turn our public schools into fundamentalist Christian recruitment centers. Opposing their politcal strategy is not hate.
Alsp, there is no need to attend one of their conferences. I can find out anything I want about ID/YEC right here!
Yeah. Another “ivory” tower here… I work for Safeway bagging groceries, use dialup to connect to the internet, and my parents… A stay at home mom (mostly anyway, she did work some once in a while) and a father who never graduated college, worked at first in a foundary, and only later advanced to… wait for it… the manager for a weld shop at Mammoth Lakes Ski Resort, until they forced him into early retirement as a cost cutting measure, so they kids of the guy that owned it could keep stealing millions of dollars a year from it, while the business went slowly bankrupt.
My sole *ivory* towerness seems to come from reading a lot of science magazines that the people at LU probably don’t think have enough pictures of crosses in them, and spending 3 years learning how to maintain databases and other useless junk on “mainframe” systems for huge corporations that don’t give a damn about anyone, when what I wanted was to learn advanced programming for game development, or *something* more useful that fixing some other morons mistakes, because they where too damn stupid to figure out that using two digits for a year field was a bad idea, especially in 1990, and it never occured to them that someone might “accidentally”, never mine “intentionally” insert data into the system that would cause 5,000 lines of code to calculate the interest rate on some poor fools account to hemorage and die in spectacularly obvious, but mind bogglingly horrible, ways.
Yep. Lots of ivory and high places where I am sitting too. It can’t possibly be that I am sitting here wondering why people with the intellectual understanding and comprehension of a four year old, but with all the curiosity brain washed out of them, get to decide if I even get to keep my job, if next week some religious nut takes over safeway’s board of directors and the courts decide that its permissible for them to use Bush’s new laws about allowing businesses to discriminate by religious affiliation (did that one pass btw, I wasn’t unfortunately paying attention when it came to a vote) is used as a defense for firing people like me. To name just one @#$$@#$ stupid BS thing these people would love to do to me for not sharing 100% of their idiotic delusions.
Can you say “home-grown Christian terrorist,” children?
So it looks like sectarian violence to me.
quick! someone call GW!
It’s time to invade and end the sectarian violence.
Sorry, but I get a little tired of the evolution crowd sitting up in their ivory tower hating the outside world.
and I am so fucking sick of that strawman.
To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, not all Liberty U students are stupid, but mostly stupid people go to Liberty U.
Now there is another danger coming from LU.
“LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA-Reading Puts a Bounce in Your Education is the theme of a new partnership initiative between Liberty University and the Lynchburg City Schools. Its goal is to inspire 150 second through fifth graders within the city schools to enjoy reading for a lifetime.
The Flames Reading Club, a one-on-one reading program that pairs one child with one LU student, will begin with a Kickoff Celebration for the elementary students on September 11 at 9:45 a.m. in the Vines Center, featuring the LU Cheerleaders, Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams, and the Women’s Volleyball team. The River Ridge Chick-fil-A, a proud sponsor of the event, will send its Chick-fil-A cow to join the Liberty Eagle mascot in entertaining the children.”
http://www.liberty.edu/index.cfm?PID=5395
I wonder what the preferred reading list is. If not the big one, maybe “Bomb Making for Dummies”.
Let’s stop this child abuse now. Can you imagine some poor kid going one-on-one with an LU student? That is cruel and unusual punishment.
Because you are generalizing this far too much. Because you are using the excuse the stupidity of one person to indulge in characterizing an entire community in that way. Because you are too self-righteous to realize that the way you are drawing that community is not the same way that members of the community are drawing it. You’re aiming for the irrational, dogmatic part of that community that reject science; however, that irrational dogmatic part is not the whole of that community–while they are folks who can be safely written off, there are other parts of the community who should not be.
And, of course, you are not just preaching to the choir here—there are lurkers here. They can be turned off by creationist stupidity and illogic. They can also be turned off by arrogance and scorn that are poured on individuals, not ideas.
Because you are using the excuse the stupidity of one person to indulge in characterizing an entire community in that way.
personally, I’ve NEVER seen another community that so predominantly follows their “leaders” proclamations in lock-step.
it’s the very reason they were courted by the neocons in the early 80’s all the way up to now as a voting block.
if you don’t like fallwell as an example, how about Ted Haggard?
30 million people followed his edicts without question.
at least until the little man behind the curtain revealed himself. (to a male prostitute, no less).
If you don’t want us to generalize about creationists, you better get out and tell them to vary a bit.
You do realize we’re talking about a school which gives each of its entering students a page and a half on the specific flavor of Christian doctrine that they’re expected to uphold, and requires every last employee to sign a statement of faith? This is not a community with a huge amount of intellectual diversity.
No doubt the occasional science-loving, free-thinking student finds her way into Liberty University. The best possible thing we can do for such a student is point out how utterly insane and anti-education her institution is, so she leaves as soon as possible.
Among other things, Gwangung, do you realize that these same people who think that the last mammoths were smushed by magic falling ice, and that koalas could magically outrun niglai antelope in reaching Australia, as well as saying that all non-Christians are subhuman beasts, are the same people who claim to speak for all Christians everywhere?
If these people don’t actually speak for you, um, could you elucidate your argument better so it doesn’t sound like “I don’t like your stupid opinions, you stupid evolutionists, so shut and don’t say anything again!”?
Also, if we’re not allowed to heap scorn and ridicule on a Christian who thought to honor his hero by maiming people with homemade explosives at a funeral, just like they do in Iraq, uh, what are we supposed to do? Send flowers and teddybears?
I’m just amazed at the lack of tolerance towards students attending LU. Simply read these ill stated posts, and you’ll see what I mean.
I never attended a Christian or private school in my entire life. I have nothing against those that do. They are trying to get a better education, and most public institutions do not offer that.
I am no defender of any terrorist. This guy was obviously misguided and wrong. He will get his payment. I was just as appalled when the atheists lit it up at Columbine 8 years ago!
I’m just amazed at the lack of tolerance towards students attending LU. Simply read these ill stated posts, and you’ll see what I mean.
What now? What are we intolerant of? As far as I know, no one here has suggested that they not be allowed to attend the university.
I was just as appalled when the atheists lit it up at Columbine 8 years ago!
Oh my, aren’t you clever, trying to turn the tables on us?
I was just as appalled when the atheists lit it up at Columbine 8 years ago!
I’m sorry, I’m having quite some trouble finding evidence online that the Columbine shooters WERE atheists, especially with the whole Cassie Bernall “Do you believe in God?” story being apparently untrue.
Not that that really has to do with anything. But seriously, is there any evidence that they were?