How unfair that The Unicorn Museum would be compared to Ken Ham’s “Museum” — everyone knows creationism is fake, but unicorns, because they are so lovely and sweet and happy and phallic, must be real.
This is very serious. The proprietors want to put up a billboard to compete with the Creation “Museum’s”, and you can vote and donate. I would love to see unicorns praised over goofy Australian nutcases.
Some two-bit publicity hound can die, and that’s all you can find on any of the television channels … a whole grand species can go extinct, and there’s almost nothing.
Say goodbye to the Yangtze River dolphin. It is officially extinct. The funeral will be poorly attended, and it will be forgotten, except in a few academic papers.
Chris Clarke has won the blogwars by being the first to deploy an auto blog-bot with an aggressive attitude. We are doomed.
I wonder if I can steal a copy and put it to work writing my blog entries?
This has been the week that the whiny little twits have risen up to complain about atheism. The latest entry is from Camille Paglia, and many have written to me about it. I’m not going to bother. I’ve never cared much for Paglia, and Salon’s infatuation with her as a columnist is incomprehensible to me — her specialty is haughty pseudo-intellectual blurts of pretension, strung together on the one common thread of her febrile narcissism.
So, sorry, no evisceration of her babblings — there have just been too many of them lately, so all she gets is a curt dismissal.
Here’s an odd correlation for you: whenever I take a swipe at the foolishness of Scott Adams, I get a major uptick in the usual trickle of Christian email. I don’t quite see Adams as a friend to Christianity, although he does seem to foster the kind of shallow thinking on which religiosity thrives. Anyway, for your delectation, I’ve put a couple of samples below.
Sara at Orcinus takes apart the macho little boys of the Republican party — it’s one of those posts that explains a lot.
I’ll cut you if you mock my stylin’.
Cardinal Pell has issued an edict “demanding that students and their parents be more devout”. I’m afraid I’m just picturing a man in a silly hat raising his arms and commanding everyone by the power of Christ to believe! Shall we all just laugh at him?
Oh, no…not Easterbrook. Haven’t I dealt with him sufficiently in the past? He’s got a
long-winded column in which, while quantifying the nudity in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, he also whines about those godless authors that have offended him so much.
Regarding the “Golden Compass” volumes, in them God is a central character — but is actively evil, obsessed with causing people to suffer. The plotline of the books is that Christianity is a complete fraud and the source of all that is wrong with society; the final “Golden Compass” volume concerns a desperate attempt by the heroic children to kill God and obliterate every trace of Christianity from several universes. I found Pullman’s arguments against Christianity puerile — like recent anti-Christian books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the “Golden Compass” volumes resort to the cheap subterfuge of cataloging everything bad about religion while pretending belief has no positive qualities. Pullman, Dawkins and Harris are anti-faith jihadis: they don’t just want to argue against the many faults of Christianity, they want faith forbidden. But however flawed the “Golden Compass” books might be, to advance anti-Christian views is Pullman’s prerogative, and his art should be transferred authentically to the screen. Now that the Golden Compass volumes are becoming big-budget flicks, will Hollywood accurately depict their loathing of Christianity or turn the books into a mere adventure story?
There ought to be a law that Gregg Easterbrook can call no one else puerile.
I’ve often wondered what these “positive qualities” of belief might be. They’re always assumed to be there, so no one bothers to iterate them — but seriously, I see no virtue in unfounded faith in weird old superstitions. I guess that makes me anti-faith, too. But forbidding faith? Being a jihadi? Easterbrook goes too far, and is reduced to lying to support his claims. He’s just a kooky sportswriter possessed by the inanity of religion.
As for the Golden Compass — I’m hoping the movie portrays a solid loathing of religion too, although I also suspect the producers will chicken out. Fairy tales and children’s stories that put religion in a bleak light are what we need more of — I want children to grow up as doubters and skeptics, rather than gullible marks and credulous dullards.
John Hawks reports that a certain well-known 3.2 million year old lady has quietly left her home in Africa, and is on her way to Texas. She’s probably also going to visit Chicago in 2009 — I’ll be sure to stop by and pay my respects then.
