Would you believe there is actually an award called the Award for Liberty and Truth? You just know in this Orwellian country of ours that it couldn’t possibly be given in recognition of actual liberty or truth … but it’s even worse than that. It is the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, and it’s handed out by the Bible University of Los Angeles, better known as Biola; named after a prissy old fraud, given out by a bible college with delusions of grandeur, and guess who the winner is this year?
I like it.
It’s a fake award by a fake college named after an infamous creationist and now given to a second-rate character actor. It’s the creationist version of the Nobel Prize!
I bet Ben Stein is proud of himself.
sometimes i think the whole point of life is to notice (and enjoy) as much irony as possible before you die
*hugs irony*
The irony meter is definitely spiked on this one.
Bah, you evilutionists. Wait till you see what we got for you NEXT!
(scroll down to the second comment in PZ’s link)
Hah, got you runnin scared now!!!
Next is the DI will offer an award for “Honesty and Integrity of Scientific Inquiry”.
PZ…the close tag didn’t take…missing the front bracket.
I’m not sure this is really an example of irony per se. It is little more than some know-nothing college awarding one of its own with an award named after another know-nothing – this is simply crap piled on top of crap.
Now true irony would be if Biola actually adhered to the rules as dictated by the title of the award (Award for Liberty and Truth) and awarded Dawkins (or even PZ) in tribute to their tireless efforts to cut through the creationist bullshit…
It’s the closest he’ll ever get to an acting award due to those evil hedonistic hollywood types with their fancy type edukachun
Bah, just to correct those blockquotes:
Hah, got you runnin scared now!!!
I have this picture of Stein wandering lost around LA intoning “Biola?…Biola?…”
PZ is just jealous. When was the last time HE received an award with a name as fancy as the “Award for Liberty and Truth”? He’ll be secretly crying into his exon samples.
They keep using that word “Truth.”
I don’t think it means what they think it means. I’d send them a memo with a nice tidy definition and a few succinct examples, but that really would take a lot of fun out of things.
Next up, this weekend, in light of Stein “winning” this award of truth, it’s clearly possible the ghost of Dale Earnhardt will win the Daytona 500.
I don’t know if this is an appropriate time to mention it, but I just got banned from commenting at uncommondescent.com for the third time. I feel.. expelled.
The “Twisted List”: The official list of words that are commonly trumpeted by the religious with the goal of masking the real purpose of or falsely attributing desirable properties to their efforts.
– Truth
– Theory
– Life
– Real
– Science
– Fact
– Belief
– Proof
– Investigate
– Knowledge
I could be doing this for a while.
Wait, isn’t the title supposed to be “Award for Liberty from Truth?”
Getting banned from UD….now that’s deserves at least some kind of merit badge or something. Woo Hoo!!
We can make tiers of accomplishment with cool labels. For instance, if you’ve been banned 5 times your official title is “Rabble Rouser”….10 times – you are a “Provocateur”….. 20 times = “Chief Hooligan”
We ought to have a Medal for Tradition and Faith to give out to famous atheists and other such ne’er-do-wells.
We ought to have a Medal for Tradition and Faith to give out to famous atheists and other such ne’er-do-wells.
Remember who won it in 2006? The new ID poster boy Antony Flew, who in his aging years is represented as switching sides from hard core atheist to potential agnostic deist. WooHoo! The Christians win again! NOT.
I think Stein is a perfect recipient of the bogus award. It reflects perfectly on the character of the creationist/ID movement.
This reminds me of another absurd level of pretense.
Has anyone read the bio blurb of Jerzy Kosinski at the back of his book The Painted Bird? His escape from the Soviet Union reads just like the history of the creation of these awards: A confident master of bureaucratic judo, Kosinski pitted himself against the Establishment. In need of official sponsors…[he] created four distinguised – but fictitious – members of the Academy of Sciences to act in that capacity. As a member of the Academy’s inner circle and a prize-winner photographer…Kosinski had access to state printing plants, and he was able to furnish each academician with the appropriate official seals, rubber stamps and stationery… After two years of active correspondence between his fictitious sponsors and the various government agencies, Kosinski obtained an official passport allowing him to visit the United States under the auspices of an equally fictitious American “foundation.”
This phony-baloney “reward” reminds me of that. Especially because, as it turns out, Kosinski actually made up the above story! ;-)
“Vainglorious” doesn’t begin to describe the ID folks!
Ah, Biola! I understand that the name “Biola” was originally the acronym for the “Bible Institute of Los Angeles.” Now, of course, it’s a “university” of sorts and “Biola” is merely a nickname. But it still stands for credulity and faux scholarship.
Mo’ Mammon.
The IDers crave drama. They make maudlin speeches about academic freedom. They flop and flail playing the martyr role. And now they roll out the red carpet for congratulatory awards of their own (not-so-intelligent) design.
IDers should instead roll up their sleeves and do an honest day’s work in science for a (macro-evolutional) change.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Biola has been in the news a lot. It is in LA County, but it’s actually in a city called La Mirada. It’s across the street from the La Mirada Public library. It’s also home to a storm drain “creek”. I lived near it for 20 years and i only ever met one person that went there. Strange.
Dear Cthulhu, there goes another fucking irony meter…
If the Bible Institute of Ellay is now a University, the acronym will have to be changed as well.
[Cue Stein] Buola? Buola?
I thought the religious equivalent of the Nobel Prize was the Templeton award- all types of pretentious fools actually try for the big money. Biola sounds like something ladeled out of a fistula, or maybe a subsample from a meadow muffin.
My dream: Phil J. presents the award to B.S. himself, then someone offstage pulls the lever and drops the 16-ton weight on them both. Or else, releases the tiger.
Excellent idea So Laris (#29).
Ray Comfort and the Orange man from the Florida Science Standards hearings have been giving lessons in defending against fresh fruit (bannas and, of course, oranges) so the weight or tiger (or pointed sticks) are exactly what’s needed.
Disclaimer and apologies to all non nerds, especially non-Python non-nerds, for #29 and my comment if they seem too cryptic :) (I was going to say “I love it so” in “honor” of JAD but nevermind..)
The ease with which they throw around words like “liberty”, “truth”, “character”, “values”…when you contrast those words with how they live it seems like it’s a scene out of Spamalot of something. But it’s not funny because they’re a bunch of stubborn children masquerading as “god-fearing” adults.
Go ahead, take your “award” for “liberty and truth”. You and the 1000 creatins that give a sh!t will be forgotten like all other self-righteous prick cults.
I’ll bet D’souza is crying himself to sleep right now.
Don’t worry Dinesh, there will be other D-Bag awards for you to win. As a matter of fact, I award you “D-Bag of the Day.” Just cuz!
And Alex, you forgot the #1 word used by these nutters. FAMILY!
Biola is such a nice acronym. It reminds me of Biolan, a company that makes fertilizers and waste management products.
http://www.biolan.fi/english/default.asp
Ben Steins initials are BS. What a synchronicity.
Biola is such a nice acronym. It reminds me of Biolan, a company that makes fertilizers and waste management products.
http://www.biolan.fi/english/default.asp
Ben Steins initials are BS. What a synchronicity.
Remember, Ben, they probably think your people killed Jesus Christ. I wouldn’t get too cozy with ’em.
I don’t suppose the actual award is a gold plated banana? Or maybe that’s just the award Ray Comfort gives out for science…
Oh, but you forgot that in Creationist Logic, AND = FROM
“Award for Liberty AND Truth” =
“Award for Liberty FROM Truth”
And Ben Stein does make a huge effort, to liberate our souls from the dictature of the Truth.
Antony Flew was a previous winner.
As we all know, Antony Flew was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, putting Russell and Quine in the shade.
This was settled as soon as he became a deist.
And now Antony Flew’s name is being linked with Ben Stein’s.
Could an 84 year old man ever think that in the twilight of his life, he could has such laurels and accolades heaped upon him?
It must be a dream come true for Antony Flew, being mentioned in the same context as the Ben Stein’s of this world.
Did Albert Einstein ever win any awards that Oliver Hardy had also won?
No.
Yet Antony Flew can now name-drop Ben Stein into conversations.
(If Flew manages to start remembering names, that is…)
So is Phillip E. Johnson dead yet? It makes me grin every time one of these sleazeballs bites the dust before the rapture makes its glorious apperance.
I’m lookin’ at you, Jerry Fallwell.
(If Flew manages to start remembering names, that is…)
LOL Oh, that’s just too funny, Steven
– pw
You know your C.V. is very important. It certainly helps to have official sounding awards to make up for graduating from BibleU/Libertee/OralU/Pat Robertson School for Strippers (ask a local about this one. Dale Carnegie is somehow considered a joke. This award has the image of doing something when you were actually in Mom’s basement crying for more sacrifice from the troops.
“I’m not incompetent! I’m a victim!!!!”
Sorry I can’t attend. This part sounds just priceless.
It’s kind of like naming Britney Spears Mother of the Year.
Lana: Worse, that Parent of the Year award would be named after Andrea Yates and awarded by NAMBLA.
Being under the thumb of an arbitrary, demanding, and often cruel “Father in heaven” is said to be a matter of “Liberty and Truth,” so why not hand out awards for “Liberty and Truth” to hopeful theo-fascists?
If people only recognize that the inspiration for the Wedge Document, Phillip Johnson, was the first recipient of the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, the value of that award ought to be well enough understood.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
By the way, what are the science prizes put out by ID?
Funny how PR prizes and PR offensives are all that this revolutionary “new” science produces. What’s the slogan, millions for propaganda, not one cent for science?
I suppose it’s just plain blasphemous to give up lies. Truth and science are just too restrictive, True Liberty demands not only that pious lies be allowed to propagate (which I certainly do support), but that any system with honest ideals be overthrown. I mean, is it really fair to the ignorant for their ignorance to be despised?
In pure democracy, arguably not. That’s the problem, if democracy alone is valued, why shouldn’t common lies supersede more difficult truth in the schools? But of course this has never been a pure democracy, indeed, the judicial system from the beginning insisted that truth matters above and beyond mere mob rule.
Perhaps one of the complications we face is generally neglected–only common law and tradition really consistently support the concept that truth is more than what a 51% majority says it is. True, the judiciary and many other aspects of government are based on that ideal, however the justification for these aspects of government are not explicitly laid out in either the Declaration or the Constitution. Perhaps it was believed to be self-evident in a way that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seemed not to be (there was some dithering over the justification of these rights in the Declaration).
What’s bad is that sound inference from evidence is not self-evident to so many people. The good thing is that the people who don’t care about truth or liberty with any kind of understanding, like Stein, come up with absurdities which go even too far for our scientifically-illiterate bozos. Here’s what one toxic God-believer (he is a prof, but clearly has drunk the Kool-Aid) had to say after hearing Stein’s bullshit (he saw the whole movie), even though he praises the attempt at smearing science:
Oh damn, theocracy won’t be delivered via this raging tale told by an idiot. Shit, why can’t they come up with a balanced way of telling the “truth” about how “Darwinism” is a conspiracy forced onto the public by atheists in despite of the evidence? I mean, surely it would be easy to tell the truth, you know, the truth about liberty, and yet they keep screwing it up with shrillness and easily attacked nonsense.
Why do you suppose they keep falling into such traps, when they’re the good guys pointing out the evils of everybody else?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Somehow this seems relevant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7357496.stm
——————
… an Armenian priest forcibly ejected a Greek priest from an area near the tomb of Jesus.
They say the attacker felt the Greek priest had spent too long at the tomb.
When police arrived to break up the fight, some were reportedly beaten back by worshippers using palm fronds.
—————–
There has to be a donkey in this story someplace.