Some polls aren’t meant to be answered, apparently

There is an utterly ludicrous evangelical ‘course’ which has been advertising in England by slapping big ol’ polls on the wall. Like this one:

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As is, those boxes are blank…but man, they’re just begging to be filled in, and a lot of people can’t resist walking up to them and marking the right answer. Unfortunately, the transit police are then arresting them.

There’s a metaphor there. Looking at this Alpha Course, what I see is a narrow evangelical game that pretends to be an open arena for skeptical inquiry, but is actually nothing of the kind. Their ads are full of questions that by their very nature reveal that they expect certain kinds of answers, answers that only verify the dogma of Christianity. Look what they go on about:

Who is Jesus?
Why did Jesus die?
How can we have faith?
Why and how do I pray?
Why and how should I read the Bible?
How does God guide us?
How can I resist evil?
Why & how should we tell others?
Does God heal today?
What about the Church?
Who is the Holy Spirit?
What does the Holy Spirit do?
How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?
How can I make the most of the rest of my life?

But it seems to me that if your answer to the basic question of whether there is a god is “no”, it’s silly to go on to make assumptions about the divinity of Jesus, or babble about prayer, or talk about mysterious magical entities like the Holy Spirit.

You know what they’re doing. Answer any question with reason, or an expectation of evidence, anything but blind affirmation, and they will lock you up. It’s how religion works.

Aussies! Start your engines!

I’m supposed to remind you down-under people that the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, The Rise of Atheism, is taking place on 12-14 March in Melbourne. You have to sign up soon or you won’t be in the uprising, and you’ll find yourself trampled beneath the iron treads of our all-conquering robot army. Register now! The High Priest commands it!

You will also notice that, in the list of presenters — Richard Dawkins, Catherine Deveny, Phillip Adams, Taslima Nasrin, Peter Singer, PZ Myers, Dan Barker, Stuart Bechman, Sue-Ann Post, Kylie Sturgess, John Perkins, Tamas Pataki, Max Wallace, Russell Blackford, Ian Robinson, AC Grayling, Robyn Williams, Jamie Kilstein and Simon Taylor — Bill Maher is noticeably absent! And there is much rejoicing.

Oh, and non-Aussies are also welcome to attend. It’s probably recommended, even, since otherwise you’ll miss the Rise of Atheism and will have to take a subsidiary role as minions and/or lackeys.

(By the way, I’m getting a lot of requests to stop by this place and that place in Australia, and everyone is offering me beer if I show up. I have to figure out my schedule, but I do plan to do some jitterbugging about the country, since I can’t very well go all that way and miss out on a little tourism! I’ll probably have to demur on many of the beer offers, however, since the quantity suggested will be enough to fix my soft tissues, making me only suitable for touring the country as a pickled exhibit in a freak show.)

I guess I haven’t made it to the big time yet

Liberty University has this new program to adopt a liberal…and then pray really hard for them. It’s a good idea, since if nothing else, it keeps the rapscallions off the street doing something entirely unproductive. Unfortunately, looking at their list of liberals, most of ’em ain’t. Olympia Snowe? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Hilary Clinton? Barack Obama? They’re moderate to conservative. I’ll give them Barney Frank and Barry Lynn, but even there, they aren’t exactly bomb-throwing radicals out to overthrow the government and replace it with communism, free love, and LSD in the water supply.

And Barry Lynn is a minister. I think that means that hostile prayers are repelled with +5 on his saving throw, so it’s a wasted effort already.

I think they should pray for me. I’m much more deserving, and in their theology, actually need prayer much more. I’m so awful, they’re going to have to gang together a team of a thousand devout Christians, arms locked in prayer, 24 hours a day. I sure hope they get on it soon, because I’m feeling a total absence of the Lord right now.

I hate you, New Jersey

One flaw with a small school in a remote location is that we only occasionally get great speakers to come all the way out here to give lectures. Now look here: Rutgers has Alan Leshner coming out to speak on Evolution’s Impact on Science and Society, while Princeton has Sean Carroll speaking on Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species.

On the same day and time.

This is no fair. I want them to release one of them and ship them out to Morris, Minnesota. I promise, there won’t be much competition.

An evening in Minot

The Minot meeting this evening was lots of fun; what made it especially entertaining was that it was attended by a few fervently deluded creationists who boldly asked questions at the end. I got a few variants of “you’re uncivil, so I think you’re wrong” (tough — peddle bullshit arguments, I’ll call you a bullshitter), the “you just have different presuppositions than I do” argument (which works wonderfully in arguments for the existence of Santa Claus), and the claim that “creationists and scientists look at the same facts and just interpret them differently” (not true, creationists selectively ignore most of the facts). I also got a few specific questions outside my field, like the one about the shrinking sun. Too bad I didn’t have my counter-creationism handbook with me, because this is a stunt they always pull: I talk about genetics and molecular biology, so they pepper me with misconceptions about physics and geology.

Anyway, I did show one amusing video at the end of my talk to illustrate creationist theology. Here it is:

Sometime, I have to get some sleep, though. And sometime, I have to drive all the way back to Morris. Oy, this has been a long week. What day is it?

Monday?

Oh, crap.

Why not Minot?

I have to finish writing up all the interesting stuff I heard at the AAI convention, but once again, I’m on the road — I’m driving up to Minot, ND to give a talk tonight at 7pm in the Aleshire Theater on the MSU campus. I’m going to be spending most of my day driving, I think, and then talking, and sleeping, and driving back, and then getting a whole two days of relaxation at home.

I have then crazily agreed to appear in a Canadian prime-time documentary by a Christian film company (I must have delusions of being the reincarnation of Daniel) which will be in part filmed at the Creation “Museum”…so a little more travel. This could be interesting. At least they were a bit more honest in their invitation than the wankers who made Expelled.

Conservapædia has a new project

The far right wing has long rested their authority on Biblical truth — how can you possibly question them if they speak for God, after all? There is one little problem, however.

The Bible is suffused with liberal bias. A lot of the Old Testament isn’t bad, but the New Testament, when Jesus makes the scene, suddenly takes a turn into commie-land, with it’s talk of helping the poor and camels and needles and so forth. Jesus was obviously misquoted all over the place.

So what to do? When your claim of godly authority rests on your interpretation of God’s holy word, but God’s holy words contradict your desired ends, you’re in a bit of a pickle. There is a solution, though: rewrite the Bible and change the liberal bits! For this reason some of the deranged editors at Conservapædia have launched The Conservative Bible Project, which will purge the wimpy stuff and return it to it’s authentic roots, as a book that could have been written by a dumb-as-a-stick American Republican NRA member who wants to kill communists and A-rabs.

I’m not joking. They cite as reasons for a rewrite the fact that the Bible uses the term “comrade” three times, and acknowledges the existence of laborers thirteen times. It’s practically a Marxist/Leninist tract.

They conveniently give an example of the kind of thing that needs to be fixed.

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

As we all know, after all, Jesus really wasn’t into that “forgiveness” thing.

There will be some little problems with commenting on this article (besides the usual boneheaded glitches in the Sb commenting system). A while back, we had some serious problems with spamming by the Conservapædia cretins, and I had to put the word “conservapedia” into the filter file. You can’t use that word or your comment will get blocked! That means you won’t be able to link directly to Conservapædia, and that you’ll need to use the Pharyngula-approved spelling of their name, which includes that foreign, European ligature — just type Conservapædia. It also infuriates them, making the little work-around well worth doing.