This evening’s R&R for the Trophy Wife™ and myself is a lovely cup of tea made with some of the sampler of Australian teas I was generously given by Annie M. this past weekend. We like it. Thanks very much!
Ann Coulter, professional harridan, was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Ottawa tonight. It has been cancelled, citing a large number of protesters (which is not a problem, I would hope people would publicly express their displeasure!), and the possibility of violence (which is a problem, if true). At the very least, some hooligan pulled a fire alarm.
This is not the proper way to handle kooks at all.
She is a vile lunatic, but she should have been given the right to speak, and then her noise should have been ripped apart with good questions, and conversation after the event. It’s pretty much guaranteed that she would have said things that are stupid and outrageous and embarrassed herself — not that she’d notice, since she’s shameless — but now she gets a free pass and a martyr card.
I may be wrong here. If there was violence, or a credible threat of violence, then it was a bad show for free speech. On the other hand, it’s looking like there really wasn’t any serious threat — it was just a loud mob of people peacefully protesting, of which I entirely approve. The ‘violence’ story is beginning to sound like a contrived excuse for Ann Coulter to bolt out of the hot seat.
Although pulling a fire alarm is still very bad form.
The Pope is planning to visit the UK. He shouldn’t be welcomed; he should be turned away at the border as an undesirable fraud. There is a petition to sign to let the government know what people think. They make a good case:
- That the Pope, as a citizen of Europe and the leader of a religion with many adherents in the UK, is of course free to enter and tour our country.
- However, as well as a religious leader, the Pope is a head of state and the state and organisation of which he is head has been responsible for:
- opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS
- promoting segregated education
- denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women
- opposing equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people
- failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation.
- rehabilitating the holocaust denier bishop Richard Williamson and the appeaser of Hitler, the war-time Pope, Pius XII.
- The state of which the Pope is the head has also resisted signing many major human rights treaties and has formed its own treaties (‘concordats’) with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states.
- As a head of state, the Pope is an unsuitable guest of the UK government and should not be accorded the honour and recognition of a state visit to our country.
That first point is far too kind.
Don’t watch this debate on “Does God have a future?” (video here) if your temper runs a bit hot. Sam Harris was excellent, Michael Shermer was pretty good, but their opponents, Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston, were blithering morons. Harris’s early point was spot on: that there is the kind of religion that people actually practice, and then there is the New Age woo of cosmic minds and magic powers gussied up with pseudo-scientific noise, and the latter is a dodge to avoid the former.
And that’s all Chopra did: he babbled about science, of all things, supporting his flaky freakish New Age scam, and Houston was also pointless in a lot of pretentious touchy-feely vapidity.
It just isn’t worth it. I think we’re at the point where no godless rationalist ought to share a stage with Chopra — he’s an ignorant phony who will simply lie and misrepresent science while claiming its mantle. Both Harris and Shermer were solid in standing up to him, but they didn’t go far enough in dismissing his phony credentials and his dishonest schtick.
Man, I must have smacked Michael Ruse really hard. Over and over, he repeats one simple, common phrase that I applied to him — it must have been painfully memorable.
I have been called many things in my time, but I truly believe that “clueless gobshite” is a first. In a way, I am almost proud of this. After all, if you are in your seventieth year and someone feels so strongly about your ideas that they refer to you in this way, then you must be doing something right. Or if not exactly right, you must have ideas that others want to challenge so strongly that they pull out this kind of language.
It’s a very peculiar phenomenon. Here is the post in which I casually referred to Ruse as a “clueless gobshite”; I criticized him and Andrew Brown much more strongly than that one remark would imply, yet it is all that stuck in his head. He repeatedly agonizes over the cruelty of my remark, and acts as if all I had to say about him was one vicious, cutting cliche, and he encapsulates every criticism in that one insult. Further, he hangs himself on a cross and tries to claim he didn’t deserve even that, that his crime was of being too reasonable, of being generous and charitable.
And yet, I am excoriated at every turn. Why? Simply, because I am an “Accommodationist.” I think that some kind of intellectual meeting is possible with religious believers, including Christian religious believers.
Oh, poor Michael Ruse, that gentle-souled and open-minded fellow who merely wants to reach out to his fellow human beings with sympathy—how could he deserve such unkind criticism? I clutch my pearls with one hand, place the other on my brow, and gaze skyward with eyes welling tearfully, and then swoon upon the fainting couch installed handily near my desk. Michael, Michael, Michael…how could we abuse you so?
Actually, with good reason, and my attacks on his flawed character have been even stronger than you’d guess from his limited quoting. What prompted my rudeness wasn’t his pious apologetics for the common man, but that Ruse visited the Creation “Museum”, ignored the lunacy on display (except to express his sympathy with it), and went on to identify the real culprit in this anti-intellectual abomination.
Michael Ruse went to Ken Ham’s house, twirled about among the exhibits showing dinosaurs with saddles, Noah’s ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth, exhortations to accept Biblical literalism, and accusations of malice and dishonesty against every sensible biologists, and what do he and Andrew Brown do? Why, blame the atheists, of course.
That is insane.
What the hell is wrong with Ruse? How can he stand among the lies, with little children being told abominable fabrications, and think then that the pressing problem is people who demand evidence for their beliefs? I was unimpressed with his momentary show of self-serving “open-mindedness”; but I was disgusted with his completely inappropriate neglect of a genuine problem to fling blame at the people who have consistently opposed every facet of that monument to ignorance.
Michael Ruse really needs to carefully read my original complaint, because I’m not giving him a rhetorical slap because he’s too open-minded. I’m kicking him to the curb because ideas matter (something I would think a philosopher would care about), and he espouses a kind of waffling relativism that acts as if young earth creationism and science are equivalently deserving of respect, and that if atheists would just shut up we’d all be living in a happy, loving relationship with Ken Ham.
He’s not just a clueless gobshite. He’s a traitor to reason.
I don’t understand how Texans can bear it, myself — their board of education has made them a laughingstock. I always thought they had some pride down there.
That one panel captures creationist logic perfectly. They’ve battened on global warming as an issue that they believe helps their cause.
“Scientists clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. They made those mistakes in that report, after all.”
Therefore, the earth is 6,000 years old.”
“And Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs.”
For some reason, the Trophy Wife™ said I needed to share this video today. Since the enormous thread has grown again, I figure this is as good a place as any.
It’s not often you hear about testes weighing a ton and pumping out gallons of sperm from David Attenborough.
This is such a sweet story: a little boy willingly hands out cheerful notes and cookies to his neighbors, simply to make them feel good. It’s such a feel-good story that a Christian inspirational site picks up on it and shares Logan Davis’s good news.
“I wanted to do something to brighten our neighbors’ day,” the motivated youngster told the news source. “My parents have always taught me it’s good to be nice to others.”
What none of the stories seem to mention, though, is that it’s a godless family.
Bwahahaahahaa! Our plans are working: we shall conquer the world with our niceness and our habit of raising happy, well-adjusted children! And cookies and flowers!
There is a video game called Gods of War in which you guide your ultraviolent hero, Kratos, through a series of missions that lead to an assault on the Greek gods. You get to kill Zeus! There has been a whole series of these games, apparently, and Penny Arcade hints at a new direction they could take.
One has to wonder what the public response to such a game would be. Killing Zeus is reasonable and uncontroversial (except for generic concerns about violence), but I suspect a swordfight with Jesus would freak a few people out.
I’ve never played this game, but I admit…give me a shot at the Abrahamic gods, and I’d probably buy it.
Some days, I feel like the whole issue of the mention of God on our currency is trivial and stupid, and I really don’t care anymore. And then I see an ‘argument’ like the one in this argument defending keeping “God” on our money, and I realize that…YES, I DO CARE. I care very much that people are so deeply infected with religion that they actually think this is a clever defense.
The word “God” is not comparable to an organization, a building, a philosophy or a religion. God, unlike an establishment of religion, is a concept to atheists and believers alike. The believer perceives God as the living creator of all. The atheist perceives God as an unfortunate fictional concept that causes war. Either way, this country was founded on respect for a higher power than man — an entity generically referred to as God in the English-speaking world. The laws of our land protect our right to revere or disavow God, but they do not protect us from hearing and seeing the term. Believer and non-believer alike make up one nation under God, because the first law of the land protects belief or disbelief in God, the right to talk about God, and the right to make God the highest authority in one’s life.
Because we’re a nation under God — with God as a concept we are free to love as truth or disavow as fiction — we have never been one nation under Washington, Lincoln, Reagan or Obama. We are a nation that elevates God — whatever God means — above any human authority because we are a nation that elevates an individual’s choices above the agendas of authorities.
Get that? Believers like God, atheists think god is an “unfortunate fictional concept”, but either way, we have respect for a higher power. And because we are free to disbelieve in God, it is symbolic of our freedom to honor God. His god. That Abrahamic tyrant.
If they’re all interchangeable and we just need to honor a generic concept, then why not have alternating mintings where “God” is interchanged with “Allah” and “Cthulhu” and “Satan” and “Mammon” and whatever? It shouldn’t bother this author. After all, he suggests we just use our imaginations to insert whatever meaning we want.
When annoyed by currency, atheists have the option of interpreting “in God we trust” as “in a fictional concept we trust” for the sake of limited government.
I don’t care what you think of the issue, but you should vote for reason and against sloppy supernaturalist lunacy.
Should “God” be stricken from U.S. currency and the Pledge of Allegiance?
Yes, lose the references to God
43%
No, keep God on currency and in the Pledge
53%
I don’t know
0%
I don’t care
4%
If it helps, you can try interpreting “Should ‘God’ be stricken from U.S. currency and the Pledge of Allegiance?” as “Should gibbering lunatics like Wayne Laugesen be stricken from the editorial pages of the Colorado Springs Gazette?” For the sake of liberty, freedom, and justice for all. Amen.
