Islamists have brain leeches!

Susan Blackmore always lectures entertainingly — really, if you get a chance to hear her, you should — so I can guess how surprised she was when students claimed offense and walked out on her talk. They were religiously indoctrinated, and simply shut down their brains when the word “evolution” came up, and when she started presenting rational and secular explanations for the existence of religion, just forget it — there were a lot of students who thought you could only quote the Bible and Koran with unstinting reverence, accepting their divine claims at face value.

It is sad to see young people with such closed minds.

But one comment jumped out at me — it was so familiar.

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Answers in Genesis would rather you didn’t talk about this

They’ve been awarded an $18 million tax break. AiG will, as usual, declare that they weren’t actually given any money directly, but instead got a deal with the state that says they won’t have to pay as much. Because, as we all know, having to pay less of your revenues to cover the costs of infrastructure and maintenance and subsidized transport — you know, like all those roads two thirds of the country will be driving on to get to their over-priced carnie show — isn’t actually a benefit. It’s just what a god-fearing Kentucky ought to do.

But that’s not what they’d like you to avoid bringing up. No, it’s that in their state-subsidized operation, which makes them subject to state and federal hiring laws, they have a peculiar hiring requirement: they demand that all employees swear to abide by their statement of faith. That statement requires that all employees believe:

The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.

Oops. They just violated a few equal opportunity laws.

They also insist that:

All human life is sacred and begins at conception (defined as the moment of fertilization). The unborn child is a living human being, created in the image of God, and must be respected and protected both before and after birth. The abortion of an unborn child or the active taking of human life through euthanasia constitutes a violation of the sanctity of human life, and is a crime against God and man.

And of course there are a whole lot of religious requirements that only fit Christians. And not just any Christian: a very narrow, very specific version of Christianity that’s going to include only fundamentalist Protestants with a literalist interpretation of the Bible.

So there will be no Jews, gay men, lesbians, transgender men or women (or even individuals with gender dysphoria), Muslims, pro-choice citizens, Seventh Day Adventists, Scientologists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Buddhists, agnostics, pantheists, feminists, Sikhs, Quakers, or atheists employed at the Creation “Museum”. Also no honest physicists, geologists, or biologists. Karen Armstrong couldn’t get a job there, and neither could Neil deGrasse Tyson or Ken Miller. Me, either…and here I was pinin’ for an opportunity to move to the lovely Cincinnati area and get a prestigious job helping the public learn about science. Hecky darn.

But they don’t want anyone to talk about that. They’re going to nominally claim to follow state and federal guidelines, while somehow, magically, without any discrimination on their part, all the employees working as grounds crew, security, advertising, zip line guides, or accountants will just happen to all be conservative heterosexual attendees of Ken Ham’s favorite local churches.

And that may be a fair description of their applicant pool, since they’re clearly setting up a hostile work environment for anyone who doesn’t conform.

Whoa, Fark achieves a glimmering of enlightenment

They’ve just announced a new moderation guideline.

Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we’d all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.

We’ve actually been tightening up moderation style along these lines for awhile now, but as of today, the FArQ will be updated with new rules reminding you all that we don’t want to be the He Man Woman Hater’s Club.  This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary.

There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL’s "Jane, you ignorant slut" to Blazing Saddles’ multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another.

On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it’s impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point. The mods try to be reasonable, and context often matters. We will try and determine what you meant, but that’s not always a pass. If your post can be taken one of two ways, and one of those ways can be interpreted as misogynistic, the mods may delete it — even if that wasn’t your intent.

Things that aren’t acceptable:

– Rape jokes

– Calling women as a group "whores" or "sluts" or similar demeaning terminology

– Jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it

Obviously, these are just a few examples and shouldn’t be taken as the full gospel, but to give you a few examples of what will always be over the line. Trying to anticipate every situation and every conversation in every thread would be ridiculous, so consider these guidelines and post accordingly.  I recommend that when encountering grey areas, instead of trying to figure out where the actual line is, the best strategy would be to stay out of the grey area entirely.

As one of the folks who picks headlines, I can also say with some certainty that we’re not going to get everything right all the time on our end either.  I’ve been trying to keep an eye toward these guidelines for a couple months now and I still make mistakes and/or miss problem taglines completely.  We’re trying to make the Fark community a better place, and hopefully this will be a few steps in the right direction.

Cue blithering ninnies whining about censorship; sad pitiful people who want to complain about about how men are discriminated against, line up over there; everyone who decides they’ll never read Fark again…well, that’s fine, just go away. But I think it is a nice step in the right direction, and it’s good to acknowledge it.

Now, about Reddit…

Christians, stop doing this

It makes you look very, very stupid. Kevin Sorbo doesn’t understand why atheists might be angry.

“I’m a Christian myself and had to play an atheist. I see the anger of these (atheist) guys on TV and it’s like ‘wow, how do you get so angry at something you don’t believe in?”  Sorbo said.

Guy, it’s pretty simple. We’re not angry at any gods. We know they don’t exist.

We’re angry with you.

If I had an address, I’d send him a copy of Greta Christina’s book. I wouldn’t do that for every stupid Christian (there are so many it would be a total transfer of every penny of my income to Greta), but my kids were huge fans of Hercules, so I’d be willing to do that for him.

At least Xena seems to have left god behind.

18 August 1976

“Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.”

My apologies, William Goldman, but that is pure bunkum. Either a lot of kisses deserve the assessment, or I’m the most fortunate person in the world to have seized the title of holding all five.

I remember the 18th of August, 1976 vividly. It was a Wednesday. I was 19, which is a damn fine age to be. I was spending my summer saving up money for college, doing stoop labor at a nursery, spending my days weeding and hauling plant pots and clambering about on greenhouse frames nailing down sheets of plastic. My neck and ears were red — I wore a hat, but even the Pacific Northwest sun will scorch you on those days when you aren’t slogging about in the rain. I wasn’t making much money — minimum wage — but in those days, college was a bit more affordable, so I’d get by.

That doesn’t sound like a glorious summer, I know, but at the same time I’d started dating a girl. Really, when you’re 19, having a girlfriend puts a glowing rosy patina on everything (hmmm…it even helps when you’re 57.) We’d both done some traveling fresh out of high school, and I’d called her up back in June when we’d both come back to our home town, and asked her out on a date, and then we started going out every week, and then more often than once a week. It was a Wednesday, you know. I got off work, cleaned up, and borrowed my father’s station wagon to go out to the pizza parlor.

That’s what we’d do. We’d get together, we’d talk. We’d go places, and talk. She was smart and funny and interesting, and we had good times together. To explain this next bit, though, you have to understand that I have no illusions that this was a simpler, more genteel time, with ladies acting like ladies and gentlemen like gentlemen — it was the 70s. It was a loud, raucous, garish decade, and casual sex was common. But I was a shy nerd with absolutely no self-confidence at all, and she was a serious young woman working towards an academic career.

So on that warm August Wednesday, I was working up my courage to ask for a goodnight kiss.

Stop laughing.

No, really, stop. We were both comfortable with a friendly relationship, you know, and I liked her.

So we’d only been dating for 2½ months, and I didn’t want to be too pushy and risk ruining a good thing for a kiss.

You’re laughing again.

So there we were, at about 11 at night, and I’d walked her to the door of her parents’ apartment, and as she was going inside, I nervously delivered my corny and clumsy line: “I was hoping to say goodnight more properly.”

She laughed…and she started to raise her arm, as if she was going to give me a goodnight handshake, which would have been hilarious and soul-crushing. Then she seemed to think better of it, smiled mischievously, and stepped forward and planted a good one right on my lips. And then she whirled about and went inside.

It was glorious. Thirty eight years ago and I still remember it, and I know I’ll remember it on my deathbed someday.

What made it especially wonderful was the unmistakeable consent — she wanted to kiss me. And afterwards, she looked…happy. I felt like maybe I wasn’t so awful after all, and that maybe someone in the world could actually like me. Every human being needs that, and it’s in our power to give it to others, so I don’t think it’s rare. Maybe it’s more uncommon than it should be, but I would hope everyone can feel it sometime in their life.

It also gives you magic powers. I somehow floated home, and the old station wagon drove itself back to the garage, I think.