I’m really beginning to like these satanists

A Florida county planned to allow religious groups to hand out Bibles in public schools. Atheists planned to take advantage of the required religious freedom to hand out secular material as well, and the school board was unfazed — yeah, go ahead, you can send out your tepid separation of church and state pamphlet while we give ’em a whole book of lurid sex and violence and gay stonings and babies smashed against walls.

But then the satanists offered to send out Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a little coloring book, and…

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Frauds through and through

Perhaps you’ve heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo’s challenge of $10,000 to “prove evolution”; Ray Comfort’s challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don’t try: they’ve loaded the dice in every case.

Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You’d think he’d be wallowing in the cash — £500 — that he’d won, but you don’t know denialists. They never change.

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If only they understood what free speech is…

Roy Edroso and Amanda Marcotte are discussing this remarkable example of right-wing false equivalence.

Indeed, the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities’ revoking of appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.

OMG! Condoleeza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were shot and killed? Then yes, we definitely should march in opposition to that criminal outrage…oh. They were just turned away from speaking engagements? Sorry, that isn’t the same thing at all.

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Conservative values: opportunism and cowardice

At least someone has found a silver lining to the Charlie Hebdo murders: conservatives have used it to leverage censorship of a photo they don’t like.

After leaving the highly offensive photo titled “Piss Christ” posted for 26 years — despite decades of public Christian outcry over the image panned as art — The Associated Press finally removed the controversial and denigrating image, but only after a journalist called out its double standard brought to light when it touted its policy of not publishing potentially offensive Charlie Hebdo satirical cartoons of Muhammad, such as the ones that incited the deadly Paris attack.

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Why do we die?

I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina’s Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God. It’s good! This book is the sort of thing atheism needs more of: an acknowledgment that the phenomena most important to human beings can be addressed effectively without imagining fantastic supernatural creatures. Atheists have this reputation of being nerds all wrapped up in abstract concepts and making arguments against the superstitious props that people claim to find useful in day-to-day life, and it’s good that some of us make the effort to show that no, we do deal with real-world concerns, and no, your myth is actually a terribly ineffective way of handling that problem.

So I guess it’s not surprising that my strategy for coping with death isn’t in Greta’s book. I take a developmental and evolutionary view of death.

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You’re putting who in charge of science?

Further evidence that the American political system is broken: Ted Cruz has been made chair of the committee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness (one of the things in that list of three does not belong…and why is “Space”, a small subset of science’s compass, given such a prominent spot?). Marco Rubio is chair of the subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard (another hodge-podge!). This is as insane as putting James Inhofe in charge of environmental policy.

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