Answers in Genesis has announced today that they are suing the state of Kentucky for withdrawing a tax rebate. To make their case, they have released a long video featuring Ken Ham getting all the answers he wants from a lawyer wearing a greasy muskrat on his head.
I know what I’ll be reading in July: Go Set a Watchman, the old new novel from Harper Lee.
"Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus," the publisher’s announcement reads. "She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood."
Uh-oh. For a moment there, I thought I was going to have to agree with David Brooks, and then I’d have to retire from the internet and live in a cave and flagellate myself until the stupidity was purged. He has written a column in which he says secularism has to be more than simple rationalism, and the opening had me worried that it was going to sound like my schtick:
As secularism becomes more prominent and self-confident, its spokesmen have more insistently argued that secularism should not be seen as an absence — as a lack of faith — but rather as a positive moral creed. Phil Zuckerman, a Pitzer College sociologist, makes this case as fluidly and pleasurably as anybody in his book, “Living the Secular Life.”
My wife has been considering upgrading to an iPhone, but we’ve been debating which service plan we ought to get — I may have just been influenced by a bit of advertising.
A lot of my youth was spent hanging about in Radio Shack (or the Boeing surplus store, but that’s a different story), and I can’t imagine losing them, but Radio Shack is in talks that may lead to a declaration of bankruptcy, selling half its stores to Sprint, and closing the rest. There will be no more Radio Shack signs, even if the stores persist under new management.
The previous discussion on the varieties of New Atheism had me thinking. We’ve already tried contriving a new label for those of us who think atheism should be broad and dedicated to more than just rejecting deities and intersectional — that was Atheism+. And it just created a focus for the haters. So I have a different idea.
Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion.
I’m not talking about creationism, although it’s exactly the same story. It’s the anti-vax position now.
Jeet Heer has been saying really smart things: read his evaluation of The New Republic‘s legacy, for example (which follows on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ evaluation). He’s an interesting and thoughtful writer.
