Wow—Liberty University is hiring. They’ve got 27 openings for new faculty right now, so if you’re in the market, they might be tempting. The first three on the list are…

Biology: Two positions. Rank open. Ph.D. and compatibility with a young-earth creationist philosophy required. 1) Human anatomy and physiology, 2) undergraduate genetics. Supervision of undergraduate research expected. Contact Dr. Paul Sattler.

Center for Creation Studies: Rank open. Ph.D. and experience in the origins controversy from a young earth creation perspective required. Faculty will teach the required course in creation as well as develop and/or teach in their area of science expertise. Ability to teach courses in astronomy, anatomy and physiology, or other biology courses preferred. Contact Dr. David DeWitt.

Hmmm. Makes the possibility much less attractive, doesn’t it? I suppose if you were desperate enough for a job that you’d be willing to rip out your integrity, throw it in a cesspit, and let a chain of smarmy evangelical cretins squat over it, you might be willing to sign on.

I have to disagree with Red State Rabble and his announcement of the demise of Intelligent Design. We’re seeing signs of a shifting of strategies, the fading of a few personalities, and a little confusion on the part of our enemies, but it is a colossal mistake to be predicting their end at this time. Intelligent Design was nothing but the mask worn by one of the blank faces of ignorant creationism, and all we’ve accomplished with victories like the Dover trial is to take a slap at the façade. We’ve made them briefly recoil, and at best what we can expect is a brief respite while they try to change slogans. Nothing has happened to weaken the foundations of creationism.

I guarantee you that there have been meetings at the Discovery Institute where they try to strategize and rethink how to apply their resources and work their way around the temporary setback of the Dover decision. If nothing else, they’ll evaporate away, and the same people will re-emerge in a ‘new’ and ‘different’ think-tank, shedding bad baggage and expressing a new version of the same old story. Is there one person who changed their mind about Intelligent Design because of a court case? Take a look at the ID blogs, and you don’t find the proponents shrugging their shoulders and saying, “well, I guess we were wrong after all”…they’re going to try re-branding and re-tooling and they’re going to be peddling the same old piss in new bottles.

The supporting base is untouched. Megachurches are growing—and they aren’t preaching skepticism and the appropriate evaluation of the evidence. Talk to your average small-town good old boy, and they won’t have even heard of Dover or Behe or Dawkins or Johnson or Miller…but they sure as hell know they didn’t come from no monkey. There has been no dramatic change in our schools, so that they are now proudly teaching solid, uncensored biology; teachers still know that if they mention the scary “e” word, there will be parents who come down hard on them, and administrators know that if they don’t kowtow to the fundies, they’ll yank their kids out of school and hurt their funding base.

I see little, hopeful touches now and then. But no one takes on the root of the problem.

Read Tristero and wake up to what we face.

The megachurches thus become part church, part shopping mall and part country club. One in Tacoma, Washington, even has its own Starbucks. Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston has a McDonald’s on its 111 acres. The Prestonwood Baptist Church, near Dallas, boasts 15 baseball fields, a Fifties-style diner and a food court. New Birth Baptist Church, also in Texas, offers web links to “antiques”, “dining” and “health and fitness”.

In addition to the megachurches, there are 31 “gigachurches” in the US, which are defined as those that at least 10,000 people attend every Sunday; 73 per cent of all these are in Bush-Cheney territory in the South or West. Some offer bookstores and health clubs on their premises. The Lakewood Church, yet another in Houston, describes itself as a “non-denominational charismatic church” and has a congregation of 25,000 every Sunday. It says it will soon have more than 30,000 people attending the remodelled, $73m former “Compaq Centre” that was previously home to the Houston Rockets, a basketball team.

What the opposition has been doing is building institutions. They’ve been consolidating huge pieces of the social structure and making them their own. Imagine living in a town where, if you want to buy a cup of coffee or get a hamburger, you have to go to a church. We’re becoming Walmartized and Christianified—you are a commodity to destructive, stupefying, self-sustaining cultural monopoly. You want to oppose that by crying to the courts? Go ahead. A little defiance from on high just mobilizes and infuriates them. You aren’t touching them where it hurts, at the community and belief level. You aren’t building your own institutions to oppose them.

Red State Rabble is right, that some of the trappings of the Intelligent Design excrescence are showing signs of going off the rails…but Uncommon Descent and Intelligent Design News and Views and the Discovery Institute (and Pharyngula and The Panda’s Thumb, for that matter) are irrelevant, superficial phenomena. What counts is that millions of people sit quietly watching the stupidity grow, and millions more actively contribute to it.

I haven’t seen any reliable sign that the idiotification of America is receding, or even slowing down. I do see signs that some of us are trying to reassure ourselves that the worst has passed, and I think that’s a dangerous delusion.

In the ongoing Hovind trial, no new revelations except for more details about how rich the creationist con artist and tax evader is. He makes $50,000/year in speaking fees, and with his wife, sells $1.8 million/year in “Christian merchandise” (tell me, you devout and faithful believers who also read Pharyngula: do those two words in conjunction make you cringe a little bit, deep down?).

They still deny that they earn salaries, and claim that they have no income at all.

A reader in Canada just let me know that CBC Radio 1 will broadcast a program on creationist museum tours sometime this morning (between 9:30 and 10…the timezone is unclear). I won’t be able to listen because I’m going to be lecturing the freshmen on the perfidies of creationism, so if anyone catches it, let us know how it goes.

After a week long hiatus, the Hovind trial continues in Florida. This week, we learn about the virtues of Christian charity.

Hovind, a tax protester, makes a substantial amount of money. But he believes he and his employees work for God, are paid by God and, therefore, aren’t subject to taxation.

Schneider testified this morning that Jo Hovind requested financial help for her bills from Baptist Health Care, claiming that she had no income.

Schneider also said the Hovinds wrote checks to their children from their Christian Science Evangelism account. They also withdrew money from that account for cashier’s checks.

On one day, a $9,000 check was withdrawn for their son, Eric. That same day, another $9,000 check was withdrawn for Eric’s wife, Tanya.

So they’re raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, they just bunny-hop down to the bank and withdraw sub-$10,000 chunks of cash at will, and they have to beg Baptist Health Care for financial assistance? There must be a few poor Baptists somewhere who are struggling to meet their medical bills who are outraged about that.

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Meanwhile, we can’t forget that other infamous creationist, Ken Ham. He isn’t in financial trouble (far from it; I suspect he’s doing research on squeezing camels through needle eyes right now), but he’s facing another, somewhat less critical problem to his fleecing-the-rubes operation: Lucy is coming to town.

Associated Press news reports announcing Lucy’s visit state as fact that the fossilized remains are between three and four million years old and that “debate” still rages about how close an ancestor to man Lucy would be. But Ken Ham, president of the biblical creationist group Answers in Genesis, says those reports are only the beginning of Lucy’s anti-creationism tour.

“When I see that they’re bringing the most famous of the supposed ‘human ancestor’ fossils to America, and they’re going to feature it across America, I can see this is a big push for evolution,” Ham observes.

Oh, no! How dare those wicked evilutionists confont Americans with <oooh!> EVIDENCE <gasp>!! I can see how he’d be unhappy that our museums would be confronting creationist lies with the actual data—showing the evidence is making a “big push for evolution”.

The NY Times is reporting that Ohio scientists are nearly unanimous in mobilizing for the school board election there—and they aren’t on the side of creationists like Deborah Owens Fink. It’s interesting that we’re seeing such activism from scientists; the response from the creationists is also enlightening.

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was “laughable.”

Note the next bit; the reporter, Cornelia Dean, is one of the better science people at the Times, and this kind of unambiguous statement about the status of evolutionary theory is exactly what the media ought to be saying more often.

Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. In recent years, with creationist challenges to the teaching of evolution erupting in school districts around the country, groups like the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent scientific organization, have repeatedly made this point.

But the academy’s opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as “a group of so-called scientists.”

Owens Fink is so wrong on every count that you’d think she ought to be mortified at having her ignorance so boldly displayed in the pages of a major newspaper; I suspect her arrogance is great enough that she’ll be oblivious. There certainly is a consensus in the scientific community favoring evolution. You could argue that a consensus is not a guarantor of truth, but Owens Fink is simply closing her eyes and denying what the practitioners of science, including a majority of the scientists in her own state, are saying.

As for calling the NAS “a group of so-called scientists.”…how clueless can she be? The NAS is the assembly of the elite of American science; admission is selective and only the most prestigious, high-powered big-wigs of the scientific establishment get in. It may be a bit stodgy and conservative, but one thing it is not is a bunch of fake scientists from the fringe—it’s kind of the anti-Discovery Institute. Dismissing it is an amazingly foolish thing for a professor of marketing to do.

Look who’s coming to campaign for Michele Bachmann: the home school kids of Patrick Henry College and Generation Joshua.

Abram Olmstead- Upperclassman, Patrick Henry College
Meredith Schultz- Student, Patrick Henry College
Adrienne Cumbus- Upperclassman, Patrick Henry College
Ioanna Lily Cornett- Student, Patrick Henry College
Nathan Martin- Student, Patrick Henry College

We’ve also got a team of young evangelicals on their way to help out Mark Kennedy. Doesn’t it just make your heart do a little happy pit-a-pat dance?

There is a Kansas connection here: one of their leaders is Ned Ryun, son of the odious Kansas politician. I notice that one of the “resources” the site touts is Answers in Genesis—basically, we’ve got a gang of pathetic creationist conservatives being exported by Kansans to the state of Minnesota to work to make our state as screwed up as theirs. Thanks, Kansas!

Remember those silly Chuck Norris Facts? Ever wonder what Chuck Norris thinks of them (well, actually, I didn’t…so don’t feel bad if you didn’t care)? It’s sad to see that we had to find out, since all we learn is that Norris is as dumb as a brick.

Chuck Norris actually responds to the jokes—in an article on World Nut Daily, of all places. Here’s one example.

Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”
It’s funny. It’s cute. But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.
We are not creations of random chance. We are not accidents. There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me. We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures.

By the way, without him, I don’t have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things – and so can you.

Well. I guess that’ll teach me…I learned otherwise by reading the work of scholars and scientists, when I should have been paying more attention to men whose reputation is built on their ability to kick people in the face. Since Chuck Norris disagrees with all those “facts” that consist of hyperbolic exaggerations of his machismo, I think we need to start accumulating a new list of more accurate Chuck Norris Facts. Here, I’ll start.

• Chuck Norris’s skull is so dense, the tidal effects from his cranium kill you before his head-butt hits you.

• Chuck Norris sneers at neurologists—it takes a team of geologists to appreciate the pace of his thoughts.

• When Chuck Norris furrows his brow, he’s not thinking—he’s knuckling his third fist.

Does anyone else find it ironic that a spokesman for a religion of love is a muscleman who beats people up in movies? What next…will Rambo speak out for Jesus?