I was sent this very exciting piece of promotional art. I don’t know why they didn’t use it — it captures the movie perfectly.

By the way, the quote from me is something I said…it’s just taken a teeny-tiny bit out of context.

We have a new word added to the English language in honor of the teachings of people like Warren: saddlebacking. Share it and use it!

Some of you were very disappointed that this amusing monolog by Tim Minchin was yanked off of youtube shortly after I mentioned it. Hey, it’s back, in an official release by Minchin himself!

The New Zealand department of conservation maintains a network of huts in the backcountry — these are little shelters with a radio for emergency calls and a mattress so hikers can wait out a spell of bad weather. It’s all very sensible. Until the evangelicals discovered them. Now there’s a missionary campaign to put a bible in every one of them, too, since, as the founder of this plan says, “I realised then this was a captive audience.”

I think I’m going to have to move to New Zealand now. The response by hikers to this effort is classic pragmatism. They think it is a fine idea.

“Given the option of a ropey old Reader’s Digest I would rather use a page from a Bible to start a fire.”

Notice how polite he was to avoid mentioning the other use in which the tissue-thin pages of the bible are superior to the thick glossy sheets of Reader’s Digest.

Oh, man, this gets so much wrong. Sentient life did not evolve 600 million years ago; that was roughly the time that true multicellularity arose. Unless you consider something spongelike to be sentient, it doesn’t work.

Intelligent life did not first evolve 2.5 million years ago. Animal intelligence is something that has to be measured on a continuum. Molluscs are intelligent. It’s just not the same kind or degree of intelligence that tool-using humans have.

Intelligent life hasn’t evolved in Texas yet.

It’s very short. It only has to cover 6000 years to describe all of creation.