I’m sure Ken Ham is sincere in his faith…

…and that’s exactly why he is a slimy ass-pimple, a child-abusing freak.

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

2300 children. 2300 young minds poisoned. Nothing new, I know, and I should just get used to it.

But I can’t.

And here’s how Ken Ham gets away with spreading anti-intellectual idiocy.

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

“God.” Once again, I’m going to give good, liberal progressive Christians the vapors and point out that there is the destroyer, the idea that ruins young minds and corrupts education: god. Ham has god on the brain, and he exploits other people who have god on the brain to give him millions of dollars so he can run around the country and put god on the brain of the next generation.

I know. Many of you support science, and you carefully set aside your religious biases when assessing ideas about the world—you’ve managed to find means to cope with this infectious lie. That doesn’t change the ugly fact that it is a lie, a crippling corruption, and that many people don’t even try to sequester their superstitions and cultivate their rational side.

When I hear Christians make excuses for their religion, it’s like hearing smallpox survivors praising their scars. “It didn’t kill me, and these poxy marks add character to my face! Those deadly cases have nothing to do with my own delightful disease.”

So we do nothing. We let the infection simmer along, encouraging our children to get exposed to it, praising it, howling in anger at those who dare to say the obvious and point out that it’s a poison, a mind-killer, vacuous noise and evil nonsense. We let the absurdity flourish.

We know exactly where the vileness grows, in the cesspool of religion, yet we veer away from confronting the source, draining the contagion, eliminating the vector of ignorance.

We encourage it to thrive and it leads to well-meaning parents pressuring their impressionable kids into gulping down the ignorance-laced koolaid.

Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham’s presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that’s how it could happen,” she said.

Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham’s mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

I’m so sorry, Emily.

Ben Watson wasn’t quite as confident. His father, a pastor in Staten Island, N.Y., had let him skip a day of second grade to attend. Ben went to public school, the Rev. Dave Watson explained, “and I thought it would be good for him to get a different perspective” for an upcoming project on Tyrannosaurus rex.

“You going to put in your report that dinosaurs are millions of years old?” Watson, 46, asked his son.

“No…. ” Ben said. He hesitated. “But that’s what my book says…. “

“It’s a lot to think about,” his dad reassured him. “We’ll do more research.”

I’m sorry, Ben.

We let you all down.

That godly perspective

I haven’t mentioned the Clergy Letter Project or Evolution Sunday events before. They’re nice ideas—it’s an effort to get clergy to acknowledge good science, and encourage discussions about the subject on Darwin’s birthday, this Sunday—but I have to admit it’s rather orthogonal to my point of view. While I appreciate the sentiment and think it’s a positive step on the road to reason, I prefer to cut to the chase and jettison all the old religious baggage altogether.

I may have to take a more positive view towards it, though, since I ran across this weird wingnut site (well, maybe not too weird…he fits in well with a lot of Christians.) The author is greatly incensed at the temerity of these radical pastors.

Beginning with the Bible, it is simply impossible to arrive at evolution.

I have to agree with him on that. I’d counter it by noting that beginning with the world, evolution is simply inevitable and inescapable.

These 10,200 pastors arrogantly or ignorantly deviate from Christian tradition and orthodoxy by claiming their opinions trump the thousands of years of tradition and the plain reading of the Bible. The relativistic language, “forms of truth,” confirms that this is an appeal to pastors duped by the cultural influence of tolerance.

Heh. I’ve rarely seen anyone admit that they oppose tolerance, but there you go.

On the 197th anniversary of the birthday of Charles Darwin (February 12), 412 churches in 49 states will celebrate “Evolution Sunday.” Created in the imagination of University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh professor Michael Zimmerman, “Evolution Sunday” celebrates the “harmony of evolutionary science and faith”. Dismissing the Biblical accounts of creation as “beloved stories found in the Bible,” and as, “a different order than scientific truth,” Zimmerman and these churches proclaim that when science contradict the Bible, science wins.

Why, yes. Yes it does. The physical world does seem to trump religious delusions most effectively, doesn’t it?

After reading that twisted rant, I find myself viewing Zimmerman’s project much more charitably.

A good day to get a day pass

There are several items of note at Salon today, so if you don’t subscribe, watch the little commercial, you’ll get some good bang for the buck.

Reich gets reamed

My response to this odious essay by Dale Reich was, well, terse. He wrote a very silly editorial in which he claimed to have doffed the mantle of his faith to see what the life of an atheist was like, and found it empty and hateful…and his conclusion was to insist that we atheists need to start living up to our philosophy and be mean and brutal and cruel.

The heartening thing is that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where it was published, now has an editorial in reply and a set of letters from readers that unanimously condemn Reich’s ignorance. It’s good to see reason winning a popularity contest.

Dawkins for Pope

By Neddie Jingo! This is my ideal messenger:

I’ve banged on about this before, and others have said it as well: in a Breughel landscape of insanity, bad faith, desperately knotted thinking and crazed cupidity, Dawkins shines out of the darkness like a Bodhisattva, a pillar of mental health in a vortex of madness.

In the current climate of deadly foolish nonsense, I don’t know why we consider any kind of religiosity a virtue in any endeavor, let alone science.

Link to me, or the Bible gets it!

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Alright, people, I’m gonna get tough. You know what I want, and you’d better give it to me.

I’ve got a bible here, and a 44oz. Diet Coke…lots of liquid containing a diuretic, to boot. In about an hour, I figure my bladder is going to be pretty full. You know what could happen.

I don’t need information from you, and I sure don’t want your money. This is a weblog, and the currency here in these parts is the link, the trackback, the comment. Fork ’em over, or I’m taking this Bible down the hall. You know I’d do it. I’m a godless atheist—I don’t think your Bible means doodley-squat.

Intimidated yet?

I’ve also got some razor blades here. I don’t have to do it all at once—I could slice out bits piecemeal and prolong the agony. I don’t care for Genesis in particular, and Revelation is just crazy. Maybe I’ll start with those.

But hey, maybe it’ll hurt you more if I soak Psalms or the Sermon on the Mount with my heretical urine. Decisions, decisions. Shall I surprise you?

Come to think of it, I feel the need to go right now. Maybe I’ll take this book with me to the bathroom to read. Yeah, that’s it. I sure hope I don’t have an “accident” in there!

I’m going to check back in an hour. There better be some good linkage goin’ on here, or I might just let a drop fall on “Jesus wept.” You heard me. Get going. Type.

Update: I don’t think you people care enough. A few comments, a few trackbacks, and I don’t think most of the people doing it are particularly devout. I’m going to hold off a little longer, but I’m going to stash the Bible in the bathroom in case the whim strikes me in the middle of the night.

And I had another thought…if my sacrilegious urine is not scary enough, there’s a cat box downstairs. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.

It’s Day 2 of the Bible Hostage Watch. It’s the Sabbath, and I’ve just put a big pot of coffee on.

I want you all to know I’ve got the Bible sandwiched between a copy of Jacoby’s Freethinkers and Darwin’s Origin. I’m waiting for the Stockholm Effect to kick in.

Before there James Frey made the news, there was me. The article above was posted on June 4, and by June 7 I was a broken man, my charade exposed. My confession is duplicated below.

I have a terrible confession to make. I lied. This whole thing was just a desperate plea for attention. Here’s the truth:

  • It was a 16oz bottle of diet Cherry Coke.
  • I made no effort to build up a good volume of urine; when I felt the urge, I’d just walk down the hall to the bathroom and go.
  • While I have no particular reverence for the Bible, I’m an academic—I love books. I get the heebie-jeebies at the thought of defacing any book.
  • I don’t respect the Bible, the Koran, Dianetics, the Torah, or the Book of Mormon as holy texts, but I’d get pee-shy about destroying any of them just because they are books. Even if they are worthless piles of pulp.
  • The really big lie: there was no Bible. I don’t own one. I was getting worried there when commenters started pressing me for details on what edition I had, because I didn’t have a clue what to say.

I know what this confession puts me at risk for: I expect I’m going to have to fight off all the movie deals, and those Big City Newspapers are going to be pestering me with job offers. The hassle will be worth it, though, if only it will get rid of those Army recruiters. They keep pounding on my door, telling me I’ve got the complete lack of scruples they need for some jobs in exotic foreign lands, and they promise I’d never have to confront anyone who might fight back—just frightened men and women and kids and old people in chains. They’re making me so nauseous that I’m willing to admit to being a big fat lying liar who lies in order to get them to go away.

By the way, since I made that post two people have sent me Bibles, so now I do have copies to deface…if I could.

Why should Catholicism be a prerequisite for speaking science?

I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I’d be subscribing even if they weren’t sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there’s a lot of the content available online.

Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney’s article on Learning to speak science. It’s good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but…

[Read more…]

One more time

Wow, but this post has inspired so many misconceptions.

I do not think Muslims should be insulated from satire. I do not think there is parity between a cartoonist drawing a picture someone doesn’t like and a Muslim calling for the execution of the cartoonist. I am not on the Muslim’s side here, and I am uncompromising in condemning rioting and destruction as criminal.

I do think religion needs to be thoroughly criticized—you haven’t been reading Pharyngula for long if you think otherwise, and I thought I’d been quite careful to spell out that religion was a hate-amplifier in this situation—and I do think that Islam in particular needs to be taken down a peg or two (I only hesitate to say that because too many of our home-grown Christians would interpret it as approval for their sanctimony). I think some of those crowd photos show a deeply evil mindset at work.

But here’s the thing, that liberal-lefty perspective: those Muslims are people. You know, human beings with needs and desires and families and aspirations, etc. We have to live with them, unless you’re calling for their extermination or banishment (and no, we aren’t. I hope.) They’ve got this horrible, evil idea of religion stuck in their heads, and the long-term solution is to educate them and imbed more secular ideals in their communities—my objection is that I don’t see that the Danish newspaper was trying to do that. A majority poking a minority with a sharp stick is not a confrontation or an argument. It’s just being mean and petty. It’s yet another kick when they’re down to a group of people who are already marginalized.

I’d be curious to know what solutions are being planned in Europe. Maybe someone who thinks a sign that says “Butcher those who mock Islam” is irredeemable and ought to be kicked out of the country, but I suspect, optimistically, that most of the Muslims in Denmark aren’t quite that far gone; are there any constructive ideas to weaken the grip of religious foolishness on immigrant populations? Or is it all going to be a process of clumsily beating them down with simple force? Maybe some of the Danish readers here can tell us what is going to be done (oh, and if the solution is to prohibit the mockery of religion by newspapers, I’m doubly against that: it violates free speech, and it doesn’t address the real source of the conflict at all.)

I’m all for ripping into religion with wild abandon. I just think it’s obvious, though, that there is another dimension to this problem than simply the god business, and too many of us are ignoring the human/social issue to blame only a convenient religious handle on the riots.

Pox-ridden houses

I haven’t commented on those Muslim cartoons so far. I’m conflicted.

Why, you might ask? It’s a clear-cut case of religious insanity, exactly the sort of thing I ought to relish wagging an arrogantly atheistical finger at. And of course I will, in just a moment…but the difficult part is that there are actually at least two issues here, and religion is only one of them.

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

I’ve seen the cartoons, and they are crude and uninteresting—they are more about perpetuating stereotypes of Muslims as bomb-throwing terrorists than seriously illuminating a problem. They lack artistic or social or even comedic merit, and are only presented as an insult to inflame a poor minority. I don’t have any sympathy for a newspaper carrying out an exercise in pointless provocation.

So on the one hand I see a social problem being mocked, but on the other—and here comes the smug godless finger-wagging—I see a foolish superstition used as a prod to mock people, and a people so muddled by the phony blandishments of religion that they scream “Blasphemy!” and falsely pin the problem on a ridiculous insult to a non-existent god, rather than on the affront to their dignity as human beings and citizens. Religion in this case has accomplished two things, neither one productive: it’s distracted people away from the real problems, which have nothing at all to do with the camera-shy nature of their imaginary deity, and it’s also amplified the hatred.

It also doesn’t help that their riots are confirming the caricatures rather than opposing them. Once again, religiosity turns people into mindless frenzied zombies, and once again it interferes with progress.

Somehow, people are assuming from this that I’m “sympathetic to Islam”. How, I don’t know; I thought I’d always been quite clear in my contempt for all religion, and I thought the last two paragraphs above were plain enough. I am sympathetic to the problem of being a minority immigrant; that’s one issue that is being ignored too much. As I said, the real problem is being exacerbated by bad religion that amplifies the hate.

I really don’t think a Muslim would find me to be a friend to their religion.