The Muslims have entered the fray now —
one crazy lawyer, Anjem Choudary, is calling Christmas evil. How can we godless top that?

The very concept of Christmas contradicts and conflicts with the foundation of Islam. Every Muslim has a responsibility to protect his family from the misguidance of Christmas, because its observance will lead to hellfire. Protect your Paradise from being taken away – protect yourself and your family from Christmas.

Have no fear. We can say something much, much worse. Here’s an elementary school teacher who told her class that Santa wasn’t real. The reaction from the parents is amusing.

My lad was nearly in tears and so was everyone else in the class – especially as it was so close to Christmas. I thought it was wrong.

He was distraught about it. He’s only seven-years-old and it’s part of the magic of Christmas to him.

We told him that she did not believe in Father Christmas because of her religion and he’s fine now.

I found it shocking. She has done it maliciously.

So, seven years old … I wonder how many of them actually bought that Santa nonsense at all? Looks like some smart-aleck kids saw a ploy to disrupt class, make a teacher suffer, and get extra-special sympathy from their parents.

Bill O’Reilly makes one of his trademark screeds against the War on Christmas, but it doesn’t quite have the effect he intended, I think. He’s very cranky about the atheist sign in the capitol of Washington state, which is Olympia, so he rants against Seattle. I’m sure it makes sense in Billo World.

Seattle now rivals San Francisco for secular-progressive nuttiness. The city fathers are allowing public nakedness in city parks, nude bike riding, and in Fremont, a Seattle suburb, they actually put up a statue honoring Lenin, the father of communism.

What’s wrong with nudity? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea, especially in such a cloudy place — it would increase the exposed surface area for enhanced synthesis of vitamin D. It’s probably not something people could do very often there, but in the summer…sure.

And the statue is lovely. It wasn’t put up to honor Lenin, though — it was a work of art rescued from a Russian scrapyard.

Some on the Seattle school board actually supported denigrating Thanksgiving by teaching children about the atrocities against Native Americans by the Pilgrims.

Rather than keeping the children in ignorance? What does Bill think the purpose of a school is? I think it is a good idea for students to learn from the ugly events in our history.

In addition, Washington State voters have passed assisted suicide, and the state gives out free birth control pills, including the “morning after” pill.

This is wonderful! A state that promotes dignity for all and freedom for women, that does the right thing to reduce teen pregnancy, and uses government to promote the welfare of society. What’s the objection?

On the quality-of-life front, the streets of Seattle are full of homeless people, but they don’t have to be out in the rain. The city will pay to house alcoholics and drug addicts if they want it. They can actually get free furnished apartments. Taxpayers, of course, pick up the tab.

Helping the poor and needy? My dog, this place sounds like paradise.

Everything he listed sounds great! Bill O’Reilly has succeeded in making me homesick. I want to go back now, even though I know Seattle can’t quite be the rosy-dawned utopia he’s painting for us here.

He has written recently about the terrorism in Mumbai.

Grand old hotel, in an increasingly progressive and prosperous India: Suddenly, hundreds of innocent, unsuspecting people are hostages, some of them being systematically murdered. Bombs are exploding, people are screaming, military are descending into the chaos, TV crews are coming from everywhere to broadcast the carnage worldwide.

Yes, it was a terrible and shocking event. However, he really doesn’t care about Indians suffering and dying — he wants to warn Americans that it could happen here.

Look around. Watch your evening news. Read your newspaper.

Oh, Pat! I have! Where are these terrorists bombing buildings and gunning people down?

Have you not seen the awful similarity between what happened in Mumbai and what’s happening right now in our cities?

In our cities? Now? I checked the news web sites right away — they seem to have missed it. All looks quiet. Give me a better hint, Pat.

I refer to California’s Proposition 8. You haven’t heard about the well-oiled campaign to find out the names of every voter and business that contributed as much as $1,000, or even much less, in support of Prop 8? You haven’t heard about the announced plans to boycott, demonstrate, intimidate and threaten each one – because they dared to vote to retain marriage as between one man and one woman? You haven’t seen, on the evening news, prominent entertainers and even California Gov. Schwarzenegger, urging the demonstrators on, telling them they should “never give up” until they get their way?

Uh, Pat, gay people aren’t threatening to kill anyone — they are demanding civil and judicial action. How divorced from reality are you?

Slavery was abolished, blacks and women obtained the rights to vote, and these true rights were not obtained by threats and violent demonstrations and civil disruption (though these things did occur, of course), but by due process, congressional deliberations and appropriate ratification.

Oh. On Pat Boone’s Alternate Earth, the Civil War never happened, and the 50s and 60s were placid periods where lawyers and politicians quietly and without fanfare enacted civil rights laws in the absence of any citizen action. How nice.

What troubles me so deeply, and should trouble all thinking Americans, is that there is a real, unbroken line between the jihadist savagery in Mumbai and the hedonistic, irresponsible, blindly selfish goals and tactics of our homegrown sexual jihadists.

I don’t quite know what to say, Pat. I don’t believe that the thinking Americans will be troubled by your imaginary line, but perhaps the purblind ignorant ones will be…so it makes sense that you’re peddling this rancid tripe on WorldNutDaily.

Yeah, I get odd threats. Apparently, I can now expect every Christian in the country to now inundate my university with mail accusing me of Marxism and telling us that evolution is dead. It’s kind of a threat; if it happens, then I’ll post Bonnie’s full headers and we can wage a little internet war. I suspect, though, this will be nothing but a damp squib from an ignorant kook with delusions of competence.

Professor P.T. Myers
Dr. PZ Myers
Division of Science and Mathematics
600 E 4th Avenue
University of Minnesota, Morris
Morris, MN 56267

Dear Mr. Myers,

I am writing to you concerning the email campaign you instigated against the Creation Museum and the Cincinnati Zoo and your personal vendetta against Mr. Hamm.

I don’t know what your ultimate agenda is in propagating a writing campaign to a Zoo in a state you don’t live in and your taxes don’t support, but your ignorance is apparent. How someone so intolerant and closed minded could possibly be considered educated is beyond my comprehension. What scares me more is that people like you are teaching our children. You don’t teach science. You indoctrinate with propaganda. Darwin has about as much evidence proving natural selection as you have in proving there is no God.

You are quite free to believe what you want to believe, but unless Hitler was your mentor, you should know that you have NO RIGHT to interfere with other organizations or businesses that want to colaborate just because you disagree with their arguement. This only proves your hatred of people of faith. What are you afraid of?

It is teachers like you that have exploded the growth of home schooling. It is professors like you that have encouraged the installation and growth of faith based and Christian Colleges. So for that, I guess I have people like you to thank. Thank God my children will have somewhere else to go. I don’t want them learning the fairy tale of evolution, I want them to be free to investigate ALL available arguments. All of them. I mean, the theory of evolution is all you have? Seriously? Science isn’t in the box, professor. You can’t prove evolution and you can’t prove creation. No one can. So why can’t we talk about both? We rehash the same dead, unproven, broken theory when there are so many other questions out there to be asked, researched and experimented with? That sir, is intolerance. That is bigotry. That is ignorance.

I don’t think the Cincinatti Zoo will be thanking you. As a result of your hatred and intolerance toward anyone that says “bless you”, The Cincinatti Zoo has lost a very valuable partner,and a lot of visitors to their website.

I would like to point out to you, Mr. Myers, that you are not the only one who runs a blog,and you are not the only one who can write.

I may not be a professor, but I know how to write a press release and I know how to advertise. That’s my business. So here’s what I will do for you.

Let’s see how your school handles an email blitz from Christians (which I will point out to you sir, comprises of approximately 97% of the population of the United States). I am suddenly motivated to hit every one of my news sources and let them know how marxist you are. I want every parent in this country to know exactly what dangers their kids face, risking having you as a professor in that school. I want them all to know that it’s not good enough to indoctrinate just the students in your lecture hall. You want to make sure NO ONE gets exposure to any possible answers.

I want all those Christian families to think twice before ever considering sending their kids to University of Minnesota . . . and don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get plenty of credit for their decision. Email campaigns can work both ways professor. Oh, I know your school is not the only culprit and you’re not the only marxist professor teaching in our colleges. However, we can start with this one.

Evolution is a failed hypothesis. It cannot even be scientifically tested. You know it, and most of your radical scientists know it. And this kind of attack from you is just evident of the death throes of the false theory of evolution. Much like the snake trying to get one last bite as you cut off it’s head, it knows it’s dying . . . it knows it’s not going to win, but it’s going to try like hell to do as much damage as it can before it dies. Real scientific, doc. Darwin is your god. We have proof that he is dead. Mine is not. You have no proof that he doesn’t exist. You won’t let anyone try to prove it, which I guess answers what you are afraid of. Let the kids discuss it professor. What are you afraid ot? Research is the mother of discovery.

Ninety-seven percent are Christian in this country, professor, think about that. It’s a well known statistic. . . I know state taxes don’t pay ALL your school’s bills.

You can post this on your blog, you can laugh or throw it away, delete it . . . I don’t care. It is of no consequence to me. I just wanted to let you know how I feel and what I’m about to embark on. Because marxists are not the only ones afforded freedom of speech and freedom to inquire in this country. If freedom to bully others is an ammedment I haven’t heard of yet, then I guess we both share that right as well.

I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I end most of my letters this way . . . God Bless you. You are the one who needs it.

Respectfully,

Bonnie Cox

Look, I don’t need this. It’s been a rough weekend, with way too much travel for my mental and physical health, and I started off today with the Atheist Talk radio broadcast, which was good, but it was bracketed by those horrible woo-woo infomercials that always piss me off, and then I had to drive three hours to Minneapolis to send my son back to school, and then three hours back, and I haven’t had time to sit down and eat yet, and the email piled up something fierce while I was away, and I still have lots of grading to do for tomorrow, and when my brain is burned out I forget how to end sentences (with a period, I suspect), and they just run on endlessly…so. There, I stopped. OK, what’s this with an anti-vaccinationist on scienceblogs.de? We’re not going to run him out on a rail, but it is a disappointment that the vetting process on the German side seems to have been a bit lax.

Anyway, Orac is looking for some help from our readers who are more fluent in German — help him diagnose the krankheit so he can slam the bad posts with some schmerzen und weh und so weiter.

This isn’t fair. Dawkins gets censored in Turkey, now Mike Haubrich gets a warning letter, and I get nothing other than invitations to debate Harun Yahya. I’m losing my mojo — I guess I’m not sufficiently scary to the Turks. Go ahead and say lots of rude things about these Turkish creationists in the comments — I’d like to catch up with everyone else.

In less amusing email news, as you all know, I get lots of drive-by abuse in my inbox, and it usually doesn’t concern me at all. Lately, though, I’ve been getting regularly dumped on by a guy going by the name Bayridge Brooklyn. It’s crazy stuff, and that’s what concerns me most: this fellow has real and serious mental problems. And he’s writing to me and about 30 other people every day.

Whenever and from wherever I turn on a TV that is broadcasting to me live I’m seen on the monitors in the TV studios or on the monitor of the live camera. This happens every single time I turn on the TV. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING SINCE 2004.

It doesn’t matter where the TV is being broadcast from – as long as it’s live – as soon as I turn it on I’m seen on the monitors in the studios or on the cameras. Thus I’ve been transmitted live to studios or cameras in Australia, US, France, Spain, China, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Indonesia, Germany, Chile. All the newsreaders of the news programs from those countries that are broadcast live to Australia have been seeing me since 2004, as well as all the guests who appear live on their programs. Also all the regular Australian newsreaders and live TV presenters and their guests. They have all been seeing me since 2004. Anyone could see me if they were in one of the studios or in front of one of the cameras that’s broadcasting live and I turned on that channel.

Then the criminals who control this technology started being friendly to me, so I began to treat this 2-WAY TV SURVEILLANCE as a joke and laughed and smiled and waved etc. at all the people, Newsreaders etc. who were seeing me on TV – ie. all the people in the TV Studios who were seeing me in my house. So they were mostly friendly, curious.

Then I started getting aggravated by the invasion of my and my family’s privacy that this “TIVO-1984 TV” represented. Sometimes I got abusive or confrontational. That didn’t help at all.

But then I realized that all they know is that I appear on the monitor – and that they don’t necessarily know about all the DIRECTED ENERGY and NEUROLOGICAL WEAPONS torture and abuse that’s being done to me. So I started holding up protest signs and signs telling them I was being tortured etc.. Now they know there’s definitely some “funny business” going on – and they give me concerned looks etc. I don’t know if any of them have taken any other steps to help me. Some are more sympathetic than others, some seem to be thinking along the lines of – “he must have done something to be put in that position”. All the Australian journalists know that it’s all completely out of the hands of the Australian Government because I have protested, abused, held up signs and messages to the Prime Minister, other Ministers, the Governor-General etc. when they have been live on TV – and they just have to sit there and take it.

In this way such people as Donald Rumsfeld, Christopher Hill, Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, John Howard, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi, Richard Holbrooke, Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, and many other politicians, officials, commentators, journalists and celebrities have seen me and are all potential witnesses to this technology and this aspect of my abuse.

That’s only a small sample. He goes on and on for pages.

This sounds like classic schizophrenia to me. I’m only posting this in the hope that a) he’ll think reading blogs means the author will be able to read his mind, so he’ll turn off his computer; b) he will take the hint that he really needs to see a mental health care provider immediately; and c) that there will be some public record of the peculiar harrassment going on from Mr Brooklyn. Or, as he sometimes seems to refer to himself, as John Finch.

When you first read this, you’ll think the author has to be pulling our legs — it’s got to be a satire site like Landover Baptist or something. But the woman sure does a fine job of maintaining a consistent tone, and I know people who think exactly like she does. Her latest entry is an attempt to justify slavery, and keep in mind that she is a black woman.

Here’s the distilled essence of her argument.

Just as wives are to be submissive to their husbands, likewise slaves are to be submissive to their masters.

It’s an interesting sentence that can be interpreted in two ways, isn’t it? I prefer to read that as a message to women that perhaps they shouldn’t put themselves in the position of slaves to their husbands.

Well? Can you name a single terrorist attack on Kentucky soil? Hmm? (Aside, maybe, from the occasional abortion clinic bombing or KKK fear campaign, but since those are by home-grown white boys, they don’t count). You can credit a law that has been on the books since 2006.

Under state law, God is Kentucky’s first line of defense against terrorism.

The 2006 law organizing the state Office of Homeland Security lists its initial duty as “stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth.”

Specifically, Homeland Security is ordered to publicize God’s benevolent protection in its reports, and it must post a plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center with an 88-word statement that begins, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

I try to explain to people that American politics has been dominated by lunatics for many years, and they just don’t believe me.

Quiz time! What’s wrong with this paragraph?

Sometimes life takes a creative leap that’s almost miraculous. Nobody knows how this happens, and it can never be predicted. You’d never know, looking at a reptile’s round, hard, shiny scales, that they could genetically morph into feathers. Paleontologists know that they did, however, and finding the very first dinosaur that sprouted feathers is one of the great discoveries waiting to happen.

[Read more…]