It’s another example of weird fundie obsessions. In this case, it’s all about an angry god who sends hurricanes and is appeased by prayer, and just what do you think he’s angry about? We haven’t been hardline enough about Israel.
We didn’t have to wait long for right wing brains to explode into loopy, tangled strands of conspiracy theory nonsense. Creationist brains, already in a state of disarray, are already predisposed to this kind of inanity, so don’t be too shocked at what Cynthia Dunbar, creationist, Christian, and member of the Texas State Board of Education has to say:
So we can imagine the blatant disregard for our Constitution, but what other threats does an Obama administration pose? We have been clearly warned by his running mate, Joe Biden, that America will suffer some form of attack within the first 6 months of Obama’s administration. However, unlike Joe, I do not believe this “attack” will be a test of Obama’s mettle. Rather, I perceive it will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny.
Apparently, Obama is going to have the terrorists he loves so much carry out some awful action, which will excuse the use of martial law and the subsequent abridgment of our constitutional rights. Talk about projection — has she looked at the Bush record since 2001?
I’m still experiencing fallout from the cracker incident, like the slow drift of dandruff from the flaking scalp of a gyrating televangelist. The latest is a letter from Mr. E.P. Bruk, who I suspect believes he is making a sarcastic point, but is actually making my point for me…that it is absurd to equate the value of a silly little cracker to a human life, or in this case, an entire ethnic group.
Do I detect a note of anxiety in my Minnesota readers? Lately I’ve been getting lots of email from concerned locals who are worried about Tim Tingelstad, a candidate for the Minnesota Supreme Court, who is a religious wackaloon.
“Everyone has an opinion or belief as to where absolute truth is and where it comes from, and that’s what I’m telling people where I believe my rock solid foundation is,” Tingelstad says. “I believe that absolute truth exists and that it comes from God.”
And that’s one of his milder statements. I’ve mentioned this guy before, but you all know how it is — judicial elections usually fly under the radar, and most people go into the voting booth with no clue about who these guys are, and they vote for the wrong reasons. In Minnesota, there is a bit of a tendency for candidates with good Scandinavian names to have an edge (Tingelstad doesn’t have an advantage here; his opponent is named Anderson), and there might be a little bit of an anti-incumbent bias this year (Tingelstad is a challenger), so no one knows how it could swing this time around.
It’s simple, though. Don’t vote for crazy Tingelstad; do vote for Anderson.
Unless you really want a deranged theocratic god-babbler on the supreme court, of course.
Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It’s an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of “authorities”, where they make much of their pedigrees (don’t blame me, the “Dr. X, Ph.D.” is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
The photos show these people and others gushing over this lump of rock, with testimonials like:
After all that, you’d expect to find some remarkable degree of similarity, wouldn’t you? It convinced a neuroanatomist, after all, and surely all those people with their fancy degrees couldn’t be fooled. But then they show us a close-up photo of this “brain”.
They’ve got to be kidding. That’s a lumpy rock. It’s no brain; I’ve seen a lot of brains in my time, from fish to frogs to lizards to birds to all kinds of mammals, and that looks nothing like any of them. Here, in case you haven’t seen one, is a photo of a human brain:
This is the Ed Conrad effect. Hand some ignorant people a random lump of rock, tell them it’s a fossil, and their imaginations will do the rest. There is no excuse for these “experts”, though — the author of the page claims that “It has been examined and determined to be a petrified human brain by many people with high degrees in several different fields of study and occupation.” That just goes to show that even the most qualified people in creation ‘science’ have to be flaming idiots.
And your fault, too. The conservative columnist Melanie Phillips has an explanation for our current economic problems, for drunkenness and drug abuse, for rudeness, for psychopathic killers, and for the wholesale collapse of Western culture. What could possibly be the single root cause of so many catastrophic consequences? Why, atheism, of course.
I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda — and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.
Phillips is also a denier of evolution, the safety of vaccines, and global climate change, which sort of tells you what her opinion is worth.
Bill Donohue is at it again. He has pestered YouTube into putting age requirements on viewing videos of host desecration, and now he’s claiming that “we do not object to making fun of Catholics, or for that matter Catholic beliefs and practices, just so long as they are made in good taste”. ORLY? One name puts the lie to Donohue: Webster Cook. Cook wasn’t making fun of Catholics, he wasn’t doing anything in particular, and he certainly wasn’t doing anything I consider tasteless…yet Donohue tried to get him expelled from his university over that.
And now he thinks he gets to dictate what is good taste, and clearly, that now means any mockery of his cracker god.
Occasionally, John Derbyshire gets kudos from the pro-science side of the national snarl because he at least manages to recognize that Intelligent Design creationism is a load of lies and pseudoscience. I’ve been less than thrilled with the guy; he’s generally a creepy fellow who only advocates science as a prop to his bizarre ideological fantasies. The latest example: he opposes Obama because he will destroy the biological sciences. Why, you might ask? It’s a peculiar assertion, since virtually every biologist I know considers the Republican party to have been a disaster for American science, and like Obama’s positions on science policy. Just the fact that he’s willing to encourage stem cell research is a major step forward.
The reason Derbyshire predicts Obama will stop science cold is that the presidential candidate is a black man who dislikes the idea that modern genetics will demonstrate the inferiority of certain races.
To support his claim, he babbles approvingly about Herrnstein and Murray’s awful book, The Bell Curve, and cites a “genomics researcher” who must remain anonymous because the cultural Marxists who dominate the research industry will destroy him…unfortunately, he uses a pseudonym familiar to me — “Godless Capitalist” — and I know his internet ravings well. He’s a garden-variety racist who misuses genetics as window-dressing for his delusions. Just to give you an idea of how repugnant and stupid this guy is, here’s a little anecdote told by Derbyshire that tells you how clueless Derbyshire is, and how vilely misogynist and bigoted “Godless Capitalist” is:
When “Godless” was helping me get up to speed on this stuff, I asked him at one point: “What’s the difference between a geneticist and a genomicist?” He gave a very cute answer: “Geneticists are female, genomicists are male.” Asked to elaborate, he offered this: “Imagine you are walking down a corridor in a research institute, looking in through the glass panels in doors. In one lab you see a young woman of nontrivial attractiveness carefully adding drops to a Petri dish from a pipette. That’s a geneticist. A couple of doors along you look into another lab and there are two young guys arguing about some long string of numbers displayed on a computer screen. Those are genomicists …”
I guess this guy never heard of Pardis Sabeti or Anne Carpenter or Dannie Durand or any of a bunch of other female genomics researchers I can think of. Or the even larger number of male geneticists out there. And why does attractiveness even come into this?
That’s a rhetorical question. It’s because these happy chatting bigots are always judging ideas by superficial appearances, by sex or skin color or racial and sexual stereotypes.
My email was just beginning to calm down, and now Bill Donohue rants again. He names me and fsmdude, and since people can’t find a mailing address for a guy named “fsmdude”, all these cranky little old Catholic ladies are sending me their shrill denunciations of youtube videos, instead.
Oh, and Bully Billy has conveniently forgotten the history already: “It was a professor from the University of Minnesota, Morris campus, Paul Z. Myers, who started the war on the Eucharist this past summer by intentionally desecrating a consecrated Host.” I guess he never ever called for the expulsion and arrest of a student for violating a Catholic sacrament now.
Remember Rachel Bird and Gideon Codding, the spoiled, petulant little whiners who wanted their state issued marriage license to call them “bride and groom”? The ones who were being used as a wingnut cause celebre to argue that gender neutrality really does hurt heterosexual marriages?
Bad news. They won. California caved and changed the wording on the licenses.
Now gay couples getting married in California will have to get their revenge: they should cheerfully appropriate the terms bride and groom, too. Rachel Bird can call herself a bride (she could all along, of course), but so can the biggest, butchest, bristly-bearded gay leatherman with a biker mustache…and he should be able to get state recognition of his status as a bride.
It’s only fair, after all.
