Perhaps you remember Karl — I ripped into an interview he did a while back. Well, “ripped into” is probably the wrong phrase — I pointed out several things I thought were quite good, and then tore up his sectarian defense of Christianity, his blind obeisance before the Christian bible, and his mangling of what other scientists have said about religion. It must have rankled — he now gripes that “Myers doesn’t seem to like me” and has slapped together a nice bit of hackwork that is the lead story on Salon. And clumsy hatchet job it is.

Here’s his opening:

PZ Myers is a true believer, a science crusader with the singled-minded enthusiasm of a televangelist. A biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris and a columnist for Seed magazine, Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers. He is Richard Dawkins without the fame or felicitous prose style.

Then he recounts the tale of the “Great Desecration”, but without any of the context, not bothering to mention the hideous history of the Catholic response to rumors of desecration, and not even mentioning Bill Donohue’s bullying tactics. Oh, and then he compares me to Jonathan Edwards, misrepresents his own interview — he only “suggested that science doesn’t know everything,” which “got [him] condemned to whatever hell Myers believes in” — and claims that atheists like me, Dawkins, Atkins, and Dennett are just practicing a new religion. Over and over again. He goes on at length with this strange claim that we are pushing science as a replacement for religion.

But let’s assume for the moment that this is possible — that science can be canonized, moralized, transcendentalized and politicized into a replacement religion, with followers, codes of conduct, celebrated texts and sacred blogs, houses of worship, “saints” of some sort and inquisitors of another sort. And let’s suppose that it’s possible for this new religion to move out of the ivory towers of academia, where it lives now, to take its place alongside the other “world” religions, attracting hundreds of millions of adherents drawn from the main streets of the world and all walks of life. What would this new religion be like once it became institutionalized? After all, if religion fills a genuine human need, something has to fill the hole created by its passing — something that appeals to billions of people.

He babbles on quite a bit about this bizarre fantasy that we’re trying to replicate the silly superstitions and rituals of his idea of religion. Sacred blogs? Saints? This is just foolishness of his own invention. Right there in the critical post I wrote, I said plainly, “Gould and Dawkins do not claim that evolution as a religion, or that it should be treated as one, and neither do I; that would be ridiculous, since if I were equating the two, that would mean I think people ought to grow out of their absurd faith in evolution.” In the desecration post, I plainly said that nothing should be sacred. Giberson read those, apparently, and then decided that I really meant the opposite.

It’s funny how he provides these botched descriptions of what I said, but doesn’t bother to actually link to it, where it’s rather obvious that his version is misleading and dishonest.

Oh, and I’m not one of the saints. Here’s my role.

And we have inquisitors like Myers to ferret out heretics and martyr them on his Web site when they appear.

Man, my criticism of his ideas must have really burned, that he would now compare me to inquisitors and his own state to martyrdom. Hint to Karl: Catholic inquisitors tied people to stakes and literally set them on fire. Writing in dissent about someone’s ideas does not really compare very well. I might add that historically, Christians murdered Jews by the thousands for imaginary desecrations; I tossed an unpalatable scrap of bad bread in a garbage can. Any comparisons he wants to make will not flatter religion.

In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions. I share with Myers, Dawkins and Weinberg the conviction that we are the product of cosmic and biological evolution, that Einstein and Darwin got it right. But I want to believe that, through the eyes of my faith, this is how God created the world and that God cares about that world. Does this belief, shared by so many of our species, make me dangerous?

No, Karl, it makes you foolish. The eyes of your faith are delusions fostered by tradition and dogma, there is no evidence for your god or that he created anything, and there sure as heck isn’t any evidence that your imaginary friend cares about us.

It also makes Salon look foolish, that they would put an article written by someone with a patent grudge front and center.

It is another mark of the incompetence of the ID movement that they actually hand out an award named after Casey Luskin. Pick the most ineffectual, uninformed, pathetic loser on the creationist side, and use his name to inspire the next generation of IDiots. It’s actually amusingly appropriate.

I note that the latest awardee is keeping his name anonymous. That’s hopeful — at least some of them can still retain a sense of shame and embarrassment.

Good news! While I still get flooded with email every time Bill Donohue puts my address in a press release, I’m getting 90% fewer death threats! I think that maybe the example of Ms Kroll and her trollish husband has made people thinking twice before explicitly spelling out their gruesome plans, so that’s an improvement.

I’m still getting way too much repetitive crap, though. Yes, people, I know you’re offended. You don’t all need to tell me. If I had time to reply to each one of you individually, I’d simply tell you to tough it out — I’m offended by you, but none of us have a right to not be offended. So let me just tell you collectively: I’ve heard that message, and the message that you’ll pray for me, and the message that I’ll be going to hell, and the message that you think I need to be sent to jail or an asylum, and I don’t care what you think, so put a sock in it already. OK? OK. I’ve now got a bunch of filters in place that trash mail that mentions certain common keywords (hint to people legitimately attempting to contact me: try not to sound too Catholic), so there’s not even the point of harassment to your continued volleys. You can all stop now.

Anyway, in the hopes that at least a few of these loons will notice how silly their protestations look, I’ve put a semi-random sampling below the fold. Or, at least, I hope it will at least induce them to proofread before they send their whines into my trash folder.

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This is just to handle the overflow from this closed thread.

You crackerbaters are insane.

Here’s another one for the files. This guy has sent me several menacing messages — nothing new there — but now he has announced that he’s coming to visit me. I’ve put the header for one of Mr Moore’s creepy threats below the fold, for the record. His specific email address is not included, so we don’t have a repeat of the last episode.

Nice people, these Catholics. If Mr Moore shows up at my door, the only people who will be meeting him are the local police.

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Bill Donohue has once again issued a press release, urging all of his followers to harass my in-box. Once again, my email is rendered useless by a flood of idiots sending me bizarre tirades and links to Catholic fables and threats. There is a new change in tone: now lots of them are gloating that they’ve written to CAIR, and the Muslims are now going to come and blow up my house, ha ha! Thanks, Donohue, for reinforcing prejudice about Muslims.

I may have to simply dump all email sent to my more public addresses and create new accounts that I’ll only make known to a sensible few. It’s that bad.

How about a little extreme right wing paranoia to start your morning?

Global warming is the perfect excuse to do what the Left always wanted to do – to destroy faith (Christianity), the family and freedom. There is no area of our lives that will not be invaded through taxation, control, regulation or obliteration to save the earth.

Read the whole thing — global warming is the conspiracy that ties together abortion, taxes, communism, and our hatred of little children. If only it had mentioned evolution, it would have been perfect.

Also, it’s from a Canadian. It’s reassuring to see that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on loons. To be fair, though, the replies from other Canadians are scathing.

Good grief, but this is tedious. I’m still getting piles of email every day from people 1) begging me not to abuse a cracker because it is so sacred to them, piles of email telling me to 2) abuse a book because it is so sacred to Muslims (I’ve even been sent two copies of the Koran!), and of course, the 3) bizarre complaint that I’m a coward, afraid to commit sacrilege. You can all stop now. 1) Your personal sense of the sacred in a piece of bread dough is absurd to me and imposes on me no sense of obligation. 2) Since I now own one entirely superfluous copy of the Koran, it will meet the very same fate as the crackers. Thanks to all who have demanded that I treat that silly book with disrespect, I’ll have to treat both equally. 3) I have not rushed to be rude to a cracker because, well, it’s there, it’s ridiculous, and it’s not very important. I’ve been traveling, and I’ve come home to writing deadlines, and those get first priority. Heck, going into the kitchen right now and fixing myself a sandwich for lunch has higher priority. After I’ve cleared the deck of my work this week, then I might take a moment to casually demolish a sacred cow.

Now enough. You can all stop dunning me. Be patient, godless ones, and surrender to despair, O Ye Believers. And if this turns into another thousand comment thread, I shall be very, very cranky.

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Thomas Foley of Virginia is nuts. This is the delegate to the Republican National Convention who has called for increased security. Why? Because he has an irrational fear of us.

On Friday the Catholic League reported that Thomas E. Foley, a Virginia delegate to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Minneapolis has asked that increased security be considered for the event in light of Myers’ threat to acquire and desecrate the Eucharist.

“I just felt security at the Republican National Convention ought to look at him and his followers,” Foley told CNA in a phone interview on Wednesday morning. He reported that he had not received an update about his request.

Voicing his concerns about Myers, Foley said: “What I think he has done, he’s loaded a cyberpistol and he’s cocked it and he’s left it on the table. He may have set something in motion that no one can stop. It was irresponsible, a hell of a thing to do.”

Foley explained that he thought Myers should not be able to incite such acts with “impunity,” saying that he was especially disturbed by the comments posted on Myers’ blog. He said it was “eye-opening” to read the people who supported Myers’ action. Even at his age of 63, Foley said, he had never “personally encountered such bigotry.”

He also objected to Myers’ recent description of Catholic League President Bill Donohue as “braying,” which Foley, a self-described Irish Catholic, claimed was “a great insult for the Irish.”

Foley said he believes Myers was telling his readers to acquire a consecrated Host at Mass, which Foley thought would result in disruptions.

“What’s he telling them to do? Consecrated Hosts are not just lying around,” he said to CNA, noting that the only other possible way to secure a Host would be to accost a priest, nun, or layman taking the Sacrament to the sick. Even E-bay, Foley emphasized, has prevented the sale of consecrated Hosts.

Wait, what? I’m armed with a cyberpistol? Is that what we atheist brigands use to rob trucks trundling down the tubes of the internet?

I had no idea that “braying” was especially insulting to the Irish. I’m sure it’s a word that is used with great frequency in reference to Bill Donohue, though. No ethnic slur was intended, since I was unaware of any association (and still am) — it’s really just intended to highlight Donohue’s personal attributes as an ass.

I’m baffled by the last paragraph, though. If the crackers aren’t just lying around, how come people are having such an easy time getting them? The people who’ve sent them to me haven’t mentioned having to disrupt anything. And if their availability is so limited, why is he calling for increased security at the RNC? Do Republicans get Christ Crackers on registration, or something?

This is precisely the kind of deranged hysteria we have to protest against, I’m afraid.

I regret to inform you all that Melanie Kroll has been fired for using her work account to sound death threats. In a further and not-unexpected twist, it wasn’t Melanie who composed and wrote the message — the husband, Chuck Kroll, did it. We even have a confession. Good work, Chuck! You cost your wife her job!