You asked for it, I deliver. Here’s a good chunk of the opposition email that I’ve received in the last two days; not quite all of it, though, since I got bored and a lot of it has just been going straight into the trash. I’ve tried to cut out most of the identifying names and so forth, but if I missed a few…tough.
Trust me, it’s very tiresome to read.
The Catholic League has issued another press release. In addition to disparaging the theory of evolution as the “King Kong Theory of Creation” (which is a bit peculiar, since Catholicism does not take a stand against evolution), he accuses me and my ilk (that’s you, fair readers) of hysteria while making this hysterical declaration:
As a result of the hysteria that Myers’ ilk have promoted, at least one public official is taking it seriously. Thomas E. Foley is chairman of Virginia’s First Congressional District Republican Committee, a delegate to the Republican National Convention and one of two Republican at large nominees for Virginia’s Electoral College. His concern is for the safety of Catholics attending this year’s Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Myers’ backyard. Accordingly, Foley has asked the top GOP brass to provide additional security while in the Twin Cities so that Catholics can worship without fear of violence. Given the vitriol we have experienced for simply exercising our First Amendment right to freedom of speech, we support Foley’s request.
They are increasing security at the Republican convention out of fear of ME? I am puissant. Fear me, O Trembling Republicans. A flick of my wrist, and cathedrals tumble to the earth; a nod of my head, and heathen legions rise up and swarm like flesh-eating locusts over the faithful.
Hah.
The remark about my backyard is amusing — Minneapolis is 150 miles away. It’s also more towards one side of my house; I think Iowa would be my backyard, while Canada is my front yard. I sure hope I don’t get assessed for property taxes on the entire upper midwest.
So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email that says I should be fired, that the author would like to kill me, and that I only criticize because Catholics are so gentle and kind.
Oh, and of course, the university president’s office has also received lots of mail demanding my immediate ouster (keep in mind, though…Catholics are no threat to anyone at all.) I don’t know how much, but since Donohue published the president’s email address and not mine, I imagine it’s much greater than what I’ve seen. Those lovely Dark Age fanatics at the Catholic League have started a write-in campaign to start up an inquisition.
So no poll-crashing today. Instead, I would appreciate it if you would write a short note to President Robert Bruininks in support (he’s going to hate me for this). I have to ask for a few constraints, though: only do so if you are willing to sign a real name to it — most of the complaint mail I’m getting uses fake names, making it much less persuasive — and that, unlike the religious screeds I’m seeing, you take the time to proofread and send him something that at least looks like a high school graduate wrote it, which will put you way above the level of the hate mail. Be polite and rational, too!
If you really want to impress, send him regular mail at this address:
President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Bill Donohue has a loud, braying voice, and he’s already trying to stir up a witch hunt. We need a counter-campaign from the secular community.
Whoa, this one is getting heavy traffic and we need to close it down and reroute. Continue the discussion here, if you must.
Andy Schlafly is one persistent fool. After harrassing Richard Lenski not once, but twice, prompting one of the best smackdowns on the intertubes, Schlafly now wants to take some vague sort of legal action against Lenski to get his own copy of every bit of data Lenski has generated in 20 years … data that he wouldn’t understand, and which would include bacterial samples that he couldn’t maintain, and requiring so much effort to collect (can you imagine having to go through 20 years worth of stored bacterial samples to create a copy?) that it would disrupt research in the lab to an unacceptable degree. That’s what he wants, of course: he’s a petulant incompetent who doesn’t like the conclusions of research into evolution, and who has to be smarting over the international peals of laughter that have been made at his expense.
Here’s the text of Schlafly’s pretentious “challenge” (Sorry, I’m not linking to the Conservapædia fecal pond).
A Conservapedia challenge is an unsolved problem or task that offers the promise of bettering society when lawfully accomplished.
The first Conservapedia challenge is to find a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski’s federally funded data.
I don’t see how figuring out a legal strategy that will enable creationists to shut down biology labs with harassment will better society.
Admit it: you’ve been wondering what Fred Phelps thinks of George Carlin. If you’d rather not click, rest assured: it’s exactly what you might expect.
Wacky Michael Egnor is complaining that the data showing progress in treatment of some cancers should be credited to the culture of Christianity instead of science, and further claims that “The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and prayer.”
Hmmm. Given that the data shows a change, a rise in cancer survival within the past few decades, was there some breakthrough in prayer efficacy 20 years ago? Thumbs in vs. thumbs out in the folded hands thing? Accent on the “A-” or on the “men!”? Sudden change from the old useless lazy god to a new and improved go-getter god? I suspect the correlations all show the effectiveness of entirely secular improvements in treatment, since the god-stuff hasn’t changed from it’s usual ineffectiveness at all.
Egnor makes much of the fact that churches built hospitals, and that the data came from a religiously funded organization. Christians aren’t that stupid; they can recognize a successful paradigm when they see it, and can jump on the bandwagon quite well. These hospitals founded by churches are using medicine, not faith, to do their healing. We’re sloshing about in the mud of religion, so you can’t credit the muck when something rises above the superstition to shine simply because everyone’s hands are filthy with dirt.
And this is just disgusting.
Science grew in a culture made fertile by Christian (and Jewish) faith and prayer. When science is explanted from Christian culture and is idolized — consider evolutionary psychology and eugenics — it becomes banal and even evil.
Faith and prayer do nothing. They do not make a culture fertile, as we can see by many examples all around the world of quite religious countries that are marked as much by failure as success. His two examples are insane. I disagree with much of evolutionary psychology, but can you think of any evil done by that academic exercise, in particular, anything comparable to the Albigensian Crusade, to name just one example? As for eugenics, that wasn’t good science to begin with, and it was endorsed by evangelical Christians. Their god seems to be no better at leading people into right action than no god at all.
All science is explanted from sectarian superstition, and large numbers of scientists are godless — yet rather than banality and evil, they seem to be very successful at discovering wonder and beauty. Egnor’s comments are but one step away from the same nonsense Ben Stein was peddling, that “science kills people”, and just as ill-founded and ridiculous.
I had no idea Ray Comfort was running an Agony Aunt column, but here you go. He got a rather snarky question:
There’ve been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven’t checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they’re fighting floods, while in California it’s fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?
Weemaryanne
And then he answered it. Seriously. Isn’t it nice how God has arranged that there is pain and suffering in every part of the world, just so His preachers have something to point to and say “Sinners!”?
Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said “while in California it’s fair and dry.” We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed.
It’s always nice to see these kooks get explicit and credit rain to the actions of a god rather than natural meteorological processes. It’s so primitive.
Ah, if only we had stoned those gay people, fire insurance rates in California would be so much lower.
But wait! There’s more! Quick, remove those irony meters from the circuit, because Comfort’s closing will definitely cause them to blow!
You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.
Right now, my yard is littered with a couple of tons of twisted, smoking scrap irony.
…there was What the Bleep Do We Know?, another crackpot movie made with interviews obtained under false pretenses and pushing a bogus ideological twist on science. Sean Carroll and David Albert talk about it on Bloggingheads.tv.
Man, that was a bad movie.
Oh, dear. Earlier, I wrote about Ken Ham’s visit to the Pentagon, a soul-shuddering thought if ever there was one, and it seems Ken has read it. He has replied with a blog entry titled Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”. Ken, Ken, Ken. You act shocked at the thought that one guy publicly stated that you were Mr Flaming Nutbar, but you shouldn’t be. Millions of people, including some of the most knowledgeable biologists in the world, think just about every day that you are an airhead, an ass, a birdbrain, a blockhead, a bonehead, a boob, a bozo, a charlatan, a cheat, a chowderhead, a chump, a clod, a con artist, a crackpot, a crank, a crazy, a cretin, a dimwit, a dingbat, a dingleberry, a dipstick, a ditz, a dolt, a doofus, a dork, a dum-dum, a dumb-ass, a dumbo, a dummy, a dunce, a dunderhead, a fake, a fathead, a fraud, a fruitcake, a gonif, a halfwit, an idiot, an ignoramus, an imbecile, a jackass, a jerk, a jughead, a knucklehead, a kook, a lamebrain, a loon, a loony, a lummox, a meatball, a meathead, a moron, a mountebank, a nincompoop, a ninny, a nitwit, a numbnuts, a numbskull, a nut, a nutcase, a peabrain, a pinhead, a racketeer, a sap, a scam artist, a screwball, a sham, a simpleton, a snake oil salesman, a thickhead, a turkey, a twerp, a twit, a wacko, a woodenhead, and much, much worse.
You’re a clueless schmuck who knows nothing about science and has arrogantly built a big fat fake museum to promote medieval bullshit — you should not be surprised to learn that you are held in very low esteem by the community of scholars and scientists, and by the even larger community of lay people who have made the effort to learn more about science than you have (admittedly, though, you have set the bar very, very low on that, and there are 5 year old children who have a better grasp of the principles of science as well as more mastery of details of evolution than you do.)
Maybe you should write a blog entry calling attention to each insult given to you. I think that’s your calling, and it’s probably god’s intended mission for you in life, to inspire contempt.
(I encourage each and every one of my readers to express their true feelings about Ken Ham in the comment thread here. Then I want Mr Ham to write an indignant post complaining that “So-and-so called me a “disgrace to brain-damaged clowns””, or whatever — that’ll keep him occupied for years, and will distract him from his campaign of abusing the minds of young children. Be creative.)
Ken Ham, chief wackaloon at Answers in Genesis, was invited to speak…at a Pentagon prayer breakfast.
Just let that sink in.
There are people at the Pentagon who are in charge of planning where your sons and daughter and nephews and nieces and other beloved family members and friends will be sent to put their lives at risk. There are people there who can send missiles and bombers anywhere in the world. There are people there who control nuclear weapons.
And they think Ken Ham is a fine-and-dandy, clever feller.
It’s almost enough to make me wish I could pray. It’s not just Ham, either — it’s that the people with the big guns have prayer breakfasts.
And then, somehow, he segues into babbling about the existence of life on other worlds. He doesn’t think there is any. Look at the logic this kook uses:
The real world is the biblical world–a universe designed by God with the Earth at the spiritual focal point, not an evolutionary universe teeming with life. … Extraterrestrial life is an evolutionary concept; it does not comport with the biblical teachings of the uniqueness of the Earth and the distinct spiritual position of human beings.
Because the bible says we are the focus of the entire universe, there can’t possibly be any competitors. Of course, this means that his god created this vast, empty, uninhabitable space for no reason other than that we’ll have twinkly little stars in the sky at night…but hey, that’s the crazy Christian deity, always doing irrational stuff and encouraging his followers to be equally nuts.
