In which I am convinced I’ll never get any money from  the Templeton Foundation

It’s tough to tread that line between contempt and admiration: Jerry Coyne writes about the Templeton journalism awards. It really is a smart move on the part of the Templetonites to coopt journalists to sell their bankrupt line by tossing a good-sized chunk of money at them.

One interesting revelation is that the journalism awards aren’t simply handed out by cunning Templetonistas who spot a promising compromiser in the ranks of reporters — you have to apply for the fellowship. Hey, should I? They’re closed for now, but I imagine there will be a bunch of 2011 fellowships awarded, and I wouldn’t mind spending time in Cambridge.

All I have to do is write an essay “outlining [my] interest in science and religion and detailing a specific topic [i] hope to cover”. Here’s my start:

Religion is the antithesis of science, an anesthetic for the mind that disables critical thought and encourages the acceptance of inanity as fact, and wishful thinking as evidence.

Do you think it will appeal to their review panel?

Oh, probably not. Here’s John Horgan’s experience.

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

Oops. And John is so much more polite than I am.

Now I really wish those application essays were available for public reading. I’m sure they’re exceptionally entertaining.

Mooney ‘fesses up. I’d love it if he’d post his application essay!

Shepherd’s Hill Farm is a hell-hole

Got problem kids? Man, when they hit those teenage years they all get rebellious and willful, and start thinking independently, and often start doing things their parents would rather they didn’t. This is one of the tough responsibilities of being a parent — you have to be willing to let your children grow into independent human beings.

But let’s say you never got that memo, and you think your job is to raise children who are just like you: insecure, a little bit angry, shackled tightly into a fearful belief system that says all human beings are evil. Independent thinking is the last thing you want in your obedient little repressed child-slave! Well, there’s help for you: Shepherd’s Hill Farm, an accredited Christian boot camp that will stomp his wild soul right back down into the mud of conformity and obedience.

It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, so there will be no place for the wayward teen to escape to…and no one to hear them scream.

Shepherd’s Hill Farm is a counseling center, so they will also take care of the mental health of your child. Trace Embry, the director, knows absolutely nothing about mental health and even gives dangerous advice against all the evidence, but you don’t have to worry — he’s a very vocal Christian. God will forgive him.

We have testimonials from inmates residents of the camp about the other benefits of attending. Does your child have special medical needs, like seizures? They will take his medicine away, but their staff is well-trained in being able to simultaneously wrestle a child to the ground and pray for him. Is your child a bit on the hefty side? He will get ‘special meals’ — a can of beans, a bit of vegetable, and a piece of bread — until they reach that ascetic ideal. Your child will be ‘brainwashed in the blood of the lamb,’ so it’s all OK — even the beatings serve to transfigure hooligans into robots for Jesus.

Don’t worry that your child might fall behind in his classes. They teach science at Shepherd’s Hill Farm!

In their “science” classes we were indoctrinated with the christian story. We were forced to watch Kent Hovind videos, as if he and all his “theorys” have not already been debunked.

He won’t fall behind: he’ll be propelled backwards, as if they’d strapped a rocket to his ass and aimed him right at the dark ages.

For all of this — the cans of beans, the non-existent medical care, the anti-education, the beatings — what do you think you should pay? Nothing? They should pay you? Wrong! You will cough up almost $60,000 a year for the privilege of tossing your child into the hands of a dumb redneck psychopath with a farm in the wilderness. It’s a Christian wilderness, though. That’s the added value you’re paying for, and I’m sure it’s worth every penny…if you’re one of those parents who can’t abide children with personalities or ideas of their own.

Where’s my invitation?

Hey, I just checked my mailbox for a fancy gilt envelope, but no joy. I was hoping to hear from the Pope.

The Pontifical Council for Culture has announced that it is creating a foundation to focus on relations with atheists and agnostics.

See? They should be calling me any minute now…oh, wait.

The president of the Council announced the initiative on Wednesday as a response to Pope Benedict’s call to “renew dialogue with men and women who don’t believe but want to move towards God.“

Well, I’m out. That’s like putting out a call for healthy men and women who want to move towards degenerative neurological disease.

Maybe Chris Mooney is available?

They’re all nuts

You know, voodoo is a really ridiculous religion. Ritual magic, placating gods…but it’s common and accepted in Haiti.

Here’s another ridiculous religion: Christianity. It’s got its own brand of ritual magic, and it’s also all about placating one god. It’s also common and accepted in Haiti.

I’m still not at all surprised that, when the followers of voodoo recently tried to practice their silly rites, evangelical Christians attacked the ceremony, throwing rocks. Yeah, religion really helps people get along. Now they’re talking holy war.

I agree with my friend and colleague, The Supreme Servitor of Vodou, Ati Max Beauvoir, that this attack by the evangelicals is a declaration of war. These Bible Thumpers have no idea how powerful Vodou is nor how lethal it can be.

We are mobilizing our forces to meet this demonic spirit head on; bullets nor pious, hypocritical prayers have no power where Vodou is concerned. Vodou will be recognized and accepted as a valid and legitimate system of spirituality just as the Wiccan and Pagans have been accepted. Freedom of Religion is a right and no man nor religious organization has a corner on God nor salvation. There is only ONE God and His Universal Name is Yawe.

Don’t worry, Dr Kioni. I think Voodoo is just as valid and legitimate a system of spirituality as Wicca. And Christianity. They’re all exactly the same, as far as I’m concerned.

Representing for Christ

A lot of people don’t like Lyndon Rush, the Christian zealot who also happens to be a bobsledder in the Olympics. I think he’s wonderful. It’s so helpful to have someone like him openly demonstrating that Christians are morons.*

You know there’s no atheist in a foxhole, right? There’s no atheist at the top of a bobsled run, either.

But there are atheists in the military. I don’t know about any specific godless organizations dedicated to the plight of unbelievers in bobsleds — bobsledding is a rather trivial issue to focus on, anyway — but there probably are some. They’re just smart enough to know it’s pointless to make a sport a place to issue a philosophical manifesto.

Oh, but wait…here’s why I love Rush as a paragon of Christian idiocy. There are no atheists in bobsleds, but there are atheists right there on his team. And Rush doesn’t even notice that he contradicts himself!

I’ve had atheists on my team and they have no problem talking to God before the run. Everybody likes it. Even the atheists, for instance, they like how it sets the tone. We all come together and I pray about things that they want, too. Maybe they’re not in a period of their life where they believe in God, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t really believe in atheists.

I marvel at that. It’s a miracle that the same person who has the awesome intelligence required to plummet down an icy track could babble so…he doesn’t believe in atheists, but atheists are on his team, and there are no atheists at the top of the bobsled run, and the atheists there like to hear him chatter about god. He is so self-unaware, so oblivious, so Gomer Pyle.

Guess what, Lyndon? The atheists don’t like to listen you preach your inanity, except in the mean-spirited sense of watching yet another dumb Christian proudly demonstrate what an ass he can be. They probably get together for beer after a run and tell Lyndon Rush stories, and laugh and laugh.

*I know they aren’t all morons — they just believe in incredibly stupid ideas. But you have to appreciated what great negative PR Lyndon Rush is for Christianity.

Canada is sharing in Christian shame

The Canadian government is planning to help a fundamentalist Christian group, Youth for Christ, to proselytize. They’ve offered to contribute several million dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea…except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission:

To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church.

They also openly admit to their plans:

Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (5.4 million youth). This will require the development of new strategies, as well as strengthening existing efforts.

So, sure, anyone can come on down and freely use their skate park, their gym, their various services, and they don’t need to be Christian. It would be especially great if they aren’t Christian, because they will be met by a team of cheerful youth pastors who will tell them all about the glory of Jesus while they work out or play. That’s the whole purpose of the facility — not to provide a healthy recreational outlet for kids, but to corral the unconverted in one place for easy predation by a coven of kooks out to win over their minds.

Here’s another nice twist to the story, too.

Roughly one in 100 youths contacted by the organization — 17,010 out of 154,192 — “responded to the opportunity to become a Christian,” said the report, which identified “the aboriginal youth community” as a “prime area for development.”

It’s not just those cranky atheists who are outraged at the funneling of money into Christian evangelism — it’s an ethnic issue, and Youth for Christ knows it.

The Christian youth centre in a primarily aboriginal neighbourhood stirs up thoughts of historical assimilation, some First Nations leaders told councillors.

Nahanni Fontaine, director of justice for the Southern Chiefs Organization, an advocacy group for First Nations people in southern Manitoba, said giving public money to the project would be like contributing to the contemporary version of residential schools under the guise of helping youth.

“[We] saw religion used as an abusive and violating mechanism in which to assimilate aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian mainstream,” she said.

“Aboriginal people were assured that these sort of infringing practices and strategic policies would never occur again.”

Approving this proposal would just be sanctifying a “more contemporary form of the residential school experience,” Fontaine said.

That is serious stuff. People seem to have forgotten what we, Canada and the US, were doing a bit over a century ago: we were actively ripping children away from their native parents and boarding them up in schools where they were taught the White Man’s Ways, which usually involved religion in some way or another. My own university (which is celebrating its history this year) had its beginnings as a native American boarding school, run by an order of Catholic nuns. That’s not something to be proud of, but a stigma to be overcome. Why would Winnipeg want to be afflicted with a new racist black mark on their history?

Atheism book found in home linked to fire suspect!

Two suspects in a Texas church arson have been arrested. Unfortunately, guess what the most important fact in the presentation of the story is?

Investigators have seized books on demons and atheism as well as rifles and knives from in a home linked to one of the men charged with setting an east Texas church on fire and suspected in a string of similar blazes.

Jason Robert Bourque, 19, and Daniel George McAllister, 21, were arrested Sunday and charged with a single count of felony arson in the torching of the Dover Baptist Church near Tyler about 90 miles east of Dallas.

Right. Because atheists don’t believe in gods, but they do believe in demons. All this tells me is that these are a couple of confused young men…but if they’re setting fires, we already knew that.

Oh, wait…that report left something out. Here’s another one. I’ll just quote the paragraph that was buried near the end.

Jason Bourque’s family home in Lindale was also searched, yielding a small plastic bag of “suspected” marijuana seeds, more Skechers shoes, and three Bibles.

Ooops. One atheist book, one book about demonic possession, and three Bibles. Surely, that must be the most relevant datum, don’t you think?

More faith-based evil

Cults are all about control, and small children must be very hard to control.

The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died, a Baltimore prosecutor told jurors Monday.

Another horrifying detail: the mother of the boy went along with the punishment and watched him waste away…all because she wanted to be accepted as a member of the cult.

Francis Collins is up to the same old tricks

Collins has a new book coming out, titled Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith. It’s the same old drivel: CS Lewis, old chestnuts re-roasted on a dying fire, nature and science somehow testifying to the truth of faith, moral law, fine-tuning, the Big Bang, etc. Jerry Coyne says it just right:

Enough is enough.  Collins is director of the NIH, and is using his office to argue publicly that scientific evidence—the Big Bang, the “Moral Law” and so forth—points to the existence of a God.  That is blurring the lines between faith and science: exactly what I hoped he would not do when he took his new job.

And to those who say that he has the right to publish this sort of stuff, well, yes he does.  He has the legal right.  But it’s not judicious to argue publicly, as the most important scientist in the US, that there is scientific evidence for God.  Imagine, for example, the outcry that would ensue if Collins were an atheist and, as NIH director, published a collection of atheistic essays along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, but also arguing that scientific evidence proved that there was no God.  He would, of course, promptly be canned as NIH director.

Or imagine if Collins were a Scientologist, arguing that the evidence pointed to the existence of Xenu and ancient “body-thetans” that still plague humans today. Or a Muslim, arguing that evidence pointed to the existence of Allah, and of Mohamed as his divine prophet.  Or if he published a book showing how scientific evidence pointed to the efficacy of astrology, or witchcraft.  People would think he was nuts.

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition.  He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith.  He had his chance, and he blew it.  He should step down.

I note that one of the ways the book is being promoted is by touting the credentials of its editor as “the Director of the National Institutes of Health.” Atheists are often told that they are “harming the cause” by being outspoken with their ideas, that it is impolitic for science educators to be forthright about their godlessness, that we should emphasize the compatibility of science and religion (even when we think it is false) — and we’re also told that this is part of the virtue of scientific objectivity, since we can’t possibly disprove the existence of a god. I should like to see some of those same people and organizations (like, say, the Colgate Twins or the NCSE) to come out and similarly deplore this promotion of medieval nonsense by a supposed scholar of good science.

They won’t. It’s never been about fairness or diplomacy or objectivity. It’s always been about pandering to a delusion held by a majority.