I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.

• Yom Kippur is supposed to be such a solemn holiday in Israel that no one drives, no one works, no one eats, but apparently, there is no proscription against rioting. A non-Jewish man started his car (blasphemy!), which drove his Jewish neighbors insane with pious rage to the point that they ended up rampaging through the streets, requiring police force to end the violence. (via Obsessed with Reality)

• A doll that babbles baby talk has Christians upset — it seems that they when they listen closely, they think it’s praising Islam. That’s funny — that’s what I hear when I hear Pentecostals speaking in tongues.

• “The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Wait — I thought I was the opposite of holy. My wife is going to be so disappointed.

• Peter Watts has an interesting analysis of how dumb-as-rocks fundie goons can thrive in modern society. The pared down explanation: holding ridiculous religious beliefs is costly, and therefore represents an expensive investment that testifies to the depth of commitment, and thereby promotes greater group cohesion.

• Tim Tingelstad is running for the Minnesota Supreme court. Please don’t vote for him. He’s a far-right religious kook who wants to ‘return’ the country to godly rule.

• Another day, another preacher caught collecting kiddie porn. At least he’s honest—he says he viewed it for the purpose of sexual arousal, but at the same time he’s all tangled up in guilt because he thinks Jesus is unhappy with him.

Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.

People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.

The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.

Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.

I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.

If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.

Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.

And I’m already a-scared! It is not recommended that you view this collection of video clips and links of Pentecostals spazzing out before bedtime, unless you really want to induce nightmares.

I wish religious nuts could get a little perspective when they talk about “miracles”. The latest “miracle” is a piece of Ilan Ramon’s diary that is going on display in Israel; Ramon was one of the astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia.

“It’s almost a miracle that it survived — it’s incredible,” Zalmona said. There is “no rational explanation” for how it was recovered when most of the shuttle was not, he said.

The diary was fragmentary, charred, and soaked, and it required months of restoration to be rendered partially readable. The human being Ilan Ramon was similarly fragmentary, charred, and soaked, and no amount of work will ever bring him back. There was no miracle here, only tragedy, and that some piece of a prayer Ramon wrote in his diary survived is an awfully tawdry relic to celebrate the existence of a beneficent deity. It seems to me that it is actually a testament to the refutation of what they believe — not that they will see that, not when every scrap of pain and sorrow in the world is twisted into a prop for their faith.

And it doesn’t feel good. Kroto is a Nobel-winning chemist, and I’ve had dinner with him — he’s a good guy, a very outspoken atheist, strongly on the side of science education, and all around smart and personable. So I hate to say it, but this opinion piece on the Michael Reiss affair is just too exclusionist for even me. Reiss, you may recall, was the education director for the Royal Society who resigned after making some conciliatory (or reported as conciliatory) remarks about creationism.

I do not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs – for all I know the President of the Royal Society may be religious. However, I, and many of my Royal Society colleagues, do have a problem with an ordained minister as Director of Science Education – this is a totally different matter. An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface. Reiss cannot have his religious cake in church and eat the scientific one in the classroom. This is where the intellectual integrity issue arises – and it is the crucial issue in the Reiss affair.

This is too close to blacklisting people for their personal affiliations, and it should not be acceptable. I agree that being an ordained minister implies that the guy is fairly deeply into weird old woo, but surprise: people are really good, for the most part, at holding a lot of disparate ideas in their heads, and people trained as scientists are especially good, for the most part, at keeping the spiritual blather out of their science. Keep in mind that generic religiosity can be rationalized to avoid conflict with specific issues in science (in ways that are deplorably vague and pointless, of course); this isn’t like discovering that Reiss was a card-carrying creationist with an a priori commitment to anti-science. If we’re going to start kicking scientists out of organizations because they have some bit of irrationality in their lives, we’re all going to be in trouble. Do I need to start expunging the space operas from my bookshelves and the old cheesy horror movies from my DVD collection?

I say that qualified scientists should be awarded positions like Director of Science Education solely on the basis of their record as science educators. Give them the benefit of the doubt that they understand the difference between science and their private hobbies, and aren’t going to mix the two up. And, of course, if they do mix them up, go after them for the specific infraction, and not for their private interests.

This is also difficult for me to say because I do think religion is a taint that corrupts the thinking of otherwise intelligent persons, and I do find it personally suspicious when an ordained minister is given authority in a scientific organization…but no one is perfect, it’s a rational principle to judge by only appropriate criteria, and it’s simply an injustice to shut people out with such an unyielding criterion.

…and this site is fertile ground for those seeking to spread the word of Jesus Christ. The readership here is far more in need of the word than Egypt, Colombia, Iraq, Solomon Islands, Malaysia, Zambia, Togo, Austria, Pakistan or Iran. So, please, get a bible. They’re free, and if you don’t take them, they’ll be sent off to some poor innocent in some nice country like Egypt, Colombia, Iraq, Solomon Islands, Malaysia, Zambia, Togo, Austria, Pakistan or Iran, where they aren’t needed as much.