Bill Nye doesn’t use the Bible as a science text? Heretic!

Reality is highly offensive to the godly. Bill Nye has alienated Texas by pointing out a simple fact:

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

Curse you, moon! Every night when you rise, you mock the gods with your false “light”!

Was it one goat for each engine?

If I were a passenger, I don’t think I would find Nepal Airlines’ maintenance procedures at all reassuring.

Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.

At least the in-flight meals must be fresh and tasty.

Sophisticated theological arguments are unanswerable

The Rational Response Squad has a “competitor”: a group calling itself the Righteous Response Squad. I think we can already see a problem—we can expect a dearth of originality and imagination from this new gang. And to fulfill that prediction, this collection of fundies decided to declare the Bible literally true and internally consistent, and issued a challenge: “Do you have bible contradictions? Do you think you can prove the bible false?”

[Read more…]

An insight!

So Jesus and Jeffrey Rowland are having a conversation in a bar…

i-e83a874540a8f45b8a61e2d105f51ace-rowland_jesus.jpg

Now, see, that’s the root of the problem: religion is crazy when you think about it, and when people do start considering its inconsistencies and ridiculous claims, its proponents either try to spin you around with increasingly nutty rationalizations, or they outright tell you to stop thinking. If science has any heresy at all, that’s it: to stop thinking is the one thing we must not do.

This is why religion is a science stopper. It makes absurd claims about the history and origin and nature of the world, and then tells you that you can’t address the questions it raises with reason and evidence.

Sometimes, conflict is the only answer

Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet and stop confronting people on their religious biases.

Huh?

But that’s exactly the problem that we’re addressing — that people will foolishly prefer “white-beard-in-the-sky-guy” over reality. And the message he takes home from this is that we’re wrong? This is nuts. I read that poll and it says we have a serious problem that we cannot simply ignore any more; this rather craven avoidance that Mooney/Nisbet propose is not working and will not work.

I’m definitely siding with Jason on this one.

Those attitudes, and the unflagging respect for religious faith that they entail, must be weakened. Can that be done? I don’t know. It certainly isn’t easy, but other Western countries have managed to do it.

But I am definitely certain that you can not weaken those attitudes by refusing to attack them.

These polls represent the state of affairs today. What got us here was not the vocal opposition to religion served up by Dawkins and the others. They are newcomers on the scene. Instead, what got us here is years of Republican pandering to the religious right, coupled with Democratic cowardice in the face of increasing challenges to church-state separation (among other factors, of course). As I have written before, it is the nicey-nice strategy of non-engagement endorsed by Mooney and Nisbett that is refuted by these polls. The strategy where you publicly attack bad religious ideas has barely been tried.

I have this suspicion that Mooney and Nisbet are drinking too deeply of the kool-aid of public approval. They’ve got a message that says do nothing, avoid criticizing people on their deeply held beliefs, and instead try to smuggle little bits of good policy past them by actively pandering to them by “framing” your proposals in their terms … and of course audiences love that and eat it up and congratulate them on their wise and sensible perspicacity afterwards, because nothing they say will ever confront the root of the problem, and those people will never feel the need to change. Nisbet/Mooney provide a feel-good façade for inertia on our side, and reinforcement for the destructive beliefs of the religious right.

You are doing something wrong if the purveyors of ancient lies and dumb dogma are thanking you for your conciliatory position; we should be making them angry and worried, and if you have deep differences with someone, you are doing neither you nor them any favors if your sole strategy is conflict avoidance. You might as well just surrender and be done with it.

Why would anyone trust a bill from those two Texans?

Texans should be concerned about Texas H.B. No. 3678, an act “relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools.” It’s authored by Charlie Howard, an overly cheerful and zealous member of the far religious right, and Warren Chisum, who will be known forever as the bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa, and it plays the pious fairmindedness card perfectly, while hiding the fact that it emerged from the sleeve of a pair of notorious liars for Christ. It is an underhanded and sneaky bill that, under the guise of promoting religious tolerance, actually has the purpose of stripping protection from minority views and allowing a Christian majority to run roughshod over secular institutions.

[Read more…]

Hank Fox WANTS!

Coral Ridge Ministries is pushing hard to promote their pet causes, and Hank Fox suggests that they give him a few goodies from their list of crazy literature and DVDs. They say they’ll send it out in return for a voluntary donation, but so far, it looks like the “donation” is less than voluntary.

I recall taking a stab at this a year or so ago with another Christian organization that was trying to sell creationist books while calling it a giveaway, with a completely independent and entirely optional opportunity to donate a few dollars to a worthy religious cause. I never got my books.

Fear of comics

Fanaticism and oppression work! The latest editions of the comic strip Opus are being censored by at least 25 newspapers around the country. I have to concede that Breathed’s work doesn’t have quite the quality it had during the glory years of Bloom County, but that’s not the reason it’s being dropped: it’s because it mocks Muslim dress, and
newspapers are afraid to make fun of Islam.

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. “They just don’t want to touch that,” she said.

It’s not really much of a sex joke — more of a tepid innuendo — and even the joke about Islamic dress is much more about the shallow faddishness of some Americans than anything about religion. Why shouldn’t we be as free to make jokes about religion as we do about politics or sex or entertainment or bodily excretions?