Paszkiewicz is famous now!

David Paszkiewicz, the history teacher recorded while proselytizing to his students, has made the NY Times. Here’s the familiar part:

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

The story also documents some of the reactions in the community. It’s mostly negative…against the student who dared to document the flagrantly illegal actions of the teacher.

In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.

Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for Matthew’s suspension.

Despite the fact that even conservative legal organizations are saying that Paszkiewicz is basically indefensible, no action has been taken against him.

(via The Island of Doubt)

Oh, well, that’s all right then

Here’s another article on that freaky Left Behind video game. The rationalizations for the ability to kill people violently in the game are fascinating.

Left Behind Games’ president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is
pacifist because players lose “spirit points” every time they gun down
nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by
having their character pray.

Isn’t the most wonderful version of pacifism ever? Go out, butcher a few people, engage in a warlike campaign…and as long as you beg an invisible man’s forgiveness afterwards, you can still call yourself a pacifist. With that kind of reasoning, Ted Haggard is a heterosexual, Bill Bennett is a cautious investor, and Ted Nugent is an environmentalist. No wonder Christianity is popular among hypocrites.

It’s all OK if you are a Christian

Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into “faith-based” programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and have no other actual, real-world value. The clearest examples are the prisons, where con artists like Chuck Colson have been engaged in a kind of ministry that is actually religious extortion and bribery.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress.

The article documents many instance of this kind of behavior line up at the trough and get cash—large amounts of cash—to proselytize to captive audiences. It’s genuinely despicable. This is exactly why the government should not be involved in favoring one religion over another—these gasbags cannot be trusted to put the interests of their target audience above their need to preach dogma.

For another example of the sleazy behavior of evangelicals, I give to you Kent Hovind. Hovind is a dishonest creationist who was caught committing tax evasion. Not only was he skimming to enrich himself, but by playing games with their salaries and paying them under the table, he was screwing over his employees, which seems to be a most Christian thing to do. He’s been convicted and thrown in jail, and he has been sporadically posting blog entries from prison. These are appalling stories of a con man who can’t stop bilking his fellow inmates.

have also been teaching math and science to some of the others. It is great to see convicted drug dealers get excited when they learn fourth grade level math for the first time. I have spent quite a bit of time with one 29-year-old man who cannot read at all. I have been teaching him phonics and we are reading Genesis 1, 2, 3 and John 1, 2, and 3. His face lights up when he sees that he can do it. I offer commissary items like soup or coffee to men who memorize Bible verses. There is no way to describe the joy that they show when they get it right. Many have never memorized scriptures in their life, and maybe that is why they are in jail. Scripture helps us to “cleanse our ways” Psalm 119:9-11.

Hovind is not a good teacher. I’ve heard his lectures; he’s a fraud and a liar who babbles at a frantic pace, who has been peddling anti-scientific crap for decades, and now he claims to be teaching science to his fellow inmates. This is an injustice. We’re locking up these poor fellows as punishment, isn’t it a bit much to also allow a bunco artist like Hovind to fill their heads with lies and actively contribute to their ignorance?

Also note the outright bribery I highlighted in the quote—the man has no shame at all.

In fact, he is so shameless I expect that he’ll soon be applying for federal aid in his propaganda efforts…and given the record of this Republican administration, he’ll probably get it. After all, a belief in Jesus seems to be sufficient qualification for any clown to be a teacher (or a president!), overcoming any amount of stupidity.

(crossposted to The American Street)

Maybe I should beg for nickels so I can buy a pair of roller skates

Jebus, but I am in the wrong business. Benny Hinn is getting his flock to buy him an airplane.

As a result, we have recently taken delivery on our Gulfstream G4SP plane, which we call Dove One. I have enclosed a beautiful photo-filled brochure to explain more about this incredible ministry tool that will increase the scope of our abilities to preach the Gospel around the globe. Now we must pay the remainder of the down payment, and I am asking the Lord Jesus to speak to 6,000 of my precious partners to sow a seed of $1,000 in the next ninety days. And I am praying, even as I write this letter, that you will be one of them!

“Sow a seed”…of six million dollars? So he can buy a fancy new jet? This is what Christianity is really good for: providing an environment in which grasping, greasy-haired, forehead-thwacking freaks can prosper, where piety is measured in dollars and the moneychangers have inherited the temple. Faith is just another word for credulity, and preacher is a fancy name for parasite.

What’s wrong with this statement?

Something is odd about this comment:

…to help make his point that the bible was the word of god, he introduced the Dead Sea scrolls. He said that they were 3,000 years old and that scholars had found that they were identical to the modern day bible. In fact, he said, “Every dot over every ‘i’, every cross of the ‘t’, every comma, and every period is in the exact same place as in the bible in your hand” (quote paraphrased).

And to this day in Hebrew school, the children receive careful instruction in dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Demon squid?

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist ‘healer’ who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.

You’ll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.

Look at it as voluntarily flagging their impairment

Now Phil is trying to kill me—he sent me this link with a knowing smirk, plainly telling me that he knew it would raise my blood pressure. People, think this stuff through: if I were found dead in my chair, one clawlike hand clutching my chest, my face in a rictus of agony, and there on the computer screen in front of me was an email chortling over giving me apoplexy, the police would come calling, and they wouldn’t be cheerful. My family, amoral godless atheists all, would probably put out a hit on you via the Infidel Mafia. Be more careful!

As you can tell, though, I survived this episode. Basically, it’s a small, studied insult, just one more piled up on many: in Alabama, getting a license plate with “God Bless America” stamped into it has no extra cost, but various specialty plates (such as those for some veterans) will require a few bucks extra.

It’s stupid, but I can’t respond with much more than a resigned sigh. For one thing, it’s Alabama (sorry, Blue Gal, but if I got upset every time Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, etc., insulted my intelligence and that of every sensible person north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, I’d be exhausted); secondly, looking at the standard plate choices, I see it as similar to the choice between an ordinary plate, and a disability plate. People who pick the “God Bless America” plate are merely notifying other drivers that their car is being piloted by someone with a different kind of disability.

Poor things. Maybe they could be privileged with special spots in their church parking lots, too.

Who counted them? And how?

Sean notes without comment a piece on how Muslims should find Mecca when traveling in space. I am in awe of the mind that could write this.

A user-friendly, portable Muslims in Space calculator , could determine the direction of the Qiblah and prayer times on the ISS. Its essential feature would be the use of the Projected Earth and Qiblah Pole concepts. These are based on the interpretation of the holy house of angels in the sky above Mecca. The place is always rich with angels worshipping. As many as 70,000 angels circumambulate it every day. Thus, one virtual Qiblah pole can be taken as a universal reference to determine the direction of the Qiblah. When Earth is projected to the height of the ISS, every point on its surface is projected also, including the Qiblah point, which can be projected upwards and downwards along the Qiblah Pole. This allows the direction of the Qiblah to be determined in space and in the bowels of the Earth.

It’s got space stations and angels all muddled up in one paragraph. Can we get the ISS to fly directly above Mecca? Would we need to install windshield wipers on it if we did so, in order to clear off the angel splat?

Pinker says a whole lot of sensible things all at once

I’m not a big fan of Steven Pinker’s work, but I have to agree with just about everything he says in this letter arguing against the planned “Reason and Faith” requirement at Harvard.

First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for “religion.” An egregious example is the current administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” so-named because it is more palatable than “religion-based initiatives.” A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.

Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

There’s more, but here’s the conclusion.

Again, we have to keep in mind that the requirement will attract attention from far and wide, and for a long time. For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.

One of the sad consequences of the American separation of church and state is that it has fed the notion that church is as important as state, and that it needs to be accommodated with ever-growing privileges.