Miller gives another lecture

I’m going to be a bit distracted for a while, with some upcoming travel and various other bits of busy work, but I was listening to this lecture by Ken Miller (in which Carl Zimmer was in attendance, too) as I was puttering away on a lecture of my own . It’s pretty much the same talk he gave in Kansas, sans talk of shooting at new targets and other obnoxious language, but I still find myself disagreeing with his conclusions. I had to take just a minute to bring up my objections.

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Good scrubbin’

Oh, boy…Boingboing mentions something squid-related and everyone sends me email. Should I mention that I brought up Squid Soap back in August? (Hah! That Doctorow fellow thinks he’s so cutting edge. Poseur.) However, Craig Clarke just sent me some information on a holy cruciform-shaped scrub brush, and it seems to me that we have to get these two products together.

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If you’re going to wash away the sins of the world, you ought to do it with squid soap, I think.

Kook warning!

Why do we put up with these insane people? This is painful to listen to: it’s an NPR interview with John Hagee, and he goes on and on about his weird biblical prophecies that soon (maybe in the next hour!) the Rapture is going to occur, war will break out with Russia and Islam against Israel, and God will make an abrupt magical appearance that will prove his existence. It’s got excerpts from his looney-tunes sermons. We get to hear that “All Moslems have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews.” And what about Hurricane Katrina? “New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God…all of the city was punished for the sin that was in that city.”

Terry Gross is much, much too nice to this raving lunatic.

Oh, come on, Shermer…

Ugh. John Pieret is right: this effort by Michael Shermer to reconcile evolution with conservative theology is hideous, on multiple levels. It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that Christians are going to consult Shermer, a godless hellbound skeptic, on how to interpret the fine details of the Bible. Either reject it or buy into it—but nobody is going to believe that Shermer accepts the religious premises of the book. He’s being a kind of concern troll on a grand scale.

It’s also nonsense.

Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced.

Oh, really? Ask a Christian what his or her “core values” are, and they’ll probably spit up either doctrinal beliefs, such as the divinity of Jesus and the idea of salvation, or they’ll bring up a list of social concerns, such as abortion, homosexuality, or religiosity in government. Evolution either is irrelevant to those worries or contradicts them, and as I say over and over again, Christians aren’t necessarily stupid, and they know this.

I’m also not keen on someone using science to falsely bolster conservative ideology.

A troubling trend

Now we’ve got unconfirmed rumors that Steve Irwin was born again shortly before he died. You may recall that Charles Darwin was also tarred with claims of a deathbed conversion, too.

The message is clear. Don’t convert, or you’ll die.

The only question is whether it’s Jesus that does the execution, or whether wandering evangelicals are actually serial killers. And since I don’t believe in Jesus…

Poor picked-upon Pope

I’ve already done my fair share of pope-bashing, so I won’t kick him any more over this latest episode. Instead, I’ll just tell everyone to go read my homies in the science community, Revere and Sean (who is particularly telling on that jarringly bogus “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul” claim), and my fellow Minnesotan, Norwegianity, and while you’re plumbing the Minnesota mentality, you might as well take in Tild’s deconversion tale and regular Spong blogging…if there’s some human heart beating under the religious vestments, it ain’t Ratzinger’s, and Spong is a better substitute.

Must be one of those easily dismissible radical fringe types

“Archbishop of York”? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?

The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.

Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.

It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’, and remove references to faith from public noticeboards for fear of causing offence. It is both my view and my experience, that most British Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of secularised culture that denies its own foundations. What they object to is the attempt to build human society without God. And so given the choice between the two prefer a faith environment, even one which they do not share, to that of a secularist state.

Oh. It’s the War on Christmas already.

How to end religious strife

Give all the fundamentalist Christians a copy of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, then sit back and wait for them to kill each other. I’m amused that the article calls it a “theological argument”: the guy gets upset at the movie, sees his wife, calls her evil, and tries to strangle her. Yep, that’s a “theological argument” in a nutshell.

(via Andrew Brown)