Would you believe I’m still trying to get home?

It was a rough night—roads in Minneapolis were clear, so I managed to drive halfway home, but then they turned into glassy sheets of frozen slickness, so I stopped for the late night at a cheap motel. Now the journey resumes by daylight, at least. It’s still icy, but at least I’ll be able to see.

I’m relieved that there will be no more travel this semester.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Let’s see…where am I? Oh, yeah. Springfield. Skepticon. My talk went OK, it was an all-science talk, and maybe disappointed those who expected me to lasso a god out of the sky, set him on fire, and stomp on his smoldering carcass. Afterwards, the party went on for quite a while. I was supposed to referee a drinking contest between Rebecca Watson and Richard Carrier, but they both faded pathetically early, forcing me to continue on for both of them.

No sleep for me. I ended up shooting the breeze all night long with DJ Grothe and Amanda Marcotte and Bug Girl and a few others.

Now I’ve got a long day of travel ahead. I expect to simply sleep through it all.

Quickies

I must catch a plane, but here are a few short notices I didn’t want to neglect.

  • Godless folk are trying to establish an atheist discussion site, and they need votes for approval. Help ’em out if you’d like.

  • Phylointelligence is a new site organizing essays to summarize and explain the evidence for evolution. Take a look!

  • Jeff Randall is an activist for secular humanism and skepticism who has fallen on hard times — his friends are fundraising to help him through a current crisis. Help if you can.

I have enraged some Canadians

And it is so cute and adorable. A while back, I laughed at the theocrats of Christian Governance. Apparently, the exposure stung, prompting one of them to write a whiny little rant. Here’s how it begins:

It has been very interesting engaging with atheists over the past couple of weeks. They came looking for us, finding our website, it seems, due to exposure by a PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Myers is brash about his own atheism, declaring that his website is about “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” If these people are his “disciples,” he, as a professor, should be thoroughly embarrassed.

What, you may ask, could people have done to embarrass me? As he rages on and on, what really annoyed him is that people asked for evidence to support his claims, and are out to make creationism look silly. As if that is difficult.

These atheists would also demand that you lay out the material backing up your position. If you told them to go and look for it themselves because you know how easy it is to find on the internet, or if you even just tell them, that if their interest is genuine, they should just keep reading your own website, you again got accused of not having a defense, of not having rational reasons to back up your claims.

On numerous occasions, I accused these atheists of engaging in guerrilla warfare, trying to wear down their enemies by sucking them into a long, drawn-out battle, demoralizing them at the same time with fraudulent accusations and sarcastic, mocking criticism. I am sure that if I bothered to look, I’d find a book somewhere called “Atheist Battle Strategies Against Christians.” The tactics used by some of them were so repetitive and robotic, as though they were brainwashed disciples of some cult leader.

Poor fellow. I can see why he was getting battered about with demands that he back up his claims: he’s wonderfully evasive. It’s a pointless cranky essay in which he gripes about being asked for evidence, yet never actually gets around to mentioning what the evidence is for, let alone actually telling us what his evidence is. Oh, right, it’s somewhere else in the dominionist glurge on the website. Read it all to find out…that no, it isn’t.