Sometimes the NPR Series “This I Believe” peddles a short dose of codswallop, but today’s is pretty good.

Would you believe a school in Minnesota suspended three eighth graders for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? Outrageous. The pledge is ridiculous to begin with and replaces conscientious thought with blind obedience, and I think it ought to be rejected everywhere, but to punish students for refusing to kowtow to McCarthyite relics is absurd.

Greg Laden wants us to crash this poll. It’s a bit redundant, fortunately, since the forces of reason are already leading, but let’s tip it farther.

Here’s the silly poll:

Did school officials react properly to the students who did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?

• Yes, but the punishment should have been more severe.
• Yes, a one-day, in-school suspension is about right.
• No, they should have been given a warning first.
• No, they shouldn’t be required to stand.

The town of Frankenmuth, Michigan likes to flaunt their crosses — they’ve put them up on signs, and they’ve got one on the city logo. I suspect the town contains a Christian majority, so their local news probably felt safe putting up an online poll asking,

Should Frankenmuth remove its cross from the city shield?

They don’t expect a horde of ravening godless atheists to descend on them and vote “YES!” — they never do. Mount up, internet warriors, and assault their poll with fire and sword and level it until they reel back crying for mercy.

Frankenmuth won’t know what hit them.^*

^*Literally; most probably won’t even notice. It’s just a pointless internet poll.

The Catholic church is always ripely ridiculous, and it’s a fine fillip on the rococo elaborations of their dogma when some silly news organization tries to turn them into a poll. Here you go, two, count ’em, two polls at once on the absurd entity called the Virgin Mary. You get to vote on “Do you believe the Virgin Mary has appeared as an apparition?”, which is silly as it stands, but then there’s also this ambiguous question, “Are you surprised the church officially recognized the Virgin Mary sightings from the 1600s?”. So we’ve got “do you believe in ghosts with hymens?” and “are you really surprised at how stupid religion can be?”.

I had to vote no on both. Vote according to your reason now!

(By the way, don’t expect dramatic shifts in the results on this one — they’ve got over 150,000 votes each right now.)

So here’s another one. A West Virginia newspaper poll asks,

Should local governmental bodies be allowed to open their meetings with a prayer?

You know the answer to that one.

It’s an event that caused more than 10,000 dead in Myanmar, and who knows how much devastation.

All we have to do, though, is wait a few days, and it will disappear from the news.

Did you all catch Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person in the World segment? Ben Stein almost made the top of the list — he was beaten by Ann Coulter, though, so the competition was fierce.

The other “almost”…what prompted the nomination was Stein’s claim that listening to me reminded him that science is all about killing people. Alas, Olbermann only mentioned me as a generic scientist, not by name. Oh, well.

I’m confused by the consequences of the Virginia twisters.

Brenda Williams, 43, returned Tuesday to the shopping center where she was buried beneath a collapsed ceiling in a manicure shop during the storm. She was pulled to safety by a stranger, she said.

“I’m not lucky, I’m blessed,” said Williams, who had a 2-inch gash stitched above her left eyebrow and stitches on her right forearm. “I’m fine. I’m here. I’m in the land of the living.”

She retrieved possessions from her car, which was flipped on its roof and destroyed in the parking lot.

Why was Ms Williams praying to be buried beneath a collapsed building, to be gashed and mauled, and to have her car destroyed? I think her insurance company ought to scrutinize her claims very carefully; she’s too danged cheerful, and I suspect she prayed to some thug god to trash her possessions so she could collect on her policy.

A lot of people got hurt with this reckless prayer stuff, you know.

Looking at the photos of the aftermath, I think god must have got his copy of GTA4 early, and he got carried away. Those video games are bad for you, especially if you’ve already got a rather impressionable and infantile personality.

The infamous proposed Christianist license plate for the state of Florida, the one that said “I believe”, is dead. The supportive faith rays emanating from the prayerful public were apparently not strong enough to overcome the ass-suing beams radiating from the likes of the ACLU.

Boy, so far this day of prayer seems to be working out well for us godless, prayer-free heathens. God must be working in his mysterious ways again.

A reader reminded me of a good corrective to the awful little man who claims that science leads to killing people: a dose of Jacob Bronowski.

“When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

My students in introductory biology will be watching this whole episode next week — I wish there were a way we could spare the time to have them watch the whole series … which, come to think of it, would make for an excellent framework to discuss the history of science.