Why is the media so hateful to Ken Ham’s “museum”?

The man certainly has an ego. His new commercial features…Ken Ham himself. Speaking as a non-photogenic and not particularly heroically-voiced fellow myself, it’s a big mistake from a purely commercial perspective for creeeepy, neck-bearded, thin-voiced weirdos with a foreign accent to be doing ads, unless he goes for the wacky angle. And this one might just feed the Christian persecution complex by highlighting the way all the media thinks his little freakshow in Kentucky is dumb, but everyone else is simply going to have their impressions confirmed when good ol’ Kenny boy stands up to out-nasal even the standard American nasal voice.

Why is the media so hateful? Because his carny-act pretending to be a “museum” actually is a menace to scientific advancement, a cheesy pile of kitsch, and a haunted house putting on airs and trying to con people into thinking it is an educational institution. They aren’t being hateful, they’re being accurate.

Proof positive that all forms of astrology are wrong

This is the Geek Zodiac, a spoof of the Chinese zodiac (the image at the link is larger and easier to read). It’s horrible and wrong.

i-bdac87b668aa79e5c9cf004826683369-geekzodiac.jpeg

I skimmed over that diagram and thought that all the choices were cool and geeky, except…well, this is just me, and you can feel differently…I thought the one I liked least and that was most boring was astronaut. And guess what, I was born in 1957, and therefore I fall under the sign of the Astronaut. Boo! Astrology is bunk! I was most hoping for Undead Alien Pirate, which would have required my mother to be pregnant for 5 years, and then stretch out labor from 1962 to 1965, which I admit would have been a bit cruel.

(This argument is the inverse of, but is just as valid as, the wishful thinking of the religious, who’d really like heaven to be real, therefore it is. I’d really like this zodiac to be false, therefore it is. So there. Ha.)

Why does the Catholic church allow Bill Donohue to speak for them?

This is a real mystery. Donohue is an angry guy with a fax machine who gets donations from affronted Catholics, which is nothing the church can do about, obviously…but he also pretends to be a defender of Catholicism while having no standing with the church and while making the most outrageous claims. You’d think someone in the hierarchy would take a moment to mention to journalists that the crazy ranting guy does not speak for them. I guess maybe the old guard thinks he does a good job representing their views, which makes him even worse.

Donohue is waxing indignant again about church pedophilia scandals. He has returned to his familiar excuse: it isn’t child abuse, it’s evil homosexuality.

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

If it is inexcusable, why is Bill Donohue making excuses for it?

He is certainly downplaying it. He’s desperately trying to point out that there is a continuum of sexual behavior here, as if that means it wasn’t as bad as everyone thinks it was. Why, it wasn’t always a priest pinning a 9-year-old girl down and penetrating her vaginally with his penis, so it was all OK! All it was was mostly cases of a priest being manually masturbated by 15-year-old boys, so everyone should go home now and not worry about nasty rotten evil priests any more.

He really doesn’t get it. The problem here isn’t what specific sex act was performed, or the exact age of the victims: it is a violation of trust and an abuse of minors from a position of power. I know that kids of that age may think about sex and have desires that they indulge in with their peers…but that simply does not make it acceptable for older men to hide behind their piety in order to manipulate them into gratifying their desires.

Take the case of Lawrence Murphy, the priest who molested 200 deaf boys in his care in Wisconsin. That he was having sex with males does not bother me at all; if he were being defrocked for loving, consensual sexual behavior with a man (or a woman, for that matter), I’d be holding him up as an example of the inhuman insensitivity of the church. But that wasn’t what he was doing: he was bringing bewildered schoolboys into his office, using his authority to order them to strip naked, and fondling their bodies. And then receiving no chastisement from the church, which actually protected him from official action because he was considered a valuable fundraiser.

I’d like to know what Donohue would consider acceptable behavior from a priest. Forceful vaginal penetration is clearly off the table, while a priest doing anything with a boy is going to be condemned as homosexuality…so I guess compelling 13-18 year old girls to give you oral sex is perfectly normal, healthy sexual behavior for a Catholic priest? Well within the boundaries of his vows, I’m sure.

It seems to me that by trying to excuse one part of the range of sexual activities by implying that another set of of coerced sexual activities is worse just means that Donohue is admitting that you can’t trust priests with boys in choir or confirmation classes or Sunday school. Good work, Bill.

By the way, the US court system has now served the pope with papers. The pope knew about the abuse, sheltered it, and even enabled it by defending child-molesting priests.


There are Catholics who reject Donohue’s representation — I just heard from Rev. Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Co-founder and President, Road to Recovery, Inc. and founding member of NSAC (National Survivor Advocates Coalition), a fellow who has been fighting to get the church to distance itself more from the hate advocates like the Catholic League. Good for them!

I get email

This one is from Bad Pitt. Read it while keeping in mind that we atheists are the ones called militant extremists…while good Judeo-Christian lunatics have these sick, psychopathic, violent fantasies of murder and execution.

GLORIOUS BASTERDS

Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish psycho-fantasy based on the delusional notion of retroactive vengeance against Nazi forces in France at the end of World War II. It is an artful, but ultimately pointless, exercise in orgiastic gratuitous violence. The only redeeming value of this film is:

(1) The not so subtle encouragement of the viewing audience not to take contemporary evils lightly and to act before it is too late to avert their tragic consequences.

(2) The possible equation of suave and sophisticated Nazi SS officers with intellectual and academic elites in our own American society of the 21st century.

Thus I would like to propose a sequel to this film: Inglorious Basterds II, or more properly Glorious Basterds.

This would project the urbane and intellectual SS officers onto the modern American academic milieu, specifically the Darwinian Evolutionists, whose scheme is irrational, illogical, and with many destructive consequences for society at large.

Thus this is the delicious scenario I would like to see Quentin Tarantino render into a sequel:

Brad Pitt leads his gang of Jewish vengeance seekers (along with a couple of idealistic Gentiles) onto a modern American college campus. There they lay siege to the Department of Biological Sciences. They round up all the faculty members inside a large meeting room where they place them under armed guard and lock all doors and windows.

Then they order the department chairman to recite a script over the phone to FOX or CNN. The script would read thus:

To Members of the American Mass Media,

We professors of Biological Science at the University of ___________ are being held hostage by a band of spiritual fanatics who condemn us for disseminating anti-spiritual falsehoods and irrational myths disguised under the cloak of scientific respectability called Darwinist Evolution. These falsehoods, our captors maintain, have harmed the hearts, minds, and souls of countless numbers of American youth and have poisoned the entire culture at large against the reality of the Creator God depicted in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. We are being judged as destroyers of society and traitors to America, whose Declaration of Independence clearly speaks of a Divine Creator. We have been given two options: to publically renounce our fraudulent evolutionist views and to live, or to stubbornly maintain these views and to die. We have one hour to decide our fates.

Then Brad Pitt randomly selects one of the faculty members to be shot and killed instantly, in an act of “natural de-selection”, just to demonstrate his determination. Suspense builds as the faculty members desperately seek ways to avoid further acts of “natural de-selection” as they recognize that they are faced with a choice of admitting their lives have been dedicated to disseminating a vile lie or to dying for what they know to be a complete deception. The professors attempt to engage in various philosophical and scientific arguments to dissuade the Basterds from their course of vengeance, and every so often the Basterds lose patience with their convoluted reasoning and randomly shoot and kill an academic offender.

In the end the surviving faculty members take a vote and decide to renounce Darwinism rather than their lives. Brad Pitt then tells them that though they have chosen wisely, they cannot get off so lightly and he proceeds to carve into their foreheads a large D to identify them wherever they go as former Darwinists who endeavored to destroy the fabric of American society with their anti-intellectual and God-hating ideas. And then he says: “I never realized that Nazis could come in any size, shape, color, nationality, or profession! Who would have dreamed that many of America’s own intellectual elites would turn out to be Nazis too?!”

On Source Code and the ethics of the modern technological era

[I am totally confused. I have not seen the movie Source Code, although it will be playing in Morris next week, yet I have now seen an explanation of the time-travel paradox in the movie by the physicist James Kakalios, and now here is an explanation by an English professor. You guys sort it out. I’m not going to try to read either of them carefully, until I see the movie. Which is already giving me a headache.–pzm]

“On Source Code and the ethics of the modern technological era”

By Brendan Riley

Spoiler Alert: this essay assumes you’ve seen Source Code or don’t mind having the plot revealed.

“Make Every Second Count.” “What Would You Do If You Knew You Only Had A Minute To Live?” These purport to be the dramatic underpinning of the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller, Source Code. But underneath the big-studio whiz-bang lies a story teasing out several ethical questions that haunt the technology we’re just now inventing. The film follows Colter Stevens, an Army pilot who finds himself on a doomed train in someone else’s body with only eight minutes to find and stop the mad bomber. After only a brief respite to speak with his superiors, he goes back and tries again, and again, and again. It’s 12 Monkeys and Quantum Leap meet Groundhog Day, without the piano lessons. Source Code uses a relatively familiar gimmick to tell an exciting story, but under the explosions and Gyllenhaalian studliness, it also prods us to think a bit more about how we should grapple with the new possibilities of the modern era.

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