Mike Adams is a nasty piece of work

Mike Adams must really hate the “It gets better” campaign, which is trying to give gay kids some hope, rather than letting them die of despair. Being Mike Adams, though, the only way he can deal with it is by lying. So he writes an essay in which he describes eight heterosexual kids who were hounded into suicide by homosexuals, just for parities sake, I guess.

Only he didn’t. All eight cases are based on true events of young Republican nitwits getting slapped down for anti-homosexual bigotry…but the part where Adams says “and then they killed themselves”? Total fabrication. In every case, without exception, the poor ‘victim’ lashed out to sue someone, instead.

It’s repugnant. It attempts to reverse the arrow of victimhood, making the bullies out to be oppressed and blaming the dead for their situation. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a christofascist thug with no moral compass at all. It’s Mike Adams.

At the very end of his eight lies, he ‘fesses up and manages to make it even worse.

These eight cases are all true except for one thing: The Christians who were bullied by gays and gay activists are all still alive. Not a single one has committed suicide. That is because they have centered their lives around Jesus Christ, rather than their sexual identity. And no amount of bullying can change my mind about that.

Please wrap your head around this unfortunate fact: Christians are the overwhelming majority. These eight people were not in circumstances at all similar to the gay kids who were isolated, alone, incessantly treated as filth, and bullied until they surrendered. Those kids were also not necessarily atheists — they were mostly brought up to believe in this Jesus fable, and it is a lie to pretend that gays are automatically non-religious (it’s rather a shame that they aren’t—we’d be rather closer to the goal of a godless majority if suddenly all who reject that callous, judgmental conservative Christianity really were atheists).

It seems that centering your life around Jesus Christ makes you a litigious, arrogant jerk, so maybe that isn’t the best strategy for surviving Christian thuggery. I think the It gets better project is a better model for a moral life; I’d rather see people center their lives around hope than around damnation and death.

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.

It must be Obvious Day!

I know. You’re still trying to get over the shock of learning that little Billy Dembski admits to being a biblical literalist. Brace yourself for this one, then: Glenn Beck is also a creationist, and his reasons are really, really stupid.

You know, if you know so little about evolution that you think the fact that monkeys aren’t turning into humans is a credible argument, maybe you should have “MORON” tattooed across your forehead.

Evolution is an engine of diversity. It produces “endless forms most beautiful”, to quote the guy who thought it up. Asking why different species don’t all evolve into us is about as dumb as asking why every kaleidoscope doesn’t produce the same image every time you turn it.

Are we at all surprised?

I have to commend him on his honesty: William Dembski has come right out and plainly said that he believes in a ‘literal’ interpretation of the bible, and that his god actually created the earth in 6 days culminating in the conjuring into existence of Adam and Eve.

In writing The End of Christianity today, I would also underscore three points: (1) As a biblical inerrantist, I accept the full verbal inspiration of the Bible and the conventional authorship of the books of the Bible. Thus, in particular, I accept Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and of the Pentateuch) and reject the Documentary Hypothesis. (2) Even though I introduce in the book a distinction between kairos (God’s time) and chronos (the world’s time), the two are not mutually exclusive. In particular, I accept that the events described in Genesis 1- 11 happened in ordinary space-time, and thus that these chapters are as historical as the rest of the Pentateuch. (3) I believe that Adam and Eve were real people, that as the initial pair of humans they were the progenitors of the whole human race, that they were specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors. (William A. Dembski)”

So, yes, he is an honest lunatic.

I wonder if he’ll be coming out with a mathy book dissecting the likelihood of that particular scenario?

Along these same lines, take a look at the program for this creationist conference, Vibrant Dance, which purports to bring together religion and science. It’s all church groups and old school creationists and gibbering nitwits like Dinesh D’Souza and, of course, the Discovery Institute gang, all wallowing in Jebusism.

Oh, and just for another non-surprise, look who else is represented in the program: BioLogos.

It’s easy to forget about DonorsChoose

Especially if you’ve got adblock in place, because the big banner on the left asking you to donate will disappear…but yes, we are still trying to raise money for science education, and if you’ve got a few dollars to spare, go to my challenge page and pick a project you like and help them out. One of the nice things about the way DonorsChoose is that you actually put your money in the hands of teachers who are doing work that you like.

Now I know, we’re all evil atheists here, and we’d never do something just because it was good and nice. If cutthroat competition is a better motivator to your mind, we’re also having a little contest with some of the other science blog networks, and we have a leaderboard for the science bloggers. Scienceblogs is ahead right now, but those nefarious rascals at Discover and Scientopia are breathing down our necks. Help us simultaneously crush the others and help school teachers!

The students have been slacking!

But then, so have we all. I hit my developmental biology students with the first evil exam of the term last week (I give them a couple of broad questions where we don’t have all the answers, and send them off to write a longish essay on their own time. It’s definitely the kind of test where regurgitation doesn’t work at all). Then also the last few days have been our Fall Break, a short interval with no classes which were added to allow the faculty a chance to catch up on their work and sleep, but which I squandered by gallivanting off to London where I got almost no sleep.

But they’ve got some stuff online.

I’ll crack the whip in class some more today and tell them to provide more blog fodder. If I don’t fall asleep mid-session, that is.

Is this an evolution game?

I don’t know, because my eyes kind of glazed over as this review explained all the rules for Dominant Species.

It doesn’t exactly look elegant in its implementation — it’s more for hardcore board-gamers than a family fun night, if you ask me — but at least it seems to be taking an ecosystem approach to modeling evolution which is far different than the usual ‘battling individuals’ concept you usually see in games.