For a long time, TruthMachine has been the only person to have both been awarded a Molly and also been threatened with banning. Now he has to share that distinction with Walton, who has won the Molly for September.
Now pick one for October by leaving nominations in the comments. Don’t get all contrary and try to elevate some random troll, though: that’ll be taken care of a little later today when Survivor Pharyngula goes live.
But you can’t afford the expensive registration and travel costs? Here’s the deal for you: a workshop without walls that you attend and participate in over the internet. The subject of this one is Molecular Paleontology and Resurrection: Rewinding the Tape of Life, a discussion of origins of life research. It should be cool; set aside your afternoons on 8-10 November.
We seem to be infested with nasty little conservative know-nothings lately, so here’s some rodent repellent that the usual denizens of the long-suffering thread will find mostly unobjectionable.
George Takei calls out a nobody named McCance.
I’m seriously tempted to echo some of the hateful fundie rhetoric just to get Takei to wink at me.
Lily Allen sings about the appropriate response to the anti-gay wingnuts.
(Current totals: 11,301 entries with 1,173,849 comments.)
Jen McCreight has published a solid response to the clueless anti-atheist article in Ms magazine…and it’s in Ms magazine. It’s good stuff, too, with a list of all the godless women the original article ought to have consulted.
The New Humanist is handing out an award for the most egregious contributions to irrationalism and superstition, the Bad Faith awards, and you can vote! This is going to be a tough one, because every one of the nominees deserves an acknowledgment of their inanity.
It does have a bit of an English bent, so you might be unfamiliar with some of the names…but the voting page also has a brief description of each person’s crime against reason.
Lauren Booth 7.33% (25 votes)
Prince Charles 9.09% (31 votes)
Pastor Terry Jones 9.09% (31 votes)
Cardinal Walter Kasper 4.69% (16 votes)
Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed 18.18% (62 votes)
Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi 15.25% (52 votes)
Baroness Warsi 20.53% (70 votes)
Ann Widdecombe 15.84% (54 votes)
You’ve got one more day to vote for Christie Wilcox to win a $10,000 scholarship. Get in there!
You can’t blame diverse religious groups for the presence of pedophiles and abusers. Pick any profession, teachers, doctors, scientists, dentists, whatever, and you’ll find that there are some low number of criminals and psychopaths in their midst. But religion is somewhat unusual in that this seems to happen routinely.
The police suspect that the ultra-Orthodox community in which the resident lived knew of the alleged incidents but chose not to report them to the police or authorities.
In this case, it’s a pedophile rabbi, but it’s the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing with Catholic child-abusers: somehow, the fact that the culprit has some esteem within a narrow community becomes an excuse to pardon criminality. It’s probably not exclusively religious in nature (the Roman Polanski case is similar), but a product of an ingrown, isolationist group that puts protection of its privileges from outsiders ahead of policing infractions within itself. Religion just seems to be very good at building walls around its practitioners. That might even be its primary function.
That’s not the Insane Clown Posse…it’s Ray Comfort again, screwing up once more.
First, he complains about Richard Feynman (I know! Comfort vs. Feynman sounds a bit like Bambi vs. Godzilla), because he didn’t give a simple answer to the question about how magnets repel and attract, but actually goes on at length about what are good questions before explaining succinctly that these forces are everywhere, we just take them for granted. It might be annoying if you want a one-sentence answer, but aren’t willing to accept “go master Maxwell’s equations” as that explanation.
Comfort’s explanation is to watch this video. You will discover that it says nothing about how magnetism, but is only a cheap trick that he uses to hook people into his hateful evangelical baloney. This whole “everyone is evil” crap is Christianity’s worst contribution to humanity, and it’s the entirety of Comfort’s schtick.
If Comfort tried that game with me, I’d take his box away, ask him to show me whether he’s good or bad, and when it automatically announces that he’s a bad man, ask him why I should believe one word out of his lying mouth.
Suddenly, it resonates with me.
I’ve also been sent these images of spectacular wall art. I want one. Somehow, though, I doubt that I’ll be able to convince the TrophyWife™ that it’s worth $950.
