I get email

Sometimes they sucker me. I thought James was writing a nice letter, at first.

I found your site to be entertaining. I must say after reading the comments from your site I can see where the problem really is in this country. The fools follow the leaders of silly nonsense.

See? It sort of sounds like he’s agreeing with me. Little did I know how he was using the word “entertaining”, which isn’t always complimentary. James is probably more familiar with the word in its less than flattering sense. Like when he turns to his date after sex to murmur, “Was it good for you, baby?” and she replies, “It was…entertaining.”

In the same way, James dashes my ego on the jagged rocks of his disapproval with the very next sentence.

You are either very immature or a godless liberal fool. Both would suffice based on your gibberish about evolution.

Nooooo! I am crushed…but wait. What’s that? The last sentence above — it simply ruins the effect. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy — you need to work on your delivery. The insult is fine, but don’t follow through with a statement that reveals your clownish nature. For instance, don’t do this:

“You are a fool. I wear my underpants on my head.”

Do you get my point? Take the underpants off your head before you try to pretend you’re a serious critic. Otherwise, the target will find themselves unable to take you at all seriously.

Scared your degree will be worthless? One day it will be when folks realize the dummying down of science to adjust to your religion..Scientism. That’s all it is.

Well, gosh, I’m not too scared. After all, my degree is almost worthless, economically. When you figure that I could have become a refrigerator repairman straight out of high school, I’ve given up a tremendous amount of money to get this degree, so it’s actually less than worthless.

I bet refrigerator repairmen don’t get dunned with dopey email about how they had to be dumbed down to believe that refrigerators actually work, or how they must worship coolants, and how Jesus uses his freeze ray to make things cold. I missed such an opportunity.

I was made to believe evolution while at University to be fact and never be doubted as not to be the only explanation of life.

Aaaiieeaaa! That sentence cries out in torment. My degree is at least good enough for alleviating the suffering of the English language a little bit. How about, “While I was at University, I was made to believe that evolution was a fact, never to be doubted as the only explanation for life.” Maybe you can use that when you recycle your complaint to Jerry Coyne or something.

That is when I knew the wolves were among us.

Thank you. That’s better than calling me a teddy bear, but not quite as nice as squid. I’m sure sheep find themselves intimidated by wolves all the time.

It’s nice to be educated, but not to be indoctrinated by pompous asses that believe they hold the key to all truths.

The letter is improving. I quite agree. It’s why I don’t go to church.

Good day..godless liberal fool…James

Too late, you’re still wearing underpants on your head, James!

Now that’s how to split the vote on a poll

The cunning way to make a poll unpharyngulable is to throw in an irrelevant extra option to draw off our attention, and the NY Daily News has done it well. They’re basically asking the question, “Is evolution true?” and giving us the option of no, yes, and Glenn Beck is a freakin’ moron, and look! Mobs of people rush in to give the irrelevant (but true) answer:

Is evolution a dubious theory being “forced down our throats”?

Yes, I’m sick of scientists telling me what to believe. 29%

No, it is clearly how things came to be. 24%
It’s harder to believe Glenn Beck is so popular. 47%

They should have also included “Ooooh, shiny…” and “Hey! Squirrel!”

The first answer is also misleading. It should have been worded, “Yes, I’m sick of smart, educated people telling me that my brain farts are wrong.”

Kentuckians! Have you got money in the L&N Federal Credit Union?

Do us all a favor and yank it out and invest it elsewhere. L&N is partnering with the Creation “Museum” in a 5K run. I have no objection to Ken Ham endorsing healthy exercise — presumably being a creationist dolt doesn’t interfere with the functioning of your limbs — but jebus, respectable businesses should be embarrassed to be associated with those kooks.

Make a smart decision, Illinois

In the governor’s race in Illinois, just the fact that he’s Republican is sufficient that I would discourage you from voting for Bill Brady. There’s also this video in which he claims to believe in both creation and evolution, but I have to say I found the interviewer more annoying than the wanna-be governor.

There’s a point where he’s hectoring Brady, telling him there are only two sides, he’s either got to be in favor of some garbled version of young earth creationism/intelligent design creationism, or he’s in favor of evolution. The interviewer insists on this despite Brady stating that he’s a theistic evolutionist, that his god created the world and evolution was the tool that he used to create humans.

It’s a very silly notion, but it’s still a real and commonly held position that is not synonymous with fundamentalist Biblical literalism. It’s wrong, but you aren’t going to show that it’s wrong by falsely pigeonholing a proponent into another, wronger position. It was very annoying to listen to someone who didn’t understand creationism trying to use his ignorance to bludgeon the dope.

So please do vote against Bill Brady. But do so for the right reasons, OK?

MC-AAI-ADM Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo 2010

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“La fe NO mueve montañas, la ciencia sí”

¡qui está! El evento ateo más esperado del año.

Con un importante
grupo de especialistas y expositores que no querrás perderte.

Asiste al Primer Coloquio de Ateísmo en México. Conoce
nuestra visión de este movimiento internacional que rebasa fronteras
culturales y políticas, uniendo a ateos, humanistas y otros
librepensadores en una comunidad definida por nuestro compromiso con la
libertad de expresión, libertad de conciencia, derechos humanos,
pensamiento crítico, razonamiento lógico y ciencia.

El acontecimiento tendrá lugar en la ciudad de México y es organizado de manera conjunta por Atheist Alliance International, El podcast de Masa Crítica y Ateísmo desde México.

En un solo día se abordarán varios temas de interés para los no
creyentes; Como la relación Iglesia-Estado, el papel de la religión en
la educación, La teoría de la evolución y su relación con la biología
moderna, la lucha contra el fundamentalismo, entre otros.

El grupo de ponentes incluye a íconos del librepensamiento, así como
académicos y activistas de México y el extranjero.

¡No te lo puedes perder!

Todos los precios incluyen:

  • Acceso total a las conferencias
  • Refrigerios
  • Acceso al espacio de exposición
  • Kit de bienvenida

Sitio Oficial:

http://www.ateosmexicanos.org/coloquio

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.