I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice. It’s rather strange — I’m used to getting one or two death threats in my mailbox a week, but lately I’ve been getting several a day…and it’s not as if I’ve done anything particularly dramatic lately. Or have I? Are my horns showing?
Billy Graham has a column in which he answers letters — he’s a kind of evangelical agony aunt, I guess. A recent letter will make you laugh.
DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are in the dark, and he alone in our family has found the truth. — S. McM.
That’s a real problem, and I’m sure we all know someone who has gone off the deep end with some weird belief. That’s not the funny part; the good bit is Graham’s oblivious reply.
DEAR S. McM: One characteristic of cults is that they strongly believe they alone are right in their beliefs and everyone else is wrong. Thus they reject the central truths of the Bible that Christians have held in common for almost 2,000 years and substitute their own beliefs for the clear teaching of Scripture.
Shorter Billy Graham: The difference between their cult and mine is that they think they have the absolute truth, when I know that I do.
Waaaaa. First I get a pile of porn in my mailbox (wait, that’s not so bad…except that none of it matched my particular interests), and then I get sent a free DVD: Expelled. This is shaping up to be the suckiest birthday ever.
Alright, I confess, the DVD was a good present, so I could have a copy in my archive of creationist material. And it was obtained by an industry insider who didn’t have to pay for it, so no money passed to the hands of Premise Media, which is even better. It’s actually appreciated, so thanks Stranger Who Asked That His Identity Remain Secret. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring myself to watch it, though…I haven’t seen it yet.
I am kind of bracing myself right now in case some well-meaning admirer has commissioned a dump truck to drop off a load of squid poop in my yard, or something, though.
The inaugural meeting of Wisconsin Citizens for Science will be on 18 April at 2pm, in the Monona Public Library. You want to go. They are providing free cookies. Oh, yeah, and sciency information.
Mr James M. Baker is really lashing out, cluelessly. He has sent me a few other emails (which I just trashed on sight), and now someone at the IP address 67.177.100.132 (which traces back to Shelbyville…Hi, Jim!) has attempted to subscribe me to a large body of gay and fetish porn. Who knew there were sites dedicated to just pictures of young boys’ feet?
Anyway, the people who run these porn sites are not stupid, and they know they’ll be abused by homophobes who think they are a weapon. Before they send me a pile of glossy magazines and DVDs they verify by sending an email, with the IP address of the person who tried to subscribe me. Busted! Tsk, tsk…how petty, Mr Baker.
The only question now is how Mr Baker came to have such a working familiarity with so many diverse sites, with such a focus on gay sex, feet, and watersports?
Besides, someone else has associated me with porn with a bit more humor…and a more appropriate focus.
This may shock you, but the Trophy Wife is not perfect. She doesn’t quite get the cephalopod fetish, and thinks I’m a bit…weird. I know! It’s unbelievable that there’s only one person on the planet who thinks that, and I’m married to her! So, anyway, just to appease the spouse, I’ll try to regularly throw in a non-cephalopodian creature. This week, here’s something from back home in our mutual birth state of Washington, a crab being eaten by a sea anemone. Try not to read anything Freudian into it — although now that I’ve mentioned it, everyone will be looking for a metaphor here.
A new poll gives me cheerful results:
A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.
Keep those godless numbers going up!
I was born at 7:07 am on 9 March 1957, so today I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that the earth has circled about the sun an integral number of times. I think I’ll, oh, go to work all day. It should be fun!
If you fit that description, please report to Greg Laden. The NCSE has a little job for you.
So Ray Comfort is now complaining on the revered pages of the respected publication, World Net Daily about me. The article is full of dishonest misquotes, but let’s zip right to Ray’s scientific misunderstandings. They are deep and painful. He has this bizarre idée fixe that the necessity of every species having males and females somehow greatly reduces the probability that new species could arise. It’s total nonsense, and I dismissed it briefly when I commented on it before.
“I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times: evolution does explain this stuff trivially. Populations evolve, not individuals, and male and female elephants evolved from populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females. Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female – they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.”
Ray has read that, and failed to grasp the central concept. Take a look at the workings of Ray Comfort’s mind as he attempts to wrestle with a simple idea: the hamster wheel is wobbling, but the poor beast lies dead with legs up in its cage, and nothing is turning over.
