Two contests!

These aren’t quite pointless polls, since comments are actually being solicited instead of mindless clicks, but you can still swamp the forces of silliness in thise two blog entries.

One asks, Charles Darwin: brilliant scientist or agent of Satan?. You can give any kind of answer you want, like “Charles Darwin was a brilliant scientific agent of Satan!”. Have fun.

The second one sounds even more fun: recommend new names for Falwell’s Liberty University. I’m going to have to echo Hitchens’ infamous comment about Falwell post mortem, and suggest that since the place has voided itself of it’s biggest chunk of effluent, it should now be called Matchbox U.

We are but puppets

Jen has taken me, Richard Dawkins and Hemant Mehta and used The Sims to put our simulacra together into a house. I’d say it’s some kind of pilot for a new sitcom on Fox, except I’ve seen enough Sims to know it will not end well. One of us will catch on fire, someone else will drown in the pool, and the last will die an agonizing death when he can’t find a path to the bathroom.

I do want that shirt in real life, though.

More clues to God’s identity!

One of those right-wing circle-jerks has been going on in Virginia, and the wingnuts are vying to see who can be holiest — it looks like a contest between Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. It’s boring, except, I think, for the revelation about the nature of God.

Huckabee was not to be outdone in the use of hyperbole. The former Republican presidential candidate called the United States a “blessed” nation whose victory against the British in the Revolutionary War was “a miracle from God’s hand,” indeed the same type of miracle that defeated the legalization of gay marriage in California.

Since we know how both of those victories were accomplished, that tells us something about the nature of the agent behind them. Thanks to Mike Huckabee, we now know that God is a) French, and b) Mormon.

A quick update

I’ve been neglecting you, O Readers! It’s been a busy couple of days out here in sunny Arizona — they keep telling me it is a surprisingly cool weekend, which I take to mean it is a blazing hellhole most of the time — and I’ve been having a grand time attending talks and deferring any worries about what I’m going to say tonight. Here are a few of the highlights:

  • I had a very nice dinner with some weirdos from ASU, and also had a well attended meetup at Rúla Búla. The Trophy Wife and daughter attended for the first time, and they were clearly baffled by all those strange people who wanted their photograph taken with me.

  • I very much enjoyed a talk by William Lobdell, author of the book Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It was one of those very humanist talks — lots of empathy for the religious, but pulling no punches at denouncing their problems.

  • Barbara Forrest gave an excellent talk on a familiar subject: how intelligent design creationism really is built on a purely religious foundation. It was very tightly argued — you can see why the creationists fear her. (Buy her book(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)!)

  • They had musical entertainment for Friday night: Roy Zimmerman. I coulda swooned. Too bad he didn’t play this one for Lynch’s benefit.

  • John Lynch asked “Was there a Darwinian revolution?” Like a typical history/philosophy science nerd, his answer was yes and no, but mostly no. It’s very annoying that I’ve been finding myself progressively more sympathetic to historical and philosophical questions that I had to agree with him. Darn it. Anyway, you can see his presentation slides, or even watch a podcast of Lynch in action. I think he’s trying to become King of All Media.

  • Norma Ramos gave a powerful speech on women’s rights and the trafficking in women. This was not comfortable or cheerful, but it was important stuff that needed to be said.

  • The Rev. Barry Lynn gave one of his usual great talks — how to tell if you might be a right-wing fundamentalist. Seriously, if you ever have a chance to attend one of his lectures, don’t miss it…he can find the humor in the most horrific excesses of the religious right, and he’s hated by them even more than we atheists are.

OK, now I have to get back to meeting stuff and thinking about what I should say tonight. It’s been a very good conference, so there is some pressure not to be a let-down here!

A heartbreaking absence of empathy

Cheyenne Cherry has a very pretty name. It’s too bad that the person isn’t quite so pretty a human being.

She and an unidentified juvenile allegedly broke into Valerie Hernandez’s Tinton Ave. apartment on May 6 and trashed the place.
Then in a shocking act of animal abuse, they tossed the woman’s kitten, Tiger Lily, into the stove and cranked up the temperature, ASPCA assistant director Joe Pentangelo said.

Cherry told authorities that she and her accomplice “thought we would play a joke on Valerie and mess up her apartment.”
The duo bolted from the apartment with DVDs and packages of noodles, Pentangelo said.

“She didn’t want to hear the cat crying and scratching at the oven door,” Pentangelo said.
Firefighters found the female cat’s remains smoldering in the oven after neighbors complained of smoke coming from Hernandez’s apartment.

I simply do not understand that kind of behavior at all. Why would anyone commit such a random act of unmitigated cruelty? A kitten is a small thing in the world…but it seems to me that how we treat the small and helpless is a measure of how we see ourselves.