Now you’re all in trouble. I have been personally blessed by God via email.
Hi PZ,
Just wanted to thank you for the link to My Blog, Stuff God Hates. As such I will bless you and your family and make your descendants
the rulers of many lands.Also, I rather enjoy your blog as well.
– God
“Rulers of many lands” … I hope my kids don’t get stuck with Asia.
Robert Bakker is one of the good guys, a paleontologist who really does an excellent job of communicating enthusiasm for science. I saw him talk at St John’s University a few years ago, and he clearly inspired the kids in attendance — I greatly enjoyed the talk too, even though one of his hooks was to incessantly emphasize the religious backgrounds of famous dinosaur hunters. It’s a strategy, all right? If he can get more kids to follow through on science, more power to him.
However, he also illustrates another unfortunate phenomenon: religion turns even good scientists’ brains to mush. In a recent interview on Laelaps, he said some awesomely stupid things.
While I think a non-sectarian comparative religion course would be a fine idea for our public schools, I don’t trust these bozos at all. Tennessee legislators want to stuff a bible studies class into the curriculum.
“Our government school teachers cannot constitutionally preach the Bible, but they can teach the Bible,” Herron said.
“I want students to study the greatest and most popular book in history. I want young people to understand how the Bible has enormously impacted literature, art, music, culture, history and politics. A Bible course will help students understand our culture and our highest and best values.”
A Bible class is not non-sectarian. A course that begins with the premise that the Bible is the greatest book in history is not unbiased. This is a completely phony bill that is trying to smuggle religious instruction into the public school system.
As usual, I expect the politicians to be completely oblivious to their religious agenda.
I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:
Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.
Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.
Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.
Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.
And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.
And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.
I knew this would happen: creationists are pleased with the media coverage of the platypus genome, since it reinforces their misconceptions. The Seattle Times published a couple of letters from local creationists. Need I say that they are ridiculous?
I’m grading genetics exams today. I hope the English department doesn’t inherit too many cadavers.
But at least it is locomotion with style.
Shorter Bryan Fischer: Because the Nazis really hated homosexuals, they are nothing like the Religious Right. Or maybe it’s that because the Nazis were gay, they didn’t hate homosexuality enough, as the Bible clearly says you should.
I don’t know. It’s a confused mess of butchered history, so who knows what this guy is trying to say. He sure seems fascinated with butch Nazis abusing effeminate beautiful boys, though.
You may recall that a while back I mentioned how Jerry Coyne praised some work on bat evo-devo. I also said that I was going to have to write that paper up sometime. The bad news: I haven’t written it up for the blog. The good news: I did write it up for a future Seed column. The better news: Stephen Matheson has a summary right now, so you don’t have to wait for my column to come out.
You should still subscribe anyway. It’s pretty on shiny paper.
It was commencement weekend here in lovely Morris, Minnesota, and I spent yesterday in a funny outfit posing for parents and going to commencement parties, and this morning was spent ferrying #2 Son to the Twin Cities for his long bus ride back to Madison. It’s time to buckle down and finish my grading now.
But on a happy note, I think we can safely close the nominations for this month’s Molly already: it’s a landslide, and I don’t think Kenny has a chance of catching up, and also we should celebrate the winner’s birthday somehow. The Molly for May 2008 goes to Etha Williams.
