For Mike Huckabee.
Collins is a good choice for any candidate who thinks sucking up to a religious constituency is more important than getting the best advice about science. For anyone who actually wants advice about science, I recommend RPM.
The City Pages, the arts and entertainment newsweekly in Minneapolis, had an article on the best artists of the year. One of the entries is jarring in its strange conclusions, the award to Christopher Hitchens:
Fueled by cigarettes, alcohol, ego, and, most importantly, intellect, Hitchens employs his excoriating eye in his Vanity Fair column, television appearances, and what’s quickly becoming his very own nonfiction canon. The only thing more surprising than the abundance of his output is his sheer audacity. After alienating pretty much every leftist in the country with his vociferous support for Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he dropped God Is Not Great, the most cogent condemnation of religion in recent memory, onto the number-one slot of the New York Times best-seller list and earned himself a National Book Award nomination in the process. Far from the vitriolic diatribe of a God-hating misanthrope like Richard Dawkins, Hitchens’s work is both appropriately respectful and right.
The City Pages is not a doctrinaire organ for the right or for religion — it’s irreverant (another winner is Stephen Colbert), and atheist-friendly (ditto for Philip Pullman), and this is a positive review of Hitchens. That last sentence, though…the complete mischaracterization of Dawkins took me aback, as did the cockeyed assessment that Hitchens is “appropriately respectful”. Hitchens isn’t respectful of religion at all, and Dawkins certainly isn’t less respectful.
Did Dawkins make a surprise visit to Minneapolis specifically to shoot Emily Condon’s dog or something?
This is a strange one — some kind of weird political rant. I’m pretty sure this fellow doesn’t care much for Hillary Clinton.
Mark Mathis, one of the people behind Expelled, must be doing the radio tour again. I heard he was on the Minneapolis Christian talk radio station today (I missed it, unfortunately—anyone else catch it?), and you can also hear him lying on the Coral Ridge Ministries podcast. Apparently, you can’t question neo-Darwinism in the classroom or in science; Mathis doesn’t know much about the arguments going on right now, does he? (He probably doesn’t care, since the alternatives being debated don’t involve Jesus). The rest of the show has some clueless git repeating the claim that Darwin led straight to Hitler.
Don’t bother listening unless you really want to be complete in following the nonsense they’re espousing…same ol’ same ol’.
Here’s a fine list of 20 blasphemous events, rated by
vulgarity, criminality, religious impact, political impact, and deaths. My favorite has to be number 13.
Rude Buddha
A sculpture of Buddha with a banana and two eggs strategically placed was happily on display at the Royal Academy of Arts this summer, but when it was moved to the sculptors’ home city of Norfolk it raised hackles amongst the local police force’s hate crime unit. DC Dan Cocks ordered it to be removed from the gallery. The artist said he aimed to show that in a global village everyone can take offence at something.
I know, it’s silly, but I felt like ordering Dan Cocks fired for vulgarity, too.
I know most of you have already read it with your print subscription to Seed, but I’ll mention it anyway: my last column can now be read on the web. This one is all about the weird, accidental, clumsy way segmentation patterns in flies are set up.
I gripe about the NY Times now and then — the newspaper is an infuriating mix of the best and the worst of print journalism. I’ve had a couple of the people who work there stop by in the comments now and then, and I’d love to see one of them show up now and explain something to us all.
William Kristol??!? Jebus. The man has spent years demonstrating that he’s a clueless ideologue who always gets it wrong.
So wy, NY Times, why?
And if you don’t know Kristol’s litany of failure, Tom Tomorrow reminds us.
So the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. In a rational world, there’s a range of options available: stop protecting priests who abuse their position, threaten convicted child-abusing priests with expulsion and excommunication, even revisit this peculiar custom of demanding celibacy for the priesthood. Alas, the Pope has his own very special solution.
Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.
Pray harder! Exercise a completely ineffective technique more strenuously!
I do wonder how the Pope imagines god will “cleanse” the church. Just tweaking the brains of priests so they don’t feel lust anymore would be a violation of free will and make a mess of centuries of theology, while having god get all Old Testament on the church and smite priests all around the world with lightning bolts would be spectacular and effective, but probably very bad PR.
Cool — John Allen Paulos has a roundup of the events at the Beyond Belief conference this year. It really was a stellar meeting, in part because there was such a variety of talks (almost all in attendance were atheists, but there were some deep disagreements). Paulos had one of the talks I found copacetic rather than irritating…and, by the way, he has a new book out: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s a slim little thing that comes right to the point—and this is a reminder that I ought to pull it down off the stack and get it read.
Creationist can actively impede science. One of the largest mastodon fossils ever found was discovered on a ranch in Texas owned by a fellow named Joe Taylor — an infamous creationist who runs the Mt. Blanco Fossil “Museum”, a wacky little place that peddles fossils while claiming they support a 6,000 year old earth. Now he’s putting it up for auction, and you can buy the skull for something north of $60,000.
We can’t win this one. Even if it’s bought by a reputable museum and studied scientifically, it still means that this creationist is going to get a huge chunk of change to use in promoting more lies.
