Greg Laden has created a festival of LOLcats for the latest edition of the Tangled Bank. Should I be appalled or amused? Science is serious business! We never laugh, we’re all supposed to be like Mr Spock!
The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They’re going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that’s all these scumbags are.
Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.
Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:
“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”
Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:
“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.
“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”
When dealing with others, I must be respectful, fair and civil. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to say anything about when dealing with crackers.
That last paragraph is marvelously blind. Hey, Bill! I can think of something more vile! How about intentionally desecrating the bodies of young altar boys who respect the position of trust held by Catholic priests? I think that is a lot more vile than mistreating a cracker. In fact, I can think of innumerable vile acts going on all around the world right now, and not all of them even involve Catholicism. It takes the moral vacuum of a purblind ideological bigot like Bill Donohue to think that goring his sacred cow is the worst thing in the world.
There is a new social network site for godless folk, called Atheist Nexus. Good idea, except that there may be a little problem.
A few doubting atheists (how could they possibly be suspicious?) investigated the site before signing up, and discovered some discrepencies. The fax number and mail server are shared with some outfit called the Divine Christian Center (warning: if you click on that link, the site autoplays Christian rock at you). The creator, who goes by the name Thor and Kym Membe, is also the registrant on both domains. He claims that he is an atheist, he just happens to also be a web design freelancer who was commissioned to work on the DCC site. That sounds perfectly plausible, and I’d accept that as an explanation, except that this message turns up on a bible college site:
We have seen a steady increase in uncommon and deadly events around the world – most recently, the quake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar. This is a call to prayer for the suffering and the hurting. God is calling us all to humble ourselves before Him in prayer. We may not understand what is happening; we may not have answers for anyone asking. One thing we should know without a shadow of doubt is that God loves the world and all who are in it. Let’s join forces and pray for those in China and Myanmar. Let’s lift them up before God and ask that He comforts those who need comfort and bring healing to those who need it. Let’s pray for the little boys and girls who have lost their parents, and for the everyone who has lost someone or something.
Kym Membe
Mattoon , USA
Hmmm. That doesn’t sound very atheist-like to me.
It’s all a little fishy. Maybe very fishy — this could be an evangelical group fishing for atheist names and email addresses. Or it could be an innocent case of an industrious web designer getting work with diverse groups.
There aren’t any grounds to flee Atheist Nexus just yet, but it looks like they need a little more in-depth scrutiny. Maybe some of the godless experts in networks and security that hang out here will want to chase down the details.
This is horrible news. Some faction of the religious right has called for a boycott of McDonald’s fast-food — because they were a sponsor of the 2007 San Francisco gay pride parade. They claim it’s not about hiring homosexuals, or allowing homosexuals to eat at McDonald’s, or about how homosexual employees are treated, but is instead:
It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars. McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage.
Oh. They don’t object to homosexuals being served food in the restaurant, they just object to promoting civil rights for gay people in the whole dang culture at large. Homosexuals can have the right to consume greasy fast food and work at low wages, but that’s it, we’re drawing the line at allowing them to be treated as full human beings.
And this is horrible news because now I’m going to have to stop by my local McDonald’s and order something. Maybe it’s enough if I just get a diet Coke there.
Guess who’s next in line to get a certain famous fossil? The Pacific Science Center will be exhibiting Lucy between October and March. Even if I can’t arrange it, I expect you lucky Pacific Northwest residents to all make the pilgrimage.
For another example of the religious expressing absurd beliefs, you must listen to this conversation between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox — it’s astonishing. Dawkins just probes with a few pointed questions, and Lennox, a theologian, babbles on and on and on, asserting the most amazing things. All those miracles in the bible? They literally happened — he doesn’t hide behind metaphor and poetry. Water into wine, resurrections, walking on water…it all actually happened, exactly as written, and further, he claims that all of these accounts represent historically valid evidence. This is the sophisticated theology we godless atheists are always skipping over, I guess.
Oh, he does start to waffle when Genesis is brought up. Those aren’t literal, 24 hour days, but still, he claims, the account is compatible with the scientific understanding of the origin of the world and life. He also trots out the ridiculous claim that he made in a prior debate that because Genesis describes a beginning, rather than a universe of infinite existence, it actually got the physics right.
Dawkins played it right, letting Lennox just run off at the mouth and expose the inanity of the theological position.
Never mind that, though — Hybrid Medical Animation has a lovely demo reel of cells and molecules bouncing around.
We have a new blog here: Next Generation Energy, a temporarily active blog discussing alternative energy. It’s a bit of an odd duck and an experiment, with a team of bloggers focused on this one issue and exploring it for a limited term, but check it out.
One concern I can predict: it’s sponsored by Shell Oil (what next? A blog on the virtues of vegetarianism sponsored by McDonalds?). To allay concerns a bit, we’ve been assured that Shell will not be imposing editorial constraints — although, of course, there is always the indirect pressure caused by the fact that displeasing your patron may mean they will not fund future ventures — and the blogging team they’ve put together has a history of independence on this subject. I also think that the commenters here can play a role in keeping the discussion honest, since Shell isn’t paying you.
If you live in Edmonton, Alberta, which is somewhere up north in Canada (and if you live there, I presume you know where), you might want to get in touch with the newly formed Society of Edmonton Atheists. They’re looking to expand!
Here’s a much more serious issue than a goddamned cracker: it’s the steady accumulation of military power in religious hands. It’s not overt policy, but we should be worried that there is an increasing association between religiosity and military service — an association between credulity and obscene amounts of physical power. Jeremy Hall is discovering this first-hand.
