Somebody else has visited Darwin’s house and taken a stroll on the sandwalk. I can testify that it is surprisingly difficult to get to the place, unless you have a trusty native guide — but once you get to the village, it really ought to be easier than that to find the place.
Two new Homo fossils are described in this week’s Nature, and here they are.
Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I’ve heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.
It’s in Texas, of course.
I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?
I mentioned the growing entanglement of fundamentalist religion in the military the other day, and here’s another example: proselytization in the military by evangelical freaks like Stephen Baldwin.
Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among
active-duty members of the US military. As an official
arm of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a “Military Crusade in Iraq” in the near future.
Hang on there … maybe we shouldn’t worry too much. If the evangelical arsenal consists of the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers and an exceptionally lame video game, all it’s going to succeed in doing is recruiting the dregs and dullards…
…who will then be lofted into positions of leadership in the most powerful military force in the world.
Hmmm. Maybe we should be concerned.
Don McLeroy is the new head of the Texas State Board of Education, and if you want to get an idea of what we face, there’s a transcript and recording of a talk by McLeroy on the web.
It’s awful. It’s mostly incoherent babble. He quotes a lot of odd irrelevancies, declares naturalism to be the enemy, compares evolution to the Matrix, and openly admits his advocacy of Intelligent Design creationism as a strategy to advance the goals of himself and his audience, and he says “we are all Biblical literalists, we all believe the Bible to be inerrant”. He also quotes Phillip Johnson:
So what do we do about our Bible in the intelligent design movement? According to Johnson, the first thing to do is to get the Bible out of the discussion. Remember, even if you don’t bring the Bible into the discussion, the naturalist has already put it into the discussion. And Johnson states “it’s vital not to give any encouragement to this prejudice and to keep the discussion strictly on the scientific evidence and the philosophical assumptions. This is not to say that the Biblical issues aren’t important, the point is the time to address them will be after we have separated materialistic prejudice from scientific fact.”
So give ’em a little time. They’re not going to mention the Bible in their efforts right now, but all this ID stuff is simply a cunning plan to eventually sneak Biblical literalism into the public schools.
And this is the fellow they’ve put in charge of public school education in Texas.
Baptists for Brownback are accusing me of satanic lies now, but I still haven’t made their list of the hellbound.
I’m wondering if it’s my trophy wife who is keeping me from the brink of damnation. She was brought up as a Baptist, after all, and the fact that she’s still with me at least implies there is some hope for my salvation.*
*Mmmm…naaaah. No hope.
How unfair that The Unicorn Museum would be compared to Ken Ham’s “Museum” — everyone knows creationism is fake, but unicorns, because they are so lovely and sweet and happy and phallic, must be real.
This is very serious. The proprietors want to put up a billboard to compete with the Creation “Museum’s”, and you can vote and donate. I would love to see unicorns praised over goofy Australian nutcases.
Some two-bit publicity hound can die, and that’s all you can find on any of the television channels … a whole grand species can go extinct, and there’s almost nothing.
Say goodbye to the Yangtze River dolphin. It is officially extinct. The funeral will be poorly attended, and it will be forgotten, except in a few academic papers.
Chris Clarke has won the blogwars by being the first to deploy an auto blog-bot with an aggressive attitude. We are doomed.
I wonder if I can steal a copy and put it to work writing my blog entries?
