Dear readers: I hope you die soon

That’s the sentiment Terry of Rapture Ready expressed. Don’t believe me? Here’s the direct quote:

There are two important statistics to note:

1. Each month about 160,000 people visit Rapture Ready.

2. Every year, the mortality rate claims around 1 percent of the population.

Internet usage by the elderly is somewhat lower than that of the general population, but it still means that hundreds of you people who are reading this right now will not be here the same time next year.

For you folks who become part of the mortality figures in the coming days, I commission you with the same task: When you meet the King of Kings, please ask Him to pour His grace and guidance on this web ministry.

You unsaved folks who happen to be reading this article and think it is total nonsense, you are pure gold to this cause. Once you meet your unfortunate end, you’ll cry out 10 times louder from bowels of hell than a saved person who might be distracted by the glories of heaven.

Charming, eh? That isn’t the worst of it. He wrote this missive after his mother’s death a few weeks ago. Before she died, he asked her to go tell Jesus to send more traffic to his website.

Seriously.

I have a mission for all of my readers here on Pharyngula, too. I want you to stay alive. You don’t have to continue reading this site, unless you really want to; traffic is not that important. But if, as you are going about your daily life, you happen to meet someone who thinks Rapture Ready is a wonderful resource, I want you to be sure and tell them that they are a demented fuckwit. Just for me.

The delusions of John Gray

The critics of atheism seem, without exception, to be lacking in imagination. Over and over again, what we hear from them is desperate attempts to pigeonhole atheism as just another religion; they squat uncomprehendingly in their hovels built of faith and peer quizzically at the godless, seeking correspondence with their familiar theological nonsense, and crow in triumph when they find something that they can sort of line up with their experiences. “They want more people to think rationally — why, that’s evangelism!” Never mind that you could, with the same legitimacy, argue that when one person mentions to another that it is raining, they are attempting to evangelize their precipitational worldview. “They are so damned sure that they are right — they’re fundamentalists!” Jebus, but I’m tired of that “fundamentalism” claim: it’s the surest sign that you’re dealing with a clueless, dissembling, frightened apologist for religion when they start flinging the “fundie” accusation at atheists. And yes, it is exactly like accusing the fellow who walks through the door in a wet raincoat, to the sound of raindrops pattering on the roof and the occasional distant boom of thunder, of being a fundamentalist rainist because he can show you the deluge.

The latest entry in the dead-eyed zombie moan category of the standard atheism-is-a-cult criticism is John Gray’s complaints about “the atheist delusion”. There is no thought, no creativity in it; it’s simply another tedious retread. By finding a few opportunities to stretch the meanings of words, he wedges atheism and religion into a forced propinquity; then he tells us how awful, wretched and wicked this amalgamated godless religion is; and then, of course, he complains that atheists dare to find religion unpleasant, never mind that his entire critique depends entirely on labeling atheism a religion. I swear, sometimes I think it’s the defenders of the faith who have the lowest opinion of religion, since they all seem to believe that all they need to do is tag anything with the label of “religion” or “belief” and presto, they’ve killed all of its credibility.

[Read more…]

Carnivalia and an open thread

Well, I’m facing the consequences of my little fall yesterday — all day and night yesterday I could feel every little muscle in my back slowly knotting up in protest at the unkind treatment they have received. On top of that, I really have to finish my Seed column today (And I will! I am determined! It Shall Be Done!), and I have to spend some time working with the humane society this afternoon, which means I am tired, cranky, and under pressure … so go read these carnivals for a while, or talk about something else. I’m either going to stew for a while and explode in an ornery rant about something, or I’m going to soothe myself with some cool science (I’ve been reading up on an interesting phylum I knew nothing about before, and I’m also itching to write that up), or maybe both. Until I erupt again, entertain yourself with these:

The Tangled Bank

Also the Tangled Bank is coming to Tangled Up in Blue Guy on Wednesday, 19 March. Send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net soon!

Hide the women and children!

The atheists are coming!

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It’s nice to see we’re getting front page coverage on the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but it’s also sending the wrong message. American Atheists are having their big conference in town next week, but we’ve been here all along and we aren’t leaving after Easter. It’s a somewhat muddled article, too — the writer seems a bit confused by this whole atheism business.

No one can say for sure how many atheists there are, partly because those within the movement can’t agree on the definition of an atheist. Some count humanists, agnostics and practitioners of astrology as atheists, but others draw a tighter circle.

Somebody has to explain to him that practitioners of astrology are regarded as creationists, not atheists. That’ll confuse him even more.

Anyway, the article does give some nice plugs for Minnesota Atheists, the Atheists Talk radio show, and Atheists for Human Rights. And I’ll be sure to get my horns trimmed and tuck my tail into my underpants so I don’t alarm people when I’m walking around downtown Minneapolis this week.

Backtracking in Florida

Uh-oh…Casey Luskin made a significant gaffe. He claimed that Florida’s “academic freedom” bill would specifically allow public school teachers to offer instruction in Intelligent Design, and he said it with the microphones on where newspaper reporters could catch it. As Wesley says, it’s obvious that the DI is recruiting “lawsuit fodder” from the ranks of deluded schoolteachers. The DI won’t have any liability, so they can sit and provoke and let poor school districts eat the expenses of any legal cases. (Maybe the next big creationism court case ought to somehow assign blame so these criminal jokers at the DI and AiG can pay the cost of their lies, rather than the tax payers of victimized school districts.)

Now here’s the funny bit: John West of the DI rushed to spin Luskin’s comments.

Isn’t that odd? When Luskin says something stupid about the law or about the DI’s devious designs, the ideologues at the institute know they have to quickly police the message and make sure it’s twisted to conceal their motives. When Luskin says something stupid about science, though, that’s clearly less important, and silence is all that is heard from his cronies. Perhaps it’s not so odd, though: DI fellows are highly unqualified to assess the scientific evidence, while they are world-class experts in lying for Jesus. Perhaps they feel a strong personal obligation to improve young Mr Luskin’s expertise in obfuscation.

Ask a Biologist

More people, especially public school teachers, ought to be aware of the Ask a Biologist website — it’s an excellent and easy resource. Kids (and adults) can fire off a quick question that gets tucked into the database, and then someone on their team of volunteer professionals will try to answer it. There are some big names on that list!

AAB also turns one year old today, so let’s celebrate by getting more schools to send in questions.

A flop!

I complained before that Florida lawmakers were being treated to creationist propaganda at a facility of Florida State University. Perhaps I should have had more confidence in the people of Florida. The movie was shown, and…

But the evening at downtown’s IMAX Theater, which was rented out to Mr. Stein’s group for $940, was a bust, with only about 100 people attending the movie.

They paid to have people attend for free, and they still couldn’t get a decent crowd.

Friction-free morning

This is my least favorite time of the year in Minnesota. I hate early spring.

Everything is melting during the day: there’s a constant drip-drip-drip, puddles everywhere, the snow is shrinking away from all those untrammeled areas surrounding us, and during the day, the walkways are all like shallow streams. And then at night it freezes again.

Which brings me to by big complaint: I get up early in the morning, and I step outside, and the sidewalks are all these beautifully smooth sheets of ice; it’s like a Zamboni has gone down the streets of Morris, polishing everything. There’s this path through some trees that I take to work, and it has a very gentle downward slope that makes it like a luge track, and I just know that some March day I’m going to step on it and find myself rocketing at a 100 miles an hour down to the row of lampposts at the bottom.

I was spared that this morning, though. Instead, as I was walking down my sidewalk, I hit one of those glossy smooth ice spots at my usual barely conscious amble of about 3 miles per hour, and whooosh, I was momentarily airborne, and made a perfect landing flat on my back, knocking the breath out of me and jarring every joint in my body. Nothing was seriously damaged, but even now I can feel every muscle slowly knotting in protest at the rude treatment they received — it’s going to be a painful day, I can tell.

And worst of all, my morning coffee flew out of my hands before I’d even had a sip. Do you hear me? I spilled my coffee. There is no god.