D’Souza vs Hitchens

D’Souza is crowing over his debate with Hitchens — he’s got a YouTube clip on his site that he seems to think exemplifies his triumph. His arguments there are 1) the fine-tuning argument for God, which is pathetic, as Douglas Adams scotched that one long ago, and 2) the usual claim that atheists are the major murderers of the 20th century, which is again silly — blame totalitarian ideologies for that, not philosophical positions on the existence of deities.

But then, D’Souza is running a poll to judge the winner. I think you can all go over there, view the clip, and judge for yourself how to vote. I have to agree that Hitchens wasn’t at his best in the segment D’Souza chose to show, but he is still ten times smarter than the little wingnut pipsqueak.

Why is San Diego on fire?

I would have guessed because it’s very dry and windy, but James Hartline has a less obvious answer.

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don’t care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!” And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of “mom” and “dad” in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.

And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.

Doesn’t God have a baseball team to manage? It would be a better use of his time than these silly destructive temper tantrums.

#1 on Google!

The World’s Fair has a new meme: find the terms that return your blog as the first hit. Here is the overview:

I’d like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we’ll take the other country specific ones if need be), you’ll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This is easy.

I like the first one. Nobody can spell “Pharyngula” and most have a hard time pronouncing it, so I just tell people to google the two letters “PZ”, and there I am.

The second is obvious.

The third is a little surprising: it returns very few links. I thought it would be a much more common term.

The fourth and fifth…I just looked at the common search terms that bring people here.

As Janet suggests, your search results may vary.

Depressing stats

John Lynch seems to have about as little to say about this statistic as I do: 60% of adult, educated, normal Americans believe Genesis is literally true. Or, more accurately, 60% of Americans say they think Genesis is literally true.

There is a difference. There is an attitude that religious explanations must not be questioned that is common here: what we need to do, and what I think the “New Atheists” are most successfully doing, is waking people up to the idea that that is not true — you can argue with religious proclamations, and having a divinity degree does not make you smart, let alone infallible. In fact, theologians face an image problem if they keep throwing up these long-winded clueless twits to be chewed up by meanies like Dawkins and Hitchens.

Official denial, unofficial endorsement

I told you that the Discovery Institute was going to have conniptions over the Stein/O’Reilly interview. O’Reilly defined ID as the idea that “a deity created life,” and I could have mentioned this nonsense from Stein:

There’s no doubt about it. We have lots and lots of evidence of it in the movie. And you know Einstein worked within the framework of believing there was a God. Newton worked within the framework of believing there was a God. For gosh sakes Darwin worked within the framework of believing there was a God. And yet, somehow, today you’re not allowed to believe it. Why can’t we have as much freedom as Darwin had?

So now ID is a framework for god-belief. This is far off the reservation; the DI wants you to believe that there isn’t a shred of religious motivation behind their propaganda…a lie that was cleanly refuted in the Dover trial. It’s a lie that they want to continue to ask you to believe, however, but O’Reilly and Stein and all the happy creationists who freely associate ID with their theistic creationism haven’t got the message.

So the Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division has issued a hasty demurral. I knew it would be coming.

I wonder if the guys behind Expelled are doing a frantic rewrite right now?

Maybe not—there is something else to consider. This may be exactly what they want: official denials coupled to widespread public perception that ID supports their religion. If the Discovery Institute convincingly argued that their guess was entirely secular and had nothing at all to do with god, it would die away and disappear overnight. They’ve got to walk this risky tightrope of pandering to the religious for their support while struggling to maintain plausible deniability that they have a religious agenda. It’s got to be hard, poor fellas, but they may actually appreciate fronts like O’Reilly and Stein keeping the religious fervor going, while allowing them to remain officially aloof from it all.

Two images of the patriotic warriors for America

Here’s the true, heroic history of America:

You know this is “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”, right? Now you must check out the true, heroic recounting of the horrors faced by one of Horowitz’s neo-con speakers at the deepest pit of hell Wellesley. The girls made mean faces at her. This is cause for great fear and concern on the right: it suggests that Hamas is offering eye-rolling classes to their terrorist curriculum, and the Horowitzians cannot survive that kind of mockery.

We really are living in Roy Zimmerman’s America. I don’t think I like it much, even if it is funny.

Florida needs your input

Florida Ciizens for Science reports that their brand new state science standards are available for comment. That means you can click over there and make suggestions, even if you aren’t a Florida educator (they do ask for your connection, so don’t worry that the creationist mob can just descend on this poor document and taint it). Make good, productive, constructive suggestions, and help the kids of Florida.

I haven’t gone through it carefully yet, but my general impression is that the evolution standards are broad, but good; on the other hand, the organismal biology standards read like a med school prep course, and don’t say much about the concepts of physiology. So they’re not bad, but they could use some improvement…so help them out!

Get out there and party like it’s MMMMMMX!

Oh, no … we’ve almost missed it! Now we have to make a mad scrabble for birthday hats and noisemakers and cake and ice cream. It’s the big 6010th birthday for planet earth, according to Ed Darrell and Phil Plait and these guys in Austin. Hmmm. Maybe we should at least make a quick trip to the Dairy Queen.

Oh, wait. I don’t believe that crap. Neither do any of the people I linked to above. But some of the wacky people at World Net Daily do.

But the author of the book frequently described as the greatest history book ever written, said the world was created Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. – making it exactly 6,010 today.

In the 1650s, an Anglican bishop named James Ussher published his “Annals of the World,” subtitled, “The Origin of Time, and Continued to the Beginning of the Emperor Vespasian’s Reign and the Total Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Commonwealth of the Jews.” First published in Latin, it consisted of more than 1,600 pages.

The book, now published in English for the first time, is a favorite of homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously. It’s the history of the world from the Garden of Eden to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

<snicker> “homeschoolers and those who take ancient history seriously”. How can WND not be a parody site, I sometimes wonder.