Fall Break

The beginning of this week was fall break at our college campus. We had the weekend off as well as Monday and Tuesday. Since I had been planning to return home to northern Minnesota for the first time since moving down to west central Minnesota in August, I decided to take Thursday and Friday off also. The few days I spent away from this desolate prairie wasteland and back among the conifers and lakes were phenomenally enjoyable.

This is my first year of college away from home and a long way from home it is. I remember the first few weeks I was down here, only vaguely though, a lot of adapting has taken place since then. The three-day dragged out orientation process for freshmen and transfer students at the end of August was intensely boring. I had been informed by mail that my presence was required but it would have been great had I known what it entailed and that I very well could have gotten away with not attending (this sounds negative, I know, but I’m sure some of you can relate). I remember the immense amount of time and effort it took to meet new people and figure out who to make friends with. Luckily the homework load had not picked up yet and there was plenty of free time to devote to this. Did I mention I had never bought my own groceries before coming to college? The first night I went to buy food I had no idea what I needed to sustain myself in a semi-healthy manner. The first five items I put in my basket had something to do with hotdogs. I’ve since learned a few things about grocery shopping and cooking. Although the first weeks were uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating, it was well worth the effort to take them on.

The drive home was long and rainy. There were a few deer that crossed as I approached them but staying attentive kept my vehicle intact. My lily plant sat quietly on the front passenger floor and when I inadvertently opened the glove box on its head I caught myself apologizing. Talking to a plant seemed odd to me so I ignored it and its personal temperature preference for the rest of the trip.

When I finally got home just before midnight, I sat in my living room with a bowl of soup, quietly but excitedly looking at everything I hadn’t seen for a while. The pictures hanging on the wall, the bookshelf filled with various things, the scent of my dad’s cooking brought forgotten memories rushing back to me. The plant atop the bookshelf with vines that had hung down half way in August had now reached the floor. My dad, who was sitting in his recliner on the opposite side of the room with his own bowl of soup, talked about things that had happened while I was gone, the new addition on the back of the garage, why our silverware was different, and how my aunts and uncles are doing.

The weekend flew by quickly and before I knew it I was sitting in neurobio again yesterday morning (we have wednesday discussions in the cafe now so PZ can get coffee). The time I spent among the seemingly infinite number of trees and lakes in northern Minnesota was enough to keep me going until I can go back again. For now it’s just good to know that everything I call home and everyone who means the most to me are still up there, safe and sound.

Vote “no” on Bill Wenmark

The Minnetonka school district is one of the best in Minnesota, with an exceptionally concerned and active set of parents and teachers who work hard to keep informed and support their schools. They established an organization, TonkaFocus, to oppose creationism in the schools and attempts to demolish their international baccalaureate program, a very smart move — pro-science parent activism is always something to encourage.

Minnetonka was also the home district of Dave Eaton, an ID sycophant who was a crony of the odious Cheri Yecke, and who was responsible for some of the shenanigans in our state’s last attempt to get some decent science education standards. He’s gone, fortunately, but one of his pals, Bill Wenmark, is still on the Minnetonka school board.

But, we hope, not for long. He’s up for re-election on 6 November.

School boards should be places for people who know something about education and who want to improve schools for our kids. Creationists who want to damage science education and make our kids more ignorant do not belong on them, and Bill Wenmark is one of those wackos who wants to inflict his religious vision on other people’s children — he needs to be replaced on the school board. Greg Laden has more on Wenmark, who doesn’t particularly like TonkFocus or the ACLU or legitimate science education. I have to second Greg’s suggestion:

Minnetonkans! Vote for The Other Guy!

Leviticus 3

A reader sent me this picture full of schadenfreude. Maybe this was the Gay Atheist Church of Malibu?

i-23d49d21cc463925b85990a448f8df9b-MalibuChurchBurning.jpg

In case you are curious, here’s Revelation Chapter 4.

1: After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.
2: And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.
3: And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
4: And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
5: And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
6: And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
7: And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.
8: And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
9: And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever,
10: The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying,
11: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

Why anyone would think that gibbering insanity is worth spending a Sunday morning discussing is a mystery to me … unless maybe it was the Gay Atheist Church of Malibu, and they were discussing how looney one has to be to consider that nonsense to be of importance in your life. Your god is a demented god, Christians.

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.