Oh, no! Poor Ted!

Ted Haggard is reduced in his circumstances. He and his family are living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment while he attends classes full time at the University of Phoenix, and he’s also helping out in a halfway house for the homeless. It’s as if he’s taken a vow of poverty and is living the ideal Christian life of charity and giving. Oh, what a good man!

To help him in his good works, he has sent out a letter asking people to give — he sends an address to a Christian charity that he promises will send 90% of the money to the Haggard family and use only 10% for administrative costs. For once, he’s pushing a charity that doesn’t skim off the cream because he is the recipient of the charity. He also doesn’t mention that he isn’t exactly destitute:

However, he doesn’t mention that when he left the church, New Life Church leaders agreed to pay his salary through 2007 – estimated at about $138,000 annually.

In addition, as Colorado Confidential reported earlier this month, El Paso County Assessor property records show that the Haggard’s still own their 5-bedroom, 3-bath home in Colorado Springs. Sitting on 5.1 acres, its current market value is listed at $715,051.

Once a grifter, always a grifter, I guess.

Fear of comics

Fanaticism and oppression work! The latest editions of the comic strip Opus are being censored by at least 25 newspapers around the country. I have to concede that Breathed’s work doesn’t have quite the quality it had during the glory years of Bloom County, but that’s not the reason it’s being dropped: it’s because it mocks Muslim dress, and
newspapers are afraid to make fun of Islam.

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. “They just don’t want to touch that,” she said.

It’s not really much of a sex joke — more of a tepid innuendo — and even the joke about Islamic dress is much more about the shallow faddishness of some Americans than anything about religion. Why shouldn’t we be as free to make jokes about religion as we do about politics or sex or entertainment or bodily excretions?

Godless roundup

It’s Sunday morning! It’s that time when we lounge about in robes and jammies and mock (or feel pity for) the faithful, trudging off to be lied to at church. Here are a few fun links for us atheists:

  • Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists of UMM has a preliminary web page, designed by Skatje, and also has a forum. Their first meeting is on Thursday at 7 (pizza party at the Pizza Hut in Morris!), but the big initial recruitment fair is tomorrow — so she is looking for suggestions. She needs stuff she can put together now, but she’s also thinking longer term — ideas for tabling at the student union, for instance.

  • Kirk Cameron is getting feisty again in his own ridiculous style — he’s asking if we’ve “patronized blasphemy lately”. The answer is yes: frequently and with vigor, especially since the religious insistence on trivia makes it absurdly easy to commit blasphemy. S.Z. takes poor Kirk down a few notches. My favorite part: Kirk pines for the good old days when the Hays Code forbade blasphemy in the movies. S.Z. points out that the Hays Code also forbade miscegeny. Wash and Zoe: abomination!

  • Awful as it must be to be Kirk Cameron, I feel more pity for Matt Nisbet. Revere calmly pulverizes his liver, rips out his lungs, and gives him a classic Stooges eye poke. Nyuk nyuck nyuck. I don’t get it — I’m not averse to the principles of framing, but why is it that its proponents suck so badly at implementing it?

Not D. James Kennedy again …

Lots of people have been sending me email to let me know that Coral Ridge Ministry is airing a program linking Darwin to Hitler. In case you missed it, this show, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, was first aired last year, and I reviewed it then, Wilkins eviscerated its premises, and even the Anti-Defamation League got in the act. It’s a horrible piece of dishonest dreck, and now I guess it’s going to be a yearly television event, like a demented evil version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has me thinking — the Christianists will re-air their lies and stinking garbage over and over again, but have you ever noticed that the great science programs, the ones that inspired many of us, seem to be allowed one appearance and then … nevermore. Why doesn’t PBS have a yearly rebroadcast of, say, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man? Those were great programs; I’ve seen bits and pieces of both now and then, and I think they’ve also aged reasonably well.

But no, we can find that droning mackerel’s lies for Jesus on a regular basis, but the beautiful and honest science shows get to rot in storage somewhere, with occasional fragmentary bits appearing on youtube.

Don’t miss Hector Avalos’ contribution to the debate on the relative morality of atheists and Christians!

Carnivalia, and an open thread

I’m in the Middle Ages, where we don’t have computers, and it’s a real pain to have to hire a wizard to send these messages to the internet. You’ll have to talk amongst yourselves and peruse these fascinating carnivals without me.

The Tangled Bank

The next Tangled Bank will be at Balancing Life on Wednesday. Send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net. The list of future hosts is also shrinking, so if you have a blog and think you’d be interested in hosting, volunteer!

Legal advice

Not for me, for someone else. I just sit quietly and listen, but I must say this “Rule 11 of the FRCP” sounds awfully interesting. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but there sure are a lot of smart lawyers lining up on my side; they probably know, don’t you think?