DL Overload

Whoa…there were a lot of people at Drinking Liberally last night, and I was rather overwhelmed with all of the introductions. How about if attendees use this thread to tell everyone and remind me of who you are—pass along links to your Seattle blog, too, or give us links to pictures.

It was a great evening, and the only blemish is that there are now about 50 more people who know that I’m not ten feet tall and that I don’t breathe fire.

You’re all going to be jealous as you learn who I met last night — the accounts (and photos) are trickling in. Other people at DL were:

Practicing information hygiene

A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!

At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.

It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.

I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.

(via the Friendly Atheist)

Towards a good cause

TR Gregory is wondering whether a blog post can do anything worthwhile … and so he’s trying to encourage donations and contributions to his parents’ new charitable project, The Livingstone Performing Arts Foundation. This is an effort to set up a self-sustaining institution that will benefit the people of Zambia economically, and also preserve the tradition of the arts in that country. Visit the site, and support the cause!

We’ve lost another good one

One of the early blogs that I very much enjoyed was The Rittenhouse Review, a Philly blog which I discovered shortly after leaving Philadelphia. It had gone quiet a while ago, rather mysteriously — it’s another of those odd things about this medium that there can be so few signs of what’s going on in real life from what we see online — but sadly, we now learn that the author, Jim Capozzola has died after a long illness.

Do Christians get a humorectomy at confirmation?

There’s a rather unsurprising study that shows babies can “lie” at a very early age, deceiving their parents with fake cries as early as six months (any parents out there? You know this is trivial—kids pop out of the birth canal as greedy, selfish little beasts who will do anything to cajole their way into your heart.) Now look at how a fundie blog spins the story: it’s sin! It confirms what the Bible tells us, that we are born into sin! And then the author asks, “What stories (humorous, preferably) can you share about how your children demonstrate they, too, are sinful from birth?”

It will make you groan with boredom. There follows a discussion of whether Jesus would have faked a cry to get Mommy’s attention (no, apparently not) and the most boring anecdotes about kids ever. It’s pathetic and tedious and clueless all at once.

I recommend you read these stories instead. The heathen are much, much more entertaining.

Creationism at the NEA

The National Education Association is having their annual meeting in Philadelphia right now, and guess who’s there?

Answers in Genesis!

It’s rather like finding the Mafia has a booth at the police convention, but there they are, with lots of pictures, proudly peddling creationist dogma that is not legal to teach in public schools, and which can get school districts embroiled in expensive lawsuits, to teachers. This has been going on for years — there is a retired teacher who rents the booth, and AiG ‘donates’ huge quantities of freebies, so they don’t have an “official” presence, but they still have people advocating what, to a teacher, should be considered criminal activities.

I’m mystified why the NEA would allow this — any teacher in a public school who followed the advice of these clowns could land their school in very hot water, not to mention that they would be misleading and miseducating their students. Are there any teachers now at NEA who could let us know if there is any counterprogramming going on? Has anyone tried to inform the teachers visiting the AiG booth that teaching creationism in school spells big trouble? I’d also be curious to know what the attendee reactions are like: AiG is only saying positive things about their booth, of course, but I can’t imagine that no teachers are loudly arguing with those idiots.