Give Ham the Scalzi treatment

John Scalzi lives right near the Creation “Museum,” and he refuses to go. Good for him, I say — we’re going to have to start starving Ken Ham soon. On the other hand, if anyone could mock Ham’s Folly effectively, it’s Scalzi … it’s also so much fun to torment him. So his readers are teaming up to compel him to go.

Here’s the deal: Scalzi has a price. If people send him at least $250, which he will turn around and donate to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he’ll suffer through the cheesy dinosaurs and silly lies, and also write an amusingly snarky summary of the visit. If he gets a thousand dollars or more, he’ll reward everyone a bonus prize or two.

This is brilliant. Rather than sending a scientist to that joke of an exhibit, send a comedian. Laughing at these clowns is the best way to expose them. So go ahead, get on over there and chip in a few bucks, and let’s get an appropriate commentator to review the show.

Sniveling milquetoast rebukes mean atheist!

Now this is a different categorization of the differences between bold, brave assertive atheists and the spineless, gutless apologists for religious lunacy: we’re “mean”, and they’re “nice”.

When the mean atheists and the nice atheists get together, it’s not so much that it annoys the mean atheists to be asked to play nice. It’s more that they just want to be able to call the nice atheists names like “sniveling milquetoast” and the like. Y’know, while they’re at it. Because when it comes right down to it, the mean atheists just want to have fun. And I respect that.

Yeah, we just want to have fun, like a cat with a mouse. And we do feel obligated to earn those titles assigned to us.

The fruits of war (creationist branch)

Duae Quartunciae (will he ever settle on a name?) has an excellent historical summary of the Answers in Genesis civil war. There’s loads of fun stuff there, including an account of a prior split that involved accusations of witchcraft and “demonic infiltration”, Ken Ham’s pitiful claim that he is currently under “spiritual attack”, and bizarre sleazy shenanigans, largely driven by the nastily ambitious American group led by Ken Ham.

In October of 2005, there was a fateful meeting between AiG-USA and members of the board of the Australian group [now called Creation Ministries Internation, CMI] — but not the management of the Australia group. The Australian board signed a rather startling agreement, in which they give AiG-USA a license to use and modify all the articles on the website, while at the same time holding AiG-Australia liable for any damages that might be claimed arising from such changes. Basically, they handed over complete control of the articles to AiG-USA, took full responsibility for ensuring authors would also consent to this, and accepted full liability for any damages should the original authors object!

It’s got lots of links to the documentation published by both the Australian and American creationist groups. One of the wonderful benefits of this kind of internecine battle, besides the fact that they are eating their own, is that all kinds of useful internal information spills out of the wounds. And now it’s all nicely organized in one place.

Sunday in the Park

The first of three potluck picnics sponsored by one of our regional godless groups is being held Sunday, 10 June, at noon, at Columbia Park—Skatje, my wife Mary, and I are planning on being there. Come on out and join the freethought community in the Twin Cities area!

By the way, it’s weird how we’ve got all of these infidel organizations here — the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists at the University of Minnesota, the Humanists of Minnesota, the Minnesota Atheists, and the Atheists for Human Rights (who in this case aren’t participating in the picnics). The Twin Cities has an embarrassment of riches, while the rural parts of the state are just embarrassingly pious. We have a few students who are going to try and start up a CASH chapter here in Morris next year, and we’ll see how well that goes—if there are any other atheist groups in outstate Minnesota, let me know…and if there are any lonely, isolated atheists scattered here and there (and I know there are), let me know that, too. We should try to build a wider community.

Whining for a paper

Somebody out there must be able to give me a fix—I keep trying to get this paper, and either my library gives me ambiguous messages about access and a few errors, or the Royal Soc. site balks and tells me that there is system maintenance going on. I can’t even get to the videos. Come on, man, I’m going through withdrawal here. I need a little taste. Please.

Kubodera T, Koyama Y, Mori K (2007) Observations of wild hunting behaviour and bioluminescence of a large deep-sea, eight-armed squid, Taningia danae. Proc Biol Sci 274(1613): 1029-34.

There’s got to be a fellow academic out there who’s willing to help out a squid junkie in need. If you can send me the pdf, I’ll owe you bigtime.

Thanks to Reginald Selkirk, Bob O’H, and Don S., I now have my fix. I’m squirting it into my brain through the eyeballs right now. I may have to go lie down for a while to let the good feelings linger.

This is pretty nifty — putting out a request and getting multiple replies in less than a half hour.

I didn’t even have to get my hands dirty

That Egnor fellow believes that if minds are material, than “all of humanity’s notions of moral value and culpability are nonsense”—like most creationists, his arguments collapse into a rather pointless fallacy, the argument from consequences. It’s enough for me to just say that if I’m correct, then Egnor is the one who believes his morality is gone, not me. It’s a theme running through his latest bloviation, that truth is irrelevant if ideas are a product of the brain, to which I have to say, “so what?”

Anyway, I’m pleased to say that I don’t need to waste time with the babbling Egnor, since ck at Arbitrary Marks has taken him down for me, in a
three
part
series on “iron spikes and materialism.”

Now I want the rest of you to get cracking and slay a few creationists for me. I like this business of sitting back with a kind of imperial hauteur while the knights go out and skewer the dragons.