Charming. Good Christian Vox Day argues that murdering toddlers in the name of Jesus is defensible.
(I’m hoping ol’ Vox will make another post calling me “Pharyngurl”. It’s pathetic that he thinks femininity is an insult, isn’t it?)
Minnesota has its own Christian ministry scandal, but it probably won’t get that much national attention, since there’s no sex and it’s just the usual “minister fleeces flock” story. Mac Hammond runs one of those mega-scam mega-churches in a Minneapolis suburb, where he preaches and practices his Prosperity Gospel. It’s a story to make an atheist or a Christian retch.
“Noah was the first investment banker,” he said at the start of one recent sermon, which was filled with folksy charm, biblical references and business jargon. “He was buying stock when the rest of the world was liquidating.”
He’s a smug little bastard, too.
He got one of many laughs when he said the Star Tribune story had “left out” his two motorcycles. He also quipped that his Porsche has been “an expensive ministry tool” because a State Patrol officer who gave him one of four speeding tickets he has gotten in it went through church membership classes. He said he buys expensive clothes because “if I look decent, I preach better, so I’m really doing it for you, amen.”
He’s in trouble right now because he has been using his church for political purposes (to promote Michele Bachmann, of course, who else?) and he’s been skimming the cream off the church to hand him sweetheart loans for his personal real estate games and for his own plane. Jesus really wants him to have that plane. Here’s hoping there’s enough dirt on him to shut this con artist down.
There’s also a little tidbit to completely sour you on “Christian” charity:
The congregation was presented with the annual report, which said the church had $34 million in gross revenues last year and gave $3 million to charitable causes and evangelism.
There’s much more—Jeff Fecke and Andy Birkey have been covering this story well over at Minnesota Monitor.
What’s the matter with New Scientist? Check out Ian Musgrave’s smackdown of Douglas Axe and the Biologic Institute is good stuff.
If Douglas Axe and his co-signers are so badly misinformed about something as basic and well known as the relations between engineers, computer designers and biologists, can we trust their judgment on any research that comes out of this Institute?
The DI claims to be supporting real research…so why is what little emerges from them so bad?
Extortion just won’t work, especially when the threat is so tantalizing. Greg Laden tries to get me to join in this thinking blog meme by telling me I’ll get a basement full of snakes if I don’t participate. Bring ’em on, I say. Gimme my snakes!
I’ve never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She’s one of those people who makes extravagant claims for dietary supplements that she sells, backing them up with loads of pretentious and utterly bogus pseudoscientific gobbledygook.
This is a sad story of compartmentalization carried to an extreme: a Ph.D. student in the geosciences who is also young earth creationist. This is a tricky subject: religion is not a litmus test for awarding a degree, but supposedly depth and breadth of knowledge is. I say that you cannot legitimately earn an advanced degree in geology and at the same time hold a belief contrary to all the evidence, and that the only way you can accomplish it is by basically lying to yourself and your committee throughout the process—and look at this…the student agrees.
Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.
And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”
In other words, he was going through the motions. He was doing “research” on the distribution of mosasaurs 65 million years ago, but what he was actually doing was echoing ideas he disagreed with to fit the expectations of his advisors—he was a complete fraud.
I have a hard time imagining spending 4+ years working hard at something I believed was a complete lie, but this guy did it, and thinks he accomplished something. His motive clearly was not a love of science, but to acquire credentials under false pretenses that he could then use to endorse his ideology. What a waste of his time; I wouldn’t hire such a phony, and I don’t know anyone who would. Where could he end up working? But of course…
Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text.
“We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity,” he said. “I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required.”
If his training was a lie, I guess he doesn’t have any scruples about lying a little more: I’ve seen the job ads from Liberty University, and a “young earth philosophy” is a prerequisite for teaching there. He teaches something called CRST 290, which is in a “religious studies” category, taught as part of their required instruction in “creation studies”.
CRST 290: History of Life
An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of
life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation
Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and
philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for
creation and evolution.
I think the University of Rhode Island might want to review their doctoral programs a bit. It looks like someone can slip through with only the most superficial knowledge of their field, and can admit to faking it throughout their entire training. This kind of slack in the standards diminishes the luster of degrees from RI.
It also says something even worse of Liberty University. They’ll hire any old hack to teach their courses.
Lots of people have been emailing me about this: YouTube is getting weird about censoring accounts by atheists. This one fellow, Nick Gisburne, with a long history on the service had his account abruptly deleted due to its “inappropriate nature”—he’d read some excerpts of violent passages from the Koran, with no commentary at all. It’s bizarre—it’s apparently not that he was espousing atheism, which YouTube does not seem to object to, but that he read quotes that put Islam in a bad light.
This is a remix of the ungodly CNN panel, with refutations and arguments imbedded in response to the harpies’ wicked denunciations. Good stuff!And remember, we’re guessing Dawkins and Hitchens will be on CNN tomorrow at 8ET. Unless Paris Hilton steps on a poodle or something.
(via Freethought Weekly)
Here’s a site full of interesting noises: freesound. You can search for anything, and it will return Creative Commons licensed sound samples; if you want the sound of a phone ringing, or wind chimes, or throatsinging, or thunderstorms, or someone being tortured, or a good laser death ray, there it is. I started looking for more organic things, like whale songs, crickets chirping, frogs croaking, bird songs, etc., and it’s amazing—all kinds of stuff turns up.
One creepy thing, though, if you have squeaky mattress. You’ll also discover that people are recording what their neighbors are doing late at night.
It’s very addictive. Now I have to get back to work on composing that genetics exam…
(via jill/txt)
