Sagan joins the fray

The NYT has a nice article on Carl Sagan’s new posthumous book—it was put together by his widow, Ann Druyan, and she makes a few good points:

In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. “A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.

I’ll say. It was a stupid truce, anyway, entirely to the benefit of the old guardians of mythology.

Global warming disproves god!

Lynch finds a strange argument against climate change.

My biggest argument against putting the primary blame on humans for climate change is that it completely takes God out of the picture. It must have slipped these people’s minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over what’s going on. (Dear Lord Jesus…did I just open a new pandora’s box?) Yeah, I said it. Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created?

Well, actually…let’s think this through. At least the guy has made a discrete argument, that there are certain phenomena that are incompatible with the god hypothesis. He’s got it backwards, trying to fit the data to his hypothesis, but I prefer to think of it this way: if a god would not allow humans to destroy the earth, but humans are destroying the earth, then there must not be such a god.

Hey, didn’t that guy Augustine say something about pegging your faith to issues of science?

Call your legislators and protest, Californians

Take a look at the newly introduced California Bill AB 165.

This bill would establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives within the office of the Governor and would require the
office to serve as a clearinghouse of information on federal, state,
and local funding for charitable services performed by charitable
organizations, as defined, encourage those organizations to seek
public funding for their charitable services, act as a liaison
between state agencies and those organizations, and advise the
Governor, the Legislature, and an advisory board of the office on the
barriers to collaboration between those organizations and
governmental entities and on strategies to remove those barriers.
This bill would also create the Advisory Board of the Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to be appointed as specified,
and require it to provide direction, guidance, and oversight to the
office and publish a report of its activities on or before the first
day of August of each year.

Yep, California legislators will be considered establishing a Faith-Based Office. That’s all we need—the legitimization of more unsupported nonsense in our government. Please, let’s stick to evidence based leadership, OK?

Darwin Day party coming right up!

The Myers household is going to celebrate the day in half an hour — we’ve got the cake, we’ve got the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, we’ve got the hot chocolate — and we figure we’ll party by watching CNN at 8ET to see if Dawkins and Hitchens are going to go on a rampage. I hope they do, but I also sort of expect that they’re being set up by the theidiots at the Zahn show. I’ll report back on how (and if) the show goes.

Hey, the CNN show went well! Dawkins was good, emphasizing the positive aspects of atheism. The panel consisted of Ellen Johnson of American Atheists (good work, getting an American representative), Rachel Maddow of Air America, and a deranged dimwit priest named Jesse Lee Peterson who made the godless look damn good. You know we’re on the winning side when the resident theist resorts to protesting the way atheists seek to impose their evil lifestyle on Americans in exactly the same way those wicked homosexuals imposed their lifestyle on heterosexuals (that was a real “WTF?” moment). Ellen Johnson was also clear and assertive, and got the most time on the panel; Maddow was also strong in stating that freedom from religion is exactly what the Constitution guarantees us.

I’m relieved. I was worried about a hatchet job, but our secular representatives made an excellent show.

OneGoodMove is sure quick—the complete segment is available here already, in case you missed it.

Mac Hammond and his cheesy Prosperity Gospel scam

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.

Ian Musgrave’s letter should have been published

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?