Minnesota creationist update

I am such a trendsetter. First I pick up on the Paszkiewicz story weeks before the NY Times, and now another creationist I took a shot at, Julie Haberle, is written up in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ms Haberle is responsible for a set of anti-evolution billboards going up in the region, and she does not come off very well. Here are a few quotes from her that expose her shortcomings.

Julie Haberle, 55, said she once believed creationism “was absolutely nuts” and has over the past nine years come to the contradictory conclusion that “evolution is just silly.”

“I’m just a hack.”

“I’m not a biblical scholar and don’t pretend to have one original thought on the site.”

Contradictory hack without a single original thought? Couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh, and speaking of me, I’m quoted, too—and look, Ma, I’m famous!

“It’s kind of standard creationism stuff,” said Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and one of the nation’s most ardent critics of intelligent design. “It’s not a serious site — it’s just chunks of arguments strung together.”

Before I get too cocky, though, the article also notes that the billboards are cheap: somewhere shy of $10,000 each. That’s cheap? I think each one greatly exceeds the entire yearly budget of MnCSE.

Greg Laden, another ardent critic of ID and UM professor who was quoted, has also commented on this article.

Paszkiewicz is famous now!

David Paszkiewicz, the history teacher recorded while proselytizing to his students, has made the NY Times. Here’s the familiar part:

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

The story also documents some of the reactions in the community. It’s mostly negative…against the student who dared to document the flagrantly illegal actions of the teacher.

In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.

Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for Matthew’s suspension.

Despite the fact that even conservative legal organizations are saying that Paszkiewicz is basically indefensible, no action has been taken against him.

(via The Island of Doubt)

Stereotypical redneck stupid

What are they thinking? You may have heard that Bill Dembski commissioned and posted to his website for kids a very silly flash animation mocking Judge Jones and the words of his decision—it uses images of various evolution supporters to trigger Jones to recite criticisms of ID in a high-pitched voice, with grunts and fart sounds and other such classy touches. Now we learn that Dembski himself did the voice-overs. This was all absurd enough, but here’s the icing on the cake: Dembski was so proud of this effort, and so convinced that it was sufficiently amusing that everyone represented in the animation would enjoy it, that he sent out a letter asking those same evolution supporters for a “high res jpg” so they could be included, and asking Judge Jones to record his voice for the miserable little sneer.

Richard Dawkins has posted the letter. It’s unbelievably oblivious.

If they ever make a movie of the Dover trial, I think they have to get Larry the Cable Guy to play William Dembski.

Wait! There’s more!

In Richard Dawkins’ reply to that tripe, he wrote, “Anybody who resorts to tactics of desperation like this has to be a real loser.” This has prompted that master of decorum, DaveScot, to reply by calling Dawkins a “girly man”.

Now we have a real problem. For the movie, where are we going to find someone to play DaveScot? We need someone able to do crude and stupid even more thickly than Larry, and with even less sympathy.

Good grief, it’s like Dembski is in a contest to demonstrate how stupid he can be (I’m now thinking Jim Carrey must play him in the movie). He has just announced that there’s a new version…without the fart sounds.

The Rembrandt of flash animation and I are working to enhance “The Judge Jones School of Law.” As a first step we have made the animation less offensive to more refined sensibilities. All the overt flatulence has therefore been removed. Go to www.overwhelmingevidence.com for the less objectional version of this animation (we are keeping the original, however, so that when the history of evolution’s demise is written, all versions of this animation will be available to historians).

These guys are insane.

Does this actually work?

This spam mail came into my mailbox, and I made the mistake of opening it. I know the spammers throw in random blocks of text and mangle the porn keywords to throw off our filters, but this juxtaposition was just plain weird.

Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God.

URL deleted
Rvedhead Gxirl Sfucking Her Fhirst GIGTANTCOCK

The Holy Spirit can’t save saints or seats. If we don’t know any non-Christians, how can we introduce them to the Savior?Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.Jump into the middle of things, get your hands dirty, fall flat on your face, and then reach for the stars.

I suspect this would have been more effective at getting people to look at their site if they left out the garbled English line after the url. Although, I don’t know since I didn’t follow the link—maybe there’s an evangelical Christian site there.

(I sincerely hate and despise spammers. Currently, I’m getting about 2:1 junk:real mail ratios delivered to my laptop, and that’s after spam assassin torches much of it at one of the intermediary sites I run mail through.)

Our War on Christmas

We atheists have been caught in our ongoing devious strategem for destroying Christmas. The NY Times first expresses some surprise that fervent atheists celebrate Christmas, but then the writer begins to catch on.

“Presumably your reason for asking me is that “The God Delusion” is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”

He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

Why, yes. My personal war on Christmas is fought in a way the Bill O’Reillys of the world don’t even recognize: I blithely wish people a Merry Christmas without so much as a germ of religious reverence anywhere in my body. I take this holiday and turn it into a purely secular event, with family and friends and food and presents. I celebrate the season without thought of Jesus or any of the other myths so precious to the pious idiots who get upset when a Walmart gives them a cheery “Happy Holidays!”.

For now, they have to pretend that this myth of the dour atheist, the sour old Scrooge sitting home alone because he refuses to bend his knee to Jesus, is actually true. Someday, though, they might just notice that there are an awful lot of secular folk having a good time in late December and early January. Maybe we need to get a children’s book or a Christmas television special made…

And the Priest, with his priest-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?
It came without Jesus! It came without gods!
“It came without reverends, ministers or frauds!”
And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Priest thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a church.
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…needs a bit more research!
And what happened then…?
Well…in Doubt-ville they say
That the Priest’s small brain
Grew three sizes that day!
And the minute his brain didn’t feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with his load through the bright morning light
And he brought back the books! And the logic and reason!
And he…
…HE HIMSELF…!
The Priest skipped church for the season!

(crossposted to The American Street)