There’s just no way around it any more. IF:
There’s nothing at all wrong with that, of course, and you should just stop living a lie and come out with it.
We should have known, I think. The bright lights, the adoring audiences, the singing, the showmanship…being a pastor at one of these fundie megachurches is just like having a hit show on Broadway.
After Dembski sent out that request for more contributions to his petty flash animation, Ken Miller offers him more than he asked for: a nice assortment of the most embarrasssing moments for the creationists at the Dover trial. No response from Dembski yet; aren’t you all looking forward to it?
Gosh, but it looks exciting.
(It really did arrive in my mailbox … inside the pages of Mad magazine.)
Brian Flemming posts an interesting quote from Sam Harris:
I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy lingo to the people who were writing “The Adventures of Superman” radio show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan, and the real Klan’s mumbo jumbo was put out all over the airwaves for people to laugh at. Kids were playing Superman vs. the Klan on their front lawns. The Klan was humiliated by this, and was made to look foolish; and we went from a world in which the Klan was a legitimate organization with tens of millions of members – many of whom were senators, and even one president – to a world in which there are now something like 5,000 Klansmen. It’s basically a defunct organization.
Is anybody else feeling like the Discovery Institute is voluntarily putting on the big red nose and the clown shoes without our help, lately?
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I’ve already answered, so I thought I’d just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the Left Behind series, have made disparaging comments about violent video games. Now that they’ve got a violent video game based on their novels, though, they’re saying “It’s not more violent than the Old Testament.” Set the bar low, will ya?
(A “Christian hypocrisy alert” isn’t exactly breaking news, is it?)
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.
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. PaszkiewiczÂs class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was Âignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion. Some anonymous posters on the townÂs electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for MatthewÂs 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)
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.
Sometimes one does get a little tired of powerpoint presentations, but the subject matter can help overcome the tedium: here’s one on The Evolution of Vampires, Homo sapiens whedonum. It’s an interesting exercise in free-running BS, but still, there’s some surprisingly accurate general information about the principles of evolution embedded in all the silliness.
(via Jonathan Arnold)
