I get email

Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself “Concerned American-Christian” <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it’s Krazy Korn himself, since he’s so obsessed with the subject.

And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren’t sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.

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Open season on gay men, apparently

Religion can be used to justify anything. Even the virtues of killing the innocent. It’s amazing how the combination of needing to control sexual behavior and the presence of an accommodating religious impulse can lead to deeply deranged behavior.

A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God’s work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill.

“I believe I’m Elijah, called by God to be a prophet,” said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. ” … I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing.”

Interviewed in the Brazoria County Jail Saturday morning, Mangum said he feels no remorse for killing 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., whom relatives described as a “loving” son who never forgot a holiday and a devoted uncle who had set up college funds for his niece and nephew. He worked at Southwest for 24 years.

Mangum, who described himself as “definitely not a homosexual,” said God called on him to “carry out a code of retribution” by killing a gay man because “sexual perversion” is the “worst sin.”

Think for a moment for a few words to describe yourself. Would “definitely not a homosexual” be one of the first phrases to come to mind? Somebody is a little obsessed.

And if sexual perversion is the worst sin, how come it didn’t make it into the ten commandments? “Murder” is in there, though. This fellow who studied the Bible for “thousands of hours” seems to have missed that.

The futility of being Cheri Yecke

Yecke, Minnesota’s former odious education commissioner, is now campaigning to be odious education commissioner for the state of Florida. Her history in our fair state is now a bit of a stain on her reputations, so she hired a company called “reputationdefender” to sanitize the internet for her. This company googles up people who have said unkind things about their clients and sends out email threats to them, telling them to take it down. Their first target: gentle Wesley Elsberry. What’s particularly weird about this is that the post in question is simply a collection of news clippings with sources, with virtually no commentary at all.

Even weirder, if you google Cheri Yecke, Wesley’s post is #5; posts on Pharyngula occupy the #3 and #4 slots, and I guarantee you, I take much greater joy in stomping on yucky Yecke than Wes…but “reputationdefender” hasn’t hassled me at all.

It is amusing, though, that her efforts to whitewash the past and silence her critics are going to win her wider attention on the net. Look, here I am, once again adding to the links pointing to her creationist-friendly history!

You have got to take a look at “reputationdefender’s” claims to believe them. For the low, low price of $29.95, they promise to DESTROY any online entry you don’t like. That’s good to know—the limit of their efforts is that they’ll put $30 worth of time into expunging the web of undesirables. What is that, about 10 minutes of a lawyer’s time spent drafting a letter? $30 wasted on an exercise in futility?

Here’s what they promise to do. For about $15/month, they’ll regularly search online content for you, and send you a report. Then, at your request…

Next, we DESTROY. You can select any content from your report that you don’t like. This is where we go to work for you.

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

If we find an item of online content you don’t like, we’ll carry out our proprietary DESTROY process for you on that item for the one-time low fee of $29.95. This is where the rubber hits the road. It is an arduous and time-consuming process for our team of specialists, but we work hard so you can sleep better at night. You don’t pay this till you command us to DESTROY unwanted online content.

The “proprietary” and “arduous and labor-intensive task” seems to involve meekly asking the author to take down his article.

Your weekly Fish

I’m sorry to say that Stanley Fish is treading the same futile path that every defender of religion follows: there’s the knee-jerk detestation of atheism, then there’s the argument that atheism is nothing but faith itself, and now he’s reduced to impotent handwaving about a sublime but unknowable god, and therefore religion is … what? He’s not clear. He seems to be saying we can’t criticize religion because we have imperfect knowledge of a perfect being.

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The Vatican wishes me a safe and spiritual journey

I’m about to set off for the Minneapolis airport — a 3 hour drive, aaargh — and I’m informed that the Vatican has some suggestions for us drivers. There’s a set of commandments (but of course, it’s not religion if they aren’t ordering you about). First on the list: “You shall not kill.”

Yeah, I’m already thrown off by that. I usually set out with the intent to run down anyone I see walking along the road.

Others are similarly trite. Obey the traffic laws, don’t use your cars to sin, support accident victims, etc., and they suggest “periodic celebration of liturgies at major road hubs, motorway restaurants and lorry parks.”

I don’t think so.

And then…

And it suggested prayer might come in handy — performing the sign of the cross before starting off and saying the Rosary along the way. The Rosary was particularly well suited to recitation by all in the car since its “rhythm and gentle repetition does not distract the driver’s attention.”

Handy — how?

Somebody, please explain to me how religion hasn’t already collapsed under the weight of its utterly useless inanity. The Vatican can’t put together a rational policy on contraception, a far more serious problem for the world and to which their beliefs contribute, but they can send out these trivial and irritatingly idiotic suggestions for drivers?

We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved

i-40619c18cd0722ed1e920522e1fee0ce-bamyan.jpg

When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn’t an atheist who lit the fuse. These modern atheists that have stirred up so much resentment among the apologists for religion are not destroyers who seek to demolish the past or who want to advance a destructive ideology — they aren’t philistines who reject literature and art and music, and they aren’t monsters who will exterminate people to achieve their ends. We aren’t out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture, although we have been accused of such nefarious plans; such claims are easy to dismiss as the ravings of the delusional.

Stanley Fish doesn’t go quite so far in damning these “new atheists,” perhaps to avoid the easily ridiculed paranoid martyr-complex of the mob. Instead of being the ‘new communists’ who are planning to march the orthodox to Siberia, we’re merely unlettered, unschooled near-illiterates with no appreciation of the depths of religious thought. We don’t understand the nuances, he cries; we dismiss all of the texts and traditions as “naive, simpleminded and ignorant.” We just don’t understand, period.

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Heed the word of God

George W. Bush is having private conversations with an invisible friend. Back in 2003 he met with the Palestinians and told them all about it.

Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.'”

Let’s get George to sit down and lead us through every step of these conversations—I’m sure his fundamentalist base would love it. Although I think there is a serious problem here that the literalists will point out to him. Notice that God did not say, “send other men to fight terrorists.” He said, “George, go.”

Those words are so clear and unambiguous, I suggest that we immediately give George a rifle and a uniform and ship him off to the Middle East. The fact that we are failing in Iraq is a sign of God’s displeasure that his servant has failed to heed his commands.

Just to be on the safe side, let’s send Cheney and Rice, too.

We get email

By “we”, I mean me and Richard Dawkins. I can’t even imagine the volume of tripe that has to be flowing into his mailbox, but sometimes people send their important missives to both Dawkins and me (of course, I’m just an afterthought; the body of the letter is usually addressed to you-know-who). I’ve put the latest example below the fold—it is mildly amusing and definitely weird.

The formatting of the text is exactly as received.

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A man after my own heart at Iowa State

Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.

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