My own daughter, a participant in the blogospheric War on Easter…where did I go wrong right?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
My own daughter, a participant in the blogospheric War on Easter…where did I go wrong right?
Connie Morris is the lead creationist kook on the Kansas state board of education. She recently took a tour of a middle school and was horrified at the depravity on display:
State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state’s new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher’s door.
Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed.
It was a picture of…The Flying Spaghetti Monster!
You know, when word gets out that pictures of noodles and meatballs get Connie Morris all twitterpated, there is going to be a thousand of these blooming on school teachers doors now. Especially since, when Morris asked the principal to have it removed, the teacher was advised that a school board member had no jurisdiction on the matter…and the picture is still up.
John Lynch beat me to this story about catfish feeding on land, so I’ll be brief. It shows how the eel catfish, Channallabes apus, can manage to take an aquatic feeding structure and use it to capture terrestrial meals. Many fish rely on suction feeding: gape the mouth widely and drop the pharyngeal floor, and the resulting increase in volume of the oral cavity just sucks in whatever is in front of the animal. That doesn’t work well at all in the air, of course—try putting your face a few inches in front of a hamburger, inhale abruptly, and see how close you come to sucking in your meal. So how does an aquatically adapted feeder make the transition to eating on land?
A very cool idea: portray the Evolutionary Timeline on a web page, drawing it so that one pixel equals 30,000 years.
Go to the page and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
Pfeh. Who wants to be a superhero?
Let me know when there is a casting call for Who wants to be a supervillain?
Martin Brazeau is looking for volunteers to spend July in Atlantic Canada helping him split rocks, looking for Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous fossils. Let’s see…I wonder if the family would mind if I abandoned them for a month? I don’t have any important responsibilities, do I?
I received 45 submissions for this edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, and the carnival rules required me to select only a final ten. That was harsh; there were many excellent links sent in, and I struggled with the need to reject so many. Ultimately, I just had to let my own biases rule my decision, so if you sent in a submission and I didn’t use it, it’s nothing personal and it says nothing about a lack of quality in your work—it just means it didn’t fit my narrow criteria for what I wanted to read this time around. As you’ll see, I tend to promote godless secularism and grappling with real world issues in science, and so some fascinating and worthy articles on war and economics and labor just didn’t make the cut this time around.
A Carnival of Education is up! I don’t know that the plague theme is entirely encouraging, but as we creep towards the end of the term, it feels like it is entirely appropriate.
Also, tomorrow is the Invasive Species Weblog‘s fourth birthday (I know, she’s really, really old), and Jennifer Forman Orth is celebrating with a contest—send her a link to an invasive species-related post by midnight Thursday and you might just win a prize.
It warms the cockles of my heart to see this sort of thing, it does. Scientists in Britain are on the attack!
After all, the churches are charitable institutions, with a higher calling to help the sick and weak in the name of a loving God. They have a role model in Jesus, who reached out to those rejected by society. Turn away the needy? That would be unchristian.
Unless, of course, the needy were some sick pervert. Then it’s OK to kick her to the door; in fact, you’re obligated to reject her, even if it costs you lots of money.
Read the charming story of faith-based discrimination in a Minnesota church. Trinity Lutheran Church had a sweet deal with county social services, getting remunerated for caring for disabled seniors, until the county pulled a fast one and tried to trick them into caring for a damned minion of the devil transsexual. They signed her up, showed her around, and then she mentioned that she’d had an operation, and the good reverend had to wield his deep personal knowledge of god’s mind to smack her down.
The church declined to accept her. It said its staff wasn’t trained to deal with such a person. It feared discomfort among members and other clients, not least over use of the bathroom. And it pointed to its own theological beliefs. What she has done, Maxfield said, runs totally “contrary to God’s revealed will.”
Hallelujah! And this is exactly why I will always oppose any attempt to draft the godly into the business of supporting the social safety net. It is this pretense of knowing the will of an invisible being, which they freely use to give their bigotry the deity’s imprimatur, which makes them untrustworthy. Anyone who makes untestable claims of a god’s will, claims that can’t be verified by anyone else, is suspect—it’s simply too convenient an out. And when it’s used to make an innocent suffer, it’s simply contemptible.
