It appears that even though the IDiots have succeeded in having their religious mythology taught in Kansas public schools, the University is taking a stand. According to Paul Mirecki, department chairman, “Creationism is mythology. Intelligent design is mythology. It’s not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The proponents of Intelligent Design Creationism say they simply want criticisms of evolution taught. As we all know, though, the criticisms of evolution they speak of have been debunked a thousand times over.

So what are the real motives of the Intelligent Design Creationists? Are they innocently ignorant of fact? Or do they choose to plug their ears and ignore science? Even worse – they know they’re beliefs aren’t so but use the “controversy” to inject religion back into the public sector!

Luckily though, Kansas higher education will not bow to the whims of pseudo-science. In a bold move, they will be teaching intelligent design…as a course in Religious Mythology. Sounds fair to me – I can only imagine the mass debunking fun that will occur behind those hallowed halls.

Happy now, IDiots?

Love,
Rockstar Ryan

Salon has a nice piece by Michelle Goldberg (”How the secular humanist grinch didn’t steal Christmas“) on the mythical “liberal war on Christmas” and the history of this particular piece of witch-hunting. Definitely worth a read, especially if you think this bit of “Red Scare” — or, “Godless Scare” — tactic was invented recently by Bill O’Reilly and Jerry Falwell. As she sums it up in the subtitle: “The right-wing crusade against the liberal “war on Christmas” is great for rallying the troops. Too bad the war doesn’t exist.”

The opening bit on some of the history, to whet your appetite:

In 1959, the recently formed John Birch Society issued an urgent alert: Christmas was under attack. In a JBS pamphlet titled “There Goes Christmas?!” a writer named Hubert Kregeloh warned, “One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning.” The central front in this perfidious assault was American department stores, where the “Godless UN” was scheming to replace religious decorations with internationalist celebrations of universal brotherhood.

“The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand,” the pamphlet explained. “They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”

According to the JBS, this assault on yuletide iconography was “part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the UN, but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs.” The pamphlet called on all Americans to fight back by informing department stores that those with improper ornamentation wouldn’t be getting their business.

Very nice piece. Actually worth going through the extremely annoying “Watch the ad for a day pass” thing that Salon enforces now. And I wouldn’t usually say that; mostly that thing is enough to get me to turn back.

Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller, of course) does today’s “This I Believe” essay on NPR. And what Penn believes is that “There is No God“.

A tidbit or two:

I believe that there is no God… Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more… Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around… I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do”… Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Read (or listen to) the whole thing here. (And for the other side, check out the earlier — incredibly lame — essay for the “This I Believe” series from William F. Buckley, How Is It Possible to Believe in God?)

Reader Levendis sends us this little gem of an article. Hey – if we’re gonna teach the “controversy”, why not go all out, eh?

Sunday School
Believe it or not, there are some people in this world who think that maybe Jesus Christ isn’t watching everything we do at every moment. Although these heathens clearly just hate God and America and are willfully doing the work of the Great Deceiver, there is a controversy. I propose we start teaching Sunday School students about the remote possibility that maybe there isn’t an invisible man in the sky who will kill you if you don’t impregnate your dead brother’s wife.

Exactly. How dare they!!

Hey. At least we are starting to have a debate that has escalated above name-calling and all-out contempt. There are some smart theists in the world. I just happen to think they are wrong. No, evolution can’t explain everything, but I am not sure that claim was ever made. But at least somebody on the ID side is asking for some calm and rational discussion. For all I know, he is a flaming ass, but this sounds kinda balanced compared to the vitriol we have been hearing so far.

He sounds like a nice enough guy (always liked that expression for its irony), but we can still rip his strawman down by pointing out that nobody ever said Darwinism could explain everything. It can probably explain nipples for men, though, dude (my favorite line from Time Bandits).

Don’t get me wrong. He is still being intellectually false and deceptive… I just like the fact that he doesn’t sound like a screaming, flaming, fire and brimstone asshole from Heck.

Thoughts? Let’s work this one over, shall we?

Vienna cardinal draws lines in Intelligent Design row

The Panda’s Thumb has long been a favorite of mine. And they’ve got a fun one up with Breaking news: Darwin appears in holy frying pan!

Check it out yourself; but here’s a little taste:

…Scientists around the world are puzzled about the possible mechanism that might have resulted in the 19th century naturalist’s portrait being deposited on the suface of a cooking utensil …it was found that the probability of this occurance is less than that of fairy circles appearing to form a mole on the face on Mars… the owner and discoverer of the miraculous pan has opened bidding for the object on ebay. All proceeds from the sale will benefit the American Civil Liberties Union….

This one’s pretty old, I guess. But, still, news to me:

Target refuses to fill woman’s prescription for emergency contraception

A 26-year-old Missouri woman was refused EC when she handed her prescription to a pharmacist at a Target store in Fenton, MO, on September 30. The woman was told by the pharmacist, “I won’t fill it. It’s my right not to fill it.”

Given this dipshit behavior, other questions can legitimately be asked along the same lines:

- Target pharmacists who don’t want to fill prescriptions for Jewish customers who killed Christ?
- Target pharmacists who only dispense HIV medicine to “innocent victims” of AIDS?
- Target pharmacists who want proof that women were really raped, and that they didn’t “deserve it,” before they sell them emergency contraception?
- Or how about Target pharmacists (or cashiers) who are simply Jehovah’s Witnesses? Can they refuse to sell any medicine to anyone, even aspirin?

Read more about the bullshit here, here, and here.

Survival Of The Flimsiest

A taste:

There’s an anti-evolutionist brushfire sweeping the United States, and at its heart lies a paradox. These days, it seems, the less the creationists say about what they actually believe, the better they’re likely to fare. In an attempt to avoid triggering the First Amendment’s ban on commingling church and state, the more canny of today’s fundamentalists have become clever minimalists.

Rather than discussing anything immediately recognizable as the Christian God — much less the Bible — they invoke “science” itself to undermine one of the most robust scientific theories in history.

This science-abusing strategy has reached a pinnacle in Kansas, where the state Board of Education, dominated by anti-evolutionists, has adopted standards that call for teaching about alleged “scientific criticisms” of evolutionary theory, and that redefine the nature of science itself to potentially include non-natural explanations. Call it the Ghostbusters approach: According to Kansas, scientists are now free to go hunting for ghosts, genies, and other supernatural entities. If they happen to discover God along the way so much the better, but let no one say the board has explicitly required it.

My favorite bit:

But in 1987, the Supreme Court unmasked “creation science” for the thinly-veiled religious apologetic that it was, and declared its teaching unconstitutional in public schools, a violation of the separation of church and state. Anti-evolutionists promptly evolved again, further refining their strategic attempt to pose as scientists. Now, they would promote something called “intelligent design” (ID). Gone was any mention of a young Earth or Flood — the most direct parallels to the Genesis account. Instead, ID advanced a vague philosophical argument: Biological complexity requires a designer for its existence, and could not have resulted from a mindless and directionless process such as evolution.

Once again, today’s creationists claim ID is science. But as with “creation science” in the 1980s, we’re now witnessing the unmasking of ID.

The designer is obviously God, the scientific bona fides of ID are scarce to nonexistent, and its proponents can’t seem to check their religion at the door when it counts. When the Dover, Pennsylvania school board introduced ID into its biology curriculum, statements about religion abounded; they’re now Exhibit A in a just concluded First Amendment lawsuit over the board’s actions.

The court hasn’t yet ruled, but in the meantime, Dover’s anti-evolutionist school board members have been swept out of office — a development that led Pat Robertson to assert that Dover has abandoned God and shouldn’t expect His protection. So much for disguising ID as science.