Moore Baloney: Alabama ‘Commandments’ Judge Gives Two Thumbs Up To Evangelistic Film At Public School

Roy Moore, Alabama’s infamous “Ten Commandments judge,” has a penchant for misconstruing church-state law, and now he’s giving bad advice to school officials in Tuscaloosa.

and here is the trailer of the disputed film, “Facing the Giants“:

Officials at Paul W. Bryant High School have indicated that they will stop showing the film “until the merits of the complaint could be addressed.”

Moore wants school officials to reconsider. In a Jan. 18 letter, he claims that “the simple fact” is that school promotion of the “Giants” film does not violate the separation of church and state. The missive applauds the school for “showing their students an inspiring, family-friendly movie such as Facing the Giants” and again promotes Moore’s cramped understanding of the First Amendment. (He tags Americans United as a group bent on muzzling Christianity in the public schools.)

If school officials are serious about upholding constitutional principles, they will not take Moore’s legal ramblings seriously. The courts have long held that it is not within the purview of the public schools to evangelize students. Teaching about religion in an objective and academically sound manner is permissible, but showing students a film meant to convert them to a specific religion is not.

As Americans United Communications Director Joe Conn told The Tuscaloosa News, Moore’s “legal advice is certainly on the fringe. The school board should look to objective legal advice, not to Judge Moore.”

A first try at embedding video. (I hope it works.)

Anyway, Sean and I used to discuss Chomsky and Zinn all the time, as well as some of the consequences.

(Cross posted at The Uncredible Hallq)

Andrew Sullivan has up a quote representing a defense of religion that’s quite common:

Part of my skepticism with regard to the efforts of my fellow atheists to demonstrate how absurd the opposing position is comes from knowing a fair number of intelligent, reasonable, thoughtful people who believe in God–including one I am married to. Part comes from weaknesses I can perceive in the foundations for my own view of the world. At some point, I think, each of us is using the superb pattern recognition software that evolution has equipped us with to see a coherent pattern in the world around us–and since the problem is a harder one than the software was designed to deal with, it isn’t that surprising that we sometimes get different answers.

The idea seems to be that if otherwise great people believe something, it must be reasonable to believe. Once you’ve spelled it out like that, though, it starts to become easier to see the reasons why this is a dumb idea. People aren’t representations of ideal types. They’re people. They have good qualities and bad qualities. I’ve known religious people who’ve been great in their way. I’ve met similarly great people who believed in the effectiveness of tarot card reading, or who accepted Marxist dogmas about the nature of society without bothering to study economics or psychology or anything like that. Because they were great in other ways, it doesn’t mean that it was good of them to accept those ideas. And Newton, though a great scientist and mathematician, was into alchemy and numerology. Who thought the world would end in 2060.

I’m not sure what else to say here. This is one of those issues where at first glance stating the obvious would seem to be enough. Of course, in reality stating the obvious is rarely enough. So let’s speculate on why people think this way. I’m betting on the fact that as many have notee before, religious beliefs aren’t even really supposed to be about reality. People don’t rly on them the way they do their beliefs about reality, or when they do it’s a tragedy. Rather, they’re used for things like like establishing group solidarity. When you need to make a tightly knit group that readily hates outsiders, a unified dogma helps, but in a bourgeois society where you have to do business with people significantly different than yourself it helps to be able to adopt an irrational relativism about points of disagreement. To insist that your friends’ belief in God is rational isn’t to say it’s really rational n the sense a philosopher would understand. It means you want a smooth relationship with them that ignores the question of whether anyone’s beliefs about non-immediately relevant matters are true.

I was trolling the ‘Netwaves a few weeks ago, in lieu of the Pekka-Eric Auvinen tragedy – because let’s face it, folks, we get blamed for every frackin’ thing under the sun. This dipwad was an alleged ‘humanist’ who hated humanity – an ‘anti-human humanist’ to be exact. Which, by definition, means this loser was a serious wack-job. Let’s never mind that this phrase runs contrary to the law of noncontradiction.

I won’t go into any extended analysis. The kid was a loon. Atheism wouldn’t have ‘driven’ him to it – likelihood is, he could’ve been a Mormon, a Baptist, or any other denomination. Mentally ill is as mentally ill does.

Anyways, I didn’t have very far to go. This site features two fellows, Scott Ragan and John Sexton. It turns out that John has a big problem with atheism. It also seems that he’s actually currently pursuing a Masters in Science and Religion at Biola University. Surprise, surprise! Another oxymoron! ‘Biblically Centered Education’! (note that here, we have that already worn out crap about a ‘former atheist’. This allegedly ’scientific’ university even has a page about ID!)

For now, I’ll bypass how ridiculous the damn book is (as I’ve gone on at length about this in prior posts). How it fails miserably as a scientific textbook (hold your jeers, folks!). Or the Intelligent Design ‘debate’ (didn’t last more than a few weeks in court, gimmee a break here!). For now, I’m calling strawman.

What our dear friend John does in his ‘criticisms’, is what just about every religious critic does when they critique atheism. They take the more outspoken among them, do a dervish dance, and poke holes in either said proponents actions, or said proponents words, and use these items in a manner to cast some form of aspersion on the individual, thereby incriminating any others (inferred or otherwise) that fall under the umbrella of said movement.

Which is a fine and valid technique if you’re going after an actual epistemology, but fails miserably in this case. Why? Because of the lack of cohesion amongst us. Because atheism trends towards the individual, rather than the hive-mind. True enough, what binds us together is an absence of belief, and certainly, most of us agree on certain items, but for the most part, we agree that the supernatural is just some romantic arrested development on the part of most individuals. That’s about it.

A consensus of opinion on one matter is not necessarily a consensus on all matters. I’ve rejected moral relativism, I support Israel, I’ve even pointed out where Muslims have contributed to civilization, and have even disputed the concept of Qiqong as ‘woo’. Oh, and I’m pro-life and pro-choice.

I think it’s probably quite frustrating for the religious critics, who approach us from the angle of the tu quoque, only to have the blow land on nothing. Or perhaps they simply imagine that they’re striking a blow for truth and justice? Probably, seeing as they have imaginary relationships with entities that don’t exist.

Let’s get back on track here.

Johnny boy obviously misses the whole point here when Harris challenged 1 billion people to pray a limb to re-grow. (Prayer doesn’t work.) He also doesn’t seem to understand that the Golden Compass isn’t really an ‘atheist tract’ – in fact, he claims the author (Lev Grossman) ’is a fan of the books and was worried they wouldn’t be anti-Christian enough.’ Actual quote is: ‘My chief worry going into the movie was that they would soft-pedal the anti-church aspects of the novel.’ Not quite the same thing. Then there’s this weak-ass critique of how the ‘Amazing Atheist’ didn’t act in time to prevent the Jokela (or act appropriately – Jokela’s in Finland, dude!), though judging from this sordid little bit, the guy’s anything but ‘amazing’. And his piece about ‘Atheists Behaving Badly’? Well, for starters:

A. Watson’s an asshole for making that claim about African Americans,
B. Stark isn’t the only politician who’s said some pretty stupid things (but he’s one in a thousand in this respect: he fucking apologized, at least. Larry Craig’s still denying he’s gay, for one thing: I could go on at length about all these ‘family values’ hypocrites).
C. George Carlin’s comment was completely taken out of context (what a surprise! What was that thing, you know, about bearing false witness?).

As to this ridiculous study, it’s obviously not taking the actual statistics into consideration – Canada’s seems not very forthcoming as the latest serious stats date back to 2001. Anyone have anything more recent?

So these mushmouths (like that last dweeb I exposed as a lying twit has already declared ‘victory’, see under Reasons for Examining My Persuasion in his blog – somehow he won! Nary a valid point was raised…I criticized his parroted right wing talking points only) really can’t figure out why we’re so pissed off? Why we can’t just be those precious little ‘casual secularists’ they snivel about? Waaah, waaah, waaah!

Hey, far as I’m concerned, kid gloves are off. They have been for some time. The carnies have a saying: “You wanna play? You gotta pay.”

This is the Apostate, signing off.

Kinda nice how thoughts like these can actually be spoken…

UPDATE: Changed to a working link, forward to about 2:35 in (sorry about that)…

Man, this really cracked me up…

UPDATE: Thanks to ChuckA for originally pointing this out.

There’s definitely something

a little wacky

about The Book of Job

(as I’ve tried to make clear)

but this ditty from Saint Gasoline

is funny as hell.

Go see the other stuff, too.

Against the trend, U.S. births way up

Well, global warming, diminishing resources, over-population doesn’t seem to be bothering a lot of people here in the US of A and many other countries as shown on the graph to the left.

ATLANTA – Bucking the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years.

The nearly 4.3 million births in 2006 were mostly due to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Hispanics. That group accounted for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. births. But non-Hispanic white women and other racial and ethnic groups were having more babies, too.

An Associated Press review of birth numbers dating to 1909 found the total number of U.S. births was the highest since 1961, near the end of the baby boom. An examination of global data also shows that the United States has a higher fertility rate than every country in continental Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan. Fertility levels in those countries have been lower than the U.S. rate for several years, although some are on the rise, most notably in France.

Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty.

*snip”

Other factors include recent declines in contraceptive use here; limited access to abortion in some states; and a 24/7 economy that provides opportunities for mothers to return to work, he said.

Also, it is more common for American women to have babies out of wedlock and more common for couples here to go forward with unwanted pregnancies. And, compared with nations like Italy and Japan, it’s more common for American husbands to help out with chores and child care.

There are regional variations in the United States. New England’s fertility rates are more like Northern Europe’s. American women in the Midwest, South and certain mountain states tend to have more children.

The influence of certain religions in those latter regions is an important factor, said Ron Lesthaeghe, a Belgian demographer who is a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. “Evangelical Protestantism and Mormons,” he said.

As a mother, I understand the desire to have children to love and carry on the family name and all that, but I think it is irresponsible and selfish to have a whole flock of children like many people do for various reasons. They keep having kids, and many of them cannot afford them, but have them anyway. And not using contraceptives in this day and age in the United States of America or any other Western nation is totally irresponsible, even if you come from a low-income community. The education is there, free clinics are available as well as Planned Parenthood where those who cannot afford it can get free contraceptives. As for the religious nutjobs popping out babies because their mythology books says “go forth and multiply”…well that is just plain idiocy.