Two Aphorisms
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
— Edsger Dijkstra
Math is no more about equations than music is about staves and sharps.
— me
Whith-arrrrrr Freedom of Religion?
The Asheville, NC Citizen-Times tells the tragic story of a High School student whose religion is being persecuted:
being kicked out of school for a day?
Bryan Killian doesn’t think that’s a fair reaction to his decision to come to North Buncombe High School wearing an eye patch and an inflatable cutlass.
…“I feel like my First Amendment was violated,” Killian, 16, said. “Freedom of religion and freedom of expression. That’s what I tried to do, and I got shot down.”
Freedom of religion?
Yes, Killian says, his “pirate regalia” is part of his faith — the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, even those who love him won’t support him:
Killian’s mother, Vanessa, agreed with the school’s decision despite sympathizing with her son.
“I think Bryan should be able to voice his opinion,” she said, “but he kind of got carried away.”
First Newsweek, Now Time
Remember the fall of 2006, when the cover of Newsweek featured a story about Annie Leibowitz… except in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, where the cover story was Losing Afghanistan??
See if you can tell what Time learned from that:
(In case you can’t read it, the European, Asian, and South Pacific editions say “Talibanistan” and the US edition says “Why We Should Teach The Bible In Public School“)
US No Longer a Christian Nation?
James Dobson says presidential candidate Fred Thompson isn’t a Christian:
“Everyone knows he’s conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for,” Dobson said of Thompson. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Christian; at least that’s my impression,” Dobson added
…In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson’s claim. He said that, while Dobson didn’t believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless “has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith.”
“We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians,” Schneeberger added.
(emphasis added)
I note that according to the American Religious Identification Survey, in 2001 about 1 million people identified themselves as “Evangelical” — they were outnumbered by Muslims. That’s less than 0.5% of the US population.
So can we expect Dobson et al. to drop the “America is a Christian nation” argument?
(HT PZ.)
LJ Plugin for WordPress
I’ve made enough references to LiveJournal users like and enough that I got tired of copying and pasting the standard LJ HTML to link to them.
So I did what any good hacker would do, and wrote a WordPress plugin to expand <lj username> tags.
You can download it .
Morality for Morons
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curvemudgeon points me to an article by Steve Alderman in the apparently badly misnamed American Thinker. This is a response to an op-ed in the LA Times by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation and one of the more outspoken critics of faith.
Discovery Institute Doesn’t Think God Loves Them Enough
The Mar. 16 episode of Intelligent Design the Future has this blurb:
On this episode of ID The Future CSC Fellow, Dr. Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler asks, “does Darwinism devalues human life?” Some Darwinists deny that Darwinism has any ethical implications at all. In this short clip, Dr. Weikart looks at comments from Darwinists about the animal ancestry of humans and shows how that blurred the distinction between the animal kingdom and humanity, and negates the idea of human exceptionalism.
(Transcribed from the MP3 file, in case you notice differences between this and what’s on the episode web page.)
Read that last sentence, and then look at the title of the episode:
Does Darwinism Devalue Human Life?
Conservapedia Now Slightly Less Fun
Readers of talk.origins may remember Ray Martinez, a particularly dense and combative young-earth creationist. I’d been having fun this past week or so reading his antics at Conservapedia.
Highest-Ranking Elected Atheist Announced
You may recall that a while back, the Secular Coalition for America ran a contest to find the highest-ranking elected
atheist
[1]
in the U.S. Government. Now the contest has ended and
the results have been announced.
Freedom Of Religion and Freedom From Religion
This particularly hateful letter,
published in the Kenai, AK Peninsula Clarion (registration required; see also here), promulgates a popular misconception:
The United States is based on having freedom of religion, speech, etc., which means you can believe in God any way you want (Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, etc.), but you must believe.
Let’s consider a scenario: the government in your state allocates X million dollars to buy rosaries to be handed out in public schools, to hire priests to lead the school in reciting “Hail Mary, full of grace” over the PA system each morning, to bus students to mass on Sunday mornings, and so forth.
Most Americans, I suspect, will think, “Wait a sec! How come the school is pushing Catholicism on my kids? That can’t be right!” Then they’ll look up the bit in the first amendment that says, “Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion” and see that no indeed, that can’t be right.
So what the first amendment says is that the government can’t push Catholicism on you. You have freedom from Catholicism.
Except that the constitution doesn’t explicitly mention Catholicism. It covers all religions. So the first amendment says that the government can’t push any religion. You have freedom from religion.
Yeah, it really is that simple. Why don’t people get it?
(HT My Confined Space, via Pharyngula.)