Dance, Monkeys! Dance for My Enjoyment!

Dance, Monkeys! Dance for My Enjoyment!

Today seems to be the day when a bunch of right-wing fundies all decided to make themselves look ridiculous in public, seemingly only to entertain me.

For a while now, Ray Comfort’s weblog wasn’t accepting new comments, because he had been hired by Examiner.com as their Creationism Examiner, and he wanted comments to be posted there.

This morning, however, I found a post on his old site, with a bunch of comments. I can only surmise that the Examiner decided that Ray was too kooky for them, and booted him back to blogspot.com.

Then there was the kook fight: according to this WND story (sorry, I couldn’t find a reliable source), Ray basically accused Catholics of not being True Christians™

But the Vatican has chosen to officially believe Darwin rather than Jesus

BillDo, recognizing in Comfort one of the rare people who could make him look reasonable and measured by comparison, responded by saying that the Catholic church’s position is that it’s okay to accept evolution, as long as you still believe in a magic man in the sky.

Ray’s response to that basically boils down to “is not!”

(HT PZ.)

But the one who had me laughing out loud all morning was Brannon Howse, who has a show on Christian Worldview Radio.

Howse recently put in an appearance at a church in Ft. Worth. Bud Kennedy, a reporter for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, wrote an article about it, under the title “Who knew that yoga is a tool of Satan?”, talking about Howse’s superstition, ignorance, and paranoia.

I wasn’t at the event in Texas, but Kennedy’s account is pretty much in line with what Howse has talked about on his radio show: ZOMG teh gays, the Earth is 6000 years old, Obama == Hitler, and so forth.

So Brannon Howse spent an entire episode whining about how the article made him and other True Christians™ look foolish and extreme, at one point asking, “is there anything extreme about saying that there’s nothing Christian about yoga?” (Yes, Mr. Howse. Yes, there is.)

What had me laughing out loud was that Howse’s “corrections” of Kennedy’s librul yellow journalism just made Howse look as bad as before, if not worse. For instance, he claims that he never said yoga is a tool of Satan. It is, however, an Indian occult practice, and anti-christian.

On other topics, like the notion that the stimulus package is a way of achieving a worldwide monetary system and a one-world government, his response was basically, “Well, yes, I said that, because it’s true. But when Kennedy puts it in the paper, it makes us look foolish.”

Yes, it does, Brannon. As the saying goes, people who don’t want their beliefs ridiculed shouldn’t hold such ridiculous beliefs.

And finally, to cap off a perfectly wonderful day, here’s Richard Dawkins’s response to Ray Comfort’s challenge to debate him for $10,000.

Go read the whole thing. It’s wonderful.

$10,000 is less than the typical fee that I am ordinarily offered for lecturing to a serious audience (I often don’t accept it, especially in the case of a student audience, because I am a dedicated teacher). It is not, therefore, a worthwhile inducement for me to travel all the way across the Atlantic to debate with an ignorant fool. You can tell him that if he donates $100,000 to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (it’s a charitable donation, tax deductible) I’ll do it. A further condition is that it will be filmed by Josh Timonen for my website, RichardDawkins.net, and distributed by Josh as a DVD, if he thinks it is funny enough. To this end, it would be nice if Mr Comfort would reprise the ever popular Banana Sketch.

Richard Dawkins

(HT Shelley.)