Thanks to Fez for pointing out this
video
of Bill Donohue complaining about eucharist desecration, and YouTube
not pulling videos of people doing same:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLP2fHGHX7c&hl=en&fs=1]
Isn’t he adorable? Don’t you just want to pinch his chubby little
cheeks?
I just got back from an advance screening of Bill Maher’s new film,
Religulous,
(via the
Beltway Atheists, who
get a shout-out for it).
If you’ve seen the trailer, you know what to expect: Bill Maher
travels around the world, interviewing people about religion, and
basically letting them show how ridiculous their beliefs are. And
that’s basically it, plus some film clips thrown in for comic effect,
and some lines that you’d expect to hear on Real Time or
in his stand-up routine, rather than in a serious documentary.
The film does slow down in the last third, but not enough (IMHO) to
drag, and ends on a down note. In the meantime, it does manage to
raise some important questions about religion, though probably not the
ones one might expect.
Spoilers and ranting below the fold.
K-Lo at NRO
relays
a bit from the Katie Couric/Sarah Palin interview:
Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.
I can understand a politician trying to dodge a question like “Did you
have sex with that person?”, “What happened to the missing funds?”,
“What’s your plan for getting us out of this mess?” and the like.
But “Which newspapers were you reading two months ago?”?! FFSMS,
woman, even if you’re a terminally oblivious clothhead who pays no
attention to anything in the news that isn’t about you, you can still
make up something plausible: “Well, I get the Wasilla Journal and
Juneau Times delivered at home [if true; subscription lists can be
checked], but I also subscribe to the NY Times, WaPo, and dozen other
news sources in my RSS reader. And of course I’m always adding Google
News alerts.” See? Simple, plausible, and hard to disprove.
But speaking of newspapers, the LA Times
passes on
the story of a Wasilla resident who asked Palin about her religious
beliefs:
Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the
Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about
prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin
said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the
tracks,”
It sounds like she’s talking about the
Paluxy River tracks,
about which young-earth creationist organization Answers In Genesis
wrote:
Some prominent creationist promoters of these tracks
have long since withdrawn their support. Some of the allegedly human
tracks may be artifacts of erosion of dinosaur tracks obscuring the
claw marks. There is a need for properly documented research on the
tracks before we would use them to argue the coexistence of humans and
dinosaurs.
Caribou Flintstones Barbie: more ignorant than AiG. That’s impressive.
For those who weren’t paying attention, today’s the day of the
Alliance Defense Fund’s
Pulpit Freedom Sunday,
in which pastors are protesting the fact that their churches’
tax-exempt status comes with strings attached, namely rules against
endorsing political candidates, same as any other non-profit
organization.
From what I’ve seen, the news coverage is mostly unsympathetic. The
Post’s On Faith column has a
guest post
in which the author tries to defend this act of civil disobedience,
and gets smacked down in the comments.
So it looks as though most people recognize that the participating
churches are trying to have their cake and eat it too, and can cry me
a tax-exempt river.
According to
this story
in the Post, the Virginia police superintendent issued a directive
saying that police chaplains have to conduct non-denominational
services, i.e., not invoke Jesus’ name. This is in response to a
federal court ruling about prayers before city council meetings.
Del. Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson), a former state trooper, said he is organizing an online petition to get the State Police to reverse its decision. Carrico said he will submit a bill to overturn the action when the General Assembly returns in January.
“Col. Flaherty needs to abandon this attack on Christianity,” he said.
So as I read this, troopers can practice whichever religion they like
in private. They can pray on the job, if it doesn’t affect their job
performance. Troopers who are also chaplains can also perform
religious services on the taxpayer’s dime. But when a line is drawn,
saying that they have to include non-Christian theists while on the
job, suddenly it’s an attack on Christianity.
Perhaps they’d like to call the EMTs to bring a waahmbulance.
One of the ID creationists’ favorite words is “front-loading”. From
context, I gather that it means that the output of an algorithm is
inherent in the algorithm itself. In other words, if you write a
detailed program that calculates the square root of 16, then that’s
just a long-winded way of having it print “4”. You could have saved
yourself a lot of time by just having it print “4” in the first place.
Front-loading comes up in two arguments: 1) evolutionary algorithms do
not demonstrate that evolution works, because the solution is hidden
in the code, and 2) the fact that complex organs exist is evidence of
the unfolding of God’s an unspecified intelligent
designer’s plan; the appearance of limbs and organs in the fossil
record is part of the unfolding of God’s the
designer’s plan and was front-loaded at creation some
unspecified point in the distant past.
This
is fucked up:
GHUMUSAR UDAYAGIRI, India — Babita Nayak was cooking lunch for her pregnant sister when a mob of Hindu extremists wielding swords, hammers and long sticks rampaged through their village, chanting “India is for Hindus! Convert or leave!”
The gist of this depressing article is that Hindu fundies are killing
Christians, burning their homes, destroying their churches, and
driving them into refugee camps.
Background: the
Alliance Defense Fund,
a right-wing religious group, is backing the
Pulpit Initiative,
in which, on Sep. 28, 2008, a bunch of pastors will give sermons
directly endorsing specific political candidates. They’re hoping to be
sued, and to use the suit to overturn the law against churches
directly endorsing candidates.
CNN’s Rick Sanchez hosted a “he-said, he-said” exchange about this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vsNx5ooBU&hl=en&fs=1]
Webster Cook, the University of Central Florida student who
precipitated
Crackergate
by failing to eat[1]
a piece of bread he was given, has been
removed from his post on the SGA,
the university’s newspaper reports.
The only thing that could make this better would be if his colleague’s
name were Spitz.
BarryA at Invisible Science Uncommon Descent:
I will demonstrate that under very clear United States Supreme Court precedent, the subjective motives of a policy maker are simply irrelevant in determining whether the policy violates the Establishment Clause.
Let us begin at the beginning – the Lemon test. In Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) the Supreme Court established the following three-part test for determining whether a governmental policy violates the Establishment Clause: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;
(emphasis added)
Creationist logic:
