Category Religion

Retelling the Classics

Once, there was a man who had two children. One day, they said to each other, “You know what we should do? Make some movies and put them on the Internet, so everyone can see them.” So they built characters out of modeling clay, and sets out of cardboard. They made some stop-motion animations with a webcam they had lying around, and uploaded their shorts to YouTube. After a while, they learned quite a bit about how to make movies.

One day, their father surfed around the net to see his children’s movies and find out what they had been up to. It turned out that they had quite a lot of fans, including one person who worked in Hollywood and was trying to work out a deal for them to make a feature-length motion picture.

The father thought to himself, “Wow. If these kids can achieve so much with just a cheap camera and some clay, there’s nothing they won’t be able to do.”

So he took away his children’s modeling clay, burned the cardboard sets, and smashed their camera. So they stopped filming, and never did make that feature film.

(HT whoever for the original.)

Carnival of the Dembski

Bill “The Isaac Newton of Information Science” Dembski gave a talk at Oklahoma University in Norman, entitled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. But it appears that instead of the usual audience bussed in from local churches, the talk was attended by a lot of OU faculty and students. From all accounts, he gave a pretty standard presentation, but was ripped to shreds in the Q&A session.

Start by reading Golfvixen’s liveblogging of the talk. Then proceed to ERV’s account (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and/or this summary at Further Thoughts (or better yet, this
roundup of coverage of the event[1]).

And finally, a Christian who didn’t manage to get into the talk, but describes the Q& A and the goings-on outside.

Oh, and I would have liked to link to Dembski’s own account of how the evening went, but I can’t find one.

[1] Yes, he links here. When two carnivals link to each other, does it form a merry-go-round?

(Updated Sep. 21 to add another link to Further Thoughts.)

Lack of Evidence for God Is Evidence of God, Says Pope

Quoth the NY Daily News:

“All believers know about the silence of God,” he said in unprepared remarks in Italy. “Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God.”

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God to understand the situation of people who do not believe.

So God doesn’t actually, like, make himself known to people because he wants believers to sympathize with atheists? And maybe the fact that I can’t fly is a gift from Superman to help me sympathize with the residents of Smallville. I gather that “unprepared remarks” is code for “pulling lame excuses out of his ass.”

(HT Olly’s Onions via Jesus and Mo.)

Why Is Faith Considered A Virtue?

Because without it, people wouldn’t believe in God.

As far as I can tell, it really is that simple.

China Regulates Reincarnation

From Newsweek:

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

This may seem silly, but I think a country that executes as many people as China does would want to regulate reincarnation. It’s only a matter of time before Texas does the same.

Any Questions?

I just watched PZ Meiarz’s talk about mind and brain, and listened to Ron McLeroy’s talk at his church, about the evils of materialism and evolution. I’ve also listened to Kent Hovind‘s schpiel, and seen his show live.

One thing that struck me—and it’s a small thing, but I think significant—is that PZ took questions during the talk, while McLeroy and Hovind didn’t.

Yes, the last section of Hovind’s seminar is a Q&A session, but that comes at the end of 14 hours of Gish Gallop, while PZ’s audience asked questions while they were fresh in their minds, and while the relevant slides were up on the screen.

And again, to be fair, I’ve attended talks by scientists and researchers who asked that questions be kept until the end, but even there, this was considered unusual enough that it was announced at the beginning. Certainly, throughout school and college, it was the norm that you raise your hand when a question occurs to you, not at the end: if you don’t understand something at the beginning, you should correct that as soon as possible, otherwise you won’t understand the stuff that comes later.

Of course, the other difference is that PZ is trying to teach his audience, and explain why (he thinks that) something is true. McLeroy and Hovind, on the other hand, are telling their audience what to think.

Crippling Brains for Jesus

Does anyone need more proof that Ron McLeroy, the newly-appointed Texas State Board of Education Chairman, is a superstitious asshat who’s out to cripple the state’s education system? Here’s what he told his church in 2005:

“Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young-Earth, old-Earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design,” McLeroy said. “And intelligent design here at Grace Bible Church is actually a smaller tent than you would have in the intelligent design movement as a whole, because we are all Biblical literalists…. So because it’s a bigger tent, just don’t waste our time arguing with each other about…all of the side issues.”

“Modern science today,” McLeroy complained, “is totally based on naturalism,” thus “it is the naturalistic base that is [our] target.”

What’s frightening is that this assclown is in charge of education in Texas. And as bad as that is, the effect of his militant ignorance won’t be confined to one state: Texas is the second-largest market for school textbooks (after California). This means that publishers will tone down the science in their books if they think it’ll make them more likely to sell in Texas.

Maybe we need a new rule: that someone in charge of X must not be ideologically committed to destroying X.

(HT Texas Observer → Texas Freedom Network → Americans United)

I Think I’m Fisked in Japanese, I Really Think So

I ran across this article about my FABNAQ about Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese, which I don’t speak, and the Babelfish and Google translations are bad enough that I can’t even tell whether I’m being fisked or praised.

Are there any nipponophones in the audience who can take a look and give me a sense of what’s going on?

Criminally Incompetent Teachers

Over at Kent Hovind’s Whinery, I ran across this comment:

I am a high school science teacher. So far I have been able to teach creation science a couple years without being stopped by administration. I spend as much time if not more teaching creation science as I do going thru the textbook they make me use. Of course, I skip all the chapters with evolution. I use Dr. Hovind’s seminar notebook and his book Are You Being Brainwashed. In a couple weeks I will be going at it again. I pray I can continue to do the same as I have been.

Hopefully, this guy is just lying, and has made the whole thing up. Because if not, that means he’s not just failing to teach the kids science, he’s teaching them antiscience, filling their heads with nonsense that has to be unlearned before they can be properly taught. He’s skipping important parts of the curriculum. He’s bringing in “teaching” materials by a wackjob so far out there that even other young-earth creationists have asked him to stop. And if this has really been going on for years, we have to consider the possibility that the school administration knows about his activities, but is turning a blind eye to them.

How would one go about subpoenaing cseblogs.com’s httpd logs to see where this clown posted from, to see whether any of it is true?

Fifty Bucks, Same As In the Vestry

Religious scandals are always fun, whether it’s Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard, or Tommy Tester.

According to the Kingsport, TN Times-News, police in Johnson City, TN, accosted Tester to investigate reports of indecent exposure. Tester, a Baptist minister, radio host, and all-around upstanding citizen, was obviously rattled by this:

“He said they (Johnson City police) scared him–he was scared to death and didn’t know what he’d said or what he’d admitted or anything else,” Morris said.

So rattled was he that he offered the cops blow jobs.

He then got out of his car, lifted his skirt, and peed on a car wash in front of some kids.

The cops also found an open bottle of vodka in his car.

According to reports, Tester also allegedly admitted to police that he had been drinking and failed all field sobriety tests.

He’s been charged with indecent exposure, DUI, and having an open container of alcohol.

Update, 16:13: Well, that didn’t take long. familmusicgroup.com has a gallery of photos of the site owner with various radio people at a convention last year. According to Google’s cache, as of July 15, that page included a photo of Tommy Tester. Not anymore.