Keith Olbermann’s worst person in the world countdown with Illinois State Representative Monique D. Davis (D), winning the gold (Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly taking bronze and silver).
You gotta love Olbermann…
Category Archives: Religion
Dealing with a YouTube antievolutionist
Here is a blast from my not too distant past for your entertainment and edification. About a year ago (I hadn’t stated blogging yet) I ran across a video on YouTube by an evolution denier who goes by the handle Philos71. In that video he bashes the fossil evidence for evolution and acts like he is reading a quote from a popular field-guide type book on fossils, and I felt compelled to respond. First is his video and then below the fold are my two response videos (which he blocked on YouTube), enjoy…
“Unfortunately” the author of the original video removed it from YouTube. However my response videos remain below:
McDonald’s + the gays = we are all going to die!
As Ed Brayton reported the other day on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, the “conservatives” over at Worldnutdaily have been “throwing a fit” because one of McDonald’s executives (Richard Ellis, vice president of communications) was elected to the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, and because McDonald’s is a corporate partner with the NGLCC. Oh the horror!
But “throwing a fit” is not a strong enough term for what is going on over at Pro-Existence the blog of Rick and Nancy Pearcey (Nancy is one of the top brass in the intelligent design crowd). Here is Rick’s “measured” reaction to McDonald’s actions:
Dinny the dinosaur, a fond childhood memory defiled
Since at least 1975 anyone driving on Interstate 10 through the tiny truck stop of a town of Cabazon California (about 15 miles west of Palm Springs) could catch a glimpse of an amazing sight; a massive, larger even than life, concrete replica of a Jurassic dinosaur Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus) named “Dinny” the dinosaur.
Dinny was the creation of Claude Bell (1897-1988) an artist who had once worked for Knotts Berry Farm in Buena Park, CA, and later ran the Wheel Inn truck stop next door to the dinosaur. Starting in 1964 it took him eleven years to construct and reportedly cost upwards of $250 thousand dollars. It about 150 feet long and weighs in at more than 100 tons.
Expelled promoters just can’t stop lying
My colleague John M. Lynch over at Stranger Fruit recounts in several posts what happened after he signed up to see a screening of Expelled in Tempe AZ.
First he received an e-mail notifying him that the scheduled time for the screening had been changed to start an hour earlier. But promoters screwed up and the e-mail had been sent to him as a CC (carbon copy). This meant that he got a list of all the e-mail addresses to which the message had been sent (“boughtbythecross,” “homeschoolma,” and “covenant-dad.” etc.).
He then received an e-mail saying that the screening had been canceled. However this e-mail was not CCed to “covenant-dad” etc., like the previous one, and this led him to suspect that they might be trying to screen him out, so to speak, and were actually going to hold the screening as re-scheduled.
Turns out his suspicions were well founded. One of his compadres, Ken McKnight, decided to call the theater ahead of time and ask if the film was still to be shown at the re-scheduled time.
I just called the Arizona Mills Harkins theater and said that I had heard that the private screening of Expelled had been moved from 7:00 to 6:00 (I didn’t mention that I had been emailed that the showing was canceled). The person I spoke to confirmed that the movie is showing today at 6:00. Clearly the promoters are somehow screening the attendees and then sending out cancellation notices to the “undesirables.”
Wasn’t there something about not lying in the Intelligent Designer’s book? I guess it was “thou shalt not lie”, except to people who might be critical of your film.
John has all the gory detail on his blog (see links above). There are two accounts of the screening that was, then wasn’t, but then really was after all, from people who attended the “canceled” screening. One from Brad and another from Ken McKnight. Check’em out.
Seperation of church and state in public schools
GilDodgen over at Uncommon Descent points out an article from the associated press about a controversy over a public school student’s art class project. And in this case I am going to have to agree, at least on one level, that the the students rights were infringed.
First I have to address Gil’s propaganda spin attached to the story:
Responding to questions about “Darwinism” and intelligent design creationism
I’m moving this up from the comments on an earlier post as I think it will take more that a comment to respond to.
A commenter, Josh Caleb, says that he has “a few honest questions“. I am going to answer him as if that were true even though I am now somewhat suspect that it isn’t due to his having cited trueorigins.org, an antievolution knockoff of talkorigins.org, and because of several of his comments left in response to others.
So it’s true, Darwin is to blame…
John Wilkins has dared to do what none of us in the evolution defenders camp has had the courage to do. He has faced the TRUTH and systematically documented some of the horrors visited upon world Jewry at the hands of Darwin and his followers from 38CE to the present.
Wilkins you monstrous bastard! How can I live with myself now that I have gazed upon this soul scorching truth about Darwin laid out so irrefutably?
[Shuffles away from computer sobbing.]
Via Pharyngula
Responding to my first blog critic
Some guy name Timothy with a blog is having fantasies about he and I having a “blog-duel” over my post “Contradictory stories from the ID crowd on the Expelled incident“.I don’t want to have a duel with an apparently unarmed man so I will respond once and then he can say whatever he likes.
Me: Over at Post-Darwinist, Denyse O’Leary is quoting Expelled producer Mark Mathis as admitting that he…
Timothy: Troy makes the following assertions regarding Denyse O’Leary’s post:
Someone has reading comprehension problems. I made no assertion about Denyse’s post, I noted that she quotes a statement from Expelled producer Mark Mathis from who she says wrote to her. That quote I believe expresses the true reason for his expelling Myers from the screening.
More irony from the ID creationist crowd
On the one hand the ID creationist crowd wail and moan about how they supposedly face discrimination and censure (that’s what film Expelled is about), and on the other we find this sort of stuff:
Pandas Thumb reports on an article in the Washington Post that talked about the case of Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary:
Nancey Murphy, a religious scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said she faced a campaign to get her fired because she expressed the view that intelligent design was not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”
Murphy, who believes in evolution, said she had to fight to keep her job after one of the founding members of the intelligent design movement, legal theorist Phillip Johnson, called a trustee at the seminary and tried to get her fired.
But this isn’t the only example.
Back in the mid-1990’s Christian biochemist Terry M. Gray was tried and convicted of heresy by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for daring to suggest that humans have primate ancestors in a review… wait for it… of Phillip Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial (1991).
Fortunately Dr. Gray wasn’t put on the rack or burnt at the stake for his “heresy” (like they used to do), but he was censured and had to write a recantation.
Dr. Gray has a page on links to articles on the incident: Documents Related to the Evolution Trial in the OPC
A similar example is Christian physicist Howard Van Till, of Calvin College in Michigan had the school’s board of trustees questioning his views after he wrote in a book (The Fourth Day 1986) in which he argued that “…the stories of the Bible and science’s account of evolution could both be true” (from chicagotribune.com):
His critics on the school’s board of trustees had no interest in reconciling the religious account of creation with a naturalist explanation of how life and the universe have evolved over the ages. For years after the book’s release in 1986, Van Till reported to a monthly interrogation where he struggled to reassure college officials that his scientific teachings fit within their creed. Van Till’s career survived the ordeal, but his Calvinist faith did not. Over the next two decades, he became the heretic his critics had suspected.
Over a span of three years a conservative businessman Leo Peters ran thirty full-page ads in the Grand Rapids Press attacking Van Till for his views.
Seems they can dish it out but can’t take it; though they really haven’t had to actually take it because most (if not all) of their claims of discrimination or censure are nonsense.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 