And in the end, who pays?

The school board at Cranston RI racked up a $150,000 legal bill in their foolhardy attempt to defend the blatantly unconstitutional prayer banner in the Cranston High School. And now they’ve decided it’s unfair to expect them to pay the whole thing. Their solution? Split the bill with the taxpayers, 50/50. [UPDATE: A commenter informs me that I’ve got it exactly backwards: the city has already paid, and the school board is volunteering to pick up half of the tab. That’s marginally better, but still, that’s $75,000 that could have been spent on educating students, and it’s going to pay off a very foolishly-incurred debt instead.]

The vote was unanimous in favor of the proposed fee split proposal submitted by School Supt. Peter L. Nero.

The school district will pay $75,000 toward the legal fees owed the ACLU for representing Cranston High School West student Jessica Ahlquist, 16, in a challenge to the constitutionality of a prayer banner which used to hang in the school’s auditorium.

Yeah, I know, it’s taxpayer money either way. But still, why should the general public (including atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians) get stuck paying for Christian evangelism efforts? Give that bill to the local churches and let them split it up. They’re the ones who were driving the original push for Christian supremacy in the public schools. Let them pay their own damn bills.

Pentagon-sponsored identity theft

USA Today is reporting a disturbing and blatantly illegal propaganda campaign apparently being conducted by Pentagon contractors.

A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.

Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.

A Pentagon spokesman denied being aware of any such activities on the part of its contractors, but the sites mysteriously disappeared after the contractors were asked about them.

An odd response

My latest post at Evangelical Realism seems to have attracted the attention of a self-described “New Evangelist” named David Roemer. It’s an odd response, though. My post was about William Lane Craig’s problems with the doctrine of Hell and Christian exclusivism, and, well, see if you can tell what (if anything) Roemer’s response has to do with the post he’s responding to.

There are three theories about our purpose in life: 1) To serve God in this world in order to be with Him in the next. 2) Life has no meaning. Man is a “useless passion” is the way Jean Paul Sartre put it. 3) To achieve self-realization and serve our fellow man.

There is a considerable amount of evidence for #1, some for #2, but none at all for #3. # 3 is irrational because we can achieve self-realization in different ways. The problem of life is deciding how to achieve self-realization. Concerning # 1, we are not guaranteed salvation. It is something to hope for with “fear and trembling

That’s the whole post response, including the two missing punctuation marks at the end. But what does he mean by this odd response?

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Spoilers

This week at Evangelical Realism I give away the plot behind William Lane Craig’s argument for Christian exclusivism, and begin to look at the argument he uses to try and explain why an all-powerful God has no power to save most of His own children from Hell. Craig packs so much fail into such a small space that this one’s going to be a two-parter. Check it out if you’re interested.

 

The rest of the [back]story

Like I said yesterday, I decided in my mid-teens that I was going to follow God no matter what men said about Him, and that more than anything else led to my eventual rejection of Christianity. When you try to go beyond what men say about God, to the reality behind the words, you discover that the words are all there is to the reality. Superstition and subjective feelings reinforce the words, but when it comes down to the substance of the faith, it’s just words.

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The deacon’s backstory

Someone mentioned not knowing my backstory, so I thought I’d take a minute and share my background, and how I went from being a committed, conservative, Bible-believing Christian to being—well, whatever it is I am now.

I grew up in a nominally Christian home, and generally believed in God by familial osmosis. We weren’t terribly religious, though. When I was in the sixth grade (12-year-olds, for those of you outside the US educational system), my mother decided to start going to church again, and took us to one of the more liberal Methodist churches in the area. I hated to go because I was kind of a geek and got picked on a lot, but I did sing in the children’s choir and go to catechism class. It was there I got my very first Bible.

It was a “Young Readers” Bible, very large, with pictures and helpful footnotes and introductions to each book. The commentary confused me, because it sounded like the people who wrote the notes didn’t really believe in God, and were talking about the Bible like it had more or less evolved through human fumbling and good intentions. I decided, at that point, that I was going to believe in God regardless of what men said about Him. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that decision made my eventual atheism inevitable.

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Consistent self-contradiction

PZ Myers recounts a visit his blog had from a bunch of Hovind fanatics.

I can summarize their argument very briefly:

  • Your ability to reason comes from god.
  • Therefore, if you use reason, you prove the existence of god.
  • If you use reason to disprove god, you actually prove god.
  • If you claim any of their arguments are logically fallacious, you are using reason, which comes from god, therefore you prove them correct.

Maddening, isn’t it? But at least they’re being consistently self-contradictory. Let’s look at their argument and see what it tells us.

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Making good men evil

There’s an interesting thread happening in the comments for my post about God as an abusive husband. One commenter raised a few eyebrows by using strong rhetoric regarding William Lane Craig and his own prospective future vis à vis torment, and others reacted. It was a bit strong for my tastes as well, but I’m listening, and here’s a point I think is worth discussing.

Craig is not Evil-with-a-capital-E Evil, just evil-with-a-lowercase-e evil. I believe he can still be redeemed, but he’s so stuck in his epistemological and prideful rut that only experiencing something that will completely shatter him will knock him out of it.

Even John Loftus, a former pupil of his and kind of a scary guy himself, thinks the man is basically good. I would agree, in the sense that he probably isn’t a primary sociopath and would probably make most of the same moral choices the elusive “normal/control human” would (and for the same irreligious reasons).

However, this is a man who wields considerable “soft power” and whose writings are perpetuating a civilization-corroding, corrupt religion and culture. And say what you will, but there is nothing as evil-minded as thinking that any sentient being deserves infinite punishment for finite crimes.

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Pilot swerves to avoid collision with planet

In a story that might almost have been funny if nobody had been hurt, an Air Canada pilot put his aircraft into a steep dive to avoid a collision—with the planet Venus.

Sixteen passengers and crew were hurt in the January 2011 incident, when the first officer rammed the control stick forward to avoid a U.S. plane he wrongly thought was heading straight toward him.

The pilot had just awakened from a long nap and was still a bit groggy at the time.

“Under the effects of significant sleep inertia (when performance and situational awareness are degraded immediately after waking up), the first officer perceived the oncoming aircraft as being on a collision course and began a descent to avoid it,” Canada’s Transportation Safety Board said.

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Aiming for stupidity

The Happy Scientist took a look at the test questions for Florida’s FCAT exam, used to assess whether or not fifth graders have achieved expected levels of scientific literacy for their age group, and found some problems.

I expected the Test Item Specifications to be a tremendous help in writing simulated FCAT questions. What I found was a collection of poorly written examples, multiple-choice questions where one or more of the wrong responses were actually scientifically correct answers, and definitions that ranged from misleading to totally wrong.

Click on the link to see some specific examples (the predatory cows are my favorite). But you know what’s even worse? The response he got when he pointed out the problems.

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