Good news! While I still get flooded with email every time Bill Donohue puts my address in a press release, I’m getting 90% fewer death threats! I think that maybe the example of Ms Kroll and her trollish husband has made people thinking twice before explicitly spelling out their gruesome plans, so that’s an improvement.
I’m still getting way too much repetitive crap, though. Yes, people, I know you’re offended. You don’t all need to tell me. If I had time to reply to each one of you individually, I’d simply tell you to tough it out — I’m offended by you, but none of us have a right to not be offended. So let me just tell you collectively: I’ve heard that message, and the message that you’ll pray for me, and the message that I’ll be going to hell, and the message that you think I need to be sent to jail or an asylum, and I don’t care what you think, so put a sock in it already. OK? OK. I’ve now got a bunch of filters in place that trash mail that mentions certain common keywords (hint to people legitimately attempting to contact me: try not to sound too Catholic), so there’s not even the point of harassment to your continued volleys. You can all stop now.
Anyway, in the hopes that at least a few of these loons will notice how silly their protestations look, I’ve put a semi-random sampling below the fold. Or, at least, I hope it will at least induce them to proofread before they send their whines into my trash folder.
Bryan Stikeleather is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh, and this is the way his mind works. Actually, a lot of Catholics have been sending me email along these lines — do you all fantasize about raping and murdering people? Please stop reading the Old Testament!
Just wanted to send you a note to say that if someone publicized that they were going to kidnap your wife, Mary, and your kids Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje, rape them brutally, kill them, throw them in a trashcan, and then laugh and brag about it, then you just might have just a hint of the outrage that you have caused many good people.
Hoss Gardner wants to hurt the educational system of some mysterious state I’ve never heard of in retaliation. Read further and you’ll discover the irony of that.
You have put y our education institution in the middle of this. So every agency, public and private, that gives to Minnisota University will be informed of your actions and letters of protest will be going to halt all funding. The bureau of Minnisota Tourism and Chamber of Commerce will be notified and a boycot started against the state of minnisota. We will hit you economically every way we can.
And there’s more! Hoss keeps sending me email.
I work at a school working with high school students. If I did anything like this and publized it I would be fired for unprofessional behavior.
But beyond that, it seems to me that you are afraid. I noticed on your site that there is a small insert about violent attacks be reported. So its true that the Christian martyrs have and had more guts than atheists. After all you are afraid that now you have insult the Catholics and the Muslims, you might be hurt.
Mainly I’m afraid of the Catholics. The Muslims haven’t threatened me at all. But…Hoss works in a school? That is the most frightful thing I’ve read yet.
This one just calls himself “Al. G.”.
hey jew if you got balls say somthing about your jewish backround fag.or the moslems
Well, gosh, I don’t think I have any Jewish background — at least not anywhere in the last few centuries. Why are so many of these letter writers calling me Jewish?
At least Ron Peplau is a little more imaginative in his queries.
Your actions are irrational. You must have done this before. Are you a wiccan.
Why, no, Ron! I’m an atheist! Wiccans are kind of silly, don’t you think?
I read this one with some concern — I’m happily married, and anyway, I don’t really swing that way. Jason really needs to find his own teddy bear and bottom.
Hello, my name is jason Larrimore, I am a 35 year old mechanic from Thomasville, AL. I am a Catholic Christian, I would like to desacrate your fat ass. I know that I shouldn’t feel that way, but you are truly ther worst kind of ignorant.Give me a call {if you are man enough} and I will come to you to deliver your ass whipping. 334-410-0611. I’m sure that you won’t call, I’m sure that you will know the truth eventually, hopefully sooner than too late. I will pray for you, even though I would really enjoy kicking your ass.
If nothing else, he has a future writing copy for the classified ads section of your local city weekly.
Rick DeLano is more representative — he sends his demands to both me and President Bruininks (who must be heartily sick of all this).
Please be advised that there is a limit beyond which gratuitous, evil and demonic hatred expressed toward Catholics will either be dealt with by the appropriate authorities, as it should have been long ago in this instant case, or else the victims of these hate crimes will have no choice but to defend themselves against the unopposed spread of this blatant, bigoted, Nazi-like hatred.
I strongly urge, advise, and recommend that you fire this bigot and hate criminal NOW, because if you do not, you will have opened the door to something terrible indeed, a return to the religious persecutions and ugly anti-Catholic vandalism for which this country has had plenty of occasion to be ashamed in the past.
If that particular Pandora’s Box is opened up how very sorry those authorities will be, who could have intervened with a decent application of existing authoritative guidelines against such evil and vile contempt and bias.
Stop the bigots and haters NOW.
Fire this grotesque blasphemer Myers NOW.
Stop the desecrators of the Catholic eucharist RIGHT NOW.
Or we will have no choice but to conclude that our defense will have to rely upon our own resources.
Most sincerely,
Rick DeLano
Right…Surrender Dorothy, or we’ll send in the flying monkeys!
Mr S. K. Kutai is very, very Catholic. And very, very stupid.
so you are a biologist, huh. I presume you are quite acquainted with amoeba; you know the thing that divides and divides and divides without doing the thing that you and your wife do as a bedtime pastime.. no, you don’t know why it divides and divides and divides apart from appropriating it some kind of ‘intelligence’which it has not. so you see, you are quite stupid on that. Is that all you can be, a stupid biologist? you can’t even stop aging. look at your tummy!!!why didn’t you learn to be a philosopher? so at least you can understand the associations of words and their effect on society. how much do you love your son. myers? or are you looking at him just as a big blob – a collection of amoeba-like entities? a blob you could abuse to satisfy your animal instinct? given your state of biology-based stupidity, i presume it’s not immoral for you to fondle your son to satisfy your penis’ needs, huh? afterall you are not on any moral code; you are just a plain professor of biology, someone the world can survive without….just a blob of amoeba – a blob that is hell-bound until your 9th generation..Have you heard of the candle fire at the stadium biblicum ofm in hongkong , myers? I presume not. well that fire is from Jerusalem. it is especially transmitted. do you know about the words of consecration for the consecrated hosts, myers? they are the same words used by Jesus and handed over to Catholic priests through the ages through apostolic succession. and what Jesus wants done, it goes. many martyred their lives to get His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity to the present. don’t think a desecration of the Eucharist by you will go unabated. what you did was sacrilegious. you can laugh at what you did, but you have also brought abomination to yourself and your generations to come. you are hell-bound, myers!!! I can only advise you to repent. go to a Catholic priest and confess….or hell shall be your rightful dues. we’ll see each other but from oppossite sides of the great divide…I’ll raise my hand to remind you, and you’ll raise your clenched hand with a grotesque face to acknowledge me but you’ll be naked and burning all eaten up by your generations of cursed posterity.
Yeah, my brain hurts too. I hope you didn’t strain yourself actually trying to make sense of that.
Dorothy Westermann of Eau Claire is a bit peeved.
Your actions described below indicate you are not fit to be a professor at any institution of learning. Your immature and irrational actions are not only hateful, hurtful and destructive, you should not be allowed access to young people. Your intentional harm to both Christians and Muslims should be punished by jail time, firing from the University staff and social ostracism.
You have used the education, position and privileges you have received in life to spew your bile from a high podium. This makes you also an ingrate and a disgrace to the University of Minnesota.
I other words, I hope you rot. You are not worthy to be called human.
What? I’m not human, but I bet she thinks a blastocyst is!
Just to be fair, let me mention the current tally: somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims.
I’m afraid that I won’t be able to estimate the numbers in the future, now that they’re being automatically trashed, but I think it’s safe to say that the Catholics have run the scoreboard.
There must have been some post deletions – perhaps for being spam. It has thrown out the post reference numbers used in subsequent posts, not just your millennial game. In the game of hunting through the post fossil record, I make the location of the gaps to be somewhere a little after #508. ;-)
It has thrown out the post reference numbers used in subsequent posts
Yet another thing that sucks about the scienceblogs software. What user interface genius decided that deletion should cause renumbering?
holy moly. You’re getting hatemail from Catholics? I thought we were all fallen christians? I was raised catholic, and it only pushed me more into an agnostic point of view. I didn’t get the full brainwashing, as I went to religious class part-time as a kid, I went to public school, and had classes after, at a nearby catholic school. So, let me say this, the ones that believe without a doubt, are the seriously deluded ones. The bible was written by men, if it had come down from heaven on a glowing silver platter, perhaps I’d be more convinced, but there’s no proof of supernatural origin. Therefore, to my fellow christians, do you not have a brain? Can you think for yourselves? Then look closely as what the bible says, and you’ll see it has been edited, by the powerful and wealthy, throughout the ages, to create a form of social control. Keep the peasants in line. We’re sheep, so it says. On the other hand, to think that there is nothing in the universe, greater than mankind’s knowledge, is insane. I don’t necessarily believe in a creator, who controls all variables, I like to think of the universe as a science experiment, something, somebody set up the rat maze, and now the ball is rolling. There’s far too much order in the universe, for this thing, to have been random, on the other hand, we’re 1 species in a trillion, trillion, so why would our species matter to God, more than say some piece of algae, I don’t think we’re anymore special, than the rest of Life. If there’s a creator, he cares for us, about as much as the scientist in his lab cares for the rats. Perhaps God needed someone to play Chess with, that’s my guess, but believe what you like, I’m not here to convert anyone. I think the earliest religions got it correct, worship the earth, and the life it brings, call it God, whatever name you choose, give thanks to the source of life, this world.