Have you ever had relatives give religious books to your kids as Christmas or birthday presents? And then you start thinking about sending their kids science books to teach them a lesson? Here’s another way to do it: send them The Intelligent Design Coloring Book. Then time how long it takes them to figure out it’s satire, rather than an admission of your conversion.
The only worry is that they might not ever figure it out.
This is a bit off-topic, but these guys are atheists and they are funny–great way to start the day:
I did this. My sister is a creationist, so I gave her boys Mythbuster science kits for Xmas. They called me and said that I gave them the best gifts ever, and that there were marshmallows all over the house (one of the kits was about air pressure, so they built a marshmallow cannon).
They’re remarkably undisturbed by the fact that a couple of bombs are hurtling (oddly vertically) toward them. Must be great faith, even if the wrong one.
I do wish it got into the absurdities of ID itself more–at least more than you see in the preview. That probably would be too subtle, though, while the joyful destruction of those with the wrong faith probably will give the game away to most believers.
Glen Davidson
YAY!
Well, turn the page for heck’s sake, I want to find out!
I spend days trying to purge the memory of Spire Christian Archie comics (Motto: “Like Archie and the gang, kids? Well, Spire Christian publishers are here with a big ‘fuck you’ to you and your shitty abused childhood by pissing on the one thing you have to escape the pain.”), only to have it come flooding back with this post.
Now I’ve got to spend the day researching nursing homes with a history of neglect for some of my very special religious relatives.
I have known people, good typical evangelical Christians*, who would look at that page in the colouring book and have absolutely no problem with it.
* I think I might have a different definition of ‘good typical evangelical Christian’ than they do.
My kid gave me “The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas” for Christmas…I think he’s going to be just fine…;-)
For your consideration:
A local church ran a Christmas book-donation drive here a few years back. I heartily approve of giving books to kids, so I pitched in half a dozen copies of Pullman’s “The Golden Compass.”
sigh
If you’re going to post youtube links, please hide them in a description or something so they don’t just show up.
Like This
Good call. Totally not NKOTB’s “The Right
Faith, er, Stuff”.I found a similar image, but sadly it appears that it is not satire. I hope you’re not a man of India…
http://mikedaisey.com/images/man_of_india.jpg
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
Why is this a problem for you? I seriously don’t get it, especially the ‘sigh.’ If you don’t want to watch the videos don’t click on them. Problem solved.
I don’t think it’s a worry, I think it’s pretty certain that they won’t figure it out. I posted a Mr Deity episode to my FB page. My fundamentalist nephew commented that at first he thought it was blasphemous, but after watching it further, he realized what a wonderful teaching tool it could be.
Satire has its perils: some are not capable of seeing it as other than a depiction of reality.
michelemanion, I think the problem is that the videos show up in the comments and fuck up the formatting. On a smartphone, the videos will cover up the items to the right of the comments. So, it’s not just a matter of not clicking on the videos. Unfortunately placed video comments will make other links unuseable.
Because it’s so much work to use tags. I prefer segregating text and video into separate windows, and it’s not like the YT auto-embedding is an unknown phenomenon.
I was the kid who occasionally got given religious presents. My reaction at the time was that these were shitty, shitty presents. Not what I would call a successful evangelism technique. Now if only someone had given me the Intelligent Design Coloring Book. I would have laughed my arse off.
I know a few adults who would love the intelligent design colouring book. Satire or nit, they would agree with parts if not all of it.
Very entertaining book.
Randomfactor@10–
Speaking of the Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, I recall a few years ago that the middle schools in my son’s school district offered students in certain 8th grade classes a chance for a field trip to see the movie adaptation of the book. Those who wished to attend had to get signed permission slips from parents to see the movie!
(Geez,… it MUST be because of all the sex and violence in the movie…. ;)
michaelmanion,..
Thanks for the video inserts. Too funny. Very reminiscent of Monty Python’s style.
(Correction: Thanks michaelmanion@1 and jamesrlindley@9 for the video inserts.)
They have some nice Intelligent Design stuff, but what about Intelligent Falling, or Intelligent Warming ?
Seriously? You know how to embed vid but yet you don’t understand that some people use devices/browsers/systems/firewalls for whom doing so will keep them from accessing comments or even make the entire page slow to a crawl or become unloadable? Then let me enlighten. I had two script crashes loading this page (which took about 5 times longer than usual) and then when it finished, I had two embedded youtubes that covered the right side of the page. Ideally PZ would have embedding turned off but looks like he’s entrusting commenters to link vids rather than force the downloading of the initial content.
WTF?
So the right faith allows you to kill people instead of being killed?
Oh, and to use the good old Lichtenberg aphorism:
That they pray in the churches doesn’t make the lightning rods on the roof superfluous.
Kreativekaos- wouldn’t permission slips be needed for any such field trip?
The juice box is a lie!