Here’s a strategy to make money from your expertise!
There is some bad news, though.
THE SCENE: A circular room cut deep into stone; magma pits bubble left and right, all is lit by roaring torches that cast dark, flickering shadows. In the center, the Cephalopod Throne.
THE CAST: PZ Myers broods on his throne, chin on fist. He glowers at a horde of SUPPLICANTS, bowing and scraping before him. Many are speaking at once, but all have the same concern.
SUPPLICANT: “O Lord PZ…”
SUPPLICANT: “…Great Lord PZ…”
SUPPLICANT: “…Lord PZ, do you ever…”
SUPPLICANT: “…ever worry…”
SUPPLICANT: “…worry that your puissant and uncompromising godlessness might…”
SUPPLICANT: “…might frighten…”
SUPPLICANT: “…drive away…”
SUPPLICANT: “…terrify…”
SUPPLICANT: “…terrify the religious moderates?”
SUPPLICANT: “O Lord?”
SUPPLICANT: “Perhaps you shouldn’t be so hard on the soft and unthreatening believers, who might also find goodness in science?”
SUPPLICANT: “Perhaps your atheism diminishes support for science education?”
Since Katie is trying to turn this into a football blog (don’t mock it! Have you seen the kinds of traffic numbers the big sports blogs bring in?), here’s another football story with a neuro link: a player who credits his recovery from a concussion to a “miracle”. It sounds like there is a whole epidemic of foolishness in the NFL.
“People get really nervous when they hear someone proclaim their faith boldly,” says the Rev. Peter Gallagher, one of the chaplains for the Indianapolis Colts. “So the easy thing to do is make fun of them. That way you won’t have to deal with the real questions about spirituality you may have in your own life.
“I believe Jon.”
He better. By all accounts, Gallagher is a card-carrying member of the NFL’s so-called God Squad, led by its evangelical coach Tony Dungy and a starting quarterback who admitted to praying his way to last season’s Super Bowl.
“Admitted”? I think he means “claimed”.
Oh, well. These guys aren’t picked for their superlative brain power, that’s for sure. But I have to disagree with Gallagher: we make fun of them because they say stupid things that reveal they haven’t considered “spirituality” beyond a lickspittle obedience to dogma and the most superficial interpretations of causality in the world.
OK, one more football-related link: Best lampoon of Gregg Easterbrook ever.
And I think I like him better that way. Some Belgian bishops don’t.
This game looks like it is way too much fun.
IF ID WAS MEDICINE
I could tell you you were sick, because you *look* sick. We’d have some fantastic metric for sickness that no-one has ever used and our “sick or healthy” filter would just be a concept…. that didn’t work. I could maybe tell you you were sick, because you look sick but could make no comment about the disease causing the sickness, how it makes you sick or how to cure you. Real medicine would be a dogmatic religious belief, though.
Everyone can play! Pick your own analogy!
A few people in this thread were suggesting we needed a creationist bingo card — Skeptico obliged earlier this month.
You need a couple of randomized versions of this, but you’ll still have the problem that people all over the auditorium will be shouting “Bingo!” five minutes into the talk, and by the end, you’ll have to give everyone a prize.
Or I would, if I actually had a land squid.
Does anyone know where I could pick up one of those babies? Petco, Petsmart?
This would be something like Reason #5,422.
Another reason is that there’s no such thing as “Talk Like a Ninja Day”. (Psssst…19 September. Arrrr.)
Man, everyone is sending me this comic and saying it reminds them of me. I don’t know why.
Just for the record, I would never shoot a dog. I know how to use an IV and some barbituates to painlessly euthanize them. But I wouldn’t. That’s only your theory.
