Aww, how sweet

I got a package in the mail today! It was from the Catholic League! It included a personal, signed note from Bill Donohue! It also said “SWAK” and all the ‘i’s were dotted with hearts! (Oh, OK, I made up that last bit. A boy can dream, you know.)

It was their 2008 Report on Anti-Catholicism, a 74-page exercise in institutional paranoia, and I am featured on pages 26-30! Oh, joy! You know what that means: I can expect another uptick in sad letters from nuns and pious little old ladies in Waukegan.

One curious thing about those letters: they are all the same, and they all come in neatly lettered envelopes with printed return addresses in the top left corner, and they all come from Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. George Jones or some variant thereof. I don’t know any of the names of these women, but I do know their husband’s names. It’s very, very weird — it’s the formalism of patriarchy.

Kook fight!

Oh, boy! Ray Comfort and Bill Donohue are arguing! The issue is evolution, of course; Comfort says that Christianity and evolution are incompatible, and Donohue is claiming otherwise. They deserve each other, and I don’t really care what either of them says, but I have to point out one glaring inconsistency in Donohue’s position. Here’s what he says:

Comfort is wrong. The fact is that in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII said there was no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of faith, as long as God was not excluded. Pope John Paul II affirmed this teaching in the mid-1990s.

In other words, the Catholic Church teaches that God is the author of all creation. How stages of human development have unfolded is a legitimate area of scientific inquiry, and it has nothing to do with rejecting God as the Creator.

This is nominally true — the Catholic church has been scrupulously vague on the intersection of their religion and the science of evolution. However, Donohue has not. In fact, he has shown considerable contempt for evolutionary theory himself. This past summer, he referred to me as “the Planet-of-the-Apes biologist“, and offered an interesting description of the theory of evolution: “the King Kong Theory of Creation“.

I guess that means the battle is between a moron and a two-faced lying hypocrite. Fun!

Faith of plagiarism

The other day, I briefly mentioned this ridiculous “Faith of Britain” site that was full of woo-woo nonsense. Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out they’re also cheap and unoriginal. Alongside a section that says this:

Faith of Britain Day will help us all overcome whatever obstacles and difficulties we may face as a country, an economy and as individuals. With over 80 million people concentrating their mental energies at the same time on the same day, we will unleash an irresistible psychic force that will, quite literally, make our dreams come true.

Faith of Britain recognizes that Britain is a multi-cultural, multi-faith family. All of our faiths and beliefs have one common thread: the belief that positive thinking makes positive things happen.

They have a little photo montage of various diverse people. I’ve gotten several emails today from people who say, “Hey! I recognize those guys!” — it seems they aren’t British, and they aren’t particularly into New Age quantum weeblishness. The picture is lifted straight out of the web page for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida. I wonder if they know that their mental energies are being harnessed to psychically fix the British economy?

Ray Comfort has a new book

I don’t recommend reading Comfort’s book, but I can whole-heartedly recommend the reviews of You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics as worthy and entertaining. As you might guess, they aren’t kind.

The best review, though, gives the book five stars. But then, what else would you expect from General JC Christian, Patriot?

Quote of the day

This is a real letter from Muskegon, Michigan.

On the Feb. 8 “60 Minutes” program, we were captivated while viewing the Katie Couric interview of the crew and passengers of Flight 1549.

However, we were struck there was not one mention of God, who directs pilots of planes and secures the safety of passengers.

We have written CBS and asked them for more realistic programming. Help protect our freedoms. Write CBS about this.

It was fine right up through “not one mention of God”, then swoooosh, it plummets off the cliff of insanity into the sucking sludge-pit of unreality. God keeps planes safe? More god = realistic programming? Fawning over a deity protects our freedoms? Nuts.

One reassuring note, though, is that most of the comments on the letter are scathing. Not everyone in Muskegon is quite so wacky, apparently.

Washington state kook wants a law to discriminate against atheists

While Arkansas takes a small step forward, a few people in my home state of Washington want to take a great leap backwards. Some crank named Kimberlie Struiksma, who is apparently associated with education, has proposed to put a remarkably clueless measure onto the ballot. Behold Initiative Measure No. 1040:

Ballot Title
Initiative Measure No. 1040 concerns a supreme ruler of the universe.

This measure would prohibit state use of public money or lands for anything that denies or attempts to refute the existence of a supreme ruler of the universe, including textbooks, instruction or research.

Should this measure be enacted into law? Yes [ ] No [ ]

Ballot Measure Summary
This measure would require state government not to use public funds or property for anything that denies or attempts to refute the existence of a supreme ruler of the universe, including but not limited to appropriations for displays, textbooks, scientific endeavors, instruction, and research projects. The measure would provide that no person shall be questioned based on their personal values, beliefs, or opinions regarding the existence of a supreme ruler of the universe.

That’s just the abstract, and if you’re a masochist, you can read the whole thing; it’s long and tedious. You can get the gist of it, though, in a few paragraphs. It’s a weird document that tries to explicitly silence atheists and cut off any representation of godlessness, but at the same time flounces about and insists that this isn’t discrimination. It’s going to exclude atheists from everything.

Respecting no establishment of religion, yet with respect to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, whose existence has been declared in the preamble to the Constitution of the state of Washington, the state shall make no appropriation for nor apply any public moneys or property in support of anything, specifically including, but not limited to, any display, exercise, instruction, textbook, scientific endeavor, circulated document, or research project which denies or attempts to refute the existence of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

There’s a clue to the motivation here in the restriction against “any display”: I bet this is aimed directly at the people who dared to put up an atheist sign alongside the Christmas tree at the Washington state capitol this past year. Many people fulminated against that, and here’s Ms. Struiksma trying to make it illegal for atheist ideas to be presented, while anyone who endorses a god will not be discriminated against.

Then it gets expanded to cover just about anything that might offend a devout Christian. If you read the definitions, for instance, you discover that one of the targets of the ban, “scientific endeavors”, is defined as “any act, idea, theory, intervention, conference, organization, or individual having to do with science.” Apparently, the state cannot support any atheist who is a scientist. There goes a large percentage of the faculty of the University of Washington!

There are also lots of frantic clauses to assure everyone that this is not a “government sponsored witch hunt” and that it wouldn’t “limit or infringe upon religious freedom” — which, of course, simply highlights the fact that that is exactly what it is intended to be and do, and that the author is fully aware of it.

Don’t panic yet, Washingtonians! This is only a proposed initiative. Ms. Struiksma must gather the signatures of 241,153 registered voters by July in order for it to actually be put on the ballot. There aren’t that many crazy stupid people in the state, are there?

On second thought, maybe you should worry a little bit.

Other people get email

I’m a bit jealous — I didn’t get this amazing email:

As for myself, I believe that science has proved that there has to be a creator (The best mathematicians, physicists, biologists, astronomers,etc all admit they cannot explain how the DNA data gets into each cell/gene and can only be put there by intelligent design. But a campaign of disinformation from the atheist scientific communtity was exposed on British TV (I have the documentary), that proves that even the atheists admitted in secret scientific unpublished journals that all organic life in the universe had to come from a designer creator, and cannot appear randomly. The documentary exposed these findings and carried the atheist scientists through to their final statement and conclusion (which was pretty weak) that all artificial intelligence can appear randomly, but they admit that all organic life has to have a creator. THAT WAS THE COVER UP! THIS WAS EXPOSED AND THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY WERE INFILTRATED BY OCCULT SECRET SOCIETIES AND PAID TO NOT PUBLISH THEIR FINDINGS. (MOSTLY HIGH RANKING FREEMASONS, ROSICRUCIANS, ORDER TEMPLAR ORIENTALIS,ETC). tHE DOCUMENTARY PART 2 STATES THAT 90% OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY DO NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION BUT AGREE WITH CHRISTIANS SCIENTISTS THAT NATURAL SELECTION IS A CORRECT THESIS, BUT THEY CANNOT ADMIT THIS, BECAUSE THEIR FUNDS WILL BE STOPPED BY POWERFUL INSTITUTES CONTROLLED BY THESE OCCULT FREEMASONS/BUSINESSMEN WHO OWN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS

That is impressive, a classic kook-rant that hits all the high points: paranoia (“secret scientific unpublished journals”); conspiracy (“freemasons, rosicrucians, order templar orientalis”); delusions that a majority secretly agrees with them (“90% of the scientific community do not believe in evolution”); and of course, everything is completely made up. And the sudden ramp up into all-caps hysteria is beautiful.

I’m going to have to add something to my to-do list, though: contact the freemasons and find out what happened to my checks. I’ve got about 30 years of outspoken evolutionism that I’ve been giving out for free, and they owe me big time.