You know what’s wrong with Christians? They’re lousy tippers!

Apparently, the Sunday brunch-after-church crowd has an awful reputation for being bad tippers. Somehow, I’m not surprised. But even fellow Christians have noticed and find fault with them.

Take, for example, how Christians tip and behave in restaurants. If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal. The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.

Wait…the “single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America” is poor tipping? I don’t think so — that’s more of a symptom of a shallow, selfish, superstitious philosophy that is in itself an affront to thinking human beings everywhere. I don’t think that if I were bussing tables that getting a 20% tip would convince me that talking snakes, genetics via striped sticks, and getting excused for my sins because a crazy rabbi got executed two millennia ago are rational ideas.

But otherwise, yeah, it’s simple decency to leave a reasonable tip for people who work hard for low pay.

Doug Wilson is a nasty piece of work

As I mentioned yesterday, Christopher Hitchens is touring the country with a pastor, Doug Wilson, doing public debates. A reader wrote in to inform me of who Wilson is, and I was appalled. He has a ministry in Idaho which has ties to the white supremacy movement! Doug Wilson has an entry at the Southern Poverty Law Center that explains that he coauthored a book, Southern Slavery As It Was, with Steven Wilkins, a neo-Confederate, that was essentially a mangling of history and theology to assert that slavery in the South wasn’t so bad after all. He runs a private school in Idaho that celebrates Robert E. Lee’s birthday; he wants a “cultural reformation” in America, and his model, his ideal, is the antebellum Confederacy. He’s a regular speaker at Christian Reconstructionist conferences sponsored by the League of the South. His ideological heroes are Robert Lewis Dabney and Rousas John Rushdoony. Here’s a collection of links that point to the vileness of this sleazebag.

He doesn’t confine his bigotry to other races, either. He’s a wanna-be theocrat who wants to return to biblical barbarities.

Wilson used the Bible’s view on homosexuals as another example.

The Bible indicates the punishment for homosexuality is death. The Bible also indicates the punishment for homosexuality is exile.

“So death is not the minimal punishment for a homosexual,” Wilson said. “There are other alternatives.”

I don’t understand at all why Hitchens would want to be associated with such a creature, unless he was specifically seeking out the very worst that American Christianity brings to the table. Unfortunately, he’s contributing to the reputation of a monstrous blight on the Palouse, a racist, theocratic ideologue whom people of that region deplore.

What took him so long?

Paul Haggis, a Hollywood bigwig, has publicly renounced and rebuked $cientology. His reasons: they lie, they disregard basic ethical concerns, they smear their critics. Hasn’t everyone known this all along? The anti-reality field at those scientology centers must be very strong.

Now let’s see a few more celebrities ditch the nonsense, and they’ll have nothing left to prop them up.

Physics!

Oh, look. A homeopath explains physics to us all.

I’m sorry. Did I break your brain?

Here’s a non-homeopathic cure. It takes an hour of Lawrence Krauss to counter 8 minutes of that kind of lunacy, I’m afraid.

…and those cheapskates at Monsanto haven’t given me a penny!

Gosh. I put out a call to vote for Biofortified in a blog contest, and you guys all did your part and registered and voted honestly, and now what happens? I’m accused of fixing the competition.

This group has been putting out the following messsage on Twitter: “Vote for Biofortified in Ashoka Changemakers contest”.
 

A Monsanto PR operator has discreetly done the same and now the votes for Biofortified have suddenly exploded, more than doubling in a matter of hours in a completely unprecedented pattern.

Uh, I hate to say this, but the surge in votes is thanks to ME, not some obscure tweet on twitter, and I am not a “Monsanto PR operator”, nor is Biofortified a tool of Monsanto. And all I did is point people in the right direction.

Also, the pattern isn’t at all unprecedented. We see it all the time here on Pharyngula.

Ask ’em what they really think

Christopher Hitchens has been debating a Christian pastor named Douglas Wilson on the subject of whether Christianity has been a force for good in the world. These debates were recorded, and assembled into a film called Collision. I haven’t seen it, and I doubt that it will be showing in my small town theater, but I’ll be looking for it on DVD. This is obviously not a movie review, then…I just want to comment on one point Wilson throws out.

“It’s not a question of whether we have faith, it’s what we have faith in,” says Wilson. “Christopher has faith in the role of scientific inquiry, rational inquiry. He has faith in that process. Christopher is as much a man of faith as I am.”

I so detest that line of argument, that attempt at setting up a false equivalence, reducing all words to equal lies. If the only way you can support your beliefs is by claiming that all ideas, from Scientology and Young Earth Creationism to Ohm’s Law and the theory of evolution, are equally matters of faith, then your only line of defense is to endorse ignorance and the pretense that everything we know is stupid. It is contemptible.

But sure, let’s ask what they actually have faith in. Pin the bastards down, I say, and let’s hammer out the details of their faith — don’t let them retreat into woolly-headed platitudes like Karen Armstrong with vague claims that they revere transcendence, but find out what Christians really think.

Sam Harris has done so, with a poll that asks atheists and believers what they really believe. The results are amusing.

Over 65% of Christians believe angels really exist. Over 70% think the Bible is the most important book in the world. 75% think Jesus’ execution atoned for our sins. Over 50% think the book of Genesis is a true account of our origins. 75% believe Jesus was literally born of a virgin. Over 70% literally believe in a Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

In virtually every case, atheists are nearly unanimous in rejecting all of those ideas.

I have no idea whether Wilson even tried to support the actual beliefs of Christians in this movie, but it would be interesting and ridiculous to see him arguing for the truth of the existence of angels, placing it on an equal footing with belief in the Krebs Cycle. That’s basically what he’s claiming…it’s just that when you actually get them to explicitly state what it is they believe, they all sound like such clowns.

Yum, genetically engineered plants!

Here’s a good science blog you can help: Biofortified, a group blog on plant genetics and genetic engineering (and, by the way, Sb’s recent addition, Pamela Ronald, is part of the team). They are in a contest to win a small cash grant and an interview with Michael Pollan, and this group is thoroughly deserving — Biofortified is kind of the Panda’s Thumb of plant genetic engineering.

Unfortunately, they’re in second place right now, trailing an anti-genetic engineering, industry sponsored site, and they need more votes to win. You can help out!

To do so, though, is a little more cumbersome than simply clicking on an online poll, I’m sorry to say. You need to register with the contest site, and then click on an entry in an online poll. It’s not too hard, though, especially since Biofortified provides step-by-step instructions. You don’t have much time, with only one day left to vote. Register, then vote for Biofortified!