This is an excerpt from HBO’s Generation Kill, a series about the Iraq war. Warning: there is crude language and blasphemy in this clip!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is an excerpt from HBO’s Generation Kill, a series about the Iraq war. Warning: there is crude language and blasphemy in this clip!
One of my students said I had to show you this, because it’s exactly like one of my lectures.
The Indianapolis Star has been running a pointless little prayer on page A2 of the newspaper for years. Not any more; the editor has decided to discontinue it. It isn’t because it has suddenly become a mouthpiece for militant atheism, though:
We appreciate that this has been a long tradition in The Star. But we are re-evaluating our mission and all that we do. I believe that prayer is a very personal thing and that offering prayers is something for individuals and their churches. We are a newspaper, not a church.
Also, we do live in a society in which there are many, many different beliefs. We respect all religions, and the prayer was written only from the Christian perspective.
Because of those issues, we have decided to drop the prayer. I’m confident that people will continue to offer their own prayers reflecting their own lives and faith needs.
Good for the Star! As you might guess, this decision has triggered lots of complaints. Here’s one that I thought was very funny.
Very disappointing decision. If you are able to print the horoscopes, then you should print a prayer …please reconsider.
They are on a par with horoscopes, aren’t they? Just as ineffective, and just as ridiculous…but that’s not an argument for keeping either of them.
There are also reasons D, E, F…etc., that I’m sure any sufficiently apologetic Christian will trot out for us, but they’re all of ever-increasing absurdity. Most seem to subscribe to a less comical version of A, blaming his reluctance to manifest on a Divine Snit over the Fall.
Personally, I favor answer answer Ω: there never was any god to blame. Simple, clear, reasonable, and it fits all the facts.
Short summary: unimpressed.
But then what else could you expect from a running dog reactionary old guard supporter of bourgeois ideology?*
*Let us not linger over the uncomfortable fact that I actually agree with him in this case.
The state of erv now has an embarrassing distinction: Oklahoma has put up the first anti-evolution bill for 2009. The year isn’t even a week old and they’re already pushing this nonsense.
Senate Bill 320 (document), prefiled in the Oklahoma Senate and scheduled for a first reading on February 2, 2009, is apparently the first antievolution bill of 2009. Entitled the “Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act,” SB 320 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to “assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies” and permit teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.” The only topics specifically mentioned as controversial are “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”
Expect these so-called “academic freedom” bills that are really stealth creationism bills to pop up like crusty pimples all over the country all year long.
Thankfully, these are the waning days of the awful, incompetent, no-good Bush/Cheney presidency, years we will try to forget in the decades to come. What will help is that we don’t have a good name for this decade — The Oughties? Bleh — and we’re just going to have to refer to them as the years with a couple of zeroes in the middle.
This odious administration is not going out gracefully, however, but is instead leaving with a flurry of last-minute knifings of our country. Some are exploitive efforts to pay back interests to whom the conservatives are beholden, such as the stripping of environmental protection laws (which the next administration may be disinclined to roll back). Others just seem inexplicably arbitrary and petty, the work of small-minded tyrants who want to get in one last poke while they can.
Here’s one such example: the Department of Justice is redefining “service animal”. They’ve redefined “animal” to mean “dog”! I’ve got nothing against dogs, but there are people who use non-canine animals as service animals, and suddenly they are going to be stripped of the legal rights associated with service animal use.
Don’t ask me why. I think it’s just because they can.
Speaking of people who can’t understand basic science, here’s Denyse O’Leary:
A couple of years ago, after I had been following the controversy for several years, I found myself listening to a long lecture by a Darwinist, replete with bafflegab and pretty lame examples. Finally, sensing (correctly) that I was unconvinced, he proclaimed to me, “You just don’t understand how natural selection works, do you?”
And suddenly, the penny dropped. What he meant was that I just don’t believe in magic. I can’t make myself believe in magic; I haven’t been able to since I was a child.
Natural selection is not magic; there are no miracles, no unexplained steps in the process, and once you grasp it, it’s simple and obvious. That O’Leary equates the two means the correct answer to the question was “yes”.
The real funny part, though, is that O’Leary is an intelligent design advocate and ardent Catholic. She does believe in magic!
I am genuinely amused at this caricature of scientists from a creationist site. How many of you believed these things?
Everyone is biased. Scientists just happen to be biased in favor of reality, and have a set of tools that help them overcome predispositions that might lead them into error (Non-scientists have the same tools. Creationists just prefer not to use them.)
Again, they try to be objective.
Hah! Anyone who has done any science at all knows that a good part of the process is spent winnowing out sources of error.
He wears a…wait, what? In a list containing such grand and unattainable virtues as lack of bias, objectivity, and infallibility, this joker throws in choice of attire? Something doesn’t fit here.
Need I add that the title is about “the scientist in the white coat,” so by definition he or she would be wearing a white coat?
Now watch as our creationist tries to correct these myths:
It looks like Obama has picked Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. He seems a bit of a lightweight, to me — he’s mainly known as a congenial talking head on television news. He’s also an apologist for US health care, which does not give me any confidence that we can expect the slightest effort towards health care reform. I suspect Obama has just picked a pleasant smiling face to act as a placeholder, and that disappoints me.
We’ll have to see how that ol’ conservative, Orac, reacts to this news.
