It’s a crazy world out there

It isn’t so good for a fellow’s sanity to get the full dose of my inbox all at once, rather than spread out over four days. I got my mail working again a little while ago, and just browsed through some of the crazy stuff you people send me. Be amused.

  • A priest dared to ordain women. He’s getting a reward, though: he’s being excommunicated.

  • A priest denies communion to Obama supporters. He’s intrinsically evil.

  • I have to give the Pastor Ray Mummert award to the Bishop of Lancaster, who has declared that the problem with the church is all those darned educated people who aren’t attending Mass.

  • Maybe I should find a case of a commentator saying something nice about someone. How about this? Sarah Palin is the incarnation of “practical common sense conservatism”. Well, you all know what I think of conservatism.

  • People are worried about the “mark of the beast”? Really? A company that makes recognition systems tries to preempt concerns that their devices are tools of the devil by making a suggestion in all seriousness that people should use their left hand in their scanners, because the bible says the mark is on the right. Little do they know but that agents of the anti-christ will be observing scanner use and writing down the names of anyone who uses the wrong hand in their satanic machines.

  • And of course I’m still getting lots of loony Catholic email over crackers. This one from a Catholic priest, I thought, was amusing.

    What about eucharistic miracles that have happened in our own times?
    http://www.dsanford.com/miraclehost.html
    this one was actually verified by a scientific team and some video footage.

    Also, my patron saint, saint joseph of cupertino (1603-1663), would levitate as he consecrated the host at Mass, this was witnessed by many people including the pope of the time and other secular leaders. he also performed other miracles just like all the official catholic saints …

    I think “just like all the official catholic saints” is the operative phrase here. Cheap tricks in front of credulous audiences…just like all of them.

Radio reminder

In less than an hour, Atheists Talk radio will be on! This week, they’re discussing how to talk to a christian proselytizer, and are also having a segment on fundamentalism. It sounds very depressing, but I’m sure it will be good.

By the way, I am back home, and my laptop is still dead. I’m using an older, slower, smaller laptop while the other is out for repair, and I’m just now beginning the slow process of doing a complete restore to this little machine. I’m feeling sort of brain-damaged, but at least I’m getting some functionality back.

One thing that never restores very well, though, is all my old email. I have an abiding hatred for Apple’s Mail software, and it gets even with me by being a PITA, and compounding that with the fact that I’ve been unable to get to my mail for several days, meaning that there is probably a backlog of a few thousand messages awaiting my attention, I suspect my email is probably hosed. I hope nobody is expecting too prompt a reply from me today.

Relying on the Mollies

Yes,. I’m still down for the count with a dead laptop, still only able to get on to the web in a limited way. Since I have just been reminded that I am behind on the bestowing of the Molly awards, it seems appropriate that I just turn it over to you all to make your nominations right here in this thread.

And with that, I’m off to the airport, flying home by way of the famous Apple Store in the Mall of America, in hopes that some genius there will manipulate the fabric of space-time and restore my lost video.

PZ Myers naked

It has come to this. I can’t get to my files on my laptop, my usual posting habits are disrupted, and site traffic is way down. I have to resort to a desperate ploy to regain your eyeballs. I know, it’s shameless, but this kind of thing sells, so until I can get my gadgets fully restored, I’m going to have to use my collection of nude action photos to keep your interest.

(Say…if I coupled this to donations for a new laptop, I could get rich, although the constant demands that I please stop might hurt my ego.)

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Catastrophe!

I’m in the pleasant town of Kearney, Nebraska to give a couple of talks at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and something tragic and horrible has happened.

My laptop has died. The video card, she no longer generates the video. It makes it rather difficult to illustrate my talks with projected images. It also makes it difficult to get on the web and engage in the blogging (I’m using a hotel business office computer to post this).

I’m planning to stop at an Apple Store at the Mall of America when I get back to Minneapolis tomorrow and beg them to FIX IT RIGHT NOW, but until then, I’m crippled, with half my brain no longer functioning. It does make my talks more entertaining, though: I’m just talking. I’ve managed to fool them all so far, but today’s talk is all about embryonic development, and I’m going to have to show the evidence through interpretive dance, epic poetry, and finger puppetry, I think. It might be amusing, anyway.

An early Christmas present!

Watch Bill Donohue explode! I know, it’s so easy to set him off, so it’s not much of a present…maybe we should think of it as a reassuringly repetitive holiday tradition. This time he’s outraged because humanists bought ad space on city buses. It prompts him to a tirade about atheists, Hitler, and even fatwah envy — they’re always picking on Christmas, and don’t have the guts to abuse Ramadan, don’t you know.

Blithering utopianism in the cause of ignorance

The TED folks are sponsoring a disturbingly vacuous call for a Charter for Compassion, which they claim is an attempt to rescue religion from an aberrant fundamentalism by emphasizing the goodness of faith. I don’t see it. What I see is a foolish whitewashing of religious history to claim that it is all about tolerance, when it’s the opposite: it’s all about tribalism. Instead of opening minds to the wonders of the world, it’s all about clamping down on the human mind and imposing the strictures of dogma. It’s all very nice to sit around and dream up a religion that’s all beauty and sweetness, but it’s the same wishful thinking that drives belief in invisible nonsense.

Throwing up another dishonest façade of a fatuously beatific faith accomplishes nothing but to reinforce one of the greatest promoters of ignorance, hatred, absurdity, and intolerance. We don’t need this. The way to change the world is to work to free people of religion, rather than inventing more rationalizations for it.

I’m with Dan Gardner on this one. Fundamentalism is not some recent historical quirk of modern religions: the selfish, dangerous, destructive narrowness of religious belief has been there in the Abrahamic religions all along, and religions have actually gotten less virulent (with obvious exceptions flaring up sporadically) recently. Would you like to live in an 8th or 14th century Christian, Islamic, or Jewish community? No way. Asking religion to return to its roots is asking for a restoration of theocracy.