A little Jewish lunacy…

Only religion seems to have the power to give deranged nutbags credibility and influence in government. Latest case in point: Israel, where the Kadima Party has to negotiate with Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef to form a coalition…and the rabbi is one of those insane ultra-orthodox wackaloons who, in a rational world, would be some old coot shaking his fist from his porch, avoided by others in his neighborhood, and with absolutely no influence at all.

But no, because he claims the voices in his head are a god talking to him, he gets to be consulted on affairs of state. A short taste of the wisdom of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef:

Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef has describ[ed] the Holocaust as God’s retribution against the reincarnated souls of Jewish sinners. He said Katrina was punishment for godlessness in New Orleans and U.S. support for the Gaza pullout. And he once said that “walking between two women is like walking between two donkeys or between two camels.”

For this kind of advice, he also gets to wear fancy robes and a special hat. I think that’s enough of a reward; let them wear elaborate ceremonial dresses, but keep them out of government.

Vital news for this sacred day!

I am not yet in Madison, but I am in the Land of the Cheeseheads and am about to hit the road and expect to be there by early afternoon. And then I discover two coincidences, one happy and one mildly problematic.

By my good luck, Ron Numbers is speaking on the campus today, at 3:30 in Science Hall room 180. Hey, I should be able to make that! I just hope he doesn’t dispense some jewel of wisdom that compels me to rewrite my talk on the spot.

One concern: this is September 19th! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day! This means, of course, that I have to give my lecture in a hokey dialect, which always makes us People of the Pirate sound silly to those who have no respect for our traditions. This is important to us, and I sure hope others around us, even the non-believers, will honor our deeply held beliefs and join us in the ritual. It will fend off global warming, you know.

I hope someone lets Dr Numbers know. I will feel much better if he engages in a little sabre-rattling before the talk, and perhaps punctuates his major points with a holy “Arrrrr.”

Woe, woe is me

If things get quiet around here for a while, it’s not because I’ve received a letter bomb…it’s just not a good week. Lots of teaching piling up; lots of committee meetings; I’m trying to apply for a sabbatical, which in a small department means lots of work to make accommodations on workload; the family is a bit disrupted, with my father-in-law suffering a severe illness (the whole family, except for me, is about to fly back to Washington state for a while); writing deadlines are flying by and I’m scrabbling frantically for time to finish up; and I’m doing all this traveling and speechifying that’s eating up lots of time. So I’m a little bit stressed right now.

What to do? Well, of course: we’re having Greg & PZ’s Excellent Party tonight! Party on, dudes! Join us at the Black Forest Inn tonight, around 7, and help me forget my worries for a little while. I expect you all to show up and make me very happy — I’m going to be looking for you, personally, and if I don’t see your face I’m going to die a little inside. Do you feel the guilt yet?

Aferwards, I’m going to crawl into a cheap motel somewhere and put in a few hours of writing. Then, Friday, I drive to lovely Madison, Wisconsin.

Here are details of my talk there, but we haven’t worked out any post-babbling events yet. I suggest that if you want to get together with me, show up at the talk or after the talk, and we’ll figure out some nearby place where you Wisconsinites can drag me to cheer me up some more. The party tonight will not be sufficient, you know: it’s going to take a lot of work to haul me up out of this slough of despond.

Now…off to meetings and another quiet writing session before departure.

Richard Dawkins gets mail, too

Maybe he and I are going to have to have a competition to see who gets the nastiest letters. We do get a slightly different perspective on Christianity than most, I think, since our view is of a near-constant flow of letters like this one:

Warning! Uses Christian language!
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(Click for larger image)

I’ve got a little stack of similar letters growing on my desk, too. Although, to be fair, most are less scatological abuse, and more whining about how I’m so awfully hateful, but fortunately Jesus will toss me into a lake of fire soon.

Ramtha triumphant

In case you were wondering about that lawsuit by JZ Knight in Seattle — she was claiming that a former student had stolen the teachings of her Atlantean warrior spirit guide for profit — it’s over now. Knight won. Keep that in mind if ever a channeler tells you some flaky secret knowledge someday: it’s protected, privileged speech and the ghostie can sue your butt off.

We’re going to be in big trouble when John Edward‘s spirits copyright the alphabet.

Nice example of using creationism in the classroom

This is cute: college professor is preparing a lecture on homology, rummages about on the internet to see if there are any useful or interesting sources, and finds one that leaves him bemused and amused at the prospect of using it as an example in class…a bad example. The source is Conservapædia! The story concludes with a little understatement:

The Conservapedia entry on homology seems more concerned with acceptance of “custom and tradition” as a basis for “truth of religious matters” than with possible comparisons we might make among organisms. Indeed, it seems that the Conservapedia aims to dismiss important scientific approaches through superficial allusions. Perhaps we should be wary of trusting the Conservapedia, despite its subtitle.

It’s a nice example of using a creationist source to make a legitimate point in a science class, while not surrendering an inch of credibility to that source.

Virginia Tech gets a visit from the tinfoil hat brigade

Any physics-minded people at Virginia Tech who would like to deal with some crackpots coming to your campus? There is a talk at Virginia Tech this Friday by Bill Lucas on his claimed biblical model for the structure of atoms. It looks like very weird stuff.

CAMPUS BIBLE FELLOWSHIP

INVITES YOUR ORGANIZATION MEMBERS
TO A
CREATION SEMINAR on the

“EXPANDING EARTH: EVIDENCE FOR BIBLICAL CREATION”

PRESENTED BY

DR. BILL LUCAS, B.S., M.S., PH.D in Theoretical Physics

TO BE HELD ON

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008
AT 7 P.M.
IN SQUIRES STUDENT CENTER, ROOM #341

The presentation in is the form of a PowerPoint using many pictures to explain the new theory of gravity that supports a Biblical view of creation.

There will be opportunity following the presentation for questions and answers.

If you would like to check out the organization that Dr. Lucas works with, you can go to the website: www.commonsensescience.org

You really have to check out that Common Sense Science site — it’s very glib. They claim to have a new model for the structure of matter that involves spinning rings; nowhere do they explain what problems this model solves. I know, I’m not a physicist, so how would I know this isn’t really an exciting and revolutionary new idea? Well, there’s a couple of clues. First and foremost, it claims to be a new idea in physics, but there’s no math anywhere. That is very surprising.

Second, when you rummage around, you won’t find any scientific rationale for anything…but you will find repeated assertions that the model is compatible with Judeo-Christian beliefs. That’s an awfully feeble excuse.

And finally, if you expect their links page to give you some useful external sources to check against, think again. The only external sites mentioned are places like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, etc. You will not find any credible physics at any of those sites — actually, you won’t find any science of any kind.

And of course, the flier is the clincher. This will be a preachin’ fraud who will try to bedazzle the audience with pseudoscience.

If any of you go, let me know what he says! There could be real entertainment value here. You might also want to get in touch with Freethinkers at Virginia Tech; they’re trying to coordinate some kind of response.

What kind of music do Minnesotans like?

Let’s see…it must have a lot of accordions in it, or cowboys singing drunken love songs to their trucks, right? Just to blow your minds, my colleague with esoteric musical taste, Nic McPhee, is getting interviewed tonight, and he’ll be playing some of his favorite songs on the radio. This is our local university radio station, which has a limited license and can’t play anything that has cracked the top 40 in the last 10 or 20 years, but I don’t think Nic’s taste will conflict at all with the station rules.

So tune in to KUMM, 89.7FM, at 6:00pm Central and have those rural Minnesotan stereotypes broken. If you live farther away than Starbuck, Minnesota, you can also listen to the internet stream.