Hide the women and children!

The atheists are coming!

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It’s nice to see we’re getting front page coverage on the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but it’s also sending the wrong message. American Atheists are having their big conference in town next week, but we’ve been here all along and we aren’t leaving after Easter. It’s a somewhat muddled article, too — the writer seems a bit confused by this whole atheism business.

No one can say for sure how many atheists there are, partly because those within the movement can’t agree on the definition of an atheist. Some count humanists, agnostics and practitioners of astrology as atheists, but others draw a tighter circle.

Somebody has to explain to him that practitioners of astrology are regarded as creationists, not atheists. That’ll confuse him even more.

Anyway, the article does give some nice plugs for Minnesota Atheists, the Atheists Talk radio show, and Atheists for Human Rights. And I’ll be sure to get my horns trimmed and tuck my tail into my underpants so I don’t alarm people when I’m walking around downtown Minneapolis this week.

Backtracking in Florida

Uh-oh…Casey Luskin made a significant gaffe. He claimed that Florida’s “academic freedom” bill would specifically allow public school teachers to offer instruction in Intelligent Design, and he said it with the microphones on where newspaper reporters could catch it. As Wesley says, it’s obvious that the DI is recruiting “lawsuit fodder” from the ranks of deluded schoolteachers. The DI won’t have any liability, so they can sit and provoke and let poor school districts eat the expenses of any legal cases. (Maybe the next big creationism court case ought to somehow assign blame so these criminal jokers at the DI and AiG can pay the cost of their lies, rather than the tax payers of victimized school districts.)

Now here’s the funny bit: John West of the DI rushed to spin Luskin’s comments.

Isn’t that odd? When Luskin says something stupid about the law or about the DI’s devious designs, the ideologues at the institute know they have to quickly police the message and make sure it’s twisted to conceal their motives. When Luskin says something stupid about science, though, that’s clearly less important, and silence is all that is heard from his cronies. Perhaps it’s not so odd, though: DI fellows are highly unqualified to assess the scientific evidence, while they are world-class experts in lying for Jesus. Perhaps they feel a strong personal obligation to improve young Mr Luskin’s expertise in obfuscation.

Ask a Biologist

More people, especially public school teachers, ought to be aware of the Ask a Biologist website — it’s an excellent and easy resource. Kids (and adults) can fire off a quick question that gets tucked into the database, and then someone on their team of volunteer professionals will try to answer it. There are some big names on that list!

AAB also turns one year old today, so let’s celebrate by getting more schools to send in questions.

A flop!

I complained before that Florida lawmakers were being treated to creationist propaganda at a facility of Florida State University. Perhaps I should have had more confidence in the people of Florida. The movie was shown, and…

But the evening at downtown’s IMAX Theater, which was rented out to Mr. Stein’s group for $940, was a bust, with only about 100 people attending the movie.

They paid to have people attend for free, and they still couldn’t get a decent crowd.

Friction-free morning

This is my least favorite time of the year in Minnesota. I hate early spring.

Everything is melting during the day: there’s a constant drip-drip-drip, puddles everywhere, the snow is shrinking away from all those untrammeled areas surrounding us, and during the day, the walkways are all like shallow streams. And then at night it freezes again.

Which brings me to by big complaint: I get up early in the morning, and I step outside, and the sidewalks are all these beautifully smooth sheets of ice; it’s like a Zamboni has gone down the streets of Morris, polishing everything. There’s this path through some trees that I take to work, and it has a very gentle downward slope that makes it like a luge track, and I just know that some March day I’m going to step on it and find myself rocketing at a 100 miles an hour down to the row of lampposts at the bottom.

I was spared that this morning, though. Instead, as I was walking down my sidewalk, I hit one of those glossy smooth ice spots at my usual barely conscious amble of about 3 miles per hour, and whooosh, I was momentarily airborne, and made a perfect landing flat on my back, knocking the breath out of me and jarring every joint in my body. Nothing was seriously damaged, but even now I can feel every muscle slowly knotting in protest at the rude treatment they received — it’s going to be a painful day, I can tell.

And worst of all, my morning coffee flew out of my hands before I’d even had a sip. Do you hear me? I spilled my coffee. There is no god.

Rare hyperbole

They couldn’t even get the title right: A Meeting of Minds. It’s more like a meeting of the mindless. Ben Stein has had a friendly meeting with that old fraud, Ken Ham, and apparently they were perfect for each other. The sexual tension is palpable in the accompanying photo; the mutual praise flowed like champagne between the two of them, although Ham finally won the prize for high sycophancy.

Expelled is hosted by the brilliant Ben Stein, actor/economist/lawyer/presidential speechwriter/science observer—a 21st-century Einsteinian figure.

Einstein? They’re comparing a 3rd rate actor best known for playing the most boring high school teacher ever to Einstein? I think there must have been a few typos in that article. Here, I fixed them.

Expelled is hosted by the soporific Ben Stein, character actor/failed economist/eyewash huckster/Nixon apologist/creationist—a 21st-century Pecksniffian figure.

Chris Hedges wastes everyone’s time

Chris Hedges wrote a pretty good book on fundamentalism called American Fascists; at least, I thought it was pretty good, but now I have my doubts about his credibility. He has a new book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, and has an essay that summarizes his position. I could not believe how awful it is — it’s basically a declaration that all atheists are exactly like Pat Robertson, and then it charges in with nothing but venom and accusations to defend his position.

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