Have you Floridians been pining away for a museum like Ken Ham’s? OK, no, you haven’t, not in the slightest, but you’re getting one anyway. The Gospel Fossil man is coming to lie to your children!
Here are a few new carnivals:
The next Tangled Bank will be at geek counterpoint on Wednesday, 23 May — send those links in to me or [email protected].
Ralph Reed is a sleazy con artist who hides his predatory nature behind a mask of piety; Hannity is a slow-witted thug with a simple-minded view of the world that he takes straight from the religious. It was therefore rather delightful to see Christopher Hitchens plainly reject their ridiculous demand for a hypocritical expression of sorrow at the death of a rich old shaman.
I was particularly appalled at Hannity’s list of Falwell’s virtues that included founding Liberty University. If founding a compound where ignorance is encouraged to fester is one of his accomplishments, I will admit that he was much much more successful at it than Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Elizabeth Clare Prophet…but I refuse to regard it as positive on Falwell’s ledger sheet.
It was good to see how to handle the right-wing blowhards well, too: charge ahead, don’t allow them to force you into their frame, and talk right over their diatribes.
I’ve got a better idea of what my schedule is like, and even have a recommendation for a hangout tonight — would anyone care to join me at the Arbor Brewing Company tonight (Thursday) around 7 or 8pm? I’m going whether anyone shows up or not, and if nobody joins me, I’ll be drinking alone…and how pathetic would that be?
Look for the bearded fellow with a copy of that book with a bright yellow cover titled “God is Not Great” — I’ll be working on my Hitchens impersonation.
While I’m off at this meeting, you all can nominate your favorite commenter for the Order of the Molly. I’ll tally up the votes on Sunday, when I get back home.
Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online.
(And I’ve just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)
Man, what a beautiful burn.
And he doesn’t just take on Falwell, it’s the whole rotten edifice of religion.
This is a fascinating diagram from a zoology text of the 1930s—it’s an illustration of the effects of reproduction rate on the frequency of subsets of the population, and the author was using it to justify eugenics. Up into the 1960s, he was advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded to improve the human race.
Why, this guy must have been one of those evil Darwinists of the kind Michael Egnor, D. James Kennedy and the Discovery Institute deplore, and whose amoral ruthlessness those worthies have blamed on the teachings of evolution! Surprise: these sentiments were expressed by William Tinkle, a creationist, and one of the founding fathers of the organization that preceded the Institute for Creation Research, along with such well-known creationists as Henry Morris and Duane Gish. He completely rejected evolution, natural selection, and the idea that human beings were animals, and published his endorsement of sterilization of “defectives” while Secretary of the Institute for Creation Research. Read more about it at the Panda’s Thumb.
