$30 is too much for the cheap laughs this would give me

Wheee! Look at this slick new game. Doesn’t it look fun to play?

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It’s even educational!

“Intelligent Design vs Evolution” is unique in that the playing pieces are small rubber brains and each team plays for “brain” cards. Each player uses his or her brains to get more brains, and the team with the most brains wins. It has been designed to make people think … and that’s exactly what it does.

Errm, until you look more closely at who puts it out: Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. You know, the insane guys with the banana. And then you read the testimonial:

“Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are doing much more than revealing the bankruptcy of molecules-to-man evolution. They have a greater purpose: proclaiming biblical authority and reaching the lost with the precious gospel message. Enjoy this wonderful family game as you also become better equipped to defend our precious Christian faith.” — Ken Ham, President, Answers in Genesis.

I don’t think this is one of those games designed to reward you for getting the right answer—it’s one you should be proud to lose.

(via Friendly Atheist)

My wife will be so surprised

Hank Fox, who assures me that he is ALL MAN (just look at that beard), told me to take this test…and I seem to have a woman’s brain.

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It’s my result from my BBC sex test. I think I confused them, though: I did well on all the spatial reasoning tests and kind of bombed on the empathy stuff (male!), but I also kicked ass on the “spot the difference” test and the ability to recognize emotions from just eyes (female and off the scale!). Being able to spit out 16 and 17 synonyms for a word also makes me more ladylike, I guess.

(When you look at the actual raw scores and the averages, though, my main impression is that men and women aren’t that much different from one another, given the likely amount of variation.)

So…where can I get a copy of “Revolve”?

Jason brings to my attention an eye-opening article on the bible-publishing business:

The popularization of the Bible entered a new phase in 2003, when Thomas Nelson created the BibleZine. Wayne Hastings described a meeting in which a young editor, who had conducted numerous focus groups and online surveys, presented the idea. “She brought in a variety of teen-girl magazines and threw them out on the table,” he recalled. “And then she threw a black bonded-leather Bible on the table and said, ‘Which would you rather read if you were sixteen years old?’ ” The result was “Revolve,” a New Testament that looked indistinguishable from a glossy girls’ magazine. The 2007 edition features cover lines like “Guys Speak Their Minds” and “Do U Rush to Crush?” Inside, the Gospels are surrounded by quizzes, photos of beaming teen-agers, and sidebars offering Bible-themed beauty secrets:

Have you ever had a white stain appear underneath the arms of your favorite dark blouse? Don’t freak out. You can quickly give deodorant spots the boot. Just grab a spare toothbrush, dampen with a little water and liquid soap, and gently scrub until the stain fades away. As you wash away the stain, praise God for cleansing us from all the wrong things we have done. (1 John 1:9)

“Revolve” was immediately popular with teen-agers. “They weren’t embarrassed anymore,” Hastings said. “They could carry it around school, and nobody was going to ask them what in the world it is.” Nelson quickly followed up with other titles, including “Refuel,” for boys; “Blossom,” for tweens; “Real,” for the “vibrant urban crowd” (it comes bundled with a CD of Christian rap); and “Divine Health,” which has notes by the author of the best-selling diet book “What Would Jesus Eat?” To date, Nelson has sold well over a million BibleZines.

Of course, my first concern is: are these books theologically sound? Do they treat the philosophy of religion with the seriousness that is its due? My next thought was to wonder how to counter this kind of glib cultural programming, and I suspect the only appropriate response would be a lengthy, in-depth, scholarly dissection of Anselm’s work, or perhaps an exegesis on the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas. That’ll wake people up to the silliness being peddled to their children.

All the criticisms of Dawkins and Harris need to be inverted—it’s not that they are insufficiently schooled in theology, it’s that they’re just too freakin’ high-minded and serious, and they’re addressing on an intellectual level a bunch of ideas that are transmitted in the same way that fashion labels get traction.

Superclades of the Cambrian

Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I’ve mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief primer in some major animal groupings. Here’s a greatly simplified cladogram; I’ve left off quite a few groups to make the story simple.

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I should use parables more often

They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett:

“Look at it this way, then,” she said, and took a deep mental breath. “Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach . . . and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering . . . yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.”

(For those not familiar with the backstory, the Hogfather is the Santa Claus equivalent in his fantasy stories.)

No regrets like Christmas regrets

I come from good lower middle class family with a healthy respect for education. Most of my relatives from the generation prior to mine had rarely finished high school, let alone gone on to college, but they weren’t stupid people, oh, no — we were regularly told that a good education was a path to a better life, and all had a lively interest in the world around them. My parents both liked to read and were creative, alert people, but I will admit that the combination of unschooled intelligence and an omnivorous curiousity unhampered by academic conventions meant that the reading material around the house was eclectic, to say the least. I’ve explained before that I had easy access to lots of weird literature, and I read just about everything I could find.

That’s the prelude so you can understand how I found myself in the uncharacteristic situation I describe below, over 30 years ago when I was but a skinny nerd in high school, and how I could be so stupid as to hurt someone I cared about.

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