Why I love Bill Donohue

He’s a damned funny man if you pretend—I almost typed “repent”—that he’s kidding. In any case, parody is unnecessary because the man is a caricature of himself, losing his mind over a single line in an episode of The Simpsons (“What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?”) but taking the South Park episode satirizing him, in which he is depicted as taking over the Catholic Church and sentencing Jesus to death, in good humor.

In an unrelated note, I was at the bookstore yesterday and spotted a book called The 10 Biggest Lies About America. Sadly, instead of the book of “neat historical facts they never taught you in grade school” I had hoped it was, it turned out to be some conservative wingnut blowhard’s attempt to assert that America was, in fact, founded as a Christian nation and… actually, at that point, I think my brain shut down. The justification for that first claim was just so convoluted and idiotic that I had to put the book down and go buy Richard Dawkins’s new one, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Which, by the way, is very shiny. I haven’t opened it up yet, but it’s very pretty and I can’t wait to read it. Knowing Dr. Dawkins’s previous work, I’m sure I’ll love it.

I haven’t forgotten

I haven’t forgotten about you, dear readers, I’m just busier than usual. I’ll have something interesting up by the end of the week.

I’m on the Atheist Blogroll!

Mojoey’s added me to the Atheist Blogroll, which now has over a thousand blogs linked. It’s also linked in my sidebar. Check it out!

Creationists? At MY alma mater?

Creationist Essay Contest… Who’s Entering? | Friendly Atheist by @hemantmehta

A couple years ago, Marcus Ross received his Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of Rhode Island. His dissertation was “impeccable,” according to his advisor.

The topic: “the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that… vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago.”

The problem was that Ross was a Creationist and believed the world was only a couple thousand years old to begin with. Therefore, he didn’t believe the very subject he was writing about.

Ick. Creationists at my alma mater.

I suppose it’s no surprise that creationists are getting doctorates as window dressing. Now this idiot is offering prizes for essays written to support the moronic and objectively false claim that human physiology supports a “biblical account of creation” rather than being obvious evidence of evolution. It’s tempting to submit an essay demonstrating all of the evidence for evolution found in human anatomy, but it would also be a colossal waste of time. There’s no convincing someone so deluded that they’ll slog their way through a Ph.D. program in paleontology.

Pastor Steven Anderson is a hypocrite

I’m doing videos now!

When parody is taken to an extreme…

…you get things like OBJECTIVE: Ministries, quite possibly the most hilarious Christian parody site I have ever seen. It features such gems as their evolutionism propaganda page and what I have dubbed Creepy Angry Baby Jesus, who wants to know why you haven’t accepted him:

Screenshot from OBJECTIVE: Ministries

Go ahead, explore the site. It’s huge and it just gets funnier the more you browse around. They even have a page about how they’re out to get Landover Baptist shut down (here).

Don’t expect us to always agree.

I was reading blaçfemmē’s entry for today and I thought I should address the same point—atheists are not all the same. For that matter, neither are all theists. This is a mistake that seems to be common to a lot of people, theists and atheists alike, and I’d like to stop getting the same three responses from both sides whenever I mention I’m an atheist:

Diocese of Bridgeport demands special protection

Conn. diocese appears to break church pledge of openness – The Boston Globe

A Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut has invoked the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in a request to the US Supreme Court to let it keep clergy sexual abuse documents under seal, a move that appeared to contradict the church’s recent pledges of openness.

I missed the part where “separation of church and state” grants religious groups the right to violate the law. The Establishment Clause forbids the government from protecting any establishment of religion. In other words, the government isn’t allowed to give any special privileges to a religious group over a secular group, for one. Would a secular group that had records of child abuse within its ranks be allowed to hide their records from the authorities? I don’t think so.

On Thursday, two days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg denied the Diocese of Bridgeport’s request to keep the documents under wraps despite a recent ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court, the diocese said the dispute raises fundamental constitutional issues and asked the full US Supreme Court to review the case.

The only constitutional issue being raised here is the fact that the diocese has the audacity to demand protection from the government after knowingly sheltering and protecting dangerous criminals.

Mental Slavery & Moral Bankruptcy

There is a peculiar kind of willful ignorance in claiming that God is all-powerful and all-loving while simultaneously either ignoring or rationalizing the fact of suffering and evil in the world. Either God is all-powerful or he is not, and if he is, he cannot possibly be loving or good.

Crackpots of the Month: Answers in Genesis

Answers in Genesis is Ken Ham’s little anti-reality creationist organization, you know, the people who run the Creation “Museum” that was visited by nearly 300 atheists recently, among them biology professor and “atheist firebrand” PZ Myers (who noted that Ham and his goons were photographing students’ cars). Ken Ham, his organization AiG, and their so-called “museum” promote a racist lie about the origin of various ethnic groups, completely based on the Bible, that goes something like this: All races are descended from Noah’s children; Ham, Noah’s son, sees him drunk and naked, and Noah curses Ham’s descendants to be servants forever. The Creation “Museum” promotes this nonsense along with the ugly, racist lie that all Africans are the descendants of Ham. PZ Myers documents it fairly well here.

Basically, Ken Ham and his legion of creationists and apologists are my picks for crackpots of not just the week, but the entire month, for promoting a racist theory of human origins that has no basis in fact and is a relic of the ugly dogma used to provide Biblical justification for slavery over centuries.