Religion & Law

Gag Rule

Posted on March 26, 2009
Laura Miller has a joint review of two new books: Matt Baglio's The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist and Peter Manseau's Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead. Both look like they are interesting, if at all, in that car-wreck-rubbernecking way...

Monty Pharyngula

Posted on March 25, 2009
.Okay, this tickles me!:People like Richard Dawkins or P.Z. Myers turn purple shouting those who disagree with them down. If anything should convince the open-minded of the religious nature of their belief system, it should be the vicious nature of these attacks on the apostates...

Fire Breathers

Posted on March 25, 2009
Another point about Don McLeroy's stunning article in The Austin American-Statesman is this bit of what has to be deliberate disinformation:Words ["strengths and weaknesses"] that were uncontroversial and perfectly acceptable for nearly two decades are now considered "code words" for intelligent design and are deemed unscientific...

Hi, Ho ... Hi, Ho ...

Posted on March 25, 2009
About the quote mine of Stephen Jay Gould that Don McLeroy uses in his bafflegab piece in The Austin American-Statesman, Jeremy Mohn included it in his Collapse of a Texas Quote Mine. It is one of the quote mines McLeroy got from Genesis Park, which describes itself as presenting:...

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Leading the Blind

Posted on March 24, 2009
Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle has a refreshingly blunt piece on the fiasco threatening to happen this week in the Texas State Board of Education.Ever seen a cat-dog? Of course not! That just proves it's impossible for one species to evolve into another...

McLeroy Gives Away the Farm

Posted on March 24, 2009
You really have to see this to believe it.Don McLeroy is in The Austin American-Statesman making some amazing admissions (as well as deploying some unamazing quote mines). It will take more time to deconstruct than I have tonight because it is such a muddle of disingenuousness and/or stupidity that it rivals the lunatic book he endorsed...

Jesus Christ, Super Liar

Posted on March 23, 2009
That's apparently what Ken Ham thinks of Jesus.As recounted at Exploring Our Matrix and Clashing Cultures, Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project has taken note of Ham's complaint that the BBC "ambushed" one of his "scientists," Jason Lisle, by turning a scheduled interview into a debate with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education without informing Lisle ahead of time...

Department of Justice

Posted on March 23, 2009
As reported by the National Center for Science Education, the Supreme Court has today denied, without opinion, Lawsuit Larry Caldwell's petition for a writ of certiorari, letting the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision stand, which had upheld the District Court's dismissal of the case...

Selection Against Darwin

Posted on March 22, 2009
.A thought:The surge of enthusiasm for eugenics came at a time when the majority of biologists had turned their backs on Darwinism. Even when natural selection began to attract more attention in the 1930s, there was no direct link to eugenics. If R. A...

Finis

Posted on March 21, 2009
Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has noticed Casey Luskin, Gofer General of the Discovery Institute, quote mining a review article in Biochemical Journal by Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke. By all means, go to Mike's place to see the details. I'm interested in something a bit different; namely, another example of projection by a DI drone:It's always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i...

I Think We're Back in Kansas, Toto

Posted on March 21, 2009
Texas State Rep. Leo Berman is the bright light who proposed an amendment to the Education Code to exempt:... a private educational institution, including a separate degree-granting program, unit, or school operated by the institution, that: (1) does not accept state funding of any kind to support its educational programs; (2) does not accept state-administered federal funding to support its educational programs; (3) was formed as or is affiliated with or controlled by a nonprofit corporation or nonprofit unincorporated organization; and (4) offers bona fide degree programs that require students to complete substantive course work in order to receive a degree from the institution...

Of Spills and Beans

Posted on March 20, 2009
My, my! This is interesting.Solving Light Books announced today that Don McLeroy, controversial Chair of the Texas State Board of Education, has recommended "Sowing Atheism" (ISBN: 978-0-9705438-5-1) by Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr., to other board members and to the general public...

Singing From the Same Song Hymn Book

Posted on March 19, 2009
You've probably heard about Canadian Science minister Gary Goodyear's original refusal to respond to a question about whether he "believes" in evolution, saying:I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate...

Hope For the Future

Posted on March 18, 2009
Remember Matt LaClair, the Kearny, New Jersey high school student who dared to stand up to a popular American history teacher who was injecting his religious views into his classes? Well, he's not alone. All the way across the country, deliciously in the back yard of the Undiscovery Institute, another young man has shown remarkable maturity and courage:Colin Moyer, a senior at Curtis High School in University Place, has been awarded a 2009 ACLU Youth Activist Scholarship for challenging the teaching of a form of creationism in his science class and for promoting freedom of speech at his school...

Freudian Spit

Posted on March 17, 2009
Ah, David Klinghoffer is over at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation practicing the fine art of projection. Ironically, it begins with an admission dressed up as an accusation:The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you...

The Road to Perdition

Posted on March 16, 2009
The Texas Freedom Network is reporting that the Texas State Republican Executive Committee has passed a resolution calling upon the Republican members of the State Board of Education to support the retention of the "strengths and weaknesses" standard in the Texas science standards, officially making the results of science and educational content a partisan political issue...

Break Out the Floppy Shoes

Posted on March 15, 2009
Apparently the creationists in Texas aren't confident that their representatives on the State Board of Education can carry the day. As reported by the NCSE, the appropriately named Wayne Christian (guess which party!) of the Texas House of Representatives has introduced H...

Steady ... Steady ...

Posted on March 15, 2009
New Scientist really wants to trash whatever reputation it may have once had.First it was the "Darwin Was Wrong" cover that did not match the contents of the (over-hyped) story of long known issues about the "tree of life." The author, responding to numerous criticisms, defended the sensationalism all over the blogoshere on the basis of selling magazines...

Workers of the World

Posted on March 14, 2009
I'm a little more progressive than Mike Dunford but a little less than John Lynch. But anyway you slice it, all three of us are commie, God-hating, anti-Merkin', wine-sipping, nattering nabobs of negativism and part of the effete corps of impudent snobs "extremely progressive" according to the Center For American Progress...

Dueling Theologies

Posted on March 14, 2009
Both Larry Moran and Mike Haubrich have favorably mentioned this article: "The Untenability of Theistic Evolution (2009)" by Bart Klink. I'm afraid I find it wanting in many ways, but there is no real need to go beyond this:To avoid conflict with the methodological naturalism of science, TE would have to exclude consideration of any supernatural intervention during creation...

One Man's Meat

Posted on March 14, 2009
Dr. Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is at The Christian Post "Lamenting the Reversal of Pro-Life Stem Cell Policy."Monday was a sad day for the sanctity of all human life in America...

No Trouble

Posted on March 13, 2009
Do you suppose Casey Luskin will be whistling anything from The Music Man anytime soon?Oh, there's nothing halfwayAbout the Iowa way to treat you,When we treat youWhich we may not do at all.Well, the Iowa legislature is the latest to have the good sense to turn the Discovery Institute's "academic freedom" scam into fertilizer ...

Punishing the Righteous

Posted on March 13, 2009
Here's something you may have never thought about before: who preaches to the Pope? Apparently, it is Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household. That's right, even being the head of some 1 billion faithful doesn't mean you get to skip the boring sermon...

Heavens Above

Posted on March 12, 2009
Ooh! This looks like fun:UFOs and aliens may not neatly match the Hollywood depiction of advanced races from far off planets reaching us through worm holes or inter-dimensional portals. Daily sightings of anomalous airborn crafts worldwide and accounts of alien abduction might find an explanation in something as handy as your Bible...

Texas Two-Step

Posted on March 11, 2009
Texas politicians continue their war against quality education. The National Center for Science Education is reporting that a member of the Texas State House of Representatives (guess which party) has introduced a bill to amend the Education Code, that presently reads:A person may not grant or award a degree or offer to grant or award a degree on behalf of a private postsecondary educational institution unless the institution has been issued a certificate of authority to grant the degree by the board [that is, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board] in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter...

Rat Dreams

Posted on March 11, 2009
You may remember David DeWitt, the neuroscientist from Liberty University who thinks that the chance death of an organism somehow "begins to unravel the idea of natural selection." Well, it seems he takes his students in his ironically named Advanced Creation Studies class (what exactly is there after "then God poofed it into existence"?) on a field trip...

Turkeys

Posted on March 10, 2009
The English translation is a little fractured but this is, if even vaguely correct, a revoltin' development. It seems there is a Turkish government agency by the name of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜB?TAK) that publishes a popular science magazine, Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technical, according to one on-line translation), that has killed a cover story on Charles Darwin due to political pressure:Allegedly, a executive member of the council intervened at last minute to remove Darwin from the magazine's ?Bilim ve Teknik- cover, as well as a dossier on the theory of evolution...

Science Diseducation

Posted on March 09, 2009
The National Center for Science Education has identified the amendments to the Texas science standards inserted at the last meeting of the State Board of Education by the creationist members. The list is below and if you go the NCSE site you can get a full explanation of why they suck, though many of the reasons will be obvious...

The Carnival Turns Ten

Posted on March 08, 2009
The Carnival of the Elitist Bastards X has set sail out of port En Tequila Es Verdad, a tad late but heavily laden with a cargo of disdain for the anti-intellectualism abroad in the land. Here is a small sample from PalMD:The origins of human sexuality are interesting, but completely irrelevant when discussing civil rights...

Educational Test

Posted on March 08, 2009
The Discovery Institute drones keep telling us that they don't want the teaching of Intelligent Design to be mandated in public school. No one on the side of good science education believes them, of course. Now it seems that the DI's allies don't believe them either...

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