Religion & Law

A Fine Judgment

Posted on May 22, 2008
Lessee ...... God punished the residents of New Orleans by sending Hurricane Katrina.How many people from New Orleans would vote for me anyway?... the Catholic Church is "the Great Whore."Um, well ... how many Catholics are there in the Red States?.....

Stupid Legislator Tricks

Posted on May 21, 2008
The Louisiana House of Representatives advanced that state's version of the Discoveryless Institute's Trojan Horse "academic freedom" bill. You can find the bill and the House's amendment here.Without minimizing the potential mischief this bill could do if it becomes law, it is, of the legislation considered by various states so far, the one that affords the best chance for advocates of good science education to counter any bad effects...

What Am I?

Posted on May 21, 2008
In the never-ending game of 20 Questions that Intelligent Design advocates play, it seems that we have a new entry.Is ID, as William Dembski says, "the path for people to come to Christ"? Or is it philosophy of science, promising us a non-materialistic version of science?Now it seems that it may be politics...

Please Have a Seat ...

Posted on May 20, 2008
Missouri has joined Florida and Alabama in being unable to pass the Undiscovery Institute's misnomered "academic freedom" legislation. With Mike Fair of South Carolina predicting the same fate for that state's try, the DI might be feeling a little antsy right now ...

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Educating Educators

Posted on May 20, 2008
There is a new survey of high school biology teachers published in PLoS:The good news, as shown in the above chart, is that biology teachers are more likely to accept evolutionary theory than the general public. The worst news is how little time is devoted to the subject at all: [W]e found that those who take most seriously the advice of NSES to make evolution a unifying theme spent the most time on evolution...

Good News ... Maybe

Posted on May 19, 2008
Acccording to the sponsor of the South Carolina untruth-in-advertising "academic freedom" bill, Sen. Mike Fair (another misnomer), it has no chance of passage this year.On the other hand, I'm pretty sure his lips were moving when he said that.They certainly were when he said this:The Republican told The Greenville News the bill would not advocate teaching any point of view...

Abusing Reason

Posted on May 18, 2008
In the run-up to the Carnival of Elitist Bastards, I naturally got to thinking of the nature of terms of abuse -- why we use them and how they work.Terms of abuse, like "elitist," are, by their very nature, broad brushes. As we've seen recently, it can be used to describe those who have the temerity to think that science is a good thing and, more importantly, that it should be taught to children as it is actually practiced, while philosophy and theology should be taught as what they really are -- conceptually separate, though potentially valuable in their own right, intellectual exercises...

Fools Advice

Posted on May 18, 2008
First a quote from the Dallas News:Our image of God strongly depends on our image of the world, and our image of the world continuously changes under the influence of science and scientific discoveries.- Michael Heller, cosmologist, theologian, Catholic priest, and winner of the $1...

Bringing Home the Bacon

Posted on May 17, 2008
A thought:Darwin was prepared for the abuse which the content of his theory, especially its implications for man, was to receive from certain quarters, but he was not prepared for the criticism which his methodology was to receive from the most respected philosophers and scientists of his day...

Crossville's Cool

Posted on May 16, 2008
Find out why.

Waiving It About

Posted on May 16, 2008
I'm sure Cathi and Kris Unruh are nice people. They no doubt fit comfortably within John Wilkins' 95/95 Rule: 95% of all people are decent 95% of the time. Despite their evangelical Christian faith, that led them to home school their children, they purportedly taught their children a wider philosophy and accept that they may think differently than their parents do...

Standing in the Aisles

Posted on May 15, 2008
Some very good thoughts:[W]e conclude that, under this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process...

Modern Scholarship

Posted on May 14, 2008
Good ol' WingNutDaily! They always bring the crazy nice and frosty cold!They have a little blurb about the upcoming oral arguments before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Larry Caldwell's quixotic lawsuit against the University of California-Berkeley because of the University's involvement in creating the non-commercial, educational website, Understanding Evolution...

Inferiority Complex

Posted on May 13, 2008
Brian C. Melton, Assistant Professor of History at Liberty University, is over at Intellectual Conservative trying to twist the cap off of another bottle of Expelled whine.As usual, there is talk about the "naturalistic biases" of scientists, without any explanation of how unnaturalistic "explanations" could be tested ...

How to Build a Quote Mine

Posted on May 12, 2008
Michael Craven (okay, that one's too easy), described as the "Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture," has a blog at Crosswalk.com where his latest post is more fertilizer spread around the smelly weed that is Expelled. Craven dredges up the supposedly unaddressed "holes" in the theory of evolution that only remain so if you resolutely refuse to look for the answers in those secret, hidden away places called "libraries...

Monkey See

Posted on May 11, 2008
The Gofer General of the Discoveryless Institute, Casey Luskin, is holding forth on what he calls "a biased and error-filled post at the Chronicle of Higher Education by Richard Monastersky." As a sleight-of-hand artist, Luskin lacks all panache, so I'll refrain from chasing the weasel all the way 'round this mulberry bush...

Thinking Out Loud

Posted on May 11, 2008
Will you risk being sneered at by both Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh? Would you like to stick your thumb in the eye of people who believe knowledge is a bad thing? Do you think that science and education and culture are all things worth openly and proudly pursuing?If so, you may be ready to participate in the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards...

Out and About the Intertubes

Posted on May 11, 2008
Freshwater, Stale Brain:There is more on John Freshwater, the crazed teacher who thinks he was hired with public tax money to be preacher.Among other things, Freshwater used a device to brand a cross into the flesh of some of his students, which turned out to be a BD-10A High Frequency Generator, about the same size and shape as a power screwdriver, the tip of which puts out up to 50,000 volts of electricity...

Propping Up the 'Ganda

Posted on May 10, 2008
There is a nice example in The Modesto Bee of how the Discoveryless Institute goes about making its alleged connection between "Darwinism" and Hitler and the Holocaust, and the best that can be said of it is that the smoke and mirrors are artfully arranged...

Out of This World Marketing

Posted on May 09, 2008
Okay, as regular readers (all two of you) will know, I tend to be tolerant of and strive to be reasonably respectful to the more rational religious sects and their adherents.But sometimes ...According to the Associated Press, the Vatican has ordered Roman Catholic dioceses worldwide to withhold member registries ? essentially, the records of baptisms and deaths -- from Mormons...

An Object Lesson In the Constitution

Posted on May 08, 2008
I've mentioned John Freshwater before. He is a middle school science teacher in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who has refused to remove his personal Bible from view on his classroom desk. That is, in and of itself, arguably not a violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state...

Explosive Exegesis

Posted on May 07, 2008
No, it's not the Fourth of July come early. The sound you hear is irony meters all over the world meeting catastrophic demises over an article from WingNutDaily:A minister who promotes the Old Testament roots of Christianity suggests a rare string of lunar and solar eclipses said to fall on God's annual holy days seven years from now could herald what's come to be known as the "Second Coming" of Jesus...

Loving You

Posted on May 06, 2008
You may have heard of the death of Mildred Loving. She was half of the interracial couple that the State of Virginia jailed and tried to force to leave the state for the simple fact that they were married:In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws...

Music to My Ears

Posted on May 05, 2008
And the recriminations keep coming:"People pushing this legislation are pushing it on the merits, not to demonstrate we still have muscle," said James A. Smith, the executive editor of the Florida Baptist Witness, who watched the debates in the Legislature last week...

Over the River

Posted on May 05, 2008
Stony Brook University is the home of Dr. Michael Egnor, the brain surgeon who disproves the trope that "it ain't brain surgery" properly refers to an activity requiring the opposite of great intelligence. That and the fact that the University is nearly in my back yard makes it particularly sweet when the student newspaper, the Stony Brook Independent, nails Intelligent Design Creationists for their disingenuousness:Stein is portrayed as a courageous and daring figure standing up against the tyrannical actions of the scientific community...

Decisions, Decisions ...

Posted on May 04, 2008
There has been some concern expressed that the recent decision (pdf file) in Sklar v. Clough will support the Nondiscovery Institute's claim that merely stating that some religions have accepted evolution is an unconstitutional preference of one religious denomination over others...

In Which I Hit the Big Time

Posted on May 03, 2008
Sniff ... success at last!David Klinghoffer is over at the Discoveryless Institute's Ministry of Misinformation, in a post entitled "Lying for Darwin," complaining about "the juvenile name-calling" directed at him for supporting Expelled. Of course, he immediately goes on to claim that no one can reasonably disagree that "Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments [whatever the heck that's supposed to mean] to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution" "if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level...

And the Recriminations ...

Posted on May 03, 2008
John West in the Undiscovery Institute's Whine and Jeez blog:Supposedly, the Florida House refused to pass the Senate bill because it favored a stronger measure to require the critical analysis of evolution. As a former political science professor, I can tell you that this explanation doesn't hold water...

Learning More Than Science

Posted on May 03, 2008
Wes Elsberry has a good history of the fight for proper science education in Florida that, unfortunately, people in many states, including Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, and Louisiana, may need to study for their own battles:Back in 2005, Florida hired Cheri Pierson Yecke as its K-12 Chancellor, the second highest post in the Department of Education...

Dope

Posted on May 03, 2008
Here is a humorous but telling comment about Expelled from a Letter to the Editor by Fred Herman in The Modesto Bee:Someday, "Expelled" will be a "Reefer Madness" relic of Bush-era excesses. Today it's an ideological bludgeon, a tedious attempt to make audiences believe it white when it is, in fact, black...

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