NEW POLL! Why the bear suit?

And vote for my Lol! click the pick.

Add your own option!

I am offended by this video. It can just priest off.

Sent to me by some God Mocker.

I refuse to be entertained by such “comedy” or to distribute it any further. Just watch it and you will see what I mean. Totally repellant. It really bugs me.

Jesus is a Jam-Tart!

John V. sent me this, saying I had to post it. I agree!

Its from the Far Left Side, the best web comic ever!

But should that not be a penitent butter and Jesus jelly sandwich?

Now, what else can I put here so I’m not just ripping off a FLS cartoon? Hmmm. I know, some music!

Here is Jelly Roll Morton and the Jelly Roll Blues!

Hmm, Tasmanian Bus-Devil!

Hobart Tasmania now has atheist bus ads! HT to the Friendly Atheist.

Put up by the Atheist Foundation of Australia.

At least if the devil-drivin bus hits a tree now, the bus will win!

A Do-It Myself Carnival of Godlessness

I have no idea why the Carnival of the Godless fizzled. The last one at the start of November was very short, and then there has been nothing. Alas.

So here are some of my favourite godless and less-gods-the better-posts from folks on my blogroll over the last little while!

Destination 360

I can be teh Karnibble Kween?
moar funny pictures

~~~~~~~~~

One Minion’s Opinion reminisces about a favourite childhood show, a bit of sentimentality brought about by ChristWire’s very rational, serious and not at all satirical essay on the fact that God hates the homo-Smurfs (and so should you), and there was only one lady Smurf.

Oh, but Christwire isn’t actually freaking out about homosexual smurfs. They’re getting their freak on about how the sultry Smurfette is the only chick in a land of men. (Sic throughout – FYI: homonyms only sound homosexual, dear deer reed readers…)

My dear White Christian American friends, I am hear [sic - here] today to alert the God-fearing American public of yet another subversive attempt of the homo-infested Hollywood to further promote the homo-gay agenda. Homowood is resurrecting this 1980`s television series that was riddled with homogay undertones and, just as horrible, was targeted at none other than CHILDREN!

Methinks Minion became a Poe*-Smurf, but she did discover that there has been talk of  a Smurf movie out in 2011.

I never could stand those little blue buggers (and buggerette).

Apocalypse Smurfs. See, they missed the Rapture.

* Poe’s Law: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”

~~~~~~~~~

Michael Fridman is A Nadder, a great godless site, and he is a very good Bible Blogger too. He has blogged his way right through Job, and more recently has turned his attention to 1 Samuel with a little post called A Real Biblical Marriage (1 Samuel 1).

Now that I’ve finished blogging through the entire book of Job, time to start another book of the Bible. Samuel is the next logical choice — it’s my favourite book because it is most like a novel. There’s a definite, coherent plot, it’s structured quite well and rather than copious amounts of law or poetic rambling we are treated to a true masterpiece of narrative fiction.

The Brick Testament. Scandinavian Theology at its best!

However YHWH is a petty tribal god and can be bought with gifts. In her pain, Hannah makes a vow that if she gets pregnant with a male child (otherwise what’s the point?!) she’ll dedicate the son to YHWH and make sure he never cuts his hair (ie. she’ll make him a Nazirite according to the laws in Numbers 6). This sounds good to the good God, since he will now get to keep the boy for life.

I don’t know how many other bibliobloggers have him on their blogrolls, but he is very perceptive and entertaining. Here is the link to his Blogging the Bible series.

~~~~~~~~~

From Wikimedia

Bay of Fundie has a great continuing series describing his madcap adventure is stupid-land attending a “Darwin was wrong” seminar.

Uncyclopedia

Here is Part Five!

If you’re going to lie, lie big! “[S]cience is debunking every aspect of Darwin’s hypothesis[!]”

That’s what’s great about living in a fantasy world. You can wave your hands and all of your problems go away. Evolution: *Poof!* It’s gone. Atheists: *Poof!* They’re gone. The Establishment Clause: *Poof!* It’s gone.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, evolution is stronger than ever, there are more atheists than ever, and the Separation Clause… Umm… It’s actually looking a little faint. Damn!! Their magic really does work! Quick! Somebody nominate some Supreme Court justices!


The Sensuous Curmudeon turns the heat up on the Discoveroids of the Discovery Institution for their pissant take on “Climategate”.

It began here: Thrilled About ClimateGate, but the Discoveroids couldn’t control themselves. Matters swiftly escalated to this: The Mask Falls Away. (Hey, that one post got almost 9,000 hits so far.) That’s where we identified the “vindication of all kooks” doctrine — which holds that if the legitimate views of global warming skeptics had been wrongly suppressed, then all science dissent has been similarly mistreated, and therefore the science-denial of creationism is now respectable.

~~~~~~~~~

The Godless Girl goes all Mark Twainian in Lies, Damn Lies and Lunatics Part 2, not talking healing claims on faith.

Click here to watch both clips side-by-side.

In clip 1 Bentley speaks of a woman whose legs get beaten like a baseball bat on the stage. In clip 2 he’s telling the same story (you can hear the similar lead-in about “crippled people” and “not one”) but this time it’s a small boy whose legs God says to beat on the stage. So which is it, a male or female? I believe these tall tales are fabricated for theatrics and to give the audience a sense of awe and to gain trust before they step up to be healed. Hardly a  trustworthy man of God!

~~~~~~~~~

Salvador, Brazil

The Tangled Up in Blue Guy has finally seen the light and is now telling atheists to “Stop it” and just go back to being retend believers so we don’t cause offence (or get sarcastic).

It is time for atheists to leave well enough alone.  We’ve had our say, we’ve had our moment in the sun and now it is time to go back to being nice and quiet and let the Christians guard over us, so that we can all live and let live and no one will ever talk about the ways that religion rules our lives unfairly again.

To all Christians I apologize for being so uppity. I promise to be good.  My hat is in my hand, and excuse me while I go to the back of the bus and get off at my stop and hope that none of you are dishonored again by having to look at me.

~~~~~~~~~

Good Grief! The Unrepentant Old Hippy is unconvinced that the timing of Obama’s last T.V. special, which pre-empted the airing of Charlie Brown’s Christmas special was a Muslim plot. Silly girl.

Russell Wiseman, mayor(!) of Arlington, Tennessee, claimed that Obama’s speech on Afghanistan this week was deliberately timed to block the airing of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”…. because he’s a Muslim. No, I’m not kidding:

The mayor of a suburban Memphis city accused President Barack Obama of deliberately timing his speech about the war in Afghanistan this week to block the airing of the “Peanuts” Christmas television special.

According to The Commercial Appeal, Arlington Mayor Russell Wiseman posted the statements on his Facebook page and said the president is Muslim.

Blag Hag tackles Tim Tebow’s Well versed and video’s face. She writes:

This isn’t about censoring Christians so that they can never talk about their faith. There is a time and place for such discussions, and representing a public university in college football is not it. This is about illustrating that you’re rewarded for expressing your Christianity, but everyone who disagrees better keep it to themselves. Christians are a privileged group, and crying “Oppression!” as loudly as they can doesn’t change the facts.

~~~~~~~

Greta Christina is one of the best godless bloggers around. She wonders what a truly metaphorical religion would be like

I was debating the other day with a believer who was getting bent out of shape about how religion was just a story people found comforting. People didn’t have to believe religion was literally true for it to make a difference in their lives, he insisted. So why was I being so intolerant and mean and trying to take it away? And it suddenly struck me:

The version of religion he’s talking about?

It’s Trekkies.


Anyway, that’s my little Carnival of Godlessness. Hope you liked it. So, lets have some music!

On SBL’s Battle of the Bloat: A secularizing suggestion.

Last Wednesday (Nov. 25), April DeConick posted an open letter about the Society of Biblical Literature on her blog, Forbidden Gospels.  I just noticed it the other day, so here is a late response in view of my own hopes to add a new group to the SBL’s already bloated schedule. She makes three closely inter-related main points.

She complains is there is far too much overlapping of groups with similar interests or themes. This only divides the audiences. She suggests that the SBL could engage external consultants to work on scheduling of the conferences. I’m not sure that extenal consultants are the solution, that sounds like a terrible expense, but I agree wholeheartedly with her recognition of this problem. Part of that issue is the proliferation of so many groups, which is her primary concern.

But before dealing with that, we need an  interlude:

DeConick also deals with scheduling. Organizing the time table for sessions for the SBL and the American Academy of Religion meeting (which used to be held concurrently) must have been a nightmare. DeConick observes that the problem of overlapping sessions is actually worse now that the two societies do not hold joint meetings, since the SBL has seen such a dramatic rise in the number of specialized groups.

Her primary complaint concerns the view expressed in the group Chairs’ meeting that the large number of sessions at the recent conferences was a sign of the society’s health.  In her opinion, the rapid growth in the number of sessions and groups has led to over-specialization, diminished audiences for all groups and to a reduction in the actual sharing of ideas among people. I cannot but agree with this. She writes:

Our groups have proliferated to the point that there is so much competition for audiences that entire sessions are beginning to have only a handful in attendance. Papers that may have taken a year to prepare may have an audience of five. This means that there is little discussion and little in terms of dissemination of research to the broader community.

The increasing specialization and fracturing of scholarship into ever more rarified sub-disciplines is, as Steve Wiggins noted in a comment on DeConick’s post, endemic to the wider field of scholarship, but I wonder if it really need to be so bad in the SBL. I think DeConick is right, the SBL could sure stand to loose a lot of the different groups, consultations, and what not it has acquired over the years.

One odd thing about the present situation, however, is that I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find sessions to which I might propose a paper. My stuff often does not fit anything but the very general, open sessions on the Hebrew Prophets and such like.  Yet, these open sessions seem to be rarer and rarer as even the broadly defined subject areas host many sessions with specific themes some of which can be quite narrow in focus. The opportunity for papers that do not fit into these pre-arranged categories appears to be far slimmer now than a decade ago. I might be wrong about this, but it is an impression I am getting.

Agnes thought the SBL New Orleans  Session on "Throwing your Pearl Beads on Lolcats:  Interactive Approaches" was a glorious success.

Remember when T.V. had variety shows? I remember watching Ed Sullivan as a kid. You never knew what you were going to get on any evening. Jugglers then the Beatles, or a broadway singer, a comedian and the Rolling Stones. It was wonderful, and everyone watched everything (although my dad had a fit when he saw the @$^%!!(#^$!(!!! long-haired Beatles for the first time. Some childhood memories will never die).

I like variety. The SBL should have more of it, but not not a wide variety of exclusive-club, inward-looking talking shops, each with their own totemic, esoteric jargon and secret handshakes.

All that being said, I should admit that the plan to start a Secular Critical Scholarship of the Bible group would just be adding to the mess of groups already there. What would the justification for that be?

(Another interlude: A probably apocryphal, but still telling, story I heard during my last years as an undergrad at the U. of Alberta was that there was a committee struck to look into how the university might reduce the number of committees)

First of all, the question of secularism in the SBL is not a peripheral subject but strikes at the heart of the what the SBL is, does, and should be doing to “foster biblical scholarship”. I have heard some opine  that since scholarship should be secular, why do we need to talk about secularism at all? The answer, of course, is that Biblical Studies is not fully secular. Many scholars are, but the academy is definitely NOT. And since people continue to attribute to the texts we subject to critical analysis a fundamentally unique status among writings and human thought, the issue of secularism should be a significant topic of discussion. Yet, it is not. The SBL seems to be OK with papers, sessions, and affiliations with faith-based perspectives. This is a major issue and needs to be discussed openly.

Biblical exceptionalism is rampant in the SBL. Rather than offer analysis the Bible as one of the many textual products of human culture, some presentations seem to construe the Bible as the primary human text and even as a divine text. The latter has no place in academia, and the former often strikes me as simply a quasi-secular corollary to overt theological work.

The last point may be a little harsh but at least it deserves to be discussed openly. What is the SBL for? As a short exchange on this blog and elsewhere several weeks ago reveals, there are members of the SBL who simply cannot see the validity or even existence of non-religious thought about the Bible. One would have thought that an international academic society would do a better job preventing such an identity crisis. As Alan Lenzi argued in Feb. 2008, the SBL needs to adopt some standards for membership.

What does the SBL require for full membership? $65 (see here, updated on February 11, 2008). What kind of learned society has no requirements for its members? The problem this creates is most evident, in my experience, at the regional meetings where I have witnessed pastors or, in one case, a woman who had had a visionary experience share their thoughts about the Bible or god or religion. Is the SBL the appropriate venue for this kind of report?

Full membership in the SBL should be restricted to people with an academic doctoral degree from an accredited program. Student membership should be restricted to academic doctoral students. We should make it harder to join instead of easier. Furthermore, given the function of what we study for contemporary religion and the fact the membership in a learned society can give credibility to one’s status in the field, it does not seem unreasonable to inform potential applicants for membership about the Society’s orientation to academic Biblical Studies. Namely, the application should make it clear that all members of the Society engage the Bible as a product of and influence on human culture. By joining, members implicitly agree in principle to the practice of using the same critical faculties and exercising the same kinds of judgments on the Bible as one might use on, say, an Assyrian royal inscription or a non-canonical gospel. In other words, it should be clear that members of the SBL do not privilege the Bible with a special mode of inquiry (see note).

I agree whole heartedly with this (M.A. students, of course, would not be banished entirely!). As Lenzi points out and as I have said elsewhere there, clearly, many religious people can do good secular research, and we cannot morally impose a religious test for membership. Yet, society as a whole tends to treat “secular” as synonymous with “atheist” and since very strident and widely read atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (who count as non-academics when it comes to the study of religion) rub so many people the wrong way, attempts to “secularize” biblical studies is taken by some as being equivalent “church bashing”. It is not. It is merely church-ignoring.

From my experience, it is far more likely that in any given session in the SBL meetings that someone will start to speak overtly from a faith perspective, or to try to make critical scholarship palatable to “faith communities” than to openly declare secular standards of scholarship. It was such a relief to attend the North American Association for Religious Studies session in New Orleans, that placed biblical studies in the light of  wider scholarship into religion. A very different atmosphere to what I noted in many SBL sessions. NAASR is one of those affiliations that SBL should be encouraging.

So, back to the SBloatL problem identified by DeConick. I think a partial solution would be to eliminate the “religious” sessions. They simply do not belong. Studying religion academically is very different from furthering any one religion’s internal discourses, no matter how intellectual those discourses are. The SBL needs to sort out its identity. It cannot be a clearing house for all talk about the Bible and the Judeo-Christian traditions that uses big words and produces big books. Affiliations with the overt theological groups need to be broken. Theological groups (that is, those that do theology, rather than critically examine other people’s theologies) within the SBL should be ended.

I think far too many SBL members see the society as a vehicle for furthering the inner-church discourses carried out in seminaries and even from the pulpit. Why the hell does the SBL have sessions on “Homiletics and Biblical Studies“?  From their call for papers:

Invited panel session: Preaching from the Psalms. Invited panel session: Preaching and the Personal: Prophecy, Witness, and Testimony. Open call: The Homiletics and Biblical Studies section is seeking papers dealing with the relationship between biblical interpretation and proclamation.

The SBL could certainly loose this and a number of other faith-based sections and groups and its academic credentials would only increase.
What is the intended audience of critical biblical scholarship?  It must not be construed as solely those consuming biblical interpretation as an expression of or aid to their religious beliefs. The SBL actually should not be catering to that market at all. The way I see it, the real audience of biblical academics are those interested in the wider knowledge of human society, culture, and religiosity.

The SBL should abandon its attempts to be all things to all people, resist any attempt to use it as an adjunct of the church or seminary, and take its mandate to further scholarship seriously as part of the wider explorations into human life conducted in the secular humanities and social sciences.

Dr. Jim’s Thinking Shop: Deluxe Windbaggery Our Speciality!

Got a comment a couple days ago from a certain Mr/Mrs/Ms. “Anonymous” to a post I made on April 19 telling me I’m a windbag. Good to see Anon. is a regular reader!

It was actually a damn good little post. Too bad it took 8 months for anyone to actually read it!  Basically the post was about a lengthy exchange I was having with some  Christians in the local newspaper. At one point I was called a “militant” atheist. So my post was reporting on my just-published reply. Here is that with one of theattention grabbing, crusading pictures I found so I can wallow in my militant glory.

Andrew Joosse calls me “militant” for criticizing religion. Militant people carry guns and throw bombs. I wrote to my local newspaper. Luckily, I didn’t use upper-case letters for emphasis or Lethbridge might get a reputation as a terrorist haven.

christian-soldier

A gun shop, perhaps the one from where the noted militant, Dr. Jim,
bought his deadly lap-top that has been striking common sense into the
sleepy town of Lethbridge .

My views are said to confirm Augustine’s claim that Christians do not base belief on reason but rather believe in order to understand. OK, so Augustine was happy with a circular argument and a bit of special pleading that seemingly protects his views from criticism and self-doubt. I’m glad Mr. Joosse and I had the opportunity to clear that up.

I do not question many Christians’ charitable nature or work for world peace but the same can be said of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Wiccans, agnostics, and atheists. My real point is that religions get undeserved preferential treatment. For example, organized religions enjoy special laws allowing them to issue tax receipts for donations, regardless of whether the money is put to any real humanitarian end. This is unfairly denied to other groups.

To illustrate the Christian sense of “true religion”, Mr. Joosse employs a verse from the biblical prophet Micah that advocates doing justice and humbly walking with one’s god. We get a different perspective on it if we flip ahead several pages in the Bible to the prophet Malachi, who accuses poverty stricken Judeans of stealing from God by skimping on their tithes, offerings and sacrifices to the temple.  Some biblical passages are simply timeless.

After this, I tore into another letter (by Brock Schuler) to the same editor that cried a few crocodile tears for the atheists who don’t know what they are missing and declaring that religion is inherently valuable. Oh yeah, he added that atheists are just bitter.

I find it unfortunate when people refer to faith in derogatory ways when it has so much to offer. Faith provides foundations for morals and gives hope.

…I feel sorry for the naturalist / secularlist / scientist that has nothing to believe in. I find belief in God essential for my personal and spiritual development, even my intellectual development.

So I challenged him on a few points. Anyway, here is what Mr/Mrs/Ms. “Anonymous” has to say 8 months later in the comments:

You are a windbag. You’re an arrogant fool who likes attention and the idea that he is somehow a crusader for truth and liberty. I’m not a christian and to me you look ridiculous. Stop embarassing yourself.

Stolen from http://lauren-and-justin.blogspot.com

Well, I suppose one way to not embarrass myself is to post insults anonymously, but what would that achieve? Of course, Anon is keeping his/her name out of circulation simply out of modesty. We must not assume that this is just a surf-by insult. No, Anon is too dignified to stoop to that.

OK, so some uber-modest self-professed non-Christian jackass (I’ll bet he is a Christian, though, and is lying through his freakin’ teeth) thinks I’m embarrassing myself by stating my opinion. Well la-de-da.  Why the fuck is it any concern or hers? At least in my original post I was attacking ideas, not just hurling insults. If our nameless dipwit can’t see the point of satire on the internet perhaps there is a rock he can find that needs crawling under.

And now, back to regular programming, militant crusading.

Michael Shermer to visit Lethbridge (very advance warning).

I got an email the other day from Paul Sparrow-Clarke who works in the mysterious reaches of the “7th floor” at the U. of L. (where the president’s offices are), letting me know that they have booked the speaker for the fall 2010 Owen G. Holmes  lecture.

Mark Sept. 23 on your calendar!

Michael Shermer

Author of “Why People Believe Weird Things”.

Shermer is the  e Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

Here is a cut and paste blurb about his books from his blog,

Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

Whoot! When’s it gonna be September?

Here he is at a TED lecture. Its about 14 minutes long, but then, we’ve got time, haven’t we?

Anyway, in the video, Shermer mentions Katie Melua, so here is the video of the tune he mentions.

 

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Answers in Genesis OK’s Accomplice to Genocide.

I saw this at Pharyngula today. I have to write on it.
The creationist cretins at Answers in Genesis have posted a note on their site by Bodie Hodge, actually a response to an email for advice, in which Hodge actually condones telling the truth. Don’t get your hopes up.

I often wonder if a Nazi soldier asked if someone was there hiding and they told the truth before God, could the Lord have in mind a greater purpose? Could God have used that person to free a great many people who ultimately died in the Holocaust? Or have done something to stop the war earlier? Or cause a great number of Jews and Nazi’s to come to know Christ? It is possible, but we simply cannot know. And one should not dwell too long on “what ifs” anyway.

Let’s consider again the Nazi-Holocaust situation: there seems to be a conflict in the situation to lie before God to try to save someone else’s life. The result is often called the “greater good” or “lesser of two evils.”

I’ve been told in the past that the lesser of these two evils would be to lie to save a life—hence the common phrase “a righteous lie.” This is often justified by appealing to the command to love our neighbor (Romans 13:9).

Consider this carefully. In the situation of a Nazi beating on the door, we have assumed a lie would save a life, but really we don’t know. So, one would be opting to lie and disobey God without the certainty of saving a life—keeping in mind that all are ultimately condemned to die physically. Besides, whether one lied or not may not have stopped the Nazi solders from searching the house anyway.

einsatzpic2

“All are ultimately condemned to die physically” Bodie Hodge, 2009.

FUCK! HAS THIS SHITHEAD NO HEART AT ALL?

Warsaw None of the people shown being arrested here are worth the sin of a lie to save, according to Bodie Hodge.
Of course, no one has come for his kids yet.

If the Nazis come looking for Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, intellectuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, blacks, cab drivers, poets, or however, you can lie. You can cheat. If you think it is a good idea to help their quarry get away, you do violence to the nazis. Fuck ‘em.

Even the Jains understand this better (well, except for killing the nazis bit). They say it is OK to lie to a hunter to save the life of a deer. Certainly a lie to save humans is justified.

I wonder what this fuckwit would do if the nazis came to his door looking for his kid who had helped some other people excape. Would he lie to save the life of his own child?  Jesus said  healing and saving lives on the Sabbath was within the law (rabbinic Judaism-often villified for being legalistic, teaches the same). This jackass thinks you can’t suspend the ban on lying to save a life. Hopefully one day Hodge will be travelling in some country where the police have extraordinary powers and he needs someone to tell a little white lie to save his ass. Let’s see how he likes having others do onto him and he preaches others should do unto other innocent people.

Nazisatthedoor

From Tablet Magazine: A New Read on Jewish Life

Here is something a lot more inspiring morally than Atrocities in Genesis.

Garden of The Righteous

“Even now it is difficult to know how best to remember the Holocaust. It is especially difficult to know how to teach it to children in a way that will give them strength and so that the Holocaust will be appropriately remembered. One special element in that education process is teaching about the non-Jews who risked their lives and dared to try to save Jews during World War II. Yad Vashem, the Memorial Museum and Archives to the Six Million in Jerusalem, has identified 50,000 such “righteous gentiles”, many of whom it has recognized by planting trees in their honor in a Garden of the Righteous.      (bold added)

EDITED TO ADD: I had originally posted a picture form wikipedia said to be SA men arresting Jews on Kristallnacht (1938). There is some doubt expressed in the comments below about the authenticity of that picture so I switched it to the two above. The image is here.

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Seventh Day Creationists Petition the Teaching of Reality. Hopefully La Sierra will evolve into a real university.


La Sierra University in California, a Seventh Day Adventist institution, is facing a a bit of a mutiny of the faithful because some of its science faculty are teaching evolution in biology classes without including sections on the “Truth”™, i.e., creationism.  Needless to say (but I will anyway) Dr. Jim thinks La Sierra should dump the religion and teach the science.

According to the Press-Enterprise:

More than 5,600 people from around the country have signed an online petition that will be presented to the La Sierra University board of trustees at its Nov. 12 meeting. It states that creation occurred in six 24-hour days, expresses concern that evolution is presented as fact in Adventist universities and calls for the universities to explicitly inform students and parents how evolution is taught.

The ultimate goal of the petition drive is to require Adventist teaching on creation in La Sierra biology classes, said Shane Hilde, the Beaumont man and La Sierra graduate spearheading the petition drive. If that doesn’t happen, petition supporters may push La Sierra to disassociate itself from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he said.

dino_love_jesus

Stolen from Devil's garage

Of course, the university administration is caught, not wanting to compromise the school’s reputation with the non-anti-intellectuals in the world, and maintaining the denominational ties. The article also reports that Hilde is “ looking into allegations of pro-evolution biases at other Adventist universities”.

“Pro-evolution biases”? Holy chattering clam-lips, Batfuck! We can’t have 150 years of intensive scientific research by tens of thousands of highly educated people using the most sophisticated tools in the world create ‘biases’ in the study of Biology! That would be terrible! Oh the Humanity!

(ed. note: That was an editorial)

Long Lost Relatives  Kind of annoying, actually.
moar funny pictures

The petition does not call for the dismissal of the three La Sierra biology professors who are at the center of the storm. But Hilde said “that ultimately is what happens in these situations.” What a fucking self righteous asshole.

“I would blame the administration for hiring people like this,” he said.

Lee Greer, one of the three targeted professors, declined to comment publicly. In an e-mail, Professor L. Lee Grismer called the matter a “minor controversy” and declined to discuss it further. Professor Gary Bradley did not return phone calls. In September, Bradley told the Web site Inside Higher Ed that he will not denounce or contradict evolutionary theory in his class.

University spokesman Larry Becker declined to reveal the professors’ religious affiliations. About 90 percent of La Sierra’s professors are Adventist, he said. Only Adventists are granted tenure.

“People like this”. My shattered nerves. I really do feel sorry for the profs involved. If they were hired on the agreement that they could teach according to accepted science, then it is a damn cruel thing to change rules after the fact. Hopefully they will be able to find employment at a real university soon, and they won’t have to play with these clowns anymore.

I
moar funny pictures

According to the newspaper, in view of the protests, La Sierra now forces all biology majors to take a seminar on Seventh Day creationist doctrine that includes creation in six 24 hour days. The story doesn’t say if they subscribe to a young earth. Now, apparently there is no move to stop the teaching of evolution per se, but to merely acknowledge in class that it doesn’t fit with church doctrines. Well, whoopdie doo. Scientific facts qualified are facts denied. There is no controversy to teach and the conclusions of scientific experimentation do not constitute a “world-view” as Hilde would have it.  La Sierra’s president, Randal Wisbey, didn’t want to interviewed.

In a written statement, he said, “We expect that students will be introduced to the prevailing scientific views within a supportive classroom environment that values the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s contribution to the understanding of biblical creation.”

What a load of diplomatic hooey. Where is the value on the academics that lie behind the “prevailing scientific views”? Does this guy want to run La Sierra as a university or a church?

Worldwide Adventist Church President Jan Paulsen addressed the evolution controversy in June by calling on all Adventist university professors to advocate church teaching that creation occurred during six 24-hour days.

“Faith is certainly not subject to the findings of science,” he wrote.

Paulsen’s got it freaking backwards.

The finding of science–or history,  anthropology,  religious studies or biblical studies, for that matter-are not subject to faith.

Finally, one clever species of Catfish decided to leave the water for good, vowing never to return.
moar funny pictures

This kind of thing really pisses me off, and only reinforces my belief that universities that answer to religious belief first and not to the conclusions of advanced research that is subject to open scrutiny are not true universities and should be shunned, blacklisted and mocked by academics around the world. If a school wants to teach science, then teach it, don’t water it down with religion or make excuses for it. If they want to teach religion, then fine, but don’t pretend to be giving your students a good education in  something else.

I feel the same way about the study of the Bible, too. Regardless of what seminaries, churches, Bible schools and Sunday Schools teach about it, it is also a subject for secular research into the history of human thought and behaviour. This secular approach to learning ABOUT religion is diametrically opposed to the teaching that any one body of religious teachings represent “truth”.

Hopefully, the board of governors will put academics ahead of appeasing the anti-intellectuals in the Church, and if that means breaking its ties with the Church, so be it. The students will be the ones to benefit.

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