Sanity Pills

As if things weren’t bad enough on the homefront, it appears the pandemic known as “Intelligent Design” has made its way over the border to Canada. This time a professor at McGill has been denied a grant for a research project which would study the detrimental effects of Intelligent Design on Canadian students. Why was he denied the funds? Because he couldn’t prove the validity of evolution to the panel who has discretion over said funds. For my subjective opinion of this, see kstevens comment regarding the Amazon reviewer’s critique of Lawrence of Arabia. I would also like to apologize for my complete lack of grammatical skill today, my mind is shot.

At any rate, click here to read more.

Prof. Paul Mirecki got his just desserts this week. The UKansas religious studies professor, who gained some notoriety recently because he isn’t crazy, was attacked and beaten by two men on a rural road early Monday morning. Mirecki claims that the two men made reference to the class that Mirecki was planning to teach about how wrong intelligent design is. The course was “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies,” but Mirecki canceled it after newspapers publsihed an email he sent to a student that took a jab at religious fundamentalists.

Religious fundamentalists were angered by these statements, in which Mirecki referred to them as “fundies.” Fundies is disrespectful? I think it doesn’t go nearly far enough, it’s tantamount to only calling Nazis “brownies.” Retards works better for me, maybe fucking retards, idiots, cocksuckers, cunts, douchebags… feel free to add your own.

I think (hope) that this debate becomes one of the defining issues in politics. The debate could be as heated as that over abortion, but this time there is no way in which defenders of creationism are even close to correct.

I think we know where Mirecki is headed:

And Ann Coulter still likes to claim that liberals are the violent ones.

And pray to Him today, September 19th.

Ramen

The Pastafarians are growing in popularity because it appears that people are finally starting to accept the one true faith. It’s impossible to dispute the correlation between the number of pirates and rising global temperatures.

Boing Boing will give $1 million to the person who “can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” I have a strange feeling no one will be cashing that check.

The Sistine Trattoria.

I heard the tail-end of a great debate on WBUR, actually it was more of a complete ass-whooping than a debate.

For Intelligent Design, there was George Gilder of the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think tank, and for science and common sense, we had Richard Dawkins, Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.

I bet you can deduce the arguments. The interesting thing is what Dawkins did. He refused to debate Gilder. It was great. He wouldn’t do the interview if he was on with Gilder because that would give credence to Gilder’s point of view. It would make it seem as if it was a debate between two scientific theories, which of course, it is not. I think it’s a great tactic for scientists, but I fear that the Intelligent Design idiots might be able to win converts if allowed to present their views without instantly being shown what fools they are.

Anyway, check out the audio here.

Also, Dawkins considers Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution to be the best obliteration of the intelligent design theory, and written by a devote Christian, no less.