The Morning Heresy 5/7/12: Fruitloops Goonybat
May 7, 2012
Your daily digest of relevant news and links from Paul Fidalgo
Welcome to the work-week, folks. I just bought a bicycle yesterday, and it's the first time I've ridden one in almost 20 years, so as you can imagine, it's a whole new world for me (the whole gear-shifting thing was explained to me, but I only pretended to understand it). Perhaps to avoid hurting myself too badly, I should have taken my new bike to Milton’s Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Massachusetts, where they were blessing bicyclists and motorcyclists with holy water from a bike helmet. It actually looked like it was kind of fun! (Hat tip to Heresy reader Jay for the link.)
Point of Inquiry's Chris Mooney goes on MY FAVORITE SHOW, Up with Chris Hayes, and does a spot on The Young Turks
CFI-Indiana's Reba Boyd Wooden is in DC today to lobby the White House and Senate on filling judicial vacancies
AtheismTV has video interviews with folks from the secular movement in the Reason Rally tent (played to an electric guitar version of "Flight of the Bumblebee," which is weird), including our own Michael De Dora
Maryam Namazie reprints an address on Sharia law given on the CFI Rhine River cruise
LaRae Meadows recaps SkeptiCal 2012
Do the Double-X Double Take and keep yourself from being bamboozled by questionable science and medicine journalism
Valerie Tarico has a long piece at AlterNet on diplomats vs. firebrands in atheists' dealings with religion
More Edwina Rogers reax from the atheosphere (let's just say people aren't dancing for joy yet)
Greg Laden says Rogers may need a Tardis to go back to a time when across-the-aisle work was possible, recommends a withholding of trust until she can prove herself
Greta: "Wheels are grinding"
Austin Cline: ". . . how can we trust her? Indeed, how can we trust the people who hired her?"
Crommunist: "Ms. Rogers’ claim that the religious right is a fringe movement of a much more centrist, moderate Republican party is absolutely laughable."
Jacques Berlinerblau at the Chronicle of Higher Education is the most bullish on Rogers I've seen so far:
Asleep-at-the-wheel secular leaders, clinging to the sepia-tinged memories of knightly JFK and principled card-carrying separationist studs like Michael Dukakis, never fully understood that for more and more Democrats the affair was over.
Shameless-yet-relevant self-promotion: This squares with my own writing in my mini-book on the secular movement in the section entitled "They're Just Not That Into You: Atheists and the Democratic Party," where I write:
Democrats have been carefully balancing their desire to win over believers while remaining true to secularist/pluralistic principles, but they have remained vulnerable to knee-jerk reactions from traditionalists who conclude that those who hold liberal social positions must therefore also be irreligious.
Bill Lehto and his collection of essays, Atheist Voices of Minnesota, profiled in local paper
Ottawa Citizen asks religious leaders what they think of atheists, and some of the answers are weird
John W. Loftus rounds up how a lot of people think Sam Harris wrong about a lot of stuff
I don't know what the Alyona Show is, but Hemant was pretty happy to see Sean Faircloth on there to talk National Day of Reason
Seems even the Vatican is a little taken aback by the Legion of Doom's crackdown on nuns
Archbishop of Philadelphia declares five priests "unsuitable for ministry" due to sex abuse allegations, exonerates three others
Leah Libresco on the discomfort some folks feel with evolution's bad rap
Taslima Nasrin reminds us of the connection between feminism and secularism
PZ pounces when HuffPo allows a fashion editor to tell us that Darwin was wrong (because of space vibrations or something), calls one of her citations a "fruitloops goonybat"
If you see Bigfoot in Texas, feel free to murder him
Angola prison inmates put on a play of "The Life of Jesus Christ":
A spiritual but not particularly religious man, [director Gary] Tyler recounted the instructions he gave to the cast — which he picked himself — especially the Muslims and nonbelievers, and the male actors who were reluctant to play a snitch like Judas. You were acting a role when you were on the streets, he told them, and you were judged based on someone you were not. Use the same energy behind that deception for the role, one that you can control.
Try not to be shocked: Alt-med doesn't help you if you have prostate cancer
Family squabble airs the dirty laundry of the Trinity Broadcasting Company
Dr. Danny Crockarell on religion's attempts to own "values" and its inevitable collision with humanism
James Randi in Wired on his efforts against faith healing scams
Raleigh News & Observer editorializes against North Carolina's anti-gay Amendment One
Quote of the Day
io9's Raychelle Burks on SkyMall's hawking of a facial steamer that purports to produce steam molecules "1/8,000 smaller than normal water molecules":
Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI . Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.Just one problem: steam is just vaporized water, so it can't be smaller than itself.
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Comments:
#3 Paul Fidalgo on Monday May 07, 2012 at 10:53am
Yep, I linked that when it happened here: http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/the_morning_heresy_4_10_12/
#4 Darcy (Guest) on Monday May 07, 2012 at 12:56pm
I’m not american so maybe I don’t get the subtleties of hating someone because of their political affiliation but what is the deal with the Edwina Rogers thing? Seems pretty petty for a group that likes to think of itself as mature and rational.
#5 Ophelia Benson on Monday May 07, 2012 at 5:12pm
Not about hating. About right person for the job.
#6 Darcy Cowan (Guest) on Monday May 07, 2012 at 5:34pm
ie not a Republican.
I still don’t get it.
#1 idxque@gmail.com (Guest) on Monday May 07, 2012 at 10:38am
Here’s another link: The congressman from my district made an absurd claim that atheists do not actually exist.