Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry vs Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdencombe MP. I’m a bit curious as to why a member of parliament in Europe, her sphere being politics rather than debating (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek), thinks she can effectively out-argue Fry, much less Hitchens, on this point. She certainly falls on her face at it. Onaiyekan seems like a genuinely good person; it’s a shame he is tasked with this insurmountable mountain of evidence against the Church.
This is the debate I mentioned in a previous Random Crap post, which I hadn’t yet actually seen. Julie of Rational Behavior was kind enough to post the playlist at her place, and I just needed to cross-post it.
You’re probably going to see this video pretty well everywhere on the blogosphere, but I’ll post it nonetheless: Sagan’s last interview.
Here’s one you might not see elsewhere. Michael Shermer does a retrospective on Sagan’s career in order to analyze whether his “UFO nut” reputation is deserved. (Spoiler: it isn’t.)
FOX Noise has been railing about ACORN since the general election. Why? Because some poor people trumped up fake names, names that would never vote anyway, so they could get a few extra bucks?
Epic day today, after an epic day yesterday, so I have hardly any time to navigate the intertubes. Well, I have enough time to inform you that a poor soul is now out of work, and he is asking for your help in finding a new job.
Today is Carl Sagan Day, celebrating the 75th anniversary of his birth… two days early. There’s a celebration in Florida, and if it was held on his birthday, on Monday, nobody would be able to come.
I have had a post queued up for two days now, ready to auto-publish on Monday morning. For today, though, go celebrate at one of the bigger blogs:
Maine is famous for its lobster industry. They have yearly festivals, cooking contests, and huge intra-fishery wars, and the industry makes up a huge percentage of the state’s local income. The aggregate total of their fishing industry averaging 15% of their GDP (in 2007 being $48 billion), and lobster makes up a huge chunk of that industry, as 30% of all fishing landings. That means 4.5% of their GDP is directly lobster-related, and with 80% of America’s lobster coming from Maine, that’s a sizable industry with sizable influence.
It’s no wonder the bible-thumpers chose to go after gays instead, with estimates ranging from 1.5% (census self-identified) to 10% (extrapolated from potentially flawed data) of the population being homosexual. I mean, even if they were all fishermen, they wouldn’t make up any more than 0.5% of the GDP! They’re a much smaller lobby with much smaller monetary influence — and therefore much less money with which to fight back.
If gays married, this family would dissolve! The father would start drinking, beat his kids, they'd divorce and the children put up for adoption! ZOMG!!!
Maine had legalized gay marriage back in May, and thus far, nobody’s straight marriage suffered for it. But that never stops homophobic Christians from demanding that civil rights for a minority be put to a majority vote. We all know Christians are the majority and are the real power-brokers in the States, regardless of what they’ll tell you — that they’re the underdogs, that they’re put upon from all sides by the scary minorities. So it’s no surprise that when the religious demand that any civil rights law for a minority of people gets put to a vote by the majority, that the majority will turn out the vote and vote for “marriage = 1 man 1 woman” out of deference to their biblical teachings. I mean, Leviticus 18:22 says clearly:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. -KJV
It’s a good thing the religious are around to spend over $9 million on attacking civil rights “defending marriage”, outspending the grassroots No-on-1 campaign by a factor of at least 4. All this to the exclusion of any sort of organized religious effort attacking the gigantic and profitable lobster industry that is every bit as much abomination to the Christians’ sense of morality:
11:10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
11:11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
11:12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you. Leviticus 11:10-12
Just think of all those sinners making all that money off of abomination! You’d think they’d be a way bigger target than the otherwise harmless gays that just want to marry one another and promise themselves to lives of monogamy. Especially given all of Jesus’ teachings about how you can’t worship God and money at the same time!
Take heart though, my gay and lesbian friends — the homophobes are dying out, literally. They are becoming the aging majority, and where they are still the majority now, they only have a few more electoral cycles left. Soon the youth of today (who split pretty well 80/20 for “No on 1”) will be the majority, and they’ll be around for many many more electoral cycles than the religious assholes that have you subjugated right now.
Blag Hag beat me to this, as well as a number of others that realized the hypocrisy well before I did. Petursey also rails on the fact that the 53% Yes-on-1 outcome shows that 53% of the state’s voters are bigoted.
Christians specifically are fond of saying they are the most tolerant people, and especially much more tolerant than we heathens. Too bad they always vote against tolerance.
Yet another paragon of Christian morality and virtue, Miss California USA Carrie Prejean, fails under minimum inspection. After having her nude photos leaked and the fact of her boob-job was revealed, she started a bunch of lawsuits against the California pageant, claiming defamation. Now, a sex tape has emerged where she reportedly goes solo on herself with a Jackhammer Jesus. That’s right, for those of you who REALLY want Jesus to fill you up, they made a dildo just for you.
No, the video hasn’t leaked. No, I have zero interest in it. She’s got fake boobs and a fake worldview and a fake moral high ground on which she pretends to stand. Yes, there’s some schadenfreude in seeing the right-wing fall apart as yet another of their nouveau leaders is built up and crushed under the weight of their own failings.
By the way, the failing isn’t that she likes to masturbate. Nor that she videoed herself doing it. It’s that she’s a fucking hypocrite, claiming to be a morally pure Christian and suing anyone that proves she isn’t for defamation, while in the meantime working actively to oppress homosexuals as being somehow sinful and wrong. (Remember, she’s the chick that was spanked in a non-hot way by Perez Hilton over her “opposite marriage” ridiculousness.) After the sex tape leaked, she folded on all her defamation suits and paid the pageant their lawyer costs.
Julie at Attempts at Rational Behaviour and Petursey are all over Prejean coming unglued. Apologies to both of you for the image of you being anywhere near Prejean, much less “all over”. Also, apologies for using the word “coming”.
Pharyngula covers the hilarious but wholly unsurprising fact that Ray “Bananaman” Comfort’s gambit against Darwin’s 150th anniversary is one big failure, all because of Comfort’s own moral failings.
The copy-&-paste creationist is a familiar figure in internet debates — they don’t have an original idea in their head, but they know how to copy some long screed off the internet and paste it into a comment box, almost always without attribution, or even a link back to their source. I am completely unsurprised by the fact that Ray Comfort is a plagiarist who ripped off a brief biography of Darwin.
The ridiculous and often-debunked assertions of Darwin being Hitler’s BFF and irreducible complexity being a viable line of argumentation are his own, but the actual biographical info was a complete bite. Will anything happen to him as a result? Will he be made to own his inability to do anything right?
