stcynic
Posts by this author
March 20, 2006
Alain's Newsletter is, much like the Worldnutdaily, home to a variety of religious right loonies. But this essay by someone named Jean Valjean Vandruff may take the cake. It's a virtual cesspool of ignorance capped off by one giant whopper of a lie:
Is homosexuality an inborn behavior? A few years…
March 20, 2006
YouTube has the entire episode of South Park about scientology available to watch online. It's quite funny, with the humor existing on several levels.
March 20, 2006
I've never been an anti-UN guy. I've always had a realistic view of the UN as an organization that can be effective at things like small scale peacekeeping operations, refugee aid and moderating minor conflicts between nations. When it comes to major conflicts between the world's powers, the UN is…
March 20, 2006
No, not the food but the legal scholar. Philip Hamburger teaches law at the University of Chicago and is a respected scholar, but his position on the first amendment religion clauses are quite troublesome. Jon Rowe reviews his latest book, Separation of Church and State, over at Positive Liberty. I…
March 19, 2006
You know, for all of Jerry Falwell's complaining about the "liberal media", he's getting an astonishing amount of credulous and fawning coverage over the completely meaningless fact of the Liberty debate team being ranked #1 in the nation according to a point(less) system. The latest is a long…
March 18, 2006
I picked 23 out of 32 first round games correctly. Not terrible, I suppose, but I lost a couple of teams I had going pretty deep. In fact, I've lost 3 of my final 8 teams (Iowa, Kansas and MIchigan State), but thankfully none of my final four. So it's a mixed bag for me. And of course, I've lost…
March 17, 2006
Most people know by now that Isaac Hayes has quit working on South Park (he was the voice of Chef) because they did an episode making fun of Scientology. Comedy Central decided to pull the episode, and their reason for doing so is so ridiculous that no one in their right mind would buy it:
A Comedy…
March 17, 2006
Thanks to Sandefur for sending me a link to this information. I've done a lot of work defending the ACLU for a long time, but on this one I will gladly condemn them, at least this chapter, in the harshest possible terms. The Florida ACLU has elected to its board a man named Parvez Ahmed, who said…
March 17, 2006
Jon Rowe has another post up about the Founding Fathers and theistic rationalism, a subject on which he and I have both written a good deal. It includes a long quote from Gregg Frazer, a historian who did his dissertation on that subject and is the man who invented the term as a description of the…
March 17, 2006
Jeff Jacoby has a column in the Boston Globe about the situation with Catholic Charities and gay adoptions in Massachusetts. It's not nearly as balanced and thoughtful a column as you usually get from him, but I'm going to agree with the core of his argument while rejecting the over-the-top…
March 16, 2006
The editor of the student newspaper at the University of Illinois has been fired for published the infamous 12 caricatures of Muhammed. The board of the paper did not say that he was fired for flagrantly and wantonly committing journalism, but they might as well have.
March 16, 2006
Pat Hayes from Red State Rabble also noticed Richard Thompson's ridiculous quote, but he found some interesting parallels with David Duke. I really must add Red State Rabble to my links. It's an absolute must-read blog.
March 16, 2006
When I learned of last week's California Supreme Court ruling on whether the city of Berkeley had to subsidize the Boy Scouts despite their discriminatory policies, my first thought was, "I can't wait to see what Hans Zeiger says about this." Zeiger is a budding Sean Hannity wannabe who writes for…
March 16, 2006
I find myself constantly vacillating between taking politics seriously and viewing it solely as a form of entertainment. As Mencken noted so famously, democracy is the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. On those days when I'm looking only for entertainment from the political…
March 16, 2006
Here's a couple blogs we should definitely be reading. The first is Good Math, Bad Math. This blog is authored by Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist, and he specializes in critiquing the standard creationist arguments on probability and information theory. The second is Immunoblogging, authored…
March 16, 2006
It looks as though Paramount is indeed going to make a movie out of the Dover trial. They had someone there taking notes the whole time and now they've hired Ronald Harwood to write the script. Harwood is one of the more prominent screenplay writers in the world, having written such movies as The…
March 16, 2006
The latest issue of the Skeptic's Circle is up at Paige's Page. One of my favorite entries is this post by Jim Lippard about his long experience with Scientology. Jim does really good work in this area. He's not only taken on Scientology but also Amway, an organization with many of the trademarks…
March 15, 2006
The Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division is complaining about a New York Times article on a new study about human evolution. It's a fairly simple article, nothing terribly shocking in it. It says quite openly that the importance of the study is only in combatting an attitude common among…
March 15, 2006
From the Department of Ridiculous Hyperbole comes this statement from Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center:
Behind its legal actions is the belief by its president and chief counsel Richard Thompson that Christianity is under siege from all quarters, but especially from the federal courts…
March 15, 2006
I've mentioned before being on the Worldview Weekend mailing list. This is basically a group of religious right types who meet, appropriately, in Branson fairly regularly. They send me a list of articles on their website every week and it's typically a source of much amusement. No group that…
March 14, 2006
From one of the diarists at DailyKos comes this quote from Jamie Raskin, a law professor at American University. He was testifying in front of a Maryland legislative committee on an anti-gay marriage amendment and one of the legislators used the Bible to support her arguments against gay marriage.…
March 14, 2006
Jason Kuznicki has decided to declare an "opposite day", wherein he defends an idea he disagrees with and attempts to do so without making a parody of that position. He chose to defend the divine right of kings, an idea that is anathema to his libertarian mindset. I was asked to give it a shot as…
March 14, 2006
Allow me to express my enormous gratitude to Christopher Patti, legal counsel for the University of California. Not only did he see my blog post about the Caldwell suit and immediately email me the judge's ruling in that case, he was also kind enough to send me two filings on the ACSI's…
March 14, 2006
Larry and Jeanne Caldwell, lawsuit filers extraordinaire, have had one dismissed. They sued over Berkeley's Understanding Evolution website, claiming that it used government money to promote religious views. Timothy Sandefur wrote a response to that suit showing why it was clearly frivolous and…
March 14, 2006
John Lofton, the Constitution Party maven and genuine theocrat, has an essay up condemning Jay Sekulow as a mindless cheerleader for Bush's judicial nominees. Sekulow is the director of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice. And just to show you in their own words how completely…
March 14, 2006
Aerik Knapp-Loomis (whoever the hell he is) has written a follow up in response to my post about his rather incoherent screed about me. It's far worse than the first one. All you really need to see is this one ridiculous statement:
He says I'm barely coherent. Well then, I suppose his assumptions…
March 14, 2006
This time from Agape Press. Let's play a rousing game of "spot the missing logic".
A sociologist and writer says America cannot afford to say no to traditional marriage. Brad Wilcox, co-author of The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals (Spence Publishing, 2006), believes how U.S…
March 14, 2006
Take a look at some of the bills being submitted in Missouri. In addition to the "Christian Nation" amendment I mentioned recently, they also have bills that would:
1. Allow prayer in public schools - where it's already allowed individually, but if its mandated or sponsored by the school, the…
March 13, 2006
I found this trackback to an angry and not terribly coherent response to my post about Catholic Charities pulling out of the adoption business. Someone named Aerik Knapp-Loomis didn't like that I require comment registration, so he posted his comment to his own blog and called me out for a "…
March 13, 2006
Whoever this dlamming character is, and whatever reason he has decided to target me specifically, he appears to have a particular gift for making himself look foolish. After tilting at the windmill once and coming out looking quite silly, he's now back again with another set of distortions in this…