The Institute for Intellectual Disco Dancing has spun its recent debacle at Minnesota thus:
The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque.
Note that in passing it is not a fallacy to be ad hominem if the point is relevant to the argument. But let's focus on dyspepsia. A friend recently noted my own dyspepsia on matters religious (not nearly as strong as PZ's though). It occurred to me that dyspepsia is a really great condition: it stops you swallowing shit uncritically. Now intellectual coprophagia may be necessary to ensure that one's children swallow the same shit you do, but really, if you want to have a healthy intellectual diet, don't eat shit at all. Eat nourishing stuff like facts and logic.
I am sure that you realize that the claquery was paid for in beer. Otherwise we wouldn't have been interested. We were all feeling a bit dyspepsic going in.
I don't drink beer, but would have gone just for the event. Same reason I saw the Rolling Stones: ya gotta do it once, just to see what the fuss is all about or so you can say you did it.
There has to be a better reason that that to see the Rolling Stones. Maybe if they were performing Their Satanic Majesties Request...
Sure there's a better reason to see the Stones ... there's always the chance that the guy up there older than me is gonna do one too many gyrations and break a hip.
As much as I like to read PZ Myers's blog (along with yours!), sometimes it does seem to me like he is an ad hominem, especially on the topic of religion. Like some people on talk.origins that I have complained about, Dr. Myers seems to take great glee in pointing all the bad things that have come about because of religion and loudly proclaim "All religion is bad!!!". They never acknowledge organizations like Habitat for Humanity (http://www.habitat.org/), Christian Peacemaker Teams (http://www.cpt.org) or Ten Thousand Villages (http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/) and many, many other organizations that grew out of peoples' faith and how Christians should be helping others.
When I mention these good organizations, the most common response is that of crickets chirping, but occasionally somebody says "You know, they don't have to be a faith-based organization to do good things." While that is correct, it usually shows that the respondent has missed the point I was trying to make.
From my personal point of view, this attitude among atheists is the exact counterpart to the creationists' ignoring of scientific evidence for evolution or the big bang. Both attitudes are, IMNSHO, willful ignorance, and I find both to be equally frustrating.